Unexploded Ordinance...

[Hauksbee 103]

Found this amongst the Yahoo News offering this morning. I confirms what I read in a copy of "Horizon" (now, sadly, defunct) nearly twenty years ago. There's still a humungous amount of artillery and grenades coming to the surface each year. And no end in sight. And it's still killing people, even the professionals who are called to dispose of it. This article does not mention gas-filled shells, but the Horizon article did. The pros who do this kind of work said the gas shells were the worst. In them, the chemical constituents are still pristine, waiting to burst forth into the air and corrosion has in many, many cases rendered the shell walls paper thin. Disposal crews will prefer to handle high explosive shells over gas shells every time. And...there are more every year.
 
By Antony Paone

VERDUN France (Reuters) - The fields and woods around Verdun, site of one of the most devastating and protracted battles of World War One, may now appear tranquil. But remnants of the war - unexploded ordnance - still pose a threat 100 years on. The 10-month Battle of Verdun ranks among the bloodiest encounters in the Great War, its unrelenting hailstorm of ammunition killing hundreds of thousands French and German soldiers from February to December 1916.

 

French and German Presidents Francois Hollande and Joachim Gauck both attended commemoration ceremonies in Alsace and Liege on Sunday and Monday to mark the war's start and pledge Franco-German solidarity. 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.
 
Crosses are seen at the cemetery outside the WWI Douaumont ossuary near Verdun, northeastern France, … "I can't tell you how many I find sometimes," said Roland Dabit, a resident of the nearby hamlet of Somogneux. 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."
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.
 
Craters from shelling during WWI are seen in the village of Bezonvaux, near Verdun, northeastern Fra …
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.
That heavy shelling works out to an average of six shells that fell on each square meter of earth in the area during the battle.

 

"If you have a million shells falling - besides all those that fell after - the turnover of the soil inevitably buried a large number of those that didn't explode," said Guy Momper, one of the 10 specialists in the unit.
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. 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. 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." "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."

 

(Writing By Alexandria Sage; Editing by Toby Chopra)

Edited August 5, 2014 by Hauksbee

[Olham 164]

Hauksbee, the Flanders farmes often just put the shells and grenades at the side of their field, near the road,

where the ammo spcialists then collect the stuff. They collect, if I remember correctly, 3 tons per year.

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

Must be a very sobering reminder of the past horrors to deal with that 'harvest' every year.  A century later and still the crop comes up, it honestly staggers the imagination to think about what mankind has done, (and continues to do), to itself.

 

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[JFM 18]

I took these at Vimy Ridge when I was there in 2011:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although grass covered and eroded, the shell holes are still well evident.

[Olham 164]

I guess they have sheep in there to ignite any possibly threatening ammo - sheep have rather small,

hard hoofs. In Ostfriesland we use them to stamp back the clay in the dykes, when mice or moles

have dug any holes into them.

[Hauksbee 103]

Hauksbee, the Flanders farmes often just put the shells and grenades at the side of their field, near the road,

where the ammo spcialists then collect the stuff. They collect, if I remember correctly, 3 tons per year.

Farmers here in northeastern United States do the same thing with rocks that emerge from the earth in the spring thaw. Then they stack them up and build walls with them. Works great here, but probably not a good idea in Flanders.

.

[Olham 164]

Yes, that's no joke - theybuild little "iron walls" of the duds, until they get collected and disposed. An "iron harvest"...

 

 

 

[Hauksbee 103]

I was impressed with the figures when I read the article, but seeing your photos, Olham, is chilling.

[Olham 164]

Isn't it? And this is only a little part of the story - maybe the finds of 1 - 3 years!

[Hauksbee 103]

And it's not just WWI. I saw this with morning coffee:

 

http://news.yahoo.com/clearing-wwiis-explosive-legacy-pacific-044209150.html

 

An article on Peleliu Island in the Pacific. Nowhere near the density of shells fired in WWI, but put onto a tiny island, and every bit as deadly.

.

Edited August 11, 2014 by Hauksbee

[JimAttrill 24]

Here is a link to a very interesting Dutch site.  If you go down the left there is a link to their reports on unexploded stuff in Belgium and dumped in the sea off Zeebrugge.   Other interesting articles and pictures as well. 

 

http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-color.html

[Hauksbee 103]

Here is a link to a very interesting Dutch site.  If you go down the left there is a link to their reports on unexploded stuff in Belgium and dumped in the sea off Zeebrugge.   Other interesting articles and pictures as well. 

