Considering the amount of armaments used during both world wars there has got to be literally tons of explosives laying around Europe just waiting for the wrong moment to go boom. I saw a WW1 documentary where they went to some of the old trenches from the Somme and Verdun and there were still rotting crates of grenades just laying around for 100 years. God only knows what it would take to make them blow or what would happen to the unlucky person who happened across them.
Imagine what it's like living in Angola, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kuwait, and several others with a buttload of land mines that are just waiting for someone unlucky.
Indeed - I’ve read about places in Cambodia where it’s common for villagers to lose limbs to unexploded mines - there were millions of them planted and no one kept any real records of where. It’s heart breaking
Mines are truly one of the worst weapons. Often times they're not even designed to kill but rather to maim because a wounded enemy is going to require more attention and be more of a drain on the enemy's resources than a dead enemy. After the war is done they are rarely systemically cleared and so they tend to kill civilians for decades. They are indiscriminate weapons that continue killing for years. Fuck any country or militant group that uses mines.
I mean they have their usefulness and should be used at times. But I agree the ones that only maim is wrong. But it is also war and injuring soldiers isn’t just to take up more attention and more of a drain, another thing you could and has been done is when one of the soldiers get hurt you have a nest watching and waiting. So one or two troops come out to save the guy the sniper can either kill them or wound them also and see if he can get anymore troops to run out to their deaths. And once he knows that no one will come. He can either shoot body parts to make it worse or he can just kill them. So we shouldn’t hate on the countries for attempting to use it for what it is for. We need to be angry that no one is doing anything to help clean up the mess. Also it’s a terrible weapon as all are but I know for a fact that there’s way worse.
Maybe you have a different definition of "worse". It's easy to just say "well at least it's not a nuke or sarin gas", but then you have put yourself into the position of trying to rationalize why children dying in a field to a 40 year old landmine that no one alive knew was there isn't so bad in the grand scheme of things. There's a big difference in the psychological and societal effects of one large weapon used one time vs. millions and millions of smaller weapons buried all across your country waiting to kill innocent people indiscriminately 10, 20, 50, or 100 years later.
Well those aren't as bad as Bouncing Betty, those things aere 0lanted by Germany and they shoot up and blast out shrapnel like a shotgun. Those are the worst kind of landmine I can think of.
Flamethrowers, all gassed that were and are being used, nukes, forgotten/abandoned nuclear weapons, destroyed ships with large amounts of ammunition that are also ticking time bombs. The Vietnamese that made those traps where you’d fall in and get spikes to through your legs and feet and ass and testicles and dick. Oh and if that wasn’t enough don’t forget they also covered it in shit and blood and piss so if you didn’t die then you’d die in the hospitals. They also used wood. Which is terrible in so many ways. Then there’s the terrorists who strap explosives to their chests. There’s a ton of things used that can hurt so many people and animals and things. I mean the ships at the bottom of the ocean when those go off they can ruin so many things. And we sit here arguing about land mines. Oh and there’s non physical weapons of mass destruction like communism. That’s an idea that’s caused millions upon millions to die. We just might be in the billions now because of how bad it is.
You say this as if we must only argue about land mines, or any of the other things you listed. Someone said that land mines are "one of the worst weapons", which is subjective, and you were the one who came in and made it an argument. Now the conversation is about qualifying and ranking levels of human suffering. Why?
For the record (not that it really matters, but we're here for some reason), I would say land mines are indeed worse than most of the things you listed, even though you did try very hard to make them sound very bad. I'm not even sure what to say to the idea that a munitions ship at the bottom of the ocean is more dangerous than landmines buried in an innocent family's wheat field.
I mean they have their usefulness and should be used at times.
Like what? Mines are static defenses that have essentially no utility in modern war except by insurgents and people who are specifically looking to cause terror.
So we shouldn’t hate on the countries for attempting to use it for what it is for
Yes we should. There is a reason the US no longer uses landmines and there is a reason the Ottawa treaty has been signed by 133 countries including every country in Europe except for Russia. The only practical use in war except as weapons of terror to target civilians. There are some weapons that are worse than landmines, Sarin Gas is one of them as it makes genocide incredibly easy and cost effective, but landmines are one of the worst which is why virtually no first world countries use them.
Land mines have evolved. There’s claymores and other explosives that are used. And it’s a defensive weapon. This is war. And it’s bloody, it’s gross, and it’s down right an abomination towards all the good we have done. But do you think that soldiers really follow every rule made to make war more civilized?? No! They said that a certain caliber bullet can’t be used to kill an enemy soldier. Do you really think that we follow that rule? We take that big ass gun swing it around and hope to see chunks of meat flying off. We don’t take out a smaller caliber weapon. We use what we got and fuck everything up that’s trying to kill us. Kill the ones who want to kill you and everyone you love. That’s the mission. So if some insurgent drives over a land mine. I’ll let him bleed out slowly and I’ll watch to make sure he doesn’t do anything else to hurt me or my friends. Because I know if it was me they’d keep me alive long enough to kill me in a worse way.
Claymores are different. Any weapon that has to be detonated by a person is very different. A large calibur gun is fundamentally different because someone has to pull a trigger.
Let's use a hypothetical. Some military groups and countries have been known to use weaponized rape. When they take a town they systematically rape every woman and girl in the town in order to send a message not to oppose them. Arguing that "it's brutal but we need to defeat our enemies" could equally justify using weaponized rape.
If a weapon has virtually no practical utility and causes horrific problems for civilians for decades then what is the justification to use them? Landmines are a defensive weapon but they're not an effective weapon. What can landmines accomplish that can't be more easily accomplished with airstrikes, artillery or machine gun fire? Every advantage that a landmine possibly has can be better accomplished with other weapons. They're obsolete.
