The Forbidden RED ZONE in Europe, Where Life is No More
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- Опубліковано 19 жов 2022
- The "zone rouge" (in French, Red Zone) is a noncontiguous area that occupies the northeastern part of France and corresponds to the places that hosted some of the bloodiest battles of the Great War. Originally extending as much as 1,200 km2, over the years, thanks to reclamation efforts, it has been downsized to about 100 km2. Despite this, the subsoil still conceals a disproportionate amount of unexploded ordnance, conventional and otherwise, to the point that it remains virtually inaccessible to humans.
Sources:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17555...
www.messynessychic.com/2015/0...
www.lemonde.fr/a-la-une/artic...
www.riskope.com/2014/02/13/10...
I grew up a few dozen kilometers away from Verdun. I remember playing in the pine forests planted on top of former battlefields. They still find literally hundreds of tons of ordnance every year.
i bet you can still find some poor soldiers bones in there.
@@madeofgrease9220 for sure.
And apparently those mines can and do still blow up today, I’ve heard stories of charred animal corpses being found near forgotten mines they set off
@@badpiggies988 Indeed. Those are shells rather than mines though. But both still blow up and kill.
Cool. Finding shells must be, when young, exciting, but older, scary.
To illustrate how the ordnance from WWI still impacts areas very far away from the actual battlefields : there are some ongoing archaeological digs in Tours, a city in central/western France, literally on the other side of Paris, 500 or 600 km away from the WWI frontlines. The archaeologists there are digging up the remains of a medieval Abbey prior to construction works.
The problem is that on top of the ruins of the Abbey, the French army had an artillery depot and barracks prior to WWI. Every week the archaeologists find unexploded ordnance and ammo from WWII (there were aerial bombings and fighting even after the French government capitulating from what I understand), but in november 2022 they had to evacuate the whole place in a hurry and the neighbourhood as well because they found unexploded chemical weapons from WWI, kept in earthen jugs which didn't register on metal detectors.
Apparently the place was a test site for the French army prior to and during WWI.
Planes didn t exist in WWI
@@lordmoncef5494 it takes 5 secs to google “WW1 planes” and yet you sit here and spout such nonsense in an era of easy access to information.
@@lordmoncef5494 You're wrong, there were planes in WW1 and they were used in military, though mostly for reconnaissance. In 1915 there were already fighter planes. Yes, their role was much smaller compared to WW2 or these days, but it still existed.
Calm donw nerds i just made a mistake
@@lordmoncef5494 Promise you they did, even if they were very humble and pretty shit
It is absolutely insane to me that there are still unexploded ordnance around, the scale of that war was unbelievable.
The insane part is that it could still explode over a century later.
The worst french lose in one day during ww1 is more important that dead ukrainians soldiers in more than one year
The forests of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam are still littered with UXOs from American, Khmer Rouge, Viet Cong, South Vietnamese, and Chinese military actions. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded when they accidentally stumbled upon these while digging the fields, or purposely dismantling them for the valuable scrap metal. I was in Vietnam in a decade ago, and met a young boy who had been blinded by an exploding UXO that he & his friends found.
It is absolutely insane to me how much WWI is overshadowed by WWII.
I live in Munich for a decade and had to evacuate my house 2 times already because of aerial bombs found deep beneath the city.
It's scary.
Just below us for half a century and then we find them.
I live in the yellow area. The local PLU (document that gives all rules to construct houses such as color, shape, materials. There is one such document per city or village) casually says "and when you build a house here, check areas liable to flooding and by the way, check for unexploded ordonnance, you can expect to find anything from bullets to grenades and heavy artillery".
"and by the way, don't lick anything that smells suspicious"
The place is contaminated with chemicals with explosives and yet they still concern themselves with regulating the shape and colour of houses? Makes you understand why nothing has really been done. Everyone in the area is already insane from the chemicals.
@@MrBottlecapBill such regulations exist everywhere, so also in that town. No reason to live in anarchy just because some pieces of land may hold explosives.
@@MrBottlecapBillTheses regulations are very common.
@@MrBottlecapBill What the fuck do you want villages to do about unexploded bombs? That's the job of the army, not the poor village mayor.
I grew up in a remote area of Mecklenburg in East Germany and even there we found countless boxes of ammunition, pistols, and even rusting antitank guns with ammunition boxes around still in the 1950s. Sure the ones above ground were removed (by private collectors and State authorities) but I doubt that they found all the buried weapons wrapped in oil paper to be ready for the next round of madness. We kids were surprised how our mad parents reacted to the nice looking Luger we brought home ...
What the hell. I live in Western Germany and all I found as a kid were some WWII bullets and rusty metal splinters.
@@sonnenblumenkernsuppe2686 here in brandenburg when the soviets left they left everything behind they couldnt exchange or carry.
One Station still had AKs and one guy when he died around 2010 they found a MiG Jet in his barn, not fully functioning tho
@@phnix6242 Years ago I read an article about the German government confiscating a panther tank after it was discovered some guy was just hiding it in his garage or basement. Do you know if he got to keep the tank?
@@bobmcham5192 they had 😂to take Parts of the House to get the Tank out of the basement and the Tank was confiscatet and the owner was find of course. 😅 you may find a Video here on UA-cam
@Rainer Stahlberg
Kein Wunder, das liegt doch zwischen Küste und Berlin. Küste = viel Warenverkehr (zu der Zeit wollte und musste Deutschland Seemacht werden und wurden es auch für ihre Verhältnisse) Berlin wurde bis zum Ende gehalten, drumrum gab es nochmal riesige Schlachten zum Ende des Krieges und auch viele Flüchtlinge. Es wurden auch viele Flüchtlinge aus den Ostgebieten geholt, um sie vor Russland zu retten, aber diese Schweine (Großbritannien und Russland) haben auch vor Schiffen mit Zivilbevölkerung (und sonst nichts) keinen Halt gemacht. Viele Soladten haben damals vielleicht einfach ihre Sachen versteckt, um eine Chance aufs Überleben zu haben, wenn die Besetzer angekommen waren.
