Hi, I have a character who is near the explosion of a bomb during the blitz (out on the streets, not in a building/ shelter). They are walking away in the opposite direction when the bomb goes off and they are thrown to the ground. I’m struggling to decide on injuries as I don’t have much knowledge. I want the character to survive and not to lose any limbs. I watched a show that had a similar scenario with an explosion and the character was walking away from the building, the building exploded and she was thrown to the ground and her back was injured but would that be burns/ or shrapnel? If possible I would also like the character to have to use a cane/ crutch for a period after? Does anybody know the sort of injuries that could realistically happen? Thanks in advance if anyone knows anything that could help
The following links have useful information on blast injuries.https://storage.googleapis.com/global-help-publications/articles/techortho_warinjuries.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706344/ https://ke.army.mil/bordeninstitute/other_pub/blast/Blast_monograph.pdf A shrapnel wound to the leg would put your character out of action for a while, and would probably necessitate a crutch or cane. Look at pages 100-101 in the first article that I linked for graphic examples. Make it as serious as you want. The leg injury could also come from the fall, not necessarily the shrapnel. Your character could simply fall the wrong way and break his leg.
Most injuries from bombs are from stuff being flung out from the shock waves . Terrorists add things like nuts and bolts to their bombs to make them more deadly . In the war there were two main bombs dropped on london .High explosive bombs , that would make a big hole in the ground and throw out lots of debris , especially if it landed on building . The other bombs , dropped in hundreds at a time , was the iron bomb . Relatively small in size . A heavy thick metal case with a small amount of explosives inside . The bomb would shower anybody standing near the explosion with red hot fragments of metal . Only about 80% of them exploded and they are still being being dug up in london today.
Regardless of the physical injuries, don't forget PST (nightmares, flashbacks,etc). They didn't talked about it like we do now though.
It's also fair to note that sometimes with bombs, especially back in the WWII days, they weren't designed quite as well. Many were duds, or simply blasted out in sideways directions, never actually injuring people on the side of it. Even more common with grenades back then. Sometimes dumb luck happens in reference to those kind of explosions.
Weird shit happens with bombs of all kinds... a guy i know was rather too close to an IED in Iraq, the guy to his left caught a load of frag in his vest, the guy to his right got burned all to hell... my mate was completely unharmed except for a bad case of tinnitus.
Unless a piece of debris hits the character the injuries will be internal due to the shockwave. As for the leg injury, just break the character's leg in the fall (on the fall... which one is it???).