LowCommand
Posts: 138
Joined: 8/14/2002 From: VA Status: offline
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quote:
There is an area in France where the British in 1917 dug tunnels to underneath the German front line positions and emplaced huge amounts of explosives, several thousand tons, below the German trenches. When the charges were detonated simultaneously, they literally atomised the German positions. It was the most powerful man-made intentional explosion up to WWII. Years later, it became known that at least two of the charges had not been blown up when one of them was set off by a lightning strike in the late 'fifties or early 'sixties, an estimated 150-200 tons of explosives tearing a crater about sixty feet deep and several hundred feet wide into a field that had been under cultivation since WWI. A check of old documents resulted in determining that there was at least one other unexploded charge, but it proved impossible to find its location. So there is a place in the French countryside where, sixty or so feet deep, a few hundred tons of high explosives lie waiting to detonate, unaffected by time, unsuspected by the people who live on top of it ... The History Chanel did a show about this, "One of Our Mines Is Missing. It turns out that more than one is missing. Some very brave military engineers donated their time tracking down some of these mines. They managed find and cut the wires and/or pull the detonators from some of the mines. The explosives are too deteriorated to move. At least one mine is in an unfortunate spot. I've lost my copy of the show, but I seem to remember that some of these men have since died trying to defuse another mine.
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"Mines reported in the fairway, "Warn all traffic and detain, "'Sent up Unity, Cralibel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."
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