AURINGEN, Germany — I was visiting family in a village not too far from the city of Wiesbaden, Germany, when I learned that an unexploded World War II bomb had been found just a few kilometers away, near the gas station we passed on the road into town.
It was British-made, weighing about 275 pounds, presumably dropped during the war by the Royal Air Force — just one small remnant of the 2.7 million tons of explosives dropped by the British and the Americans on Europe between 1940 and 1945, half of which fell on Germany.
As many as 1 in 10 of those bombs failed to explode on impact and year after year they still surface, dangerous until they are defused or carefully detonated.
