How investigators identified Formidable's one-ton bomb

Identifying the bomb requires physical evidence and careful source criticism. Accounts of German one-ton weapons often use inconsistent nicknames and blur general-purpose and semi-armour-piercing variants, making book-to-book comparison unreliable. Formidable's clean entry hole and deep detonation narrowed the weapon's weight class. Later inspection in an American dockyard recovered fragments, measured casing-wall thickness, and used German colour bands to identify the likely bomb. Matching every hit to an exact variant remains difficult when several aircraft and weapon types attacked together. That uncertainty matters because a protection scheme can only be judged fairly against the weapon that actually struck it.