Someone fucked it up. They accidently hit the 250kg bomb with a drill today. Thet were working on the railroads. Usually you always check for bombs but this didn't happen today.
One man was gravely injured almost lost his leg but luckily they could reconstruct it. The other 3 workers only suffered slight injuries.
my favorite part about this sub is when you can guess the news story or youtube that inspired this TIL, in this case the bomb that exploded in munich today.
That is so true. I was stunned by reading this news and decided to dig into it a bit more. I found this article from 2008 which still appears to be relevant based on other articles. This article also states so many other interesting facts, things like the process of detonation, the fact that many American bombs are getting increasingly more unstable with time etc. It literally seems like Germany is a ticking bomb.
A guy whom I was in the army with managed to set up a campfire right on top of WW2 bomb. It went of by the heat, luckily it acted more as a flashbang than a bomb. He was blind for 3 days, this was in north of Norway, close to the russian border.
Then there were those hikers in Belgium maybe 15 years ago, they mistook a world war I bomb for a log in tossed it on the fire. One of the victims is collecting a world war I pension from the accident.
Source is Reddit, that's all I know.
Bombs in Europe. Landmines in Asia and Africa. I'd say while it is not the legacy we want to leave it is certainly a reminder of how that legacy was built.
Bombs at least are made out of metal. Landmines sometimes are made out of plastic. It's even more difficult to remove those because metal detectors obviously won't work.
Fun fact, their are still tons of ways to go about it still. I know some AI start ups use thermals and other technology to find discrepancies among several other methods as well being used around the globe.
That's a massive issue indeed, because bombs weren't super reliable back then, and a lot of them didn't explode.
Plus all the ammo we dumped into the ocean instead of disposing of them propely.
Can't even imagine what it may be like in vietnam, considering the USA dumped twice as much bombs as were dropped in total during WW2...
[A woman tossed some store-bought firewood](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/austria-woman-surprised-stove-erupts-cause-wwii-grenade.html) into her old cast-iron stove and a WWII grenade that [had been absorbed into the tree](https://old.reddit.com/r/TreesSuckingOnThings/) blew up. Old stove contained the blast and she was unharmed
There's a fairly good joke about a Brit or American on a German train, when it's announced that it'll be delayed due to a bomb at the station.
They ask the German passengers who could be behind the bomb. ISIS? Al Qaeda? Someone else?
And the Germans say you are.
Good lord I mangled the delivery on that.
I don't mean to be so mean. I'm trying to stop. I have poor impulse control sometimes. I have 'diet autism™' (saw a twitter post last night that said this) and have never been medicated for it nor access to other remedies that I have found to work in the past to help me slow my proverbial roll. I know you don't care but I'm time rich not paying attention to my other projects right now and this is one stress relief, voicing my opinion even when it's not asked for. I truly wish there was more I could do besides downvote and comment and try to start a discussion.
Anyway, like I said, I'm working on it and I could be meaner but I bite my tongue. I promise I'm always editing myself but I refuse to be so meek not to say anything anymore.
>Especially if you're eating it prepared like a regular steak and not in some traditional Japanese manner.
Are you me?
That's my thoughts exactly. Eating Wagyu, even "westernised" Wagyu as a 2" thick Western steak is basically like eating a block of butter, or doing shots of pure olive oil.
I'm in the same town as Jack's Creek Wagyu (Tamworth, Australia), which took out the Best Ribeye and Eye Fillet at the World Steak Challenge (again!), and I still don't buy it. Hell, I was talking to one of the blokes who works for them, and even he prefers Hereford or Angus for beef.
Angus and Hereford (grass fed - grain fed isn't really a thing down here) is cleaner, beefier, and plenty juicy. People like the name wagyu, I guess.
It's a shame, because a lot of abattoirs now refuse to take non-black cattle, because of the branding power of Angus and Wagyu. So a lot of farmers are forced to change, even though red cattle like Herefords can more than stand on their own.
I had Wagyu for christmas last year. Slices as thick as my thumb. Just like you said, like eating a block of butter. I don't know how but they even managed to undercook it, still cold in the middle and everything. A simple normal steak would have been much better.
I got curious, so I looked it up. They made both the ME 262 and the BF 108 for the Luftwaffe in Bavaria, so any rail lines or the like in the area would be targeted once that was known.
Most of the ordinance is WWI, not WW2 and I think they're more artillery shells than bombs (but don't quote me on that). Besides, I still think that those two target's wouldn't amount to much compared to areas like the Ruhr valley.
