by Will Davies
Towards the Somme, at the southern end of the line between Fricourt and Mametz, the enemy was close and the firing of large camouflets was a regular occurrence. Everywhere the tunnellers were like busy moles, pushing out galleries and Russian saps, building underground accommodation for the troops, loading deep chambers with tonnes of ammonal and preparing push pipes.
One sap near Casino Point came so dangerously close to the enemy it was decided to silently drill forward with an earth auger. Two tunnellers, lying in the cramped space at the end of the sap, silently worked their auger and bagged up the spoil. Progress was slow and delicate, as they calculated they were only ten metres short of the German line. Suddenly, however, at eight metres, they broke through into a German officer’s dugout. Withdrawing their auger as quickly and quietly as they could, they lay panting, fearing swift retribution. But nothing happened. As they lay there, they could hear German voices from time to time and footfalls on the duckboarded floor, yet they appeared not to have been noticed.
The tunnellers stopped work on their sap and crawled back to report the incident to their officer. Fearing the discovery of the sap, he crawled out along the shallow tunnel to investigate and found that the Germans had seen the hole and simply plugged it up. Lying close to the auger hole he listened, but he couldn’t hear anything suspicious and there was no indication that the Germans realised what the hole meant. The next day the tunnellers heard picks at work. Again, nothing came of this and the work soon ceased, so the tunnellers continued undisturbed and prepared a charge in readiness for the attack. This they then fired later, destroying the enemy trench and two dugouts.5
Everything was in place for the offensive on the Somme, but some in Allied High Command had reservations about it. Haig was reluctant as from the earliest days he had wanted to attack on the Ypres salient, regain the high ridgeline from Messines to east of Ypres, and occupy the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge now held by the Germans. Lord Kitchener was opposed to the large-scale Somme attack, preferring to continue making small offensives. Even France’s General Foch was questioning whether the offensive should take place. For the first time the word ‘attrition’ was coming to replace phrases like ‘total victory’ and ‘breakthrough’.
For seven days leading up to 1 July 1916, the British subjected the Germans to a relentless bombardment of about 1.7 million shells. The Germans were expecting an attack and their machine guns were oiled and ammunition belts ready – the very equipment that would turn this day into the most disastrous in British history.
One enormous blunder was the timing of the detonation of the first mine, at Hawthorn Redoubt, north of the River Ancre. Initially it was planned to fire this mine four hours before the attack, but General Harvey argued that it would simply alert the Germans. The compromise was to fire it ten minutes before zero hour. The explosion proved devastating, utterly destroying the redoubt and along with it many Germans, but it did exactly as Harvey had feared. All along the line, the enemy came up from their underground shelters and lined the parapets, mounted their machine guns and laid out their bombs. The Germans were ready and waiting.
Then, at 7.28 am, two minutes before zero hour, eight large mines were blown, creating massive cavities and throwing up high rims of debris.
Near Lochnagar, well over 100 metres of German frontline trench was obliterated, leaving a crater 100 metres across and 30 metres deep. At Tambour, near Fricourt, one mine failed due to moisture, but two other mines devastated the German line. At nearby Casino Point, the mining officer watched the seconds tick down on his watch, ready to push the electric plunger home. To his horror, with minutes still to go, he noticed British troops climbing over their parapet and heading towards the German line. There had been a problem with the synchronisation of watches and the men had started out too early. What was he to do? Quickly he forced the plunger down, and the German frontline vanished, but not without inflicting casualties on the advancing troops.
At zero hour, the whistles blew and the men filed out of their trenches, crossed their start lines and headed out into no-man’s-land, their rifles across their chests and advancing in lines 100 metres apart. The preceding seven days’ bombardment had supposedly cut the wire and wiped out the German troops and frontline defences, but the commanders had not taken into account the deep shelters the Germans had dug underground, and the discipline that meant they could quickly take up positions along a tattered line and return fire.
