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WW1 battlefields


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I've always been intrigued by the transition from battlefield back to productive farmland but theres hardly any information available. Does anybody know:

1) how long it took to remove ordnance / remains etc

2) what sort of work force it required - where they military / civilian / numbers

3) if any photos exist

4) whst was the cost of the clean up

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The shells turn up every year and are harvested by French and Belgian EOD Teams, taken away and made safe.

 

The Maccains chip factory on the outskirts of Peterborough regularly buys lorry loads of potatoes from France and Belgium and quite often find hand grenades in the loads.

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The shells turn up every year and are harvested by French and Belgian EOD Teams, taken away and made safe.The Maccains chip factory on the outskirts of Peterborough regularly buys lorry loads of potatoes from France and Belgium and quite often find hand grenades in the loads.

After what they did to our lamb a few years back, i'm not surprised . Lol

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I've watched some documentaries on the battle fields and in parts of France they only shallow plough and plant due to the amount of scrap metal of old ordnance and bones of the many lost soldiers that were not recovered.The edges of fields are full of it. One lady housewife and mother was on call as bomb disposal.

 

Still get trenches caving in to this day.

 

The pictures of now and then showing the fields before war during and then restored for farm use is quite humbling how much the landscape changed. Woods disappeared flat fields with hills and troughs as it takes too much to move that amount of earth.

 

One of the biggest movement of earth was lochnagar the crater is huge.

 

Figgy

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We were visiting a few years ago (we have visited the battlefields a few times) and our guide was telling us about a school party that were caught taking home live, filled gas shells! The armies have milk rounds collecting the shells. You see them stacked up at the sides of the roads. There are still quite a few farmer fatalities as a result of all the unexplded ordnance.

 

David.

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I lot of Chinese labour stayed on after the conflict to work clearing anything of Military value back to Army stores but most damaged stuff was buried I believe. A lot of Chinese graves in Military cemeteries due to flue pandemic that swept through in 1919.

 

Astromonical amounts of ammunition and other equipment was simply lost into the mud or turned over my artiliary barrages and buried. Most cemetries have lists of graves that disappeared when the front moved back and forth over the same ground or shells simply obliterated them, same with stores. A lot of equipment was simply surplus at the end of the war, out dated or no men left to us it.

 

The little piles of shell casing you see even now in the corners of fields ready for collection are just scrap near the surface. I believe their are several know mines that didn't explode that run into hundreds of thousands of pound of explosive, last one went up in the sixties after a lightening strike. I am amazed there aren't more casualities out there.

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Listen, I was robbed at this years synchronised swimming gala, there was no way I was out on the last triple plume de tante

 

I thought you lost it at the Catalarc 180 in the trans from closed (following the Eifel Walk) to the open trans from the first to second. ..... but hey, what do I know? ...... it's not my battle to fight

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We visited the ww1 battlefields with school a couple of times and all found mushroomed bullets on the ground and casings in the undergrowth.

 

The most most memorable part was being there just after harvest on a scorcher of an afternoon and having our tour guide point out to us the patches of soil on the other side of the valley. You could clearly see the outline of the old trench network through the stubble on the baked soil.

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I heard that the French charged us for clearing up our sector and that it took two years before the last section was handed back.

 

There are some fairly shocking pics if the turk clean up after the gallipoli campaign. Huge piles of sun bkeached remains.

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I watched a documentary where there were tonnes of explosives under a farm in France which was about to get blown up but the tunnel was detected and by all accounts it was all still there buried under the ground

this is true it's from when the Brits took miners to tunnel under the German bunkers and it never got used

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