p51,
We had a well known collector & dealer in Civil War ordnance killed about two years ago by a naval shell his trained eye said was disarmed,
sadly the last casualty of the Civil war has probably not been written about for years to come, I remember a story in one of the collector books
of some people that found a couple of Civil war shells that they set in their cabin as andirons they took a walk in the nearby woods after dinner......
they thought they heard thunder........ it was the end of their cabin destroyed by their newly acquired andirons.....thankfully they took a walk......
Yeah, I knew about that. Quite a back and forth on a US military collector’s site about that, split between people like me who were trained to not blow myself up and the people who thought me and others like me were being over dramatic. Trust me, when you find yourself already in the middle of an impact zone that wasn’t on your map, you take on a totally different view of unexploded ordnance with a quickness! I’ll never forget the feeling, my driver looking over and saying, “Uh, sir, what are those?” And me looking up and seeing projectiles everywhere, even behind us. Thankfully most of the projectiles I could see were training solid shot tank 105 rounds and still retained their color coding. But there were other rounds that looked like they might have been HE shells with fuses still attached but I of course never got too close to those to look. I tip-toed my way behind the vehicle and we VERY slowly rolled back over our prior tire tracks. I swear I felt like I’d aged a decade in those few minutes. My driver wouldn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the day. At the edge of the impact zone I found one of those 105s sitting out in the open, solid canister-shaped shot and painted light blue. I kept it as a door stop in my orderly room afterward. I still have it at home as a reminder of how easy it is to do something really stupid:
Another case study I read about was some campers who found (I guess a large) Naval shell in Virginia. They rolled it to their camp site and one guy was sitting on it right next to the fire! The only reason they know this was one guy went off to find firewood and heard the explosion. Again, not much left of his pals. I think that was in the mid 70s, if memory serves.
I’ve been to the Belgian town of Ypres, which was one of the most intensely shelled places on Earth, for all of WW1. It’s illegal to dig with mechanical means in the town without a special permit and the farmers constantly dig up unexploded rounds and just dump them in the ditches alongside the roads. Signs on each road into town tell people to leave it all alone. It’s creepy to walk and drive past stacks of unexploded Krupp and other heavy caliber rounds sitting just feet away.
And all this on the heels of “The Hurt Locker” wiping out the competition at the Oscars. Any similarities between that film and any real life EOD people (or soldiers in general, for that matter) is purely coincidental, but that’s beside the point…