Authors: Richard Holmes
Tommy (62 page)
Just over a year later, mines on an even bigger scale were an integral part of the British plan of attack on the first day of the Somme. Nineteen mines had been dug beneath strongpoints in the German front line on the Somme, and one of them, which produced Lochnagar crater, which still pits the fields just south of La Boisselle, contained 66,000 lbs of ammonal in two charges 52 feet below the surface. When it was exploded, at 7.28 on the morning of 1 July, it left a crater 90 yards across and 70 feet deep, with lips 15 feet high. The explosion could be heard in London. Mines like this did not simply destroy German trenches and obliterate their garrisons, but they shook the earth so severely as to wreck deep dugouts some distance from the blast. Yet they did not guarantee tactical success. The mine beneath Hawthorn Ridge, near Beaumont Hamel, was blown at 7.20 am, deliberately early so that this dominating feature could be secured before the main attack began. Corporal George Ashurst, waiting nearby with 1/Lancashire Fusiliers, felt âa queer dull thud and our trench fairly rocked, and a great blue flame shot into the sky, carrying with it hundreds of tons of brick and stone and great chunks of earth mingled with wood and wire and fragments of sandbags'.
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It had long been axiomatic that, as Harry Ogle reported in 1915, when a mine was exploded: âThe enemy lip of the crater had to be occupied if possible and put into a state of defence or at least denied to the enemy.'
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At Hawthorn Ridge parties of 2/Royal Fusiliers rushed for the crater even as the debris was settling: the Germans, who had been using earphones to trace the progress of British mining, were ready, and had men in reserve to secure their own side of the crater: the Fusiliers were eventually dislodged. Corporal Ashurst, pinned down in No Man's Land with the leading elements of his own battalion, ânoticed a few of them running for their lives back to the front line' much later in the day: 2/Royal Fusiliers lost 561 men that day, including their commanding officer.
Mines were next used on a large scale when Plumer's 2nd Army assaulted Messines Ridge on 7 June 1917. Some of the mines exploded that morning had been started in 1915, and the entire mining programme showed just how large an enterprise mining had become since that first British mine had been exploded under Hill 60 just over two years before. Each army now had a Controller of Mines with a specialist staff. There were more than 30,000 men in British, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian tunnelling companies and their supporting units. In suitable areas a shallow defensive mine gallery, intended to detect and disrupt German mining, would run below the front line. Offensive mines ran deeper, their horizontal galleries generally approached by way of a vertical shaft. In the Messines area miners sinking these shafts had to contend with surface soil, then sludgy quicksand, and then a layer of blue clay which expanded on contact with the air and had to be very carefully shored up with stout timber to prevent the shaft from caving in.
Clay-kickers, lying against their wooden frames, drove the galleries forward. Their mates shovelled the spoil they excavated into sandbags and dragged them back to the start of a track which carried trolleys, and these were pushed along to the shaft. Men working at the top hoisted the sandbags to the surface, and once there they then had to be shifted far enough behind the British front line for their presence not to make the mine shafts obvious to aerial observation. Hand-operated pumps sent fresh air down into the galleries, and miners took canaries down with them, keeping a watchful eye on the bird's health as they worked. Breathing apparatus helped rescue squads to make their way to men overwhelmed by gas. Frank Dunham of 25/London found it âmost interesting to see these miners digging away, and strutting up with planks of wood as they went along. Where the width of the tunnel permitted, trolleys were used to wheel the soil away. Another strange thing was that these tunnels were lit by electric light, worked from a dynamo.'
