Find out how a rediscovery of a lost WWII-era bomb helped inspire Alex Jablokov’s latest story, “The Last of Operation Shroud,” now available in our [Sept/Oct issue, on sale now!]
Unlike some of my stories, “The Last of Operation Shroud” has a specific moment of genesis: a story in the New York Times about the discovery of an unexploded WWII munition at the bottom of a canal in northwestern Poland. It turned out to be a British bomb called a Tallboy, a powerful five-ton bomb designed specifically for hitting difficult high-value targets. Tallboys were used to destroy V-1 and V-2 launch sites during Operation Crossbow.
Tallboys were also used in a raid by specially modified Lancaster bombers to sink the German cruiser Lützow, which was holding up the Soviet advance along the Baltic coast, in the last weeks of the war. The raid succeeded in sinking the cruiser, but one bomb’s short-delay fuze failed and it ended up deep in the mud of the Piast Canal, where it stayed, undetected, for 75 years, until a dredging operation revealed it.
Polish divers attempted to defuse the bomb, but it eventually had to be detonated, throwing up the dramatic column of water in the photograph that initially caught my eye.
So that was my initial image: a concealed, unexploded munition, long forgotten. I knew that it concealed more of a secret than it originally appeared, and that the ship that had been its target also held a mystery. Unexploded munitions are a danger wherever there has been combat, the danger can remain for an astonishingly long time. Live WWI shells turn up in French fields, over a century on. The violence of combat still lurks beneath the leafy countryside, and its victims are innocent people going about their daily lives . . . or children who just want to play in the woods.
And I had my character, a veteran of the operation that destroyed that ship, one more difficult and complex than the one that sank the Lützow. She has returned to learn what actually happened during that mission, dealing the complexities of postwar attitudes in the country, not her own, where much of the war was fought, and the ship was sunk. And I knew she had to encounter the bomb disposal expert who was looking for the same thing.
Tallboys are a weapon with a kind of dark charisma. They were invented by the engineer Barnes Wallis, best known for the bouncing bomb used to destroy the Ruhr dams during the Dambuster raids of Operation Chastise in 1943. Among other targets, Tallboys were also used to destroy a vessel much larger than the Lützow: the Bismarck-class German battleship Tirpitz.
It took years, and multiple attempts, before late in 1944 the RAF succeeded in sinking the Tirpitz where it was concealed in a Norwegian fjord. One way it survived was by concealed itself beneath a cover of chopped-down trees and clouds of chlorosulphuric acid. That artificial fog damaged trees in the area, with damage detectable in the tree rings. That kind of damage also still remains, and affects how things grow, most of a century later.
That gave me something my main character to look for, a way of detecting where the operation had taken place, the operation she no longer remembers: what it did to the trees.
The other person she encounters, the bomb disposal expert, is tracking parts that came from the bomb, inspired by the Tallboy, that was used here. To understand how she might be trying to figure out where what she is looking for might be, I researched conflict archeology and conflict-landscape studies. These fields started with the structures and destruction of WWI combat, then evolved to be able to analyze the remains of the more mobile warfare of WWII, and have moved on from there. Studies of the Polish Kozle Basin, with its 6,000 preserved bomb craters, and of the Kall Trail and Vossenack Ridge in the Huertgen Forest, on the German/Belgian border, proved particularly useful for understanding what remains after combat.
I also learned how quickly many dramatic and violent events are forgotten. Their physical traces become keys to understanding what the participants experienced.
In developing the actual ground-level part of the operation to sink this particular ship, I was inspired in part by 1942’s Operation Frankton, where British Royal Marines used folding kayaks to attack cargo ships docked at Bordeaux with limpet mines. Poor planning and a lack of coordination with another service’s mission to accomplish the same goal, led to the deaths of most of the men on that mission.
Each piece of research took me back to the story with another view of how past and present relate. I wanted the landscape to feel something like the mixed forests of the south Baltic coast, a place I have never been, save through Google’s Street View. The countries are not real, but I like to feel that the people are.
Which brings me back to Barnes Wallis, a fascinating character whose first great design, long before the various bombs of WWII, was the airship R100, in 1930. When its competitor, the R101, crashed in a field in France, killing almost everyone aboard, the British government abandoned serious airship development—though by that point it didn’t make any sense to proceed any further down that path. This just goes to show that not all the research behind a story should make it into the story, but while my bomb designer is not Barnes Wallis, he clearly is inspired by him.
The characters are what is important, but they need a world to live in. I hope you enjoyed watching me dig through my research notes and documents—its own form of archeological research—to remember how that world came together.
From Earth to the Stars 