More than a hundred years after the First World War ended, its unexloded shells are still killing people.

We’re talking about hundreds of millions of duds still buried in the ground from a war where over 1 and a half billion shells were fired.

So many that even the rats in those trenches were going crazy.

70% of all casualties in the First World War were from artillery.

We’re going to show you how that happened, what various types of those shells did to the human body, and why so many men were never the same after surviving this war.

Believe it or not, the story of artillery begins with Chinese alchemists who were searching for an elixir of immortality.

They never found it, but what they did find was that combining salt peter with sulfur and charcoal created an explosive compound.

The earliest weapons to use it appeared around the year 1 in the form of fire lances, which were basically bamboo or metal tubes mounted on spears that ejected flames and shrapnel when packed with gunpowder.

These early fire lances worked essentially as flamethrowers with a range of about 3 m.

So not exactly what we think of when we hear the word artillery, but this was the beginning.

The transition from fire lances to actual [music] metalbarreled firearms happened over the next few centuries with the first true cannons appearing in China.

From there, cannons grew larger and more powerful.

Medieval bombards became massive siege guns with the largest weighing over 20 tons designed specifically to batter castle walls using round stone projectiles.

Artillery kept evolving faster and faster through history.

But to not bore you with each step in that evolution when you came here to learn about how it killed about 70% of soldiers in the First World War, let’s just say that the real revolution came in the 1850s with rifled [music] and breach loaded cannons which transformed artillery accuracy and range dramatically.

And then the French introduced something that changed everything.

The French 75 mm field gun was the first truly modern artillery piece, and it revolutionized field warfare with its hydronneumatic recoil system.

You see, before this gun, artillery pieces would jump backward violently when fired, requiring the crew to reim after every shot.

The French 75 [music] solved this problem with a barrel that slid backward on rollers while the gun carriage remained completely stationary.

A hydraulic cylinder absorbed the recoil energy, which was equivalent to stopping an automobile traveling at 100 mph within 3 feet, and compressed air returned the barrel to firing position so smoothly that the gun was ready to fire again almost immediately.

The result was a firing rate of 15 to 30 rounds per minute.

Compare that to just one or two rounds per minute for pre-oil artillery, and you can see why this was such a dramatic improvement.

The smoothness of this system had no equal when it appeared and wouldn’t for at least another 10 years.

The French treated the recoil mechanism as a state secret, scattering production of parts around France so that only those responsible for final assembly knew how it actually worked.

It made the main German field guns useless overnight.

And when used in large numbers, the 75mm turned artillery from a support arm into the dominant battlefield killer.

All the major powers in the world by this point were building up their own versions of modern artillery pieces with Germany starting a frantic race to build better guns before the war.

But here’s what nobody fully appreciated at the time.

No one had actually tested modern artillery in a real war.\\

European warfare since Napoleon had seen only brief [music] conflicts between professional armies.

Everyone believed the next European war would be short and decisive.

Maybe a few weeks, a couple of months at most.

This error would cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the failed offensives that pulled all sides [music] into the deadlock of trench warfare never before seen in history.

So when the war began in August 1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier heading for the city of Leage, gateway to Belgium.

The city was protected by a ring of 12 fortresses built to withstand bombardment from 210 mm guns, which at the time were the largest mobile artillery in the world.

Belgian planners believed these fortifications [music] could hold for a month.

But the Germans arrived with something the Allies had never seen before.

Two prototype 420 mm siege howitzers.

Nobody knew these weapons even existed.

Within days of the first shell striking, fort after fort surrendered.

Fort Line fell when a single 420 mm shell struck its ammunition magazine, causing a massive explosion that killed [music] 350 of its garrison and blew the fort to pieces.

The entire ring of forts that was supposed to hold for a month was reduced in just 11 days.

The same thing happened at Nama where the big birthers and Austrian Scoda 305 mm mortars battered the fortress into surrender in just 4 days.

Fortifications that had taken years to build and cost enormous amounts of money crumbled in hours.

The Germans had shown that no fortress could stand up to their heavy artillery and this changed how everyone thought about defense for the rest of the war.

