“The Big Bang” or “No Time for Sergeants and a certain Lieutenant too”

 

During the spring of 1964 things were getting a little dicy at a NATO Early Warning Radar Station in the Norwegian arctic were I was stationed at the time.

It was avalanche time, and the Radar station entrance was located on the side of a mighty mountain with a 60 degree slope and a zig zagging road up the mountain side from the base in the valley.

Predictably, one day the mountain let go a big fart, sending thousands of tons of snow down at a frightening speed, snapping off middle sized spruce trees as if they were match sticks.

As the Radar station had just been constructed to keep an eye on the Ruskies, the station brass had not encountered this problem before and was looking for solutions.

A local army base with an artillery unit was contacted to see if they would be interested in some target practice with their 88mm cannon? The idea being to create some artificial avalanches to mitigate the problem of vulnerable station personnel, travelling on the zig zag road.

The army dudes came by, looked up from the road in the valley floor, and decided it was too risky: They might blow up the zig zag road while they were at it.
(Hell you guys, I thought you knew how to aim that tube of yours, better than a sling shoot, surely? Maybe not : (

So the call came: “Any volunteers to solve the problem?”

Stepping up to the plate, a certain Lieutenant volunteered to take charge and recruit a crew.

It so happened that we had lots of high explosives at the station, in those days of the cold war, when an enemy might be expected to want an intact radar station for his own ends.

The Lieutenant’s idea was to use some of those sticks of whatever it was, to create hand launched packages with time fuses and throw them from the top of the 1000 meter high mountain, down the slope towards the zig zag road and the station entrance, there to explode and trigger avalanches while people were safe inside.

That Lieutenant was an interesting kind of a guy, he was part of the operational crew and lived in a relationship with a lady friend down in the local village in the valley, a few kilometers distant. Much frowned upon by the station brass. (Those were the days!)

When the call came for volunteers with explosives experience, I quickly reviewed my resume which included a teen age childhood using nitrogen fertilizer mixed with sugar to blow up all kinds of things, without getting caught.

Figuring that was good enough, I stepped forwards along with a few similar minded, bored with the winter, colleagues.

So, we proceeded to make the hand held bombs from about 200 kilos of high explosive sticks, insert fuses, and declared ourselves ready to go to the top of the mountain in a cable car on a 1.5 kilometer railway line inside the mountain.

A sleigh with two skis connected by wooden cross members was used to haul the doomsday package out to the edge of the mountain, above the zig zag road and station entrance.

The initial plan did not work all that well: A few bombs were thrown with lighted fuses, and sure enough, some big bangs were heard.

However, an urgent call came trough from the admin building with exposed windows to the valley. They had been badly rattled, as the bombs had found their way down the mountain to the station entrance before they exploded.

We had miscalculated the fuse length badly, not realizing how fast these babies would move down the 60 degree slope.

Realizing that it only took a few seconds for the bombs to move down to where they should be, we chickened out on shorter fuses and held a war council out there on top of the mountain in the waning light.

 

Feeling creative, I put forwards the suggestion that we might just put a fuse in the whole load left on the sled, tie a rope to it, and lower it down to a suitable spot.

So we proceeded with that plan, under the guidance of the Lieutenant, poor guy, lit the fuse, which we made quite long for safety, and lowered the sled down the mountain.

As plans go, this one had never been tried before, with a predictable result: The rope suddenly went slack; the sled had lodged on an outcrop a little way down the mountain, not far from where we stood.

I didn’t know that it was possible to run that fast for cover trough loose snow.
When the boom finally came, it made our ears ring for quite some time and an inspection revealed that a rocky outcrop below the edge of the mountain had disappeared.

Thankfully, no avalanche was released, that would have likely buried the station entrance and the road too, but something else happened: Many windows in the village were shattered by the shock wave from the blast.

Didn’t see the Lieutenant much after that. Not sure if he was reposted. Personally, I kept a low profile.

I guess the army got the last laugh on that one.