The Dangers of the Battlefield...One Hundred Years Later

 By the late fall of 1914--basically around this time 100 years ago--the final flanking maneuvers in the race to the North Sea were solidifying a line of trenches from the Belgian Coast to Switzerland.  Stretching some 440 miles, the tactical and strategic goals of every subsequent campaign to regain (or alternately to hold) territory along the trenches of the Western Front would demand the use of artillery to try to dislodge or destroy enemy fortifications.  The demand for artillery shells was insatiable; for most of 1914 and early 1915 neither side could produce shells in sufficient quantity (in the millions) to prevent shortages on the front.  In the haste to ramp up production of this critical war materiel, everything from miscalculating the quantity of powder to poor-quality chemicals, fuses, or metal ultimately resulted in about a quarter of all artillery shells failing to detonate when fired.

Moving forward in time to the present, undetonated shells still represent a constant danger for farmers and individuals working, or simply walking, in and around the battlefields and military posts of World War I.  And those shells are still taking lives.

While it may be difficult to grasp the dangers of these shells individually, since we tend to think of them inadvertently going off one or two at a time, let's pause for a second to talk about the Battle of Messines that began on 7 June 1917.  British soldiers labored over eighteen months to dig 21 mine shafts across no-man's land and under German positions along the Messines Ridge.  Each shaft was filled with thousands of pounds of explosives (the largest containing some 41 tons), with the plan to detonate all the mines at 3:10 am just prior to a massed infantry assault (comprising nine divisions) and a creeping artillery barrage to provide cover for the advance.  Only 19 mines were detonated, but they killed some 10,000 men almost instantly and allowed the British assault to achieve its initial tactical objectives within three hours.  So what about the other two mines?

The British told Belgian authorities that with all the German counter-mining going on, and the devastation caused by the massive explosion of the other mines, that they were no longer certain where the two missing tunnels (and the explosives in them) were located.  One was found on 17 June 1955 near Le Pelerin when lightning struck nearby electrical pylons (erected in the 1950s) and set off the explosives in the ground beneath it.  The other mine is still under the Belgian countryside somewhere south of Ypres....

A recent article about the dangers of unexploded ordnance along the Ypres front highlights the ongoing concern for how to safely locate and remove these explosives and serves as a good reminder for our next talk on November 6.  Please come out to Twomey Auditorium on Nov. 6 at 6:00 pm to learn about efforts to preserve the battlefields, deal with unexploded shells, and address the public history questions and civic responsibilities that surround efforts to commemorate the First World War.

One of craters produced by the Messines mines. Photo Credit: Wikipedia