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How were the trenches and battlefields of WW1 cleared after the war? |
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How were the trenches and battlefields of WW1 cleared after the war? Viewed with approval by Roger Atkins , Masters Professional Ed History & Politics, Deakin University (2008) and Hugh Weller-Lewis , MA Literature & Social Sciences, The Open University (1991) One of my relatives was still a soldier in France clearing up the battlefields until 1924, when the last soldiers left France finally after “finishing”??? ,!!!!! the clean up operations….. By hand and shovel basically….and not very well at all…. But the battlefields were vast areas, filled with rotting bodies, poisonous sludge and bomb filled pools of foul water, rats and disease. Many underground shelters, dug outs, trenches and other things, including vast dumps or heaps of artillery shells, got just buried, filled in with earth, boxes of mortar rounds, grenades bullet clips and bombs buried or were thrown into trenches and then buried in them…wooden boxes of bullets and machine gun Ammunition, mortar bombs and grenades, all rotting by now, and LETHAL….. In some places, German or British Engineers dug tunnels, mines, that were then never finished, and left filled with demolition explosives…..as battle moved on farther up the lines of trenches….they were filled in, forgotten after the war, and remain rotting, polluting water, fields soil and vegetation today…. image file 2263527 British Heavy Artillery being moved. It was either the giant tractor or the railway nothing else could move these Iron giants.… In one place (at least one!) in Belgium, an abandoned forgotten Military underground Mining tunnel, left behind when the course of the battle changed, was recently rediscovered by using old wartime maps; It lies 80 feet beneath a farm barn on the MESSINES RIdge, the site of a great WW1 battle. The explosives are believed to be around 50,000 pounds of TNT. Enough to destroy an entire town… 8000 Metres of Military secret underground Mine tunnels were built, a full 18 months before the Military offensive began. British miners dug tunnels along the Ypres Salient towards the German trenches on the Messines Ridge. Ypres Salient was a bulge in the British and French lines, where you could be fired on from the left, right or even from behind, a very nasty place to have to fight. A underground mining plan was initiated to try to break the murderous deadlock at that point of the front lines. The father of the writers English step father, (Grandfather) fought in the Royal Engineers at Ypres, and took part in the building of some of these mining tunnels himself. He survived the war to become the towns local chimney sweep. Below. Wartime map of Military trenches and positions at “Messinnes”. Lines of trenches crossed from Belgium right as far as Switzerland during World War One. battle moved along and up and down them, with a great many offensives, attacks, counter attacks Artillery Salvos and barrages for years on end. The sites , often forgotten and now near to houses, remain littered and dangerously contaminated in certain areas. Unfortuneately for several farmers today, their homes and farms and livlihoods are all placed 80 to 100 feet above several of these deadley old explosive tunnels. And they are now extremely old and rotting, and could be triggered by a lightning strike or internal instability at any It (http://time….It) is a bitter legacy left behind from a war almost a century ago now….and there is NO SAFE way to clear up or remove the danger…. The Infamous German “Paris” rail gun. it could fire a shell 75 Miles. Special “rifling” on the gun barrel produced shell stability and accurracey over long range. The secrets of the design were revolutionary for its day, and after the war, the giant gun “dissappeared”. It is thought it may remain walled up inside one of the old allied military railway tunnels somewhere under Europe. Technology was only rediscovered again similar to it in the latter years of the 20th Century. EXPLOSION IN FRANCE HEARD AS FAR AWAY AS DOWNING STREET IN LONDON Just for ONE Campaign of battle (there were many others !) 25 Military Mine tunnels were dug out, and many were fillled with explosives. Five however were not used, and left abandoned. One tunnel is known to still contain around 20,000 pounds of high explosives…and it is now unstable, rotting away….anything could happen. One explosion during the war killed 10,000 German soldiers in one go. CONTINUED RISK OF EXPLOSION Old explosives are highly unstable, can go off at any moment for the least obvious of reasons. One of the four unused mines exploded after 38 years in 1955, believed to have been triggered by a lightning strike. On June 7th,1917, 19 of the mines were detonated within half a minute. When the explosions took place more than a million pounds of explosives were packed into the underground