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Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
- Animats 10y agoFrance is still digging up and disposing of tons of unexploded ordnance from WWI. About 900 tons a year, every year.
- neppo 10y agoThis is the so called red zone, here are some pictures about it: http://imgur.com/gallery/CdxZM http://imgur.com/gallery/CdxZM
- ourmandave 10y agoI wonder how many kids grow up in these areas thinking this is normal and the whole country isn't safe to play in.
- martindelemotte 10y agoAs a kid I played in these areas while my dad was cutting wood. It was rather exciting to find a shell as these were rare compared to other pieces of metal. We were just told not to play with them. I remember that one day we found a shell buried not that far from a fire that my dad had lit. I was young so I can't certify that we were in a "red zone" but it was in the woods around Verdun so there's a high chance.
- trhway 10y ago>It was rather exciting to find a shell as these were rare compared to other pieces of metal. We were just told not to play with them. We were told about the same. Fortunately, we didn't have parents around during the day - USSR, all parents at work :)
- e12e 10y agoA little more in this link posted to hn a while back: "The Real “No-Go Zone” of France: A Forbidden No Man’s Land Poisoned by War" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9609091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9609091 http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone-of-france-a-forbidden-no-mans-land-poisoned-by-war/ http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone...
- dredmorbius 10y agoClarifying: there are large regions of France which are forbidden to entry due to the UXB, mine, and other hazards present in them. That's the Red Zone map mentioned by another commenter here. I'd run across a good article on that a year or so back. Search doesn't turn it up, though a NatGeo piece covers it: http://nationalgeographic.org/news/red-zone/ http://nationalgeographic.org/news/red-zone/ 42,000 acres, which is 170 km^2 or 65 mi^2.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI just want to throw this in here for some more context: "During The Somme, the British bombardment consisted of 1,537 guns firing over 1,500,000 shells over a period of 168 hours averaging 8,929 shells fired per minute." That is just... staggering. I can't find a source for it, but I remember some factoid stating that on average it took several hundred shells to kill one soldier. That's not to say they had to take several hundred hits, but that on average that's how many shells it took to rack up one kill. (from: http://www.tommy1418.com/wwi-facts--figures--myths.html http://www.tommy1418.com/wwi-facts--figures--myths.html) *Edit for caps only
- dang 10y agoCould you please edit that quote to not use all caps? (per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- jschwartzi 10y agoIt seems like the purpose of a bombardment like that isn't to kill the soldiers outright, but to crush their advance and keep them out of your territory.
- ams6110 10y ago
- Noseshine 10y agoIn this context, about PTSD: "What if PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological?" > A new study supports what a small group of military researchers > has suspected for decades: that modern warfare destroys the brain. Cause: Brain injuries stemming from blast exposure. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/what-if-ptsd-is-more-physical-than-psychological.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/what-if-ptsd-is-m...
- e12e 10y agoI suppose a better synopsis would have been that there may be a set of injuries that result from physical trauma to the brain, that can be conflated with war-induced PTSD. But as people that suffer trauma without serious head injuries exhibit some of the same traits as those that are associated with PTSD, it's not really about PTSD in general being physical (as in result of external physical trauma, as opposed to physical changes in the brain, which can often result from eg: depression "alone"). But it is certainly interesting that "just" being subject to such physical abuse could lead to conditions similar to that of PTSD.
- Noseshine 10y ago> that suffer trauma without serious head injuries You didn't read or you didn't understand the article. The injuries they are talking about are invisible unless you put the brain under a microsocope.
- e12e 10y agoI meant trauma in the sense of head injury/head trauma -- a concussion is usually first diagnosed by secondary effects, not by "looking at the brain" as far I am aware. Perhaps I should've said "head trauma without visible/apparent injuries to the head". Sorry for the confusion. I only meant to contrast the micro-injuries that these new studies reference with the also real physical changes that often accompany "purely" psychological conditions.
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- sandworm101 10y agoThe article treats conditions along WWI front lines as static. They were not. The conditions in the trenches changed from one part of the war to another. Gas was not a thing during the entire war. And the germans and allied trenches were different from each other, with allied trenches being much more haphazard due to the insistence that they not be permanent. Artillery too underwent change over the years, with new and technologically interesting shell designs changing the experience on the ground. xxxxxxxxxx (Something is blocking me from replying more than twice an hour. I'm trying to reverse-engineer this system to see exactly what limits are being enforced, but for now I'll edit-in this comment that I had wanted to add to ternaryoperator's link/pic.) A million, ten million, a hundred million ... there is a point at which you are just moving the same dirt back and forth without any difference. I'm more interested in the smaller stuff. You can push dirt around for months, but is the barbed wire actually cut? Destroying the little things is very much harder than leveling roads.
