Incredible audio shows what WWI sounded like when the guns and bombs just suddenly stopped
Published: 7 February 2024
By Annie Reneau
via the Upworthy web site
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Much of World War I was fought in trenches.
It’s both beautiful and haunting to hear the ceasefire silence at the agreed-upon 11th hour.
On November 11, 1918, U.S.soldier Robert Casey wrote from the American front in Western Europe:
“And this is the end of it. In three hours the war will be over. It seems incredible even as I write it. I suppose I ought to be thrilled and cheering. Instead I am merely apathetic and incredulous … There is some cheering across the river—occasional bursts of it as the news is carried to the advanced lines. For the most part, though, we are in silence … With all is a feeling that it can’t be true. For months we have slept under the guns … We cannot comprehend the stillness.”
It was the 11th day of the 11th month, and the war was scheduled to end with a ceasefire at the 11th hour—11:00 a.m. exactly. It had been four years of bloody, brutal fighting in what would later be called World War I. (Ironically, the war that was dubbed “the war to end all wars.”)
The sense of relief at the ceasefire had to have been palpable, and thanks to modern technology, we can get an idea of what it sounded like to have the constant gunfire, artillery shells, fighter planes and bombs just…stop.
The following audio is not a recording, since magnetic tape recording technology didn’t exist in WWI. It’s a sound recreation based on visual “sound ranging” recordings the military used to determine where enemy fire was coming from. Special units placed microphones in the ground and used photographic film to visually record the noise intensity of gunfire, similarly to how seismometer measures an earthquake.
The lines you see in the film below are vibrations from noises at the River Moselle on the American Front, which were interpreted by sound company Coda to Coda using meticulous research on the kinds of weaponry that would have been used and how far away they were, even taking into account the geography of the area.
The result is the sounds soldiers would have heard during the last minute of World War I.
Read the entire article and listen to the audio on the Upworthy web site.
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