My family is from Verdun and I remember playing during vacations there, in the countryside. You have no idea how common it is and how much ammunition / explosives / gear you can find buried in the ground. And accidents aren’t rare at all, I even have an uncle who lost a hand because of a box of German grenades he found as a kid (and here everybody knows at least someone who died because of such accidents).
I remember as a child we were playing with ammo and were disassembling them to gather the powder inside, we made huge lines of it and then light the powder on fire to see a big trail of flames !
Maybe a bit dangerous but great memories nonetheless.
i live close to Verdun and at any walk, we found at least one shell. Remember trying to send rocks at them to make them explode at distance ... . Fortunatly, never succeded
crazy how such a big battle with so many casualties still causes deaths till this day and will for a long time
@@Gnomezonbaconwell Europa Was the main stage for 2 World wars and the USA had one big war for independence and same with Mexico were the battlefields are on now US territory but after ~200 Years and in times before great industrialization and the much smaller scale of sayed Wars is a huge contributor too the amount of stuff in the ground
@@Gnomezonbacon there has, the American civil war, it was fought with very similar weapons as WWI
@@My_Old_YT_Account Yup, but the artillery masses and use was never on the western front scale, and concentrated on such a short frontline. There might be places around Saint Petersburg that are as much poisoned, and modern minefields in Ukraine, Cambodge, Vietnam or Bosnia-Herzegovina might compare in terms of poisoning, and especially dangerosity.
Something that should be noted is the ‘bleed the French dry’ reasoning for the attack was only ever given after they failed to take many of the forts they intended to. So more recently it’s been thought by some historians that the German commander was using that as his fallback excuse for not actually having taken the strategic position.
Agreed. Bleeding the enemy dry by assaulting his strongest held position is prima facie nonsense. Falkenhayn was posting cope.
I do believe he was genuine with that strategy. They did wish to take more land, but he restrained his generals from engaging in more decisive battle because he favoured attrition.
They captured Douaumont and Vaux and I can see how they could have bled the French out by making them attack these "sacred" defense positions where it would be easy to kill alot of attackers but we will never surely know
@@granola661 Not really a good trade when you take practically the same amount of casualties while dedicating more artillery to the fight, especially when you cannot absorb casualties as much as the two predominant empires at the time can.
@@jeanhunter3538 Yeah well that was his miscalculation and overestimation of skill in the face of total war
J. R. R. Tolkien served at the Battle of the Somme and his experiences show up in "The Two Towers" as the Dead Marshes. Reading the book as a kid, I thought the Dead Marshes were the creepiest, most horrible area in the whole trilogy.
_"Don't follow the lights!"_ is one of the creepiest sentences in all fiction
J.R.R Tolkien also despises war, yet in his romans made war glorified and culturally accepted
@@andmos1001it was his way to cope with his experiences I can imagine 😅
Chilling to think that it’ll take around 700 years to fully cleanse an area from the effects of a war that lasted just four years.
Now consider how the planet would take tens of thousands of years to recover from the war that would last but minutes.
@@kjj26k What are you referring to? I can't think of any weapon whose effects would outlast an unexploded shell or landmine
@@riccardo6112 He's refiring to a WW3 type scenario where lots of nuclear weapons are used.
@@benhill3834 The effects of a nuclear explosion would fade after less than a month, even in a nuclear war landmines would remain a danger the longest.
@@riccardo6112 If that's the case. Go to Chornobyl and move into reactor 4. It won't end well for you, and no, I'm not talking about the Ukrainian government arresting your idiot ass for trying to walk into a military patrolled exclusion zone.
they didn't believe the forts to be invincible. they literally removed the cannons from the fort because they thought they were useless. they were manned by old and infirm troops, hence why the germans were able to take them without a fight. and in the end, they were dead wrong, the forts themselves resisted the artillery bombardement, which led to the maginot line, which is heavily misunderstood as well but that's another subject entierly
the maginot line did hold though, it was so well built, the problem was it was not extended to Belgium, Luxembourg and Netherlands
In fact, they removed the canons not because they thought the forts will never hold a attack but because they thought the germans would never attack there as the forts was supposed to stop any attack (Verdun was the downfall of France during the 1870 franco-prussian war so they builded one of the most strongest forts in that place after the war)
@@yaboi672 it held because it was never attacked
not to forget that it was never supossed to be an uncrossabler line and the french goverment knew that aswell
its sole purpose was to stall the enemy until the whole army was mobilized
luxembourg and belgium had friendly relations with belgians, and building a huge defensive line between their border doesnt look good politically speaking.
@@yaboi672 The line did extend through their borders though, it wasn't as heavily fortified as the German or Italian sections but there were fortifications
I have witnessed the presence of drops of slightly viscous liquid that to a casual observer looked like dew....at 1500hr with the ambient temperature at 30C. This was in the 1980s in the Alsace, but apparently still happens and is not limited to the Red and Yellow zones.
That was/is NOT dew, but evaporated and then condensed chemical agent with the workings of mustard gas.
Damn.
Wow
holy shit that's gnarly
@buyingvowelsforfree I am an Nuclear Biological and Chemical war specialist (or at least I used to be when I served). So yes, I have tested it and reported it in the proper channels.
I mentioned this, so that people are aware of what they can run into and recognise the signs before they will suffer the horrendous consequences of contamination.
pictures or didnt happen :D
I visited the battlefields in France and Belgium and the "iron harvest" is a constant danger to farmers and the demolition soldiers who must take care of the bombs and shells. I took a bike tour around Ypres in Belgium and when I stopped for some water I looked down and saw three rusty artillery shells placed by the side of the road, now located by my right leg. I guess a nearby famer had collected them for the army to come take care of. While most of the shells are now inert, many are not. I quickly rode away from the danger and luckily nothing bad happened.
i was there, i was the bomb and i clapped
They are not inert. Just need a way mor strenght to detonate due to the rust.
