Fortunately for him, I’m guessing the soil it was buried in absorbed most of the blast and shrapnel.
Better watch out where you stick your fingers you have left
I knew some idiots who found an M79 round near Camp Williams in Utah. They put it in the campfire to see what would happen. They all survived but got various amounts of shrapnel and hearing loss. Darwin Award Runner-Ups.
There is still a fair amount of un-exploded ordinance from WW1 and WW2 in the fields of Europe.
It couldn’t have been too massive otherwise they would have picked him up with tweezers and tongs.
Danger UXB would be informative still.
PinGGG............Gendarmes, Graves and Grenades...............
His home near Metz made me think of something.
In a biography of Patton, that was the one place which held him up for a while.
“...massive explosion sent him flying backwards...”
He’s lucky to be in one or two pieces.
I have no doubt if I had found it as a kid, I would have tried with a screwdriver and hammer to take the front of the bomb off.
I was lucky I never found one...
He’s lucky to be missing only one finger.
Early on during the centennial commemorations for the First World War, several magazine articles were published, addressing the ongoing situation of people finding unexploded ordnance.
If memory serves, in the years before 2014, landowners and field hands in northeastern France were still discovering live bombs & shells at the rate of some 500 tons a year.
Farm operators had by then gotten more proficient at identifying types of dud ordnance. Emergency-response personnel had trained them to tell the difference between poison-gas shells and those filled with “mere” high explosive: they’d call in authorities after finding a gas shell, but they’d simply drag HE shells to the edge of their fields and place them on the side of the road. Once a week, disposal teams would come by and collect the accumulated munitions.
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