WWI soldier’s hidden diary reveals amazing trench truces

 

1. That, somehow, is how I see our military/revolutionary situation. We will win. I hope it need not be,

   Posted by cmblake6       10/29/2009  at  11:06 AM  



2. Sappers - tunnelers and miners - played a very large roll in that war, one that has been largely ignored. Both sides dug tunnels to mine the enemy’s trenches. Combat at arms length would happen underground when two tunnels met. Take all the horror of that war, and do it in the dark, in the poor soil and mud, where at any moment the tunnels could cave in or be collapsed by your enemies and leave you to die.

   A very good book is available on the subject, called War Underground, the tunnellers of the Great War.

   There are still half a dozen or more unexploded mines in the tunnels beneath the battlefields, filled with tons of ordnance. Lightning set one off in 1955, another was discovered beneath the Vimy Ridge memorial and removed in 1997. Another one turned up in 2002.
   Much of this info is out on the internet, and you can get DVDs, but you’ll have to figure out how to convert British PAL discs to the US NTSC disc format.

   Posted by Drew458       10/29/2009  at  11:18 AM  

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