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Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

angrystaffofficer.com

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Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#41

Post by fiatjaf »

grellas wrote: post #13

There is no more eerie account of what it was like to be a foot soldier caught up in trench warfare than Arthur Guy Empey's book "Over the Top" (1917). It is available free as a Kindle ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Over-Top-Arthur-Guy-Empey-ebook/dp/B0... (some reviews can be found here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1517707.Over_The_Top ) Empey was an American who managed to get in the mix with the British sold…

For anyone interested in getting a big picture of both reality at the front and the cultural moment of Europe during the Great War, I recommend Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring: https://www.amazon.com/Rites-Spring-Great-Birth-Modern/dp/03...

Besides other interesting things, it contains a ton of evidence cited from soldier letters.

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#42

Post by camperman »

thearn4 wrote: post #40
camperman wrote: post #38

I've been shelled with 155mm shells. There is (or used to be) a bunker on Salisbury Plain where trainee artillery officers could experience it for themselves. It has very thick concrete, four foot thick windows and so on. Even with all the protection it's terrifying. They drop the rounds a few yards in front of you. The noise is unbelievable, the shockwaves actually bend the concrete inward a little and the dummy tar…

I was an artilleryman is the U.S. Army. We get the machine gun fired over us in a trench during basic training (like everyone else), but that sounds like so much more profound of an experience. I kind of wish we did that here. That said, I was enlisted (NCO), not a commissioned officer. For all I know, they may do something like that for (to?) the officers at Fort Sill.

On that topic, artillery shells flying over you sound strange, like tearing a linen sail or sheet down the middle - no joke.

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#43

Post by trhway »

martindelemotte wrote: post #36
ourmandave wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many kids grow up in these areas thinking this is normal and the whole country isn't safe to play in.

As a kid I played in these areas while my dad was cutting wood. It was rather exciting to find a shell as these were rare compared to other pieces of metal. We were just told not to play with them. I remember that one day we found a shell buried not that far from a fire that my dad had lit. I was young so I can't certify that we were in a "red zone" but it was in the woods around Verdun so there's a high chance.

>It was rather exciting to find a shell as these were rare compared to other pieces of metal. We were just told not to play with them.

We were told about the same. Fortunately, we didn't have parents around during the day - USSR, all parents at work :)

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#44

Post by moptar »

mikeash wrote: post #11
andrewchambers wrote: post #10

Funny how that shows every person online claiming to have PTSD from online bullying have nothing of the sort.

Funny to use the word "funny" in relation to other people's suffering.

Perhaps the world would be a less violent place if we laughed at soldiers for their failures instead of glorifying them. The article fittingly ends with "all that suffering .. for what?" It really was a lot of murderous people getting themselves killed and injured while trying to kill other people. Not something to have sympathy for. Sure, they might have been fooled by naive ideas of nationalism, but that's still a problem today - people who are so patriotic they'll kill others and risk their lives for no real reason other than "my country is better than yours"

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#45

Post by mikeash »

ams6110 wrote: post #35
mikeash wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have used "sorrow" to refer to both denting a car and losing a family to genocide, but that doesn't mean there's any implied equivalence.

I myself find "sorrow" doesn't do the latter justice, but YMMV. In general I think specific meanings are better especially for complicated concepts like PTSD. I think separate terms would be better for the effects of long term psychological abuse experienced as a child, and the psycho/physical life-threatening experiences of combat soldiers. To use the same term for both just muddies the waters.

I think the trouble is that psychology has such a poor understanding of fundamental causes, and diseases tend to be classified by symptoms instead. PTSD is probably a collection of loosely related or maybe even unrelated problems, but they look similar from the outside. Imagine if we used "chest pain" for broken ribs, collapsed lungs, and heart attacks, having no understanding of the ribs, lungs, or heart. More specificity would make a lot of sense to me, but it seems like it's held back by this lack of fundamental understanding.

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#46

Post by JshWright »

Aelinsaar wrote: post #3

I 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…

And yet, more than half of the combat related deaths in WWI were from artillery/mortar fire.

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#47

Post by mikeash »

moptar wrote: post #44
mikeash wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny to use the word "funny" in relation to other people's suffering.

Perhaps the world would be a less violent place if we laughed at soldiers for their failures instead of glorifying them. The article fittingly ends with "all that suffering .. for what?" It really was a lot of murderous people getting themselves killed and injured while trying to kill other people. Not something to have sympathy for. Sure, they might have been fooled by naive ideas of nationalism, but that's still a…

Soldiers don't generally start wars. They go where they're told and fight who they're told. The penalties for disobedience are severe. To force someone to fight and then laugh at them for the effects it has on them strikes me as psychopathic.

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#48

Post by duskwuff »

vermontdevil wrote: post #34

So many shells were fired that farmers are still digging up unexploded ones today. I saw a bunch of them at a corner of a farm field in Belgium pending pickup and it spooked me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/1...

Often referred to as the "iron harvest":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#49

Post by beloch »

Imagine being a member of an attack force following a creeping barrage, especially before it was perfected and short-falling shells were expected to kill a significant fraction of your comrades. Willfully walking into that kind of hell simply blows my mind.

Re: Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage

#50

Post by Someone »

Aelinsaar wrote: post #3

I 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…

There also were mining operations at enormous scale (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_on_the_first_day_of_th...)

About a year later, the battle of Messines (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messi... ) saw larger mines, some of which with over 40,000 kg of explosives.

Five of them weren't detonated. One of those exploded in 1955 after a lightning strike. Most likely, four others are still lying below ground. It's anybody's guess whether they still are dangerous and might detonate one day.

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