- Spooky23 10y agoSoldiers were redeployed around the front as conditions demanded. You might be in a quiet sector fighting misery, boredom and trench foot and subsequently dispatched into the horror. The western front was a sort of scientific experiment in organized slaughter. The cavalry charges evolved into trench systems. Set piece rolling barrages coordinated with gas were perfected, shock tactics pioneered. It was an evil thing.
- Someone 10y ago"The article treats conditions along WWI front lines as static" I don't read that: "On the opening day of the Somme on July 1, 1916, British guns hurled 250,000 high explosive and shrapnel shells towards German positions" That's phase one: throw lots of stuff in the hope to destroy their capability to fight. When you think that succeeded, have your infantry walk over and conquer their positions. "During the beginning of the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, over 3,000 British guns and howitzers fired a “creeping barrage” on German positions" Throw lots of stuff to prevent their soldiers from killing your soldiers with their guns while your soldiers advance on their position. "The Germans developed and perfected the “box barrage" Throw lots of stuff to prevent your enemy from being reinforced. "The American St. Mihiel Offensive on September 12, 1918 was preceded in some areas by a seven-hour preparatory bombardment" Throw lots of stuff for ages to soften their defenses. Stop bombarding when your troops attack. Problem: they dig down deep, wait for the bombardment to end, and then get up and shoot your infantry while it still is exposed between trench lines. "By the end of the war, most attacks by French, American, and British forces began with a swift but short artillery bombardment that massed thousands of guns on one small area, followed up almost immediately by a ground attack" Throw lots of stuff to force them to keep their heads down, then immediately have your infantry get up to them (= use artillery bombardments as covering fire) That's a lot of evolution, partly driven by technological advances. For example, a creeping barrage requires the capability to drop stuff close to your own troops, while not hitting them. That requires good maps and explosives with reliable explosive force (so that one can be confident that shells will carry the desired distance). As another example, concentrated fire requires precision, too.
- ternaryoperator 10y agoHere is the aerial view of what a town looked like before and after almost a million shells were directed at it in WWI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Passchendaele_aerial_view.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Passchen...
- andrewchambers 10y agoFunny how that shows every person online claiming to have PTSD from online bullying have nothing of the sort.
- mikeash 10y agoFunny to use the word "funny" in relation to other people's suffering.
- moptar 10y agoPerhaps the world would be a less violent place if we laughed at soldiers for their failures instead of glorifying them. The article fittingly ends with "all that suffering .. for what?" It really was a lot of murderous people getting themselves killed and injured while trying to kill other people. Not something to have sympathy for. Sure, they might have been fooled by naive ideas of nationalism, but that's still a problem today - people who are so patriotic they'll kill others and risk their lives for no real reason other than "my country is better than yours"
- mikeash 10y agoSoldiers don't generally start wars. They go where they're told and fight who they're told. The penalties for disobedience are severe. To force someone to fight and then laugh at them for the effects it has on them strikes me as psychopathic.
- Gustomaximus 10y agoMany soldiers are volunteers. You're clearly trying to present one side of an arguement only. Any while I dont believe soldiers suffering is funny, I do feel some nations hero worship soldiers ad nauseum. And further even with severe punishments for people refusing conscription cases, I admire a man like Ali who went to prison over his conviction not to go to war, over someone willing to support a killing machine that they dont believe in because of a few years in gaol. We almost always have a choice. Also I appreciate someone in this (or any) discussion presenting an alternate view. And I like to think HN will remain a place where we can have open minded discussion without pushing clearly limited consideration retorts.
- dexterdog 10y agoIf this piques your interest at all I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History where he did 6 parts and about 18 hours on WWI from a mostly military history perspective. He also did a shorter one on the eastern front in WWII.
- untothebreach 10y agoCame here to say this. I learned so much that I didn't previously know about WWI from HH. Not only the military history aspect, but the political and cultural context for a lot of it.
- douche 10y agoThe Great War youtube channel is also great. They do at least one video a week, on what was happening 100 years ago, plus extras on notable people, questions from viewers, and other things.
- michaelcampbell 10y agoYup, I just wrote essentially this same comment, then deleted it after I had seen you'd done it already. Even the telling of the stories leaves one affected.
- zwily 10y agoCan't second this recommendation enough. I used to take part in the whole "haha French military" nonsense... Not anymore.