I grew up in north of france, where Kippling's son diseppeared. I was still "collecting shell's splinters the size of a man's hand 70 years later. The trenches outline was still visible in the winter fields. At the turn of the century it was still "normal" to find unexploded shells while digging for construction.
Every profession has it's own nuances depending upon where you are practicing it, but I would imagine that most backhoe operators would rather avoid the nuance of hearing a metallic "clank" while digging a hole. (Actually, now that I think about it you probably get a few days off while the real pain transfers to your supervisor.) I'll bet construction contracts in that area have some interesting clauses to deal with such eventualities.
The problem with WW1 type of chemical agents and particularly those of the mustard gas variety is that in their evaporated stage and aggregation state, it is significantly heavier than the ambient air and thus remains in the lower lying terrain where it eventually condensates into a clear oily fluid when temperature drops by atmospheric conditions or during nightly cooling off. Eventually it heats up again and takes its gaseous form and the cycle repeats.
It does not significantly oxidise so it remains locally present, potent and persistent. This will remain so until these nearly forever chemical compounds deteriorate and break down. In nature this can take centuries. Nasty!
Can u explain again but in English pls
@@daraghdalton956 gas awake during day. fill air. very poisonous. gas settle down at night, very cold. gas sleep on floor. turn into more solid form. day come. gas wake up again, fill air with poisonous. cycle repeat. very hard to stop it
@@daraghdalton956 Google it.
@@daraghdalton956 that's plain English buddy, open a book
@@daraghdalton956 The dew you see on leaves in the morning? in the red zone that dew contains chlorine and sulfer mustard, drips off the leaves sinks into the ground, ground cools down they turn into gas and stick to the leaves, in a near never ending cycle
As someone living in western united states, it's always scary to me hearing of the places with lots of history. Worst wars that happened where I live are small quarrels with native Americans hundreds of years ago, when there are people living in areas that no only are still impacted today by the remains of two world wars, but also sitting on top of buried remains of millennias of warfare history stretching back to biblical times
Well, due to the lack of written account, you can't know for sure what happened there before the colonization. But I doubt that the various tribes there never waged war
@@jeanfonssedeporte3158 i'd even Say we're pretty fucking sure they waged war against each other, not sure about them using chemicai weapons tho
American civil war says hi
If you live in the West, then there's definitely a few battlefields from the Mexican subjugation wars... Mexican territory basically went from Oregon down to Alabama.
@@noneyobidness3253 northwest
I’m from the American South and my history teachers family opened a grocery store called Piggly Wiggly around the time of the battle of Verdun. And my teacher explained how the French outlasted the Germans at Verdun because they had a more modern “Just in Time” inventory system like the one Piggly Wiggly used. The Germans still did inventory from a rail way mindset of fewer larger shipments like old school grocery stores. The north east French countryside doesn’t have much rails it has roads for automobiles, so you need a system of constant small shipments. Ironically a lot of the French roads were built by emperor Napoleon 3 who lead France to a really terrible defeat versus Prussia decades before WWI. Also i know these French German border regions have been depopulating since before the time of Napoleon 1 because if you were a non-combatant you got pressed in to service by whoever caught you
Yes exactly ! The forts around Verdun were part of a bigger line of fortification called Serré de Rivière. The principle of these was to have a clever logistic, with some big central fortified city with a train station, and some smaller shipment coming from this city to the dozens of forts around protecting the city and the area. They used roads but also smaller trains with narrow tracks to ship from the main city to the forts
On the German side, you can see they tried to have a nice rail system with a lot of train station as close as possible to the front line. Considering they were on the attacking side, it's not stupid. They had way better trenches and bunkers, which is impressive considering they occupied the land a few months before fortifying it
Napoleon III the Greatest leader of the 19th century after his Uncle not only wanted peace but knew France woudn't win with an unmodernized army so not ironical at all
@@ommsterlitz1805 napoleon III the greatest leader 😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣
I don't know a worse loser than Napoleon III in history. He won a rigged election, triggered german unification, then triggered a war, lost the Alsace Lorraine, was made prisonner, lost the war who will pave the way toward the 20th century atrocities and that's basically it
@@jeanfonssedeporte3158 If you went to school and weren't such a pos you would have got that Napoleon III didn't wanted the war and opposed it and isn't to be blamed for it's consequences, at this point the one to be blamed is among the most evil creature ever sent on earth, bismarck.
@@ommsterlitz1805 yeah but then the question stays. What are some great things that Napoleon 3 have done ? I see little to none, and all is counterbalanced by the fact he is one of worse loser of French History
In France and Belgium every day there are still unexploded shells found. Me and my brother lived near the border of the Netherlands in Belgium, and found a shell while playing in the woods. The army unit for unexploded ordnances (DOVO) came by with a team and recovered the shell.
Similar thing here in germany, news about unexploded bombs from ww2 are very Common with the area being evacuated during disarmament
Core memory of Flemish culture: Man bijt hond "If you see obus, you turn of the machien, and you run he"
I feel you. When we are taking vacation to "la mer du Nord", we still can see those dunes with the red band telling that this is still mined !
German authorities discovers literal tons of UXO from cities every year, it is thought that 25% of all the bombs dropped on Germany failed to detonate and as a result nearly a century after the second world war there are tons of bombs yet to be discovered.
really makes you wonder what the clean up effort within Ukraine whenever the Russo-Ukrainian war ends will end up looking like and if it will be at all "successful," we like to pat ourselves on the back for making more functional arms and munitions than ever before but just last night I watched some drone footage where 2 35mm grenades failed to detonate after being dropped because the dirt was too soft & your basic artillery shell is largely the same.
history doesn't repeat itself but she does like to rhyme.
Yeah in Netherlands too. My brother used to go look for it with a metal detector and he's found so much ammo, rusted away weapons, grenades etc.