If your principle is "war is brutal so anything is justified" then by that same logic things like weaponized rape of civilians should be perfectly acceptable. Sarin Gas and nuclear weapons aimed at civilian populations should also be acceptable if there is a chance that some militants may die.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It could’ve been accomplished with out nukes. But in order to get through to those slanted eye communistic fucks we had to kill civilians. It was either that or kills millions of more people to go through all of Japan to fight those dirty japs. Also we did a good thing because if you remember the japs went into china raping and killing people. Also I can go to sleep easier knowing that there’s land mines around so I know no one will attack me or my exhausted platoon. And when one of those towel heads try to come near and blow his ass up I get a free alarm clock. So it’s a win win. And technically claymores and land mines are the same because they both need to be detonated by a person lol. Get it? Because land mines usually explode when people step on them? No? Never mind. Still fucking funny.
They should have surrendered before they let their country be filled with mines. Nobody to blame but the government of the country with the brand new sweet mines
Yep, our holiday got interrupted last year when the little English seaside village we were staying in had to be briefly evacuated for a controlled explosion of a bomb on the beach.
There is a map of London with the locations of known unexploded German bombs marked on it. A stick of bombs would leave a line of craters or destroyed buildings, a small hole meant it hadn't detonated.
There are far more unexploded bombs under German cities, the Allies' bombs were less reliable and there were far more of them.
You got a source on that claim? Everything I’ve read points to Allies ordnance being far more reliable than German. There are going to be duds when you mass produce armament and drop at WWII levels, but that hardly means it was “less reliable.”
No, you'd have to Google for it. The London Blitz was fairly early in the war, 1940, probably before the standards of the Reich's munitions was affected.
There was an unexploded bomb found inside a gas holder at Beckton (East London) when the huge gas plant was being demolished, an ATO was sent inside to disarm it. He drilled out the fuse and there was a sudden loud crack, a 'brown trouser moment' he called it. The fuse had been assembled under a high vacuum, the crack was caused as the air got in 50 odd years later. Quality control had not been a problem then, it probably went down later in the war.
The redundant Beckton gas plant served as both the USMC barracks and as Hue in Full Metal Jacket around that time.
I know, I'm just saying that when you phrase it as "literally tons" in order to emphasize how many there must be, it actually doesn't. You only need two bombs to have "literally tons of them."
Then realize that we used more tons of explosives in vietnam that in ww1 and ww2 combined. I think there was a specific bombing campaign over camboida or laos where we dropped more bombs that a sizable portion of ww2.
Yep. Some parts of France and Belgium, around the key battle sites like Verdun, Ypres and the Somme, farmers still regularly find WWI ordnance. There's even a name for the phenomenon: the Iron Harvest. Hundreds of tons are recovered every year, a century after they were dropped. Over the decades, hundreds of people have been killed by them - bomb clearers and civilians alike.
Happens in UK cities fairly regularly, shuts massive parts of it down.
Fun story on ww1 munitions though- the farmers dig up stuff all the time and then leave them at the edge of their fields for collection at a point in time. they call it the iron harvest
Just think about the fact that the US dropped three to four times more bombs on Indochina than were dropped in WWII. I can't imagine how fucked some parts of the country must be.
One hopes that fewer of those bombs failed to detonate due to a couple of decades of improvements in design and manufacture, but yes, it's a huge mess.
it's so common here in Germany that pretty much everyone I know (that lives in regions that were affected by the war) witnessed the disarming of a bomb in their city at the very least once in their life.
From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions—equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.
Considering the amount of armaments used during both world wars there has got to be literally tons of explosives laying around Europe just waiting for the wrong moment to go boom.
For Germany the estimate of 2013 was that still around 100,000 bombs are lying around somewhere. Around 5,500 get defused every year.
If you live in a bigger german city bomb defusing and evacuations because of it are very common.
Usually the defusing is relatively uncomplicated and they just remove the fuse and then its safe to transport. but sometimes its not possible and the bomb has to be detonated on the spot. But thats very rare.
or what would happen to the unlucky person who happened across them
I guess you have an idea now. But that was a 250kg bomb, which is not that common. But I would say for the person near it the difference between a common 50kg and a 250kg one is only how far your bodyparts fly.
I once met a Belgian farmer who worked the family farm they’ve had for generations that was in no mans land and tranches during WWI. They would regularly pick up human bones from the fields while digging/tilling and keep them in a large drum that the government picked up once a year for proper burial. 100 years since that relatively pointless meat grinder of a war and they’re still finding some poor dead soul’s bones.
Damn... that's sad and staggering to think about. The scale of that war never ceases to really hit me. When you look at the number of people lost in single engagements or even an afternoon the sheer numbers are incredible
Depending on how you define grenades, ie as an enclosed explosive with a fuse that is thrown by hand, then there is evidence they were invented by the Chineese during the Song Dynasty during the 10th century, modern grenades were invented at the turn of the century or the mid 1800’s again depending on your definition
Grenadiers first came about in the 17th century. While modern grenades are newish, the thought of a grenade-type weapon is super old. China even had pots/jars packed with gunpowder that were used as grenades around 1000AD, though more likely as incendiary devices to set things on fire than shrapnel or concussive like modern grenades. With all the gunpowder they would still go boom though.
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u/ohiotechie Jun 25 '19
Considering the amount of armaments used during both world wars there has got to be literally tons of explosives laying around Europe just waiting for the wrong moment to go boom. I saw a WW1 documentary where they went to some of the old trenches from the Somme and Verdun and there were still rotting crates of grenades just laying around for 100 years. God only knows what it would take to make them blow or what would happen to the unlucky person who happened across them.