#tunnellers

Tunnellers   -   Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson , 1916.

British 1889-1946

 In December 1914, German forces exploded ten small mines under the Indian Sirhind Brigade. When word was spread across the lines, British troops grew worried. At the time, the British had no military mining corps. In early 1915, continued German mining efforts further forced the British to respond and by March 1915 the first British Tunneling Companies were hard at work in Flanders. The site of this first German mining offensive would take place near the eventual site of the “Tunnellers Memorial.”

Underground efforts had long been in practice by armies. Long before the advancements of machine-guns, barbed-wire, or rapid-fire artillery; besiegers and besieged alike had attempted to break their deadlock with efforts underground. The “race to the sea” in which Allied and Central powers had attempted to turn their opponent's flank ultimately left both sides with a massive line of trenches, essentially unbroken from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Both sides proved well-dug in and neither side had enough of an advantage to provide a decisive breakthrough. As such, both sides were essentially besieging the other and this proved an ideal condition for underground warfare.

By mid 1916, the British had nearly 25,000 tunnelers. These men had been enlisted from coal mines, sewer workers, and other such underground engineers in an effort to make the British tunnels safer and faster in deployment. In addition to these miners, man of the “Bantams” (soldiers rejected from regular units due to below-average height) would serve as simple laborers and “beasts of burden”.

The goal of an offensive mine was the destruction of a specific surface target and the formation of a crater or the destruction of an enemy's mining efforts.  While underground, the only way to detect an enemy mine was by listening for their efforts. Listening at first was done with only the ear, but eventually sensitive equipment was developed and deployed in an effort to discover the enemy's mine. Soldiers above were often not informed of the specific aims or details of any mining effort due to the fact that the sheer time it took for any offensive mine to be used was so long, and the labor was so pain-staking that if the enemy were to learn of the plan it could lead to, at best, a massively wasted effort, or even the loss of life in a horrible way.

The most infamous example of this underground warfare was the Battle of Messines in the summer of 1917 and the British mining effort against Messines Ridge. One year prior to the assault, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand engineers began a massive underground effort under the German trenches. They would lay twenty two mines with a total of 455 tons of ammonal explosive. The Allied geologists had done an excellent job in their planning of the project. A contemporary said of their efforts that:

One reason for the great success of the British operations at Messines ridge, where fifty or more mines were exploded, was the skill of the geologist who planned their location; for in some cases they were so surrounded by quicksands that the Germans could not countermine. I cannot vouch for the truthfulness of this, but, knowing the men concerned, I believe it.

The Allies dug some 5500 meters worth of tunnels underneath the German positions. They were able to divert attention of countermining efforts by deploying countless secondary mines on a shallower layer, closer to the surface. The largest mine was at Spanbroekmolen and formed was is called the “Lone Tree Crater” with the detonation of 41 tons of explosive 88 feet underneath the ground. The night before the attack, the British General Plumer said to his staff “Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.”