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Comment by bell-cot

16 hours ago

Even if every scrap of WWII bombing records had been kept, preserved, and properly indexed for that - WWII bomber navigation was nothing near accurate enough for it to be very useful. I'd figure the builders just go with their local knowledge - of how many WWII bombs have turned up, and where, and things to watch out for.

BTW, Europe has similar problems with dud artillery shells, old minefields, etc. And it's not just WWII, nor just Germany. The most infamous is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Zone_(World_War_I)

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bell-cot

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kjs3  3 hours ago

You are correct. See: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_...

The money quote is:

  Conventionally the air forces designated as "the target area" a
  circle having a radius of 1000 feet around the aiming point of
  attack . While accuracy improved during the war, Survey studies
  show that, in the over-all, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at
  precision targets fell within this target area.

I went down a rabbit hole and researched this a bit when we built an EU datacenter a couple of decades ago.