by Simon Jones
Only three significant books have appeared since the end of the First World War on the British mining effort, with the exception of technical publications. The Old Comrades Association of the British Tunnelling Companies produced a history, Tunnellers (1936), written by one of their officers, the mining engineer William Grant Grieve. Grieve made use of a large number of accounts submitted by his fellow officers, now alas lost, and was given comprehensive access to the records being used by the British Official Historian of the Army. It remains the most comprehensive account of British mining operations during the First World War. The publisher, however, brought in a popular writer, Bernard Newman, to enliven the style and remove some of the technical details. Newman had served as a Staff Sergeant in the Army Service Corps on the Western Front, but had gained a reputation as a military authority on the basis of a novel imagining what would have happened if the war had been fought the right way, as opposed to the way that it was actually conducted. Newman seems to have brought this simplistic perspective to parts of Tunnellers and those parts which now feel most dated may be ascribed to his rewriting.
In the late 1950s Alexander Barrie wrote War Underground, his first full-length book, using interviews with a number of surviving tunnellers and, like Grieve, access to still secret War Office records (on the condition that he made no reference to having seen them!). Barrie’s intended focus was the Battle of Messines, but the remarkable stories that he was told led him to try to tell the whole story. Although unreferenced, his research stands up well to modern scrutiny and the interview transcripts are now in the Royal Engineers Museum.
Beneath Flanders Fields, which appeared in 2004, was the work of three well-qualified authors: a film-maker with a long-term interest in underground warfare, a geologist, and a mining engineer resident in the Ypres Salient who has spent many years exploring surviving tunnels and dugouts. The book is highly recommended for understanding the British mining effort in Flanders, not least for the significance of geology and for British tunnelling methods and dugout construction.
Important as these three works are, however, none examines underground warfare in the context of the rapid evolution of fighting methods on the Western Front. Moreover, almost nothing has been written in English describing the French and German mining efforts, or presenting them alongside those of the British. The purpose of this book is to assess the military effectiveness of this antique means of warfare, which was elevated through mass civilian participation and modern technology to the point where it seemed to offer a solution to the deadlock. The text of this book is dispassionate and detached: the personal testimony of individuals is included to convey that underground warfare was, despite the use of technology, fundamentally dependent on human skill, courage and endurance.
Time and space has prevented me from covering the no less remarkable mine warfare of the Vosges and Italian fronts. I am grateful to Mrs Margaret Heese for permission to quote and use illustrations from the diary of her father, Cyril Lawrence, published as The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers – 1st A.I.F. 1915. It has proved impossible to contact copyright holders of other quoted material which may still be in copyright. I would like to extend my thanks to staff at the Royal Engineers Museum and Library, and at Special Collections at the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool and the National Archives, Kew. I am also grateful to Peter Barton, Nick Evans, Peter Lane, Chris McCarthy, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Robinson, Johan Vandewalle and the Amis de Vauquois for their help.
Simon Jones, Liverpool, August 2009
Chapter 1
Military Mining Before 1914
The attack of a fortress by mining is recorded in the ninth century BC. A tunnel was driven beneath the walls and the soil replaced by timber props, which were then destroyed by burning, causing the walls to collapse. Mining was usually resorted to when artillery had failed and was a slower, but ultimately more certain, method of reducing a fortress. In the first century AD the Roman writer Vitruvius described methods of attacking fortress walls. At ground level covered protection, such as a ‘testudo’, or tortoise, was used against projectiles thrown from above to enable the walls to be attacked with hand tools or a battering ram. Where mining was employed he described the burnt-prop method to bring down walls and also the use of a tunnel to emerge inside the fortress or walled town, from which attacking soldiers issued to surprise the garrison. This technique was used by the Romans to end their nine-year siege of Veii in 396 BC.1 Sometimes the knowledge that the walls of a fortress were undermined was sufficient for the garrison to capitulate, as at Marqab in 1285 when the Knights of St John surrendered after being shown the extent to which Egyptian miners had tunnelled beneath their great tower.2 Defences against mining incorporated into fortresses included ready-dug countermines and a deep and wide water-filled ditch. A breach in the walls was so often decisive in breaking a siege that in medieval times it became a convention that the garrison of a castle or fortress might surrender with honour once their walls were breached, whereas if they continued to resist quarter would not be shown and the castle could be sacked.