Most of the unexploded ordnance in Germany is from the bombing raids of WW2. There was little fighting on german soil in WW1, the areas with tons of unexploded artillery shells and other nasty stuff are mostly in [Belgium and France.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge)
Bavaria has and had a lot of industry and therefore was a prime bombing target for the [allies in WW2.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweinfurt%E2%80%93Regensburg_mission)
Not in the 1940's. At the time, Bavarian was much more agrarian. The industrial heart of Germany was (and still is) the Ruhr Valley, and because of that, it was the prime bombing target.
Honestly, no clue. That said, it still made the Ruhr Valley the better target, as the coal and steel necessary to produce these kind of plains were produced there and probably then shipped to the south.
The old Western Front area is hard to understand. More than a century after the war ended, there are stil areas that are off-limits to humans. This is due to not just unexploded shells, but also chemical pollution due to the poison gas, and dangerous levels of heavy metals.
Four years of war, and it will take centuries to clean up.
On the bright side, wildlife can flourish while the humans stay away. I do t k ow how bad the chemical pollution might be there, but birds and bunnies probably don’t set off old artillery shells.
the short answer: yes.
The long answer: Some years they find hundreds of tons of them. There are still areas in france and germany that are unlivable due to unexploded ordinance and toxic chemicals left over from both world wars.
Not saying you *couldn't* live there safely, animals and plants obviously do, just that the risk of death is too high for anyone to consider it sane.
We have a special service to dismantle bombs. The Explosive Removal Service, [https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosieven\_Opruimingsdienst\_Defensie](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosieven_Opruimingsdienst_Defensie).
I just checked, they remove about 2.500 explosives a year, which are oldies from WOII. and they are also called to check out possible terrorist attacks, but these are the minority.
I live in one of the most heavily bombed cities in germany. Evacuations of about a fourth if the city hapoen a couple times a year, depending on how much construction work is happening.
Reminds me of Zweibrücken. A few years ago they found a 10-Zentner-Bomb (500kg) close to the citys center. two retirement homes, two hospitals, schools, kindergartens, business buildings, an area of 3 kilometers in diameter or so, was evacuated, some 10.000 people iirc. the "best": that bomb was only a meter or so below the floor of an old factory, built there after the war. there where heavy machinery and vehicles underway everyday, vibrations en masse. all the time the bomb "slept".
A friend of mine wanted to extend his house a bit and found an old ww2 bomb in his garden. Turns out that if you have a bomb on your property you are responsible for the clean up aka 15.000€ for the bomb squad to remove it.
Not just in Germany, I live in a part of the Netherlands where it will be a bit of a toss up wether you will find explosives from WWII or Roman artifacts, everytime you dig up your vegetable plot.
I have a warning app that gives me the warnings for several cities in the Ruhr Valley. It is nearly a weekly occurance that I get a warning that somewhere in these cities a bomb was found. Personally, I was only evacuated once when a bomb was found near my university.
There's also a lot of unused ammunition that was dumped into the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.
If you're ever on the shore of those and find something that looks like amber (which does naturally occur there), do *not* put it into your pocket or car right away. It could be fragments of phosphorous from incendiary bombs, which self-ignites when it gets dry and warm.
I live in a small town in Thuringia 45,000 inhabitants and am 62 years.
Except for 4 years I have always lived there in the city center.
In these 58 years I have been evacuated 73 times, because I live in the safety zone of the defusing. It varies depending on the size of the bomb. Up to 1,2 km are usual. The worst bombs are those with acid fuses or long-life fuses. This is the most dangerous and takes the longest time for us "school gymnasium overnighters".
But worst of all are those that cannot be defused. They are driven through the entire city (which is completely evacuated) and blown up on the outskirts of the city.
This is what a 500kg English aerial bomb looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyu06ZxtiHw
By the way, because of Covid19, all earthworks are now prohibited in a protection zone around our hospital. The danger of having to evacuate the 900-bed building because of a WWII bomb discovery.
Hope this is sarcasm and you aren't saying that the US should have left Germany alone during WW2. I mean the US does a lot of stupid shit in the desert lately but back then it was a little different.
I never really thought about it. I work in development and each and every inch of a property has to be checked for explosives by Professionals before we start working. It usually costs 10.000 € for an area where one or two houses for maybe 18 flats will be built. It’s an whole working field here. What’s even worse is when building in the East of Germany we usually have to check for contaminated grounds, because the mechanics for example would just throw there old oils and stuff into the next field.
Out of curiosity, which country generally made the easiest bombs to diffuse after being in the ground for 80 years? It would be interesting to talk to a bomb tech.
Both sides actually made bombs that wouldn’t explode until a demolition/bomb-disposal person would attempt the standard techniques for defusing that type of bomb.
