Military Archaeology

A perennial problem at this beach.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-57119069?fbclid=IwAR3XlUGwp-qbeeeNW8bGQLH8ieAEe4WxMuVJvorYtKZXh78UT4ldfn9fiyg

 

Sorry if this was before....

Brit heroes among bodies of 125 WWI soldiers found entombed in German trench 101 years after they were killed

‘NEVER GIVEN PEACE’
Brit heroes among bodies of 125 WW1 soldiers found entombed in German trench 101 years after they were killed

Advancing German troops attempted to break through the defending British and French lines.

In one of the Great War's bloodiest conflicts, 58,155 allied soldiers were killed while 46,765 Germans died in the space of a month.

The archaeological site was known to the allies as Hill 80 and was held by the Germans until June 1917 when it was taken by British and Irish troops during the Battle of Messines.

 

What a grim job.
"Forensic archaeologists and anthropologists from Cranfield University have started to recover the bodies of victims executed by the Franco regime at the end of the Spanish Civil War during an excavation in the Ciudad Real region of Spain.
The team from Cranfield is working with partners from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and social anthropologists from Mapas de Memoria (Maps of Memory) to search for, exhume and identify those executed and buried in the civil cemetery at Almagro between 1939 and 1940.
Several bodies with gunshot wounds to the head, personal effects and parts of clothing have already been recovered and in total the team are searching for 26 people in this excavation which is focused on a separate area of the graveyard that has been closed for decades.
Families of victims have been found in the hope of identifying relatives through DNA analysis and returning the human remains for proper burial.
This exhumation is part of a number of recoveries from the Spanish Civil War which are currently being investigated in Spain. Since 2000, over 7,000 victims have been recovered."
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/cu-fab052421.php

 

Sad that it's only just been found.
'In 1944, a US Air Force Dakota aircraft vanished over Wales en route from Paris.
Its four passengers were believed to have died in a crash, but the plane's fate has never been revealed, until now.
High temperatures at Llyn Dulyn meant the waters have parted to reveal a secret hidden in Snowdonia's waters for 75 years."
Heatwave solves mystery of plane's fate from 1944

 

Nice find.
"A shipwreck in the middle of the Southern Irish Sea, previously thought to be that of a submarine, has now been identified as the minesweeper, HMS Mercury.
The discovery has been made as part of a joint project between Maritime Archaeologists at Bournemouth University and scientists at Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences, who have been combining marine archives with high-resolution multibeam sonar data to try and identify many of the unknown wreck sites located off our coast.
Originally built as a Clyde-based ferry, HMS Mercury was requisitioned by the Admiralty in 1939 to serve as minesweeper. It sank in 1940 after being damaged by a mine that it was attempting to clear and was reported lost off Southern Ireland."
www.bournemouth.ac.uk/news/2021-09-02/discovery-minesweeper-hms-mercury

 

How pirates destroyed the capital of the Roman slave trade

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p09tvctz/how-pirates-destroyed-the-capital-of-the-roman-slave-trade

The island of Delos in Greece was described by ancient Roman writers as 'the biggest market on the whole planet' and it became the heart of the Roman slave trade. However, Delos was heavily reliant on an uneasy relationship with pirates - one that would eventually cause its downfall.

 

El Alamein, conflict archaeology to save the battlefield about to disappear - Archaeoreporter

The El Alamein Project is an exhaustive reconnaissance of the original locations where the battles of El Alamein took place in 1942, making it a perfect example of conflict archaeology. It involves a census and an initiative to preserve the military posts, remains, documents and material evidence that can still be found in the desert west of Alexandria, Egypt, where the Italian and German Axis forces fought against the Commonwealth and other allied nations, including France (July, August and October/November 1942).

Plans currently exist to build a large, modern city of about 2 million people between the sea and the desert. New Alamein will erase much of the battlefield and its material evidence. In fact, this process has already begun: the 8-lane motorway runs over posts that were heroically held by the Italian Folgore division. In the future, other posts will be “obliterated” as well. The El Alamein Project is also an example of public archaeology, as it sees the participation of members of the public.

An Italian Air Force collection has made it possible to study these invaluable historical aerial photographs. A preliminary Italian aerial reconnaissance of the battlefield just before the attempted breakthrough by Axis troops proved unsuccessful due to problems with developing the photographs. A second mission managed to bring some photographic material back to base, but the Air Force units ran out of film when they reached the very spot where the Italians and Germans were supposed to cross with their tanks to outflank the British (30 August 1942). The defences and the extension of the minefields remained unknown.

The gaps in intelligence caused precious time to be lost at a decisive moment. This event was certainly not the reason for the defeat, but it helped the Commonwealth forces, which had also intercepted useful information via Ultra to their advantage, to defend the front in the desert.

