Thanks!

Great photos - thanks for posting the link.

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1 out of every 4 artillery shells was a dud ...

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People smarter than me: Do you think this is accurate and if so, is it a result of rushed, mass production errors or the relative inefficiency of artillery shells back then?

Beautiful Photography of an interesting subject.

In addition to what Rabid Cougar said, a couple of more problems were a lot of World War I shells still relied on timing fuses that were very sensitive. If the shell impacted before the fuze was cut to go off, the fuze would likely be damaged and the shell become a dud.

Another issue is most of the old factory workers were probably in the trenches so a lot of women and new workers were employed to build the shells with no previous experience. Yet the production rates were accelerated with these dodgy workers and they had to keep up. To further accelerate the production the QA processes were severely shortened or eliminated. Thus defective products were sent out.

I've always found it interesting that solid objects would rise up out of the soil, as these old shells. Imagine your hand in a bucket full of BBs. Every time you shift your hand a little, a BB or two shifts underneath your hand. Do it long enough, and your hand will eventually be forced to the top.

Same thing with these shells and the soil they are in, every time the soil moves due to freeze, plowing, or wet/dry cycles.


Side question, are these shells still dangerous? Doesn't sound like it, if the farmers pick them up and move them.

They still are dangerous as the powder is still dry. Civil War rounds still kill someone every year or so.

CanyonAg77 said:

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Side question, are these shells still dangerous? Doesn't sound like it, if the farmers pick them up and move them.

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Yes, still dangerous. I know the French have bomb disposal units just for picking up stuff from farmer fields and I am pretty sure the Belgians do too.

ja86 said:

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CanyonAg77 said:

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Side question, are these shells still dangerous? Doesn't sound like it, if the farmers pick them up and move them.

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Yes, still dangerous. I know the French have bomb disposal units just for picking up stuff from farmer fields and I am pretty sure the Belgians do too.

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There's been a book written about this topic and for the life of me cannot remember the title. Mentions this issue in several places around the globe --- Vietnam and Afghanistan IIRC. Read it years and years ago so my memory is a bit hazy.

Anyway, the book talks about farmers spotting them in the fields, calls the government, and disposal units come get them and take them to the coast to detonate them. Apparently, it's not unusual for members of the unit to die when collecting the artillery shells. Thousands of acres in France are uninhabitable today because of this problem. At the rate they are collected, areas cannot be reopened for like 1000 years or something crazy like that.

Book also mentions that although most of the shells are WWI vintage, every now and then they find a live one from the Franco-Prussian War fought some forty plus years earlier!

[edit: looked it up. According to Wiki, 700 years is the figure, not 1000, before someone raises the BS flag on me: "Each year dozens of tons of unexploded shells are recovered. According to the Scurit Civile agency in charge, at the current rate no fewer than 700 more years will be needed to clean the area completely. Some experiments conducted in 200506 discovered up to 300 shells/10,000 m2 in the top 15 cm of soil in the worst areas."]

There are still some low lying places in France that you cannot enter due to the mustard gas this lingering there. The Great War was something else!

An unexploded World War I shell sits in a field near Auchonvilliers, France, in November 2013. The iron harvest is the annual "harvest" of unexploded ordnance, barbed wire, shrapnel, bullets, and shells collected by Belgian and French farmers after plowing their fields along the Western Front battlefield sites. It is estimated that, for every square meter of territory on the front from the coast to the Swiss border, a ton of explosives fell. One shell in every four did not detonate and buried itself on impact in the mud. Most of the iron harvest found by farmers in Belgium during the spring-planting and autumn-plowing seasons is collected and carefully placed around field edges, where it is regularly gathered by the Belgian army for disposal by controlled detonation.

Fun to read this morning
Thanks for posting that.

clarythedrill said:

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There are still some low lying places in France that you cannot enter due to the mustard gas this lingering there. The Great War was something else!

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This video pretty much makes the same claim. Indy Naidell from his outstanding Great War series:

I think you and clary both are confusing contaminated soil and unexploded gas shells with the presence of atmospheric gas today.

Are there areas where the ground is so contaminated, it's not safe to live or farm? Definitely. Safe to walk? Probably, just don't allow prolonged contact with the soil or water. And don't touch any unexploded ordinance, both for the danger of explosion, and the danger of releasing gas.

Are there areas where it is dangerous because poison gas lingers in the air? I'd say no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

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Zone Rouge (English: Red Zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War. The land, which originally covered more than 1,200 square kilometres (460 sq mi), was deemed too physically and environmentally damaged by conflict for human habitation. Rather than attempt to immediately clean up the former battlefields, the land was allowed to return to nature. Restrictions within the zone rouge still exist today although the control areas have been greatly reduced.

The "zone rouge" was defined just after the war as "Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible".[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge#cite_note-nogo-1][1][/url]
Under French law, activities such as housing, farming or forestry were temporarily or permanently forbidden in the zone rouge. This was because of the vast amounts of human and animal remains and millions of items of unexploded ordnance contaminating the land. Some towns and villages were never permitted to be rebuilt after the war.