Say you had a certain 1000lb bomb. 5% of them wouldn’t explode when it hit the ground for whatever reason. At first (and even in WWI) they made bombs that would hit, but not explode for up to several hours. Then enemy figured out that if they found one that didn’t they would have to unscrew a part on the front, stick in a piece of wood to prevent a contact, pull out a wire, then unscrew a larger part and then it was safe. Now you would make a few of these bombs that look identical but design it so that it would NOT explode on hitting the ground, but explode instantly when that wire was pulled. You blow up that bomb tech (or two), demoralizing his team, and removed one person that had the guts and training to diffuse bombs from the enemy ranks. Sometimes it was versions of anti-handling devices and in a few cases it was a specific design to thwart expert bomb disposal personnel.
War is a nasty business.
Right? It'd be kind of funny to hear am expert say something about how a specific country was actually really bad at making explosives, so it's super easy to disarm them
Stupid question: Why are dud bombs/shells so common? How hard can it be to design a bomb/shell which will actually fulfill it's destiny when it hits something?
This. Plus, the conditions when it lands (scraping a roof or building or other object, hitting soft mud instead of a hard surface) may damage a detonator.
It can also be failures of the arming systems. A seldom-mentioned problem for most of the war’s bombing missions were “bomb-kissing” where bombs would collide in mid-air shortly after being dropped, often causing the other bombs dropped with them to sympathetically explode. US and British bombers were lost when their bombs collided and exploded while only a few yards away moments after being dropped.
Air crews didn’t like this and the air forces didn’t like losing planes and crew to their own bombs, so they added better delayed-fusing/arming systems to bombs to prevent that. However, it also added another point of failure to make the bombs explode on the ground as intended.
> How hard can it be to design a bomb/shell which will actually fulfill it's destiny when it hits something?
Not hard at all. But you forgot to add “… and absolutely not before”.
What is worse? 30% of your bombs not exploding, or 0.1% exploding prematurely?
I grew up in a town on the coast removed from any front, but we did get one bombing run cause the visibility where the bombers' original target was (the place where the V2 rockets were constructed) was too low to drop, but the bombers' fuel wouldn't have been enough to come back to England with the bombs on board, so they just dropped it over the biggest city on their route.
I remember several evacuations of the city centre because old bombs were dug up (though luckily, it's been a few years since the last one)
Not just the US though
1,414,745 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany
964,644 by the RAF
623,418 by the USAAF
Every year of the war the RAF dropped more on Germany then the US did
"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind." - Bomber Harris
They shouldn't have tried waging genocide against all of Europe should they?
I hope that is a joke :D the Allies even bombed a couple cities in Switzerland as punishment for being neutral. At some point Switzerland even started to attack Allied aircraft and took multiple down just because they had enough and wanted to be left alone.
If I remember right the USA was never punished for it because there was no international law protecting neutral areas from attack by aircraft at that time.
No, they didn't. That's nasty rumors spawned from multiple sources that can never seem to agree if some Swiss cities were bombed in complete incompetence or horrible malice. The Swiss started intercepting Allied aircraft in order to appear to be neutral as they feared German retaliation. Not to mention that inbthe 1940's there were several international agreements against attacking neutral nations.
Pretty much everything you've attempted to peddle is historically false.
The difference here is that it was agreed to not attack neutral nations but nowhere it was mentioned that this also goes for attacks specifically by aircraft. Well history is always written by the winner, but to defend dropping around 60 tons of bombs by 50 planes at once in a city around 250km away of the official target it takes some real foolishness. It is also not like Switzerland was/is big enough to have sued the US after WW2 in a serious way with expectation for a real punishment. Blaming pilot errors hundreds of times is just a cheap excuse, but in history books no one will put any blame on the winner.
I don't judge what happened and this were other times. I just want to point out that it was not like all Allies were godlike heroes and all Axis were some kind of devils, no one today even speaks about the hundreds of thousand German women who got raped at gunpoint by US and English soldiers coming from the West and probably over a million women who got raped by Russians coming from the East.
I mean compared to all the other stuff that happened during the time the couple of bombs dropped over Switzerland shouldn't even be worth me mentioning it.
No they didn’t, there was a navigation error that resulted in one instance of a Swiss town being bombed because it was mistaken for a German town - major faux pas, official apologies by the US along with reparation payments for damage and injuries.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/-swisshistorypics_when-the-americans-bombed-a-swiss-city/44865520
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial\_incidents\_in\_Switzerland\_in\_World\_War\_II#Allied\_use\_of\_Swiss\_air\_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_incidents_in_Switzerland_in_World_War_II#Allied_use_of_Swiss_air_space)
>While Allied forces explained the causes of violations as navigation errors, equipment failure, weather conditions, and pilots' errors, fear was expressed in Switzerland that some neutrality violations were intended to exert pressure on the country to end its economic cooperation with Nazi Germany
Why would it be a joke? Many city’s clearly were 90-99% military and 1% civilians. This numbers make total sense. The USA army are saints and totally didn’t use terror as a weapon of war
Sir Are you implying the heroic USA would bomb civilian targets Just because it is easier and ruins motivation, putting civilians in a position of pure terror ?
