Beneath Hill 60

by Will Davies

  Many of the mines had been in position for over a year and their deteriorating condition was a great source of concern. Rain filled the tunnels now the pumps had fallen silent. Moisture was a relentless, determined and destructive enemy threatening to destroy the work of many men. All their effort, all their pain and blood – and now they simply had to wait. Nerves were frayed to breaking point.

  Above ground, the preparations continued. The infantry moved towards the front – endless lines of marching men with heavy packs, basic webbing bulging with small-arms ammunition and grenades, slung rifles, entrenching tools and their gas masks sitting ready across their chests. They had little idea of the battle ahead. All frontline troops fear enemy mines but as they trudged along the muddy Belgian and French lanes that led to the front, the men could little suspect that massive charges lay silent beneath the earth and were about to wreak damage and carnage on the enemy before they sprang across their tapes and headed into no-man’s-land in a few days’ time.

  Three kilometres south of Hill 60, the Canadians at St Eloi were waiting anxiously. On 28 May they had just finished laying the final charges and tamping their mine, the deepest of all the 19 mines at nearly 40 metres, and holding the largest charge of nearly 44 tonnes of ammonal. Unlike Woodward’s elaborate firing system, the Canadians had just two circuits, and rather than a comfortable, protected, light-proof firing position, their firing party was to take up a position in a dugout or open trench. They had been under way on a gallery that would have allowed them to fire another mine, but needing another two to three weeks to complete the work, had abandoned this plan.

  South of the Canadians, the 250th Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers had seven mines to keep operational and ready for firing. Their commanding officer, Major Cecil Cropper, was credited with digging the first deep mines into the blue clay, and he had come up with an idea similar to Norton-Griffiths’: to blow open the Messines Ridge with a series of mines. But in late December 1916 he had been ordered to hospital suffering from exhaustion and German measles, and unfortunately could not return to Messines to watch the results of all his hard work on the northern three mines at Hollandscheschuur.

  The 250th Tunnelling Company was responsible for three other mine sites. At Petit Bois, the second-longest tunnel stretched well under the German lines to two relatively small mines. At Maedelstede Farm work had fallen far behind schedule, and one shaft was abandoned when it was realised it could not reach its objective in time. All effort went into the main Maedelstede tunnel. When it reached a length of 500 metres, it was loaded with over 40 tonnes of ammonal and 1.8 tonnes of guncotton, tamped, tested and made ready for firing just one day ahead of zero hour. It was the second-largest charge and was to be fired by electrical current from a generator normally used to power lighting. At the Peckham mine, the nuggety Welshman Haydn Rees had battled cave-ins, camouflets, wet sand and a muddy slime that seeped into his gallery and threatened to close his mine. He had laboured to build diversionary tunnels around the cave-ins and re-wired the charges himself.1

  At Spanbroekmolen, a feverish, incautious group of miners of the 171st Company were pushing relentlessly forward, now knowing the date of the attack and not caring much if the Germans heard them or not. In early March 1917, a German camouflet had rocked the main gallery, severed the firing wires and completely collapsed the tunnel. It had taken nearly two months to drive another parallel shaft; along the way, the tunnellers struck pockets of deadly gas, and three died of asphyxiation. In a race against the clock, Captain Henry Hudspeth dug a diversionary tunnel around the collapse. This allowed the men to attach a half-tonne dynamite priming charge to the original charge of nearly 40 tonnes of ammonal, and run new firing wires back. This was frantic work, the tunnellers sweating and straining and ever fearing another German camouflet. The massive charge was ready just hours before zero hour.2 Hudspeth was so concerned the mine would not fire that he quickly scribbled a note to his Divisional Headquarters, explaining the problem and asking that the commander of the attacking troops be notified. He paced about, fearful that the waves of men throwing themselves against the German line in the days ahead might not have the advantage of his massive, destructive mine.

