They are using rats nowadays. These rodents can find the explosives, but they can’t defuse It yet.
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Who’s a tall boy?
Are you a tall boy?
Ka-BOOM.
Yes. Yes you are!
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In the region around my hometown (in north-eastern Poland), large amounts of unexploded bombs are found every year. Thankfully nothing as big as this though.
My grandfather (the nicer one) used to gather unexploded bombs and defuse them for fun. He was lucky, but many people in the area were killed pursuing such hobby.
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That was very gutsy and very lucky.
I met a guy who was ex black ops - he would not acknowledge that directly, but I could tell based on what he couldn’t talk about. Among what he did say was that in his unit in the regular service was a guy who would kick any unexploded ordinance he came across. Whenever he spotted a bomb sticking out of the ground, everyone else would run away. He did not survive his deployment.
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There must be something in the Geneva Conventions about that, surely.
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I can’t find the source now, but I’ve read that the amount of live munitions (mostly from WWI) recovered each year in Belgium is measured in tonnes.
And there are parts of France that are still considered very dangerous (partly due to the environmental effects of WWI, and partly due to the enormous amounts of live explosives still kicking around).
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There was a Luftwaffe bomb discovered near me in east London a few years ago, but due to the plucky Blitz spirit I wasn’t that bothered, even though I wasn’t able to go to my gym, and my (ironically Polish) co-worker was forced to evacuate her home.
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Presumably a huge number of fish died.
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I’ve heard of people changing nationality for political or economic reasons; but irony?
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As someone who has stood besides many a mechanical excavator while it dug holes into Europe that is entirely a part of life and a risk everyone is aware of.
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Not all bombs are dangerous
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Why ironically? Polish army fought on the same side as
UK on WWII.
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It’s the other way round every so often - the excavator driver thinks it’s an old boiler or pipe or whatever and just dumps it next to the dirt he has excavated so far.
The bomb casings usually are quite thick (for penetration power and/or shrapnel) and corrode on the surface. That sort of blurs its look, but the bomb as such is still intact.
The fins are just thin metal sheets that will have corroded into nothing after a couple of decades.
So you end up with a chunk of metal that does not look like the mental picture most people have when they think “bomb”.
It’s similar with stuff like mortar grenades, hand grenades, shoulder-mounted anti-tank weaponry, etc, etc.
Stuff just doesn’t look the way one expects it to after some time in the ground. (Unless you’re an archaeologist.)
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Spending my early teenage years in army camps on Salisbury Plain we used to find all kinds of discarded and lost equipment, a friend of mine found a Second World War vintage anti-tank grenade – caused a bit of a stir. A controlled explosion and a lecture about picking things up later…
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Yes, I was wondering why the cameras (drones) were put in place if it was just a defusing. Makes more sense now, they knew some kind of explosion will happen.
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I’m in Rome, the last WWII bomb (albeit a very small one) has been found in city center no more than two weeks ago.
Lots of them still around here, though I’ve never heard of any of them exploding by themselves. They usually defuse them if they’re big, or force a controlled explosion in smaller ones, first moving them to a safe place when possible.
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The Tallboy is pretty much the first bunker-buster designed specifically for that task. If it exploded on land rather than in the water the results were even more impressive:
(My great-uncle might have been on the plane that dropped that particular bomb, and possibly the one that’s just exploded in Poland, but I’d have to re-read his autobiography again)
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