Meanwhile, in open battle, artillery was proving equally decisive, but in the opposite direction.

During the Battle of the Frontiers, French infantry advanced in dense formations.

German defenders sat tight on high ground where they could observe French positions and [music] use their artillery to devastating effect.

The French used their beloved 75mm guns for [music] direct fire rather than indirect support, leaving their crews exposed and their potential wasted.

German artillery sat on ridges beyond the view of French [music] gunners and kept bombarding without anyone firing back.

August 22nd, [music] 1914 became the bloodiest single day in French military history with 27,000 soldiers killed in 24 hours.

The French doctrine of offensive spirit, which put morale and rapid infantry assault above firepower, proved disastrously wrong against modern weaponry.

Then something strange began to happen.

Artillery and machine guns made movement above ground so deadly that it forced men underground.

Both sides concentrated on protecting their own troops by digging deep into the earth.

What happened next was a series of attempts by each side to outflank the other.

Each time one army tried to swing around the enemy’s flank, [music] the other extended its line to meet them.

And each time the armies met, the defending side dug in and the attacking side couldn’t break through.

This kept going until the race ended at the coast when there was simply no more room to outflank anyone.

Trenches that began as simple rifle pits grew deeper and more elaborate as heavier artillery was brought up.

The result was an unbroken line of trenches stretching approximately 450 mi.

The war everyone expected to be over before Christmas had become something entirely new.

A siege on a continental scale where artillery would reign supreme [music] and the only way forward would be measured in yards rather than miles.

Now, all of this firing revealed a problem nobody had anticipated.

Pre-war ammunition stocks of about 1,00 to,500 rounds per gun were supposed to last approximately 6 months of fighting.

Spoiler alert, they ran out in weeks.

[music] Quickfiring guns could fire 15 to 30 rounds per minute, meaning a single gun could exhaust an entire day’s aotment in an hour of heavy action.

Within weeks, every major power was rationing shells.

[music] British guns were limited to just a handful of shells per day, sometimes as few as six.

The shell crisis happened because armies were burning through ammunition far faster than anyone predicted.

Stockpiles were full of the wrong ammunition type, and factories simply weren’t [music] ready for this kind of demand.

So, what happened next was that entire economies transformed to feed the guns.

France went from producing 20,000 rounds per day to a 100,000 by 1915.

Germany’s monthly shell production grew over 30fold by 1918.

Britain’s output went from half a million shells a year to over 70 million.

And because men were busy fighting and dying at alarming rates in the trenches, [music] by midw British weapons and shells were being produced by women, these munitionets worked 12-hour shifts with exposure to toxic chemicals, and hundreds of them died in accidents and from overexposure to toxic substances.

The war had become an industrial contest as much as a military one.

Now, going back to the trenches, let’s take a look at how artillery actually worked in practice and why it transformed the whole war so much.

First, the coordination between artillery and infantry was one of the biggest problems nobody could solve during the entire conflict.

Telephone lines worked well enough in defensive situations, but during an attack, messengers were the only way to send and receive requests for fire support, and that sometimes took hours, assuming the messengers survived at all.

The wire communications were constantly cut by shell fire, and radio was still new and unreliable on the battlefield.

The result was that once the infantry went over the top, the artillery was essentially firing blind, unable to adapt to the actual situation on the ground.

Forward observation officers were positioned in or near frontline trenches to observe where shells were landing and transmit corrections [music] back to the guns using telephones when the wire was intact.

But the farther an attack advanced, the more this system broke down because the observer couldn’t keep up while maintaining communication with his battery.

Wire laying parties had to work under fire constantly just to keep the lines working.

Observation balloons were positioned miles behind the front at altitudes often exceeding 3,000 ft.

Able to see up to 11 miles with the best binoculars.

These balloons were connected to ground by telephone for real-time corrections.

But being filled with hydrogen, they were easy targets for enemy aircraft.

Balloon observers were called balloonatics [music] for serving in one of the war’s most dangerous jobs.

However, unlike the plane pilots of the time, they actually had parachutes.

