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On 21 September 1921, roughly 450 tons of ammonium nitrate mixture detonated at the BASF plant in Oppau, Germany. The blast killed 560 people, injured another 2,000, and left behind a crater big enough to make an entire chemical factory look like it had simply ceased to exist.
Before Oppau: My Own Introduction to High Explosives
Blowing up stuff is one of the few marketable skills I retain from the military. Soon after I bought my rural Mississippi farm back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, it became obvious that we were going to have to get rid of an even dozen beaver dams if we ever hoped to make the place habitable. A skilled operator can do that with a track hoe. Or you can follow the manly route and call upon energetic chemistry.
Sourcing Explosives Was Once a Very Different Proposition
Back before al Qaeda ruined absolutely everything with 9/11, acquiring certain explosive materials was a radically different proposition than it is today. No kidding, I once arranged a legal purchase over the phone and picked up commercially available explosive supplies from a dealer in a church parking lot. Suffice to say, it’s a bit more complicated than that today. I swear sometimes it seems that the primary function of modern government is to keep American males from enjoying themselves.
My kids and I spent two amazing days clearing those twelve beaver dams. I don’t know when I’ve had so much fun. We even inadvertently blew up one terribly unfortunate beaver, but that’s a story for another day.
I later experimented with commercially familiar reactive-target chemistry on my property as well. Tannerite is the best-known consumer example of the general concept. Used lawfully and according to the manufacturer’s directions, reactive targets provide the sort of immediate feedback that can put a memorable punctuation mark on a shooting session.
High explosives are indeed notoriously unforgiving of stupidity, inattention, or sloth. Normally, only folks like highly-trained professional gun writers should be allowed access to such volatile stuff. However, sometimes large volumes of explosive precursors are entrusted to irresponsible stewards with predictably exciting results.
Oppau 1921: Inside the BASF Ammonium Nitrate Plant
In September of 1921, the BASF plant in Oppau, Germany, was busy churning out ammonium nitrate fertilizer by the literal ton. This same material has a dual use application as an oxidizer in explosives. The facility began producing ammonium sulfate in 1911 to support Germany’s war effort during WW1. They later made ammonium nitrate using something called the Haber Process. Oppau was the first chemical plant in the world to do so.
When heated, ammonium nitrate produces large quantities of oxygen that can then be used to service an explosive reaction. Additionally, ammonium nitrate is fiercely hygroscopic. This means that it rapidly absorbs moisture from its surroundings.
The Dangerous Storage Problem Building Inside BASF
Let ammonium nitrate get a little moist, and it sets up into a plaster-like substance. BASF was storing their fertilizer in 20-meter-high silos. German workers had to employ pickaxes to get it out of the storage facilities. As being crushed by massive collapsing mounds of fertilizer was quite a serious concern, workers eventually adopted an explosive method for breaking apart the hardened material.
This was admittedly crazy, but it was sort of based on science. Testing conducted in 1919 demonstrated that formulations containing less than 60% nitrate could not be convinced to explode. The fertilizer BASF made was typically about 50/50. They actually took a load of this stuff out into the woods and subjected it to destructive testing just to see what would happen. Convinced that they were good, these maniac Krauts began storing ammonium nitrate in 50,000-ton lots. Whenever hardened material needed to be loosened, workers relied on an explosive practice that history would eventually reveal to have been catastrophically overconfident. What could possibly go wrong?
In their defense, it is estimated that they had used explosive charges to break up solidified chunks of ammonium nitrate at least 20,000 times in the past. However, despite that much experience, this stuff is still the oxidizer for a very potent high explosive compound. Then, on 21 September, something very bad happened.
The Oppau Explosion Turns BASF Into an Enormous Smoking Hole
Nobody knows the details. There was nobody left to interview. Anybody even close to the point of detonation was utterly vaporized. 560 people lost their lives. A further 2,000 were seriously injured.
There were actually two explosions that occurred about half a second apart. Roughly 10% of the fertilizer in one silo detonated. 450 tons of ammonium nitrate were consumed. The blast left a crater 90 meters wide, 125 meters long, and 19 meters deep. The noise was detectable in northeastern France some 186 miles away. The cumulative effect was equivalent to nearly two kilotons of TNT. This was about one-eighth the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb.
