by Will Davies
While tunnelling progressed, Oliver Woodward, some officers and a few select men attended the newly established Mines Rescue School held at the Headquarters of the 171st Royal Engineers Tunnelling Company, outside of Nieppe, a few kilometres to the northwest. There they would have been trained in the use of Proto kits, mine rescue and listening equipment, boring machinery and explosives, the removal of enemy mines and camouflets, and mining tactics.
Such training was invaluable because the Australian tunnelling companies would be called upon to assist with trench raids and other offensive actions when their specialist sapper or explosive skills were required. And, soon after his return from attending the mines rescue course, Oliver Woodward was nominated by his commanding officer for just such a job.
To the northwest of Armentières, past Houplines, is the small village of Touquet. This village was part of the operational area for the No. 1 and No. 2 sections of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, which at the time had its headquarters in Armentières. Here, just outside the German wire entanglements, about 80 metres from the Allies’ trench, was a partly damaged farmhouse, known as the Red House, from where German machine gunners and snipers were firing daily, causing Allied casualties. It was Woodward’s task to cross no-man’s-land, demolish the Red House with explosives and eliminate the German gunners. This was an especially dangerous operation, and Woodward later wrote:
I frankly admit I experienced a sinking sensation when this news was given me. Up to this date I felt quite a hero to be even in a Frontline Trench. Here was a job which would test my nerves in full. It was a critical stage in my career. A failure and I would be damned, a success and I would win my spurs as a soldier. Which was it to be?1
He returned to his unit and selected two men to undertake the task with him: Sergeant Hugh Fraser and Sapper Morris. The men’s enthusiasm when they were told of their selection fortified and steeled him. ‘I selected as my companions for the patrol, Sergeant Fraser and Sapper Morris, and the joy with which these men received the news helped materially to quell my fear of the unknown,’ he wrote.2
They packed a charge of 46 kilograms of high explosives into a canvas bag and attached two sets of fuses so that the explosives could be detonated by either an electrical charge or by a length of instantaneous fuse, which was lit with a match. Woodward allowed nearly double the distance between the trench and the Red House for the length of the electrical lead, to account for the roughness of the ground, the shell holes and the fact that he knew he would not travel in a straight line in the dark. The plan was to crawl out, lay the charge beside the ruined walls, crawl back and into the safety of their own trench and ignite the charge with a small Military Portable Exploder, a hand-held device that once pushed down sent a current down the electrical lead to explode the charge.
In the dusk light of 10 June 1916, Woodward and his two men left their headquarters. Four hours later, after picking their way along the winding communication trench to the front, they arrived at the headquarters of the West Kents, the English regiment holding this part of the line. Here he picked up four men who would provide flanking protection, two on each side of his party as they crossed no-man’s-land. After being briefed, the rifles, explosive charge and electrical leads were checked and the men sat down to await zero hour, which was midnight, half an hour away.
Woodward found a small, unoccupied recess in the trench wall away from the party and sat down. Of his thoughts he later wrote:
We were to carry out a duty in the sight of a large number of the manhood of our nation. To show signs of cowardice in any form in the hope that thereby one’s life might be preserved meant that life under such conditions would be purchased at a price too terrible to contemplate. There was only one course open and that was to overcome any sign of cowardice and this I strove to accomplish. I can honestly say that throughout my life as a soldier I never really overcame Fear. It was always present to a greater or lesser degree. I believe I did conquer cowardice. I am of the opinion that those who claim to never have experienced Fear in War were either braggarts or were devoid of intelligence. A hard statement but none the less true. The degree of heroism was the degree by which individuals conquered cowardice.3
Because nights were short at this time of the year, zero hour had been set for midnight. Hearing the occasional burst of machine-gun fire from the German trenches, the raiding party slipped over the parapet and crawled towards the barbed-wire entanglement that stretched along their front. They wriggled through a small gap in the wire, pulling themselves along by their elbows, their bellies dragging through the mud and their noses just clear of the stinking ooze.
Suddenly a flare rose skyward, leaving a trail of sparks and making a fizzing noise like a cracker-night skyrocket. The men froze. Woodward pressed his face into the earth, holding his breath and waiting for the machine gun, now less than 50 metres away, to open up. Surely the Germans must see him and his two men lying prone behind him.
The flare fizzled out and died, its burning parachute falling to the right somewhere. Just then, a machine gun started up further down the line, its bullets sweeping no-man’s-land in a wide arc high over his head. He remembered the heavy bag of explosives he carried and the effect of the impact of a bullet.
Closer to the German lines the men came across grass, which gave them a little cover as they crawled forward. Their advance was slow as they wound between shell holes and regularly stopped to check their direction and progress. In the glow of a far-off flare, Woodward saw the silhouette of the Red House, now quite close and ominous. Gathering the men around him, he lay still for 15 minutes, straining to hear the faintest sound from the ruins that might betray a German presence. All was quiet.
