The day after or week after these were dropped 60-100 years ago, did people not think, there’s a bomb over there we should make it safe.
Edit: I singled out the UK because they discovered a bomb from World War Two today in Plymouth. I know the UK is still in Europe.
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Really a lot of bombs were dropped. The failure to detonate rate was pretty high. This is because the fuses were primitive and could be easily damaged. Often the duds would bury themselves in the dirt far enough that you couldn’t see them. People weren’t worrying about them all that much as there were fresh bombs coming down daily.
In WWI, about 25% of the artillery shells fired failed to detonate. That’s why there are the Red Zones around the trench areas where unexploded shells and poison gas shells show up all the time. The French deminers who handle them are very brave and I take my hat off to them in respect.
There is a wonderful British TV show called Danger: UXB about dud bombs in WWII and the people who defused them. Highly recommended.
You might be underestimating the scale and primitive nature of warfare (by modern standards) in WW1 and 2. Also, lots of the bombings took place at night and weren’t exactly targeted. And at the start of WW2 (don’t even bother with WW1) around 1/3 of UK homes didn’t have electricity. And, in many respects, the UK was ahead of Europe at this time.
So if you’ve ever been in the countryside at night and turn off the lights, you might get an idea how impossible it is to locate things.
Bombs that failed to detonate tended to bury themselves into the ground. In the chaos of a bombing raid where thousands of bombs might be dropped, it’s not practical to track which bombs landed where and which ones didn’t detonate.
So they just didn’t necessarily know at the time where all these bombs were, the ones they did know about would have been dealt with eventually, but the ones they didn’t know about? Well, large area underground clearances at that scale (like, your whole city scale) aren’t practical.
Fun fact, the US military EOD school is located on an old Air Force bombing range. They still occasionally find bombs there, sometimes it even gets students a day off.
You wouldn’t necessarily know where exactly the bombs or artillery shells landed.
Imagine you’re at home, when you hear explosions start going off in the distance. You and your family go down into the basement which hopefully offers some protection. You can’t see anything, all you can hear are thumps and booms, some nearby, some far away. Eventually the noise stops, and you come out of the basement. There is a lot of churned up dirt everywhere, a bunch of big craters and destruction. It would be easy to miss a comparatively small hole where a big heavy bomb that didn’t explode buried itself in the ground. You clean up your yard as best you can, smoothing everything out, and you don’t bother to put any kind of specialty marker on each and every hole you find. Then 50 years later your grandkids are remodeling the house and when they dig up the yard they find a mysterious metal tube.
An important factor is just how many bombs and shells were fired in these wars. It isn’t hundred, or thousands, we’re talking MILLIONS of bombs and artillery shells. All over the place. That means thousands of bombs that might have failed to go off, scattered everywhere across the countryside.
Belgian here, from the region where many of these bombs are found. (Ypres, Passchendale, …)
The scale and size of the war was such that there were no people left to see the unexploded bombs.
The houses were gone. The roads were gone. The people were gone. There was only mud.
Many were also dropped at night. The muddy ground causes unexploded ordinance to immediatly be buried on impact.
Words can not explain, so I will share some self-explanatory photographs:
* near Ypres, October 1917 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Chateauwood.jpg/1200px-Chateauwood.jpg
* Ypres, 1918 https://cdn.britannica.com/53/135153-050-D8DDC147/battles-troops-site-town-British-West-Flanders-September-29-1918.jpg
* Passchendaele 1917 https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/b00ddf7f-b199-4bd3-95d9-41f5430c22bf.jpg
* Passchendaele 1917
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSQocODyBBulcXLKUFgZKCqYOx5Yd3T5ezSfg&usqp=CAU
* Passchendaele before / after the war. Note all the craters on the second picture. Each touching and overlapping the next.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F8a1peah0s0041.jpg
Even provincial cities like Plymouth were bombed on 40-50 occasions in WW2 , city centres were devastated and that was the bombs that were on target. Bombing by eye at night wasn’t at all accurate and many bombs failed to explode on impact. So yes we still have unexploded bombs.
In WW1, between 900 million and 1,2 billion artillery shells were fired. That is just artillery shells, not other projectiles which may contain explosives, hand grenades etc. On very very limited areas of the world. Its estimated around 300 million projectiles (not just artillery shells) were duds. Its not like people missed 300 million of them, but when you got 300 million of various different kind of explosives here and there, you will miss some. Remember that artillery would keep firing after those duds had landed, so ground would keep changing and those might get buried deep, only to be discovered much later on by farmers who touch the stuff, bringing ground from the bottom closer to the top.
And then you got second world war, which saw massive scale aerial bombardments as well. Those bombs would scatter over large area, they were very inaccurate. Idk how many of them exploded or were dropped, but its good amount.
Its not like people were stupid
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iron_harvest)
If you were to scatter exactly 1 million coffee beans around your apartment, it would propably be very difficult to find ALL of them. And your apartment does not hopefully have a ground which is constantly changing and shaped by artillery bombardment, burying coffee beans deeper.
For scale: on the first day of the Battle of Verdun, the Germans alone fired **1M shells in 10 hours**, and that battle lasted ~10 months .
That’s a lot of shells, buried in the earth. You usually only find them when you dig to build something
This just speaks to the ungodly amount of bombs dropped during those wars. People often underestimate it but out of all bombs only a small amount don’t detonate, and out of that small amount most were cleared during the post war, and even as such that tiny minority of bombs that didn’t go off and weren’t found still account for a huge number of such instances.
People have a hard time understanding the sheer scale of WW1 and WW2
In WW2 Allied air forces dropped nearly 2.7 million tons of bombs, flew 1,440,000 bomber sorties and 2,680,000 fighter sorties.
79,265 Americans and 79,281 British airmen were lost. More than 18,000 American and 22,000 British planes were lost or damaged beyond repair.
Approximately 20 percent of the total number of buildings in Germany were destroyed or heavily damaged.
There was so many bombs dropped that a large number that failed to detonate are still buried underground all over Europe.
That’s also just bombs, there’s also other explosive devices like artillery shells and mines.
There’s several places in France that are permanently off limits to civilians because the concentration of unexploded ordnance leftover from WW1 is so high as to make it too dangerous. The French government is actively working to clean it up, but there isn’t enough budget to clean it all up in a reasonable amount of time.
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