Cleaning up after WWII (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Cleaning up after WWII (2017)

wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com

95 pointsdredmorbius24 comments

The GI and his wife pictured about a quarter of the way through this piece are likely Ernest Kreiling and his newlywed bride Jean Vonachen, who toured post-war Europe in 1947, revisiting locations he'd fought in during 1944-5. Their photography ran in Life Magazine:

<https://www.life.com/history/where-it-happened-a-former-g-i-...>

I suspect this is another image from the sequence of the pair on the tank: <https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/04144747/...> (from the Life article above).

Super niche nitpick: the photo is not of a tank. That appears to be a StuG III, which is not a tank. There is no turret, the gun is just fixed in the hull, with a couple degrees of freedom. Originally intended as a sort of mobile fire support for infantry, eventually got some anti-tank capability. They were not part of the Panzercorps by the Wehrmacht, who saw it as a specialized form of artillery.

Thanks for the nitpicking!

WWII??? We haven't managed yet to clean up after WWI! For example, nearly every day unexploded munitions are found on the former Isonzo frontline.

There are parts of France that are simply off limits because the volume of UXO left over from WWI was deemed too much to even try to clean up: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/zone-rouge.html

Imagine then having a forest fire in zone rouge: https://www.businessinsider.com/slovenia-wildfires-set-off-h...

This is one reason why cluster bombs are banned (albeit that's ignored) and why anti-personnel mines should be banned (there's the Ottawa treaty but the bigger forces like the US, Russia, China, India and Pakistan have not signed it). As an alternative the US's ATACMS rockets have a variant with tungsten shrapnel, which has been used against Russian force gatherings and transport columns like a giant shotgun blast but without the leftover unexploded ordnance.

I had an engineer friend in an eastern European country who had a contract with their army to build automated equipment to dismantle artillery shells from WWI still in stock at their armories. So, yeah, we still haven't cleaned up from WWI.

To this day, bombs from World Wars are being found in Poland. Recently, a renovation of one of important roads in Gdańsk was stopped because they found a WWII bomb in the ground

Planes, too; a German bomber that crashed 81 years ago, as well as an English aircraft were dug up recently in my country: https://www-omropfryslan-nl.translate.goog/nl/nieuws/1671228...

Regular occurrence here in Austria as well. Funnily enough back in school when we watched "Der Untergang" (Downfall), we were escorted out of the movie theatre by policemen right after the movie ended because they'd just found a big WWII bomb nearby at a construction site.

Especially common here in Berlin. They found several bombs when building the Tesla factory recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_bomb_disposal_in_...

Hitler rants....about creppy ordinance. Und fisch.

Holy cow, I had not heard of this one-man German manually guided rocket before, the Bachem Ba-349 Natter:

> Rocket-powered, it took off vertically from a launch pole, and was guided at near-transonic speed by an autopilot. At the last moment, the pilot took over and aligned the nose, which was filled with unguided rockets, at an enemy bomber. After the one-time attack, the Natter split in half. The engine parachuted down for re-use, the nose section was discarded, and the pilot (who was “spit out” of the open nose by inertia as the tail section parachute opened) separately parachuted to safety.

Truly a weapon of desperation. Imagine being asked to climb into one of those things...

> Only 36 Ba-349s were built and only one flew one time, killing the pilot.

That's batshit crazy, but it could be worse[1]. At least the Nazis could say "well, you got a chance you'll live".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokosuka_MXY-7_Ohka

Semi-related discussion, in which this link was mentioned: "How WW2 bombs across the Pacific are found and destroyed, decades after war" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41314166#41354620>.

I had to sign off that I am not concerned of the likely undetonated bombs underneath my home when buying my apartment this year. In Hamburg, Germany, there are so many bombs still under buildings, because buildings were put on top hastily.

The bombing of Hamburg is a shocking event. The scale of it was so immense that it was used as a justification for nuclear attacks on civilians. The argument being ‘What’s the difference? Tens or even hundreds of thousands die in either event’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_...

Wasn't Operation Gomorrah a response to the Operation Blitz that was conducted by Germany earlier?

I can see that German Blitz is reported to cause 40.000 civilian deaths, similar to Allied Gomorrah. So if anything would be shocking, it should probably be Blitz, not Gomorrah?

The Blitz was an 8 month campaign targeting cities all across Britain. Operation Gomorrah had a comparable death toll within one city over eight days. It sounds like the density of destruction from Gomorrah was a lot greater.

I'm pretty shocked by both, aren't you?

Well, true, if we consider those without context. But context is key. There's attack and there's retaliation. British bombings for me aren't nearly as shocking as aggression of Germans.

Just a few days ago, a refinery had to be shut down and evacuated because an old unexploded WW2 bomb was found.

https://www.ogj.com/refining-processing/refining/operations/...

> Prefabricated steel matting was used by the Allies in both Europe and the Pacific, usually for aircraft runways but sometimes as road reinforcement.

Hehe, I got some laying next to my driveway, for use in muddy situations. Here in France you can still find them here and there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com