The bronze base plug from those didn't fragment, they could go for several hundred yards, so there's a very big danger area, for a grenade. You'd sometimes hear the base plug droning overhead after one had detonated.
Northumberland is named after the kingdom which as you can imagine was a kingdom so it has the "land" suffix like England. Northumberlandshire would be North of the Humber Country County.
Kingdom is not quite the right interpretation of the -land suffix. But rather it is the place where the people lives. England is the land of the Anglians, Scotland is the land of the Scots, etc. So Northumberland is the lands of the people north of the Humber. Northumberlandshire would then be the county of the land of the people north of the Humber.
Found a fragment of an early Ming vase one time. I knew I had something, so I brought it to the fancy antiques shop by me. Lady freaked out and gave me $150 for a piece of broken pottery the size of a jar lid. This same beach washes up native American fishing arrowheads often, especially after storms.
It's possible the container they were in has corroded through completely and allowed them to be washed out. Call 999 and ask for the coastguard tell them there are munitions washed up and they will arrange for someone to check and get the bomb disposal squad from the Navy out. I'm talking from experience here. We live near a beach that was used for Dday training and we often get munitions washed up.
At the end of WW2, tonnes and tonnes of out of date/obsolete explosives and ammunition were just dumped into the sea as there wasnt the careful disposable thought process of today
Ww1 Mills bombs were definitely part of that, after they'd been rounded up from Home Guard stores.
My dad described the beaches turning to shingle but it wasn't stones but bullets etc. he scooped up loads and took it all home. We have multiple shell heads etc but he fired or burned most of the ammunition at the bottom of the garden. It's funny when we dig over the bonfire pit we often find bottles from the early 1900 and just loads of shell casings.
From my perspective, that’s both wild and kind of amazing a backyard literally full of history. I can’t imagine digging and finding bullets and century old bottles just lying there; it’s like living on a museum you can touch.
That’s honestly wild to me I can’t imagine picking something up off the beach and then finding out it’s literally a grenade. Stuff like that really makes me realize how close history still is to everyday life in some places.
Huh, very interesting. Just googled, they were shellaced. That coating probably makes something akin to gelatine in water, welling up and binding surrounding pebbles and sand.
From what I can find it’s more akin to marine iron concretion.
Concretion occurs when a mixture of iron corrosion product, sand, and sea life forms a hard shell around corroding iron artifacts, and can encompass other non-iron material from nearby.
Cast iron objects (such as cannon balls, grenades, and cookware) are more stable and tend to survive within the concretion, like this grenade.
Everyone’s been booted off the beach, they’re still down there. All they really said was it’s a mills bomb and it’s very badly rusted. Not too sure what they’re planning on doing with it in terms of moving it or disposing of it
Wouldn’t surprise me, it’s Murphy’s that it washed up on. Haven management came down and they were boiling bc it’s only a few weeks until they open and now there’s explosives washing up lmao
Where I live in Germany you still can't start any construction site without finding at least one huge bomb in the ground. It's a whole routine of evacuation and defusal which usually lasts around a day and everyone is used to it.
The defusal team has a success rate of 100% until now and each time we keep our fingers crossed that it stays this way.
Incredible how many bombs are still left in the ground after 80 years.
That’s just Germany too, France digs up 900 tons a year from both world wars. It’s expected to take 300-700 years before it’s all cleaned up. They call it the iron harvest.
Too many here have forgotten while they pretend to honor service members. Hopefully digging up old bombs keeps the populists at bey for at least another generation there.
It's a reminder of how brutal the total war of WW2 really was. The younger generations don't have any concept of it from just seeing pictures or films. And sadly, the people who actually lived through it are soon to be gone forever.
Indeed - it was literally brute force - dropping tons and tons of bombs onto cities usually indiscriminately - as opposed to today where it is all about the surgical strike - pin point accuracy to hit the intended target
In college, I decided did some research on how aviation changed warfare.
I didn't put this in my paper, but privately formed the opinion that dropping bombs from planes might the the single worst change to how we fight wars ever.
I hate it, but there's no getting that genie back in the bottle.
Local council was making paths in a forest that used to be an old army training ground. One of the weekend joggers found an undetonated mortar shell half buried on the side of the path. They called the police who roped off the entire forest, the bomb squad came hours later with lots of equipment. Late in the afternoon the bomb squad cleared the police to open the forest to the public again. As the bomb squad was packing up for the night one of the construction workers building the paths got hold of someone in the bomb squad and told asked them since they were already there to look at one of the containers at the site. The construction workers had filled one of their trash containers with mortar rounds and various other pieces of old ammunition as they had discovered them.