  At Kruisstraat, 700 metres away, Captain Henry Hudspeth had other mines ready. He had dug a tunnel over 650 metres long, well behind the German frontline and as far as the German third line of trenches. Here he had laid three mines along the gallery with a total of 50 tonnes of ammonal. These were connected to a generator used for lighting, and were ready for firing. Hudspeth had suggested that these mines be slightly delayed so that the Germans fleeing from the frontline trenches would be caught in his blast. He was refused permission on the grounds that the delayed firing might cause casualties for the advancing infantry, hit either by the shock of the explosion or falling debris from the blast.

  Hudspeth also had a mine at Ontario Farm, directly west of the village of Messines. Here, in the second-deepest mine, 32 metres below the surface, he had problems with liquid sand and was rushing to complete the work. This was a crucial mine in the attack on the ridge line, and he knew full well his responsibility and place in the grand plan. By early June, he had excavated the chamber and by the end of the following week, just one day before the attack, had placed 27 tonnes of ammonal and tamped the charge. The firing leads were only run out a few hours before zero hour, connected to the two exploders, and the firing party able to take their places.3

  At the southern end of the line, in the section furthest away from the Australians on Hill 60, there were still problems. Here the men of the Canadian 3rd Tunnelling Company, who had moved to this sector after handing over Hill 60 to the Australians the previous November, had been working on a series of mines at the very end of the Messines Ridge, just to the east of Ploegsteert Wood. Three days before the start of the attack, a heavy-calibre shell made a direct hit on the entrance of an escape tunnel at Factory Farm. Suddenly, a 20-metre hole opened up and when Lieutenant Hall peered down into the darkness, he could just make out the coils of the firing leads at the bottom, which were being buried in sand cascading from the broken boards that lined the shaft. He scrambled down the ladder and with Sergeant Beer worked frantically to repair the lining boards and recover the buried firing leads.

  Originally, Hall and another officer, Lieutenant George Dickson, were to fire their mines from a position at the base of the shaft, but because of the extent of the damage, with zero hour just 12 hours away, their firing position was now to be above ground. This meant running firing leads from the base of the shaft to the surface. There was little time, especially given that there were six separate circuits to connect up. To make matters worse, Dickson was affected by gas. With the help of Sergeant Beer, the men attached the firing wires, fixed them securely to the timber lining and tested the current. Up and down the two men went to check and recheck the circuit, sweating, struggling and frantic until just 20 minutes before zero hour, they made their final test, and waited.

  On the night before the attack, General Plumer is said to have remarked to his staff: ‘Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.’ How right he would prove to be.

  Oliver Woodward was nervous. He had kept the tunnel open through to the gallery that contained the ammonal charge, as he was anxious that the approaching Germans might break into it, and he wanted to be able to monitor their movement and attack if needed. On 3 June, in preparation for the firing of the mines, he began retamping the gallery. Gradually the bags of spoil were passed forward and quietly placed into position. As Woodward looked on, he could barely hide his apprehension. The addition of each bag made any repair harder. Fearing the Germans would find the mine and disarm it, from that moment on he had an officer working the newly installed switchboard, continually taking both continuity and resistance tests and reporting to him.

  He had just returned to his dugout at 3 pm when the British artillery all along the front opened up with what
was termed a ‘demonstration barrage’. It frightened the life out of him, and he feared that the rumble and percussion might set off his mines. The roar of the shells continued for half an hour. The next day was noticeably quiet, but the following day at 3 pm the British heavy artillery gave the Germans another demonstration of their firepower, this time for an hour.

  The time of the attack – zero hour – had been kept secret even from Woodward. It was not until late on 5 June that Brigadier General T. S. Lambert, the CO of the 69th Brigade, the British infantry who would attack the Germans at Hill 60, informed Woodward that zero hour was at 3.10 am and that he would be with him in the firing dugout to provide the countdown and to see the mines fired. To be told the exact timing was something of a relief, because at last Woodward could calculate what the expected location of the German tunnellers would be at zero hour.

