<P> In World War I, no man's land often ranged from several hundred yards to in some cases less than 10 yards . Heavily defended by machine guns, mortars, artillery and riflemen on both sides, it was often riddled with barbed wire and rudimentary improvised land mines, as well as corpses and wounded soldiers who were not able to make it across the sea of bullets, explosions and flames . The area was usually devastated by the warfare and riddled with craters from artillery and mortar shells, and sometimes contaminated by chemical weapons . It was open to fire from the opposing trenches and hard going generally slowed down any attempted advance . However, not only were soldiers forced to cross no man's land when advancing, and as the case might be when retreating, but after an attack the stretcher bearers would need to go out into it to bring in the wounded . No man's land remained a regular feature of the battlefield until near the end of World War I, when mechanised weapons (i.e. tanks) made entrenched lines less of an obstacle . </P> <P> Effects from World War I no man's lands persist today, for example at Verdun in France, where the Zone Rouge (Red Zone) is an area with unexploded ordnance, poisoned beyond habitation by arsenic, chlorine, and phosgene . The zone is sealed off completely and still deemed too dangerous for civilians to return: "The area is still considered to be very poisoned, so the French government planted an enormous forest of black pines, like a living sarcophagus", comments Alasdair Pinkerton, a researcher at Royal Holloway University of London, who compared the zone to the nuclear disaster site at Chernobyl, similarly encased in a "concrete sarcophagus". </P> <P> During the Cold War, one example of "no man's land" was the territory close to the Iron Curtain . Officially the territory belonged to the Eastern Bloc countries, but over the entire Iron Curtain there were several wide tracts of uninhabited land, several hundred meters in width, containing watch towers, minefields, unexploded bombs and other such debris . </P> <P> The U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is separated from Cuba proper by an area called the Cactus Curtain . In late 1961, Cuba had its troops plant an 8 - mile (13 km) barrier of Opuntia cactus along the northeastern section of the 28 - kilometre (17 mi) fence surrounding the base to prevent economic migrants fleeing from Cuba from resettling in the United States . This was dubbed the "Cactus Curtain", an allusion to Europe's Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain in East Asia . U.S. and Cuban troops placed some 55,000 land mines across the no man's land, creating the second - largest minefield in the world, and the largest in the Americas . On 16 May 1996, Bill Clinton, the President of the United States, ordered their removal . The U.S. land mines have since been replaced with motion and sound sensors to detect intruders . The Cuban government has not removed the corresponding minefield on its side of the border . </P>

Importance of no man's land in ww1