When I was 17, I went on vacation to a friend's house on the border between France and Belgium. I was helping him dig in his backyard to make a small pond, and we found unexploded ordinances. A trip to the gendarmerie later, we spent our entire day sitting in the local parc while they were working to secure the backyard. When we came back, we had deep enough hole for the pond.
@@Toikbokkleinsanely dangerous 😂 there is a reason it is blown up in place
It's more like a natural resource, either you have a pond in waiting, or you don't
So if Gavrilo Princip hadn't assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, you would have had to dig that pond.
Hello from Ukraine, it was hard to put like under this video, but it's great that you try to draw attention to ecological aspects of war, thank you.
Great video. I live in South Africa, fortunately no forgotten ordinance here, However next door in Mozambique.. so many landmines from the civil war.. miles of beach, coastal forest, and even hot spots closer to peoples homes... so many landmines. Its sadly still common or innocent people to fall victim. Worst weapon we ever made.
Gas is a terrible weapon in it's own right.
Boer War?
@@brianbelobrajdic6160 Angolan War
I agree mines are terrible. Still used today though.
If its worst... dont think so. Wait till they start shooting nukes.
also, if 1% doesnt detonate, russia is firing 90k shells per day i believe and Ukrain some 15k. Thats over 100k shells/day. If 1% doesnt detonate, thats 1000 shells a day in the soil, for future 'pleasure'.
Russia has some 6000 nuclear warheads. The US close to some 4k. 10k total lets say. If 1% fails (bc of trigger mechanism), thats going to leave 100 unexploded nukes laying around.
Nice starter for the people being sent back to at least the dark ages. If mankind would survive that at all.
edit: Or bio weps...
@@brianbelobrajdic6160 nope, it's in angola, so it was the UNITA/MPLA clashes. And probably some remnants of the portuguese colonial war as the cherry on top of the death cake.
Growing certain crops/plants may actually help the areas contaminated with heavy metals to recover more quickly. Some plants are hyperaccumulators - they soak up these poisonous compounds like sponges. If the plants are dried and burnt, the metals can be recovered from the ashes.
Fungi (which aren't plants) are especially interesting for this. I believe there has been tons of research on how to decontaminate nuclear waste sites like Chernobyl using fungi, and I've heard similar stories for heavy metals.
its hard to farm among shell craters
@@tavish4699 It's also hard to farm at old mining sites for metal ores, yet still these places are also being rehabilitated.
Some trees can accumulate lots of heavy metals too, so conventional farming techniques aren't really necessary.
You plant a few trees, wait 10 years, cut them down, use the wood for energy production and keep the ashes, plant the next few, etc., and in 5-8 decades, the soil is significantly less contaminated.
@@cvbattum Yes, fungi can do that too, but it's extremely difficult to generate a lot of fungal biomass and be able to remove it from the soil without insane effort, due to the nature and location of the mycelium. What I heard about fungi in Chernobyl is that they evolved to produce a new sort of pigment that lets them use gamma rays as a source of chemical energy and that they have extremely upregulated DNA repair mechanisms.
The newest development in this regard involves bacteria and can be used for water treatment. Some bacteria (magnetospirillum magneticum) can incoorporate heavy metal compounds into their capsule (it was tested with Uranium-IV-Oxide and also happen to form tiny pieces of magnetite within it.
You can put those into a water reservoir, let them replicate for a bit, and then remove them, along with the heavy metals they have bound by using magnets.
@@Psychx_ The main problem is not the chemical, it is billion of bombs everywere.
Whithout bombs, it would far easier, of course.
This video should be in all high schools across north America as a lesson to aggression and warfare.
Ai Video showing their loved ones in a fighting scene loosing with extreme gore and all the terror would be much more effective.
and as a lesson of the French not being surrender monkeys.
In my region people thought they had seen a UFO, later it was found that a munition suddenly exploded in the evening and followed a ballistic trajectory in the sky. It was 4 years ago. People saw this while dining on their terrasses.
A couple years ago in our neighborhoor they started the sirens and everybody was ordered to leave their home. They found a big unexploded ammunition on a construction site, it was too big to move and too risky to manipulate so they decided to destroy it on site.
Such things happen all the time, and it's all over France really, because of the 2nd world war.
Where I live the farmers collect the unexploded bombs they find and pile it up in the corners. A couple times a year the state send people to take it away.
The explosions are very rare tbh, and the injuries even rarer, but they happen sometimes.
I remember I found bombs 20 meters under the mediterranean sea off the coast of Perpignan, near the Spanish border, while diving.
I think if I was a farmer plowing the land in France, I'd install ballistic glass and a steel "bucket" around the seat of the tractor.
In the East, on the former war frontlines, the lumberjacks can't use chainsaws to cut trees, since many trunks are riddled with shrapnel.
Bravi. As a follow up video you can explore how the relics of WWII ships are an environmental disaster waiting to happen. The highest number of such relics are located from the UK to the Baltic Sea
There are quite a number of ships, that could be disasters, sunk in the Pacific, as well. The deep water would provide some protection, due to cold temperatures and pressure.
Such as the uboat Carrying mercury that was sunk off of the norweigian coast and has slowly been contaminating the area where people no longer fish
There are so fucking many wrecked submarines that were never found and will never be that will silently be polluting their chemicals forever
@@ninus17 The USS Arizona is still leaking fuel oil into Pearl Harbor, 80 years after the attack. What happened before the attack was this; she was going to Bremerton, WA, to be overhauled, but collided with another ship in a dense fog. She went to Pearl, which was not far from the collision, was repaired, and had her fuel topped off for the long trip to Puget Sound. She was due to leave on 8 December, but as we all know, she never left.
@@danielcobbins8861 that is spectacularly unlucky.
Great info, never heard this here in the USA. I had assumed most of the land returned to nature, farming and human occupation not long after WW1.