The area is saturated with unexploded shells (including many gas shells), grenades, and rusty ammunition. Soils were heavily polluted by lead, mercury, chlorine, arsenic, various dangerous gases, acids, and human and animal remains.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge#cite_note-nogo-1][1][/url] The area was also littered with ammunition depots and chemical plants.

Each year dozens of tons of unexploded shells are recovered. According to the Scurit Civile agency in charge, at the current rate no fewer than 700 more years will be needed to clean the area completely. Some experiments conducted in 200506 discovered up to 300 shells/10,000 m2 in the top 15 cm of soil in the worst areas.

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I'll even add as a former artilleryman I can't even fathom firing that many rounds. That number just blows me away.

For those of you interested enough in this subject to go see for yourself, the National WWII Museum offers this tour: Two Wars

clarythedrill said:

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There are still some low lying places in France that you cannot enter due to the mustard gas this lingering there. The Great War was something else!

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I read that there are some areas that you can't enter because there are still Germans with machine guns

BQ78 said:

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In addition to what Rabid Cougar said, a couple of more problems were a lot of World War I shells still relied on timing fuses that were very sensitive. If the shell impacted before the fuze was cut to go off, the fuze would likely be damaged and the shell become a dud.

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If you are talking about paper fuses, they were not used in WWI. They went out of use after the American Civil war. Almost all the different fuses used were mechanical in nature.

Nope, talking about the brass/bronze clockwork fuses used by all the major belligerents, where they set the timing by rotating a disk. If they set them too long they could become a dud as they were not percussion shells.

Should have said set instead of cut, shows how Civil War-centric I think.

Odd that they survive being fired and hitting the earth brand new without going off, but you can't handle them safely 100 years later.

As for ww1, my great grandfather never talked about it

I think people viewed it as just a waste and something to forget. Certainly horrible. Followed by the plague. Early in film technology so not as well documented.

People didn't really appreciate the fact that it is actually, in hindsight, possibly the most significant conflict in all human history. Certainly since the fall of Rome

cbr said:

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Odd that they survive being fired and hitting the earth brand new without going off, but you can't handle them safely 100 years later.

As for ww1, my great grandfather never talked about it

I think people viewed it as just a waste and something to forget. Certainly horrible. Followed by the plague. Early in film technology so not as well documented.

People didn't really appreciate the fact that it is actually, in hindsight, possibly the most significant conflict in all human history. Certainly since the fall of Rome

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Not sure I agree with this. Perhaps if you accept the fact that the end result did rearrange the European map in such way that, along with the horrific disaster called the Versailles treaty , it made WW2 inevitable then well OK. Of course it did facilitate the rise of the worst catastrophe in human history , outside of disease, called communism but the socialist spark was always there and socialism ALWAYS leads to communism and a complete collapse so.....
Interesting debate. I could possibly see it your way..maybe....BUT I still think that WW2 was the pivotal event of "modern" history.

cbr said:

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The Original AG 76 said:

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cbr said:

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Odd that they survive being fired and hitting the earth brand new without going off, but you can't handle them safely 100 years later.

As for ww1, my great grandfather never talked about it

I think people viewed it as just a waste and something to forget. Certainly horrible. Followed by the plague. Early in film technology so not as well documented.

People didn't really appreciate the fact that it is actually, in hindsight, possibly the most significant conflict in all human history. Certainly since the fall of Rome

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Not sure I agree with this. Perhaps if you accept the fact that the end result did rearrange the European map in such way that, along with the horrific disaster called the Versailles treaty , it made WW2 inevitable then well OK. Of course it did facilitate the rise of the worst catastrophe in human history , outside of disease, called communism but the socialist spark was always there and socialism ALWAYS leads to communism and a complete collapse so.....
Interesting debate. I could possibly see it your way..maybe....BUT I still think that WW2 was the pivotal event of "modern" history.

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I think you sort of proved my point. Ww1 brought modern war. Brought communism. Put it into power in Russia. Drew middle eastern map. Ended Western European enlightenment and power - immediately and more directly by spawning ww2. If not only made ww2 inevitable, it defined the ideologies, players, and maps that defined everything about ww2. Left a power vacuum in Asia. Ended the spread of western values and infrastructure through the third world. Basically triggered the destruction of western civilization from within.

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Very interesting debate. A case could be made that the World Wars were really a single event separated by a short rebuild, rearm and realign period. ( typical of Europe) Since WW1 ended with an armistice instead of a true total crushing defeat, total destruction of the state and occupation you could say that WW2 was just a restart of a flawed end of WW1. 1945 brought about the true end of the war and the complete destruction of the losing side. In 20th century terms at least , we didn't "salt the earth" in classic Roman terms but came close.

We may see the same result of the end of the Cold War as we did not ( sadly) totally defeat and DESTROY Russia and its ruling class like we did the japs and Germans. We simply allowed them to replace one totalitarian vicious oppressive state with another totalitarian vicious oppressive state . One was communist and today it is fascist.
Interesting....