I skipped the meeting, but the Memos showed that Ignoramus17663
wrote on Fri, 09 Jan 2009
15:12:38 -0600 in rec.crafts.metalworking :
A long time ago, near Moscow, I was working on a fall potato harvest
with my class, and one girl found an unexploded mortar shell from
WWII, I would say 3-4 lb weight.

Not all that surprising. I recall reading of a Red Army unit on
maneuvers in the 1970s, and the grandmother was insisting to the
"young" officer that she had a bomb under her bed. He decided that he
would humor Grandmother, so he went to take a look. Yep, just as she
said, there was a hole in the floor, and a 100kg bomb, dropped during
the Great Patriotic War and still there. Live.
Russian Grandmothers: you can't scare them.

I doubt the following statement from Wikipedia:

It has been estimated that, for every square metre of territory on the
front from the coast to the Swiss border, a tonne of explosives
fell. One shell in every four[2] (some sources say one in every
three[3]) did not detonate. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial Site
is notable for supposedly having one unexploded munition for every
square metre.

Sounds a little excessive.

Sounds excessive, only if you don't know the scale of the
situation.

Some years ago, I helped edit a friends paper of the partition of
British India. She could not really grasp that half a million people
had been killed in the riots. Being from Alaska that was almost more
people than were in the entire state. But when I pointed out that at
the time, the India subcontinent has half a billion people on it, 0.1%
fatalities was "nothing".

Same with the Western Front of WWI. Artillery was fired for four
years over a very narrow area. Now, some places got more that others,
I have heard estimates that every square meter of the Verdun battle
field was hit, twice. 300 days on a ten kilometer front. They had
to resurvey the area after the war, the terrain had been that changed.

The French have an army unit with the task of cleaning up the
battle fields. Still. A lot of shells buried themselves without
exploding, and have been working themselves to the surface. Then
there are the occasional discoveries of "more recent" munitions -
those from WW2.

tschus
pyotr
--
pyotr filipivich
We will drink no whiskey before its nine.
It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!