Menaces en mers du Nord

I learned to swim in the murky waters of the North Sea,

where the remains of five centuries of naval battles lie.

This world of submerged wrecks seemed all the more fascinating to me

because it was hidden.

While diving, I realized the extent of the military debris that the 20th century left there.

Because in the North Sea and the Baltic, the Allies have deliberately sunk ships

carrying hundreds of millions of tonnes of chemical weapons.

Today, we multiply the commemorations of the two world wars, while under water,

the metal fuselages which contain these substances corrode.

If we don't act, scientists predict an unprecedented catastrophe.

Ammunition kills silently, as chemical compounds

continue to spill into the sea.

Why were these chemical weapons dumped into the sea?

How can we react, in order to protect people and the environment,

before it is too late?

Because this terrible heritage is ready to resurface,

as if salt water was preventing the scars of history from closing.

THREATS IN THE NORTH SEAS

At the beginning of the 20th century, the North Sea became the place of confrontation of industrial nations.

France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Germany are fighting there

for commercial and political hegemony.

The first industrial war in Europe saw the development of new weapons,

like the submarine, the plane, the tank,

and the deadly chemical weapons.

A chemical weapon is two things. It is first of all a toxic agent,

that is to say, a substance capable of having a toxic effect on its target,

in this case, man, since we are in the context of human conflicts.

And this toxic agent must be coupled with a dissemination system,

it can be a bomb, it can be a rocket, it can be an aerosol, it can be a grenade.

It has an almost psychological, very strong psychiatric dimension, it is very scary.

Replacing the usual din of infantry assaults,

I imagine the dead silence of a green cloud weighing 168 tons,

sweeping over the French lines,

and instantly poisoning nearly 15,000 soldiers.

It was in 1915 that the Germans used chlorine-based combat gases for the first time,

near Ypres, in Belgian Flanders.

The world had just entered the era of chemical weapons.

During the great war, all the belligerents developed combat gases.

The soldiers protect themselves with more or less sophisticated masks.

Substances are detectable by their odor.

Phosphorus smells of freshly mown hay,

mustard gas, also called yperite in memory of its deadly use in Ypres, smells of garlic,

lewicite smells of geraniums,

and hydrogen cyanide evokes bitter almonds.

These olfactory indices will be corrected by German chemists,

and the next generation of gas will kill stealthily.

I wondered what had become of these toxic arsenals after the armistice.

My first surprise was to discover that access to French military archives was prohibited.

On the other hand, in the archives of the Royal Belgian Army, I found a document

from May 1919, advising the Ministry of War

to clear its territory of abandoned munitions,

and, in particular, asphyxiating gases.

It is specified that the most effective way is to drown this ammunition at sea,

so the minister ordered to dump 35,000 tonnes of chemical weapons

on the sandbank of Paardenmarkt, close to the upscale beach of Knokke.

Because this site is very close to a densely populated area,

it is today one of the best documented in Europe.

Dumping sites have been around for a long time, since 1919,

when ammunition was found in Belgium after First World War.

It was mostly German ammunition.

There were many accidents, explosions,

so we had to get rid of this dangerous ammunition.

They chose to dump them very close to the shore,

so that they could use smaller boats.

They wouldn't have to go very far, as it was very dangerous

to transport a lot of chemical munitions over a long distance.

35,000 tonnes of chemical weapons is the equivalent

of over a thousand of our current semi-trailers,

buried a few hundred meters from the industrial port of Zeebrugge and the beach of Knokke.

In addition to the danger of this proximity,

the depth of the site is extremely shallow,

with some areas of the deposit under less than one meter.

Today, the currents have covered the bombs with a film of sand and marine sediment.

Is it the opacity of the North Sea,

or the vagaries of an eventful history, which made this site disappear from memories?

It ended, I think, in the spring of 1920.

But everyone forgot about it, until the 1970s,

during maintenance work on the port of Zeebrugge,

when a dredger hit big obstacles at the bottom of the sea.

Let's say it's still part of our historical heritage.

It is a relic of a war, which nevertheless greatly affected our regions,

Flanders, Belgium, France.

And suddenly, we are faced with a trace left by war.

Today, the official position is that those responsible for these spills

were unaware of the potential dangers.

However, from 1919, the mayor of Knokke worried about the idea

of ​​chemical spills in front of the beaches of his municipality.

He then wrote a letter to the Minister of War,

in which he expressed his concerns for the health of the coast and the future of coastal fishing.

The latter replied curtly:

"It is the fastest solution, and the dangers mentioned will not arise".

However, we now know that their degradation in water can increase their harmfulness.

The main danger comes from clark, which is made up of arsenic.

Most chemicals, breaking down in water, remain extremely toxic.

They can remain toxic for a very long time.

Mustard gas is not a gas.

None of these gases are truly gaseous.

It's like a very thick liquid.

If it is in seawater for a long time, it will become brittle and hard.

It will then become a kind of lump.

