My 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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21asdffdsa12 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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..

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scyzoryk_xyz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	lukan 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice." Definitely not in this eastern part of germany where I live. Every major construction needs to check for bombs, but it also happens randomly that a excavator finds a bomb. There were just a looot of bombs that were dropped. (And they don't always move it, often it is too rusty also to defuse and then controlled explosion if the surroundings allow it (they use lots of water bags on top, witnessed it once))
	▲	mrlonglong 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Defuse. Diffuse has a different meaning.

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dingensundso 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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msdz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> so when rebuilding it was probably just easier to just leave them there. That's just a guess.

My take (equally guessed): Among the literal rubble spread all over the cities, people constructing everything back up with whatever means possible couldn’t even recognize a mostly buried object as a bomb (instead of just more scrap from a collapsed building).

So less of an active decision to not deal with it, rather one out of necessity and/or not knowing about them, perhaps?

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GolfPopper 2 hours ago | parent [-]

My own guess is that a fair number of them just buried themselves. While I don't have all the relevant facts at hand, per the US Naval Institute, a 550 lb bomb dropped form 20,000 feet would hit the ground at 880 feet per second [1]. If my rusty mind is correct, that would be around 9 megajoules, while feels like it ought to be enough to bury a bomb pretty well in any sort of yielding soil.

1. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1941/december/how...

	▲	usrusr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Have another bomb in the vicinity that did not fail and there will be absolutely no visible indication at all that something penetrated the ground. I might be imagining this but I think that I have seen a report about some systematic effort to trace bomb dropping patterns in aerial images of the aftermath to find gaps in the pattern where something did not go off. But no idea how early or late after the war that happened (if it did happen). And those patterns will only show up for smaller bombs dropped in quantity, not for the big ones.

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bell-cot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.