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Dunedin Man Defused Bombs During World War II

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By Cheryl  Bentley | The Suncoast News

Published: November 8, 2008

Living with his wife Betty in a Dunedin condominium overlooking the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Ed Maguire knows a life of peace.

But the 91-year-old veteran also saw his share of war. During World War II he was a member of the U.S. Army 33rd Ordnance Bomb Disposal Squad.

Looking back, he was a natural for the bomb squad, Maguire says. A self-described "brat" in school in Philadelphia who loved math and science but hated poetry, he studied metallurgy, the science of metals, at Philadelphia's Temple University night school and eventually landed a job as ordnance inspector with the U.S. War Department's Philadelphia Ordnance District. The district was in charge of three Army contracts. He later received special training at the Watertown Arsenal, in Watertown, Mass.

Maguire was drafted in 1943 when he was visiting future wife Betty in Florida. The Army sent him immediately to Aberdeen Proving Ground Ordnance Center, in Aberdeen, Md. He volunteered to work in newly formed bomb disposal squads, lured by the promise the work would be done only in this country.

"They said, 'You'll never leave the U.S.,'" Maguire remembers. The squad had the task of handling unexploded bombs if the U.S. were attacked.

The Army, however, had a change of plans. One month after he married Betty, on Oct. 30, 1943, Maguire found himself in a convoy of 50 ships going to Europe. Without notice, the domestic unexploded ordnance work had shifted to bomb-cratered Europe.

In England, Maguire became part of a seven-man squad that dealt with unexploded bombs brought back by Allied fliers after missions to France. In order to avoid dangerous landings with 500-pound bombs, the pilots dropped them on English beaches before landing.

The bomb squad would dig a hole to get to the bomb, put framing around the hole and diffuse it, Maguire explains. They would take the bombs to an area with other bombs and blow them up all at once.

During the two years he worked in England, Maguire's squad destroyed 96 bombs. With the exception of one German bomb, all of the unexploded ordnance was American.

Did Maguire like the work?

A big grin lights up his face. "Oh, yeah, it was different."

But there is no bravado when he remembers his work on the bomb squad. "We were well trained," he says quietly.

His unit arrived on the beaches of Normandy three weeks after the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion and was sent to the small village of Chef-du-Pont. "We dug a hole in the ground, put our pup tent over it, and that was our living quarters," he remembers.

His squad then traveled through France, Luxemburg and Belgium picking up munitions and bombs and destroying them before the Germans got to them. In France, they found a four-story building struck by an unexploded bomb. Squad members packed explosives around the bomb.

"We ran down two flights of stairs, got under a truck, and the thing crumbled," Maguire remembers in a calm voice, as if describing a typical day at the office.

After the invasion, the squad lost two members who were wounded by a grenade during their work. Two others were later felled by an explosion in a black-powder factory. Of the seven men in his squad, only three returned home intact.

After the war, Maguire settled in Baltimore and became a partner with his father and another man in an industrial supplies distribution firm.

The Maguires raised a family of five. They bought their first Dunedin property, at Royal Stewart Arms, for $17,000 in 1971 and sold it in 1980 for $40,000, a sum, which in hindsight, was a good deal. Their friends recently paid $200,000 for a similar condominium there, they say.

In October, the couple celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. It has been a good marriage, Maguire says. The impish humor arises when he describes his relationship with wife Betty. "She always says yes. She won't argue with me."

Becoming serious, he adds, "She's really there for me when I need her."

Cheryl Bentley can be reached at 727-815-1069 or cbentley@suncoastnews.com.

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