A blast from the past

The Second World War, Obiter can confirm, is long over. Yet the legal ramifications continue to be felt in the High Court.

This week the case of Allianz Insurance Plc v University of Exeter settled an issue over damage caused by a one tonne Luftwaffe bomb, which caused 12 of the university’s halls of residence to be evacuated when it was discovered in 2021.

Royal Navy bomb disposal experts were called in and, judging the 80-year-old bomb too dangerous to move, carried out a controlled detonation on site. The university and its insurer could not agree on which should pay for the damage. 

Allianz insisted that the damage was ‘occasioned by war’ and therefore excluded from cover. The university countered that the proximate cause of the loss was the act of the bomb disposal team in detonating the bomb.

Noting that the bomb had lain harmlessly for 80 years, His Honour Judge Bird, sitting as a High Court judge, acknowledged that a ‘gut feeling’ would lean towards concluding that the detonation was the dominant cause of the damage. But he noted that the passage of time had not made the bomb any less lethal than when it was delivered on behalf of Hermann Göring during the ‘Baedeker raids’ on English provincial cities.

‘The bomb provided both the explosive payload and the absolute need for the detonation,’ the judge found. Thus the dropping of the bomb was the obvious proximate cause of loss. ‘The dropping of the bomb is an act of war and so the loss suffered is excluded from cover.’

A blow for the university, no doubt, although at least its law students have a good case study on their doorstep (if it survived the blast).