Sorry, I gotta do this.
The word some of you are looking for is ordnance. As you may recall, an ordinance is a law, not artillery whatnots.
Again, I apologize. I just had to pick that nit. It’s tiny, but it really itched! Please carry on.
Okay, I misunderstood the question. I’ll admit here in the United States it would be virtually impossible to find a buried bomb like you described so we don’t really think about the possibility.
This is off topic, but ordinance from WW 1 is found often in France (and Belgium). At the battle of Messines Ridge the British tunnelled under the German lines and planted explosives in 21 different mines. A total of 400 tonnes of high explosive. 19 of the mines went off killing 10,000 German soldiers- the noise was heard as far away as Dublin.
One of the other unblown mines was set off by a lightning strike in 1956 and killed a cow.
The other has never been found.
Be lovely to have that in your backyard.
Well, to be a PITA–Guam is technically part of the US, and national parks people there quite seriously warned me to watch out for ordnance on the beaches. Bit of a different situation though–if there, it would have been washed up from offshore, 60 years after the Americans retook the island from the Japanese.
Similar anecdotes: In the Oxfordshire town where I went to school, an ammunition truck had fallen over the bridge into the river during a blackout in WWII. The wartime authorities thought they’d got everything up, but they hadn’t.
Both of the following happened when I was at school in the 1980s.
Incident #1: two kids larking around in the river discover a hand grenade in the mud. One guy (supposedly - this might be an embellishment) pulls the pin and throws it at his friend. It doesn’t go off, and to add to the laughs they call the police. Bomb Squad arrives and clears the area, then blows the thing up, leaving a 10-metre crater; legend has it the only reason it didn’t go off is that the handle was rusted shut, though this makes extraction of the pin unlikely, IMO.
Incident #2: similar dimwit, in the same part of the river, pulls up a mortar. Doesn’t know what to do with it, so carts it up to school in his bag and drops it on the secretary’s desk, with the immortal words “What should I do with this, Miss?” Secretary blanches, gets everyone out of the building, calls the police, who advise evacuation of entire school of 1,000+ students. Bomb Squad take it away rather than blowing it up in situ, which rather disappointed us. That one I know to be true because I was bunking off at the time and got in massive trouble because I wasn’t on the roll call during the evacuation.
There have been a couple of incidents of children on school trips to French and Belgian battle-fields coming back with live ammunition and hand-grenades in their luggage.
When I was a freshman in college I worked part time as a chemistry lab assistant along with another student. When we were taking inventory of the stock room we found an old, large bottle of picric acid…it must have held several quarts of the stuff.
The date on the label indicated that it was to have been disposed of already, so we looked up the proper disposal method. I am pretty sure that all of the info that we found indicated that it was best to have the bomb squad or some other professional dispose of old picric acid. Our chemistry professor did not agree. He looked up the formula to “neutralize” it, and gave us all of the proper chemicals to use to make the neutralized solution.
So, the other lab assistant and I spent the next several days neutralizing the picric acid under a fume hood, several grams at a time. I don’t know if what we were doing was inherently unsafe, but in retrospect it probably would have been best to call someone to come remove the stuff, just in case.
We’ve got a large hospital on site, so risking “an incident” even in unattached buildings wasn’t an option.
Which reminds me, a couple of months ago a rather fraught email was sent out to everyone on site. Someone had left a container of picric acid unattended in the solvent disposal room and they wanted the cluprit to own up. The lab technician who found it was not best pleased and I’m told that the post-doc that did it was on the verge of tears after bollocking she got from the head technician.
The mentor of a mate got killed trying to make another tunnel of explosives safe.
The general area we live in was a battlefield during the Civil War in the United States. Two or three years ago a gentleman found some sort of unexploded device while digging in his yard. I think he had it on a shelf in his tool shed for a while until advised by a neighbor to call the bomb squad or panic or something.
The series Danger: UXB was quite good, by the way.
I recall reading about one method used for weapons that couldn’t be safely disassembled, like old chemical weapons. They slowly freeze them to liquid nitrogen ( or was it liquid helium ? ) temperatures, which renders them inert, and crush them to dust. As I understand it, the extreme cold keeps anything from going off or dissipating into the air, crushing it destroys any components that might set it off when rewarmed, and they can dispose of the resulting dust in a safe manner.
I recall reading that UXBs and/or other explosives are occasionally unearthed by farmers ploughing their fields in Belgium/France.
I have no idea if this is still happening
Incidentally, do explosives have a “Best before” date
It’s called the “iron harvest” and I am sure that it is still happening. Every time a field is ploughed , or a ditch is dug then these things turn up. Nor surprisingly when you read that in some battles millions of shell were fired with many having faulty fuses, falling into very soft ground. When I was there about ten years ago the Belgian army had a bomb disposal squad permanently stationed in the area. just to deal with this problem. I have heard a figure of five tons of this stuff a year being found.
When the Paris to Brussels motorway was built a few years ago it cost twice as much and took twice as long as planned because of all the unexploded shells (and human remains) that were found when the road traversed the old battle fields.
From the wiki article on Unexploded Ordnance:
700 years before that region of France will be safe…
I’m by no means an expert on WW2 munitions but my take on it is this.
In England virtually every week some sort of unexploded ordnance from the war is uncovered,most of it is in the obvious areas ie. those that were heavily blitzed but as other posters have noted there are Allied discarded munitions in some pretty odd places,including the middle of nowhere so you cannot definitely say that anywhere is totally safe.
It is my perception that most of the German bombs unearthed are on construction sites ,where the digging is a fair bit deeper then the bloke digging over his garden.
Also if the garden has been dug over regulary over the years it is a lot less likely that there are any unpleasant surprises lurking there though it is not impossible.
Being specific to airdropped bombs,UXBs fall into two categories those that were ntentionally designed not to explode on hitting the deck as a UXB causes much more disruption post raid,the area needs to be sealed off so transport needs to divert,important buildings(Hospitals or area HQs say) have to be evacuated and broken gasmains,electric cables and other services cant be repaired until the often overworked and highly fatigued bomb disposal team can make it safe.
The others failed to explode because of faulty manufacture(sometimes the hidden hand of slave labourers back in Germany)or because the arming mechanism was set incorrectly or quite often the bomb was dropped from a lower than intended height so that the propeller (wrong term I know)at the rear of the device didn’t make the requisite number of revolutions to set the thing off.
This was a big problem for the Argies during the Falklands war until the BBC kindly told them why so many of their bombs were failing to detonate and rectified the problem.
(You mean the enemy listen to the BBC?Good heavens!Typical sneaky foreigner trick!)
The fact that the bombs haven’t detonated in all this time is a plus but could be due to constriction or pressure but being moved could change that and my guess is clogging mud and or rust could play a part in its continuing inertness.
Personally if I hit something metallic while digging the garden I would pay no mind to it unless I had some specific reason to be wary.
But if I were a little worried I would gently remove the earth from over and around it to make out its shape and if still worried then ring the Old Bill.
Though on one site I worked on they found a buried welding gas cylinder which looked uncannily like the real thing.
I believe that “Butterfly bombs” are commonly found which are small but have large fins but were designed to not detonate on the ground(or hooked up on something)until there was some subsequent disturbance or vibration.
These are considered to be bad news.
As I said I am not an expert on this topic so if there are any "Felixes"out there foaming at the mouth at any errors that I may have made my humble apologies and please set them straight. l