No going Rouge
April 25, 2018 2:01 PM Subscribe
A hundred years after the First World War, the scars it left on the French (and Belgian) landscape are still so extensive that a huge part of the battlefields is inaccessible to this day: Zone Rouge. Each year some 900 tons of unexploded bombs are still dug up from the earth there and it may take up to 700 years to fully recover, as Paul Cooper explains in a Twitter thread.
The ordnance plowed up every year by farmers is called the "iron harvest." The year I learned that was also the year some construction workers in West Flanders accidentally detonated a WWI shell near Ieper.
posted by logicpunk at 2:24 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by logicpunk at 2:24 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
Clicking through some of the links led to this page, where many of photos are sourced. This wall of shells is impressive.
posted by Existential Dread at 2:30 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by Existential Dread at 2:30 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]
I read a good book on this recently, Aftermath by Donavan Webster. The descriptions of how much are left at Stalingrad or Verdun even to this day are breathtaking.
posted by Quindar Beep at 2:33 PM on April 25, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by Quindar Beep at 2:33 PM on April 25, 2018 [6 favorites]
Came here to mention Aftermath, it was quite good. Also, Stephen O'Shea's Back to the Front.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:40 PM on April 25, 2018
posted by Chrysostom at 2:40 PM on April 25, 2018
Given that this must be some of the most intensively shelled land in the world, the fact that thousands of tons of unexploded bombs are still being found tells a pretty poor story about the quality of WWI armaments.
posted by Segundus at 2:49 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Segundus at 2:49 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
Proof positive that the absolute best thing you can do in terms of supporting and protecting the natural environment is to just keep people out of it. There's a huge section of lush, rich forest up in the White Mountains which about 100 years ago was almost totally clearcut and which then caught fire and burned down to basically nothing, and it looks amazing now. See also the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Radiation and unexploded ordinance are nothing compared to the normal workings of industry and agriculture.
It's heartening to me, how quickly things grow back in even the most thoroughly ruined places if just left alone for a century or so. It's still chilling though, seeing the pictures of what the Western Front looked like during and just after the war. "Hellscape" is a completely accurate description. 1200 square kilometers of town and farmland reduced to a roil of poisoned mud. Truly horrific.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:52 PM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]
It's heartening to me, how quickly things grow back in even the most thoroughly ruined places if just left alone for a century or so. It's still chilling though, seeing the pictures of what the Western Front looked like during and just after the war. "Hellscape" is a completely accurate description. 1200 square kilometers of town and farmland reduced to a roil of poisoned mud. Truly horrific.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:52 PM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]
I understand the high lead levels (bullets, shells, and all), but what caused the high arsenic levels in the soil?
posted by explosion at 3:22 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by explosion at 3:22 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
> Given that this must be some of the most intensively shelled land in the world, the fact that thousands of tons of unexploded bombs are still being found tells a pretty poor story about the quality of WWI armaments.
Not hardly. Per capita, Laos was the most heavily bombed country in history. The U.S. dropped more ordnance on Quang Tri Province in Vietnam than all the allies dropped on Germany for the entirety of World War II. In 2002 Vietnam was estimated to have over 350,000 metric tons of unexploded bombs plus 3.5 million landmines. And Vietnam only ranks tenth in the volume of unexploded mines: Egypt has seven times as many. France doesn't make the top ten.
posted by ardgedee at 3:24 PM on April 25, 2018 [21 favorites]
Not hardly. Per capita, Laos was the most heavily bombed country in history. The U.S. dropped more ordnance on Quang Tri Province in Vietnam than all the allies dropped on Germany for the entirety of World War II. In 2002 Vietnam was estimated to have over 350,000 metric tons of unexploded bombs plus 3.5 million landmines. And Vietnam only ranks tenth in the volume of unexploded mines: Egypt has seven times as many. France doesn't make the top ten.
