The Lethal Legacy of World War II

[Nausicaa]

An interesting article about the legacy of bombs in Germany:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...584091,00.html

[hewman100]

Which applies equally to several areas within the UK as well.

[exc141ac]

I am a great fan of the BBC series: Danger UXB
sadly it goes on
thanks for sharing.

[wombat666]

And Cambodia, Viet Nam, Chad, the Horn of Africa and Bosnia remain riddled with all manner of nasties.
Interesting read and I certainly dips me lid to the gentleman concerned.

[OBIO]

Seems like they would make more money selling the more preserved shell casings/inert bomb casings to collectors than as scrap metal. I know I'd love to have a German 88 shell casing to display.

OBIO

[Panther_99FS]

Add the Balkans to the list too....

Bottom line is that where ever on the globe that modern war occurred,
land mines & UXOs will always remain...

[von Bek]

Which applies equally to several areas within the UK as well.

There is a small difference of scale. Towards the end of the war, the allied air forces were capable of delivering to a single target in 24 hours roughly the same tonnage as was dropped on England in the entire blitz.

[stiz]

is there still a sunken merchant ship full of explosives in the mouth of the thames?? saw a tele program on it a while back and they where at the stage of wondering weather or not to raise it. They said if they left it there to rust n such it might blow up and have the force of a small nuke, but if they tried to raise it they risked setting it off anyway :isadizzy:

[CADFather]

It may have been here (pre-crash) that I read about the gas shells from WWI still laying about. That scares me worse than getting blown up. I live just outside of a Civil War battlefield in N. GA named Chickamauga and as recently as this year there were cannon shells still being discovered in the farm fields just outside of the park. I find bullets on my property all the time, down by the creeks.

[grumpos]

is there still a sunken merchant ship full of explosives in the mouth of the thames?? saw a tele program on it a while back and they where at the stage of wondering weather or not to raise it. They said if they left it there to rust n such it might blow up and have the force of a small nuke, but if they tried to raise it they risked setting it off anyway :isadizzy:

Its still there:

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums...d.php?t=126960

Best wishes
Steve P

[hewman100]

The amount of this stuff that still remains to be found is frightening and that's just the areas that supposedly had been marked on a map.

[JO_Wingnut]

When I was stationed with the air force in the Philippines, I lived off base in the local town. Next to the compound was a very large area filled with scrap metal left over from WW2. A Japanese company bought it and started shipping it out on cargo ships. In the field, before they bought it, I would walk around to see what I could find. I saw a couple old trucks and pieces of equipment rusting away. As they were moving it all out, they located some old bullets, rifle grenades (just the outer metal shells) and a 250 pound bomb. There were no fins or fuses in the bomb, but they were going to send it to the smelter to be melted down. I happened to catch the guy that was overseeing the shipping of the metal, and mentioned the bomb to him. Thats when I found out what they were going to do with it. I suggested he take it out to the deepest part of the ocean and shove it overboard and forget he ever had it, as I believed it would probably explode if they stuck it in that furnace to be melted down. I think it still had it's TNT inside. Just seeing it lay there next to my house was enough to worry me, even though I knew it shouldn't explode without it's fuse. There were also live bombs found on Clark AFB when I was there as well. EOD was called in to deactivate them.

[Snuffy]

Not necessarily from just WW2 .. but any armed conflict ..

http://www.landmines.org.uk/