Yes, on closer inspection its actually about one of the explosive filled mines dug under the German lines being detonated, not an artillery bombardment. Still a striking image though!
Grim and bleak though it was I wouldn’t describe it as depressing in a way a lot of modern comics seem to be, it was about ordinary, often decent, people caught up in the awfulness of war. It really is excellent though, I think I learned more from it than from my reading on the subject since.
Apparently of the five mines, mentioned above, that were dug under the German lines three detonated as planned, one was set off by a lightning strike in the 1960’s (I think) and the last is still under there somewhere.
I also recall reading about the huge shells from the German railway guns that were fired, some didn’t detonate and they dug themselves in so deep that they’re still making their way to the surface even today.
Fact is these great bombardments had almost no effect. The Germans knew the Soviets always launched a bombardment before attacking, so they pulled their troops back the night before and the shells just plowed up their abandoned positions. In WW1 the German trenches in particular were too well constructed to be badly damaged by even the heaviest bombardments. Soon as the shells lifted to allow the attack the German machine guns went to the slaughter.
The greatest account of the effective use of artillery is Hal Moore’s after action report on the battle at LZ X-Ray. Can probably find it with a bit of searching, the Moore and Galloway book about the same battle, We Were Soldiers Once, is also great, but stay away from the awful movie mess MG made of it.
Not just those. Every year farmers in the area dig up hundreds of *tons *of old shells. Also helmets, rifles, canteens, mines… They call it the Iron Harvest. Most of the time the plow merely goes “klunk” and the farmer gets to leave a pile of rusty UXO by the side of the nearest road and call the cops for pickup and safe disposal.
Sometimes it goes BOOM instead. The worst times, it goes Fschhhhhhh… (IIRC a whole town had to be evacuated in a hurry a few years ago because a store of old chlorine shells had gotten unearthed and aerosolized in a nearby forest)
What this description lacks is a sense of scale. Maaloy was tiny island with German gun positions on it. A British light cruiser and four destroyers, attacking just before dawn with complete surprise, put 500 high-velocity naval shells into an area 300 yards on a side in ten minutes.
The commandos landed unopposed and simply rounded up the stunned survivors.
Other parts of the operation gave them more trouble, but Maaloy was…neutralized.
If I remember correctly the Battle for Tarawa was one of the largest artillery attacks on such a small concentrated area. The Betio Atoll was a little more than half a square mile in total area and in around three hours the concentrated firepower of three battleships, two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and nine destroyers was unleashed on it along with a hundred aircraft that strafed and rocketed the island.
Anecdotically, something I learned recently : “grands invalides de guerre” (who for instance have priority for metro seats) included civilians who had been disabled as “collateral damage”. As a result, WW1 “grand invalide de guerre” cards were still delivered to people disabled by unexploded ordinance until some years ago (when the distinction between “war disabled” and “civilian disabled” was abolished), and the youngest of them is in his late 20s, IIRC.
I would still claim the big European battlefields of WW2 and WW1 can’t compare to the island campaigns of WW2 for concentrated bombardments. Iwo Jima for example is only 8 square miles but was bombarded for 3 days by hundreds of warships (actually fairly ineffectively, the original plan called for a 10 day bombardment).