We then went to Birmingham to meet our English family (sister of Grandma). To begin with the picture above shows a large piece of bomb shrapnel.. as you can see, it is about the size of my hand. It came from a bomb much, much bigger than that piece of shrapnel. In fact it would have been a little bit bigger than a vespa.
The picture below shows me holding a piece of shrapnel and Alex holding the bottem of an incendiary bomb or fire bomb. The person in the middle is my Great Aunt June who grew up during WWII. She herself collected these artifacts during the horrible, German bombing raids of Birmingham. In fact she just picked up this shrapnel out of her backyard and found the incendiary bomb on the street. As you may have known, the Americans bombed the Japanese with almost the same kind of bomb that the Germans used to bomb England. The only difference was that the Germans eventually loaded explosives as well as the gases used to ignite the flame upon contact of ground.
Also, when visiting Birmingham I met some of my relatives for the first time. They are Aunt June, cousin Helen, “little” cousin Ben (he is 6 feet 3inches) , cousin Bob and cousin Julie (they are second cousins and like our uncle and aunt). It was also nice to see Grandma and Grandpa. We went to see the house that Grandma grew up in. During our stay there, Aunt June took us to the house of the man who was in the Royal Navy. He has a real sea mine as a souvenir sitting in his front yard. The mine was as big as me and had small spikes on it. These mines were dropped from the sky by bombers into the sea. The spikes were sensors that set off the explosives inside when a ship made contact with the mine.
All in all, I think the most enjoyable part of my visit to Birmingham was rolling down a large steep hill and resting under a tree and looking at the clouds.