- grellas 10y agoThere is no more eerie account of what it was like to be a foot soldier caught up in trench warfare than Arthur Guy Empey's book "Over the Top" (1917). It is available free as a Kindle ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Over-Top-Arthur-Guy-Empey-ebook/dp/B008478XB4/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1467665338&sr=1-3&keywords=Over+the+top#navbar https://www.amazon.com/Over-Top-Arthur-Guy-Empey-ebook/dp/B0... (some reviews can be found here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1517707.Over_The_Top http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1517707.Over_The_Top) Empey was an American who managed to get in the mix with the British soldiers before America entered the war. His account is based entirely on his own first-hand experiences. His last patrol depicts an utterly futile foray at night in which dozens of his comrades lost their lives and he (and I believe one another) survived. I am going from memory here on something I read quite a while back and so my summary may be imprecise. But anyone wanting to get a sense of the horrors of what it meant to fight in such battles will most certainly get it through this account. The strange thing is that this became a runaway bestseller in America in 1917 and 1918. Far from recoiling at the horrors, the public chose to celebrate the heroism of the soldiers who put themselves in such incredible danger. It is in any case a bone-chilling account to read this and all the more so because its style is almost detached and matter-of-fact, even clinical in describing one horror after another.
- fiatjaf 10y agoFor anyone interested in getting a big picture of both reality at the front and the cultural moment of Europe during the Great War, I recommend Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring: https://www.amazon.com/Rites-Spring-Great-Birth-Modern/dp/0395937582 https://www.amazon.com/Rites-Spring-Great-Birth-Modern/dp/03... Besides other interesting things, it contains a ton of evidence cited from soldier letters.
- mesofile 10y agoFor more in this vein: Lyn MacDonald's Somme is a highly regarded history of the battle told largely through first-person accounts.
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- vermontdevil 10y agoSo many shells were fired that farmers are still digging up unexploded ones today. I saw a bunch of them at a corner of a farm field in Belgium pending pickup and it spooked me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/13/the-bombs-beneath-us-unexploded-ordnance-linger-long-after-wars-are-over/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/1...
- duskwuff 10y agoOften referred to as the "iron harvest": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest
- scoot 10y agoYup, right there in the article vermontdevil linked to: In the small farming towns of France and Belgium, undetonated World War I explosives that turn up during each year’s spring planting and autumn plowing are known as the “iron harvest."
- camperman 10y agoI've been shelled with 155mm shells. There is (or used to be) a bunker on Salisbury Plain where trainee artillery officers could experience it for themselves. It has very thick concrete, four foot thick windows and so on. Even with all the protection it's terrifying. They drop the rounds a few yards in front of you. The noise is unbelievable, the shockwaves actually bend the concrete inward a little and the dummy target vehicles you can see get instantly shredded with shrapnel. Delay the fuse a little and the shell penetrates a few yards before exploding, leading to a strange effect where all the dust and stones jump off the ground as the shockwave traverses it. Make the fuse go early and you get an airburst that sprays red hot metal down in a 100 yard radius and rattles those windows with waves of shrapnel. We were all jumpy for days. It just does that to you.
- thearn4 10y agoI was an artilleryman is the U.S. Army. We get the machine gun fired over us in a trench during basic training (like everyone else), but that sounds like so much more profound of an experience. I kind of wish we did that here. That said, I was enlisted (NCO), not a commissioned officer. For all I know, they may do something like that for (to?) the officers at Fort Sill.
- camperman 10y agoOn that topic, artillery shells flying over you sound strange, like tearing a linen sail or sheet down the middle - no joke.
- 13of40 10y agoI was in an infantry exercise at JBLM where they were firing artillery from right next to our position, and I remember every tenth round or so would have a defect that made it go zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoooooommmm when it came out of the barrel.
- camperman 10y agoAh yes, the whistling round. On the 105mm Light Gun this was from small gaps in the copper jacket around the shell that whistled when spinning.
- beloch 10y agoImagine being a member of an attack force following a creeping barrage, especially before it was perfected and short-falling shells were expected to kill a significant fraction of your comrades. Willfully walking into that kind of hell simply blows my mind.
- saiya-jin 10y agoto refuse would mean facing military trial with probable result of execution by firing squad, maybe composed from your comrades
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago>Willfully walking into that kind of hell simply blows my mind. // Walk or get shot for desertion, not sure how wilful it was. Yes, you may have signed up willingly before knowing the horror that awaited you, but still ...
