[Newsbot]

Title: Ypres: World War One weapon explodes, killing two
Category: Military
Posted By: DrCaleb
Date: 2014-03-19 12:54:20

[Jabberwalker]

There are still tens of million s of tonnes of unexploded ordnance buried along the Western Front. The French and Belgian armies lose soldiers every year, still, while disposing of it.

That is the sector that the Canadian Expeditionary Force spent a lot of their war in and around. The first battle involving the CEF was in the Ypres Salient ... and in fact, they were so successful in their first battle that they preserved the Salient (the most notorious killing zone on the Western Front). Anyway, it's a good way to start off the centenary ... with century old shells still exploding.

[Freakinoldguy]

$1:

The device was set off as workmen at a building site in Ypres were trying to dig it up.

0:

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WTF were they thinking, or should I say not thinking. Millions of tons of unexploded 100 year old ordinance and they're out there playing Hurt Locker.

[martin14]

When I was in Brussels, I read somewhere that in Belgium and France they still find a couple thousand shells every year, they have since the war ended.

For 100 years now.

They also figure they will keep finding a couple thousand shells every year for another 100 years.

[GreenTiger]

Given this data it is just a reminder of just a violent affair WW I was. The horror of what that might have been like is hard to comprehend.

[Jabberwalker]

They say that the initial bombardment of Vimy Ridge by our artillery had the frequency of an idling automobile engine and it went on for about ten minutes. That's a lot of shells raining down in a short period of time. This sort of thing happened on and off for all four years.

[BTW, one of my grandfathers worked as a shell inspector during WWI.]

[Strutz]

martin14 martin14:

When I was in Brussels, I read somewhere that in Belgium and France they still find a couple thousand shells every year, they have since the war ended.

For 100 years now.

They also figure they will keep finding a couple thousand shells every year for another 100 years.

That's amazing.

$1:

...several hundred people have been killed in similar explosions since the end of the war.

Given this you can say that WWI has not completely ended as the casualty count continues to this day.

[Hyack]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

They say that the initial bombardment of Vimy Ridge by our artillery had the frequency of an idling automobile engine and it went on for about ten minutes. That's a lot of shells raining down in a short period of time. This sort of thing happened on and off for all four years.

[BTW, one of my grandfathers worked as a shell inspector during WWI.]

I'm not too sure about the 10 minutes, it was actually something like 3 weeks and during the assault the troops went forward under a creeping barrage as noted below.

$1:

The attack was to be supported by a massive artillery bombardment. Byng was given all of the First Armies heavy artillery, giving the Canadian Corps close to 1,000 guns. The bombardment began on 20 March and lasted for 20 days. The pace of the bombardment varied during those twenty days, to prevent the Germans working out when the main attack was due. On 3 April the intensity of the bombardment was increased. The last week before the attack was known to the Germans as the “week of suffering”.

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_vimy_ridge.html

$1:

Beginning at exactly 5:30 a.m on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, the Canadian artillery unleashed a massive barrage on the German positions on Vimy Ridge. The shelling was meticulous in its timing and devastating in its intensity . The targets were specific: artillery and machine gun emplacements and wire entanglements. Lt.-Col. D.E. Macintyre later recalled: "The sustained uproar of this combined and concentrated bombardment was so violent that it quaked the earth for miles... An Air Force observer of this battle later told me that the overhead canopy of our artillery fire was so dense that he saw a number of our low-flying aircraft explode like clay pigeons as they collided with shells in flight. It was like flying through a storm of gigantic and deadly hailstones." After the initial bombardment, the Canadian troops surged forward behind a protective curtain of artillery fire, employing the creeping barrage. The assault overwhelmed the German defences. Despite 10,602 casualties, of whom 3,600 would die, the Canadians succeeded where the British and French had failed: they took Vimy Ridge.

http://www.lermuseum.org/en/canadas-military-history/first-world-war/battlefront-1917/vimy-ridge/

[Jabberwalker]

That violent melt-down of Yugoslavia the we witnessed in the 90's was certainly a left-over of WWI.