  Dawn broke peacefully on the morning of 6 June, the day before the attack was to start. Woodward recalled in his diary that it ‘was a day during which one’s nerves seemed to be strained to the breaking point’.4 He had determined to fire his two mines with a Service Exploder and again checked the leads that came into his dugout from each of the two mines. He then carefully connected the two mines together into series and extended the leads back to the specially constructed, light-proof firing position in Bentham Road support trench, well behind the frontline. Now his leads were vulnerable to German artillery, stretching as they were 350 metres from the Hill 60 mine and 450 metres from the Caterpillar mine back to the firing point. It was something new to worry about.

  It was mid-summer and the sun hung in the sky, sinking slowly and bathing the battlefield in an eerie glow. Woodward rarely saw the sun, let alone actually watched its path towards the far horizon, but as dusk came he stared at it, willing it to sink faster and just go away. By midnight, his work was complete, but the testing continued.

  An atmosphere of peace and quietness settled over the battlefield. The Allied guns had fallen silent in the hope of not stirring up the enemy artillery. Were an artillery duel to start now, the infantry lying on their start lines along nine kilometres of front and packed into forward trenches would be exposed, resulting in horrendous casualties. The Germans also remained quiet, their artillery silent, their crews asleep beside their guns in the warm summer air. Overhead, the odd heavy shell fired kilometres behind the line travelled high across the heavens, on its way to the German rear.

  At 2 am, a German flare arced up into the sky above Hill 60 and flooded the area with a dazzling white light. It hung there, then descended, leaving a smoky vapour trail behind as it fell to earth. Woodward glanced at his watch and gave the order for the troops in the mine system and guarding the tunnellers’ dugouts to be withdrawn. They moved silently to their positions, well aware that on such a quiet night any noise would travel far.

  At 2.25 am, with just 45 minutes to zero hour, Woodward made the last resistance test and confirmed to himself and to his two fellow Australians – Lieutenants Royle and Bowry – that their leads were still intact. All that remained to do was to connect the leads to the firing switch.

  Just before 3 am, Brigadier General Lambert arrived and took up his position in the firing dugout. Lambert was one of the younger generals, ‘A first class soldier who left nothing to chance and never hurried prematurely’ and who was ‘Close up to the scene of the action, from whence he would watch an attack and control by timely action its course’.5

  The strain on the firing party was intense. Their great fear was that there would be nothing – no bang, no explosion, nothing – when the firing handle was depressed. All along the line, nervous officers were getting ready, their sweaty hands feeling for the cold brass of the plunger, praying it would all work.

  Thousands of men were now watching the ticking second hand on watches along the front. Infantry officers, their whistles in hand, stood on their fire steps, a mass of helmeted men stretching as far as the eye could see, their bayonets glistening and their rifles ready. Thousands of artillerymen stood, their guns loaded, the firing lanyards in their hands, just waiting for the word to FIRE and send their first salvo. Crews sat sweating in their tanks, their hands on greasy levers ready to start up their lumbering giants. And everyone wondered about the awful day ahead and their likely fate.

  In Woodward’s firing position, all eyes were on Lambert. He stood, legs astride, the stopwatch in his open palm. No one moved. All eyes were on the watch, its black second hand continuing its relentless sweep, its ticking seemingly amplified in the silence. Woodward’s hand closed silently around the plunger handle.

  Then the silence was broken. It was Lambert. ‘Five minutes to go.’ One final check and the leads were fine. Woodward turned to Royle and Bowry. Each stood by an exploder at their feet, ready to spring into action should Woodward’s dynamo fail. They were good men and he knew he could trust them.

  ‘Three minutes to go,’ called Lambert, his tone an octave higher than usual. Tick … tick … tick … tick … tick. All along the front, so much ticking, thought Woodward, so many men staring at slowly advancing second hands, so many Germans with seconds to live. ‘Two minutes to go,’ whispered Lambert. Woodward felt his hand tighten on the plunger handle.

  ‘One minute to go.’ Woodward took a deep breath as if it were his last. Then, ‘Forty-five seconds to go’, ‘Twenty seconds to go’… tick … tick … tick … ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, FIRE.

  Over went the firing handle. Woodward had grabbed it so tight and pressed it in so determined a way that his hand came in contact with the terminals and a strong electric shock sent him spinning backwards off his feet.

