Just like Siddhartha said, you need to call the destructor to destroy the object and then you still need to free the memory allocated with new char[16].

NOTE: Placement new should be avoided as much as possible and should only be used if you know exactly what you are doing. Placement new will not check for properly alignment of your object etc.
Some more information about it can be found at http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lit...html#faq-11.10