JF Ptak Science Books Post 2364 History of Holes series
[Thanks to Jonathan Harvey for surfacing this image earlier today.]
Cemetery for Craters. That is what came to mind reading an article on WWI and the Hooge Crater Cemetery
Craters are holes usually filled with dead people, a cemetery powering its way through the air looking for a place to land. You can assume that many of the shells fired dfuring WWI were indeed flying cemeteries which landed and exploded, making their crater and creating a cemetery in it.
This is what the town of Hooge looked like after the vicious fighting that took place there in the Battle(s) of Ypres:
[Source: Australians on the Western Front]
The Hooge Crater Cemetery is actually a cemetery in Hooge, Belgium, which was a salient in the massive ultra-battle of Ypres, which was just about a war in itself, along with other gigantic battles such as Verdun and the Somme. And Gallipoli. And Brusilov. And another two dozens battles in which 100,000+ were killed. Ypres was actually three major battles which were fought in 1914, 1915 and 1917; the Hooge Crater was made by a giant mine placed by the British in the German lines on 30 July 1915. Since the geography of Hooge was fairly flat, and since the mine made such a huge crater with massive uplifts, it became a significant part of the battlefield itself–it was captured and lost and re-captured numerous times over a three year period, the last time in September 1918, right before the end of the war.
I didn’t find a before/after aerial for Hooge, but I did for the village of Passchendaele, which turned into another cemetery of craters, especially after the vicious fighting that took place there in the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. Nothing but holes:
The Hooge Crater was made by an explosive at the end of a 200′ tunnel dug by the175th Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers under No Man’s Land to find itself under the German entrenchments–when the charges placed at the end of the tunnel were exploded, it created a crater 20′ deep and 150′ across.
This is what it looked like from a crater’s-eye-view, with dugouts being made its walls:
[Source: World War I Battlefields: Hooge, here.]
And another:
[Source: World War I Battlefields: Hooge, here.]
I recollect that there were hundreds of millions of artillery rounds fired during WWI, most I think above 75mm (I cannot find this source offhand)–in any event the total number of crater creators was somewhere in the vicinity of the world’s population, something on that order. A lot.
And the very odd thing is that there were enough holes made to perhaps bury every other person on the planet.
