Although I’m a curious person, I’m rarely interested in things that gain the attention of others.

My husband and I finished watching Masters of the Air and enjoyed it so much we went back in time to Band of Brothers. After that, we moved on to The Pacific. One of the many things I noticed about all three series was the sheer volume of shell casings ejected during battles on the ground and in the air. That made me curious.

Shell casings from one day’s assault on German lines in WW1

In the shows, soldiers, airmen and Marines walk around with yards of ammunition draped over their shoulders. During battles, bullet casings are ejected from weapons and fly into the air, landing everywhere.

I wondered what happened to them all—and there must have been millions—after WWI and then WWII had ended.

Just to make the point, here’s an historic photo that shows the empty artillery casings from a single day of shelling against the German army in WWI.

Asking Quora

US 5th Army collecting artillery casings near Castelforte, Italy

The best way to find out without extensive research that I lack the time to do was to ask those in a position to know. Thus, I went to Quora and asked this question:

“What happened to the trillions of brass cartridges that fell on Europe in WWII? Guns, mortars, rifles, aerial gunships and other weapons would have left tons of them on the ground. Did they have any value?”

Several men with expertise on the subject responded with the information I sought. I boiled down their answers to three actions:

1. Recycling the Shell Casings

I found it fascinating that shell casings were recycled during hostilities because on TV no one seemed interested in collecting them. But a man who lives in Luxembourg commented:

“Of course such metal did have value. Where possible, soldiers were expected to collect it and send it back for recycling.

Two of my uncles collected a large pile of 25-pounder cartridge cases when a battery had to change position quickly and the gunners did not have time to clean up. They made a pretty penny selling it to a scrap merchant.”

I always applaud recycling although the sheer volume of the expended shell casings would have presented a logistical problem. The armies would have needed heavy equipment to deal with what were often mountains of metal.

2. Improvising New Munitions

With new materials in short supply and expensive, it made sense to re-purpose used casings to replenish supplies. When there was a war on, they did use those casings to make new munitions. Most prominent was the Cellerier mortar.

“Faced with heavy and effective German mortar fire in the Argonne sector French Artillery Captain Cellerier developed an improvised light trench mortar in November 1914 that utilized cheap and available materials.

Artilleryman firing a Cellerier Mortar

The Cellerier mortar was created by using an expended 77mm artillery casing as a mortar tube that was fixed on a wooden block set at a 45-degree angle. The devices became early French light infantry mortars. They look crude and jerry-built because they were. But they also worked.

For ammunition the French army turned expended enemy shell casings into improvised explosive devices (IED). These casings were loaded with a fuse, an explosive charge and any pieces of scrap metal to act as shrapnel. The enemy casings fit perfectly into the 77mm artillery casing.

In WWI, the armies tossed these IED rounds back and forth between opposing trenches. They would inflict damage to any man unlucky enough to be living inside an enemies entrenchment when they hit.

3. Fabricating Useful Objects

WWI Trench art objects: (Photo by Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia)

When you live in a country that’s been bombed, occupied, and demolished—sometimes multiple times—even ordinary household objects can grow scarce. Human ingenuity fabricated the brass casings into objects such as pitchers, drinking cups, vases, candle holders, ash trays, and pans. Soldiers could also create objects with the raw materials right at hand just as sailors on whaling ships carved all sorts of items from whale bone.

These objects now have a name—trench art—and can be found in antique stores or at auctions. You can see any number of them with a quick search.

That answered my question. Even so, I remain astonished by the volume of shells fired in battle.

The Human Toll of War

All three of these TV series are excellent. And I say that knowing how much I hate war. They bring home the terror, chaos, horror, inhumanity, and confusion of war in a very visceral way. I recommend them to everyone, especially those who think of war as glorious and heroic.

An unspoken but ever-present theme is the toll war takes on the bodies and minds of the fighting men. We all know about shell-shock and PTSD, but these shows also depict how war dehumanizes those who were normal and functional people before they were immersed in the fighting.

In a way, they become like the shell casings: expendable, re-used, and sometimes able to survive but never quite the same.