This year's European wildfire season has thrown up a headline that reads like historical fiction: fires in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands have been triggering unexploded bombs and mines left over from the two world wars. In the French village of Le Porge, near Bordeaux, a wildfire uncovered roughly 400 shells and pieces of ammunition, mostly old mortar rounds and anti-tank shells, according to French officials; one resident told regional media that a piece of the recovered ordnance had gone straight through a house. In eastern Belgium's Liège province, the regional governor confirmed sporadic detonations during recent fires, with emergency crews adapting their response around buried munitions.
Britain had its own dramatic version last year, when a wildfire on the North York Moors, a former WWII tank training ground in Yorkshire, set off more than 20 buried explosive devices over the course of a month-long blaze, according to the local fire service.
Northern Australia was bombed heavily during World War II. Darwin alone was hit in 64 air raids, and the broader Top End was targeted more than 200 times between 1942 and 1943. Unexploded ordnance from that campaign still surfaces regularly: a suspected WWII bomb was found in Darwin Harbour in 2022, a WWII shell turned up during road construction near the city in 2015, and three WWII-era bombs were detonated on a remote Arnhem Land beach as recently as 2025. Most of these finds happen through construction, diving or beachcombing rather than bushfire, but the raw material for a fire-triggered version of Europe's problem already exists across the Top End.
The same causation problem has already been tested in a UK court, and insurers won. In 2021, construction workers at the University of Exeter unearthed a live German bomb dropped on the city in 1942. It couldn't safely be moved, so bomb disposal experts carried out a controlled detonation, which damaged nearby halls of residence. The University claimed under its property policy. Allianz declined, citing the standard market War Exclusion Clause for loss "occasioned by war." The dispute went to the Court of Appeal, which in late 2023 unanimously sided with the insurer. Its reasoning, set out in the full judgment on BAILII, was that the dropping of the bomb in 1942 and the controlled detonation nearly 80 years later were concurrent proximate causes of the loss, of roughly equal weight. Because one of those causes fell squarely within the war exclusion, the whole claim was barred. Proximate cause, the court noted, doesn't mean whichever event happened last. Coulson LJ, delivering the leading judgment, called it a "classic" case of two concurrent causes of approximately equal efficacy: the wartime bombing and the modern-day detonation. It's a precedent Australian insurers holding similar war exclusion wording would be able to point to if a comparable claim ever arose here.
Australia also has a more direct precedent, and it doesn't involve WWII ordnance at all. In October 2013, a live ordnance training exercise at a Department of Defence range near Lithgow, west of Sydney, ignited a bushfire that grew into the largest of that week's catastrophic New South Wales fire outbreak. The blaze burned roughly 47,000 hectares and destroyed homes, part of a fire event that killed one person and destroyed more than 200 properties statewide, according to Rural Fire Service findings reported at the time. The parallel to Europe's current predicament is close: a routine military activity involving explosives, dry conditions, and a fire that outran everyone's expectations.
The scale of Europe's current season gives some sense of what's driving these events. The EU's satellite-based European Forest Fire Information System had already recorded upwards of 500,000 hectares burned across the bloc by early August 2026, ahead of the same point in 2025, itself the worst year on record there. Australia's own bushfire risk has followed a similarly unwelcome trajectory. The January 2026 Victorian bushfires burned about 400,000 hectares, destroyed roughly 900 structures, and produced an insured loss estimate that climbed past $860 million as claims developed, according to PERILS AG. The Insurance Council of Australia escalated the event to a declared Insurance Catastrophe, and the market is still absorbing lessons from a fire season that behaved differently to the 2019-20 Black Summer benchmark most underwriters use as their reference point.
A suburban Sydney or Melbourne property owner shouldn't expect to find a Japanese bomb in the garden. The overlap risk sits mostly in the remote Top End and around a handful of defence training areas, and Australia's UXO finds to date have been managed without civilian casualties. What the Lithgow fire and Europe's current season share is a reminder that dry country holds more than fuel loads and ignition sources. Old ordnance, wherever it sits, has a way of becoming relevant again exactly when conditions get hot and dry enough to find it.
