alt Hacker NewsMy aunt lives in Hamm, Germany. It used to be a massive rail road hub and allies bombed the f* out it. The old church sitting middle of the town still carries the scars of bombing. Few years ago, during the renovation of the shopping mall, construction crew found unexploded American 500 lbs bomb in the ground. City had to evacuate a lot of people. Throughout years, there were multiple other incidents with UXO in Hamm, that I can recall. I still wonder how the 500 pound bomb been sitting in the ground so many years, right in the center of the town, right by the shopping mall and no one noticed.
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10 - 20 % never exploded, and those exploding buried the unexploded ordnance. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-bomb-craters-after-allied-...
Those areas where moon craters at the end of the war. But by then logistics where decentralized, all those last days last ditch products, where made in underground facilities or small village smith factories. Effectively they bombed a bomb disposal pit..
As a German living in Berlin it's still pretty normal that once in a while WW2 bombs are found during construction. Heavy bombs that didn't explode probably penetrated the ground quite a bit so when rebuilding it was probably just easier to just leave them there. That's just a guess.
There are also still bombs and grenades in the rivers. There are some magnet fishing YouTube channels where you can occasionally see them pulling up stuff like that.
> I still wonder how...
A 500 lbs bomb falling from altitude can bury itself a fair ways in soil. Most of its fellow bombs will have good fuses - and with the mess they make, it would take some careful excavation in just the right spot to find the dud bomb. (Or, maybe it fell in a patch of overgrown brush in a park, or in a river, or a farmer's pond, or ...)
And with the scale at which Germany was bombed in WWII, there was nothing remotely resembling the resources to carefully excavate all the myriad square miles where dud bombs might have fallen. Either during the war, or after.
True further east, here in former Germany, now Poland. Especially throughout the construction and investment boom that's been happening since 00's. Just last year my neighborhood was evacuated.
Unexploded Soviet ordnance - insane how much of it was dropped and buried in the rubble to this day. You're right though - weird to think that nobody would notice, but so much Europe was turned to rubble at that time. These things got turned to unrecognizable rusty mush after a few decades.
Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice. These things are pretty routine, there is no fear or panic. IThey just diffuse and take the thing away to some military range to dispose of it.