March 6, 2007: Last month, a woman in
southern Italy bought a sack of potatoes at a local market. When she got home,
she found one of the potatoes was actually a hand grenade. And a World War II
era grenade at that. The police were called, and were not terribly surprised.
The bomb squad removed the grenade to a nearby park and blew it up. World War
II era munitions continue to show up throughout Europe. Although most of the
millions of land mines were removed from Europe within a few years of the war
ending in 1945, there are still a huge number of of unexploded of grenades,
shells and bombs buried all over the place. At least the mine fields were easy
to find, although dangerous to clear. But the remaining munitions were left
behind, in unrecorded locations, for some pretty simple reasons. First of all,
many bombs, artillery and mortar shells (over ten percent, for some
manufacturers) do not explode when they are supposed to, but just buried
themselves into the ground. These shells are still full of explosives, and
often have a fuze that, while defective, is often still capable of going
off if disturbed. Other munitions are
left in bunkers, or elsewhere on the battlefield, and get buried and lost. Most
of these lost munitions eventually get found by farmers, or anyone digging up
the ground for construction. The Italian woman got a grenade in a sack of
potatoes that came from France, where farm automation and absent minded farm
workers, can let things like this happen. Â
The World War II munitions will be
showing up like this for a while yet. Unexploded munitions from the American
Civil War, which ended in 1865, are still showing up, and some of them are
still deadly. Currently, over a thousand World War II munitions are discovered
each year in Europe.
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