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Sapper Jack Lyon of 171 Tunnelling Company helped dig one of the mines beneath Messines Ridge, exploded with such effect on 7 June 1917:
Each shift comprised twelve men with an RE Corporal in charge. At the face were three men who were RE Sappers. Three men worked the trolleys, one man manned the âwindjammer' or air pump. One man at the shaft-bottom kept the sump there empty and hitched sandbags to the rope from the windlass at the pithead. [There were] two men at this windlass, one man unhitching the bags and passing them back to the other, who took them to the dumping ground. At the tunnel face one man was engaged in âclay-kicking'. Sitting with his back against an inclined plank fixed between the floor and the roof he used both feet to press a small sharp spade called a âgrasper' into the face and lever out a lump of clay. [His mate] put this into a sandbag. When full, the bag was passed to the third man who dragged it to the far end of the trolley-rails. As each man was a Sapper, they could relieve each other so the face-man âkicked' for two hours of the six-hour shift.
It was small wonder that Plumer's chief of staff had announced that although they might not change history, they would certainly change geography. These tunnellers worked three shifts in two days and then had a day off. After fifteen days they were withdrawn âfor a bath and delousing operations, the latter being only partially successful'.
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Although sappers were the stars of mining, as usual the infantry provided the scene shifters, and generally complained about it. Lieutenant Ernest Parker remembered that:
Towards evening we daily journeyed to the front line and there, in shifts of eight hours, worked under the orders of a company of New Zealand sappers who were tunnelling under the German trenches. At the top of the sap, we hauled a continuous stream of chalk-filled bags, carrying them outside and unloading the chalk some distance from the sap-head. By special favour, I was sometimes allowed to crawl down the deep shaft, where I could cautiously watch the New Zealanders working at the rock face. Now and then we listened in, and heard the enemy working in their counter saps.
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But most infantrymen were soon convinced that they would rather be in a trench than down a mine. One of Bernard Adams's comrades told him what it was like down there.
First of all you go down three or four ladders; it's awfully tricky work at the sort of halt on the way down, because there's a little platform, and very often the ladder goes down a different side of the shaft after one of these halts â¦Â It's a terrible long way down, and of course you go alone â¦Â I didn't go far up the gallery where they were working because you can't easily pass along, but the RE officer took me along a gallery that is not being worked, and there, all alone, at the end of it was a man sitting. He was simply sitting, listening. Then I listened through his stethoscope thing â¦Â and I could hear the Boche working as plainly as anything â¦Â as we went away and left him, he looked round at us with staring eyes just like a hunted animal. To sit there for hours on end, listening. Of course, while you hear them working, it's all right, they won't blow. But if you
don't
hear them! God, I wouldn't like to be an RE. It's an awful game.
âWe always laugh at these REs for looking like navvies, and for going about without gas-helmets or rifles,' reflected Adams. âBut really they are wonderful men. It's awful being liable to be buried alive at any moment.'
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Galleries ran into wide chambers that were filled (armed was the technical phrase) with explosive, usually ammonal, contained either in waterproof bags or tins, tamped firmly by sandbags to prevent too much of the blast from blowing back along the line of least resistance down the tunnel. The explosives were initiated by a pattern of electric detonators, stretching round the chamber like the nerves of a hand, and joined to a main cable which ran down the tunnel to a firing-point in a trench, where an engineer officer would push the handle of an electric exploder to fire the mine. Sometimes there was a firing dugout further back, with a small generator providing electricity, connected to the mine by a simple throw-over switch. Usually the officers firing mines expressed relief and satisfaction that the mine had exploded as planned. But one, a son of the manse, knelt and doffed his steel helmet before he thrust down the plunger, begging God's mercy for the men he was about to kill.
Spectators found mine explosions perhaps the most unnatural of the bizarre spectacles furnished by the front line. Bernard Adams was enjoying a mug of tea in a front line trench when:
There was a faint âBomp' from goodness knows where. And a horrid shudder. The earth shook and staggered and I set my legs apart to keep my balance. It felt as if the whole ground were going to be tilted up. The tea splashed over the fire-step as I hastily put it down. Then I looked up. There was nothing. What had happened? Was it a
camouflet
[small mine] after all? Then, over the sandbags, appeared a great green meadow, slowly, taking its time, not hurrying, a smooth curved dome of grass, heaving up, up, up like a rising cake; then, like a cake, it cracked, cracked visibly with bursting brown seams; still the dome rose, towering ten, twenty feet up above the surrounding level; and then with a roar the black smoke hurtled into the air, followed by masses of pink flame creaming up into the sky, giving out a bonfire heat and lighting up the twilight with a lurid glare! Then we all ducked to avoid the shower of mud and dirt and chalk that pattered down like hail.
