Swiss Pleas

Ah Yes, 'Helvetia' As The Locals Call It

Beautiful Switzerland!  The land of majestic snowy mountains, precision watches, chocolate and enormous piles of obsolete ordnance.

     Wait what?

     Yes, massive dumps of artillery shells, bombs, grenades and all sorts of other juicy material designed to go BANG!  Art?

     This is the Swiss village of Mitholz, which we have covered three years ago on the blog, as it, too, was the site of an enormous ammunition dump that partially exploded in 1947.  

BOOJUM!: How Did I Miss This? (comsatangel2002.blogspot.com)

     Three years back.  As for the immediate aftermath of said event in 1947 - Art!

     What you need to understand is that Switzerland during the Cold War was not merely an idyllic picture-postcard landscape, it also bristled with weaponry: every Swiss male of military age had to serve time in the army and take his personal weapon home with him.  They pre-positioned mines and demolition charges in tunnels and on bridges in case the Sinisters managed to get as far as their country.  For decades they drilled with live ordnance because, being very Teutonic in nature, they deemed it proper to get things right.  Art!

Picturesque - yet DEADLY

     The thing is, when you move from one artillery or tank gun to a new model, the old ammunition becomes obsolete, or batches of shells or grenades made in 1972 get to be long beyond their sell-by-date.  What to do with them?  Well, you take them and dump them in Lake Neuchatel, as seen above, to the mass of 4,500 tons.  Also Lake Lucerne (3,000 tons).  Also Lake Brienz (no idea but lots).  Then you ignore them for decades.  A bit mad, I know.  Art!

     Yes, that is Alfred E. Neuman of "Mad" fame.  Surname sounds very Swiss, doesn't it?

     ANYWAY the Swiss authorities have now become decidedly twitchy about leaving all those munitions in the sweet waters of their nation, thanks to the possibility of highly toxic explosive compounds, or their decomposition products, leaking into the various lakes they sit in.  Also, some were dumped in shallow water of less than 20 feet depth, which is going to pose major life changes to anyone in their vicinity were they to go BANG!  Especially since shallow water implies close to shore, where most people muck about.  Art!

Spiez

     This tranquil village sits on the shore of Lake Brienz.  For the moment.

     Determined not to re-invent the wheel, the Swiss authorities are now offering ₣50,000 to anyone who can come up with a viable SAFE solution to remove all the abandoned ordnance.  Feel free to offer your brainwaves but only Swiss citizens will get the dosh.  Don't forget the ammunition can be as small as a grenade - Art!

Safely disposed of!
Not.

     To one-ton bombs.  Art!

     I don't think there's going to be a one-size-fits-all-solution here.  Conrad predicts Remote Underwater Vehicles will be used to scout things out at the very least, and perhaps attach inflatable balloons to the larger items, to float them to the surface, where a robot barge will upload them for transit.  For smaller items a trawl net, towed very slowly over the ammo?  And a submarine drone with a pincer arm to recover medium-sized objects?

     For those who would like to dump - Do you see wh - O you do - on the Swiss army and air force (I don't think they have a navy), they were advised at the time by consulting geologists that the practice of hoiking what amounted to a small nuclear-weapon's worth of munitions into the watery depths was perfectly fine.  You can tell this isn't South Canada or the lawsuits would have been flying like bullets on a battlefield.  Art!

     I was wrong - that's 1/5 of the Swiss navy right there; they have 10 patrol boats that cover their international borders on the major lakes.

     Get your little grey cells working, pilgrims!

If I Were To Say "Turtle Tank"

You'd guess incorrectly, because this is another Berni Wrightson illo.  Art!

     At first glimpse you can't tell if this is an enormous Loggerhead turtle, as big as a tank, or they are extremely minute people.  Except cunning Ol' Bern recognised that as a potential problem and has a set of reeds and bullrushes atop the monster's shell.  So, yes, it is a turtle the size of a tank.

     Once again, no attribution on the page I found it on, so I'm not going to credit them with their webpage description.

     AHA!  A bit of Googling reveals that this is a card from an FPG, whatever that is, and is #68.  There's even an explanation of Ol' Bern's on the reverse.  Art!

     There's considerably more about this item, which we will DEFINITELY go into at a later date.

Does He Have Noodles On His Ears?

This is a Ruffian saying, meaning 'Do you think I'm stupid enough to believe what you're saying?' and the answer seems to be a resounding 'Yes!' for many of the denizens of Modern-day Mordor.

     As we have mentioned in days past, there is a SPECTACULAR fire raging at the Proletarsk oil depot in the Rostov Oblast, this being Day Seven of a fire too big to be extinguished.  This has led to unkind critics (yours truly included) amending the name of the oblast to either "Rostove" or "Roastov".  Art!

     Typically, Ruffian state television has completely ignored this enormous oily bonfire, leaving it to Telegram and locals to explain what's happening.  Art!

     This dude is Maxim Tolinskiy, the Mayor of Proletarsk, the town sitting dangerously close to the oil depot, which the 20,000 residents only now realise is quite the health hazard.  His broadcast was mid-week, which is a long time ago in both politics and firefighting.  Art!

     This is dangerously close to a Falling-Out-Of-Window level of admission, because the official Kremlin version is always "All the drones were intercepted but debris from one of them caused a minor fire which has already been put out".  Maxim, in an attempt to avoid consuming tea made with extract of Thallium, then goes on to say- 

     Says he with a looming cloud of combusted petroleum products overhead.  Besides which, I bet they'd been driving at 90 m.p.h. not running.  If he did a quick census there might be a lot fewer residents of Proletarsk than he fondly imagines, because thanks to fields of grass catching fire, the flames are now inside the town limits.  Art!

     Ruffia.  What's not flooded is on fire.

"Where Eagles Dare" And Real Life

As you should surely know by now, Conrad is reading Peter Longenrich's extremely detailed biography of Heinrich Himmler.  I am now up to 1935, where HH has become Reichsfuhrer SS, a position of considerable power and influence, which he was determined to increase in power and influence, successfully, too.

     Let us now jump to that most revered of Second Unpleasantness films, WED, which is immensely entertaining tosh, not least because one of the armoured vehicles seen is actually a Sixties Teuton pa

     ANYWAY Art!

The inn scene

     I shall now append a quote I dug up about this scene.

• Lt. Morris Schaffer: What were you and that major talking about?
• Major John Smith: I told him I was Himmler's brother.
• Lt. Morris Schaffer: Yeah, well I can see why that would shake him up a little.

     This is not as unlikely as you think.  HH had two brothers, Gebhart and Ernst and Richard Burton's character is not unlike Gebhart in appearance.  Ol' Gebby had enjoyed lots of power and success in the wake of his younger brother, and the only thing one might jib at is that he would surely have joined the SS, not the Wehrmacht.  Still, not a detail a humble officer would pick an argument about.  Art!

There it is, the piker!

Finally -

To end on a note of domestic harmony, I am now going to brew a flask of coffee and get a bit of lunch.  Very prosaic, I know.  Not all my posts can be of earth-shattering import.