In many places the commanders hadn’t told their men about the Russian saps. This lack of communication, put down to the great secrecy surrounding the operation, sadly translated into the death of probably hundreds of British soldiers. There were times when tunnelling officers yelled to advancing troops just a hundred metres away to use their saps, but they could not be heard in the noise and confusion of battle.6
Despite all the hard, perilous work of the tunnellers, the British regiments walked, line upon line, into the enemy guns. The lines simply crumpled, leaving no-man’s-land ‘strewn with khaki figures mown down in swathes like ripe corn before a scythe’.7 At the end of the first day, nearly 20,000 British were dead and 40,000 wounded.
The saps were put to good use in a mere handful of places, for the resupply of forward troops, the passage of runners and reinforcements, and the return of the wounded. One battalion commander relied on saps to provide protection for his men at an exposed and dangerous salient, allowing them to hold the newly won ground.
But in the northern sector of the line, the use of a Russian sap 25 metres from the German frontline proved nightmarish. The men had expended their supply of mortars within eight minutes, and being so close to the Germans, they started taking casualties from grenades thrown over the short distance.
The southernmost mines, at Fricourt, Mametz and Montauban, had caused great damage while shattering the defenders. Here the tunnellers were able to inspect the German mine systems. One bright spot was the discovery of the very German practice of marking the daily progress of the mine construction on the timber walls, which confirmed for them that the Germans’ daily progress underground was perhaps two-thirds that of the British tunnellers’. This may have been due to the high standard of workmanship, which the Allied tunnellers agreed was probably ‘more elaborate than essential’.8
In the tunnels at Fricourt, they found the diary of a German mining officer. It showed how ineffective and harmless the British countermining had been and detailed the procedure the Germans had developed to successfully clear their men from their workings before an Allied mine was blown. Here too was evidence in the form of transcriptions, notes and numerous intercepted messages spread about the tunnels, along with the until now secret equipment they had used to record British telephone messages, all seriously disappointing news to the exhausted men.
But what probably affected the men the most was the discovery of very deep shafts, something they had not expected. A German gallery was found to be more than 60 metres deep. Although this was not an effective depth for offensive mining operations since they would simply need too much of any explosive known at the time to reach the surface, it did cause concern for the Allies, as they thought they had deep mining operations all to themselves.
What the British probably did not appreciate at the time was that German deep mining experience was very limited, as were the number and breadth of experience of men in the German tunnelling companies. Many of these men were detailed to these companies against their will, and in some cases they were directed by German officers from the surface rather than underground, possibly because they lacked mine training.
Even though the Battle of the Somme was an abject failure, it was the turning point in the tunnelling war. The mines themselves had all gone off successfully, proving the viability of deep mining. The British were now taking the mining initiative and were trying new methods, new equipment and new tactics. And the Australian and other colonial tunnelling companies were contributing different skills, experience and ideas. From now o
n, the war underground would be a very different fight, and one in which the Germans would never again achieve the ascendancy.
By the middle of July, Allied casualties had reached 100,000. After partial strategic success, particularly in the areas along the French front, the battle quickly bogged down and the spreading new trench lines again sucked in more men and material. Three Australian divisions (the 1st, 2nd and 4th) were ordered south, to the Somme. The Germans, too, were moving men there, so the British decided on a diversionary attack further north, opposite the German-held village of Fromelles. The British 61st Division and the untried Australian 5th Division would launch the attack. Some of the 3rd Australian Tunnelling Company was moved to an area behind the British lines near Fromelles. Here they used push pipes and ammonal charges to create shallow trenches to provide cover for the attacking troops as they charged across the flat expanse of no-man’s-land. These, like the whole of the Fromelles attack, were a failure. The 5th Division was virtually wiped out in this brief action, taking 5533 casualties, of which 1780 were killed.
The Australian tunnelling companies were still to the north of the Somme battlefields, spread along the line around Armentières, when on 30 June 1916 the Germans laid on a heavy bombardment of the town. It was said that a German-born New Zealand soldier had deserted to the enemy and provided information about the Allied divisional headquarters and men’s billets. These were targeted, resulting in heavy casualties, and Oliver Woodward was lucky to escape unharmed.
