[minipol]

Originally posted by Sinapus:
Unexploded shells from a past war are still being found in France, IIRC. That past war being the Great War. AKA World War I, or "The War to End all Wars"... (Of course, I could be mistaken and the supply of unexploded shells found in French fields for the past few years might now be solely from the 2nd World War, but I hope someone gets the point.)

France? What about Belgium? We still find almost 200 tons a year of shells both conventional and chemical shells. Imagine. We are 2003 yet our fields are still full of them. And shells are not all we find: guns, bunkers, trenches, shelters, grenades, shoes, bullets and so on.
A friend of mine collects stuff from wwi and he once found a pair of shoes, with the feet still in there (decayed).

Whenever they start a rather big construction in the region of Ypres (where a lot of English soldiers where stationed and full of graveyards), they almost always bump into some forgotten trench or some other find that dates back to WWI. I mean we find a lot more stuff from WWI than we do from WWII. Might be logical because the frontlines didn't move that much here in the 4 years the war Lasted.
Almost every year a farmer dies when plowing his field because of a shell that hits the plow and explodes.
When my wife was little she was playing with small artillery shells that she and her sister had dug up in the backyard of the garden of her grandmother. Unexploded ones. Of course they where too heavy to lift. Imagine that. If they would have exploded, nothing would have been left of her. So in that respect, they might be as leathal as mines.
We even needed to build a special factory to clean up all the bombs and shells.

From WWII what we find most of the time is big bombs that where dropped by planes.
So Belgium is nice but you might want to check where you walk.

[edit for yet another spelling mistake]

[ February 13, 2003, 23:03: Message edited by: minipol ]