Feature: Duo win bravery awards for tackling WWII bomb

Two soldiers who tackled an unexploded bomb whose discovery led to the closure of London Bridge and which could have killed dozens of people if it had gone off have won bravery awards.

A 250-kilogram bomb dropped by the German Luftwaffe during an air raid on the docklands area of London between 1939 and 1945 was found by construction workers at a site south of the Thames river in the Bermondsey district in March 2015.

The bomb was still live, and could have exploded at any minute. Local police sealed the site and called in bomb disposal experts from the British army.

The famous tourist site Tower Bridge, was closed because of its proximity to the unexploded bomb, and 1,200 people were evacuated from their homes with just 30 minutes warning. The local municipal authority warned that if the bomb went off it would cause significant damage to buildings within 200 meters of the blast and could kill anyone within that area.

Then experts from the Royal Logistics Corps moved in to tackle the high explosive bomb.

Soldiers built a barricade of soil around and above the bomb site. Then two soldiers -- Staff Sergeant Edward Clinton and Staff Sergeant Richard McKinnon -- moved in to successfully defuse the bomb, and it was this act of courage that led to the pair being awarded the Queen's Commendation for Bravery on Friday.

The British Ministry of Defense said in a statement about the bravery awards: "The nature and intensity of the task meant the pair had to work in shifts through the night while they painstakingly made the bomb safe, allowing it to be moved off site for destruction."

Once the bomb had been defused, it was driven by truck off the site to a quarry outside London where it was exploded.

The industrial and docklands areas of London were constant and frequent targets for air raids during the Second World War.

The area where the Bermondsey bomb was found, known as the Grange, was hit by 142 bombs between the beginning of October 1940 and the beginning of June 1941 alone. In total London was hit by 24,000 tonnes of bombs over the whole period of the war.

Inevitably some bombs did not explode, and the old but still lethal devices are found at regular intervals, often during construction work.

Last month Victoria station, the busiest London rail terminal, was evacuated in the morning rush hour after builders working on Tube line improvements found an unexploded wartime bomb. Endit