And in 116 American jumps, not a single one failed to open.

Aircraft became the main way to gather information for artillery by 1918.

Using visual reconnaissance, aerial photography for mapping enemy positions and wireless communication for realtime corrections, pilots would fire smoke signals over targets for batteries to calculate range.

But there was another war happening that most soldiers never saw.

The deadly hunt between artillery batteries.

Counterb fire was the war within the war, and many lives depended on it.

The targets were the enemy’s guns and the men serving them.

But before enemy artillery could be attacked, you had to find it first.

Their positioning behind the front lines meant that some creative solutions had to be developed.

Sound ranging was one of the cleverest ideas of the war.

Developed primarily by British scientists, the method involved a network of listening posts [music] equipped with microphones that recorded the strength and direction of sound waves when enemy guns fired.

An arc of six or more microphone stations detected the low frequency boom of enemy guns.

And by measuring the tiny differences in when each [music] station picked up the sound, they could work out the exact location of the gun.

By 1918, several guns could be detected simultaneously within minutes of their first shot.

The Germans had a much crudder system, relying on individuals with stopwatches, which put them at a serious disadvantage.

Flash spotting used the flash of the gun firing to figure out where enemy guns were.

It became less useful after the Germans started using flashless [music] powders in 1917, but sound ranging remained invaluable throughout the war.

Now, let’s talk about the shells themselves, [music] because different types did very different things.

High explosive shells were filled with explosives.

[music] Their thick steel walls producing deadly fragments spreading over many meters when they [music] detonated.

Early H shells had delayed fuses, causing them to bury into the ground before exploding, which was effective for destroying fortifications, but meant much of the blast was absorbed by Earth.

Later, impact fuses came along that detonated the shell the moment it hit any surface, making them more effective for cutting barbed wire.

Shrapnel shells were named after Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel, who invented the design in the late 18th century.

These were hollow steel projectiles filled with 200 to 500 lead or steel balls, and a gunpowder bursting charge exploded by time fuses set before firing.

When properly timed, the shell burst in the air above enemy troops, [music] ejecting the balls forward at the velocity of the shell itself.

Basically, a shotgun blast from above.

Shrapnel was effective against troops in the open, but useless against entrenched positions or shelters.

[music] Gas shells represented a whole different category of horror.

You see, after experimenting with chlorine gas released from [music] cylinders, which depended entirely on wind direction, someone got the idea to deliver chemicals [music] through artillery shells instead.

This opened up a new level of horror in the First World War because now gas could be delivered precisely [music] to any target at any time.

France produced the first gas shells in mid1 1916 by filling explosive shell casings with chemical payloads and Germany quickly followed with their own versions.

The Germans even developed a color coding system for their chemical shells.

Green cross for lung destroying agents like chlorine and phosgene.

White cross for tear gases.

Blue cross for mask breakers designed to force soldiers to remove their gas masks and yellow cross for mustard gas.

Fosgene proved [music] 18 times more potent than chlorine and was responsible for about 85% of gas deaths in the war with symptoms that could be delayed up to 48 hours, meaning soldiers [music] often didn’t know they’d received a lethal dose until it was too late.

Mustard gas wasn’t actually a gas, but a volatile oily liquid dispersed as fine mist, causing chemical burns, blistering, and blindness designed primarily to disable rather than kill.

Being shelled by conventional artillery, as horrible as it was, became preferable to these chemical shells.

By the armistice, chemical shells made up a significant portion of all ammunition supplies on [music] every side.

If you want to know more about how these chemicals affected the human body and how they were used, we have a whole video on chemical warfare in the First World War that you can watch after this one.

Star shells exploded at height, deploying a magnesium flare suspended from a small parachute to cast strong light on the nighttime battlefield for observing enemy movements.

Smoke shells were employed with gas and H shells to blind enemy artillery spotters and machine gunners, particularly valuable during advances.

The Germans and Austrians also employed concrete piercing shells with time delay fuses for their superheavy siege artillery designed to punch through reinforced fortresses before exploding inside.

