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A German backhoe driver was killed last week when he hit a WWII bomb with the scoop at a construction site. My question is does the guy count as a WWII civilian casualty? The bomb was presumably dropped by the British or Americans after all.
Digger driver dies after hitting WWII bombMay he rest in peace. I don't know what the current “rules” on war casualties are but I would argue that any deaths that are tenuously connected in time or circumstance to the war should not be considered casualties. Otherwise, war death toll numbers might always have asterisks by them, making them less meaningful. Say hypothetically that a bomb were dropped by a terrorist without detonating, and then lost, and the terrorist were apprehended without him causing any other harm. Say that the bomb was rediscovered 100 years later to explode on accident and kill a million people. Would including those numbers as terrorism casualties provide anything meaningful? Would the lesson be that we should all of a sudden spend more money on anti-terrorism efforts? Or would the lesson be that accidents sometimes happen? Also, if an archaeologist were to discover a spear from the Peloponnesian war, only to prick his finger on it and get it infected from ancient fecal matter, would it count as a war casualty?
I think in general he is considered a war casualty much like guys that die from secondary effects of war wounds decades after the war are considered casualties. Casualty numbers always have an asterisk after them. I know of no definitive casualty numbers. They are still chiseling names on the Vietnam Memorial from guys who are dying to this day.
That they explode, no. They find WWII bombs all the time at construction sites in Europe though. European EOD guys are very good.
My brother is in EOD but is about to get out of the Army. His skill set would probably transfer better over in Germany than in the States.
Perhaps. Is your brother a little on the strange side? Every EOD guy I have ever met is just a 1/4 turn off for some reason.
Ha, considering what qualifies as “strange” these days, I would say not really. I just think he likes to blow stuff up, and he needed a specialty somewhere along the line.
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