[Stealhead]

When I was stationed at Ramstein AB they found an unexploded 500 pound bomb near Kaiserslaugtern I think in what was an old rail road marshaling yard a prime target for bombers.I think it was not too far from the big Opel factory if I recall.A German EOD company found it so no one got hurt.If I recall they just blew it right there the land was being prepped for construction anyway.The entire city pretty much was leveled in 44/45 so they just built over top the rubble so older pre-war structures you stepped down into from the street.The main Catholic church still had a few scars on its bell tower.They had a pretty cool museum which had an old air raid bunker built into hill nothing too fancy though just dug out tunnels.

According to the German civilian that worked in our shop it was required by law in certain parts of Germany to have a company sweep any property before any major construction occurred.

Just think tough even if the failure rate is 5% for munitions even in a decent fire fight if say 50 artillery shells where expended that would be 2.5 UXOs. If you expended 500,000 shells with the same failure rate that would mean 25,000 UXOs.Even with only a 1 or 2 percent failure ratio with the amount of munitions used in a major conflict that is still many UXOs.

Of course many munitions in Germany especially later in the war where produced using slave labor workers who of course have a strong desire for sabotage so I bet the failure rate for German munitions late war was much higher around 10% perhaps heck the gyroscopes for the V2 the slave workers would urinate on them to cause rust they used pee instead of water because water caused rust too rapidly and would be spotted before final assembly.

Even the Allied labor force was not perfect so I'd say that their failure rate would have been in the 3 to 5 percent range.