Wildfires burning across Europe have begun igniting and exposing buried munitions from both world wars, forcing firefighters to dodge explosions while battling blazes on former battlefields.
Blasts from old bombs and mines have been reported in France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands this wildfire season, as flames sweep through forests and peat bogs that have concealed unexploded ordnance for decades. In Belgium's eastern province of Liege, Governor Hervé Jamar confirmed that "a few sporadic detonations" were recently heard in a fire zone sitting directly atop ground fought over during the Battle of the Bulge. Emergency crews have had to adjust their operations to account for the munitions buried beneath them, the Associated Press reported.
Jamar said no fire crews were in danger, but the situation lays bare a problem that most Americans never think about: Europe's soil is still loaded with live weapons from the 20th century's two deadliest conflicts, and the fires now ripping across the continent are digging them up.
The scale of buried ordnance in Belgium alone is staggering. The country's Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Destruction Service, known by its acronym DOVO, responds to more than 3,000 calls per year and disposes of 200 to 250 tons of munitions left over from both world wars annually. The Belgian Ministry of Defense receives requests from the High Fens region, the mountainous peat-bog area straddling the Belgian-German border, about every week to help disarm explosives. The ministry does not consider the area a "hot spot" compared to other parts of Belgium, which gives some sense of how saturated the entire country remains.
That region, the Hautes Fagnes, or High Fens, is now smoldering. The wildfire there is burning atop ground where Allied and German forces planted booby traps, bombs, and mines during World War II. Nearby Elsenborn Ridge saw a lesser-known but fierce skirmish, and the Hurtgen Forest, which straddles the border with Germany, was the site of an 88-day battle that killed roughly 33,000 American troops and 28,000 German troops.
Belgium's record-breaking wildfire in the High Fens has already forced evacuations. Now the fire is doing something no one planned for: cooking the ground hot enough to trigger munitions that have sat undisturbed since the 1940s.
Bernard Collard, a local historian who runs the Truschbaum Museum near Belgium's border with Germany, knows the danger firsthand. Authorized to scan former battlefields with a metal detector, Collard has found mortar shells, machine guns, helmets, cigarette cases, and once, a human skeleton. He works frequently with the Belgian demining squad.
Collard told the AP that six civilians were killed by munitions in Liege province in just the first four years after Germany's surrender in 1945. He remembers his own father detonating a found bomb in a quarry.
"When you go into a forest like this, you are not sure where the explosives are. You never know what you might come across, and you shouldn't take it lightly."
But Collard also offered the kind of plain acceptance that comes from living on land scarred by industrial-scale warfare for more than a century.
"It's part of our history. We live with it."
Around Ypres, the Belgian town infamous for some of World War I's worst trench warfare, farmers have a name for the shells and shrapnel their plows turn up every spring: "the iron harvest." It has been going on for more than a hundred years, and it has not stopped.
The problem extends well beyond Belgium. Near the southwestern French city of Bordeaux, a massive wildfire uncovered a cache of what is believed to be World War II-era ammunition. France has been evacuating thousands as fires consume large sections of the country's southwest.
In the Netherlands, a bomb-disposal team was dispatched to check a forest threatened by flames in the southern province of Limburg, near a site of fierce fighting in 1944. Jonas Tepe, a spokesman for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said unexploded ordnance becomes even more dangerous around wildfires because the heat can trigger the explosives.
Drought is compounding the threat. As rivers and lakes shrink, weapons that sank decades ago are surfacing. Slovak police pulled two naval mines exposed by the falling Danube River out of the water and buried them in a trench for a controlled demolition. In Budapest, Hungarian authorities closed Margaret Bridge, one of the city's major crossings, after a World War II-era bomb emerged at its base in receding water. German authorities found another wartime bomb as the Rhine dried up.
Europe's record heatwave has dried rivers to sand and pushed temperatures to levels that stress both infrastructure and the ground itself. The combination of fire and drought is now pulling the continent's buried military history to the surface.
This is not the first time European wildfires have set off buried munitions. In 2022, Slovenia's Kras region, the country's largest wildfire since independence, triggered explosions of World War I-era ordnance hidden for over a century. Dozens of bombs detonated. Officials stopped counting the blasts because they were so frequent, only marking those near roads used by crews. More than 2,000 people, including military personnel, fought that fire, but the ordnance explosions forced them to work only from the edges and from the air.
Slovenia's defense minister at the time, Marjan Šarec, said firefighting units "cannot penetrate into the fire but can only act on its edges." Darko Zonjič, from Slovenia's national unit for protection against unexploded ordnance, noted that fire-site temperatures were "much higher than any time in the 104 years since World War I ended."
Four years later, the same pattern is playing out across a wider swath of the continent. Wildfires have swept through Greece, Croatia, France, and Germany, forcing mass evacuations and straining emergency resources already stretched thin.
Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and Christina Greene, a researcher at the University of Arizona, co-authored an academic article on Europe's wildfires and the unexploded ordnance risk. Their assessment is blunt.
Njeri told the AP:
"Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable."
Greene put it in plainer terms, saying "the legacy of war keeps creeping up" and describing the current crisis as something Europe has not had to confront in this way for a long time.
"It's reliving the legacies of war and conflict in a way that we haven't had to deal with in a while in certain places."
A World Weather Attribution study issued in recent weeks found that the wildfire season's conditions, high temperatures combined with drought, low humidity, and stiff winds, created what Breitbart described as an ideal environment for fire. Heavy rains in January had spurred thick vegetation growth that dried into kindling as summer heat set in.
The mechanism is straightforward: fire burns away the scrub and brush that concealed ordnance for decades, and the heat itself can reach temperatures high enough to trigger explosives that survived underground since the 1940s, or, in Belgium's case, since the 1910s.
Several important details remain unclear. Governor Jamar said no fire crews were in danger in Liege province, but the AP report does not address whether personnel in France, Germany, or the Netherlands were injured by the blasts reported in those countries. The specific types and quantities of ammunition uncovered near Bordeaux have not been disclosed. And neither the High Fens wildfire nor the Bordeaux-area blaze has a publicly reported containment status.
What is clear is that Europe's governments have known about this buried arsenal for decades. Belgium alone disposes of hundreds of tons of old munitions every year, and the "iron harvest" around Ypres has been an annual fact of life since before anyone alive today was born. Spanish troops recently rescued centuries-old royal remains from a monastery as wildfire closed in, a reminder that the fires threatening Europe's past are not limited to buried weapons.
The ordnance problem is different. It is not a relic at risk of being destroyed. It is a relic capable of doing the destroying.
Europe spent the better part of a century telling itself that the wars were over. The ground underneath disagrees, and the fires are proving it.
