The Dangerous Unexploded Bombs Found In Messines | The Ultimates | Curious? Science & Engineering

the small belgian town of messin has a violent history it was here during the first world war that the awesome power of explosives was demonstrated for the first time this is the evidence these are giant craters now filled by rainwater left by a single quite extraordinary act of war a million pounds of explosives buried deep underground was detonated killing 10 000 unsuspecting soldiers it was the bloodiest 30 seconds in the whole history of armed combat it was quite unique but never been so much explosive in a small area before in history the plan was born out of desperation by 1916 world war one had reached stalemate a killing contest waged from static positions machine was a key objective for the british because of one unique feature the ridge which dominates the belgian flatlands the british marked blue were on the lower slope of messin ridge they looked up at an enemy in an impregnable position thousands of young men had been slaughtered trying to capture the commanding heights was there nothing they could do to break through the german defenses [Music] the british were being pounded into defeat at machine until one of the oldest of military stratagems promised a way out of their dilemma you had trench lines that many cases were very close together and you have a situation that's closely akin to in effect siege operations it didn't take very long for the old-fashioned siege techniques digging underneath and attacking them from below by trying to blow the enemy defenses to take hold suddenly a new kind of warrior began to appear on or at least under the western front their weapons weren't rifles but picks and shovels and though the idea was borrowed from ancient history this plan would be on a scale so large it's hard to imagine [Music] the british aimed to secretly dig a whole network of tunnels to where the german trenches lay at the end of each tunnel they would build a chamber into these chambers they plan to pile huge quantities of a brand new powerful explosive called ammonal 40 000 sacks of it each weighing 25 pounds would be dragged into place the plan would take a year to complete but after that time one million pounds of explosives would be in position the largest quantity ever in one place directly below the german army ready to erupt [Music] the british commanders who devised the plan at messines demanded the new explosive ammonal soon the first shipments began to arrive amenall has special characteristics ideally suited to mine warfare it has a powerful lifting effect it's a slow burning explosive and therefore it moves things rather than cuts into them with heat [Music] ammonia was designed for just this task though the principle behind all chemical explosives is exactly the same this is black powder also known as gunpowder the oldest known explosive originally invented by the chinese well over a thousand years ago and i'm laying it out here in a nice loose heap with no confinement whatsoever the powder is just heaped in a pile with nothing to contain it we need a way to set off the black powder what i'm going to do is put this delay fuse into the charge set fire to it and it will give me time to walk to a safe distance before the charge goes off the powder simply burns releasing smoke and hot gases harmlessly burning like this is called deflagration as opposed to detonation what would happen if those gases couldn't escape here's the same amount of gunpowder in a cardboard tube [Music] this time a powerful explosion the gases had nowhere to go pressure built up and the same would happen but on a giant scale at machine the ammonia would be tightly confined in the mine chambers and its ingredients make it three times more powerful than gun powder ammonia is basically about two thirds ammonium nitrate the remaining third consisting of a mix of tnt aluminium and a certain amount of charcoal so just how powerful is it we'll detonate four and a half kilos about nine pounds at machine each individual mine was as large as 90 000 pounds once the charge is primed only the expert and a remote camera are allowed to be this close the minimum safe distance for this explosion 1000 feet away the firing circuit must be checked and then [Music] firing now debris is thrown a hundred feet into the air and takes a little while to come down so how much damage will our own miniature mine have caused this is the effect of just four and a half kilos the charges during this first world war were ten thousand times bigger than this the british hoped that this magnified thousands of times would wipe out an entire german army the british wanted to cause the biggest explosion the world has known up till that moment not just to blow the germans into the air but to cause an artificial earthquake a psychological shock to the defenders the british were counting on the element of surprise but how could they keep such a vast undertaking secret 50 000 men engaged in mining and the logistic effort was enormous so the timber needed the explosives the special equipment etc the existence of the tunnels was kept secret even from the british troops in case they were captured and questioned but the greatest security threat wasn't from german interrogators but from the local geology deep down the tunnels were cutting through what's called blue clay and tens of thousands of tons of it had to be brought up to the surface blue clay was very different from the brown surface soil the german aerial observation went over every day and i could see the places where actually the blue clay was concentrated and then they know these are the places where they were digging to protect the secret every last shovelful of blue clay had to be loaded into sandbags then carried away from the front line under cover of darkness they would put it into shell holes cover over the top with topsoil or use it to fill up old dugouts that weren't needed but they had to hide it finally with the germans very close to discovering the secret the warren of mine shafts was complete all the mines would be detonated at the same instant then the troops would charge forward to the top of messin ridge nothing was left to chance like 21st century battle commanders british generals even ordered a full-scale model of messine for the troops to study they ordered 100 000 soldiers up to the front line and a massive artillery barrage to pound the german trenches right into the night before the attack as dawn approached firing cables were laid detonators connected troops prepared to go over the top the mines would be detonated at exactly 10 minutes past three charges just before zero hour the barrage ceased in the deadly routine of the western front the germans thought they knew what was coming next troops rushed their trenches from dugouts where they've been sheltering