posted by ardgedee at 3:24 PM on April 25, 2018 [21 favorites]
explosion, arsenic was used in ammunition as a chemical agent and smoke generator.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:50 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:50 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
explosion Oganoarsenics were pretty widely used as vesicants or tear gases. Diphenylchlorarsine and a bunch of related compounds, primarily.
posted by switchbladenaif at 3:59 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by switchbladenaif at 3:59 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
This is a ghastly legacy, but the abandoned land, growing wild, is also a kind of beautiful memorial to those who died there.
posted by thelonius at 5:09 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 5:09 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]
I keep saying this, but every time I learn something new about either of the world wars, the more amazed I am that we survived them.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:12 PM on April 25, 2018 [14 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:12 PM on April 25, 2018 [14 favorites]
Holy moly thank you for posting this. I hadn't seen this material before, but I knew about the history for a while now. I know a number of people - coworkers, friends and neighbors, acquaintances and, in the course of my job - who've traveled to France more than once, and traveled the countryside and had NO idea this ghastly history is a living history. It's mind-blowing.
posted by ezust at 5:28 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by ezust at 5:28 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
what caused the high arsenic levels in the soil?
I am curious about this as well. Mercury I would expect to see, because mercury was widely used in explosives at the time (mostly as mercury fulminate, which is a contact-detonating explosive used in primers and fuses), but most military explosives weren't arsenic-based as far as I know.
That makes me think that it was from chemical weapons. The "Clark" and "Dick" variants of what was generically called Blue Cross were arsenide compounds, so that could explain a lot of it. I've heard figures that up to 20% of the shells fired in some parts of the Western Front had chemical payloads.
There's also some amount of arsenic used as an alloy in the manufacture of lead bullets and shot, but I don't know if there would have been that much of it; the big battles in France and Belgium were, in terms of pounds of ordnance put downrange, artillery battles, and artillery shells are typically iron or steel. Perhaps some of the driving bands were lead (I believe the US used copper, but not sure about others), but it would still be a small fraction of the lead contamination.
the fact that thousands of tons of unexploded bombs are still being found tells a pretty poor story about the quality of WWI armaments.
It's surprisingly hard to build a shell that will always detonate at the end of its flight. But yes, WWI HE shells were—as somewhat new technology at the time—not especially reliable. Discussion here; the "Duds" article it references is actually located here now. Supposedly the overall failure rate across all types of ordnance and all forces is around 30%.
Failures to detonate were not the only problem. Of the British "graze" HE detonators used early in the war, it was noted:
I am curious about this as well. Mercury I would expect to see, because mercury was widely used in explosives at the time (mostly as mercury fulminate, which is a contact-detonating explosive used in primers and fuses), but most military explosives weren't arsenic-based as far as I know.
That makes me think that it was from chemical weapons. The "Clark" and "Dick" variants of what was generically called Blue Cross were arsenide compounds, so that could explain a lot of it. I've heard figures that up to 20% of the shells fired in some parts of the Western Front had chemical payloads.
There's also some amount of arsenic used as an alloy in the manufacture of lead bullets and shot, but I don't know if there would have been that much of it; the big battles in France and Belgium were, in terms of pounds of ordnance put downrange, artillery battles, and artillery shells are typically iron or steel. Perhaps some of the driving bands were lead (I believe the US used copper, but not sure about others), but it would still be a small fraction of the lead contamination.
the fact that thousands of tons of unexploded bombs are still being found tells a pretty poor story about the quality of WWI armaments.
It's surprisingly hard to build a shell that will always detonate at the end of its flight. But yes, WWI HE shells were—as somewhat new technology at the time—not especially reliable. Discussion here; the "Duds" article it references is actually located here now. Supposedly the overall failure rate across all types of ordnance and all forces is around 30%.