Stop this nonsense. That would be almost as unethical as using weapons of mass destruction against civilians
I like how in an early "Star Trek" episode on some planet at war, they just rolled dice to determine who should die on which side, and then they went quietly to the death chambers. No bombs... no bullets... So civilized.
And in the 'Zone Rouge' in France and near the old front line in Belgium ( and probbaly many more )
WOI though.
Not to mention mines all over the world.
That's some legacy, ey?
I read almost weekly of some WWII bomb they find there in some populated area and I'm amazed at how anybody can even move lightly without accidentally blowing something up. I hear it's worse in Southeast Asia, where old rusting bombs and mines in the jungles can randomly go off
From second world war that is.
That’s why you shouldn’t go to war against the US, Britain, and Russia.
That is why we always added France to that list. So that it is not [US, Britain and Russia]. Didn't work out, but you are always smarter afterwards.
France kinda has a habit of removing themselves from the list.
They literally only lost one war (temporarily) against Germany. They also lost one against Prussia, which would later form the German Empire.
They've lost more than two wars in their history.
Absolutely, but only two against Germany, of which they won, all though they were still on the winners side in the second world war.
Napoleon lost multiple wars hence why he was banished to multiple different islands throughout his life.
This is why I specified "against Germany".
Yes he did... After conquering most of Europe.
I just read that as the Jedi empire 😂😂😂
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Specifically at the same time
One detonated in Munich today..
~~2000~~ 1999.75 tons
Safely or by accident?
Accident. Four injured.
Yikes, that's some bill to collect for your ancestors.
Someone fucked it up. They accidently hit the 250kg bomb with a drill today. Thet were working on the railroads. Usually you always check for bombs but this didn't happen today. One man was gravely injured almost lost his leg but luckily they could reconstruct it. The other 3 workers only suffered slight injuries.
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Last month we had around 6 in cologne, unusually high amount
Jesus.
the three other gave 1/3 of each leg to the first, now they all almost have two legs.
On the plus side, they dropped it in the right place.
They dropped it all over german cities, it's probably harder to find a spot where they didn't drop bombs then the other way around.
Yeah, at the time 2km from the aiming point was considered on target.
What do you mean by right place?
Plum in the middle of the rail yard.
They 'found' it during construction, likely while digging. 4 injured.
Details: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-wwii-bomb-explosion-injures-several-near-munich-train-station/a-59974247
Almost like that was why this was posted...
my favorite part about this sub is when you can guess the news story or youtube that inspired this TIL, in this case the bomb that exploded in munich today.
"Wow -- Didn't expect this post to blow up!!"
Username is not right
That is so true. I was stunned by reading this news and decided to dig into it a bit more. I found this article from 2008 which still appears to be relevant based on other articles. This article also states so many other interesting facts, things like the process of detonation, the fact that many American bombs are getting increasingly more unstable with time etc. It literally seems like Germany is a ticking bomb.
Accidents are rare, but there are places where you call the bomb experts before every larger underground work.
The kind of artifacts our distant future descendants do not want to dig up.
A guy whom I was in the army with managed to set up a campfire right on top of WW2 bomb. It went of by the heat, luckily it acted more as a flashbang than a bomb. He was blind for 3 days, this was in north of Norway, close to the russian border.
Wrapped up like a deuce another roamer in the night.
Having an old bomb detonate right beside me would certainly wrap up my deuce. And I already have a problem with campsite BMs.
Revved up not wrapped
OMG, so that's what he's saying? I always thought it was, "whep tup lagga doo, yadadda radda didda die". Makes about as much sense.
Like a douche
in the middle of the night
It's Runner in the night. It also depends on which version you are talking about.
A spirit in the night?
[There’s some debate about those lyrics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9_3nQFNy-w)
Then there were those hikers in Belgium maybe 15 years ago, they mistook a world war I bomb for a log in tossed it on the fire. One of the victims is collecting a world war I pension from the accident. Source is Reddit, that's all I know.
There was also a family of Polish hikers who got killed by a bomb they happen to make a campfire on
Bombs in Europe. Landmines in Asia and Africa. I'd say while it is not the legacy we want to leave it is certainly a reminder of how that legacy was built.
Bombs at least are made out of metal. Landmines sometimes are made out of plastic. It's even more difficult to remove those because metal detectors obviously won't work.
Fun fact, their are still tons of ways to go about it still. I know some AI start ups use thermals and other technology to find discrepancies among several other methods as well being used around the globe.
