On 14 January 2026, two unexploded Luftwaffe bombs were discovered in Devon within hours of each other — a first since the immediate postwar period. One was a 50kg device at a Plymouth building site, found by a private UXO contractor who'd already predicted its location from historical Luftwaffe flight paths. The other was a 250kg monster hauled up by a dredger at Exmouth Marina, sitting on the deck of a barge loaded with 20,000 litres of diesel. The army's 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Search Regiment scrambled two teams simultaneously. The piece works because it understands that bomb disposal is not about the Hollywood moment. It is about fuzes — specifically, whether a corroded 80-year-old mechanical delayed-action fuze, built like a watch, is still capable of ticking down to detonation. Everything turns on that assessment. Electrical fuzes lose their charge over decades. Mechanical tickers, designed by the Luftwaffe to maximise disruption by detonating hours or days after impact, do not necessarily lose their spring tension. The operator's first job is to figure out which one they're looking at, often blind, in mud, with the fuze submerged. The procedural detail is exceptional and earns every sentence. PO Scott Dooley — nicknamed 'the Doom Watch' for the frequency of his call-outs — approaches the Plymouth bomb underground, builds a stable platform on a ledge of mud, surrounds it with sandbags, and places a microphone stethoscope on the casing. Silence. But silence only means no ticker has been triggered at that moment. It does not rule one out. This is the kind of granular operational knowledge that separates longform journalism from colour writing. The broader context is striking: the Luftwaffe dropped 60,000+ tonnes of bombs on Britain; roughly one in 10 failed to detonate. The reasons are varied — poor manufacturing quality from forced labour in concentration camps, soft ground absorbing impact, odd landing angles. Britain also dropped munitions on its own training land and deliberately buried surplus after the war. The result is approximately 2,000 of the 2,500 annual military bomb-disposal incidents in the UK involving WWII-era ordnance. This is not a legacy problem winding down. As cities expand and construction digs deeper, the call rate is increasing. The global dimension is handled cleanly. Three bomb-disposal experts killed in Göttingen in 2010 by a 500kg American bomb. Five crew injured off the Norfolk coast in 2020. Four injured near Munich's main railway station in 2021. Five killed in Indonesia this year. The passage of time does not render these explosives less dangerous — it makes them less predictable, as corrosion degrades the fuze mechanisms in ways that cannot be read from the outside. The writing earns its length by structuring around the dual-bomb day as a natural engine, cutting between Exmouth and Plymouth while layering in the institutional detail of how 11EOD operates from Vauxhall Barracks in Didcot. The private-sector UXO industry gets its due — Luke Templeton's S.I UXO sending historians in ahead of construction crews to run risk assessments from Luftwaffe flight-path records. The piece trusts the reader to find the drama in the procedure rather than manufacturing tension. What's missing — and this appears to be the article as published, likely an excerpt from a longer Guardian feature — is the resolution. We leave Dooley listening to silence on the mic steth, the 250kg bomb still on the dredger at Exmouth. The article cuts off mid-procedure. This is either a serialisation choice or an editing artefact, but it's the one structural weakness: the reader has been taken deep into the problem and denied the payoff.