Failures to detonate were not the only problem. Of the British "graze" HE detonators used early in the war, it was noted:
Once it was united with the shell, the detonator could be accidentally cocked by vibration, or a knock, without any external indication of the status of the shell as being ‘armed’. Accordingly, when the shell was fired from the gun, the pre-cocked detonator would be activated inside the barrel of the gun or, perhaps, within a few feet of emerging from the barrel; with catastrophic results for the gun-crew and anyone else in the vicinity. In 1916, during the First Battle of the Somme, these ‘prematures’, as they were called, occurred in around 1 out of every 1,000 shells fired. In some divisions during the Somme Offensive, 500 rounds were fired every 24 hours, thus, on average, one ‘premature’ was occurring every 2 days or so. The effect on the morale of the gunners of this macabre game of ‘Russian Roulette’ can be readily imagined.posted by Kadin2048 at 6:09 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]
There is a good documentary about people in Cambodia who recycle dud bombs. Cannot recall the name but watching someone going at a 500lb bomb with a hacksaw to get the price of the explosive and casing on the Cambodian scrap market is remarkable.
posted by Pembquist at 7:18 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Pembquist at 7:18 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
Soil that's 17% arsenic sounds like one of those hell planets that occasionally pops up on Star Trek.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:35 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:35 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
For anyone who missed it, a couple of weeks ago central Berlin was evacuated during the defusion of WWII UXO found by a construction crew. Not an uncommon event in Germany either.
The selection of photos in the OP is really amazing, thanks for the post!
posted by XMLicious at 8:56 PM on April 25, 2018
The selection of photos in the OP is really amazing, thanks for the post!
posted by XMLicious at 8:56 PM on April 25, 2018
Soil that's 17% arsenic sounds like one of those hell planets that occasionally pops up on Star Trek.
Yeah, this detail seemed so crazy to me that I thought it had to be a typo. Since the author of the thread helpfully gave a link to the source, I clicked through to check. It was not; the highest soil arsenic reading they got really was 17%.
Though it's not that these levels of contamination are particularly widespread. Evidently, after the war during the cleanup efforts in the 1920s, large numbers of unused weapons, particularly chemical weapons, were collected on the battlefields and burned, which effectively destroyed many of the nasty organic chemical agents but had the side effect of producing and dispersing ash enriched with heavy metals. The study of the environmental contaminants was looking at one of the sites where this was done, an area about 70 meters in diameter. There's a diagram in the paper where they show a schematic of the site and where the samples were taken. Basically, there's a central zone about 30 meters in diameter where nothing at all grows; the soil is too toxic to support vegetation of any kind. It is essentially a toxic ash heap that has never recovered from the original burn. Outside this area, there's a ring a few meters wide where only mosses and lichens can grow, and beyond that, grasses have managed to re-establish themselves. The arsenic readings throughout this area are all crazy high, but a sample from some 40 meters from the center of the burn site shows a much more reasonable (but still very high) level of 59 parts per million. For comparison, soil arsenic of about 1 ppm seems to be typical in non-contaminated soils.
Anyway, I thought that gave an additional interesting perspective on the landscape the thread shows. The whole area is evidently badly contaminated, with some very localized spots that are essentially incapable of supporting life at all, even a century later. What a hell we made for ourselves during that war.
posted by biogeo at 10:09 PM on April 25, 2018 [7 favorites]
Yeah, this detail seemed so crazy to me that I thought it had to be a typo. Since the author of the thread helpfully gave a link to the source, I clicked through to check. It was not; the highest soil arsenic reading they got really was 17%.
Though it's not that these levels of contamination are particularly widespread. Evidently, after the war during the cleanup efforts in the 1920s, large numbers of unused weapons, particularly chemical weapons, were collected on the battlefields and burned, which effectively destroyed many of the nasty organic chemical agents but had the side effect of producing and dispersing ash enriched with heavy metals. The study of the environmental contaminants was looking at one of the sites where this was done, an area about 70 meters in diameter. There's a diagram in the paper where they show a schematic of the site and where the samples were taken. Basically, there's a central zone about 30 meters in diameter where nothing at all grows; the soil is too toxic to support vegetation of any kind. It is essentially a toxic ash heap that has never recovered from the original burn. Outside this area, there's a ring a few meters wide where only mosses and lichens can grow, and beyond that, grasses have managed to re-establish themselves. The arsenic readings throughout this area are all crazy high, but a sample from some 40 meters from the center of the burn site shows a much more reasonable (but still very high) level of 59 parts per million. For comparison, soil arsenic of about 1 ppm seems to be typical in non-contaminated soils.
