Everyone at Exmouth Marina knew there was an unexploded German bomb in the water. Old hands at the dock had been saying so since the end of the second world war. But the marina had been dredged and re-dredged and nothing had ever come up. It had started to sound like an old wives’ tale. The marina is a busy stretch of water: a commercial port until the late 1990s that had since been converted into a home to private yachts. A bomb, you’d think, would have a hard time staying hidden. But in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, Steve Hockings-Thompson, the manager of Exmouth Marina, got a call from the crew of a dredging vessel telling him he’d better come out to the boat. “I thought: ‘Oh crikey. We’ve got a bit of an issue here,’” Hockings-Thompson told me recently. He went out to the dredger, a squat barge that hauls silt and other debris from the marina floor on to a flat deck that resembles a steel sieve. Sitting on the deck was a huge hunk of metal, caked in mud and stones. As Hockings-Thompson got closer and saw its distinctive conical shape, he knew it was a bomb – a big one. The dredger was loaded with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel, so if the bomb detonated, it would be disastrous. He called the police, who quickly came to the scene. “And then”, he said, “all hell broke loose.”
To deal with the explosives, they called in the army. The call was picked up at the control centre at Vauxhall Barracks in Didcot, a small town in Oxfordshire. This is the headquarters of the 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Search Regiment (11EOD), a specialist army division responsible for all kinds of bomb disposal – from improvised devices planted by terrorist groups to second world war-era munitions. When the Exmouth bomb was called in, Maj Andrew Boyce, who was managing operations for the regiment, was confused. “We were talking about ‘the bomb’, which I’d been told was a 50kg,” he recalled. “And then somebody on the phone tells me it’s a 250kg.”
The reason for the confusion soon became clear: the Exmouth Marina bomb was not the first to be discovered that day. Another second world war bomb had been unearthed a few hours earlier at a building site in Plymouth, 50 miles away. In Plymouth that morning, Luke Templeton, director of S.I UXO, a private contractor that goes in ahead of construction companies to look for unexploded bombs, had known what he was looking for. His company’s historians had already spent a fortnight doing a detailed risk assessment of the site. Using specialist equipment, they had found a 50kg bomb buried more than four metres down. After inspecting the bomb up close, Templeton called the police. As far as Boyce knew, this was the first time since the immediate postwar period that two unexploded bombs had been discovered on the same day.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing