Over four of our recent videos, we've discussed the worst jobs undertaken by military personnel
in the Second World War and the Vietnam War, and seeing as we don't give a trench rat about
linear progression, we'll now be heading back to the early 1900s and the so called Great
War. As with our previous videos, we won't be overlapping any examples. Best to change
your socks after this one, troopers. Trench foot is some nasty business.
Sappers have been boring tunnels through the ground and undermining fortifications since
the ancient times, and these same tactics were employed in the First World War, during
which men rotted in trench stalemates for months and years on end. The unfortunate souls
consigned to tunnelling duties were best described as miners, and while some miners were trained
for that job specifically, many were just infantrymen made beasts of burden. The miners'
main objectives were to break stalemates by tunnelling under enemy trenches and caving
them in with explosives, and this process could take as long as year. All the while,
the miners were prone to fatigue, sickness, and gruesome death. The tunnels were often
tight, dark, and cold, and they were sometimes flooded. When the earth gave way, miners were
entombed, crushed, or drowned, and natural gas pockets and gases effused by manmade explosives
could poison and asphyxiate them and even catch fire.
Private Doland Hodge described the work as "stuffy, filthy, oppressive, dangerous," and
"just…frightful," and he went on to say, "You were down there on your hands and knees
for hours on end [...]. It was the most tiring and painful work I ever did on the Western
Front."
And all this doesn't take into account counter-mining or what happened when two opposing tunnels
met. When the latter occurred, underground combat would follow. The fighting was often
in the dark and with daggers, picks, shovels, bits of wood, and other improvised weapons.
In an interview, tunnelling expert Colin Winn, said, "Some people have asked me how did they
know who they were stabbing. The simple answer is that they used to put their hand out and
grab their opponent's shoulder. If he'd got an epaulet on then he was German."
The largest mining operations of the Great War were carried out in Belgium during the
Battle of Messines, in which tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers of the British Army
— aided by British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand miners — detonated 447 tonnes
of explosives under German lines, killing some 10,000 Germans.
Overall, the casualty rates of Allied miners was around 1,200 a month.
While miners cut the earth below the surface of the battlefield, wiring parties cut barbed
wire upon it. These parties — also referred to as wiring sappers or cutters — undertook
a tense and dangerous job, not only cutting enemy barbed wire obstacles but also repairing
and rebuilding their own, and without these men, many more men would have been snared
and killed crossing no man's land. In the cover of night, cutters would stealthily approach
either their own or their enemy's lines, using a range of specialized tools to repair, rebuild,
or sabotage barbed wire obstacles. While working in the dark and sleeping in the day was taxing
in itself, cutters had to haul unwieldy loads over unfavourable terrain and keep ever vigilant
for the eye of the enemy. Searchlights scoured the battlefield, and enemy sentries were trained
specifically to look and hear for wiring parties. One wrong step, one chink of metal on metal,
and they could be more bullets than men. At the start of the war, posts and pickets were
used to support barbed wire structures, and these were hammered into the earth with a
mallet. This, however, alerted the enemy to the cutters' positions and preceded the use
of screw pickets, which could be twisted silently into the ground.
In his 1936 memoir, Canadian veteran Charles Henry Savage wrote, "Working with barbed wire
was a nasty job under any circumstances, but when you were handling it in the dark and
within a hundred yards of rifles and machine guns that would shoot at the least sound,
you were doing one of the most nerve-wracking bits of work that could possibly be imagined.
[...] If a flare went up you had to stop work and stand perfectly still, even if a bit of
wire happened to be pressing into some particularly sensitive part of your anatomy [...]. When
a machine gun swept your way it meant getting [...] flat amongst barbed wire [...]. [...] The
slightest move might mean death for half your party."
What was worse, perhaps, is that a big part of the job was dislodging corpses caught in
the wire. They could belong to both enemies and friends.
As British veteran Robert Graves recalled in his memoir *Goodbye to All That,* "Once
I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted them on the slimy body of an
old corpse. [...] Crawling, watching, crawling, shamming dead under the blinding light of
enemy flares, and again crawling watching, crawling."
While sabotaging enemy wires was a sort of raid in itself, true trench raiders, or trench
sweepers, set out at night to infiltrate enemy trenches, killing or capturing enemy troops,
destroying or capturing equipment, gathering intelligence, and simply harrying enemy troops,
with the intent of disrupting their sleep and sapping their morale. Small, lightly equipped
teams of trench raiders crept upon sentries in the cover of night, taking them out as
quietly as they could and then proceeding to the trenches. Once in the trenches, the
bayonets, trench knives, brass knuckles, spiked clubs, and entrenching tools came out. Firing
a gun was a last resort, and when raiders had achieved their objective or otherwise
decided it was time to give it legs, they got rid of all their grenades, covering their
exit with shrapnel.