  For what seemed an age, nothing happened. At first, far-off tremors rumbled through the earth from other mines fired along the line. In an instant, there flashed across Woodward’s mind a feeling of envy for those officers whose mines had successfully fired.

  And then a dull roar came from deep within the earth, growling and heaving, and suddenly the German frontline burst upward as a sheet of dark, muddy clay, planking, huge lumps of dirt the size of hay bales, and the cartwheeling bodies of men and weapons, shot skyward. Out of the top burst a sheet of red flame, highlighting the now cascading debris as it fell back and crashed and splintered in a wide radius.

  As Lieutenant G. A. Hamilton, an artillery officer near Zillebeke noted: ‘At exactly 3.10 am Armageddon began. Never could I have imagined such a sight. First there was a double shock that shook the earth here 5000 yards [c. 4600 metres] away like a giant earthquake. I was nearly flung off my feet. Then an immense wall of fire that seemed to go half way up to heaven. The whole country was lit up with a red light like a photographic darkroom. At the same moment, all the guns spoke and the battle began on this part of the line. The noise surpasses even the Somme; it is terrific, magnificent, overwhelming.’6

  To the south, in the midst of the Messines–Wytschaete Ridge, the British Inspector of Mines, General Harvey, wrote in his diary: ‘3.10 am. A violent earth tremor, then a gorgeous sheet of flame from Spanbroekmolen, and at the same time every gun opened fire. At short intervals of seconds, mines continued to explode; a period which elapsed between the first and the last mine, about 30 seconds.’ The 30-second lag, which had caused Woodward such envy, was due to the synchronisation of the officers’ watches being slightly off.7

  ‘With a fearful shuddering, the earth was shaken to the core,’ wrote Oberstleutnant Otto Füsslein, the commander of the German miners along the Messines front. He saw vast craters open up, ‘like the jaws of a hell-hound, spitting fire, water, earth and dark clouds into the sky. Clods of earth showered down over a wide area … and once more a hellish rain of steel poured out of the sky as though intent on annihilating every living thing below.’8

  All along the line, 100,000 Allied infantry felt the earth heave and stared skyward as huge funnels of black earth climbed into the sky. Rising hundreds of metres, they suddenly broke open and from within, the same blindin
g flash of red flame scorched the heavens. And then the infantry’s whistles blew, hardly audible over the crash of 2000 Allied guns along the whole of the British front, which sent an avalanche of shells into the shattered German line. The lighter artillery fired over open sights at the dark line of the ridge, now clearly visible and rim-lit by the breaking dawn. The heavier guns fell on predetermined targets: German artillery emplacements, which had been carefully and precisely located on maps, the lines of communication and advance for reinforcements, storage areas and billets, cook houses, rail lines and command centres.

  About 460 tonnes of explosives, mainly ammonal, had been detonated, in the biggest man-made explosion in history. It brought people running from their houses in panic in Lille 35 kilometres away, fearing an earthquake. It was said that it was heard far away in London, and even in Dublin, 700 kilometres from Messines. It was also the most remarkable and successful mining feat in history and one that would never again be attempted or surpassed.

  For a fraction of a second, Oliver Woodward, deep within his dugout, failed to grasp what had just happened. His shock was soon replaced by ‘joy in the knowledge that the Hill 60 mines had done their work’, he later wrote. ‘We had not failed in our duty.’9

  Woodward, Royle and Bowry shook hands and congratulated each other on their successful firing. General Lambert beamed, his lined face never happier now that he knew his men were advancing across no-man’s-land, which only moments before would have been a suicidal task.

  Deep within their dugout, Woodward and his officers had not seen the sight of the explosions. They made a hurried inspection of their mining system and saw that the dugout showed little damage and the upper section of the mine was also intact. He ordered an officer and a few men to carry out an inspection deeper down, then went across to what had been the German lines just a few hours before, to inspect the damage and establish machine-gun positions on the rim of the crater in readiness for the expected German counterattack.