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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Bombs did not fall one at a time, it was a massive amount falling over a period of time. And then again the next day. If you had a pile of rubble in a basement, you might just fill it in and never find the bomb in that pile.
Bombs are also very heavy and in already bombed and otherwise walked on or ploughed earth it might disapear underground if it falls but does not go off. You might see a small crater and think oh it was a small bomb, gone now! And 50 years later you find out the impact crater was the small one and there is a 500 pounder sitting underneath your garden shed.
Also, if you see a bomb you don’t think make it safe. You think, that could go any second I need to get it covered with dirt or diffused before it goes of. In places with trenches a bomb or shell might be dumped in an abandoned one. If it goes boom it goes boom away from me and does not send shrapnell in my face.
They often turn up in rivers and canals in urban areas where they have been stuck in the muck.
Hamburg was heavily bombed at night. Before any building construction starts, the place has to be checked. Regularly blocks in the city are evacuated until the bomb to be secured. We get alarms on the mobile, etc. Nothing unusual. It is in 5he lqw, you can not construct before checking. There are still many many bombs here. Same thing for windoffshore parks, the undersea ground will be checked. Munitions etc. were discharged in the sea.
It wasn’t a case of a few bombs being dropped. In an artillery barrage of WWI or an air raid of WWII, there would be thousands of bombs or shells dropping in a single night. People were naturally taking shelter for safety so they weren’t looking at each and every bomb falling. bombings were often at night, and cities deliberately blacked out lights so that aircraft could not tell where they were. If 1000 bombs drop in one night over a city, it is really easy to miss a couple. If this happens for a couple of years, night after night, that’s a lot of bombs you just didn’t notice,
There were places like east London that got bombed out that stayed that way for decades before redevelopment started.
The dropped a crazy amount of bombs over large areas. Many of which did not detonate and ended up buried. It’s like If I flew over your house and dropped a million pennies over it I doubt you’d ever find them all. Maybe most but you’d still be finding pennies years later. There’d be nooks and crannies where you’d never even think to look and overtime things would happen that end up hiding some in various ways.
WWI consumed about 1 billion (with a **B**) artillery shells. Even if the failure rate (shells that do not detonate) was as low as one in a thousand, that means there would be one million “dud” artillery shells laying around in Europe waiting to be found.
WWII had all that and more.
How would you know there is a bomb over there? There have been fired billions (with a b! Not an exaggeration!) bombs of which around a fifth didn’t explode. So we are still talking about hundred of millions of shells and bombs not exploded. How do you imagine tracking any of those? I think you are underestimating the amount of bombs and shells fired in both world wars by a few orders of magnitude
Were i live in nothern germany, you are not even allowed to magnet fish, because we don’t know how many unexposed bombs are still in the seas.
There were such massive amount of bombs dropped that nobody was able to keep track of all the unexploded stuff, if they even knew it was there. Rebuilding from rubble and covering up ruins was done without checking at some point.
From what I read the kinetic energy of bombs lets them go deep underground and the soil above them collapses onto them. So if it does not explode it becomes buried. And there were a lot of bombs
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