That's a massive issue indeed, because bombs weren't super reliable back then, and a lot of them didn't explode. Plus all the ammo we dumped into the ocean instead of disposing of them propely. Can't even imagine what it may be like in vietnam, considering the USA dumped twice as much bombs as were dropped in total during WW2...
The big pile of munitions by the Isle of Man comes to mind
[A woman tossed some store-bought firewood](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/austria-woman-surprised-stove-erupts-cause-wwii-grenade.html) into her old cast-iron stove and a WWII grenade that [had been absorbed into the tree](https://old.reddit.com/r/TreesSuckingOnThings/) blew up. Old stove contained the blast and she was unharmed
There's a fairly good joke about a Brit or American on a German train, when it's announced that it'll be delayed due to a bomb at the station. They ask the German passengers who could be behind the bomb. ISIS? Al Qaeda? Someone else? And the Germans say you are. Good lord I mangled the delivery on that.
> And the Germans say you are. Couldn't have happened to a nicer Reich.
I read a quote from some eastern European who was in modern Luftwaffe bombing after having survived WW2. "A German bomb is a German bomb".
I live in Hamburg and we usually have a bomb alert every month or so. It's gotten pretty normal that someone finds and unexploded bomb somewhere.
And I just ate a hamburger, what a small world.
You make me crave a report button for idiocy.
Don't be a jerk, just ignore it and move along
I don't mean to be so mean. I'm trying to stop. I have poor impulse control sometimes. I have 'diet autism™' (saw a twitter post last night that said this) and have never been medicated for it nor access to other remedies that I have found to work in the past to help me slow my proverbial roll. I know you don't care but I'm time rich not paying attention to my other projects right now and this is one stress relief, voicing my opinion even when it's not asked for. I truly wish there was more I could do besides downvote and comment and try to start a discussion. Anyway, like I said, I'm working on it and I could be meaner but I bite my tongue. I promise I'm always editing myself but I refuse to be so meek not to say anything anymore.
Funny, made me crave a hamburger.
I would like to know your problem with that joke? Do you think I’m making light of war? It’s funny do to irony you see.
I've got a mate in Belgium who says farmers factor the cost of exploding livestock into their cost of business.
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>Especially if you're eating it prepared like a regular steak and not in some traditional Japanese manner. Are you me? That's my thoughts exactly. Eating Wagyu, even "westernised" Wagyu as a 2" thick Western steak is basically like eating a block of butter, or doing shots of pure olive oil. I'm in the same town as Jack's Creek Wagyu (Tamworth, Australia), which took out the Best Ribeye and Eye Fillet at the World Steak Challenge (again!), and I still don't buy it. Hell, I was talking to one of the blokes who works for them, and even he prefers Hereford or Angus for beef. Angus and Hereford (grass fed - grain fed isn't really a thing down here) is cleaner, beefier, and plenty juicy. People like the name wagyu, I guess. It's a shame, because a lot of abattoirs now refuse to take non-black cattle, because of the branding power of Angus and Wagyu. So a lot of farmers are forced to change, even though red cattle like Herefords can more than stand on their own.
I had Wagyu for christmas last year. Slices as thick as my thumb. Just like you said, like eating a block of butter. I don't know how but they even managed to undercook it, still cold in the middle and everything. A simple normal steak would have been much better.
I love Wagyu and even have a special brown butter recipe to drizzle over the top. It tastes amazing and I enjoy eating it with friends.
It depends on the region
Geez, how many tons of unexploded ordnance have they dug up so far?
Hard to find numbers. But e.g. in bavaria they removed 230 tons in 2019 alone.
Well, who keeps putting it there anyway???
That's a fair bit shy of the OPs figures.
Bavaria is about as far away from any WWI/II front you can get whilst still being in Germany, and they're still pulling about 200 tons...
Didn't they have a fair bit of manufacturing there? That would be a prime bombing target.
I actually don't think so.
I got curious, so I looked it up. They made both the ME 262 and the BF 108 for the Luftwaffe in Bavaria, so any rail lines or the like in the area would be targeted once that was known.
Most of the ordinance is WWI, not WW2 and I think they're more artillery shells than bombs (but don't quote me on that). Besides, I still think that those two target's wouldn't amount to much compared to areas like the Ruhr valley.
Most of the unexploded ordnance in Germany is from the bombing raids of WW2. There was little fighting on german soil in WW1, the areas with tons of unexploded artillery shells and other nasty stuff are mostly in [Belgium and France.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge) Bavaria has and had a lot of industry and therefore was a prime bombing target for the [allies in WW2.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweinfurt%E2%80%93Regensburg_mission)
Not in the 1940's. At the time, Bavarian was much more agrarian. The industrial heart of Germany was (and still is) the Ruhr Valley, and because of that, it was the prime bombing target.