 

That's a bleedin' big hole!
"A team of expert archaeologists have successfully uncovered the remnants of a German V2 terror rocket 77 years after it detonated in a Kent field at speeds of up to 3,300 mph.
Colin and Sean Welch, who run Research Resource Archaeology, began digging on Monday at St Mary's Platt and uncovered the first remnants on Tuesday after excavating a 9.5m hole."
Nazi terror weapon unearthed in cornfield

 

An interesting one, though they don't appear to be battle losses-
"The Pacific Ocean's Ring of Fire is one of the most seismically unstable regions in the world. Dotted with towering volcanoes and consistently troubled by earthquakes, it's also the birthplace of an abundance of new islands—some temporary, others permanent—rising up out of the waves and continuing to grow. One such place is Iwo Jima, a spit of land south of Japan famous for the raging battle fought there between American and Japanese forces in 1945.
The war, of course, is very much over. But plate tectonics never stop. This month, a recent burst of seismic activity on the island, now known as Iō Tō in Japan, has lifted numerous WWII shipwrecks from the ocean, leaving them littered across a new black sand beach like ruins from Planet of the Apes. Three-quarters of a century after the fighting ceased, ghosts of the conflict that defined the modern world are still emerging from the blue waters of the Pacific.
To be clear, these ships aren't victims of a battle; instead, the U.S. Navy intentionally scuttled them at the location in 1945 after taking the island in an attempt to create an artificial breakwater for a planned harbor. Several of them are reinforced concrete barges, ships built to support naval operations and not necessarily for any direct combat role. Four of them are former cargo vessels, at least one of which is Japanese according to naval documents. As the island rises by between 10 and 30 inches per year—the beach where U.S. forces landed in 1945 is now over 50 feet above sea level—they are "moving" from offshore relics to eerie onshore monoliths."
www.thedrive.com/news/42802/volcanic-activity-lifts-sunken-wwii-ghost-ships-from-the-ocean-off-iwo-jima?fbclid=IwAR2MkV40Jm_kGSXsqY7H4BqU7IaZjDfLRK-GRpp0KZtqDzU_UsncNHsCv3Q

 

Ring of fire...As you can see Australia sits in the middle of its plate and is not directly affected by the "Ring of Fire" (You have to say that in a deep ominous voice)
Did you know Australia has dominion over around 8 thousand islands?


These wrecks must have been exposed for quite a while...i would expect to see coral growth on these hulls. It was discovered not long ago that artificial reefs actually promote larger fish numbers than natural ones...good to know.


.

 

Good map. Only one of those trenches I'd heard of was the Marianas, courtesy of good ol' Jacques Cousteau.

 

This just appeared on my FB feed. Some enterprising chap has just compiled a database of pillboxes in the Republic of Ireland. Good on 'im!
www.google.com/maps/@56.1283072,-3.93216,14z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m3!11m2!2snJjOwxcnnr0FNhNOfMIM4UxRwwgqsg!3e3

 

Some folk just have all the luck.
"A magnet fisherman was left shocked when he pulled six Second World War submachine guns from a canal.
Nigel Lamford, 50, lifted the 'Sten' Mk II guns out of the water using his specially-made magnet, which can lift over a ton of metal.
He made the find last month after throwing his device into a boggy canal in Weedon Bec, Northamptonshire, near the former Royal Ordnance Depot site.
He pulled out a magazine, followed by the gun and stock he re-assembled on the bank.
Lamford, from Kettering, Northamptonshire, said: "A find like that was just the best find ever in my opinion.
"You can find some amazing stuff, but I've never found so many guns in such good condition together."
The grime-covered weapon was the first of six Lamford and his friends pulled from the depths of the canal.
Thrilled with the discovery, the magnet fishermen posed with the weapons before they were taken away to a local military museum.
Father-of-three Lamford thinks the weapons – which could be fired if they were cleaned out – are worth around £1,000 each.
The auto-electrician pulled the Stens from the canal during a 10-hour fishing session on 9 January."
Fisherman pulls six Second World War machine guns from canal

 

This is a fascinating thread

 

Love how everything with tracks is a "tank" these days.
"ARCHAEOLOGISTS have ended a decades-long hunt for a World War 2-era German vehicle as severe drought causes it to re-emerge.
The exceptional drought in Italy caused a German military half-track vehicle re-surface from the River Po in Northern Italy. The decades-long search for this vehicle finally ended after it was found and recovered in Sermide, in the province of Mantua. The vehicle was pushed into the river by retreating German troops in April 1945 to prevent it from falling into the hands of US soldiers.
At the time, a British reconnaissance plane spotted the vehicle, however, the tank remained elusive despite repeated attempts to find it.
Samuele Bernini, a volunteer of the Second World War Museum in Sermide and Felonica, discovered the vehicle on March 25 after he spotted metal sheets sticking out of the sand."
www.express.co.uk/news/science/1587478/wold-war-2-archaeology-news-german-vehicle-found-drought-mystery-solved

 

Think they found a lot of human remains at the same site previously-
"Archaeologists have uncovered 'extremely rare' remains of men and horses killed during the Battle of Waterloo more than 200 years ago.
Academics and a team of military veterans digging near Brussels in modern-day Belgium have unearthed the complete skeleton of a man, believed to be a soldier under the command of the Duke of Wellington, who died during the pivotal clash with Napoleon's French army.
The soldier's remains have been unearthed in a ditch close to a farmhouse in Mont-Saint-Jean, south of Brussels, which is thought to have housed one of Wellington's field hospitals. His body is thought to have been dumped there after he died during treatment, alongside severed arms and legs removed during amputations.
Elsewhere, dig teams have uncovered the bones of horses killed during the battle - which were used to pull cannons and ammunition, as well as being used by mounted soldiers.
'I've been a battlefield archaeologist for 20 years and have never seen anything like it. We won't get any closer to the harsh reality of Waterloo than this,' said Professor Tony Pollard, an archeologist from Glasgow University."
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11009313/Rare-human-skeleton-uncovered-Battle-Waterloo-site.html

 

Just wonder. Maybe I am wrong all the way. ln Waterloo both sides expected more troops. The Prussians came earlier just hours in time and turned the tide??? And Napoleon lost thus. Read books and seen some documents on this. Comments?

 

You're right-
Battle of Wavre - Wikipedia

 

Thanx Gordon. Cheers. Kph