James Clare Lamph, Bountiful, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, March 4 & 9, 2004: Saving the Legacy tape no. 646

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JAME LARE LAMPH M R H 4 9 2004 know how often they'd blow up so they had to fight around corn r and wait until th bomb burned clear through the building, and fight the fire as the bomb burn d. o that was what happened. Okay, this one night, like I says, boom, boom, boom, like anti-aircraft was going off. I got out and looked clear across the field. What was happening was--the war with the Sicilians was over. So they were building bonfires and burning the thermite bombs, one at a time, in a bonfire. They would use it like sticks of wood, and they would throw sticks of thermite at a little fire, and bum them. They had fires everywhere, burning. They'd walk down and throw a couple of thermite bombs on the bonfire and go to the next bonfire and throw a few more on. They were burning those sticks literally one at a time. It would have taken months to burn one of those stacks of bombs out. Of course, unbeknownst to them, they run into a stack that had the explosives in. The fires were only burning a few feet away from the stacks. Well what happened was they threw a stick that had the dynamite in it, and got it going real good. It blew up, and blew a burning thermite bomb on top of one of these stacks of thermite bombs, and it set it afire. It was the dynamite in these little thermite bombs in the stack that was going off: boom, boom, boom-boom! It sounded like anti-aircraft. I walked out of my hut just in time to look across the field when one of those stacks that was hundreds of feet long, forty feet wide, and forty feet deep on that pyramid ignited all at once. It just blew. That thing blew up in one great blast of pure white light. I could see the mountains thirty or forty miles away when that thing went off. Of course, I ducked, because when it went off some of them didn't blow. They were burning. That one blast completely covered that airbase with burning thermite bombs. 66