Carefully he transferred the heavy charge from his back, cradling it against his chest like a baby. He could smell the mildewy canvas and the explosives, and feel the insulated wires. Leaving the men behind, he crawled forward into the shadow of a wall of the Red House, and again waited and listened. He could hear German voices, low and whispered, but they were coming from somewhere to his left and from the German frontline trench, behind the house.
Slowly he rose and reached for the top of the wall, planning to climb over and drop down onto the rubble-strewn first floor of the house. But as his fingers gripped the crumbling wall, cement render broke off in his hand and fell down through a gaping hole in the floor, into the cellar. Had he swung over the wall as planned, he would have found himself ten metres down in the cellar, injured and easily captured. He slowly retracted his hand and paused. The murmuring voices continued.
Hugging the brickwork, he strained to get the bulky bag of explosives up and over the wall, allowing it to hang and swing gently in mid-air high above the cellar. Maintaining his grip on the wires, he gradually lowered the bag to the cellar floor, where it came to rest with a quiet bump. Flares still soared high into the air and popped, blanketing the area with an eerie glow, and he was amazed that he or the canvas bag had not been spotted. The voices focused his mind: rather than return to the relative safety of the trench to detonate the charge, he must blow it now, close to the German line. ‘In view of the fact that we could still hear voices it seemed to me that there was a possibility of the charge being discovered at any moment,’ he wrote. ‘I therefore decided to fire by means of the ignition fuse.’4
Woodward crawled back to the men and signalled them to draw into a tight circle. He lit a match to ignite the fuse, hiding the flame from the Germans with his helmet. Then, bent double, he and the men scurried a few short steps to take shelter in the darkness of a shell crater and waited. But nothing happened. There was no explosion. It could have been the rough handling as he dragged the canvas bag across no-man’s-land, or perhaps the detonators had broken free when the bag had landed on the floor of the cellar. He had one last chance: the electrical fuse. He would run the electrical cable back to the Allies’ trench and detonate the explosives from there.
He crawled back to the brick wall of the
Red House and felt the electrical cable to make sure that it was still in place and secure. With his two men ahead of him, he worked his way back to the trench, carefully playing the cable through his fingers until he felt the wire break away and fall to the ground. He twisted the wires roughly together and hoped the connection would hold. Moving on again, he found five more breaks in the wire. The wire ended 20 metres short of the safety of the trench.
Undeterred, Woodward sent Morris back for the plunger. Then, with his sergeant and the English troops safely to ground, he joined it to the wire and drove the plunger handle down. Immediately there was a terrific explosion, and bricks and debris flew high into the air and crashed about them. Grabbing the exploder, he raced at top speed for the gap in the wire, wriggled in and threw himself headlong into the trench. The explosion was the signal for the British artillery and the British troops to open fire on the German lines, and Woodward and the men made it back just in time as the front came alive.
For his ‘conspicuous gallantry’ that night, Woodward received the first of three Military Crosses he would win during the war – an honour that made Woodward uncomfortable because it set him apart from his men:
The trophies of the chase to the officer, nothing to his men, other than the satisfaction of knowing that they had done their duty equally as well as the officer. I was quite embarrassed when my companions on the stunt offered me their hearty congratulations and I begged them to realise that I was the victim of over enthusiasm and lack of discretion on the part of Senior Officers.5
Sadly, we don’t know what became of Sapper Morris, but we do know that Sergeant Hugh Fraser also went on to be decorated, winning a DCM for rescuing buried men under heavy shellfire. He died on 31 May 1918 at the Casualty Clearing Station at Ebblinghem, on the main road between St Omer and Hazebrouck. A wiring party he was leading came under shellfire, and he received a wound to the abdomen. He died early the next morning and is buried in the Ebblinghem Military Cemetery.
By the time the Australian tunnelling companies had arrived in France, preparations were all but complete for the great offensive planned for 1 July 1916 on the Somme. When planning had begun in December 1915, it was to be a predominantly French offensive; they were to commit 40 divisions as opposed to the British commitment of only 25. But when French reinforcements had to be diverted to Verdun to deal with the German attack, the British became the dominant partner. The French were now offering only five divisions.
The Somme valley and the watershed formed by the basins of the Scheldt and the Scarpe rivers had confronted the British planners with a very different landscape compared with Belgian Flanders. Here the land rose to a height of 150 metres and the chalk offered a safe haven for the defending Germans, who held the heights in an arc to the northeast of Albert.
The frontline designated for the attack stretched 22.5 kilometres from Gommecourt in the north to Maricourt in the south, all well defended by major German fortifications. They could not go through them and they could not go around them so they were left to try to go under them. Their strategy for this underground war had two aspects: the first was to mount a massive mining operation in which mines bigger than any ever used before would be blown underneath the German line. The concern was the inability of British infantry to take advantage of the mines as they had a poor track record, especially after the disasters at St Eloi and the Hohenzollern Redoubt. The Germans were the masters of counterattack, and British tactics in crater warfare never matched theirs. It was one thing to successfully tunnel under the Germans, blow a mine and destroy their frontline trenches, but unless British infantry could take the newly won ground and hold it against German counterattack, the resulting crater simply gave the Germans new defensive positions and a more commanding high point over the British lines.