to repel the expected infantry charge this time the pause was a trick their trenches were directly on top of the mines as silence descended the eerie calm seemed more terrifying than the cacophony of battle as the last seconds ticked away there rose a sound never heard before on the front line a dawn chorus of birdsong [Music] ah [Music] it must have been something incredible the whole ridge was one huge flame like a big mushroom which went open and then which exploded the military authorities really didn't know what the effect of blowing so much explosive at the same time might be it registered as an earthquake in switzerland there were genuine fears that it might cause some kind of rift [Music] it had completely shattered the german ability to resist the attacking troops within the first couple of hours had gained the main german defenses it was a striking success [Music] where the german trenches had been now there were just craters and ten thousand bodies for the british though now the masters of machine ridge it was time to celebrate but in that moment of triumph there was one thing they failed to consider had all the mines that were planted gone off several decades would pass before that question was answered it was a sultry summer's evening in 1955 when the storm finally broke over messin village it wakened memories of days gone by when the roar of giant guns rocked the town it also awakened something more sinister what could have caused an explosion on this scale what had been a cornfield was now a massive hole 60 feet deep 200 feet wide we're actually at the spot here where on the 17th of july 1955 one of the four forgotten minds of the scenes have exploded it caused a huge crater between here and these houses in the distance for the whole village it must have been an enormous shock the crater has since been filled but it's easy to see how close it came to wiping out these houses the lightning had struck one of these poles which flashed the charge underground to the buried explosives amazingly no one was hurt villagers thought this was a one in a million freak occurrence but now experts have discovered long forgotten battle plans and there's bad news there are three others there's one behind us in the field one in that direction and one here in front of us it was an immense crater in 1955 if the three others would come to a simultaneous explosion i think it would be a real catastrophe [Music] [Music] the british attack at messin heralded a new kind of warfare killing on an industrial scale only made possible by new and more powerful explosives as well as aminal tnt first appeared during this war invented in germany but quickly adopted as a standard explosive for shells by all armies the generals demanded tnt in vast quantities it was more powerful yet safer to handle than earlier generations of explosives but history has a way of returning to haunt us nowhere more so than the world war one battlefield of mercine ridge the explosion of june the 7th 1917 huge though it was now pales in comparison to those of the following decades but it's here that history won't release its grip ensuring real and present danger [Music] just how many unexploded minds remained was one of the enduring mysteries from the first world war most history books said two but now those books will have to be revised a careful study of old battle plans and war diaries has revealed four maybe more and these are mines which are primed to explode they could be touched off by nothing more than bad weather a cluster of mines is in an area of the british code named bird cage these weren't blown on the day of the attack because the front line had shifted after the mines were placed then when the germans attacked in that area in 1918 they were lost or the positions were lost lost and entirely forgotten until one was struck by lightning in 1955 leaving the other three still armed and dangerous they are in open fields but of course people could be walking across those fields the biggest mine of all is the most menacing the 25 tons of explosives sitting underneath this farmhouse known as petit duve the mine's firing mechanism was damaged before the day of the attack and it was abandoned the petty duve mine was a big charge in the event to be going off the farmhouse would disappear whether they are aware of it i've no idea but i suspect not but now they know the explosives are there why don't they remove them a journey deep underground will show how difficult that would be just across the french border at vimy the british also planted mines on a much smaller scale explosives experts known as the durand group who tracked down the lost mines of messine have been investigating underground here though the clay tunnels of the scene will now have flooded and all the tunnels collapsed these cut in hard chalk are still accessible just about the end of this tunnel 25 minutes from the surface lie four thousand pounds of explosive exactly the same as at machine what you're looking at are bags of amino that's the explosives they used these are rubberized bags clipped at the top and relatively waterproof by and large the contents are still quite viable as far as the machine might go they'll be completely flooded the flooding in the tunnels would actually help to preserve the mines so the probability is that even to this day most of the explosives that are left there are still in good condition the flooding will have created an oxygen free environment preserving what's inside the detonators might deteriorate and what we don't know is whether in fact they might become more sensitive with time as opposed to less sensitive and then if you had a lightning strike in the vicinity static electricity could induce a current in the cable to fire the charge to learn that your home is on top of the world's biggest unexploded bomb is news that's difficult to take in for farmer roger mayur whose family have been here for generations there's not much he can do about it i just asked the farmer uh what he thinks about the fifty thousand pounds of amino which is still under the soil here and he says yeah well that you have to live with such a thing in 1955 when the mind exploded he has heard that here and there was a big trickling of the earth and that's quite a few kilometers away maybe it's just that in this part of the world you get used to living in the shadow of history reminders of war and especially man striving for the ultimate explosion are everywhere this is where the german victims of mercene are buried the plaques reveal how devastating the minds were claiming 10 000 lives on june the 7th 1917 will the minds that lie buried stay silent now that nobody can say [Music] you

Channel: Curious?: Science and Engineering

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Id: dmQQhItkvlk

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021