Anyway, I thought that gave an additional interesting perspective on the landscape the thread shows. The whole area is evidently badly contaminated, with some very localized spots that are essentially incapable of supporting life at all, even a century later. What a hell we made for ourselves during that war.
posted by biogeo at 10:09 PM on April 25, 2018 [7 favorites]
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." – William Faulkner
posted by bryon at 11:37 PM on April 25, 2018
posted by bryon at 11:37 PM on April 25, 2018
The mind blowing thing for me regard UXO is not these individual shells but weapon caches that contain thousands of pounds in one place that we can't seem to do anything about like the SS Richard Montgomery which is a liberty ship carrying 1400 tonnes of UXO and sank in the Thames.
posted by Mitheral at 11:47 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]
One of the reasons that the explosives have not been removed was the unfortunate outcome of a similar operation in July 1967 to neutralize the contents of Kielce, a ship of Polish origin, sunk in 1946 off Folkestone in the English Channel. During preliminary work, Kielce, which contained a comparable amount of ordnance, exploded with a force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, digging a 20-foot-deep (6 m) crater in the seabed and bringing "panic and chaos" to Folkestone, although there were no injuries.[1] Kielce was at least 3 or 4 miles (4.8 or 6.4 km) from land, sunk in deeper water than Richard Montgomery, and had "just a fraction" of the load of explosives.[11]There are also old ammunition dumps containing thousands of pounds of explosives concentrated in one place that are too dangerous to do anything with but I haven't been able to google them out.
According to a BBC news report in 1970,[12] it was determined that if the wreck of Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 1,000-foot-wide (300 m) column of water and debris nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 m) into the air and generate a wave 16 feet (5 m) high. Almost every window in Sheerness (pop. circa 20,000) would be broken and buildings would be damaged by the blast. However, news reports in May 2012 (including one by BBC Kent) stated that the wave could be about 4 feet (1 m) high, which although lower than previous estimates would be enough to cause flooding in some coastal settlements.[13][14]
posted by Mitheral at 11:47 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]
When I stayed for a while in Belgium, I was told that just off a nearby beach were drums of mustard gas in a sunken barge. No-one had moved them, because of the danger of breaking one. Of course, no-one could tell me about any plan to deal with their inevitable deterioration. Perhaps the hope was that the contents would degrade faster than the drums, but I don't know.
(total hearsay, of course... I make no warranty etc etc...)
posted by pompomtom at 4:51 AM on April 26, 2018
(total hearsay, of course... I make no warranty etc etc...)
posted by pompomtom at 4:51 AM on April 26, 2018
The YouTube series The Great War includes a walk through the land that was a French village that was abandoned during the war and never resettled. I found it very moving.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 5:40 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 5:40 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
RE: landmines and Cambodia: an FPP I posted 9 years ago. Go for the link, stay for the incredible comments from skwt.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:21 AM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by lazaruslong at 9:21 AM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
At the end of the war, the ordnance factory in my home town found itself with a large stock of now-unwanted smaller calibre shells. At least one lorry load of these, due to be disposed of properly, was instead driven to the local park and dumped in the lake. There they lay for about 60 years, across the road from my school, until someone discovered one of them and the whole park was closed while the bomb squad spent a couple of months clearing it all up. As kids we thought it was great as the whole operation was taking place about 200 yards from the school gates but as an adult I'm stunned at the quantity still to be cleared across France and Belgium. The people clearing them are remarkable.
posted by YoungStencil at 11:08 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by YoungStencil at 11:08 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
Lately I've been looking back into WWI. I'm continually astonished at its depths and terrors, even after all of these years.
posted by doctornemo at 10:25 PM on April 26, 2018
posted by doctornemo at 10:25 PM on April 26, 2018
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posted by Existential Dread at 2:11 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]