As a soldier in the trenches of the Western Front, you had to be alert for many things.
For snipers, for enemy aircraft, for sudden offensives, for artillery, but you also had
to be alert for danger from below.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about mining and tunneling
in the Great War.
Because of the static nature of the war on the Western Front, the majority of mining
and tunneling done in the war was done there.
That front spanned 1,000 km, from the North Sea to the Swiss border and did not drastically
change from the fall of 1914 until late in the war.
The time that both sides spent in pretty much the same positions meant time to construct
complex defenses, and that included complex networks of mines and tunnels.
Mining contributed to the shelter and transport of troops, provided cover for supply and communication,
and enabled armies to undermine enemy defenses and to destroy or compromise them.
Early in the war, mining operations were rudimentary and were precursors to an attack, like, in
1914 when the Germans dug shallow tunnels at Givenchy-les-la-Bassee and laid eight 50-kilo
mines beneath the positions of the Indian Sirhind Brigade.
They blew the mines in December and the following infantry attack took out a company of 800
men.
In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force did not have any mining companies, but Major Sir
John Norton-Griffiths, also an MP, who had once managed a gold mine in the Transvaal,
proposed the deployment of civilian miners to the front.
See, at that time he had contracts for digging sewers in Manchester and Liverpool where the
miners used a technique called clay kicking, and he figured this would be really effective
in regions where the earth is made up of clay, like in Flanders.
Clay kicking used a three-man team, composed of a “kicker”, who sat with his back against
a wooden support and dug out the clay by kicking a spade-like tool at the rock face.
He would pass the spoil to a “bagger”, who in turn would pass it to a “trammer”,
who took it out of the mine and brought back supplies.
By February 1915, some of Norton-Griffiths civilian engineers were already underground
in Flanders.
The Germans didn’t know of clay kicking, and used mattocks for digging, which was noisier
and a lot slower.
Clay kicking teams could dig an average of 8m per day; the Germans two.
By that month, the British army already had eight tunneling companies, but by mid 1916
would have 31, with 21,000 tunnelers and 50,000 attached infantry working on projects on the
Western Front.
Both sides soon developed counter-mining techniques.
Initially, this was simple listening devices, like filling oil drums with water and checking
for vibrations, or putting a stick into the ground and gripping it with your teeth to
check for them, but this became more complex as well.
Stethoscopes and eventually geophones were used that could detect noises in the ground
up to 50m away.
The geophone developed to the point where just two listeners could man three dozen sensors
over a large area and even determine the direction the enemy was moving.
Opposing tunnels, as you may guess, would sometimes converge, leading to underground
skirmishes.
Rifles were impractical underground so miners fought with their tools or improvised weapons,
but if you detected an enemy tunnel, you really wanted to disrupt or destroy it without giving
away your own position.
Camouflets, small pre-prepared charges, were directed in the direction of enemy mining
to either cause cave-ins or cracks in the area, making further progress perilous or
impossible.
Okay, it was pretty perilous in general.
The miners worked 6-12 hour shifts in cramped conditions, often in water, and were afflicted
by the same fatigue, trench foot, and illnesses as the surface soldiers, but also had to contend
with cave-ins, entombment, gas, asphyxiation, drowning, and so forth.
They did get paid 6 shilling a day, which was around six times as much as a frontline
private, and this caused some animosity between the two.
It didn’t help that soldiers in the trenches were exposed to additional dangers when mining
and counter-mining was going on below them, and if the enemy located your tunnels, that
meant extra artillery shelling on the men above.
Other than just blowing up enemy positions, mines could be used to throw up ridges to
screen positions, provide cover, or stun the enemy just before an advance.
At the Somme, the British dug 32km before the Battle there, the largest works were at
Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, a gallery 17m below the surface filled with 18.4 tons of explosives.
This was blown ten minutes before the Zero Hour assault and was supposed to disrupt the
German positions and allow the British to consolidate good positions at the crest of
the blast crater, but instead it prompted a German counter barrage and alerted the Germans
to the impending attack.
At Arras there was intense mining, with the British, French, and Germans blowing 150 charges
on a 7km front between October 1915 and April 1917.
One reason for the heavy activity there was that, unlike Belgium, the ground under Arras
is made of chalk, which is relatively easy to dig through, but is also stable and easy
to support.
Since that sector was pretty quiet the first half of the war, the Germans had built an
extensive mining network there.
When the British took over the sector of front opposite them, they immediately brought in
seven tunneling companies, and by 1917, a lot of the front was defined by 19 crater
groups separating the enemy positions.
By April 1917, when the Battle of Arras began, the expanded British network could hold 24,000
men, and had kitchens, latrines, and medical facilities, all with electric lighting.
At Vimy, 12 km of subways had been built to carry the men right up to the front in secret.
The most famous mining operation of the war, though, was at Messines Ridge.
Now, the earth there is mostly made up of clay, but the surface and subsoil includes
Kemmel Sands, which is like quicksand and made mining there really susceptible to flooding
and cave-ins, especially on the high ground held by the Germans.
British miners solved this problem by sinking mineshafts deep below the sands, 18-27 meters
down, and then extending tunnels from the shafts.
They were doing this for a full year before the Germans started doing the same process;
so British works were more developed.
In March 1916, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand mining companies begin digging
the “Berlin Tunnel”, an enormous system aimed at undermining the whole of German-held
Messines Ridge.
Despite the extent of the operations and the 15 months it was under construction, the Germans
failed to detect it for the most part.
When it was completed, it was packed with 600 tons of explosives.
At 3:10 AM on June 7th, 1917, the mines were blown, causing a titanic explosion that pretty
much blew the whole ridge into the air, leaving 19 immense craters.
An estimated 10,000 Germans were killed, and the blast could reportedly be heard as far
away as Dublin.
Four of the mines were left undetonated, and one of them actually blew in 1955 when it
was hit by lightning, killing a nearby cow, who still counts as a WW1 casualty.
As the final stages of the war ended the stalemate in the west, tunneling that required months
of planning and work was no longer viable, and the last deep mine of the war there was
detonated at Givenchy August 10, 1917.
But tunneling was not confined to the western front.
There was extensive mining by both sides in the Dolomites on the Italian Front.
Mining there meant drilling through solid rock, and was skilled labor that was also
very dangerous.
It was used to build protection, but also for offense; 34 mines were blown on that front
between January 1916 and March 1918, the largest being by the Austrians at Pasubio, which destroyed
its north face and caused casualties on both sides.
However, though mining was not solely on the Western Front, the innovation there, the complexity
of the tunnels, and the sheer magnitude of the explosions was centered there.
You can still see the impact on the landscape today in France and Belgium, and even visit
some of the craters left behind from explosions.
On that front, the work of the miners was certainly tough and dangerous, but it was
undoubtedly essential work as both sides strove to gain any advantage during those years of
bloody stalemate.