 

http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-color.html

Good find , Jim. For those who wish to follow this link, scroll down about hallway in the left-hand frame. There are two articles: (1) Death waits patiently at a Belgian beach, and (2) Poison Gas: the Abomination of Houthulst. The first recounts the dumping of poison gas shells in the ocean at a nearly deserted beach that is now a popular seaside bathing spot. A horrendous number of shells are lying in the water, happily corroding away, sometimes in as little as two feet of water. These are not duds, they are live time bombs. But Holland and Belgium are so small, so densely populated, where else can you put this stuff?

 

The second article is even worse. The man in charge of storing poison gas shells (and regular high explosives, both of which you can no longer dump at sea) Commander Pille states that the number of live shells being found is not declining. 72 mine removers work at it daily. This is twice the number as ten years ago. The article relates that in WWI, 1,500,000,000 shells were fired. (Yep, that's one BILLION, five hundred million) Of these, 30% did not explode. My first thought was: "What's wrong here? Couldn't these people design a decent fuse? Or, did they suffer from shoddy workmanship?" Turns out, the shells were just fine. It was the target that was the problem. Holland and Belgium are not called the Low Countries for nothing. So low, in fact, that the water table is very close to the surface. It only takes a little rain to produce a lot of mud. A little more and it goes to muck. Then ooze. A shell entering this slurry of water and dirt does not encounter enough resistance to activate the detonator. It just slows down. And sits there for years.

 

Commander Pille is quoted as saying, "People think that this stuff is no longer dangerous after all this time. Nothing could be further from the truth. The charge has become chemically unstable and therefore sensitive to shocks and friction. With some shells, there is only a little spring one millimeter thick that is restraining the pin. What do you think would happen if that spring were to rust through? Each year it deteriorates more."

 

It's a cruel fact of history that the five German scientists who were involved in the development of this gas warfare each later went on to receive the Nobel Prize. How's that for irony? The picture below is of the above ground storage sheds at Houthulst

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Edited August 16, 2014 by Hauksbee

[Olham 164]

Yeah, that reminds me of Wernher von Braun, "father" of the V-1 and V-2, who was later the "father of the American Moon Mission".

[Hauksbee 103]

Yeah, that reminds me of Wernher von Braun, "father" of the V-1 and V-2, who was later the "father of the American Moon Mission".

The five chemists who developed gas warfare went on to be honored for other developments/discoveries in chemistry. But, like von Braun, they had much in their past to answer for.

 

I think it's amazing that there hasn't been a major disaster yet. After all, these things are frequently found by farmers banging into them with their plows.

Edited August 17, 2014 by Hauksbee

[JimAttrill 24]

One of the ironies of war was that the British used Krupp fuses made under licence all through WWI.  In 1926 they paid Krupp industries a form of their licence fees! 

[Hauksbee 103]

One of the ironies of war was that the British used Krupp fuses made under licence all through WWI.  In 1926 they paid Krupp industries a form of their licence fees!

"...a form of their licence fees". I'm unclear here. Is this a typo Jim?

[JimAttrill 24]

Well they worked on some sort of calculation depending on how many German casualties etc per shell fired,   And they paid on that. 

[Hauksbee 103]

Well they worked on some sort of calculation depending on how many German casualties etc per shell fired,   And they paid on that.

This gets better and better. I would think that licensing fees would depend on how many fuses were made. (which could be precisely known). But did they really try to estimate numbers of German soldiers killed? That's got to be a shot in the dark for sure. Were the figures ever disputed (to the best of your knowledge)? And the British actually paid?

 

A similar strangeness happened concerning the Enigma cyphering machine. Before the war, (in the late 20's I believe) the German company the was building and promoting the machine (for industrial secrets) approached the Brits, and were turned down. Nobody was interested. Later, either after the war, or perhaps just after Enigma was broken, blueprints for the machine were discoverd in basement files of the British Patent Office.

[Olham 164]

Yeah, it's unbelieveable!

Same for Anthony Fokker - as far as I know, he had first offered his qualities to the British -

but they wouldn't have him.

[JimAttrill 24]

Rather like Col. Lewis who offered his machine gun to the US Army.  They turned it down so he resigned his commission and sold it in Europe instead.  The US Army were very p1ssed off about this and only used the Lewis when they were forced to in 1918.  It seems he had made some enemies there

[Hauksbee 103]

The US Army were very p1ssed off about this and only used the Lewis when they were forced to in 1918.

Sometimes there's nothing worse that having been right. They were pouting.

 

Still Jim, back to those Krupp detonators. Do you have any information on how they proposed to calculate the number of German soldiers killed per fuse?

[JimAttrill 24]

I really don't know.  That information must be somewhere on the net.  Personally if I was Vickers (or whoever) I would have told them to go **** themselves with a fuse. 

[Hauksbee 103]

I really don't know.  That information must be somewhere on the net.  Personally if I was Vickers (or whoever) I would have told them to go **** themselves with a fuse. 

Right on! Or, put their check in an artillery shell and airmail it to them.