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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Every year I visit various ww1 battle sites in northern France and Italy. We walk through endless farm lands to find information about certain events. We often stumble upon ammunition and steel scrap. The land is literally filled with shells, bullets, scrapnel everywhere. Some are still live and just brought to the top of the soil by farm tractor machinery. The amount of shells fired at the battle of as Verdun is so extremely high that you find layers of shells everywhere. For months millions of shells were fired in a 20 square km area. It will take hundreds of years to clean them up. 900 years in some places. A few years ago I found in the middle of farmland a lot of unexploded bullets still in their clips. After searching a bit more we found also various fragments of helmets and bajonets, leather belts and more. It turned out to be a French defense unit, completely destroyed and burried under layers of mud only to be discovered 100 years later.

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I am currently born near to Verdun

> The amount of shells fired at the battle of as Verdun is so extremely high that you find layers of shells everywhere

On the first onslaught on the city, it is estimated the German fired around 2 millions shell on Verdun in two days. [1]

It is hard to imagine by today living standards the hell that people lived there.

> The land is literally filled with shells, bullets, scrapnel everywhere. Some are still live and just brought to the top of the soil by farm tractor machinery

Some forest area are still today considered the 'zone rouge'. There is still so many shell inside them that the access or activities there are forbidden [2].

Even in the area not considered 'zone rouge', it is still pretty common for farmers or forest workers to find back non-exploded shell regularly, even today.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fINsiiUZtuc [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

2M shells in 48 hrs is 11.5 shells a second.

I watched a documentary a little while ago which described the sound as a constant drum-roll during these barrages.

I don't have sound at the moment but think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hscEoupkqv4 is something similar. The scale of these attacks is mind boggling.

> A barrage like this is referred to as "drumfire" by veterans to describe artillery that is so constant, unceasing and uninterrupted, that it sounds like drums. Others say that it sounded almost like a sea. It is agreed that it was impossible to hear individual shells, due to the sheer amount being fired.

> A video to describe the sheer scale of WW1 artillery barrages and how they may have sounded. It may also help to convey the experience of shell shock (PTSD) a WW1 soldier may have developed. Although this video pretends to be the experience of an artillery barrage, a true artillery barrage especially on this scale cannot ever be felt in the same way through a demonstration as the world would shatter, pressure and concussive forces would be felt throughout the entire body with each blast, and the noise would be so extremely violent and loud that anyone would have their ear drums ruptured.

In these days of elite, small squads as shown on television, this is a stark reminder that war is incredibly, literally unbelievably, savage thing.

But if you design a factory to make shells quickly, each production line can probably do 1 shell per second (they're not so different from big bullets, and those are made very rapidly).

11 of those lines and you can be keeping up that rate forever.

It's not enough to produce them, you also need to get them close to the front. The logistics of transporting millions of tons ammunition outside of normal trading routes should not be underestimated

Just happened to be listening to Dan Carlin's hardcore history about WWI. From memory, the Germans would build multiple railway lines to the front to supply a large offensive like this. And then they'd spend weeks stockpiling ammunition and food using those multiple railway lines. At times this conferred a large advantage to the Germans as parts of the Allies side would be supplied by a single road vs. multiple railway lines.

When you don't have to deal with boring things like permission to build, consent of landowners, keeping roads open, etc., building a railway is very quick and easy.

Building multiple railway lines is also a safety thing - you don't want to leave a whole section of your troops unsupplied just because some train is hit by a shell and wrecked blocking the tracks.

I just found out a few days ago when I have read about track gauge, that they literally built narrow train lines to transport ammunition at scale. Eg: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/light-rail-ammunition-...

Stockpiling those shells for a "huge burst" at the start of a battle is more than possible though.

The main issue today, is such stockpiles are easily found by recon (satellites, airplanes, drones), and then blown up by enemy artillery / rocket artillery.

Logistics are invented during ww1. Same for canned food. Boxing material and more.

(NUMBER OF BARRELS)[(SHOT SEQUENCE TIME/SECONDS)(11.5 SECONDS)]

Aftermath - The Remnants of War by Donovan Webster[1] is highly recommended and has a section on Zone Rouge.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Aftermath-Remnants-Landmines-Warfare-...

I'd second this book -- it's unforgettable in its description of the unexploded bombs left over from war, in addition to land mines and the continuing effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Myself and my then GF visited Arras just north of Verdun in 2019. She was a few months pregnant at that stage and in every hotel we stayed, the proprietor warned her to only drink bottled water, including for brushing teeth.

The locality got so hammered with poison gas shells, it all seeped into the ground water making it mildly poisonous!!

Lovely part of the world, but a sad legacy of military buildups.

What about non-pregnant people?

It is an honest question. Is the poison bad for others or only because a pregnant woman or the foetus are exceptionally weak to it?

If it is, why and how do people still live there?

Again, I'm guessing that pregnancy is probably a health condition where everything is under stress, and drinking toxin laced tap water doesn't help.

But lots of people do live there, and from albeit biased observation, they seem happy enough just drinking beer and wine (and maybe bottled water).

I'd say it's probably a red flag for non-pregnant folks too.

To give a bit more reference on the scale of the slaughter of Verdun and WW1 in general:

Total casualties for the 1916 battle were ~755,000, maybe less. The battle lasted 302 days, from 21 Feb to 18 Dec. Doing a bit of math, you arrive at just shy of two casualties per minute.

That comes out to crashing a fully loaded 737 jet into the ground every 2 hours, every day, every night, for 300 days straight.

The total casualties of WW1 are worse. In terms of 737-crashes, it comes out to one every ~14 minutes for the ~4.25 years of the war for military casualties. Including civilian casualties you get a 737 plane crash every ~10 minutes for the four years, three months, and two weeks of the war.

Imagine a Lion Air Flight 610 tragedy every 10 minutes, 132 times a day, every single day, every single night, for over 4 years straight. No breaks.

Just building plane after plane, fueling them, training pilots, finding people, getting them on the plane, taxiing, taking off, getting to altitude, and then intentionally running them into the ground, every ten minutes, for 4 years, nonstop.

Where would you even find a place to put all the wreckage? What airstrip's tarmac could support that many planes taking off that quickly? How could you even get that many willing people onto planes at that rate? What kind of airport fuel system could support that amount of consumption for 4 years without maintenance? How could you possible train pilots that fast?

The sheer scale of the slaughter in WW1 is just mind boggling. It truly, really, does make my just head go 'fpoooom!'.

EDIT: I'm having some trouble with my math (maybe?), if someone could double check, that would be great.

The "zone rouge": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

Yes I went as a teenager. We were warned not to buy souvenirs as live grenades were known to have been bought in the past. But you could still see chalk lines in ploughed fields where the trench lines had been and even in some of the memorials there were signs warning you to keep out of the wooded bits. And some of the memorials are massive, and just covered in names.

"...scrapnel everywhere...".

The correct term is 'shrapnel', but your 'scrapnel' means so much more.

/'Scrap', being the root of the word.

Yeah you are right. English is not my native language.

I like that neologism, very fitting.

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