The next morning, Tuesday, November 22, 1966, was warm and sunny as I walked from US Army Post Verdun to the battlefield. Nearly fifty years to the day earlier, in 1916, one of the most horrific battles in human history came to a close in that village. troops get out of the country, and I was in a five-ton truck with trailer, driven by a soldier from another unit, when our truck broke in Verdun. President Charles de Gaulle had demanded that all U.S. My next acquaintance with craters took place when I was a parachute rigger in Germany and sent to France to retrieve a load of G-11 cargo parachutes. On the other hand, when a solid like black powder is suddenly turned to gas in a millionth of a second, it needs lots of space, and everything is flung out of the way, whether it’s tons of dirt, body parts from hundreds of soldiers, or the minie rifle ball from a Civil War musket. If the transformation happens slowly, it can appear nonviolent, as, for example, the creation of ferric oxide (rust) but if the chemical change happens suddenly, it will appear as an explosion. The result is an exothermic oxidation-reduction reaction, in which heat is given off. This happens when the bonds of electrons are broken at the molecular level, where more than one atom is held together by sharing electrons. The igniting black powder used to blow the hole in the lines, and to fire all the rifles and cannon on both sides, was chemical energy. The Confederates counterattacked, and by dawn, they had encircled the Federals with muskets and cannons, killing 504 men and wounding 2,000 more in a horrific “turkey shoot.” But instead of maneuvering to the flanks, they ran into the crater, seeking shelter from rifle fire, and became bogged in loose, pulverized earth. The explosion blew a hole in the Confederate lines and immediately killed 278 men as thousands of Union troops charged forward into the darkness. ![]() In the early morning hours of Saturday, July 30, 1864, Union troops detonated eight thousand pounds of black powder beneath Confederate trenches during the Siege of Petersburg. ![]() Driving outside the city of Petersburg, Virginia, we came to the Civil War site commemorating the “Battle of the Crater.” Before us was a cavernous hole in the ground 170 feet long, 110 feet wide, and 30 feet deep, covered with grass. I was with my parents, who were visiting before I shipped off to Germany. That afternoon, I saw my second crater and observed the 102-year-old effect of a chemical reaction.
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