Oppau Explosion Facts: 560 Dead and a 125-Meter Crater
| Date | 21 September 1921 |
|---|---|
| Location | Oppau, Germany |
| Facility | BASF plant |
| Fatalities | 560 |
| Seriously Injured | 2,000 |
| Material Consumed | 450 tons of ammonium nitrate |
| Crater | 90 meters wide, 125 meters long, and 19 meters deep |
| Estimated Effect | Nearly two kilotons of TNT |
| Distance Heard | Some 186 miles away |
The Fallout: Oppau Was Shattered for Miles
80% of the buildings in Oppau were destroyed. 6,500 local citizens were left homeless. There was not an intact window to be found for twenty miles.
The pressure pulse traveled to Mannheim just across the Rhine from Oppau, tearing the roofs off of houses fifteen miles away. A streetcar was blown off of its tracks in Heidelberg, some 19 miles distant. Rescuers recovered more than 500 bodies in the first 48 hours.
Why the Oppau Explosion Happened Despite 20,000 Earlier Blasts
It turned out that the less than 60% rule was not quite accurate. Lower percentages of nitrates are tougher to conflagrate, but it can obviously still happen. The ease with which one can coax this stuff into detonating is driven by lots of different things.
Particle size, density, and ambient humidity all played a role. Prior to the accident, chemical engineers had tweaked the production process to decrease the moisture content and lower the relative density. Both of these factors contributed to the accident. Investigators also determined that the lot in question was not homogenous, containing pockets of ammonium nitrate that were more enriched than others. Once one of these pockets touched off, the resulting shockwave sympathetically detonated the rest of it.
My own experience with reactive targets reinforced how much apparently minor physical differences can change the behavior of energetic materials. Things that seemed important in theory sometimes made little practical difference, while variables a casual observer might overlook could matter enormously. With the benefit of hindsight, that is precisely the sort of complacency the Oppau disaster warns against.
Two months prior to the Oppau tragedy, some thirty tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded in Kriewald, Germany, under comparably suspicious circumstances. That blast claimed nineteen lives. History does not record why this event did not drive a re-evaluation of the industrial processes at Oppau.
Oppau Was Not the Last Ammonium Nitrate Catastrophe
Investigators originally thought that the blast had originated in the reactor facility where the product was actually made. It was discovered only later that the explosion spawned from a storage silo. Not that it much mattered.
The Oppau blast was the third-largest ammonium nitrate explosion in history. This follows the legendary Beirut, Lebanon, detonation in 2020 and the explosion of some 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate in Texas City, Texas, in 1947. We may explore those simply epic events at some point in the future.
At the time of this detonation, there were no ammonia plants of this sort in the United States. American engineers rightfully believed that the state of the art simply did not support the safe mass production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Lots of folks make it these days, but it is easier to manage safely now that we understand the physics behind this reaction so much better.
From the Oppau Disaster Back to a Mississippi Farm
It really is great fun to spend a couple of days turning binary explosives into noise. Back on the farm, we cleared our beaver dams using the training, equipment, safety margins, and procedures I had learned through prior experience. The kids naturally considered the whole affair premium entertainment. A grand time was had by all.
Once the beaver dams were done, we contracted with a dirt guy to build us a proper dam across the little creek that runs through my backyard. The end result is seven acres of heaven that is now teeming with bass, bream, and water moccasins. However, in the immediate aftermath, the lake was just bug ugly with dead trees sprouting up everywhere.
I tried lots of different techniques for felling these trees. I can attest that running a chainsaw out of a canoe is a suboptimal solution. As soon as you touch the trunk, the reactive force begins spinning the canoe around in circles. As the mission is to cut these old derelict trees down, you can never be sure which direction they might fall. Being crushed and drowned by a tree I cut down myself would look pretty stupid on a tombstone.
I eventually experimented with energetic methods rather than balancing a running chainsaw in a canoe. Properly handled explosive force can do remarkable work, but the operative words there are properly handled. The entire Oppau story exists because familiarity and repetition can convince otherwise intelligent people that a dangerous process has somehow stopped being dangerous.
