They failed to explode when thrown by soldiers during desperate fighting near Stanley in the second world war. But seven grenades brought wartime history back to life yesterday when they were finally blown up - 70 years to the day after the battle.
The grenades, two British army and the others Japanese, were believed to have been thrown during combat on December 22, 1941, three days before the British-led troops surrendered to the Japanese.
They were found by two amateur military historians on Tuesday, on a section of the Wilson Trail known as The Twins, near Stanley.
Craig Mitchell, a coach at the Hong Kong Cricket Club, said he and his friend Toby Brown combed the hill with a metal detector in search of clues of the battle 70 years ago.
'Within a few minutes of searching in this area, we started to find a few grenades,' Mitchell said. '[They were] very loosely covered with soil. Obviously they were dropped and then had only been covered, over the years, with a little bit of run-off and a few leaves. They were not very deep under the ground.'
Police senior bomb disposal officer Jimmy Yuen Hon-wing said the grenades' fuses failed to work in 1941. They would have been safe for the next three to four decades if they remained untouched, but could explode if they were hit forcefully, and injure people within a metre, he said.
