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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OK so the allied alone dropped 2,000,000 TONS with strategic bombing alone.
That does not count naval batteries, artillery, CAS support, Mines, etc.
You also have to account that not every bullet or bomb works 100% of the time.
A strong example of that is the battle of Somme in ww1. The britished shelled the Germans for 6 days straight. Literally 24/7 for 6 days and half of their shells didn’t even explode. They were duds.
The bombs dropped from aircraft in WW2 would mostly bury themselves if they didn’t explode. You might think that a hole in a roof or in a road where a bomb had passed through would be noticed, but in bombing raids there’d be a lot of smashed roofs and roads. Besides that, the emergency services under immense pressure and no-one had time to go around keeping track of new holes. They’d just fill them in and carry on.
There’s a map of London where the location of known or suspected unexploded bombs are marked.
Archaeologist working in Belgium here!
our company recently found unexploded ordenance in while working on a site.
essentially, geology made a lot of them dissapear under fields, rain, mud, erosion… filled up the impact sites and after a while farmers forgot the bombs were under these locations and started ploughing. or it just sits there after impact and gets buried next to a house or a new one is built close-by
The scale of the war is unimmaginable for us today.
For reference: currently about 16k russians are reported to died in Avdiivka. Thats MORE than combined fighting force of our military (Czechia, totals about 30k active duty)
For example, battle of Berlin in 1945 had almost 4 million soldiers available for both attack and securing nearby areas.
Stalingrad totalled for almost 2 million casualities for both USSR / Nazis.
They hit soft gound without leaving an impact crater and didn’t go off because the detonator malfunctioned. Technology was not as andvanced in WW2 compered to today. At least for mass produced bombs, they used easy to fabricate detonators that often malfunctioned when the impact forces were too low.
For example, I live in germany, around an industrial area that was obliterated by the brits in the later stages of ww2.
And since our ground here is very soft, some of the bombs hit the ground without going off and didn’t even leave a impact crater. Like if you drop a spoon in gravy. Now they lay around two to three meters deep, in some cases even deeper with detonators that are deterioraring and are still armed.
After all the rubble was cleared they started to build appartement buildings where the former buildings were leveled in WW2.
When i was a kid, my aunt lived in an area that was rebuild in the late 50s/ early 60s. Now, six or so years ago, they tore down three of the buildings and found one “Blindgänger” in the garden area between the buildings, three meters below the area where the open air clothes dryer and another one a mere meter below the concrete cellar floor of one of the buildings only 60 meters from the other away. If either one had gone off, the other could have followed and leveled that whole block for a second time. Imagine the luck of the guys digging that foundation, if one of them would have hit the bomb with his shovel or picaxe.
When a bomb hits (and doesn’t go off) it can easily bury itself 6 or 7 feet underground. Other bombs go off around it at the same time – nobody drops ONE bomb in an attack – and then you get rubble and dirt on top of the unexploded bomb. Nobody knows it’s there – nobody’s outside watching to see which bombs go off and which don’t, they’re all with their heads down hoping they don’t get hit.
Time passes, and the earth has a habit of moving large objects like big rocks and such upwards. eventually over time the unexploded bomb is shallower than it was and someone hits it with a shovel and says “Mmmm- probably aught to ring the constabulary about that, whot whot” and there you go
My family grew up close to [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort%27s_Dyke) and as far as I’m aware, unexploded ordinance washes up on a regular basis.
As an American ,if this happened in America our dope addicts would disarm them and scrap them for money
When they were little kids, my mom and her cousins were playing hide and seek under the family house in our little village in Poland. My grandfather was part of the partyzantka during WW 2 (guerilla) and so were my great-grandfathers, and part of what they did was provide and hide artillery and bombs, and general supplies. While playing my mom and the other kids found stuff under the house, went to their uncle and showed him a grenade in their hands. Multiple army trucks had to come to take away all the munitions that were still being stored there. This would’ve been the early 60s so not that long after the war, but still. A whole cache of weapons and explosives was stored under their feet for years.
A lot of people evacuated – you don’t really stick around if there are bombs dropping every day.
There wasn’t enough skilled personal around to diffuse all the masses of explosives.
No one actually counted how many bombshell were dropped where and how many didn’t explode.
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