That was where the second element of the mining operation came in: the technique of the ‘Russian sap’, something developed in the Crimean War and used successfully against the Turks at Gallipoli. This meant digging shallow tunnels, about two metres in height with only half a metre of earth above, towards the German frontline. The British troops could advance through them undercover towards the German trenches and, at an opportune moment, break out and charge over a shorter distance towards the German frontline. These saps could then be enlarged and strengthened to become a communication trench to the newly won positions, as well as providing ‘emplacements’ for both Stokes-mortar crews and machine guns. However, unlike Gallipoli, the opposing frontlines were not just a hundred metres or less apart, but in some places nearly a kilometre apart. This required serious planning and dangerous, exposed digging.
The British planners also had to solve the problem of the debris scattered over a wide area by massive mines. If the attacking troops were too close, they suffered casualties from the falling debris, but if they were too far back, safe from the debris storm, they gave the defenders time to gather their wits and man their machine guns. The tunnelling officers came up with a new idea: they would increase the explosive charge in the mine (it was called ‘over charge’), which would throw more debris higher into the air, extend the radius of the falling material (killing more of the enemy in the process) and create a higher lip to the crater, providing better protection for the attacking troops. Usually the lip was about two metres high, but if they could create a three-or four-metre lip, it would provide significant protection for their attacking troops.
To cover the 22 kilometres of front, the British needed the help of the tunnelling companies, so five were sent to work in this sector. And to do the work needed by ‘zero hour’, the tunnelling companies pulled in every available man they could, in some cases doubling their usual number. The British 252nd Tunnelling Company at the very northern end of the line had more than 2000 men; many of them attached infantry who probably hated the idea of being ‘tunnellers’.
Opposite the ‘Redan’, the northernmost mine, the Russian saps started to be pushed forward from April 1916. The Germans constantly watched no-man’s-land and located one of the nine saps on the front north of Beaumont Hamel. They fired a small charge, killing seven British tunnellers. A week later, they fired a second charge killing another two tunnellers, but work went on and the saps were ready in time for the offensive.1
In this same area, the tunnellers had placed two mines; one at a depth of 17 metres and the other 19 metres. Just south, a gallery had been driven at Beaumont Hamel into the hard chalk, but the tunnellers had struck large chunks of flint and this had slowed them considerably. Men had to slowly and silently prise the flint from the chalk with bayonets after the face was thoroughly wet with water, then catch the falling stones so as not to make noise and alert the Germans.2 Once they had driven 320 metres out and under the German defences, a chamber was dug and packed with 18.5 tonnes of ammonal.
And all along the line, with only a flickering candle for comfort, thousands of men sweated at the chalk walls before them, clawing at the face with bayonets and bare hands, wondering when the next German camouflet would explode. They all knew the results of a blast. They had seen it: liquid, oozing chalk that ran red, pieces of human flesh clinging to the tunnel walls, perhaps a hand protruding from the white, gluey bottom. The men knew death was everywhere, imminent and close, and that there was no way, in this deep, black and uncharted hell, their mothers would visit their grave. Dante’s inferno was very real and they lived it.
Further south, opposite Thiepval, now the site of the massive British Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, ten shallow saps were pushed out and emplacements constructed for the positioning of heavy trench mortars. One sap, ‘Inverary’, went out 75 metres to within 25 metres of the German line, and another, ‘Sanda’, was more than 100 metres long.3 It actually connected the German trenches and later became invaluable for communications. Saps similar to these were pushed forward all along the British frontline and one sap driven opposite Ovillers, named ‘Rivington’, reached just ten metres from the German line. It was so close that from the
end Germans could be heard talking and laughing. The other sap, ‘Waltney’, dug into the chalk, was pushed out over 500 metres.
The area around the small village of La Boisselle was very active with mining. Many shafts were more than 30 metres deep and had galleries at four different levels. The big mine south of the road was ‘Lochnagar’, which had a steep incline sunk to nearly 30 metres and two chambers packed with 16.3 tonnes and 11 tonnes of explosives. These tunnels had been driven in December 1915, along with the sap ‘Kerriemuir’, which connected the Lochnagar crater to the German and the British frontlines. After 1 July, this was used extensively by troops and a whole battalion passed through it. Later it was used for the evacuation of the wounded.4
Opposite Fricourt, a number of deep shafts were dug, but this area came under heavy and constant artillery attack and many of the entrances were closed. Here too the chalk was very hard and the only way to tunnel through it was to drill six-centimetre holes. Four holes were drilled in a circle known as a ‘round’ then filled with an explosive, generally a small charge of ‘Blastine’, and ignited. The Germans adopted a similar method and their rounds could be heard exploding far out in the chalk. Three Russian saps were driven out, this time to be used as flamethrower positions, but only one was subsequently used as the German line was not captured in this area.
