WAR UNDER the BRACKEN: Bombs, Trenches, Tanks and Hidden Military History of Cannock Chase

In 2010, diggers on Cannock Chase uncovered a British wartime bomb, and it had not been dropped there by the Luftwaffe. During the Second World War, British aircrews had used the Chase itself as a bombing range, aiming at a marked target at Anson's Bank while Covenanter tanks were tested across nearby ground. More than sixty years later, a British bomb was still there.The military had been coming to Cannock Chase for generations. In 1873, huge manoeuvres brought regular troops, cavalry, artillery and engineers onto the Chase, with an estimated 180,000 people watching the concluding parade and march past. By the First World War, the scale had changed again. Recruits trained in trench systems, assault courses, firing ranges and gas schools spread across the hills and valleys. French officers came to observe British chlorine tests. Thousands of German prisoners were held at Brocton, while New Zealand troops built something even stranger: a large concrete model of the battlefield at Messines, with German prisoners helping in its construction, recreating Belgian roads, farms, trenches and slopes on Staffordshire soil.The next war found new uses for the same ground. In 1942 a rifle grenade exploded during Home Guard training, killing three local men and injuring eleven; the dead included a seventeen-year-old colliery worker and a veteran of the First World War. RAF Hednesford trained thousands of technical personnel despite having no conventional runway, while at nearby Shugborough a 1,000-bed American military hospital became a centre for military neuropsychiatry, preparing hundreds of doctors for the psychological casualties they expected to meet after D-Day.War Under the Bracken follows this story from Victorian military schemes through two world wars and into the remains that survived them. The familiar camps are only part of it. The larger story is why Britain kept returning to this one stretch of Staffordshire, what happened when it did, and what was left behind when the soldiers went home. The wars ended, the camps and ranges closed, but Cannock Chase kept the evidence.