The Underground: Bomb Shelters and Bat Caves by Kirsten Anderberg
The Underground: Bomb Shelters and Bat Caves
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)
The Underground: it connotes many images from subterranean hide-outs, to guerilla militants operating outside the law. But those images are actually correlated. Few military conflicts in history have been conducted without the use of caves, tunnels and underground spaces. Whether it was the warring sides of a conflict, or the innocents caught in between the battles, subterranean places have been wombs of safety for perhaps as long as humans have had violent conflict. In American history, Jesse James hid out in caves, and in 1863, during the American Civil War, citizens of Vicksburg, Miss., dug cave homes into the sides of hills to get away from the nonstop artillery.
Excavations have uncovered an 18 story deep city dug into soft lava rock, that could protect 20,000 people, in Cappadocia, Turkey. The underground complex is thought to have first been dug out by ancient Hittites, and then it is believed early Christians added to the Hittite complex in the 7th and 8th centuries. During WWII in France, a huge underground complex of tunnels and spaces, with an above-ground fort around it, called Maginot Line, was created as a defense against the Germans. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese used caves and underground dwellings very effectively. In fact, in 1974, the U.S. Military discovered a North Vietnamese tunnel system running right underneath their operations. In 1978, they found two more. So the U.S. created a "Tunnel Neutralization Team," which took 12 more years to find another tunnel!
In war-torn Afghanistan, natural caves were used as effective refuge from the Soviets in the 1980's, and then again in the 2000's when America came with bombs and military. In Afghanistan, natural caves are used to store ammunition and equipment, as well as being used for shelter. Underground bunkers have also been built, such as those Bin Laden commissioned, deep in the earth, some large enough for tanks and trucks. And there are also underground irrigation tunnels that people can hide in. Which reminds me of the way sewer pipes are often used by immigrants to cross the US/Mexico border, as the movie "El Norte," beautifully illustrates. The Zhawar underground complex in Afghanistan has held up against American and Soviet bombing. It is said to have 40 large caves, a mosque, a bilingual library, a hospital, a hotel, and a complex tunnel system connecting it all, and that was before the Taliban took it over. Who knows what upgrades they have added.
Part of the lure of underground spaces is that they are really hard to locate. Past successes at finding these spaces by US military have relied upon seismic listening devices, thermal imaging, drilling, intelligence, and luck. It is not as easy to "smoke them out" as Bush implied. Underground dwellings have proven effective against air strikes from technologically-advanced US military planes, which is interesting. Primitive caves outwit the highest-priced weaponry. This happened repeatedly in Vietnam also. In a US Army brochure entitled, "Hole Huntin'," tunnel entrance camouflage is discussed to try to better the odds of US soldiers finding them. Some tunnels and underground spaces had water entrances, where you swam to the entrance, basically, hidden next to the waterline. They also cited bamboo camouflage over entrances, as well as spaces dug under sand, with everyday fishing huts over them. And what does the military do when it finds these tunnel entrances? The Soviets would yell into the cave, then throw grenades. The current US Joint Chiefs of Staff vice-chair says the current US approach to caves and tunnels in enemy territory is to put a 500 pound bomb at the entrance.
In 1942, the Army trapped thousands of guano bats in the Carlsbad Canyon in New Mexico and put them in a refrigerator to trigger hibernation. Then they strapped 9 gram bombs in 1 gram containers filled with kerosene onto the bats, held on by a string on their chests. The idea was they'd release these bats over Japanese cities. The bats were supposed to chew their way through the string to get the bombs off, and leave them where they did. But in the trial run, some bats never woke up. And others escaped, and set fire to a hangar and a general's car! The program ended in 1943. Some have suggested that since bats fly into caves, and the Taliban is in caves, we should try this type of thing again. But scientists say the problem is bats that are kidnapped, disoriented, and then dropped from 1,000 feet, do not act normally and fly into caves. They act in unpredictable manners instead.
