Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
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Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
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Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#2France is still digging up and disposing of tons of unexploded ordnance from WWI. About 900 tons a year, every year.
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#3I just want to throw this in here for some more context:
"During The Somme, the British bombardment consisted of 1,537 guns firing over 1,500,000 shells over a period of 168 hours averaging 8,929 shells fired per minute."
That is just... staggering. I can't find a source for it, but I remember some factoid stating that on average it took several hundred shells to kill one soldier. That's not to say they had to take several hundred hits, but that on average that's how many shells it took to rack up one kill.
(from: http://www.tommy1418.com/wwi-facts--figures--myths.html)
*Edit for caps only
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#4I just want to throw this in here for some more context: "During The Somme, the British bombardment consisted of 1,537 guns firing over 1,500,000 shells over a period of 168 hours averaging 8,929 shells fired per minute." That is just... staggering. I can't find a source for it, but I remember some factoid stating that on average it took several hundred shells to kill one soldier. That's not to say they had to take s…
Could you please edit that quote to not use all caps? (per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#5In this context, about PTSD: "What if PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological?"
> A new study supports what a small group of military researchers
> has suspected for decades: that modern warfare destroys the brain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/what-if-ptsd-is-m...
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#6I just want to throw this in here for some more context: "During The Somme, the British bombardment consisted of 1,537 guns firing over 1,500,000 shells over a period of 168 hours averaging 8,929 shells fired per minute." That is just... staggering. I can't find a source for it, but I remember some factoid stating that on average it took several hundred shells to kill one soldier. That's not to say they had to take s…
It seems like the purpose of a bombardment like that isn't to kill the soldiers outright, but to crush their advance and keep them out of your territory.
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#7The article treats conditions along WWI front lines as static. They were not. The conditions in the trenches changed from one part of the war to another. Gas was not a thing during the entire war. And the germans and allied trenches were different from each other, with allied trenches being much more haphazard due to the insistence that they not be permanent. Artillery too underwent change over the years, with new and technologically interesting shell designs changing the experience on the ground.
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(Something is blocking me from replying more than twice an hour. I'm trying to reverse-engineer this system to see exactly what limits are being enforced, but for now I'll edit-in this comment that I had wanted to add to ternaryoperator's link/pic.)
A million, ten million, a hundred million ... there is a point at which you are just moving the same dirt back and forth without any difference. I'm more interested in the smaller stuff. You can push dirt around for months, but is the barbed wire actually cut? Destroying the little things is very much harder than leveling roads.
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#8I just want to throw this in here for some more context: "During The Somme, the British bombardment consisted of 1,537 guns firing over 1,500,000 shells over a period of 168 hours averaging 8,929 shells fired per minute." That is just... staggering. I can't find a source for it, but I remember some factoid stating that on average it took several hundred shells to kill one soldier. That's not to say they had to take s…
The Germans fired nearly as many shells, 1,100,000, in just the first five hours of the 1918 Spring Offensive.
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#9Here is the aerial view of what a town looked like before and after almost a million shells were directed at it in WWI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Passchen...
Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
#10Funny how that shows every person online claiming to have PTSD from online bullying have nothing of the sort.