War of 1914-1918 posed to the fighting powers not only the question of uninterrupted supply of multimillion-dollar armies with everything necessary, but also of the correct disposal and recycling of the garbage that these armies left behind - from glasses of shells and containers for fuel to torn shoes and food scraps. This was done by both ordinary soldiers and specially created units designed to clean up the places of hostilities from accumulating waste. In addition, in parallel with this, methods were developed for the secondary use of military property in the rear and in the army.
British experience
One British journalist astutely observed in 1918 that “nothing in the world is more meaningless than the army. After training in peacetime economics, the quartermaster sergeants, who ran the warehouses with the highest level of bureaucracy, on the battlefield force the army into the wildest extravagance.
In the conditions of trench warfare and an established supply of ammunition, such mounds of spent cartridges in artillery positions grew very quickly.
At the start of the war, “everything was sacrificed for speed in striking. The first phase of the battle in the West ended in powerless opposing forces in December 1914; the ammunition on both sides was nearly depleted, and the ground on which they fought abounded with the things they needed."
Apparently, the British army was almost the first to start collecting waste, because even before the economy was transferred to a war footing, it was in dire need of supplies. For example, British sappers "showed great interest in empty jars, beef and sardines." The troops were in dire need of hand grenades, and engineers had to improvise on the basis of empty cans.
An impressive mound of used horseshoes taken from horses.
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Also, contemporaries note the initiative of two wounded British officers who were ready for further active service, but gave the command the idea to simultaneously help the troops on the ground and find work for refugee women by opening a clothing repair shop in France. They began by gathering a few seamstresses and fixing the most torn uniforms, gradually transforming their institution into a magnificent uniform rescue organization.
Shoes were more important than clothes. The strength of the army depended on this, and for this reason the British commander-in-chief John French in June 1915 appointed Major General Sir John Stevens as the head of the central shoe repair shops. One such was opened in Calais in the fall of 1915, another was created in Mudros on the island of Lemnos during operations on Gallipoli and was subsequently taken to Thessaloniki.
After the end of hostilities, such rubbish had to be removed.
Later, a workshop was opened in Alexandria for the army operating in Palestine, while the army in Mesopotamia repaired its boots in Basra. Instead of 250,000 new shoes a week, only 100,000 were now required, which made it possible to significantly save on leather, as well as to transfer part of the shoe factories' capacity to provide for the Allied forces (of course, not free). At the same time, work was underway to create new models of shoes, with stronger soles and linings.
Since both the defense and the offensive depended on artillery, the serviceability of the gun park was a guarantee of victory. It was too expensive to ship every damaged gun to England, so special repair shops were created, and then a whole repair plant, where skilled workers were discharged from Britain.
A sign at the British front-line dump, calling not to drown recyclables in the mud, but to collect it for further processing and send it to Fritz.
Car breakdowns then forced the concept of auto repair shops to rethink, because even if the chassis was completely broken, the engine often remained in working order and could be used.
However, when new British forces arrived in France in the summer of 1916, along with an incredible amount of materials, the old system of property saving and scrap collection was abandoned. The amount of waste grew very quickly, since the quality of the equipment supplied to the front was low due to poor raw materials, inexperience of new ammunition manufacturers, etc.
German initiative
The Germans, under the influence of the Entente blockade and a sharp reduction in the import of vital materials from the summer of 1916, launched a gigantic campaign to collect and process all the resources available at the front and occupied territories: metal, fabrics, food waste and sources of fat.
British soldiers burn tin solder out of empty cans.
Products and waste of lead, tin, copper, aluminum and other valuable metals were collected by special teams that went around house after house in Belgium. Contemporaries note that millions of empty cans were carefully collected and sent to metallurgical enterprises to recover the valuable tin. For this purpose, old banks were collected even in neutral countries, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, and then shipped to Germany.
All supplies of clothing were also controlled by the German government. All worn-out woolen items were to be handed over to the authorities. Mattresses with wool or cotton padding were counted, confiscated and returned to the owners already packed with paper, seaweed or shavings. All leather stocks were taken into account by the army, and process engineers conducted continuous experiments to develop artificial leather and rubber for shoes.
British army warehouse for sorting and repairing soldiers' shoes. https://www.iwm.org.uk - Garbage War | Warspot.ru British army warehouse for the sorting and repair of soldiers' shoes.
All the supplies that the Germans managed to capture were carefully counted and sent to army warehouses. In this respect, as observers note, Ludendorff, Hindenburg and Mackensen were perhaps the best German "rescuers of things." After the next withdrawal of the enemy, a quick and accurate recount of the captured property took place.
Interestingly, the most intense campaign focused on the collection of fats for the production of nitroglycerin. "At home, the Germans organized a systematic collection of pips from which oil could be extracted, and began that strange search for fat that the Allies stopped laughing at when they also discovered that fat was one of the main problems of the war." In addition, the fat was used for the production of grease for weapons. The fat harvesting campaign has generated a lot of strange rumors, both among the Germans and among their opponents.
Garbage collection on the battlefield
The British also wanted to awaken their soldiers' interest in collecting and recycling garbage. They began collecting trash from the battlefield towards the conclusion of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, but as a rule, officers had to watch the soldiers if they wanted their division to distinguish itself in the eyes of the quartermaster general.
Loading bones, from which fat will be extracted, and then burned on bone charcoal. Collected in the background are empty kerosene cans.
Nevertheless, there were enthusiasts like the Guards Brigade, which, during the Third Battle of Ypres, began collecting property left in no man's land. The guardsmen collected, in particular, a million rounds of ammunition that fell out of the cartridge bags, and calculated that by collecting the waste of one battle, they reimbursed the salary of their unit, including benefits for wives and children. However, it was impossible to save everything, and the weapons continued to lie in the ground after the battles for decades, posing a danger to civilians.
And in the fall of 1917, Andrew Weir, the new British Surveyor General of Supplies, visited France in connection with the creation of a scrap collection unit. Observers noted that a lot of work had already been done to collect fat, metal and rags, but Weir believed that this was not enough.
German "stalhelms" carefully collected by the British awaiting disposal.
A feature of Weir's plan to preserve the economic power of the Entente was a system of careful collection of waste, installed directly in the places where supplies are most quickly and recklessly spent. Therefore, at Weir's direction, a special post-battle property collection unit was created to coordinate military operations with commercial waste disposal work. Special efforts were made to prevent the accumulation of large stocks of scrap, as it was found that they only lead to even greater losses due to spoilage.
Weir's initiative, while receiving command support, was sabotaged on the ground. The soldiers were already tired of endless battles and therefore were looking for the slightest excuse to evade what they thought (the expanded propaganda campaign was ignored), work on the disposal of waste and damaged property. In addition, the teams specially created for this were too small. The ones arranged in the winter of 1917 - in the spring of 1918 helped the best. competitions between divisions with prizes. The winners also had an additional vacation, for which the soldiers were ready to do anything. They began to happily go on patrols to the no-man's land, as this promised many finds suitable for scrapping.
French women choose shell casings from metal trash for further disposal.
By the end of the war, when the American Expeditionary Force moved to Europe with its disposal and repair system, the Entente and its opponents already had excellent workshops and teams that found, dismantled, stored and repaired everything that could be useful in the future. Tin cans, cartridges, cans, torn clothes and leaky shoes always found someone who was ready to pick them up and hand over them for reward for recycling.
Yaroslav Golubinov