Europe's Burning Battlefields: How Climate Change Is Re-Arming the Past

Europe’s Burning Battlefields: How Climate Change Is Re-Arming the Past

The wildfires that have scorched swathes of Europe this summer have done more than destroy forests and homes; they have reached into the continent’s violent past and pulled it, smoking and volatile, into the present. As flames have chewed through old battlefields in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, they have ignited a lethal legacy of unexploded bombs and mines, forcing emergency crews to contend with a threat that has lain dormant for nearly a century.

In the eastern Belgian province of Liege, Governor Herve Jamar confirmed that "a few sporadic detonations" were heard in recent days as a fire advanced through the High Fens, a dense peat-bog forest that straddles the German border. While Jamar stressed that no fire crews were in immediate danger, local media published photographs of a firefighter handling a rusted bomb, a stark reminder that the ground beneath Europe’s feet is not always as benign as it appears. The fires have effectively turned the continent’s forests into ticking time bombs, where the heat of a blaze can trigger explosives that have survived decades of peace.

This is not a peripheral concern. The High Fens is a site of profound historical significance, having been the theatre for the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German offensive on the Western Front. The current fire is burning perilously close to the sites of two lesser-known but equally bloody skirmishes along Elsenborn Ridge and in the Hurtgen Forest, the latter of which lasted 88 days and claimed the lives of approximately 33,000 American and 28,000 German troops. For British readers, the echoes of this conflict are familiar; the Battle of the Bulge was the final gasp of a Nazi war machine that had previously rained terror on London during the Blitz. The danger now is that the very landscape which witnessed those sacrifices is becoming unstable once more.

A Perfect Storm of Climate and Conflict

The mechanism behind this alarming phenomenon is a grim intersection of meteorology and military history. This wildfire season was supercharged by heavy rains in January, which spurred a dense growth of vegetation. That vegetation became perfect kindling when the summer heat arrived, creating an ideal environment for fire, according to a study issued last month by the World Weather Attribution group. The combination of drought conditions, low humidity and stiff winds has allowed flames to spread rapidly across terrain that has long been known to hold unexploded weapons.

Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict scholar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, argues that this is a direct consequence of shifting climatic baselines. "Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable," she said. For decades, Europe’s steady temperatures and predictable rainfall ensured that most buried weapons stayed dormant, their explosive compounds sealed within rusting metal casings. That era of "climatic luck" is over. The fires do not merely ignite the munitions; they also burn away the scrub and brush that once concealed them, leaving the ordnance exposed and accessible to firefighters and civilians alike.

The scale of the problem is immense. In a tinder-dry forest outside the southwestern French city of Bordeaux, a massive wildfire uncovered a cache of what is believed to be World War II-era ammunition. In Germany, authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia, just across the border from the Belgian fires, are on high alert. Jonas Tepe, a spokesperson for the region, warned that unexploded ordnance is even more dangerous around wildfires because the intense heat can trigger the explosives. The threat is not hypothetical; blasts have already been reported in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, where a bomb-disposal team was dispatched to check a forest threatened by flames near a site of fierce fighting in the Limburg province in 1944.

The Iron Harvest: A Lethal Legacy in the Soil

For those who live in the shadow of these old battlefields, the discovery of war remnants is a fact of life. Bernard Collard, a local historian who runs the Truschbaum Museum near Belgium’s border with Germany, has spent years documenting the detritus of war. He is authorised to scan the former battlefields—now forests, pastures and farmland—with a metal detector, and has unearthed mortar shells, machine guns, helmets, cigarette cases and, on one occasion, a human skeleton. "You never know what you might come across, and you shouldn't take it lightly," he said, standing in a field where blueberry bushes now cover old foxholes, trenches and deep craters from artillery fire.

Collard’s work is a testament to the sheer volume of ordnance left behind. During World War II, booby traps, bombs and mines were sprinkled throughout the High Fens. In the first four years after Germany’s surrender in 1945, those munitions killed six civilians. Collard 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," he said. "It's part of our history. We live with it."

This is not a uniquely Belgian problem. In the west of the country, farmers in towns such as Ypres—infamous for the harrowing trench warfare of World War I—call the annual tilling of the soil "the iron harvest" because it turns up so many war remnants. The Belgian Ministry of Defence receives requests from the Liege region about every week to assist in disarming explosives, though it does not consider the area a "hot spot" compared to elsewhere in the country. Nationally, Belgium’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Destruction Service responds to more than 3,000 calls every year and disposes of between 200 and 250 tons of munitions left over from both world wars. The fires are adding a new, urgent layer of danger to an already hazardous routine.