The Real Lesson of Oppau: Experience Does Not Rewrite Physics
Blowing stuff up really is fun so long as you don’t also wipe out yourself, your home town, and 560 of your closest mates in the process. Some commercially available reactive-target products can be legally transported and possessed under circumstances that differ dramatically from regulated blasting materials. Other explosive components and activities are governed by extensive federal, state, and local requirements. Anybody dealing with such materials needs to know the law, follow applicable storage and handling rules, and understand that energetic chemistry does not grade on a curve.
That is perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Oppau explosion. BASF workers had repeated their process thousands upon thousands of times. Success became routine. Routine became confidence. Confidence became complacency. Then chemistry reminded everybody in the most savage way imaginable that twenty thousand uneventful repetitions do not constitute immunity from physics.
In 1921, in Oppau, Germany, a bunch of guys got in a bit of a rush and blew themselves to smithereens. Something similar happened in 1947 in Texas and then again in 2020 in Beirut. However, with knowledge, proper controls, respect for the law, and serious attention to detail, energetic materials can be managed far more safely than they were a century ago. Oppau remains the spectacular, crater-shaped reminder of what happens when experience is mistaken for invulnerability.
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TACK, RAP, BANG BY COMMANDER GILMORE
Before Molly Goodman asked her 23-year-old son-in-law to nail up some loose molding in her hallway, she should have asked herself if the lad was qualified. We don’t mean qualified as a carpenter, we mean, like, qualified to walk, chew gum and breathe without coaching.
Lacking a hammer and maybe a few IQ points, young Richard Gardner produced a .25 caliber pistol and commenced to rapping tacks with it. A few seconds later, a tack rapped back.
Gardner’s tool-of-choice discharged, sending a round through his hand and into the abdomen of his 21-year-old wife, Mary Ann. Fortunately, both were treated and released from a local Lancaster, S.C. hospital. Note: We’ve never known a .25 caliber pistol you could call a “tack-driver.”
Two Items Short
Kevin Stanley Stokes was only short two items on his robbery list — guns, car keys, wallet and brains — when he hit a grocery store in Cadiz, Ky. He parked the getaway car outside in a handy location, packed his gun into the store for a bout of barrel-waving and threat-making, then fled with a paper bag holding about $170.
Stokes must have known there were thieves in the area because he had carefully locked his car doors. Must have left his brains in his other pants; he locked the keys in the car!
As Kevin stared at his keys on the seat, those sirens kept getting louder … and closer. Lots of witnesses around. Lots of empty pavement and clear sky. Lots and lots of adrenaline-pumped, heavily-armed cops converging on his narrow butt. He laid down the roscoe and went, according to Chief Ray White, “without incident.”
Witnesses to Kevin’s arrival at his locked car quoted him later. He is reported to have said, “Whoops!” We believe it.
Wrong Place, Time
On almost any other night, Z’s Sports Tap would have been a much better target for a robbery attempt. The popular downtown Chicago bar does a landslide evening business, and the till gets pretty pumped.
The two stickup men who waltzed in through a side door on a recent Tuesday night were probably dreaming of the stuffed cash register, overflowing with proceeds from the party in the main room.
When they confronted employee Tammy Bertucci, she politely explained she’d have to fetch their loot from the party room.
Confident or brain-damaged, they sent after the cash. She simply reported the robbery to the party-goers and let them handle it. After all, over 100 of them were Chicago cops, there for a retirement bash.
“Our two rocket scientists,” as police spokesman Pat Camden called them, went to jail after a scene reminiscent of the climax in “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.”
On the one hand, they can brag to the boys in the Big House that they’ve had more guns pointed at ’em than Davey Crockett at the Alamo. On the other, we don’t envy them their nightmares.
Armed Robbery 101: Don’t Rob A Bank In Front Of A Police Officer!
Several less-than-brilliant bunglers vie for our title of “Waste Of A Good Gene” this time, but for our bucks, William Bratcher takes the cake — and a dozen jelly-filled donuts to boot.
Just imagine a would-be bank robber so lacking in perception he fails to notice the bank’s only customer is a uniformed cop!