Sidney Amatt of the London Regiment described the onset of a raid: "The idea was to crawl
through the German wire and try and get underneath and jump into their front line trench, dispose
of whoever was holding it by bayonet, if possible, without making any noise or clubbing over
the head with the butt. Then you’d drop into the trench [...]."
Charles Quinnell of the Royal Fusiliers saw the raids as a pointless: "[...] It was a
waste of time, we just hated it. [...] There was some general about 30 miles behind the
lines wanting to know who was on the opposite side. [...] He ought to have had the job himself
[...]."
Agreeing with Quinnell was an officer known only as F. Jourdain: "[...] Every raid I’ve
heard of always involved a disproportionate number of casualties for what they got out
of it."
An officer in the Gloucestershire Regiment known as Charles Wilson, however, thought
trench raids were necessary "to find out what troops were in the line opposite." Wilson
also said, "[Another benefit] was to get [the men] accustomed to getting out into no man’s
land. Not to feel that they must be safe in a trench."
Now, as we just said, on the other end of a trench raid were sentries — troops charged
with keeping an eye out for the enemy and alerting their friends. It was for this reason
that they were prime targets, just like radio operators. Additionally, sentries were not
afforded the same degree of cover as their friends deeper in the trenches or in bunkers,
and they could not, by military law, fall asleep, lest they pay the ultimate price.
In British soldier Harry Drinkwater's diary, the following account was recorded: "Snowed
all night. Had a hard job to keep awake. One or two fellows – of whom I was one – were
found to be fast asleep at the end of their sentry. We’d gone to sleep standing up – and
the relief man was also asleep. Under military law, this is a crime of the first water [punishable
by execution]."
New Zealand Private John "Jack" Dunn came down with pneumonia in Gallipoli, and after
receiving treatment in a hospital on a Greek island, he was found asleep on sentry duty.
For his offence, Dunn was court martialled and sentenced to death according to the following
clause in the *Manual of Military Law: "*A sentinel found asleep or drunk at his post
while on active service would, if the character and circumstances of the offence were sufficiently
grave, be liable to suffer death." On further consideration, however, with consideration
to his illness, Dunn's sentence was remitted, and he was sentenced instead to just ten years
of hard labour. The poor man died in war before he could carry this sentence out, however.
One French soldier, on the other hand, thought sleep was near impossible: "[...] The time
crawls as if paralyzed. This guard duty will never end. The man who was determined not
to sleep can feel his eyes about to close, but he will not sleep. He will feel the cold
and the rain, he will slip occasionally into swift unconsciousness, but he will not [...] sleep
[...]. There is always the rain, always the winter, always the shadow."
Now, as we just said, on the other end of a trench raid were sentries — troops charged
with keeping an eye out for the enemy and alerting their friends. It was for this reason
that they were prime targets, just like radio operators. Additionally, sentries were not
afforded the same degree of cover as their friends deeper in the trenches or in bunkers,
and they could not, by military law, fall asleep, lest they pay the ultimate price.
In British soldier Harry Drinkwater's diary, the following account was recorded: "Snowed
all night. Had a hard job to keep awake. One or two fellows – of whom I was one – were
found to be fast asleep at the end of their sentry. We’d gone to sleep standing up – and
the relief man was also asleep. Under military law, this is a crime of the first water [punishable
by execution]."
New Zealand Private John "Jack" Dunn came down with pneumonia in Gallipoli, and after
receiving treatment in a hospital on a Greek island, he was found asleep on sentry duty.
For his offence, Dunn was court martialled and sentenced to death according to the following
clause in the *Manual of Military Law: "*A sentinel found asleep or drunk at his post
while on active service would, if the character and circumstances of the offence were sufficiently
grave, be liable to suffer death." On further consideration, however, with consideration
to his illness, Dunn's sentence was remitted, and he was sentenced instead to just ten years
of hard labour. The poor man died in war before he could carry this sentence out, however.
One French soldier, on the other hand, thought sleep was near impossible: "[...] The time
crawls as if paralyzed. This guard duty will never end. The man who was determined not
to sleep can feel his eyes about to close, but he will not sleep. He will feel the cold
and the rain, he will slip occasionally into swift unconsciousness, but he will not [...] sleep
[...]. There is always the rain, always the winter, always the shadow."