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DETONATION OF HIGH EXPLOSIVE IN SHELL AND BOMB, AND ITS EFFECTS

1939; BMJ; Volume: 2; Issue: 4111 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/bmj.2.4111.816

0959-8138

D. D. Logan,

In the official Medical History of the War, in order to show how little novelty there is in warfare and to point out that mining dates back to remote antiquity, I quoted an ancient historian who described the use of asphyxiating gas in mining at the Siege of Ambracia in the year 189 B.C. On that occasion the Aetolians filled jars with feathers.These feathers were then set on fire and the resulting smoke blown by bellows into the faces of the Romans. 189B.C.! Yet the method adopted by the Germans more than a thousand years later was somewhat similar.In France, in 1917, a group of collieries in the Bethune district was one of the few remaining fields in active operation.Although one of the collieries, Fosse 8, in this very important mine system was in enemy hands, and all the shaft heads and the mining villages of Annequin, Vermelles, Philosophe.etc., had been frequently shelled, the French had been able to continue working.At the height of the submarine menace, when there was an urgent demand for coal by the French, the Germans made a determined effort to stop production in these collieries.Unfortunately the French had delayed building off FoEse 8, which was still used as a downcast shaft.Great quantities of chloropicrin gas were thrown down this shaft.Powerful fans, the modern development of the bellows used by the Aetolians, were installed in one of the collieries.These carried the gas to all quarters of the system, killing many French miners who wereb at work, and also members of a British tunnelling company who were on guard.The gas was so concentrated as to render respirators useless.Gas warfare, as it is understood to-day, is the natural evolution of the use of explosives and dates back to the sixteenth century, when gunpowder revolutionized warfare.With its introduction the possibilities of offensive mining in all phases of fortress warfare greatly increased.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gas poison'ing from the fumes of exploded gunpowder was of frequent occurrence.