The American military, and GWBush, have been characterizing the Arab world's use of caves and the underground as refuge, as "cowardice" and "primitive." Yet America has crawled into holes in fear. As a matter of fact, Vice-President Dick Cheney went into a subterranean bunker under the White House during 9/11. During the Cold War, the Army Corps of Engineers researched buildings and natural spaces for fallout shelters during a nuclear attack. In 1963, they identified 60 caves as "usable" and said a "surprising amount" of others were "adaptable." The US has about 10,000 located caves. Caves have been used by the US military to store munitions and as temporary barracks, and 100 underground bunkers have been built for US government officials in an emergency. The Pentagon originally was billed as being "bombproof." But its builder, General Leslie Groves, said after the first nuclear weapons test, "I no longer consider the Pentagon a safe shelter from such a bomb." After 9/11, when a mere plane took out part of the Pentagon, the idea of it being "bombproof" is only laughable.
During the Cuban missile Crisis, and the Cold War, Americans became obsessed with fallout and bomb shelters. Caves were selected as shelters and stocked with food and supplies. But caves breathe, thus they will not protect you from radiation. If you airproof them, so they don't breathe, you die of no ventilation, so caves were not employed as fallout shelters for long. New York's McFail's Cavern, which has 6.7 miles of mapped tunnels and caves, could hold the city of Manhattan in an evacuation. But it is a 3 hour drive from NYC, so even if it was stocked, utility is questionable. Most caves were too far from cities to function as fallout shelters. Most caves in the US are privately owned and used for science, tourism and sport. Meramac Caverns, in Missouri, offers tours of its immense fallout shelter from the Cold War.
In 1965, there were up to 200,000 fallout shelters in America. And every now and then you will see one of the yellow and black fallout shelter signs, but if someone told me to go to the fallout shelter in my neighborhood now, I would not even know where to begin to look! Some of the bomb shelters people made in the 1960's were crude holes with old doors on the top. Some of them were prefab models costing $5,000 or more. Some were made of metal, some of concrete. I remember as a kid, I was about 7, driving with my dad in Los Angeles. I saw this weird, round, concrete, dome, and I asked dad what it was. He said, with disgust and distain in his voice, "that is a bomb shelter." I asked what that was and he said it was a "stupid idea that never would work to protect people in a war." And it is true that the practicality of bomb shelters has never been proven. My dad was on one of the Navy boats that nuked Bikini Islands. He understands what a nuclear blast is, and why the shelters would not work. (He was radiated by the US military, along with the island itself, its atoll, and its people, because when they used those nuclear weapons on Bikini Island, the Navy knew so little about radiation, they just had the sailors on his ship rinse everything with water, after the bombings, thinking radiation could be rinsed away with water.)
Even though bomb shelters never were proven useful, the main deterrent to them was ethical. There were the usual ethical dilemmas, such as locking your neighbors out of the shelter as they begged to come in. But more importantly, just as America is associating "cowardice" with the Taliban in caves in Afghanistan, they also associated themselves climbing into shelters in caves and tunnels as cowardice too. In his book, "One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture," Kenneth Rose says it was hard not to look like cowards going into caves, as people equated it with a "devolution of the human species," where "humanity's long climb out of the dark caves was now being reversed."
Christian and Islamic religious teachings represent a hell underground. And Greek mythology has a Greek underworld ruled by Hades. But caves have significant spiritual rebirth and revelation mythologies too. While America is depicting Bin Laden as a coward in a cave, others are equating his refuge in caves with the Prophet Muhammad and his revelation in a cave at Mount Hira in the 7th century. Prophet Muhammad also escaped to a cave when rulers of Mecca threatened him. The Prophet Elijah, in both Islamic and Jewish traditions, had a spiritual revelation in a cave at Mount Carmel. And in the Zohar, it is written that Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai spent 13 years in a cave hiding from the Romans. Early Christian mythology depicted a cave as the place of Jesus' birth.
As a kid, I used to explore caves in the Santa Clarita Valley with my dad. Kids actually got a specific ailment from going into caves in that area, due to breathing a mold inside the caves. In the 1994 Northridge earthquake, people began to come down with "Valley Fever," which had symptoms very close to those the kids in the caves got. The theory was that the intense shaking of the earth, shook the molds and dusts out of the caves and land, and people inhaled it. And photographs from the air, of the moment of the quake, show dust clouds rising like steam, out of the land. The art of cave exploration is called "Spelunking." People do it all over the world. And the more I really think about it, we should be forming Advanced Anarchist Spelunking Societies.
Kirsten Anderberg. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint/publish, please contact Kirsten at kirstena@resist.ca.
Kirsten Anderberg. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint/publish, please contact Kirsten at kirstena@resist.ca.