But here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Dud rates were a critical problem throughout the war.

Estimates suggest 30% of shells fired in the SO preliminary bombardment failed to explode.

Problems included faulty fuses, quality control issues from rushed wartime production, and improper storage at the SO.

The combination of mostly shrapnel shells, which were useless against dugouts, and the high dud rate meant German defenses remained largely intact despite the massive bombardment.

We’ll come back to the unexloded shells later, because what’s still buried in the ground today is its own story.

Now, let’s look [music] at the tactics that evolved around all this firepower.

The French and British initially used prolonged bombardments before an infantry assault, trying to completely destroy the defenders.

The 7-day barrage opening the Battle of the Som was the prime example.

The theory was that artillery should batter the enemy to complete collapse before friendly infantry was committed.

But these massive bombardments warned the enemy exactly where the [music] attack would come, destroyed the ground the infantry would have to cross, and often failed to destroy well- entrenched defenders who simply sheltered in deep dugouts and emerged when the shelling stopped.

The Germans took a different approach.

Rather than trying to destroy everything in the path of the attacking infantry, they focused on tightly synchronizing fire support with the infantry [music] to neutralize the enemy defense just long enough for their troops to overrun it.

While typical artillery preparations in 1917 lasted a week or even 2 weeks, German preparations lasted only a matter of hours with far better effect.

They made extensive use of gas and smoke shells which immobilized and disrupted targets without destroying the ground their own [music] men would have to cross.

One of the most important innovations was eliminating registration fire.

Previously, before any attack, artillery had to fire ranging shots to calibrate their aim, which gave away their position and warned the enemy.

The Germans developed mathematical techniques to predict corrections from careful measurement of weather conditions and each gun’s characteristics.

When properly applied, this allowed accurate fire without any warning shots.

The first attack of Operation Michael in March 1918 began with a barrage of 3 and a half million shells in 5 hours, almost 200 shells a second, with the German guns firing in complete surprise.

The British were actually developing similar techniques, and some historians argue they were years ahead of the Germans in this area.

The solution to the communication problem between artillery and infantry was to advance the artillery fire on a preset schedule.

This evolved into the creeping barrage, placing a curtain of artillery fire just ahead of advancing infantry, shifting forward at a predetermined rate, typically 50 m per minute.

At a pre-arranged time, large numbers of field guns opened fire on a line, and after a set number of minutes, the curtain of fire would lift onto the next target.

The attacking infantry were trained to follow closely behind this moving wall of their own artillery fire, [music] keeping pace whether they were ready or not.

But the creeping barrage completely tied the infantry to the artillery plan.

There was no way to adjust the rate if something went wrong.

The rigid movement of artillery fire often outran the heavily laden infantrymen struggling across shell pocked ground, allowing defenders time to leave their shelters and engage the attackers [music] after the barrage had passed.

The French considered 10% self-inflicted casualties acceptable for infantry advancing behind a moving barrage with men needing to stay within 50 yards of exploding shells.

Just think about that for a moment.

And while we’re on the French and artillery, we absolutely have to mention Verdun.

On February 21st, 1916, 1,400 German guns packed along an 8-mile front fired over a million shells in a 9-hour bombardment.

What followed was 10 months of the most savage fighting of the entire war.

With both sides feeding men into a meat grinder of artillery and close combat that killed or wounded over 700,000 soldiers combined, the landscape was completely transformed into a moonscape of overlapping shell craters.

And the constant bombardment meant bodies couldn’t be recovered.

[music] Men fought among the rotting remains of their comrades.

And then there was Third ERA, also known as Passandale, which showed what happened when massive bombardments destroyed more than just the enemy.

More than 3,000 guns firing four and a half million shells in a 10-day preliminary bombardment completely destroyed the drainage systems that kept the low-lying Fllanders fields from flooding.

When the rains came, the battlefield turned into a sea of mud.

Soldiers sank to their waists.

Men, horses, and tanks literally drowned in the muck.

Artillery couldn’t be moved forward because guns sank deeper [music] with each shot.

The British gained about 5 mi at a cost of over 250,000 casualties.