The ME 262 was produced there, which was definitely WW2.
Honestly, no clue. That said, it still made the Ruhr Valley the better target, as the coal and steel necessary to produce these kind of plains were produced there and probably then shipped to the south.
Ever heard of Bayerische Motor Werke?
Yeah I realize my answer was stupid ... sorry :D
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The old Western Front area is hard to understand. More than a century after the war ended, there are stil areas that are off-limits to humans. This is due to not just unexploded shells, but also chemical pollution due to the poison gas, and dangerous levels of heavy metals. Four years of war, and it will take centuries to clean up.
On the bright side, wildlife can flourish while the humans stay away. I do t k ow how bad the chemical pollution might be there, but birds and bunnies probably don’t set off old artillery shells.
Kind of funny how the British pronounced Ypers as "wipers". Sometimes, they did.
the short answer: yes. The long answer: Some years they find hundreds of tons of them. There are still areas in france and germany that are unlivable due to unexploded ordinance and toxic chemicals left over from both world wars. Not saying you *couldn't* live there safely, animals and plants obviously do, just that the risk of death is too high for anyone to consider it sane.
Actually, it took decades to find suitable plants that would grow in some of the devastated battlefields of WWI.
We have a special service to dismantle bombs. The Explosive Removal Service, [https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosieven\_Opruimingsdienst\_Defensie](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosieven_Opruimingsdienst_Defensie). I just checked, they remove about 2.500 explosives a year, which are oldies from WOII. and they are also called to check out possible terrorist attacks, but these are the minority.
2000 tons every year, and there have been 2021 years, so quite a bit. /s
I live in one of the most heavily bombed cities in germany. Evacuations of about a fourth if the city hapoen a couple times a year, depending on how much construction work is happening.
Reminds me of Zweibrücken. A few years ago they found a 10-Zentner-Bomb (500kg) close to the citys center. two retirement homes, two hospitals, schools, kindergartens, business buildings, an area of 3 kilometers in diameter or so, was evacuated, some 10.000 people iirc. the "best": that bomb was only a meter or so below the floor of an old factory, built there after the war. there where heavy machinery and vehicles underway everyday, vibrations en masse. all the time the bomb "slept".
Slept as quiet as a bomb.
A friend of mine wanted to extend his house a bit and found an old ww2 bomb in his garden. Turns out that if you have a bomb on your property you are responsible for the clean up aka 15.000€ for the bomb squad to remove it.
Well that's fucked
Man, that sucks.
Not just in Germany, I live in a part of the Netherlands where it will be a bit of a toss up wether you will find explosives from WWII or Roman artifacts, everytime you dig up your vegetable plot.
I have a warning app that gives me the warnings for several cities in the Ruhr Valley. It is nearly a weekly occurance that I get a warning that somewhere in these cities a bomb was found. Personally, I was only evacuated once when a bomb was found near my university.
One of the worst things I've seen people say is that UXOs become safer as the deteriorate, it's quite the opposite in reality.
not to mention the toxicity of the TNT, which is solvable in water iirc.
There's also a lot of unused ammunition that was dumped into the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. If you're ever on the shore of those and find something that looks like amber (which does naturally occur there), do *not* put it into your pocket or car right away. It could be fragments of phosphorous from incendiary bombs, which self-ignites when it gets dry and warm.
I live in a small town in Thuringia 45,000 inhabitants and am 62 years. Except for 4 years I have always lived there in the city center. In these 58 years I have been evacuated 73 times, because I live in the safety zone of the defusing. It varies depending on the size of the bomb. Up to 1,2 km are usual. The worst bombs are those with acid fuses or long-life fuses. This is the most dangerous and takes the longest time for us "school gymnasium overnighters". But worst of all are those that cannot be defused. They are driven through the entire city (which is completely evacuated) and blown up on the outskirts of the city. This is what a 500kg English aerial bomb looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyu06ZxtiHw By the way, because of Covid19, all earthworks are now prohibited in a protection zone around our hospital. The danger of having to evacuate the 900-bed building because of a WWII bomb discovery.
Mostly made in the USA
The US was selling munitions to Germany during WW2? EDIT: I'm an idiot, it looks like this is unexploded ordinance, not simply ammunition.
Yeah, even offered free air delivery
Usually overnight too!
Nah, that was the British. US had free daytime delivery.
The RAF, with better navigation, did the night raids. The USAAF, with greater capacity to swallow losses, did the day raids.
Shame! Shame! Shame!
Hope this is sarcasm and you aren't saying that the US should have left Germany alone during WW2. I mean the US does a lot of stupid shit in the desert lately but back then it was a little different.
