Posted on 03/20/2014 7:23:24 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
First World War bomb kills two construction site workers 100 years after it was fired at Belgian battlefield
• Armament was disturbed and exploded evacuation works at the site
• Killed two and injured two, all construction workers working in the area
• This area of Belgium is rife with unexploded bombs from the Great War
• It is the former Flanders battleground where many shells were fired
A First World War bomb killed two construction site workers when it exploded 100 years after being fired at a Belgian battlefield.
The bomb had laid dormant for a century at an industrial site in the former area of Flanders battlegrounds, killing two and injuring two more.
Johan Lescrauwaert of the Ypres prosecutor's office confirmed that the armament from the 1914-1918 war exploded near the workers, but did not say whether it was a shell or a grenade.
The circumstances were unclear because there was apparently no digging at the site - the usual cause of such accidents.
Every year the battlefields in western Belgium throw up hundreds of armaments from the Great War, and most are destroyed without incident by a special Belgian army bomb squad.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
World War I battleground scene from am exhibit at the In Flanders Fields museum in Ypres, Belgium.
It is hard to believe those explosives are still active after a hundred years.
I have read that this type even happens just about every year maybe including WWII munitions.
I well remember the centennial of the American Civil War in the early 1960s, but it is hard to wrap my mind around WW1 being a century ago. That is when my parents were born!
Winner should make the loser go pick them all up after the war is over.
There are accounts that trees in some areas of the western front had absorbed enough mustard gas that they would occasionally poison people trying to clear them some 50+ years after the war...
My father and uncles used to hunt gazelle in North Africa using leftover M1's and US Army jeeps, I knew a Frenchman whose playtime as a kid included restoring and firing machine guns left over from WWII in Normandy.
Germany and Eastern Europe are littered with Wehrmacht ammo dumps that were just covered with earth at the end of WWII. Every year, the German police bust individuals who have restored WWII weaponry they dug up-- one guy in Berlin a couple summers ago was trying to sell a 40mm Bofors AA gun in working condition with ammo.
Europe has very strict gun control laws, but I swear half the families have leftover ordnance from the World Wars stashed somewhere.
Lol
So messy can’t countries just play war on simulators
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.
I was just thinking of something similar. During the 50s and 60s, I remember my parents regularly talking about their childhood in the 20s and 30s. It really seemed like ancient history yet that was only roughly 30 years back.
Now the 60s are 50 or more years ago and they seem like almost yesterday. I recently read a story my Grandmother wrote in the newspaper about her first trip to Geneva, Alabama.
That was in the 1800s before automobiles, airplanes, radios etc. I guess the car had been invented but it was before they were in popular use. She, her Sister and Father rode an oxcart to pick up their Sister who was arriving by train. A hurricane hit and the president of the school she was attending telegraphed that he was keeping her for an extra day because of the storm.
I had a science teacher tell me something like that back around 1970. I was young and empty-headed and I pictured the scenario as a low-lying dip in the land, with some sort of lingering fog of mustard gas just waiting for an unwary traveler to stumble down the hill and die, 50 years after the fighting stopped. As I grew older I decided that the teacher made the whole thing up (because my scenario was preposterous). But perhaps the tree aspect is more believable.
book
Reading the Army’s official history of my Father’s WWII battalion, they once dug 18 mines out of a six by six foot plot of ground.
The Germans must have stacked them on top of each other.
The Bolshevik Revolution is still killing people to this day and it started BEFORE WW-I
My dad left me several boxes of 1954 Twin Cities Arsenal 30-06 ammo. It still shoots; I fired off a box last November. Properly stored it lasts a long time.
The problem with the old shells and bombs is that in the wild, the explosive actually becomes more unstable and dangerous over time.
Just d@mn!
UXB is no joke in Europe, a German backhoe operator was killed a couple of months ago by an unexploded bomb. If you read the story above, the Belgians are still decommissioning gas shells from WWI found a year or two ago.
Around 10 years ago, I bought a thousand rounds of 7.65 Argentine/Belgian Mauser ammo. It was headstamped FN 32 or 33. Every bit fired without a hitch.
On the other hand, I bought some Argentine .45 auto which was from the 50s. It was clean and bright but was about 90% bad. It had obviously been stored badly, probably over heated.
Yes Daddy had some good war stories. He brought home a couple of nice cameras, a Luger, a P-38 and an Austro-Hungarian .32 auto.
The Luger had an interesting story. After the war, his unit went into Berlin not too long after the Russians captured it. Most of the soldiers would feed German kids who were close to starving.
The two Daddy fed were Fritz and Ingrid. One day he asked Fritz if he could get him a Luger. The roughly six year old took off running and in about an hour he brought Daddy a sack. In it was a Luger, spare mag and a holster. They still had dirt on them and had obviously been buried.
The author of In Flanders Fields, Lt-Col John McCrae, commander of No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill), died of pneumonia on 28 January 1918 at Boulogne, France.
I am curious if there is some sort of “reverse tilt shift” photography technique... it must not exist as I envision it as every model train picture in publications like Model Railroader would look nearly completely realistic.
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