Inverted Iwo--Sappers and Blowing Up Trees, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1331

Most of the stuff that was blown up in WWI was an end  result of explosive shells being fired from canons--only a miniscule amount of the percentage of all bombing done during WWI  was from airplanes, and another very slight percentage from tanks.  On the other hand sappers played a much larger role in WWI than in just about any other war, placing explosives by hand and then detonating them.  (I wrote earlier in this blog about the extensive underground trench fighting that went on with sappers tunneling under No Man's Land and placing explosives underneath an enemy's trenches.  And I guess you could tunnel under the tunnel, and so on. This sort of warfare is extremely old, though the name is not, being about 150 years old. These soldiers were forward combat engineers, and had training across a number of different areas—they were responsible for many technical chores, like building (and blowing up) bridges, laying/clearing minefields, general demolition, defense construction, and, of course, fighting.  It could be a tremendously difficult job, unimaginable.) 

This photograph reminds me in some odd way of Arthur Rothstein's iconic photograph of Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, but only a little. (This photo is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

The caption of this news photo service image identified these soldiers for blowing up trees to obstruct the canal in the background.  If you land enough trees in a canal like this you are definitely going to cause corruption and heart attacks for anyone trying to move men or ordnance down the canal. 

And this detail:

I thought for a bit that these men might actually be threading barbed wire through the trees to make the job of removing that even more heinous.  But there's no way that you could lay hundreds of yards of barbed wire without gloves and without slicing your hands up--maybe you could do it carefully for  a little bit, but not for long. 

But I've got to say that this really doesn't look like demolition materiel....

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

Maybe you remember the scene in "We Were Soldiers" in which soldiers such as these wrapped this stuff in a line around a group of trees and blew them over to make a new landing zone. It made an impression on me because I thought, "Cool! I never have to mess with a chainsaw again!" It wasn't available at the local hardware, though. It was a Mel Gibson movie, so maybe you missed it. Based on a fascinating, frightening book "We were soldiers once ... and young."

[John F. Ptak]

Haven't seen the film. And I'm not sure if that chainsaw thought isn't untrue--I've had a lot of exposure now due to a bunch of farm blasting pamphlets from duPont. Stump blasting. Tree blasting. Ditch blasting. Hill blasting. Blasting blasting. If it were up to those guys, you'd be blasting right now. Thanks for the poke on the book--I don't know it.