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First World War

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by gerry_clarke (U14669698) on Monday, 8th November 2010

  Many a programme has been made about the horrors of this terrible war, but one thing has always intrigued me β€” how the hell did they even start to clear up the mess in Flanders afterwards and return the land to agriculture. My brother lives in Belgium and has looked in libraries, but says there is virtually no record to be found of this. Is it feasible, before the farmers there all die off, to get a picture of how they managed to extricate the ordnance and the human and mechanical wreckage from the ground and rescue their land?
  
  Gerry Clarke

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  Posted by Pete- Weatherman (U14670985) on Monday, 8th November 2010

  Along with a lot of good men its all still there. From on the surface to 90ft + down. Check out some of the progs on the war to see how much. The amount of times Digs were stopped becuse of UBXs or Farmers saying how they find thing year after year. If you look around the old battle sites you can see it all just lieing around, or re-used as bit of fence and other things, You will find that most Battle site are litterd to some degree with old ordenece from Sterling to the Falklands

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  Posted by dmatt47 (U13073434) on Monday, 8th November 2010

  The ordnance is still there, in northern France there are warnings for vehicles not to stray off the road as there is still live ammunition. One of the top British bomb disposal experts was killed a few years at, I think, Vimy Ridge, from an unexploded bomb.
  
  Every so often there is an excavation on a reported discovery of bones of soldiers, I believe MOD have a unit that deals with the cases.

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  Posted by Mike Alexander (U1706714) on Tuesday, 9th November 2010

  The battlefields were mostly cleared by cheap imported Chinese labourers, known as "Coolies". There were many fatalities. This was carried out in the early 1920s. There is a fair bit about this in Adam Thorpe's historical novel 'Nineteen Twenty-One'. I have also read that German POWs were also used to assist in the early stages of the clear-up.

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  Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Tuesday, 9th November 2010

  Gerry,
  
  coincidentally to day there was on the news overhere the finding of six soldiers
  on a battle field of WWI:
  
  They said also that on average 10 soldiers are found each year and that there still 100,000 soldiers are missing in Belgium alone.
  We had here a contributor from Yorkshire living in the Netherlands now, as he is married to a Dutch woman. He was several times overhere (Belgium, Ypres) to talk with a group called "The diggers". Unfortunately he is disabled now due to a stroke. It was a great contributor. Sometimes his wife contributed on this messageboard under the nom de plume: Lady of Sweetlake.
  
  
  
  As for the cleaning immediately after WWI. I have to ask the Diggers, but I suppose the farmers cleaned their land and if they found something especially munition they reported it to the authorities. Each year they still find munition from WWI and WWII. I suppose their was also a black market for the cupper and alliages....
  
  Kind regards,
  
  Paul.
  

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  Posted by Pete- Weatherman (U14670985) on Tuesday, 9th November 2010

  Re-cyceling is common in any war front, In the Philepines Jeep's were converted in to a taxi/bus form of transport, Brass shell cases are turnd in to a variaty of items and guns are kept or sold every were. But the majoraty of things are still there. In WW1 sevral thousend ton of shells were fired, if only one in 100 were duds thats still a lot of ordenece out there, Every time troops whent over the top, hundreds of clips of ammo were droped or lost. The same with Bombs Granaides and Gas shells.Tanks, truck and cars, were blown to bits and lay scatterd over meany a battle field. And mixed up with all this are the bodys of thousend's of men from both sides.

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