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 Post subject: Trench warfare & mining ?
PostPosted: Sun May 02, 2010 1:23 pm 
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Joined: Sat Oct 29, 2005 8:32 pm
Posts: 783
Watched a show on the military channel Saturday night. It was concerning excavating world war one trenches before they were built over( urban sprawl) in Belgium. As the stale mate continued a new devastating tactic was used beginning in 1917. Tunnels were dug up to 100 feet underground under no mans land to under the enemy trenches, The tunnels were packed with explosives and detonated. The resluts were devastating, men were just vaporized. Some of these tunnels were up to 300 yards long. One documented story goes that a crew of Canadian tunnel workers were underground when the Germans over ran there position. Upon completion of there shift they came to the surface to discover the Germans were now occupying there lines !!! Now to this day they have trouble with subsidences. They showed a small pot hole in a farmers field. In the past whole tractors have fallen into the depths below, and yes even COWS !!!! Its not uncommon for a cow to be there one minute, and gone the next !!!! Funny part is the town is expanding and there going to be building homes over these mined out areas. So.......... guess its not only northeastern Pennsylvania where they dont learn from history !!!!! Another part of the story was detection of the tunnel under construction. If a tunnel was discovered the enemy would let the tunnel progress untill they were with in a few feet of there position. Then they would drill a horizonal borehole, place a torpedo in it and let it go through the borehole and smash through into the enemy tunnel and explode.To make matters worse, usually at this point the enemy would be in the process of packing there tunnel with explosives, They also explained the type of explosive used. And how it had a purcussion effect all the way to the surface. It began with an " M", but I cant recall exactly what. Anyways it was interesting.


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