1,000 world war one grenades found in field

[JoFerret]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=4939660

BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - The Belgian army said Friday it was clearing more than 1,000 grenades uncovered in a field in western Flanders, the scene of heavy fighting during World War One.
The World War One grenades were found during the draining of a field in Moorslede, close to the town of Ypres

[Wickerman]

1. Oh, in Belgium _ I thought if they were in Iraq, Bush* might try...

yeah, anyway.

That is wild. all that time.

[JoFerret]

4. The ordnance turns up all the time

...there is also one huge mine yet to ecxplode, location unknown. but while the bombs and ammunition and grenades and mines and etc last for decades the emotional impact lasts through the generations. The human, social, familial, personal cultural toll are even more lasting.

[rockymountaindem]

2. Battle of Ypres...

one of the worst battles of the war, site of the first use of poison gas in warfare. As I've learned from being in Canada, it was the brave Canadians who refused to retreat in the face of the gas, while everyone else ran away. So stop making fun of Canada!!!

[wheresthemind]

5. oh quit whining or we'll invade you...

;) Just kidding of course...

[JoFerret]

7. Not true

French at Neuve Chapelle in 1914 were the first to use gas - tear gas - against the Germans. For a first hand account of the use of poison gas at second Ypres: - http://www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/firstgasattack.htm.

and - anyone with intelligence would run away if unprotected from a poison gas attack. Outdated notions of heroism and fantasies of romantic warfare about canadians here. I admire Canada for its willingness to step up to real humanitarian challenges and for what is right in the world. Not for the sad losses of its soldiers in futile battles at Ypres or Vimy Ridge or Dieppe - "heroic" though they were.
No need to apologise for being Canadian. Be proud of the real acts of courage.

[rockymountaindem]

8. I'm not Canadian, I just act like one sometimes.

I'm actually a Coloradan who is studying at the University of Toronto. As for the tear gas thing... well... I have to admit that I'd never heard of that one. I guess it doesn't get as much attention because tear gas isn't the same as mustard gas, ya know?

[w4rma]

10. Note, Hitler was at Neuve Chapelle. (nt)

[JoFerret]

15. It was chlorine gas at second Ypres

Mustard gas was later. And you are right that the xylyl bromide used by the French and others was more of an irritant than a deadly killer. I suppose the real issue is the unleashing of yet another weapon and once the barrier was broken it was only a matter of time before all participants used poison gas to kill and disable and terrify the enemy. The British later used poison gas to "pacify" the Kurds in 1922.

[Abbalon]

9. Please

forgive me but I must say, standing firm in the face of terror or certain death marks those men and women of high valor. Character traits that give one such courage represent the best that is man.

At the Choson Resivor several units, one after the other were sent on top of a hill overlooking the retreat of the main part of our forces. The Officers and men who were ordered up that hill knew they were not likely to come down.

Because that pass was all that stood between certatin defeat and an orderly retreat. Except of couse those units that stood their ground. The next units that would take their place moved their comrades bodies to the side.

Now think of the courage it took for the last few uints who marched up that narow pass.

You must understand that in every instance like this you also have those who refuse and live. I can't say it is wrong to want life. We all cherish it.

God bless every Canadiana soilder who stood his ground. They showed uncommon courage in the face of certain defeat. Please dear God let me be counted among the dead for I don't want to be the Son Of a Bitch who ran out on his mates.

[JoFerret]

19. In the first world war

....we would have been better off if everyone had thrown away their weapons and run away and refused to fight. In the end such slaughter renders notions of heroism, valor bravery, gallantry meaningless. When you are about to be mown down by machine gun fire, or blown up by an anoymous artillery shell or drown in the mud or chocke on gas there is little room for action of any kind. It is a passive endurance of the intolerable.

There were many extraordinary acts of extreme courage in the face of danger and on behalf of cause and comrade. However, refusing to join in this utter madness and futility and suffer the consequences of that choice also took enormous courage. It showed, moreover in many cases, a sense of broader humanity and insight into reality and the ways of the world. To stand up and say no when everyone is jumping off a cliff is a rare and courageous act.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Web sites say French used it first

But it was the Germans who used it at Neuve Chapelle:
It was during World War I that the Germans first used the first chemical agents. They released a quantity of irritant tear gas against the French at the battle of Neuve Chapelle in October 1914.
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/benjamin/440/gas.html

First Use by the French

Although it is popularly believed that the German army was the first to use gas it was in fact initially deployed by the French. In the first month of the war, August 1914, they fired tear-gas grenades (xylyl bromide) against the Germans. Nevertheless the German army was the first to give serious study to the development of chemical weapons and the first to use it on a large scale.

Initial German Experiments

In the capture of Neuve Chapelle in October 1914 the German army fired shells at the French which contained a chemical irritant whose result was to induce a violent fit of sneezing.
http://www.firstworldwar.com/weaponry/gas.htm

And from the table at the bottom that page - the Russians suffered more than anyone from gas:

Country         Total Casualties Death 
Austria-Hungary 100,000          3,000 
British Empire  188,706          8,109 
France          190,000          8,000 
Germany         200,000          9,000 
Italy            60,000          4,627 
Russia          419,340         56,000 
USA              72,807          1,462 
Others           10,000          1,000 

[SheilaT]

3. To learn more about leftovers from various wars,

read Aftermath by Donovan Webster. It's an amazing book.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0788196553/qid=1083035003/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-6711709-9846564?v=glance&s=books

[Tom Kitten]

6. In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John Mcrae

[LibLabUK]

14. Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent 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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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 floundering 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.
- Wilfred Owen


This is one of my favourite poems.. and so fitting with regard to current events.