The shelling hastened the planned transfer of Woodward’s unit to a new camp that had just been completed in the Ploegsteert Wood sector, to the north of Armentières, just over the Belgium–France border. The wood, about two-and-a-half kilometres long by a kilometre wide, was below the southern end of the Ypres salient, just four kilometres south of Messines. The 2nd Australian Tunnelling Company was at Fleurbaix, south of Armentières and just to the west of Fromelles, while the 3rd was at Red Lamp and the villages along the front at Aubers, very close to Fromelles.
Over the years, Ploegsteert Wood had been heavily shelled. Not long after he arrived, among the shattered trees on the eastern side of the wood, Oliver Woodward observed a photographer and artist closely studying one particular tree, making sketches and taking photographs – an odd thing to do at the time, he felt. His curiosity was satisfied some days later when he found that the tree had been sawn down and a replica tree, made of steel and very accurately painted like the original, had replaced it. At the bottom was a small trapdoor through which an artillery observer could squeeze, and then, upon climbing the interior ladder, find a safe high point from which to observe the German lines and direct fire.
Three more Australian tunnelling companies, the 4th, 5th and 6th, had been formed. When they arrived at the front they were amalgamated into the three existing companies, bringing their numbers to more than 500 men each.
Half of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company was undertaking offensive mining at Trench 123 and the Birdcage, just east of the wood. Oliver Woodward was disappointed that instead he and his men had been given a defensive mining job: building a large system of dugouts between the frontline and the support line at Prowse Point, just to the north of Ploegsteert Wood. The British High Command had finally woken up to the importance of deep shelters for headquarters and the protection of men. Unlike the Germans, who realised that men survived shelling and the harsh weather when underground, the British had the attitude that underground shelters made men lazy and soft, and that when the requirement came for them to fight, they would not come out and engage the enemy. Unbelievably, the British High Command had been happy to see their men standing around in the snow and in mud-filled trenches, suffering trench foot, frostbite and the impact of shelling – just as long as they did not get soft.
But now they were beginning to see the benefits of underground protection, and with greater numbers of tunnellers on hand, the British stepped up the digging of deep dugouts from rear areas to the frontline. It was to this effort that Oliver Woodward and the tunnellers were put to work at Prowse Point.
Woodward had just settled into the routine at Prowse Point and his men were well under way with the construction of a massive dugout, when on 8 July 1916 he was ordered to report to the 10th Queen’s Regiment in the Le Bizet sector, to the south and just north of Armèntieres.
He had achieved a certain degree of fame for demolishing the Red House, and nearby and along the same section of the line, the Allies needed to take out a similar structure known as Machine Gun House. This was a ruined farmhouse about 20 metres in front of the German frontline, in which the Germans had set up a fortified machine-gun position. It was only about 250 metres to the north of the Red House and situated on the railway embankment near Rabeque Farm.
That night, a raiding party of 30 men, under the command of Captain Pillman, was to attack the German trenches opposite Machine Gun House. At the same time, Woodward was to command a party who would approach the house and demolish it with explosives.
At 11.30 pm the raiding party moved out, slipping through their own wire and advancing slowly across no-man’s-land. Close by the German wire they were discovered, and machine-gun and rifle fire ripped into the raiding party. Almost immediately, Captain Pillman dropped wounded into a shell hole. The men, given the order to retire, raced back to the safety of their own trenches.
Soon after, a badly wounded sergeant dragged himself in and reported that the captain was wounded and lying in the shell hole where he had fallen. Woodward was with a New Zealand officer when he heard the news. ‘Instantly we both saw where our path of duty lay and conquering cowardice but not Fear, we left the trenches to give assistance to the wounded comrade,’ he wrote.1
The failed attack had woken half the German army. Machine-gun fire played across no-man’s-land, and the sky was lit with flares and the flash of explosions. Fearful of their chances, the two men leapt from the trench and raced into the blizzard of bullets, calling for Captain Pillman as they went. They found him with a deep wound in his thigh. He was unable to walk, so they lifted him onto Woodward’s back and set off across the rough, broken ground. ‘I shall never forget that trip across No Man’s Land. That we were not shot to pieces seemed a miracle. Bullets cracked in our ears as if they had missed by a fraction of an inch. We could make no effort to dodge being seen when the flares went up,’ Woodward wrote.2
They somehow made it back to the safety of their own trench and placed the badly wounded man on a stretcher. But his injury was even worse than it had first appeared.