Okay, so the officer wasn’t in your traditional patrol-cop threads. But, as Billy-boy approached the front doors of the credit union in Northglenn, Colo., he just might have noticed the mountain bike parked outside was marked “POLICE.”
If not that, he should have noticed the sole customer in the bank was wearing a rather military-looking biking outfit, complete with badge, patch, radio and gunbelt. Instead, he entered, walked past the cop, leaped over the counter, pulled an auto pistol and began the usual “everybody down on the floor” speech.
Officer Jim May declined the invitation and produced his own bullet-launching hardware. Bratcher stuttered, stalled, and pointed his gun at May. Rude, huh?
May thought so too and promptly popped a cap in the area of the 10-ring, taking Bratcher to a) the floor, b) the hospital, and c) eventually to the slammer.
We assume that, by now, Bratcher has either learned the truth of the matter or gained a healthy respect for cyclists.
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Mark Moritz hung up his satirical spurs last issue to a collective sigh of relief from America’s gunwriters whom he had lampooned in “Friendly Fire” for two long, painful years. The 10 Ring is written by Commander Gilmore, a retired San Diego police officer who bases his humor, like Mark did, on actual occurrences. All the incidents described by the Commander are true.
This story courtesy of allthatsinteresting.com – Marine Corps veteran John “Chickie” Donohue was sitting in a Manhattan bar in November 1967 when the bartender grumbled that American soldiers in Vietnam could really use a pat on the back and a cold beer. And within days, Donohue set out to do just that.
He quickly got a job on a merchant ship hauling ammunition to Vietnam. Then, with a duffel bag full of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz in tow, he set out on his 8,000-mile journey.
However, things immediately got off to a rocky start — when Donohue drank all the beer himself. Then, after restocking, he managed to find the companies his neighborhood buddies were serving in and talk his way onto Army jeeps and helicopters to make it through Saigon, Manila, and Khe Sanh.
At every turn, military personnel had no idea know what to make of Donohue, who was dressed in a plaid shirt and corduroys and often introduced himself by simply saying he had beer for guys from his neighborhood back home.
He ended up hauling his beer right through the middle of some of the bloodiest conflicts of the entire war, including the Tet Offensive — when he actually came under fire from North Vietnamese forces.
But in the end, Donohue fulfilled his mission and shared some cold beers with his old friends on the frontlines.
IBM and six unlikely manufacturers produced 90% of wartime BARs — not Colt, Winchester, or Marlin.
By the time American troops came ashore in Normandy, fought through the hedgerows of France, battled across the Philippines, and clawed their way up the volcanic slopes of Iwo Jima, the Browning Automatic Rifle had become one of the most respected infantry weapons in the U.S. arsenal.
The .30-’06 BAR gave American squads a level of mobile firepower unmatched by many opponents and earned a reputation for reliability in the Pacific’s heat, mud, and jungle — conditions that defeated plenty of other weapons. Yet one of the most interesting aspects of the BAR’s wartime story has little to do with combat and everything to do with the companies that built it.
Not Manufactured by Who You Would Think
Most shooters assume that a firearm as important as the BAR would have been produced by one of America’s major gun manufacturers. It seems like a reasonable assumption. After all, the original M1918 BAR had been produced during World War I by Colt, Winchester, and Marlin-Rockwell. When America entered the Second World War, however, the company that would ultimately manufacture the vast majority of new BARs was not a traditional firearms manufacturer at all.
Instead, most of America’s wartime BARs were built by an unlikely collection of companies whose prewar experience included silverware, sporting goods, office machinery, and bookbinding equipment.
Before Pearl Harbor
To understand how this happened, it is necessary to understand the situation facing the United States before Pearl Harbor.
Although the BAR had served the Army since 1918, production had effectively ceased after World War I. During the lean interwar years, the Army relied on existing stocks while funding for new weapons remained limited. Large numbers of BARs remained in storage, and many military planners believed those inventories would be sufficient for any future conflict.
The rapid expansion of the U.S. military beginning in 1940 invalidated that assumption. As America prepared for the possibility of war, demand for automatic weapons increased dramatically. Existing inventories could not equip the rapidly growing Army, Marine Corps, and National Guard. The Ordnance Department needed a way to restart BAR production, but doing so would not be simple.
