The Horrors of WWI Artillery

More than a century after the guns fell silent on the Western Front, the ground beneath France and Belgium still holds a deadly secret. Hundreds of millions of unexploded artillery shells from World War I remain buried, and they are still killing people. This is not a history lesson.

This is a live, ongoing crisis that claims lives every year, a grim legacy of a war that fired over one and a half billion shells and saw 70 percent of all casualties come from artillery fire alone.

The sheer scale of the carnage is almost incomprehensible. In the First World War, artillery transformed from a support weapon into the dominant killer on the battlefield. The French 75mm field gun, with its revolutionary recoil system, could fire 15 to 30 rounds per minute, a rate that exhausted pre-war ammunition stocks in weeks.

By 1918, Britain alone was producing over 70 million shells a year. The result was a landscape pockmarked by craters and littered with duds.

But the horror did not end with the Armistice. Estimates suggest that up to 30 percent of shells fired during the war failed to explode. That means hundreds of millions of live munitions were left in the earth.

Today, a specialist munitions clearing agency in France collects around 900 tons of unexploded ordnance every year. The harvest is steady, and it is nowhere near finished.

The danger is not theoretical. Plowing fields, drainage work, construction, even hobbyist digging can disturb a shell that has been corroding for a century. A single movement can set off a fuse mechanism that is now unstable.

Fatal accidents still happen. Dud chemical shells, particularly those containing mustard gas, can split or leak, and the agent can still burn skin and lungs more than 100 years later.

The human cost of artillery during the war itself was staggering. Different shell types inflicted different horrors. High explosive shells produced deadly fragments that could tear off faces or sever limbs.

Shrapnel shells acted like a shotgun blast from above, shredding troops in the open. Gas shells delivered chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas with precision, causing blindness, chemical burns, and agonizing death. Phosgene was 18 times more potent than chlorine and responsible for 85 percent of gas deaths.

The psychological toll was equally devastating. Shell shock, a term coined in 1915, affected over 250,000 men. Symptoms included uncontrollable shaking, paralysis, nightmares, and hysterical blindness.

By 1917, the British Army banned shell shock as a diagnosis because the numbers had become too alarming. Forty percent of British casualties at the Somme were shell shocked.

The physical wounds were unlike anything seen before. Limbs were amputated when shredded by shrapnel or shattered by machine guns. Gas gangrene from bacteria in the heavily manured soil of the Western Front caused rapidly spreading tissue death, with amputation often the only option.

Germany performed approximately 67,000 limb amputations during the war. Britain performed around 41,000.

The legacy of these weapons is still being unearthed. In 2018, archaeologists found the remains of 21 German soldiers in a shelter who were buried alive when an Allied shell exploded above their tunnel. They were found in sitting positions, exactly where they had been when the earth came down on them.

Such discoveries are a stark reminder that the war is not over for the ground that holds its dead.

The coordination between artillery and infantry was a constant problem. Telephone lines were cut by shell fire, and messengers could take hours to deliver requests for fire support. Forward observation officers used balloons and aircraft to spot targets, but the system often broke down during an attack.

The creeping barrage, a curtain of fire that advanced ahead of infantry, tied soldiers to a rigid schedule. The French considered 10 percent self-inflicted casualties acceptable for men advancing within 50 yards of exploding shells.

The Battle of Verdun saw 1,400 German guns fire over a million shells in a nine-hour bombardment. The fighting lasted ten months and killed or wounded over 700,000 soldiers. The landscape was transformed into a moonscape of overlapping craters.

Bodies could not be recovered. Men fought among the rotting remains of their comrades.

At Passchendaele, more than 3,000 guns fired four and a half million shells in a ten-day preliminary bombardment. The drainage systems of the low-lying Flanders fields were destroyed. When the rains came, the battlefield turned into a sea of mud.

Soldiers sank to their waists. Men, horses, and tanks drowned in the muck. The British gained about five miles at a cost of over 250,000 casualties.

The Germans developed mathematical techniques to eliminate registration fire, allowing accurate fire without warning shots. The first attack of Operation Michael in March 1918 began with a barrage of three and a half million shells in five hours, almost 200 shells per second. The guns fired in complete surprise.

The United States entered the war desperately short of modern artillery, relying largely on French and British weapons. The French 75mm served as the primary American field gun. By the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, the Allies had learned to combine infantry assaults with gas, artillery, tanks, and aircraft in coordinated attacks.

There was no preliminary bombardment. The fire was sudden and precise.

The massive guns of the war remain legendary. The German 420mm howitzer, nicknamed Big Bertha, fired shells weighing over 800 kilograms to a range of more than nine kilometers. The Paris gun had a barrel 37 meters long and achieved a range of 130 kilometers, reaching altitudes of over 42 kilometers.

It was more a terror weapon than a practical tool.

The Austro-Hungarian Skoda 305mm mortar could penetrate two meters of reinforced concrete. The British Stokes mortar, weighing just 108 pounds, could fire up to 30 rounds per minute and became the ancestor of all modern infantry mortars.

Today, the threat from unexploded shells is managed by specialist teams, but the risk remains. In France, the Zone Rouge, or Red Zone, is still off-limits to civilians in many areas. The soil is contaminated with heavy metals and chemical residues.

The harvest of shells continues, and fatal accidents are a grim reminder that the war is not over.

The lessons of World War I artillery shaped its use worldwide for the rest of the 20th century. Artillery was there to stay, and it would only get deadlier. But for the men who endured the bombardments, the horror was immediate and eternal.

The randomness of death was especially hard on the mind. A man could survive a hundred near misses and then be killed by a shell that landed in exactly the wrong spot at exactly the wrong moment.

The sounds of different shells became a language of terror. Whisbangs, Woolly Bears, and the quiet plop of gas shells all signaled different threats. Soldiers learned to recognize them, but the fear never faded.

Even the rats in the trenches went crazy from the constant bombardment.

The war ended, but the shells remain. More than a hundred years later, they are still killing people. The ground is still yielding its deadly harvest.

And the stories of those who lived through the artillery fire, and those who did not, are a testament to the enduring horror of industrial warfare.