âMagnificent,' I said to Scott.
âWonderful,' he answered.
âThe mud's all in your tea, sir,' said Davies.
âDr-r-r-r-r-r' rattled the Lewis guns. The Lewis gunners with me had been amazed rather than thrilled by the awful spectacle, but were now recovering from the shock and emptying two or three drums into the twilight void. I was peering over a vast chasm where two minutes ago had been a smooth meadow full of buttercups and toadstools.
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Gas and cave-ins were not the only dangers faced by miners. Although the Germans had lost their ascendancy by 1916, they remained capable of exploding mines of their own. As they worked, miners of both sides paused to listen, and often drove small galleries, designed to house
camouflets,
towards the enemy's work, hoping to blow in his tunnel before his mine could be armed, tamped and fired. F. P. Roe thought that:
The last thing any infantry soldier wanted to be in was a front-line trench with our own tunnelling going on underneath us and this made us extremely apprehensive of the possibility of being blown to bits when the mine was exploded; we were scared stiff that the Germans were also busily engaged in the same important business, and that it might at any time entirely without warning blow the trench and us in it sky-high. We were sure that it was a completely devilish business.
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If British miners failed to intercept an enemy mine, the consequences for the infantry above could be dire. Writing from Voorme-zeele in the Ypres salient, Frank Hawkings told of the explosion of a British mine, followed shortly by that of a German.
15 July 1915.
We hear that a mine which the REs have been preparing beneath the Mound of Death for some time past is due to be exploded shortly.
17 July 1915.
The mine was exploded at dawn this morning, but a little later the enemy exploded counter-mines beneath trench Q1. We had a shocking lot of casualties, and all the troops stood to arms and kept up a rapid fire to ward off a possible attack. They say that fortunately the enemy mine blew up short of the trench, but in spite of this there are nineteen killed and three or four times that number wounded. A bad show.
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On 9 April 1916 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were holding the line near Bethune:
At 8 am the Germans blew in yet another small mine on our part of this much-mined area. Five miners were caught underground; four or five of our men were more or less buried in the collapse of our part of the trench; a broken leg has been the worst injury. It has been an exciting affair for the miners. They could hear the German miners only an estimated 10 feet off, so there was a race against time to get a charge tamped and fired. The
camouflet
that was blown there yesterday morning obviously failed to wreck the German work.
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In June that year the Germans exploded a much bigger mine beneath the same battalion, leaving a scar 120 yards long, 70â80 yards wide and 30 feet deep, with a smaller crater proper within it. The explosion cost B Company two-thirds of its trench strength, including âtwo very recently joined young officers and its fine sergeant-major'. The Germans who attacked in the aftermath of the blast were driven off by a brisk counterattack led by Captain Stanway of C Company (sergeant major in 1914 and battalion commander in 1918). Frank Richards thought that much credit was also due to Private Hammer Lane, whose platoon commander panicked and yelled: âWe'll have to surrender.' âSurrender my bloody arse!' shouted Lane. âGet your men to meet them front and rear!' It was âa glorious summer morning next day' and, hearing that a staff officer was coming to inspect the crater, some of the fusiliers propped up a dead German officer on the firestep, with a lighted candle in one hand and a small bible in the other. Just before the red tab appeared they put a lighted cigarette in the corpse's mouth. Richards maintained that this was not done to insult the dead German, who was decently buried soon afterwards, âbut just to give the Staff officer a shock'.
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There were shocks underground too when miners broke into one another's galleries and fought with pistols, knives or coshes. British miners unable to obtain a revolver would occasionally cut most of the butt and barrel off a rifle, leaving them with a stubby weapon whose bullet could penetrate more earth than a pistol-bullet.