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Old 06-22-2016, 01:42 AM
 
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When you see videos or pictures of the landscape during and shortly after WWI everything is gone; trees, lots of craters, vegetation etc. yet today if you were to visit the sights you couldn't even tell it had been a battlefield. So what did they do to all the land that was completely destroyed? And what happened to all the trenches that they dug up?
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Old 06-22-2016, 02:00 AM
Yac
 
6,051 posts, read 7,727,132 times
They are still there for the most part. I don't really know what the process of reclaiming this land was, even if there really was one, but aerial photos clearly show the remains of many miles of trenches still and it is very common for farmers to dig up remains of the war with their plows. This article is from 2013 but I doubt much changed from then: Lethal relics from WW1 are still emerging - Telegraph
and I doubt it will stop any time soon. The area where I grew up saw heavy fighting during the ww2 East Pomeranian Offensive, the Red Army clashed with what remained of the Wehrmacht. I remember hundreds of tons of explosives being found and disposed, tanks and planes hidden in the ground. One of my favorite toys as a kid was a german Kar98k rifle my father found while digging the garden, it was far too rusty to even consider restoring it, but outfitted with a new wooden stock it made a great toy And just last year he found an 80mm German mortar round there
So what I'm saying is: what happened is most of the remains of the war were simply left there. The land regenerated, nature took it back and hid the bloody truth beneath grass and trees.
Yac.
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Old 06-22-2016, 04:57 AM
 
Location: St. Louis
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In 1974 I was a guest of a French army team who had the job of extracting unexploded WWI artillery shells from farmland. The usual method of discovering these old shells was for a plow to turn one up. Harsh treatment for touchy old explosives. We collected 20 shells that day, which was said to be average for their area of responsibility during plowing season.

For those not familiar with the process the shells rise by the same principle as stones in a field, freezing in the winter tries to compress the shell and this naturally fails, leaving the shells to be pushed in all directions by the ice. The path of least resistance is to go up, and so they rise.
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Old 06-22-2016, 06:28 AM
 
Location: Type 0.73 Kardashev
11,110 posts, read 9,810,680 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Norstromos View Post
When you see videos or pictures of the landscape during and shortly after WWI everything is gone; trees, lots of craters, vegetation etc. yet today if you were to visit the sights you couldn't even tell it had been a battlefield. So what did they do to all the land that was completely destroyed? And what happened to all the trenches that they dug up?
It wasn't destroyed - just misshapen.

Belgium and northern France are wet, temperate climates. They have plenty of rain and many freeze/thaw cycles each year. For the most part, scars on the land are erased fairly quickly under such conditions by natural processes.

But many areas still show those scars.

Trenches and craters from the Battle of the Somme:


The Lochnager Crater:
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Old 06-22-2016, 06:48 AM
 
1,535 posts, read 1,390,954 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Norstromos View Post
When you see videos or pictures of the landscape during and shortly after WWI everything is gone; trees, lots of craters, vegetation etc. yet today if you were to visit the sights you couldn't even tell it had been a battlefield. So what did they do to all the land that was completely destroyed? And what happened to all the trenches that they dug up?
Most of the destroyed land was restored to its pre war use.

After the war, tens of thousands of laborers contracted from poorer non combatant countries (most local men were exhausted from the war and did not want anything to do with the work, and the pay was not good either) were hired to fill in shell holes and trenches, haul away debris and abandoned equipment, recover bodies when possible, and destroy unexploded ordinance.

The effort was really well coordinated and led to the restoration of most battle fields. One big exception is large portions of the Verdun battle field. The devastated ridges, which before the war were open bluffs, were sown with trees and turned into a national forest. Likewise, five or so villages in the area were considered to have been completely destroyed and no effort was made to rebuild them.
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