Fire in the hole
WWII mortar bomb found in Whitby park,
He’s dug up working watches, unearthed rings and coins, and exhumed old irons.
But the last thing souvenir hunter Jeremy Revoy thought he’d stumble on in a lakefront stroll was the very object metal detectors are designed to find: a bomb.
The husband and father of two was out on an evening treasure mission at Whitby’s Intrepid Park — the former grounds of the top-secret Camp X spy training school — on Tuesday when his detector snarled its first report.
“‘Reearrr!’ That’s what it went like,” said Revoy, 34.
After homing in on a patch of marshy turf, he started to dig a mini trench around the underground artifact with a grass knife.
“My stepdad saw a picture I sent him and he’s like, ‘Get away from it and call the police.’ ”
JEREMY REVOY
TREASURE HUNTER
“All I seen was a rusty object at first and it ain’t moving,” he said.
Revoy didn’t know it yet, but just three centimetres underground lay the tip of a tail fin to a Second World War smoke mortar round. He scraped away more dirt and plucked the detached fin from the earth.
The hobbyist didn’t stop there. Egged on by his metal detector, Revoy eventually hauled out the body of the rust-encrusted projectile, buried farther down.
“I thought it might have been an oil filter or a part from a tractor or a lawn mower or something,” Revoy said. So he made a phone call and got some sage, sound advice.
“My stepdad saw a picture I sent him and he’s like, ‘Get away from it and call the police.’ ”
Revoy did. Within 10 minutes, a Durham Regional Police officer was on the scene, cordoning it off. Within 30 minutes, at least a half-dozen more cruisers had pulled up, he said.
Police blocked off a nearby waterfront trail and barred access to the area, though not before Revoy had steered an unsuspecting rollerblader off the path.
“I also told a parked truck driver, ‘Get away from there, go!’ ” he recalled.
Soon, a police helicopter was circling overhead, while Revoy forked over his photos of the ballistic relic. “The chopper was there until I left, like an hour later, maybe longer,” he said.
“This is the first report I’ve seen regarding a find like this,” said Durham police spokesman Sgt. Bill Calder.
A bomb-disposal team was dispatched from Canadian Forces Base Trenton early Wednesday.
Cpl. Dorian Ellert, an air weapons systems technician, said “there was a very high probability that it still was holding its charge.”
The team dug a narrow hole in a marshy part of the park, placed the five-kilogram mortar round inside and set it off with plastic explosives at about 8 a.m., Ellert said.
Doug Delaney, a history professor at Royal Military College in Kingston, explained the hazard that even a long-buried bomb can pose.
“They’re always dangerous,” he said. “You don’t mess around with something like that. You destroy it and just remove the potential for hurting somebody.”
The mortar round was likely more than 70 years old and used during training at Camp X, Delaney said.
During the Second World War and the Korean War, Canadian soldiers used the small smoke bombs — one mortar per platoon — “to screen your way out of something,” he said.
Subtler tools of sabotage and intrigue have emerged from the old Camp X grounds in the past.
A dagger hidden in lipstick, a poison-gas fountain pen and a revolver in a hollowed-out book were all among the “James Bond toys” included in a collection of wartime artifacts accumulated by a private collector last century.
The camp where Allied agents trained, near the Whitby-Oshawa border, also played host to James Bond creator Ian Fleming during the war, who eventually applied what he learned there to his famous “007” character.
That mystique is partly what attracted Revoy, who’s been “detecting” since last fall.
Although he doesn’t subscribe to Treasure Hunting, American Digger or Lost Treasure magazines — or belong to the 71-member Oshawa Metal Detecting Club — Revoy is en- thralled with the thrill of the hunt.
“It’s holding a piece of the past, undiscovered for years,” he said.
The hobby combines archeologylite with quasi-military apparel, but it’s the prospect of “the big historical score” that drives him onto sub-terra incognita, he said.
“Nobody else has found it, and you get to show everybody.”
His sons, 5 and 8, love it, too, especially the eldest — “only he calls it treasure hunting.”
Revoy chalks up his latest find to “fate.” A screw fell off his metal detector right after he came across the buried bomb, unhinging a plate and ruling out further exploration for the evening. “My mum said, ‘You got some guardian angel watching you.’ ”