Here Captain Pillman gripped our hands and thanked us for what we had done and a few minutes later he died. The bullet had been deflected into his body. I treasure above all else of my war life his expression of joy and relief when he found we had come to his assistance and his handgrip and word of thanks given to us just before he lost consciousness.3
Woodward returned to Ploegsteert Wood and worked with his men on the Prowse Point dugout. Here they could work without fear that the Germans would hear them or blow camouflets. But they were still not far from danger, as Woodward found when he had his first experience of gas in mid-July 1916. ‘Fortunately this one was of our own creation,’ he wrote.4 The Allies had bombarded the Germans with gas shells and ‘so annoyed the enemy that he gave strong retaliation’.5 Ploegsteert Wood became infamous for gas attacks, and many a soldier’s diary mentions the black, grotesque bodies of men that lined the quaintly named ‘streets’ – Hampshire Lane, The Strand, Regent Street and Oxford Circus – that ran through the wood.
Woodward’s section was under pressure to complete the dugouts quickly, and when several of his fellow officers became sick he worked for three weeks straight.6 It was not until 2 August that he was able to return to the rest camp and take a bath. He said in his diary, ‘By this time I had almost qualified for admission to the Society of the Great Unwashed.’7 At the rest camp he would have had his clothes deloused and washed and had time to make repairs and write letters
home. While here, he received a letter from his father: the army had told him that Oliver, after enlisting in October 1915, simply vanished. They had no record of his training or posting, and could not trace him. For Woodward, this was quite a shock.
I received a letter from my Father advising that he had been informed by the Military authorities that his son Oliver Holmes Woodward had enlisted in October 1915 and had not since been traced. I felt hurt that a graduate of the Moore Park Officers’ Training School had been lost sight of so easily. As this course consisted largely of Naval work such as knots and lashings I presume the authorities searched for me in the ranks of the Navy before appealing to my Father.8
Despite Woodward’s humorous dig about the authorities searching for him in the navy, he must have found it galling to be risking his life at the frontline while some in the army were unaware of his presence and had implied to his family that he had deserted. Presumably this was swiftly sorted out, however, as Woodward makes no further comment about it in his diaries.
It was around this time that some unfortunate news arrived at the headquarters of the Australian tunnelling companies. Their now famous and highly respected geologist, Major Edgeworth David, had had a serious fall on 6 October and been sent to London.9 David, they learnt, had been inspecting a well near Vimy and, while sitting on a wooden board and being lowered down by windlass, the rope broke and he fell 25 metres down a mine shaft. He crashed to the bottom but recovered consciousness quickly, and was able to call for help. A doctor arrived, bandaged up his bleeding head and secured him to a new line. Not one to be defeated, as he was being hauled up he called to the rescuers above: ‘Pull me up slowly and give me time to observe the water level in the shaft.’10
Edgeworth David had been severely injured. He had a deep cut to the head, broken ribs and internal injuries. Though he was never to fully recover, after only six weeks in hospital he returned to his duties, but was forbidden from going within one kilometre of the frontline without his boss, General Harvey’s, permission. General Harvey had been to see Edgeworth David in hospital and had been horrified by his accident and injuries. He understood the brilliance of the man and the need for more geology expertise on the front, so he decided that rather than compromise Edgeworth David’s important contribution to the Allied tunnelling effort, he’d simply restrict his movements from then on. As a result Edgeworth David was usually to be found, much to his annoyance, with Headquarters staff safe behind the line.