[ze_dscherman]

16. Thanks!

I was looking for this to post it.

BTW, unexploded ordnance from WWII is a very common thing in Germany. Numbers for the state of Northrhine-Westphalia in 2002:

Grenades and Handgrenades: 66.654
Mines: 150
Other Explosives: 9.616
Bombs: 1.176, with 273 bigger than 50 kg (100 lbs.)

Total Ordnance: 77.596

[Voltaire99]

17. Unforgettable poem. Thanks for posting it.

Owen's masterpiece is the antidote, of course, to all this empty talk of dying bravely.

[JoFerret]

21. I wonder whether he would have expressed the same sentimentality

if he had seen the slaughter of the Somme, Verdun and third Ypres? Would he still have urged taking up the quarrel? I have to imagine that he too would have come to his senses in the face of the events of 1916-1918. McCrae's kind of innocence died in 1915. At least there was shift of sentiment once it was clear that this was a mechanized stalemate and war of attrition.
Another Canadian incidentally. And just what was his cause?

[ctex]

24. McCrae did see the slaughter -- he was a medical officer at Ypres

In 2002 I visited the site of the dressing station near Ypres where McCrae treated wounded during one of the battles at Ypres. He penned this poem after witnessing casualties first-hand.

Ypres is an easy trip from Bruges, Belgium if one wants to see a WW1 battlefield.

[JoFerret]

25. He did indeed

....in fact McCrea had served in the Boer War and wrote the poem after his work in a dressing station. But - he wrote the poem in May 1915 before the 1916 killing fields of Verdun and the Somme and Passchendaele. The the last two stanzas speak of carrying the fight to the "foe". This sense of a quarrel with the enemy was one that increasingly faded as the war dragged on. The enemy was the war itself and those who prolonged it and those at home who complacently promoted and glorified it. They were increasingly the enemy - not the fellow sufferers across in the trench across no-man's land.

For more on how this poem came to be written visit this brilliant war site dedicated to the reality of that war and the hidden stories behind the history and the mythology.

http://www.geocities.com/~worldwar1/default.html

Read The Hero by Siegfried Sassoon.(Or any of his biting, bitter poems that slash at the empty notions of glory and place the blame for war precisely where it belongs.

The Hero

'Jack fell as he'd have wished,' the mother said,
And folded up the letter that she'd read.
'The Colonel writes so nicely.' Something broke
In the tired voice that quivered to a choke.
She half looked up. 'We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers.' Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.
He'd told the poor old dear some gallant lies
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes
Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,
Because he'd been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how 'Jack', cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried
To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care
Except that lonely woman with white hair.

Siegfried Sassoon, 1917

[slackmaster]

22. Got your Flanders Field poppies right here

Here's one:





I grow them every year in commemoration of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. They usually peak out right around Memorial Day. Looks like the warm weather is bringing them out a little early this year.

[MikeG]

11. Maybe they were Willie McBride's

[PartyPooper]

12. One of my great uncles was a survivor of WWI. There were rivers of blood.

That's what my grandmother used to say. Fortunately, her brother lived to tell his story. But, so many more did not.

And, I can't help but think of Princess Diana, too, and her last campaign against land mines.

This story makes me feel so sad.

:-(

[ze_dscherman]

18. My grandfather survived WWI

fighting in the German infantry. Got him the Iron Cross, in exchange for an arm he almost lost. Made him loose any admirance for war as well. To his luck, he was to old and sick to be called for Hitlers last stand in WWII. Too bad, I was still a kid when he died, so I could never ask him about his experiences.

My other grandfather died just after WWII (probably not war related), suffering terribly because morphine could only be had in insufficient quantities, from the black market. And stories about refugee trecks, mass-raped girls and bombed out cities are still vivid memory among my elder relatives.

Well, that's what happened to the aggressor nation, after or during bringing death to many other millions. But suffering from war is universal. Except for those that wage wars for profit.

[The Stranger]

20. WMD!

At last!

[John_H]

23. They plow up bones and dud shells in France every year...

In fact, the government has service through which the farmers pile the bones on the side of the read, trucks come and pick them up, and they're buried in a memorial.

Hmmm....Iwonder if this is one reason why those "surrender monkeys" don't love war as much as Chimp's Chicken Hawks.

[paulk]

26. My wife spent part of her childhood

in Gorizia, Italy (near where the battle of Caporetto took place).When she was eight years old she and some friends fished an unexploded WW1 artillery shell out of the river and played with it for a week - hiding it every evening because they knew they were doing something "bad". Finally a villager saw them and called the police, who took it away.

When I visited there in the early nineties, the army had cordoned off
an apartment complex that was being built near my aunt's house when worker's discovered an unexploded 1,000 pound American bomb from the 2nd WW while digging a new foundation.

[theboss]

27. London has a bunch of unexploded bombs

In 1996, the UK Government released documents that pinpointed the exact location of hundreds of unexploded World War II bombs.
The positions of the bombs had been known since the war, when their impact sites were charted.

But they were either deemed too difficult to remove or considered to be low risk.

It is estimated there are more than 100 unexploded bombs throughout London and hundreds more across the UK.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/144997.stm

[rinsd]

28. Not surprising....

Didn't they find an entire intact depot under the Berlin airport with full assembled ME-262's and the like?

Found it: http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=792292003