Drought Exposes the Past Beneath the Water

The threat is not confined to burning forests. The same climatic conditions that have fuelled the wildfires have also caused severe drought, shrinking rivers and lakes to reveal old weapons that had been submerged for decades. In Slovakia, the Danube River fell so low that two naval mines were exposed; police pulled them out of the water and buried them in a trench for a controlled demolition. In Hungary, authorities were forced to close Budapest’s Margaret Bridge after a World War II-era bomb emerged at its base in receding water. As the Rhine dried up, German authorities also found a WWII-era bomb.

This phenomenon is a stark illustration of how climate change is rewriting the physical geography of Europe, exposing hazards that were previously hidden by water. Christina Greene, a researcher at the University of Arizona who co-authored an article on Europe’s wildfires and unexploded ordnance risk with Njeri, described it as a process of "reliving the legacies of war and conflict in a way that we haven't had to deal with in a while in certain places." The legacy of war, she said, "keeps creeping up" because of climate change.

For the United Kingdom, this is a story with direct resonance. While the UK has not experienced the same scale of wildfire this summer, the nation is intimately familiar with the threat of unexploded ordnance. The Blitz left London and other major cities littered with unexploded bombs, and construction crews regularly unearth them during building works. The British Army’s bomb disposal units are among the busiest in the world, and the "iron harvest" is a phenomenon known well to farmers in the south-east of England, where remnants of the Battle of Britain and the D-Day preparations still surface. The difference now is that climate change is accelerating the process, turning a manageable, if dangerous, nuisance into a more unpredictable threat.

A New Dimension of Risk for Emergency Services

The immediate concern for European authorities is the safety of firefighters and emergency crews. In the High Fens, the fire is smouldering atop a much-bloodied battlefield, and the risk of detonation is ever-present. The Belgian Ministry of Defence has said it is adapting its procedures to account for munitions buried in fire areas, but the sheer scale of the terrain makes a comprehensive sweep impossible. The fires are moving fast, and the crews are moving faster, often without the time to conduct thorough ordnance surveys.

This is a new dimension of risk for emergency services, who are already stretched thin by the demands of a changing climate. They are now being asked to fight fires in what are, effectively, minefields. The psychological toll on these crews should not be underestimated; they are not just battling flames, but also the ghosts of a war that ended over seventy years ago. The discovery of a rusted bomb in the hands of a firefighter, as photographed in Belgium, is a chilling image that underscores the gravity of the situation.

The response requires a coordinated, cross-border effort. The fires in the High Fens stretch across the Belgian-German border, and the munitions do not respect national boundaries. The demining squads of both nations must work in tandem, sharing intelligence on where the ordnance is likely to be concentrated. This is a logistical challenge that is compounded by the fact that the weapons are often buried deep within peat bogs, which can smolder for weeks, making access difficult and dangerous.

A Warning for the Future

The events of this summer serve as a stark warning that the past is not as distant as we might like to believe. The weapons of World War I and II were designed to kill, and they are proving remarkably resilient in their ability to do so, even decades after the guns fell silent. Climate change is acting as a catalyst, unearthing these relics and reactivating their deadly potential. As Njeri noted, the continent’s "climatic luck" is running out, and with it, the assumption that the buried weapons of the past will remain safely dormant.

For the UK, the implications are clear. As a nation with a deep history of conflict, both at home and abroad, the threat of unexploded ordnance is a constant, if often overlooked, reality. The fires in Europe are a reminder that this threat is not static; it is being amplified by the changing climate. The British government, like its European counterparts, must consider how to adapt its emergency services and demining operations to this new reality — because the cost of inaction is measured in the lives of firefighters and civilians now on the front line of a war that refuses to end.

The images from the High Fens and Bordeaux are a sobering sight: a continent grappling with the twin crises of climate change and its own violent history, where the intersection of the two is proving a dangerous place. The bombs are not merely relics; they are active threats, waiting for the right conditions to strike. This summer, those conditions have arrived.

By Erica Thornton, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: The Independent, Associated Press.