chambers along seven miles dug by the miners in an attack that killed 6,000 German troops. The bang was heard as far away as Downing Street in London, buildings within a 30-mile radius shook, and even seismographs in Switzerland were able to register a small earthquake. Wartime underground Military Mines or old tunnels, can be full of old rotten bombs and boxes of explosives….just waiting to go off….many were back filled by engineers after the war but were never properly or safely emptied of their high explosive contents…. He was out there working with other soldiers in France, taking away and destroying what could be found and cleaned up long years after fighting had stopped and the others had long gone back home…. French Field Guns in action during the battle of Verdun. However, this does not mean the battlefields were remotely safe, every year in Northern France someone is killed, dead, out in the fields, walking or touching over abandoned WW1 Munitions. Ploughing the fields there is still inherently fatally dangerous too….each and every year rusty and unstable wartime ammunition “floats back” to the top again from being buried nearly a century ago. Above. This is only a very little of what can be found on a walk through the Verdun Forest or countryside ….this lethal lot is from World War One. 100 years after that terrible “Great War” ended, Europes former battlefields remain terribly poisoned, and poluuted, and very dangerous places. The problem is particularly bad in the Alsace, Liege and Belgium border areas, and Verdun. But in this area of northeastern France, and across the border into Belgium, the fallout from the fighting still lingers. Farmers and hikers around Verdun say they regularly find discarded artillery shells and grenades, vestiges of the war that are still potentially lethal. 100 years after the last shot was fired, there remains at least 100 to 300 years worth of dirty, dangerous work to finally remove to a safe level all the old rusting, decaying, rotting and unstable bombs, grenades, Mortars and Artillery Shells leftover from World War One. In one giant hangar, a team of five men work permanently, defusing or neutralising unexploded Poison Gas Bombs , each years more are found and brought there….the pile of bombs is enormous and will take a century to get rid off….if they stop finding even more tomorrow and next year and the year after next…. “I can’t tell you how many I find sometimes,” said Roland Dabit, a resident of the nearby hamlet of Somogneux. Below. Millions and Millions of shells got fired during WW1; the empty Brass metal cartridge cases were to be taken back and re used again….here is just ONE point for shell case pickup. Below. English and French Factory workers produced MILLIONS fo Artillery exploding shells of all types and sizes. Below. Ammunition was often delivered by small gauge Military trains specialy laid down for the task. Giant “Dumps” of Artillery and other Ammunition were everywhere up and down Europes trench networks in WW1 many were simply buried and forgotten…. Now just “imagine” whats going to happen when the poor person who wants to build a house here, starts useing the Digger to trench the foundations?!!! Clearing unexploded ordinance factors strongly in the cost and delays, associated with building new houses in this region. Narrow gauge secret Military railways were built by Army engineers all across the battlefields. Sometimes too the trains full of high explosives, would be hit by enemy fire or have an acciddent and literaly explode into vapour…. The countryside around Verdun, a monstrous battle of attrition, and other areas of France,are still very heavily contaminated by the left over decaying, unstable munitions from the 1914 to 1918 “Great War”. Below; Every Artillery Gun needed a Dump or supply “heaps” of Shells to sustain firing barrages. Heaps and heaps of Shells and bombs were simply left behind, abandoned in the mud….each year some of these re surface, with fatal consequences for some people. Above. just one, relatively “small” Artillery Ammunition storage Dump “somewhere” in France.WW1. There were hundreds and hundreds of far bigger Ammo dumps than this one in these battlefields…many are still un accounted for…..a ticking time bomb beneath the French countryside…. And regularly they still are killing people. “Even in the forest. How many are there in the forest? How many? Believe me, when we go mushroom-picking, I see a hundred shells,” Dabit told Reuters. Farmer Alain Doyen says that after tilling the earth in his fields, he often finds old German shells. “It is a bit scary sometimes because when you are in the middle of the field you don’t feel like touching it,” Doyen said. “It’s better not to leave them in the middle so I try to move them to the side.” Even today some parts of the lines of old Military trenches survive… The bomb clearance unit from the nearby city of Metz has its hands full responding to the numerous calls from