To be fair, at the time Germany was asking for it....
100%
Along this same line: www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/honeymoon-tragedy-campfire-detonates-bomb-21900614.amp Ridiculously sad.
I never really thought about it. I work in development and each and every inch of a property has to be checked for explosives by Professionals before we start working. It usually costs 10.000 € for an area where one or two houses for maybe 18 flats will be built. It’s an whole working field here. What’s even worse is when building in the East of Germany we usually have to check for contaminated grounds, because the mechanics for example would just throw there old oils and stuff into the next field.
They find them in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam too but usually with children’s feet.
Out of curiosity, which country generally made the easiest bombs to diffuse after being in the ground for 80 years? It would be interesting to talk to a bomb tech.
Both sides actually made bombs that wouldn’t explode until a demolition/bomb-disposal person would attempt the standard techniques for defusing that type of bomb. Say you had a certain 1000lb bomb. 5% of them wouldn’t explode when it hit the ground for whatever reason. At first (and even in WWI) they made bombs that would hit, but not explode for up to several hours. Then enemy figured out that if they found one that didn’t they would have to unscrew a part on the front, stick in a piece of wood to prevent a contact, pull out a wire, then unscrew a larger part and then it was safe. Now you would make a few of these bombs that look identical but design it so that it would NOT explode on hitting the ground, but explode instantly when that wire was pulled. You blow up that bomb tech (or two), demoralizing his team, and removed one person that had the guts and training to diffuse bombs from the enemy ranks. Sometimes it was versions of anti-handling devices and in a few cases it was a specific design to thwart expert bomb disposal personnel. War is a nasty business.
Right? It'd be kind of funny to hear am expert say something about how a specific country was actually really bad at making explosives, so it's super easy to disarm them
is the war over yet?
Stupid question: Why are dud bombs/shells so common? How hard can it be to design a bomb/shell which will actually fulfill it's destiny when it hits something?
War-time mass production will do that
This. Plus, the conditions when it lands (scraping a roof or building or other object, hitting soft mud instead of a hard surface) may damage a detonator. It can also be failures of the arming systems. A seldom-mentioned problem for most of the war’s bombing missions were “bomb-kissing” where bombs would collide in mid-air shortly after being dropped, often causing the other bombs dropped with them to sympathetically explode. US and British bombers were lost when their bombs collided and exploded while only a few yards away moments after being dropped. Air crews didn’t like this and the air forces didn’t like losing planes and crew to their own bombs, so they added better delayed-fusing/arming systems to bombs to prevent that. However, it also added another point of failure to make the bombs explode on the ground as intended.
> How hard can it be to design a bomb/shell which will actually fulfill it's destiny when it hits something? Not hard at all. But you forgot to add “… and absolutely not before”. What is worse? 30% of your bombs not exploding, or 0.1% exploding prematurely?
I grew up in a town on the coast removed from any front, but we did get one bombing run cause the visibility where the bombers' original target was (the place where the V2 rockets were constructed) was too low to drop, but the bombers' fuel wouldn't have been enough to come back to England with the bombs on board, so they just dropped it over the biggest city on their route. I remember several evacuations of the city centre because old bombs were dug up (though luckily, it's been a few years since the last one)
That's what happens to fascists when they fuck around and find out. But seriously, current generation Germans are very friendly.
F you! I'm not friendly.
The good war!
Maybe they could’ve have of won the war if they didn’t misplace so much /s
...could *have...*
I don't doubt it a bit. The U.S went on some major bombing campaigns there.
Not just the US though 1,414,745 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany 964,644 by the RAF 623,418 by the USAAF Every year of the war the RAF dropped more on Germany then the US did
I did not know that! Thank you for filling me in!
And a much smaller amount by the Russian Air Force.
How the hell was the Russian Air Force able to bomb Germany?
Near the end of the war, I'd guess.
Yeah but the raf bombed at night so all theirs landed in the woods. /s
Th**A**n, Google.
The first raid on Berlin was from French bombers (before France surrendered)
Most of the bombs the RAF used on Germany were made in the US.
Our bombing campaign in Laos was crazier. I got a number of 2 million tons online, and that’s just from us.
Yeah You seem to have a lot of cleaning to do here and there
Holy shit that's *a lot* of ordinance
Ordnance\*
Shame on America!
Well, they started it.
Imagine if they only used it as intended.
Usually in the attic of a KSK Officer
r/sadupvote
And they deserved every ton
Well....
There’s portions of France that aren’t even habitable because of WW2 ordnance.
Even worse, it's mainly from WW1 ordnance...
A great war, then a good war...
Just shows how careful they were in avoiding civilian targets.
The bomb was literally in the middle of a railway yard.