- brudgers 10y agoBent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling. out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen
- noir_lord 10y agoOne of the few poems that stuck with me from English in high school, the Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori translates as "it is sweet and honourable to die for ones country".
- apozem 10y agoThank you for sharing this. A beautiful, evocative passage that captures the emotion of the conflict.
- happyslobro 10y agoDoes anyone know offhand how airburst shells were fused in those days? The only way that I can think that it could have been done, would be to have a very accurate timer detonate the shell. But then you have to know the flight time, and that would have changed whenever the gun was aimed at a different spot. Was the gun capable of setting the shell's timer automatically, based on it's firing angle? Did someone compensate for elevation difference? Or, was there a guy with a slide rule tweaking a knob on each shell just before firing?
- cs24 10y agoBasically three mechanisms have been used: a. Powder burning, these were the norm with shrapnel shells in WW1, and continued with smoke shells until at most a few decades ago. b. Mechanical time, appeared in WW1 and still used for shells that need a high burst such as smoke and illuminating. Were also used for HE, but round to round variation meant they were sell that perfect. c. Proximity (AKA Variable Time (VT)), this uses a radio transmitter and relies on reflected radio waves, first used in WW2 for anti-aircraft. Based on UK development that was transferred to the US in 1942. Used in the ground role to get a burst about 10 metres above ground late in WW2. Now a function in Multi-role fuzes that provide airburst, ground burst or delayed burst (ie penetrate the ground for about a metre before bursting) as selected.
- angry_octet 10y agoIn WWI the British used burning timers, which are quite inaccurate due to variable burn rates vs pressure and chemical composition. The Germans had mechanical timers. The battery command post would do the calculations from gun tables, tell the battery the fuse setting (twisting something in the fuse (nose) of the round), then observers would report back and it would be adjusted. In late WWII the UK invented RF proximity fuses, first for AA then for surface. Nowadays the guns talk to the shells, the shells run self tests, etc. They will be self aware before too long, a la Darkstar: https://youtu.be/qjGRySVyTDk https://youtu.be/qjGRySVyTDk
- chiph 10y agoOne of the first large-scale uses of POZIT proximity fuses by US forces in WW-II was at Elsenborn Ridge[1] in late 1944. Prior to this, the commanders restricted their use for the fear that the Germans would find a dud and reverse-engineer it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge#Artillery_role https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge#Arti...
- rasz_pl 10y agosubmarine for Battlefield
- rdl 10y agoThe amazing thing to me, aside from the inhumanity of the war and weirdly anachronistic things like the French cavalry uniforms and tactics at the beginning of the war, was that shell shock/PTSD/etc. wasn't recognized as a real thing, instead the armies would execute soldiers for cowardice. At least many of those have been posthumously (and far later) pardoned, not that it really makes much difference.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago>instead the armies would execute soldiers for cowardice // Was it not a necessity (on the basis of "winning" the trench warfare)? If you can go home to a nice feather bed and being looked after in a care home without even the appearance of an injury by presenting as having PTSD/shell-shock then the effect on moral and ability to force men to go over-the-top with the threat of capital punishment for desertion is going to be detrimental to the offensive capabilities. Here's me 6-inches deep in mud sitting on a firing step, thirsty and flea-bitten, nursing my shrapnel wound; there's Joe going home without a scratch on him?? Cowardice and PTSD/shell-shock probably present in similar ways on a battlefield too - I'm a huge coward, I'm not trying to suggest anyone had less honour than they did, just that I'd expect to be a gibbering wreck without any shell-shock. With the tactics employed it looks like it was a numbers game, to play that game they couldn't afford compassion for the fighting men of either side.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoStrangely it had no impact on the outcome. Marching millions of men 'over the top' to be mowed down by machine guns was pointless. Even though the tactic failed utterly, they kept doing it. Out of desperation? They executed a generation.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoI'm not sure we can say it had no impact. Two cousins playing who can get the most soldiers to die for their side, sickening stuff. Perhaps there was some Gambler's fallacy involved - like wow, stopping shelling and blowing whistles before we attack somehow isn't fooling them, lets keep shelling whilst we walk on over no-man's land, it's got to work this time for sure; can't change it now, we've nearly won!??
- jlengrand 10y agoI must admit that after reading such horrifying words, the Sharing sentence look very weird : "Enjoy what you just read? Share via social media using the buttons below."
- scoot 10y agoBy coincidence, this video of the receiving end of a modern artillery barrage is near the top or /r/videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUvcdKGD-FM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUvcdKGD-FM Obviously a video is nothing like physically being present, but might give some idea.