Quote:
Originally Posted by drewpee
Still a threat after all this time,wow. Do you now if there has been any cases of ww2 ordnance actually going off? I know land mines are still a problem in some parts of the world but most of those are quite modern aren't they?
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there are many cases of unexploded ordnance being found in Europe after WW2, from small stuff to bigger ones. The main issue is that explosives tend to become unstable with time and humidity, hence the extreme care in these cases. Unfortunately there have been accidents where things went wrong, since neutralising these threats is not an easy task.
My brother is an archaeologist, he knows of my interest for WW1 and WW2 and called me on a couple of occasions asking me if I could help him identifying some suspect items his team stumbled upon whilst digging in the countryside near Anzio: whenever they go check on freshly ploughed fields there's SO much stuff coming up! Once they saw a little wooden box half buried, with what seemed like a fuse sticking out, he took a pic of it and texted it to me, I called him and said "stay well off that!! It's not a wooden box, it's a mine!!". I sent him the same day via express courier a manual with pics of the most commonly found landmines and ordnance of WW2, which he now keeps with himself all the time.
In a month they found two Schu-minen 42, 5 Teller and loads of ammunition in 40 acres of land!!
an interesting read on the topic can be found here
http://maic.jmu.edu/journal/4.2/features/ww2/ww2.htm