Ive heard of it, though Im a history buff
I'm in Europe but had never heard or even thought about this either.
I'm in France, I live next to where the front line was, and I have never heard of it lol
Our authorities tend to not be very transparent about things like that
@@jeanfonssedeporte3158 Well, it is not exactly hidden now is it?
@@poruatokin no but French authorities are particularly disingenuous about this stuff as the video itself mentioned.
It's sad that this is his last video, proof that you can't beat the mainstream algorithm...
He's back, was just busy with the other channel
Really interesting, haven't heard of this before.
About 1990, a neighborhood near Washington DC had to be evacuated because some US civil war ordnance had been found and needed to be destroyed. Everywhere artillery shells, bombs, and other explosive ordnance has been used, there are probably unexploded items.
I remember reading years ago that the area was hit with so much artillery ordnance from both sides that for 20 years after WW1, they were able to profitabl6y mine the area for iron.
over 100 years after the war to end all wars we still feel the effects of it... beautifully terrifying
For every man who was lost in those tragic years, hopefully you will be at peace some day, and may you find comfort in whatever lie beyond death.
The land itself clearly is not at peace. The death there is not beyond but very much there. That’s the whole point of the video.Russia and Ukraine are actively fighting and whole Europe Nah, the whole world, right now in this moment is participating in one way or the other.
What exactly are you talking about?
If they could see France today being overrun by Arabs and Africans they'd probably rethink their sacrifice
they were at peace maybe 10 or 20 yrs ago but look at the streets of most of the major cities and u will see these are not peaceful, not to mention the whole ukraine proxy war going on currently
No man died there. It was only french, krauts, and a handful of belgian and bong volunteers.
@@joeschipper2593 that’s what I said
Thanks for raising attention! Super interesting.
The stark contrast between the burnt matter on top and the subsoil beneath at 5:45 is unnatural. After so long, worm activity should have mixed the layers substantially. Another sign that the soil is utterly devoid of life.
Mustard gas and fosgeen decay after some time. Arseen is a trace element for some life. What not mentioned i believe is lead. Thats a pollutant for afaik all lifeforms and there will be plenty of it. Thats probably the only element in all those, that is and remains a pollutant forever.
I read there is a one ton mine under Messines Ridge that didn't explode in 1917.
I read another story that a young couple camping in northern France died when their campfire detonated a shell buried just under the soil.
My grandfather would never want to talk about his time fighting in WW1, he hated it.
My grandfather never talked about his wartime experiences either. I understand it's a common viewpoint. No-one who went through total war wants to relive it.
Basically bc you cant talk about things you cant talk about. Was some psychological/philosophical 'discovery' in the 90ies, bc they wanted to have people explain why they couldnt talk about it. But they couldnt do that either. If you have to address why you cant talk about it, you have to address the key issue, which is what is stopping you in the first place.
I saw a vid last year (older vid) of an old man who had fought in ww1 and did talk about it. He got a bit mad, bc they asked how he felt about bajonneting German soldiers. The man still remained it was a good thing to kill Germans, bc they were evil....
I mean, that was filmed end 90ies i believe, so ~75 years after ww1.
People that killed in a war, can do 2 things; either later see those enemies as humans again, which means you murdered people. Ofc you can think it was him or me, and i was ordered and had no choice, which is all true, but thats not how your moral system works. Those who see the enemy as human again (bc enemies are always dehumanized, otherwise people dont want to kill), will feel guilt. And then you have to live with that guilt, which can eat you alive. Thats why so many soldiers later go onto drugs, have all sorts of traumas and depression and even decide to take their own lives.
And the other option is to remain saying they deserved it, bc they are EVIL. It is a survival mechanism. Admitting what you did was bad, is horrible, unliveable even.
So most, decide to push everything about it away. They never talk about it, but get haunted in their dreams. They cant talk about it, bc then it rips open the memories and they have to face it again, which is destructive to them.
Same thing happens to 'criminals' that didnt want to kill at all, but it happened anyway. Also happens to cops sometimes, if they are unlucky enough to get into shootings enough times. At some point something cracks and thats it.
For the soldiers in the trenches as they were in ww1, its even much worse. I dont even want to think about it. Its horrible.
but, to give an idea
Constantly threatened with death. Gas attacks, shels impacting, bullets flying everywhere. Ordered to storm the enemy and get out of the relative safety of the trench, at gunpoint, bc if you didnt go, you yourself were shot by a superior. No way to escape it. If you stormed out, your buddies body parts came flying around, as a shell hit. Others just fell dead. Maimed bodies everywhere. You dive in a crater for cover, only to find you dove into the corpses of last weeks charge. With rotting meat everywhere. You had to stay there. They shat in their hand and threw it out. Everything is dirty, stinking, disease riddled, ugly. Rats everywhere, feeding on corpses. The rats attack you as you try to sleep. Little food all around and what you got was disgusting.
Day in, day out, month after month. Up to your knees in water and mud all the time, bc the trenches flooded. And when you finally meet an enemy, you have to plunge your bajonet in him, as he gazes at you and you see the life flow out. And then the next and next.
And if you survived all that, half blinded from mustard gas, you were one of the lucky ones, but no man ever made it out of there untainted, or whole.
I read some years ago that the countries with the most land mines are Egypt and Afghanistan. From the Second World War and Soviet Afghan war respectively
Practically once a week they find an undetonated bomb in a German city. You dig a hole large enough - you find a bomb.
Never - never ever- do magnet fishing in Germany. It’s forbidden because you are very likely to fish explosives.
Sometimes (once in Munich e.g.) they still explode, damaging whole neighborhoods.
War sucks.
@@patrickdelrue546 mostly, yeah. Hope you don’t think I wanted to imply thatcher are French.
Just gave another example how the wars are still forming the countries they happened in, and I think it’s always important to state that the aggressors always have to suffer as well.
Let’s not give the appearance that anyone can participate in or start wars without severe consequences for generations to come.
what a wonderfully articulated video. you created something beautiful from something terrible. good job
The key to these historical channels is that you resepct your audience's intelligence and don't just repeat wikipedia info. Just found your channel and I think it checks off both of those pretty well. Appreciate this type of presentation that takes itself seriously, it gets annoying when youtube starts spamming recommendations of cartoon history type junk that treats its audience like children.
Interestingly, he makes several significant errors (all of which Wikipedia has correct and cited, incidentally). For example: he's completely backward about France thinking the forts were invincible. Rather, GQG saw how easily the German artillery plowed through the fortresses of Liege and Namur at the start of the war, and decided it would be better to remove from the forts any artillery that could be removed. The forts were left with token garrisons, but even so the German capture of Fort Douaumont was almost accidental. It's is a fascinating story if you're interested in this period. I'd also recommend "The Price of Glory" by Alistair Horne.
@@enkiddu Eh I meant less about the details and more about the way it's being presented. Will look into that though, I'm slowly developing interest in the general subject of WW1. Thanks
Und ich stimme den Feedbackern nicht zu ... FINGER WEG von dem Tune, nix mehr feilen ... Perfektionismus wird überbewertet. Label suchen, releasen!
Nicely done sir!
Verdun was a literal meatgrinder. Hopefully the people learnt their lesson.
The whole war was a pointless meat grinder which collapsed the old empires. When the armistice was signed, the carnage went on for the 5 hours that were left until it toke effect at 11 Am just so they could say that the war ended on the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour. Due to telephones being wide spread on both fronts, every soldier knew the war was over during those 5 hours. Yet soldiers died a few minutes before 11AM and the Americans even timed their last shell to land at 10:58. Over 2 thousand men from both side died in those 5 hours. many more were injured. Just for the "fun" of it.
@@peter4210 damn
You think so? Most of these fools in this comments don't even know the actual points of world war.
@@Huy-G-Le enlighten US wont you. What was the point of the first world war according to you.
@@peter4210 What is the point of colonialism? Why did the colonies also wage war? Who control those colonies? the local or the white man administration from their respective country. Why did the map change so much after WW1, why did Germany lost several colonies to France, Britain and why did WW2 the Axis invade those some place again. How does capitalism work? What does capitalism in order to make a profit and growth bigger, what does it need to do?
All the question I hope you can think about yourself, if you can't, I'll wrote my actual answer.
Bravo! Excellently researched and presented! Best of luck!
This was a really interesting video with nice infographics, thank you!
You should do Croatia. Almost 30 years after the end of serbo-chetnik invasion our country is still full of mines. People think war comes and goes but it stays with people living there for many decades, even centuries.
dobro da nismo bosanci oni tamo moraju u dvorištu pazit na mine
I found some mines in Croatia.
Croatia attacked first, Бог je Cрбин
...Vlad, while I do feel true sadness that Croatians were mauled by Serbian expansionists late last century I also feel true fury when reading about nazi Croat pavlovich's and his ustache's war crimes against Serbians, and many thousands of allied airmen, a few decades earlier...
@@JohnViinalass-lc1ow yes, 10 billion serbs were killed by ustase.
I wonder if they've considered planting fields of sunflowers to reduce heavy metal contamination in the soil. The tap roots might be a concern.
There was a chemical plant, in Delaware, that was closed, but the soil was toxic. A certain grass was planted that would absorb the toxic waste, but I forget what the grass was. Once harvested, the waste would be extracted through chemical processes.
I think it's the rolling hills (aka literal bomb craters) that may obstruct sowing machines and combines.
@@valentinmitterbauer4196 just bulldoze... Oh yeah the ordnance
I heard lavender is very effective.
@@qwopiretyu yeah u get it, u cannot do anything about those area without exploding everything at the same time
I took a look at pictures of Bakhmut, andi saw the same destruction i saw on old pictures of Verdun
I think this problem with poisoned soil and unexploded ordnance and mines will be a problem for decades after this war ends
Verdun was much worse
it's not a contest, but Verdun looked like the moon, with rifles of soldiers buried alive still pointing out of the ground 10+ years after. Soldiers were fighting on a daily basis in hand to hand combat in trenches filled with guts and cadavers... That's the worst.
Not only Bakhmut. Much of the fighting there is similar to ww1 trench warfare. There are 100k shells fired a day. And indeed, ive seen many videos by drones of the entire region that looks like a moonscape.
Its not as bad as ww1 yet, but it sure looks very bad.
The difference is that those pics and vids weve seen from Ukrain, show impact craters every few meters.
ww1 trench warfare, didnt have single impact craters anymore. The soil was turned over and over and over again. At some point a crater becomes a hill again, and a crater again. In the end it looks similar, but it doesnt show how many times the soil was turned over...
As a Canadian I have some relatives who fought in Verdun, I've never really heard any stories by mouth outside of the men who fought there and refused to speak on it, till their death. The death that occurred is simply unthinkable
The last time we were in Arras, we found an unexploded 8cm shrapnel shell near one of the last remnants of the Siegfriedstellung in the newly plowed field. That is par for the course, there is almost always something like that every time.
Hundreds of tons of ordinance found every year and this work has been going on for many years…
There are no words
Interesting video, I didn't know how dead these areas could be
Also I can't believe it took almost 3 minutes for me to clearly recognize the Halo infinite music, I kept thinking i might've had something playing in the background
Halo 2 I believe, Halo infinite was a rendition of that OST
@@jakubgotowicki273 No the song that plays at ~3 minutes I know is from Halo Infinite (it's "Through the Trees", one of the early tracks that were released that raised the hype for the game because of the change back in music style and motifs), unless you mean that the one that is playing is the Infinite rendition of it
Which might take more from the Halo 2 version, which I might agree on, but is just the next rendition of A Walk in the Woods from CE (present in CE, 2, 3, Reach, CE:R, 2:R)
I never knew it got this bad... very informative video!
In my hometown at the Belgian coast, there are three big pits from bombs to this day. There were houses which served as landmarks for planes and ships and so had to be destroyed. Bombs are still being found in fields, the sea (fishing-nets) and on the beach. When i was small they detonated one on the beach and i could still feel the impact as a vibration which made all the glasses tinkle.
Superb documentary. Thank you 🙏
Belgian here. I never really realized how bad the problems with remaining chemicals was before I visited the region in 2020. Thousands of square kilometers of poison soil. And those are just the remaning pieces of the artillery that DID explode and could, by capacity, kill that one million war victims several times over.
There is a large ossuarium in Verdun, you can see the human remains of 130.000 people in a huge pile in the basement from the outside, through windows.
France certainly didn't have an easy time having the main front of 2 world wars fought along its north-east border.
MERCI de le remarquer !!!!
Bro has never heard of the eastern front 💀
@@bootes59 big difference is the eastern front was wide and vast yes there was alot more fighting there but per square kilometere I would say the fighting was more intense in france excluding major sites like stalingrad
@@bootes59 It was the main front until France capitulated. Strange how that works, isn't it?
Which is why we both made friends with the Germans *and* developed weapons of mass destruction.
Great content my compliments
Thank you for posting...I was totally unaware of the existence of this zone rouge.....
The horrors and dangerous remnants of modern war are lasting a couple of centuries, A few years back a relic collector was killed in Chesterfield Virginia USA from an unexploded shell... From the Civil War. Now with chemical weapons and radioactive projectiles we can expect these deadly reminders from long forgotten conflicts.
I heard of this and some people say he was a casualty of the conflict persons wounded by wartime munitions in Belgium get a war wounded status long after the event
I went on a school trip to the Somme battlefields in late October 1982, one of the places we visited was the South African War memorial at Delvilles Wood, we were told to keep away from the fenced-off woodland as some local French boys had ignored the warning signs and had gone into the wood a few weeks before and were killed in an explosion, on the sides of the local roads all over the Somme was old shells and munitions which had been found by Farmers
I grew up next to Cambrai in a tiny village with a public forest, it's an absolute mess, huge craters everywhere, bunkers and scrap metal. As child adults tolds us to not escaping the trails as it can explose anytime. And that happend in crops fields next to the village where plowing just finish in explosion too. Around cambrai there is like one farmer accident every year.
Even in desire to renovate my garage, we found a german live grenade ready for the boom, not a good memory tho
I still recall my visits to Verdun and Vimy Ridge in 1984.
Great video!
I live near the france - belgium - luxembourg border (not even the red or yellow zone) and in the town i grew up it's common to find shells or bullets. A man even tried to keep and dismantle himself a bombshell to keep it as a decoration but was serverly injured when the thing exploded. Most people don't know that no shell is inert and can explode with enough force
Even if you are adventurous, don't go there. My school went there maybe 15 years ago and we saw a de-mining crew hoarding bombs and they told us to never leave the path. That region is a tourist attraction for both France and Germany, but there are more mines still active than people alive in France and Germany. This region is a deadly relict of old wars, but also a future monument for Europe, because both countries train their millitary on that ground
Remember in just the first day a million artillery shells where fired and millions of rounds of ammunition from riffles and machine guns where fired and thousands of tons of chemical weapons, now extend this to 303 days, and you get the picture, literally hundreds of millions of artillery shells, bombs, chemical agents and ammunition was used here. This one battle exceeded the total usage of artillery shells, bombs, and ammunition of the entire Napoleonic wars and there's also the chemical weapons. No wonder it will still take hundreds of years to clean this up.
7:29 I love comfy looking work stations/settings like that
Very informative, great job
Interesting video 👍 I never heard about Zone Rouge.
But similar zones could be found all over the world. Mines in Africa, Cambodia and former Yugoslavia, depleted uranium in Iraq, ...
I am sure there will be lot of contaminants and unexploded ordnance in Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
It's crazy to find this video about verdun and the Spincourt's forest, when I have studied in Verdun and live litterally 15 km away from Spincourt.
I didn't know Spincourt's forest served as a place to detonate chemical bombs (this is indeed the case). Very interesting!
Thank you .Extremely interesting .
I had no idea about this and I have read lots about the 2 world wars over the last 40 years but it’s so great to occasionally find something new.
Very interesting stuff
I've been in some of the yellow zones. The amount of munitions still playing around is pretty shocking. You really have to watch yourself, as it lays around every where. Sometime the munitions can still be armed.
Thanks for this interesting information.
Thanks for this video ! As a french, i knew this pollution of the soils caused by unexploded bombs but i didn't knew about this Zone Rouge. And your prononciations of French names is really good :)
I often wondered about this and I think about those farming areas in Ukraine where the war is raging. Several areas have been locked in trench warfare for quite a while.
For these French red zones, I thought the soil couldn't really be rehabilitated, the top layer would have to be removed and a giant pit which wouldn't leak into the aquifer created and the soil dumped into that and a cap put on it. It would be a mountain. But this would be very expensive, so the government would minimize the problem and let dangerous agricultural products be sold.
Yea Ukrain, or at least those regions face big problems. Russia doing a lot in clearing up though once they established control. And no (or few) gas shells used.
Those ordnance can be 5 m deep into the soil. You cant just scrape of the first meter. Explosions cause craters. A shell lands in that crater, doesnt explode, penetrates into the soil somewhat. Another explosion fills up the crater again and the unexploded ordnance can be 5 m deep.
There is no way this can be cleaned up.
very interesting video, thank you. it's a shame to see what damage humanity has caused over time ;(
I learned something new! Thanks
Great video.
That subtle BF1 OST was a nice touch.
Halo infinite OST as well (trough the trees)
Good video but you made a mistake, this is not the big bertha at 0:40 minutes, its the 21 cm mörser 16
Fun fact, still nowadays, Verdun's region trees are feared in sawmills. They often have some shrapnel in them, damaging the saw.