This lump is very poisonous, but it stays on the seafloor.

It's a problem, but very localized, it doesn't spread very far.

For safety reasons, fishing and anchoring in the area is prohibited.

But navigation is not prohibited there and I can still see the sailing school of my childhood.

The biggest threat is a shipwreck in the area.

Besides, in 2001, a container ship ran aground near the site.

Had the bow of the ship plowed the sands of the Paardenmarkt,

the ship would probably have set off an explosion,

contaminating the coasts of Belgium, Holland, and France.

Should we wait for an unprecedented maritime disaster

to inspect the corrosion of the shells?

In 1972, a report concluded that the ammunition fuselage

was in relatively good condition.

But 40 years later, we have no idea what the condition of the fuselages is.

And that's something we would like to know.

The fuselages may still be intact,

or perhaps much of it is already corroded.

There are few countries where a single site has been the subject of repeated studies

in such a sustained fashion,

knowing all the same, that we are fortunate enough to only have one such site,

so we were able to focus on this site, knowing that elsewhere in the world,

the dimension of the problem is much greater.

All the coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea are affected.

And new sites appear.

In the North Sea, there are around fifty identified sites.

But that figure doesn't take into account the many forgotten dumpings.

It is therefore impossible to precisely identify all the deposit sites.

France, which is the country most affected by the dumpings,

hinders any attempt to access information on dumping sites.

It is again in the Belgian archives, that I discovered a letter from the Ministry of War

advising to be inspired by French and English methods.

I am apparently not the first to snoop in these embarrassing papers,

since the information note concerning France has disappeared.

I cannot imagine that France has no dumping site

for conventional munitions or chemical munitions.

Maybe there are, but we know absolutely nothing about it.

There is a real culture of secrecy in France, which is still very present,

which is very different from Anglo-Saxon cultures,

there is a reluctance to communicate these data,

even though they might be 20, 30, 40, 50, or even 100 years old,

from the Ministry of Defense.

The French army denies all access to these archives classified "Very classified",

the highest degree of military classification.

Examining the navigation charts, I discovered about sixty forbidden zones

along the coasts of France, including the one facing Gravelines,

where the Belgians dumped German chemical shells.

The archives of regional newspapers report daily dumpings near Dunkirk,

in Boulogne-sur-Mer, then the leading French fishing port,but in Cherbourg too.

Did the production of chemical weapons cease after First World War?

France had been a victim during the First World War of German initiatives.

Therefore, French policy on chemical weapons has often been marked, after this date,

by the desire never to be surprised by the Germans again,

so France reinitiated, in 1921-1922, an important military chemical program,

and with the rise in tensions at the beginning of the 1930s, all the belligerents,

be they Russia, England, Germany, including the United States,

initiated relatively large military chemical programs.

Besides, everyone expected that an eventual Second World War

would have a chemical dimension.

Not only, everyone thought that Second World War

would be a chemical conflict,

but in 1934, the Nazis discovered a new family: neurotoxins,

whose effectiveness is 10,000 times greater than the gases of First World War.

The race for chemical weapons therefore resumed during the interwar period.

In preparation for the bombardments against the Soviet army,

the Luftwaffe is heavily equipped with these secret weapons that Germany alone has.

And yet, these chemical strikes will not see the light of day,

despite the insistence of high-ranking Nazi officials, who dream of annihilating the Red Army,

after the defeat of Stalingrad.

Obviously, one will always ask the question whether the Germans had known

that they alone had the recipe for organophosphate neurotoxicants,

perhaps the Führer's decision would have been different,

because indeed, their use would probably

have conferred an absolutely incredible advantage on them

on the battlefield, particularly on the Eastern Front.

The German chemical hegemony would probably have delayed the end of the conflict.

But in the summer of 1945, Germany was defeated without having used its secret weapons,

and its immense arsenal was recovered by the Allies.

The winners meet in Potsdam, where an embarrassing question arises.

What to do with the 300,000 tonnes discovered in the wake of the vanquished?

Just as after First World War,

it was decided to dump these chemical weapons at sea,

but this time in pits in the Atlantic Ocean,

at depths greater than 1,000 meters.

We now know that these distant destinations were not respected,

since the munitions were submerged in the Baltic Sea

at a depth oscillating between 40 and 100 meters.

What are the consequences of these dumpings

for humans and the environment?

In order to find out, I sailed to the Danish island of Bornholm,

where most accidents are registered.

It was all the easier to dump at sea,

since little was known about the seabed.

In Antiquity, it was even considered to be infinite, like the sky.

Besides, don't we also find stars in the seas?

During the approach maneuvers of the turbo-propeller that takes me to the island,

I contemplate the sapphire blue of the most polluted sea in the world.

After Second World War,

the island remains occupied for 11 months by the Red Army.

Before leaving, the Soviets dump tens of thousands of tons of mustard gas

seized on the Eastern Front, during their breakthrough towards Berlin.