residents and collects some 40 tonnes of ammunition each year. Its not what you “see” its what you cant “see” buried in the mud and in the forests… Zone Rouge No one takes a walk in this bit if they have a brain….and intend to KEEp it on their shoulders… A decayed Box of Mills Bombs, (greades). Just ONE is enough to KILL…..dont for Gods sake set off the entire box !!!!!! The “Plaz De Gaz” The water in the area was found to contain toxic levels of arsenic that were 300 times above the tolerated amount and abnormally high lead levels were recorded in some animals, particularly in the livers of hunted wild boars. Can you smell Almonds? Or a strange unusual smell a bit like Garlic? RUN LIKE HELL !!!!!! IT IS POISON GAS !!!!! It is named this because people, hunters who worked here or lived nearby fell sick and died…finaly it was abandoned….the reason? Poison gas is leaking up through the ground from wartime Poison gas Ammunitions, left buried at wars end in 1918. The RED ZONES are DEADLY Dangerous areas you MUST NOT EVER GO INTO THEM. Yellow there are still unexploded bombs but less dense in number (!!) Green and Blue are relatively “safe” (But DONT RELY ON IT MATE !) old ammo is still found there too…. Alarming amounts of lead debris scattered by shrapnel were also left in place, contaminating the soil with non biodegradable lead, mercury and zinc likely to remain for at least 10,000 years to come. Farmers in less dangerous re-populated “yellow” and “blue zones”, still hit shells every year, exploding their tractors and narrowly escaping death by the remains of a hundred year old war. In Verdun, there are road signs to indicate a dumping grounds for farmers to leave the shells they’ve plowed up on their land to be collected by authorities. Below This years Farm “harvest” from the 1914 to 1918 War….very often the bombs explode underneath the farmers tractor, sometimes they are killed because of this… Even now, almost a century after the last shot got fired, the Great War is still killing persons in France…. Every day a two-person team patrols the Verdun sector looking for shells, some 1 million of which were fired by the Germans in one of the first salvos of the conflict alone. The battle of Verdun lasted 300 days…. from 21 February to 18 December 1916. Above. French soldiers attack Germans at verdun. Verdun was a veritable charnel house of dead bodies and unexploded bombs….long before battle was finished…. The construction of new houses regularly reveals large quantities of shells during excavation, a delay often taken into consideration when building a new house in the sector. Thousands of guns fired thousands if not Millions of Artillery shells. many still poison and dangerously litter the French countryside today… Some Guns were massive and the shells enormous ! Below WW1 French railway mounted gun; it could drop explosive shells on targets thirty Miles away. All these metal giants needed a huge stock pile of Shells. After the war ended many of the shells were simply left behind and quietly “buried” ! “Today we need more space, we build new houses, and what happens? We stir up the earth. When you stir up the earth, you keep the legacy of this war which are the shells, the grenades and the mortars,” Momper said. “So in this sense, the war is not over,” he added. “And I think, in the area where we are now, it will continue for 100 or 200 years.” Although reckless inhabitants sometimes try to destroy the ammunition themselves - one local man used improvised means last month to explode a 155mm shell in the forest - Momper recommends that the bomb clearance unit be notified and the dangerous work be carried out by professionals. Shell pocked ground, still visible one hundred years after the final battles finished in 1918. Don’t disturb the soil…Death still lives here for the unwary unlucky enough to touch old ammunition laying on or very close to the surface… Below In 1918…. Dead Soldiers were just left on the battlefields impossible to then bury….they too are still buried many of them there….. Precise figures on the number of deaths due to exploded shells are hard to come by, but two experts from the Metz unit were killed in 2007 after a shell they were transporting detonated. Momper said that given the number of munitions that remain in the area and are yet to be discovered, “it’s almost impossible that nothing will happen.” Verdun Forest then and now…. “Someone said once, ‘the bomb does its own thing’. In normal conditions if it’s in a certain position, you can carry it around taking a number of precautions,” he said. “You might be able to carry a million of them but the next one might explode.” Don’t go souvenir hunting or picking for Mushrooms here….pick one of these and they will never find the body…. Decaying and highly explosive dangerous old wartime ordinance. It litters Miles and Miles of the French countryside from World War One down to this day…. |
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