An Unconventional Solution
One major obstacle involved manufacturing capacity. Traditional firearms companies were already heavily committed to other military contracts. Tooling dating back to World War I still existed, but much of it had been stored for decades and required significant refurbishment. At the same time, the Army needed production measured in hundreds of thousands of rifles, not merely thousands.
The solution was unconventional. Rather than relying on a single firearms manufacturer, the government encouraged the formation of a consortium known as the New England Small Arms Corporation, commonly referred to as NESA. Organized in 1941, the consortium brought together several companies that had little or no prior experience manufacturing military firearms.
Among the firms involved were International Silver Company, known for producing silverware and household goods; A.G. Spalding & Brothers, famous for sporting equipment; National Blank Book Company; Blake Manufacturing Company; Elliott Addressing Machine Company; and Boston Wire Stitcher Company, better known today as Bostitch.
On paper, none of them looked like the maker of one of America’s most important infantry weapons.
What they did possess, however, was manufacturing experience, machine tools, factory space, and skilled workers.
The Ordnance Department understood that modern industrial production depended upon precision machining rather than a company’s historical association with firearms. If a factory could produce complex industrial components to exact tolerances, it could potentially manufacture firearm parts as well.
Production Spread Across Multiple Facilities
Under the NESA arrangement, production was spread across multiple facilities. Individual companies manufactured specific components, which were then assembled into complete rifles. This distributed approach allowed the government to leverage existing industrial capacity without disrupting other critical wartime production programs.
The transition was not seamless. Much of the old BAR tooling required extensive repairs and modification before it could be used effectively. Engineers discovered that equipment stored since the First World War often failed to meet the demands of modern mass production, and some of the stored tooling had to be updated to match the current M1918A2 configuration.
Workers had to learn unfamiliar manufacturing processes, while inspectors established quality-control procedures to ensure parts produced by different companies would fit together properly.
Manufacturing Gradually Accelerated
Despite these challenges, production gradually accelerated. By early 1943, NESA was delivering new M1918A2 BARs to the military — the modernized version of the rifle, stripped of its semi-automatic fire mode, fitted with a slower-rate buffer and a bipod, and optimized for sustained automatic fire as a squad support weapon.
Once manufacturing stabilized, output increased substantially. The consortium ultimately became the dominant producer of the weapon, manufacturing approximately 168,000 rifles during the war.
Then there was IBM. Today, International Business Machines is associated with computers and information technology, but during World War II the company participated extensively in military production. Concerned that additional manufacturing capacity might be needed, the government awarded IBM a BAR contract as well.
IBM quickly adapted to firearm production and began delivering rifles in 1943. Ultimately, the company produced approximately 20,000 BARs before its contract was terminated as military priorities shifted. The government then reassigned IBM’s manufacturing resources to other wartime projects, including M1 Carbine production.
Nearly 190,000 BARs produced for the War Effort
Combined, NESA and IBM produced nearly 190,000 new BARs during World War II. Of those rifles, roughly ninety percent came from the New England Small Arms consortium. This means that the overwhelming majority of newly manufactured BARs carried by American soldiers and Marines during the war rolled out of factories that had never built a firearm before.
The BAR’s combat reputation has often overshadowed the remarkable industrial story behind it. Historians rightly celebrate the rifle’s service on battlefields from Normandy to Okinawa, but the companies responsible for placing those rifles in the hands of American fighting men are little remembered.
Their story illustrates one of the greatest strengths of the American wartime economy: the ability to rapidly transform civilian industry into military production. Factories that had never built a firearm before the war learned to manufacture one of the Army’s most important weapons. Workers who had previously produced consumer goods found themselves contributing directly to the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Without the New England Small Arms Corporation and its network of unlikely manufacturers, the Army’s ability to field large numbers of BAR-equipped squads would have been severely constrained.
Collectors today prize Colt, Winchester, or IBM markings, yet the rifles that armed most American squads came from a wartime industrial partnership that demonstrated how American manufacturing could adapt, innovate, and deliver under extraordinary pressure. In many ways, that achievement was every bit as important to victory as the weapon itself.