There were no tree left around verdun itself but the bombing was all around the region at the time.
Nice doc good job
A friend's father, who has passed a while ago, served in the US Artillery during WW2. In the late 1990's he was telling me how at the end of WW2, his section dumped mountains of artillery shells into a river somewhere in western France/Germany? Of all the stories he could of told me, that was the only one I got. I did not think much about it until many years later.
That happened a lot. Also locations were not marked usually. They also dumped a lot into the north sea.
Hence why the baltic sea is one of the most poluted in the world, the soviet union did this for decades, with both their and german's stuff.
@@marcbuisson2463 Nonsense. F off with your anti russia bs
With special permission from the French Government people can actually enter the red zone but they need a guide that knows the area to make sure they stay away from any unexploded ordnance. Myself being a former soldier I've been to the red zone multiple times and have even helped out with the clean up of ordnance from the areas. It's not as dangerous as you're making it sound. People can live there safely even the French Government has started moving people bad into the so called "red" zone because it's become significantly safer and has been proven that human animal and plant life can survive within even the worst section of the red zone which you sadly mentioned false information... Maybe in 2004/2005 only lichens and mushrooms were growing in the place a gaz but now it's actually fully safe to be within the area it's supporting tons of plant life animal life and even human life as residence have started to move back into these zones
Makes sense, since plantlife over time would adapt to it's surroundings, with the lichens and mushrooms being the "initial" cleanup crew for nature alongside earthworms, butr slowly making way for other plants to live there, similar story to chernobyl memory serving that plantlife while slow to take back it's place now it's a lush climate for both plant and animal life to thrive. And the animals show little to none radiation.
That’s interesting. Do you know how to contact those guides to enter the red zone? Maybe there is a website for it?
@@grantelbart477 I can find out for you and get you the link :D
@@Demon2k3 Exactlyyy look at chernobyl now it's full of plant life that has evolved and adapted to the environment nature is persistent
@@desirayelawrence9676 that would be awesome!
Never heard of this. Very educative.
👍
Brilliant Video
I lo9ve the BF1 Music in the background!
Greets from good ol´ Germany :D
There’s a sapper tunnel with a 40,000 lbs unexploded mine out there somewhere. The British dug 3 and only one when off - killing thousands of Germans. The 2nd went of in a farmer’s field in the 60’s during an electrical storm, the third one?
That was Herbert Plumer's assault, wasn't it? I never knew there were other mines that didn't go off!
I recently heard that there was a movie on that though I forget the name.
God it would be a dream to find that much ordnance...
Messines ridge. The battle actually featured 21 of those underground explosive caches, 19 of which went off on the day in what is still probably the largest non-nuclear explosion in warfare. One of the two mines that failed to go off eventually exploded in the 1960s, killing a cow. The final mine remains unexploded.
The ‘Iron Harvest’ is also found along the Eastern Front, in Poland and other nearby regions.
My neighbourhood in south-eastern Poland has been a test site for a local munitions and armament facotry. Apparently there's a couple of artillery shells beneath every house here.
Good info
If you want you can make some interesting videos about WWI chemical ordnances dumps. There are a lot of underwater ones, like for instance the one on the adriatic coast near Pesaro.
Iron harvest is a pretty cool universe/boardgame/art/videogame thing
here in Belgium, DOVO (army unit for unexploded ordnances, mine sweeping, IEDs...) still does the rounds every few weeks in areas where unexploded ordnance still gets found on pretty much a daily basis. You find the ordnance, you put it by the side of the road, and the army comes to pick it up.
I'm from North of France and every year during plowing season, farmers find bombs, shells, grenades.. Same thing on the beaches or in the fish net of the fisher in North Sea (mines, shells etc coming from WW1 and WW2).
The gun wasn’t a 42cm but a 21cm, and there is lots life and vegetation is there’re around verdun.
Nova more content in this channel, please!
As the drum roll started on that day
Heard a hundred miles away
A million shells were fired
And the green fields turned to grey
The bombardment lasted all day long
Yet the forts were standing strong
Heavily defended, now the trap has been sprung and the battle has begun
Descend into darkness
303 days below the sun
Fields of Verdun, and the battle has begun
Nowhere to run, father and son
Fall one by one, under the gun
Thy will be done, and the judgement has begun
Nowhere to run, father and son
Fall one by one, fields of Verdun
Though a million shells have scarred the land
No one has the upper hand
From the ground above to trenches
Where the soldiers make their stand
As the trenches slowly turn to mud
And then quickly start to flood
Death awaits in every corner
As they die in the mud, fill the trenches with blood
Descend into darkness
303 days below the sun
Fields of Verdun, and the battle has begun
Nowhere to run, father and son
Fall one by one, under the gun
Thy will be done, and the judgement has begun
Nowhere to run, father and son
Fall one by one, fields of Verdun
Fields of execution turned to wasteland from the grass
Thou shalt go no further it was said "They shall not pass!"
The spirit of resistance and the madness of the war
So, go ahead, face the lead, join the dead
Though you die, where you lie, never asking why
Descend into darkness
303 days below the sun
Fields of Verdun, and the battle has begun
Nowhere to run, father and son
Fall one by one under the gun
Thy will be done, and the judgement has begun
Nowhere to run, father and son
Fall one by one, fields of Verdun
What an eyeopener... thank you for reminding us of this legacy.😮😮😢
Little known fact is that a lot of ammunition and chemical weapons were disposed by dumping them into oceans around the world, also radioactive waste from nuclear plants were put into barrels filled with concreate and dumped into oceans. Those barrels and ammunition are slowly braking apart and will cause local problems at least.
yea i remarked that too here and there.
Lots of surprises still await people.
Indeed nuclear waste was often dumped in containers aswell, up untill the 80ies somewhere. In the northsea, baltic, etc. Not only oceans...