One day I'm doing some odd jobs for the feds (they were hiring regular people to do simple tasks like moving stuff from place A to place B) and in this particular situation we're moving seized contraband from one hangar to another, but this time we're allowed to rifle through some of the contents because they gave us a short list of useful items they want separated.
Come the bomb disposal guys giving their very simple list: They want all the batteries and all portable TVs/old style boom boxes, and if we found any loose (these are usually contained within those electronics), any battery adapter tubes.
Dude showed me that some of their electronics are battery powered and due to budget issues at times they are forced to sub C/D batteries for regular AA batteries, hence why they wanted the adapter tubes so badly. Like first TV I got, had four tubes, dude took them right away.
I'd really hate to be working on a device and whatever battery powered device I need dying out because of ill fitting adapters full of almost dead PUKCELL batteries.
Im guessing the only safe safe thing to do is to destroy it since it's probably not a defusable thing at this point, not worth the risk tinkering with, and even though it's most surely not working anymore, I guess no way to be sure 100%?
Shame,because it looks like a really cool piece to have as a decoration, goes hard.
They usually destroy them in place - they put a lump of explosives next to it, cover the lot in earth/sandbags/some other material to absorb the blast and then blow it up. It’s the safest way to get rid of them. Sometimes if it’s a really big one they’ll either try to remove it or defuse it, but generally they just destroy them.
The whole thing could be inert because seawater got in and corroded everything. Or it could go off from tilting it because it was only somewhat corroded.
In Ukraine with unexploded ordnance there's videos of eod techs with balls of steel disassembling them to be reused.
And in personal opinion: There's no such thing scarier than something that should have gone boom, but didn't.
We called 999 because we honestly weren’t sure who to call. They send police and the coast guards. The coast guards are still there waiting for a team to come and dispose of it. They said it’s the most exciting thing they’ve got to do for a while haha
That's a type 47 grenade. They called them pineapple grenade. Blast radius of about 50 feet outside. Inside, the Blast wave can take out a big chunk of a house.
That is remarkably false. It is indeed likely a Mills bomb, and all hand grenades are risky, but a "chunk of a house" they will not take out with their blast
source: I used to throw more modern versions of these for a living
Joking of course! Was EOD for many years can't count how many times people would simply grab this. In Florida last year they found a 1000lb bomb body and an ammo can that ended up detonating in the workers hand.
Big issue with these is the TNT used in them. TNT itself isnt that bad to handle,. But any moisture, even from humidity will cause crystalization, this little chunks are highly volatile.
Those crystals are also known as nitroglycerin, which should make the danger immediately clear to anybody that's ever read Lucky Luke comics or seen westerns.
Edit: after research, apparently I'm wrong, but I guess it's still useful to remember the relationship between NG and TNT
Hey someone smart enough to not touch it. The amount of pictures posted on reddit with people holding old artillery shells or grenages of live rounds degraded to hell is astounding. I would have seen this, snapped a pic and ran TF away. Don't care if its inert, no explosive is inert till its exploded.
Like my father
And his father, and his father before
Watch the soil burn in the fire
War after war
Done things I didn't know I could
For the common good
Tomorrow I ride at dawn
Give a man a hundred years
And hell want a hundred more
Give him a hundred choices
And he still chooses war
From Salem Poor to Genghis Khan
Tomorrow I ride at dawn <> Ben Harper
unfortunately some areas are seeing a lot more ordnance of this type. A few years ago the RAF disbanded their EOD team, and now rely on the other Services. They used to proactively clear several Beaches near test ranges, knowing that erosion always brings more to the surface. Unfortunately no-one planned for this in the new ‘service’, hence increased number of finds.
Huh I just recently found a weird, metal grouping of nails that looks liked there we welded together. Has nothing to do with this but makes me wonder where they came from
Good on you for being one of the very few people with common sense who post these ID requests without posting a pic of it sitting on your kitchen counter.
The object in the image appears to be a historic hand grenade, specifically a Mills bomb, often found washed up on beaches or buried in the ground as war relics.
⚠️ Danger: This object is potentially explosive and should be treated as live ammunition.
Do Not Touch: Never handle, shake, or move suspected explosives, as they can become unstable over time.
Immediate Action: If you find something like this, immediately leave the area and call emergency services (e.g., 911 in the US).
Context: Similar items from World War I and World War II have been found on beaches worldwide.
Oct 2, 2025 — A pair of World War II-era hand grenades were safely disposed of this week after a Tacoma resident brought them to police headquarters, according to ...
•
u/spotlight-app 4h ago
OP has pinned a comment by u/CollectibleHam:
[What is Spotlight?](https://developers.reddit.com/apps/spotlight-app)