Imagine going about an ordinary Monday morning in the Staffordshire countryside when, without warning, the ground beneath you erupts. Thousands of tonnes of bombs explode underground, buildings are destroyed, a farm disappears and an enormous crater is torn into the landscape. This was not an enemy air raid. It was one of Britain’s most devastating wartime accidents.
Image: Aerial view of the crater and surrounding devastation caused by the RAF Fauld explosion photographed by the Royal Air Force on 4 December 1944/ Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.
Today I want to discover more about the RAF Fauld explosion, which happened near Hanbury in Staffordshire on the 27th of November 1944. By this point Britain had been at war for more than five years, but beneath this peaceful stretch of countryside was something few people passing through the area would ever have imagined.
Image: Storemen stacking 250-lb MC bombs in one of the underground tunnels at No. 21 Maintenance Unit, RAF Fauld, near Hanbury, Staffordshire. Photograph by B. J. Daventry, Royal Air Force official photographer / Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
RAF Fauld was home to a huge underground munitions store. Old gypsum mine workings had been adapted into chambers where thousands of tonnes of bombs and other explosives could be stored. RAF personnel worked there alongside civilian workers and Italian prisoners of war, handling the enormous quantities of ammunition needed to keep Britain’s wartime air operations supplied.
At around 11am that morning, disaster struck. An explosion began inside the underground complex and it rapidly developed into a catastrophic chain reaction. Around 4,000 tonnes of bombs were stored approximately 90 feet beneath the ground, and the force of the resulting explosion was enormous. Earth, rock and debris were thrown across the surrounding countryside as the landscape above the store was ripped apart.
Upper Castle Hayes Farm, which stood close to the site, was destroyed, while other buildings in the area were badly damaged. A nearby reservoir was also breached, sending water and mud into the surrounding workings and adding to the destruction. For the people of Hanbury and the surrounding villages, the scene must have been almost impossible to comprehend. Only moments earlier they had been surrounded by ordinary Staffordshire countryside; now part of it looked more like a battlefield.
The human cost was terrible. Seventy people lost their lives in the disaster, including RAF personnel, civilian workers, Italian prisoners of war and local people. Eighteen of those who died have no known grave, and the crater itself became their final resting place.
The exact cause of the explosion was never firmly established, although later evidence suggested that an accident during the handling of munitions underground may have triggered the disaster. Whatever the precise sequence of events, a routine day at an ammunition depot had turned into one of the most terrible accidents experienced in Britain during the Second World War.
Perhaps the most haunting part of this story is that the evidence of what happened that morning has never completely disappeared. The enormous Fauld crater remains in the Staffordshire countryside today. Trees and vegetation have gradually reclaimed the landscape, but beneath that peaceful appearance lies the reminder of what happened there more than eighty years ago.
When we think about the Second World War, we often think about the people fighting on the front line, the aircraft flying overhead and the great battles that decided the course of the conflict. But behind all of that were thousands of people working in factories, depots, maintenance units and ammunition stores, often carrying out dangerous jobs every single day.
The people who lost their lives at Fauld were part of that wartime story too, and I think they deserve to be remembered.
Had you heard about the RAF Fauld explosion before, or is this a part of Britain’s wartime history that was completely new to you?
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