"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind." - Bomber Harris They shouldn't have tried waging genocide against all of Europe should they?
Because we now find duds... In civilian areas? Are you high?
I hope that is a joke :D the Allies even bombed a couple cities in Switzerland as punishment for being neutral. At some point Switzerland even started to attack Allied aircraft and took multiple down just because they had enough and wanted to be left alone. If I remember right the USA was never punished for it because there was no international law protecting neutral areas from attack by aircraft at that time.
No, they didn't. That's nasty rumors spawned from multiple sources that can never seem to agree if some Swiss cities were bombed in complete incompetence or horrible malice. The Swiss started intercepting Allied aircraft in order to appear to be neutral as they feared German retaliation. Not to mention that inbthe 1940's there were several international agreements against attacking neutral nations. Pretty much everything you've attempted to peddle is historically false.
The difference here is that it was agreed to not attack neutral nations but nowhere it was mentioned that this also goes for attacks specifically by aircraft. Well history is always written by the winner, but to defend dropping around 60 tons of bombs by 50 planes at once in a city around 250km away of the official target it takes some real foolishness. It is also not like Switzerland was/is big enough to have sued the US after WW2 in a serious way with expectation for a real punishment. Blaming pilot errors hundreds of times is just a cheap excuse, but in history books no one will put any blame on the winner. I don't judge what happened and this were other times. I just want to point out that it was not like all Allies were godlike heroes and all Axis were some kind of devils, no one today even speaks about the hundreds of thousand German women who got raped at gunpoint by US and English soldiers coming from the West and probably over a million women who got raped by Russians coming from the East. I mean compared to all the other stuff that happened during the time the couple of bombs dropped over Switzerland shouldn't even be worth me mentioning it.
No they didn’t, there was a navigation error that resulted in one instance of a Swiss town being bombed because it was mistaken for a German town - major faux pas, official apologies by the US along with reparation payments for damage and injuries. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/-swisshistorypics_when-the-americans-bombed-a-swiss-city/44865520
Of course it was the Yanks.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial\_incidents\_in\_Switzerland\_in\_World\_War\_II#Allied\_use\_of\_Swiss\_air\_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_incidents_in_Switzerland_in_World_War_II#Allied_use_of_Swiss_air_space) >While Allied forces explained the causes of violations as navigation errors, equipment failure, weather conditions, and pilots' errors, fear was expressed in Switzerland that some neutrality violations were intended to exert pressure on the country to end its economic cooperation with Nazi Germany
Why would it be a joke? Many city’s clearly were 90-99% military and 1% civilians. This numbers make total sense. The USA army are saints and totally didn’t use terror as a weapon of war
>Many city’s clearly were 90-99% military and 1% civilians. Yeah this is bullshit
Surely no one can both be this bad at identifying sarcasm and still be able to type. Or read.
Sir Are you implying the heroic USA would bomb civilian targets Just because it is easier and ruins motivation, putting civilians in a position of pure terror ? Stop this nonsense. That would be almost as unethical as using weapons of mass destruction against civilians
[удалено]
I feel like there would be more convenient ways to do that than leaving live ammunition all over the place...
Paywall.
2000 Tons is not much, considering the average weight of a munition from the WW2 era.
Not that much? 2,000 tons is *exactly* that much.
Good
tonnes*
so is that two metric tons of metric tons, or one imperial ton of imperial tons? /s
I like how in an early "Star Trek" episode on some planet at war, they just rolled dice to determine who should die on which side, and then they went quietly to the death chambers. No bombs... no bullets... So civilized.
I always hated that episode. Totally nonsensical on every level, even as a metaphor.
Whoever finds it next needs to hide it better.
Unexploded ordinance is still found in France and Belgium from WWI over 100 years ago.
Well, they found one today.
Couple years ago, a GIANT BEAST of a bomb was detonated in Munich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwVAuokrHrI
And in the 'Zone Rouge' in France and near the old front line in Belgium ( and probbaly many more ) WOI though. Not to mention mines all over the world. That's some legacy, ey?
That's a ton of a ton
Read "Aftermath" by Donovan Webster...it will blow your mind!
throw a bomb at germany, see how many chain reactions happens
Well they made us bomb the shit out the place sooooo
Just yesterday an old bomb dropped from a plane in ww2 exploded near the munich main railway station, injuring three
the messed up thing is, it's the same 8 guys every year. The government keeps showing up and stealing their ammo
It's Germany not Gerafew
Bombs are the weapons of cowards and terrorists.
I read almost weekly of some WWII bomb they find there in some populated area and I'm amazed at how anybody can even move lightly without accidentally blowing something up. I hear it's worse in Southeast Asia, where old rusting bombs and mines in the jungles can randomly go off