[music] By the battle of Amya in August 1918, the British had learned how to combine infantry assaults with gas, artillery, tanks, and aircraft [music] in a coordinated attack.

Allied infantry followed close behind the creeping barrage while tanks crushed wire and silenced machine gun posts.

Aircraft strafed [music] trenches and bombed supply lines.

And before the attack even began, artillery crews had used aerial [music] reports, sound ranging, and flash spotting to locate German guns.

Many of those guns were destroyed before the infantry even went over the top.

There was no preliminary bombardment to give the enemy time to prepare.

Instead, the fire was sudden and precise, carefully timed to support each stage of the advance.

In 1914, the use of artillery still looked a lot like the Napoleonic era.

But by 1918, modern artillery had clearly taken shape.

Now, let’s look at some of the most notable guns of the war.

Starting with those massive weapons the Germans brought up at the outset that shocked the world.

The crop 420 millimeter mgarate nicknamed dick bera or big birther was Germany’s super heavy siege howitzer.

It fired shells weighing over 800 kg to a range of more than 9 km requiring around 200 men to assemble, transport and operate.

[music] Assembly took about 6 hours under ideal conditions and the craters it left measured 6 m deep by 9 m wide.

The Paris gun was an extreme experiment in long range artillery.

With a barrel length of 37 m and a barrel weight of 138 tons, it achieved a range of 130 km, reaching altitudes of over 42 km, the highest any projectile reached until V2 rockets in the next war.

The shells actually reached the stratosphere, where air resistance was negligible, and the corololis effect from Earth’s rotation [music] had to be calculated into firing solutions.

It was more of a terror weapon than anything practical.

The Austrohungarian Scoda 305 mm mortar, nicknamed Skinny Emma, was less powerful than Big Bera, but more mobile, capable of set up almost anywhere in about 50 minutes, while Big Bera required rail access.

[music] It could penetrate 2 m of reinforced concrete, and eight were loaned to Germany to use alongside the bigger guns.

On the other end of the scale, trench mortars came from the need for weapons infantry could carry forward to attack positions [music] invisible to artillery in the rear.

The British Stokes mortar proved brilliantly simple.

Breaking into three parts, it weighed just 108 lb total, achieved effective ranges of around 800 [music] yd, and could fire up to 30 rounds per minute with expert crews requiring only two men to operate.

This weapon became the ancestor of virtually all modern infantry mortars.

The United States entered the war desperately short of modern artillery.

General Persing’s forces were largely equipped with French and British weapons with the French 75 mm serving as the primary American field gun.

So now let’s take a look at what it was actually like to be an artillery crew.

Because although they were far from the trench horrors, they didn’t lack any trouble doing their job.

Daily routines began [music] with pre-dawn readiness followed by assigned targets where specific portions of enemy trenches were marked for destruction that day.

During active operations, batteries might fire 800 to a,000 rounds per day with firing broken into periods and reliefs every four hours due to the physical demands.

The shells were not light and crews had to maneuver them all day long.

There was sustained rapid fire causing exhaustion, exposure to elements in open pits, constant noise damage to hearing, and sleep deprivation during bombardments where crews might fire continuously for days.

Like the preparation bombardment for the SO that lasted 7 days around the clock.

The greatest threat to artillery crews was counterb fire where the enemy located firing guns and directed retaliatory bombardment.

Gas was particularly dangerous because crews couldn’t wear masks while rapidly serving [music] guns and gas shells contaminated positions for hours or days.

Defective shells occasionally exploded in barrels, destroying guns and crews, and a lucky enemy hit on ready ammunition stored in gun pits could detonate the entire stock.

But as bad as it was for the gun crews, [music] it was far worse for the men on the receiving end.

A German soldier at the SO described how they were under incessant bombardment day and night.

Shells of various calibers coming upon them constantly.

Their dugouts crumbled and fell upon them, and they had to dig themselves and their comrades out.

Sometimes they found them suffocated, sometimes smashed to pulp.

Soldiers in the bunkers became hysterical, wanting to run out.

