Staggering Amounts of Barbed Wire in WWI

The sheer amount of barbed wire used in WWI is staggering. It's estimated that over 1,000,000 miles of the stuff was put up, that's enough to go around the world 40 times!

Something to consider, this stuff isn't easy to move so once it's in place it's staying there. Through artillery barrages, under tanks, and repeated assaults, wire everywhere until some unlucky people have to clean it up after the conflict.

#shorts#wwi#ww1#barbedwire#wire#trenchwarfare#westernfront#military#militaryhistory#westernfrontww1#militaryequipment#combat#warfare#tanks#thegreatwar#greatwar

[lukycharms]

Jeez. Any statistic that uses the worlds circumference as a unit of measure blows me every away ever time

[jaydeedub]

Ernst Troller, _I Was A German_ (1933)
"One night we heard a cry, the cry of one in excruciating pain; then all was quiet again. Someone in his death agony, we thought. But an hour later the cry came again. It never ceased the whole night. Nor the following night. Naked and inarticulate the cry persisted. We could not tell whether it came from the throat of German or Frenchman. It existed in its own right, an agonized indictment of heaven and earth. We thrust our fingers into our ears to stop its moan; but it was no good; the cry cut like a drill into our heads, dragging minutes into hours, hours into years. We withered and grew old between those cries.

Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves. We prayed desperately for his death. He took so long about it, and if he went on much longer we should go mad. But on the third day his cries were stopped by death."

[Specops]

I got caught in old rusty barbed wire camouflaged by overgrown shrubbery in Sandhill '09. It's haunting how razor sharp tetanus can completely immobilize you. It took a whole damn fireteam to pull me out.

[procrastinator]

They’d be trying cut it into workable chunks, without getting sliced open or losing an eye WHILE watching out for MINES and UXE.
104 years and there are still areas that are used for grazing only.

[sebione]

I used to be in a combat engineer unit and one time during a night training exercise we had an m113 (tracked armored personnel carrier) drive over a stand of concertina wire. What an ugly scene that was. That stuff gets into every gap, groove, nook, and cranny and can take HOURS to unbind. Under fire, you might as well torch the vehicle because it's a loss.

[mbryson]

As a kid my parents took me to a barbed wire museum in Wyoming or Montana. The amount of experimentation and thought that went into developing cheap, effective fencing is staggering.

And boy howdy does that stuff endure. I've come across rusty, tetanus-giving strands all over the U.S.

[iana]

I once heard somebody say something along the lines of "It wasn't Samuel Colt inventing the revolver that tamed the west, it was strictly barbed wire."

[Lybargerb]

I was a combat engineer, let me tell you an 11 row will stop a Abrams tank.

[dominickgoertzen]

In the infantry we were taught how to deploy that nasty stuff. Growing up a farmer I was used to it, but never thought of the effect to which it could be used.

It can be a torture field, we use it to make ground tangle traps, covered in brush or in false trenches... imagine jumping into a trench in the dark, thinking you're assaulting an enemy position only to wind up in a saw movie trap... and in a pre sighted position.

Nasty stuff, glad I've never been on the wrong side of it

[lukeskywalker]

Still being cleaned up as well as the ancient ordinance.

[AhsokaTanoTheWhite]

And some people don't realise, that there were so many dead bodies, and animals in the area when the war ended, that it was deemed impossible to remove it all, so it was just left to return to nature.

[dalemayfield]

I’d hate to be on that clean up crew👎😂

[lamarzimmermanmennonitefar]

There's 100 year old sheep fence in the woods above the house. Not rusting away anytime soon either...

[scrubsrc]

Our materials lecturer was a ballistics specialist at University and we did a lecture on how artillery didn't destroy it, jist tangled it even more.

[cianmcclees]

dear lord.. i always imagined it was alot, but over a million miles of it?? i cant even comprehend that distance... trying to clean it all up, clearing bodies, debris, all sorts of stuff. absolutely insane

[joethekinghawk]

What a gnarled mess, the western front was a nightmare during ww1.

[mrfixitusa]

I'm glad you posted this this is one I expect that I honestly had never really considered before the massive cleanup job of removing all that barbed wire and everything stuck in it.

And like you said it had been run over bombed everything else so it wasn't just miles of Tangled barbed wire it was embedded buried squished everything else...

I'm sure it's probably not even possible to know how much barbed wire from world war I is still out in the fields and woods throughout the world.

[Promilee]

I have 26 stitches on my left knee and 4 stitches on right shin from this stuff.

[Smachfest]

British artillery developed special shells, designed to shred the barbed wire before the troops went over.
The special shells had zero effect on the wire.
The hell those poor men had to WALK into. The other tactic was for the men not to run at the enemy.
Hundreds of men walked straight into machine gun fire.

[Aznprada]

Never ponder about the clean up after the war. That must have been a undertaking to say the least