Bully-Grenay (Pas-de-Calais) - Bridge After Bombardment. And the Paradis Massacre.

            The Postcard

A postally unused carte postale that was published by Huret of 15, Rue de Saint-Quentin, Paris. The card has a divided back.

The image shows a bombarded bridge on the railway line running from Briat to Saint-Pol.

Abba Eban

"History teaches us that men and
nations behave wisely when they
have exhausted all other alternatives".

This was said during a speech in London UK on 16th. December 1970 by Abba Eban (1915-2002), an Israeli diplomat and writer.

Visé à Paris No. 6

The reference to 'Visé à Paris' followed by a unique reference number means that the image has been inspected by the military authorities in the French capital and deemed not to be a security risk.

'Visé à Paris' signifies that the card was published during or soon after the end of the Great War.

Béthune in the Great War

Bully-Grenay is about 15 km south-east of Béthune in the Pas-de-Calais.

During the Great War, Béthune was an important railway junction and command centre for the British Canadian Corps and Indian Expeditionary Force, as well as the 33rd. Casualty Station.

The town initially suffered little damage until the second phase of the Ludendorff Offensive in April 1918, when German forces reached Locon, 5 km (3 mi) away. On the 21st. May, a bombardment destroyed large parts of the town, killing more than 100 civilians. 

Over 3,200 casualties are buried in Béthune Town Cemetery, the Commonwealth section of which was designed by Edwin Lutyens; the majority are British (2,933) or Canadian (55), the remainder German.

Béthune in World War II

Rebuilt after the Great War, Béthune was badly damaged once more by air attacks and house-to-house fighting on the 24th. to the 26th. May 1940 when it was captured by the SS Panzer Division Totenkopf. 

The Totenkopf suffered heavy casualties, and anger at their losses played a role in the Paradis Massacre on the 27th. May, when 97 members of the Royal Norfolk Regiment were shot after surrendering. During the World War II, many townspeople were deported to work in Germany.

Béthune was officially liberated on the 4th. September 1944.

The Use of Artillery in the Great War

Artillery was very heavily used by both sides during the Great War.   The British fired over 170 million artillery rounds of all types, weighing more than 5 million tons - that's an average of around 70 pounds (32 kilos) per shell.

If the 170m rounds were on average two feet long, and if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 64,394 miles (103,632 kilometres); the line would go round the equator over two and a half times. If the artillery of the Central Powers of Germany and its allies is factored in, the figure can be doubled to 5 encirclements of the planet.

During the first two weeks of the Third Battle of Ypres, over 4 million rounds were fired at a cost of over £22,000,000 - a huge sum of money, especially over a century ago.

Artillery was the killer and maimer of the war of attrition.

According to Dennis Winter's book 'Death's Men' three quarters of battle casualties were caused by artillery rounds. According to John Keegan ('The Face of Battle') casualties were:

- Bayonets - less than 1%

- Bullets - 30%

- Artillery and Bombs - 70% 

Keegan suggests however that the ratio changed during advances, when massed men walking line-abreast with little protection across no-man's land were no match for for rifles and fortified machine gun emplacements.

Many artillery shells fired during the Great War failed to explode. Drake Goodman provides the following information on Flickr:  

"During World War I, an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient alone, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the German forces fired at each other were "duds", and most of them have not been recovered."

The Somme Times

From 'The Somme Times', Monday, 31 July, 1916:

'There was a young girl of the Somme,
Who sat on a number five bomb,
She thought 'twas a dud 'un,
But it went off sudden -
Her exit she made with aplomb!'

Taken on: February 3, 2022

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