And men had to physically hold them back to keep them in the comparative safety of the deep shelters.

Even the rats became hysterical, coming into their flimsy shelters, seeking refuge from the terrific artillery fire.

They had nothing to eat, nothing to drink, but constantly shell after shell burst upon them.

Different weapons produced distinctive [music] sounds that experienced soldiers learned to recognize.

Whisbangs was soldier slang for German 77 mm [music] field gun shells which traveled faster than the speed of sound.

So soldiers heard the whiz of the traveling shell before the bang from the gun itself, giving virtually no warning.

Woolly Bear referred to the burst and smoke of any big German high explosive shell.

Gas shells often had a quieter distinctive plop when they burst, which soldiers trained to recognize.

Because of this, gas attacks were often masked by mixing gas shells with standard H shells, so soldiers couldn’t hear the distinctive [music] sound and wouldn’t realize in time to put their gas masks on.

The randomness of death was especially hard on the mind.

A man could survive a 100 near misses and then be killed by a shell that [music] landed in exactly the wrong spot at exactly the wrong moment.

And this brings us to answering the question in [music] the title of this video.

As you now see just how many shells were fired and how constant the bombardment was, you probably start to realize why artillery killed such a high percentage of soldiers.

But there are several really disturbing things this enormous shelling did to the human body that we need to talk about.

First, the wounds were completely different than what would happen to a soldier shot by a bullet.

60 to 70% of all battlefield casualties in the First World War were caused by artillery.

Shrapnel fragments severed and destroyed whole parts of the body and caused huge blood loss.

Hot flying metal could tear through flesh [music] to create twisted, ragged wounds or even rip faces off entirely.

Soldiers died from blast alone.

Their lungs destroyed without an outward mark on their bodies.

Burial alive was horrifyingly common with explosions disintering hastily buried bodies while burying other men alive.

In 2018, archaeologists found 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 on a bench or lying down, exactly where they’d been when the earth came down on them.

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

Britain approximately 41,000.

Limbs were amputated when shredded by shrapnel or when machine guns shattered bones beyond repair.

Gas gang green from bacteria living in the heavily manured agricultural soil of the western front produced toxins causing rapidly spreading tissue death with amputation frequently the only option.

The war brought a huge increase in facial injuries from trench warfare where men peering over parapets were exposed to shrapnel.

And even if you weren’t hit directly, there was another common condition that affected over 250,000 men during the war.

Shell shock, uncontrollable shaking, inability [music] to speak, paralysis, nightmares, inability to sleep or walk, hysterical blindness, panic attacks.

The term was coined in 1915 by a British medical officer.

At first, doctors [music] thought it came from physical injury to the nervous system from explosions.

But it later became clear that men who had never been near a shell could be equally traumatized simply from the prolonged terror of being under bombardment.

During 1917, shell shock was entirely banned as a diagnosis in the British Army, and mentions were censored even in medical journals because the numbers had become too alarming.

40% of British casualties at the SO were shell shocked, creating an epidemic that nearly paralyzed the army.

Treatment at the front included [music] brief rest at stations, usually close enough to still hear artillery, some sleep, food, sedatives, and liberal use of rum.

Not exactly what we’d call psychiatric care today.

Now remember earlier when we talked about dud rates about 1 in4 shells fired on the western front didn’t [music] detonate with roughly 1 and a half billion shells fired during the war.

That means hundreds of millions of unexloded shells were originally left in the ground.

In France today, a specialist munitions clearing agency collects around 900 tons [music] of unexloded munitions per year.

The harvest is still steady and it’s nowhere near finished.

plowing, drainage work, construction, even hobbyist digging [music] can move a shell enough to set off a fuse mechanism that’s now unstable after a century of corrosion.

And fatal accidents still happen.

Dud chemical shells can split, leak, or aerosolize residues.

And mustard agent, in particular, can still burn skin and lungs more than a 100red years later.

As for the artillery, the lessons that were finally learned shaped [music] its use worldwide for the rest of the 20th century.

Artillery was there to stay, [music] and it would only get deadlier in the next