In fifteenth-century Italy there occurred the only major technological change in military mining from antiquity until 1914, when gunpowder replaced the burning of props to bring down walls. This greatly increased the power and potential of mining, as walls would now not just collapse, but be hurled into the air along with the defenders. Gunpowder also enabled miners to engage in warfare beneath the ground, attacking their opponents’ tunnels by exploding charges, called camouflets, to collapse them, which did not break the surface of the ground. The increased danger to the user entailed by gunpowder saw the rise of regulations to cover mining and, during the seventeenth century, highly sophisticated and standardized forms of fortifications and the means of assault were developed. The French emerged as the masters of siege craft, with the engineer Vauban the dominant figure. The usual method of approach by the besieger was to dig a trench, known as the first parallel, 600 to 700m from the fortification. This was at a distance far enough away for the trench not to be enfiladed (i.e. fired along the length of) by the defenders and earthworks were then thrown up in front for siege artillery to begin firing. Under cover of these guns engineers began to dig approach trenches, known as saps (hence the term ‘Sapper’ for a military engineer), towards the fortress. These were in a zigzag pattern to reduce the effect of enfilade fire. At about 300m from the fortress, a second parallel was dug and new artillery emplacements prepared. From this range the guns could begin to batter a breach in the walls. The defenders might attempt sorties to spike the attackers’ guns. If the artillery assault was not successful, the besiegers continued sapping forwards, by now under small-arms fire, to within a few metres of the walls, or a ditch or moat surrounding the fortress, and constructed a third parallel. If the artillery was still unable to smash gaps in the walls, mining would begin.3
A well-designed fortress incorporated a system of tunnels surrounding its walls designed to detect the mines of the attackers, known as countermines (the term ‘mine’ being used for both the explosive charge and the tunnel from which it was laid). Camouflets would be used to destroy the attackers’ mines, but the defenders were restricted in the size of charge that they could use, for fear of destroying their own defences. The distance at which a charge was likely to damage an opponent’s tunnel was known as the ‘radius of rupture’. Mines that were powerful enough to break the surface of the ground to form a crater were known as ‘common mines’. The distance of a mine from the surface, used to calculate whether it would break surface, was the line of least resistance (LLR). To prevent the blast of a mine being directed down the tunnel in which it was laid, the tunnel would be extensively backfilled in a process called ‘tamping’. In the late seventeenth century formulae for the sizes of charges were developed by Vauban and Mesgrigny, followed by Belidor, who carried out trials in 1725. His calculations were not accepted in France, but were taken up by Prussia an
d used at the Siege of Schweidnitz in 1762, where the Prussians blew mines of up to 2,500kg. The Russians gained much experience during the Russo-Turkish War in 1828 and at Brailov fired two mines of 4,000kg, although with only partial success, as the huge quantity of debris thrown up buried the junction box, preventing the next set of mines from being blown and also ultimately hampering the Russian advance. It was thus not just size that mattered: mines also had to be coordinated with the attack. The Russians used this experience during the most significant mining of the nineteenth century, in the Crimean War during the Siege of Sebastopol. Against a Franco-British attack the Russian chief engineer, General Todleben, organized a system of countermines and some twenty mines were blown, varying in size from 550kg to 2,000kg. Mines were driven through a layer of clay beneath hard chalk. Todleben discovered a second layer at about 15m depth, which he used for a deep level system of countermines. He laid a charge of 4,000kg, which was discovered after the fall of Sebastopol; at that depth it would not have been great enough to break the surface.4
The French mining attack on the Mastbastion at Sebastopol between February and April 1855, launched from the third parallel about 190m from the Russian ditch. Todleben’s countermines surround the Mastbastion. (From Zschokke, Handbuch der militärischen Sprengtechnik (1911).
The French right attack gallery in the above plan, 0.8m high, has been driven through a clay layer beneath hard chalk at a depth of about 6m but has been broken by heavily overcharged Russian blows.
Protracted siege warfare and mining did not, however, play a major part in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, during which the French fortresses were forced to surrender through containment or powerful bombardment. After 1870, the opinion of most artillery and engineer officers in the great military powers was that long-range, large-calibre artillery, especially mortars and howitzers with plunging fire, would always defeat fortresses that previously could be breached only by mining.5
By the 1880s it seemed that fortresses had become obsolete, along with the ancient means of assaulting them. There were, however, opposing trends. The Russo-Turkish War had involved a five-month siege of Pleva in 1877, conducted by Todleben. During the American Civil War mining was used against field works rather than a fortress at the siege of Petersburg. A 511ft gallery was driven by the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, which was both commanded by and composed mainly of coal miners. The unit laid a charge of 3,600kg at 6m depth beneath a Confederate earthwork known as Elliott’s Salient, which was blown on 30 July 1864. The mine killed 250 to 350 Confederate soldiers, but in the resulting Battle of the Crater the Union attack was badly coordinated and many of the attackers were trapped in the crater by a counterattack.6
There was an unexpected revival of mine warfare during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, especially during the siege by the Japanese of Port Arthur. The position was defended by a ring of concrete forts linked by strong points and entrenchments but, possibly believing that the ground was too hard for mining, the Russians failed to construct an adequate system of countermines. They also lacked tools and only began mining after the Japanese underground attacks had started. By the standards of the Crimean War the mining was unsophisticated and the lack of training of the Russians, who were to suffer defeat, demonstrated that skills could very quickly be lost. The first contact underground demonstrates the Russian lack of skill. A shallow Russian countermine at Fort II caved in beneath a shell crater and the tunnel was deepened with a shaft sunk to 4m. From the bottom of the shaft the Russians began a gallery inclined downwards and, on 20 October 1904, they heard noises of Japanese mining. On 26th, after determining the direction of the Japanese attack by listening, the Russians loaded the end of the gallery with 123kg of gunpowder, continuing picking until the last moment to deceive the Japanese. They blew the following day, destroying the Japanese gallery and killing several miners. However, they had miscalculated the weight of the charge, which was probably intended only as a camouflet, and broke surface to form a crater, as well as bringing down part of their own defences and effectively loosening the ground, facilitating the Japanese advance.
By December 1904 charges of 900kg to 1,300kg were used, and on 31 December the Japanese blew 5,000kg of dynamite.7 High explosives, such as TNT and dynamite, invented in the 1860s, were at least twice as powerful as gunpowder, but did not immediately replace it in mining owing to their high rate of detonation. The war also saw the construction of very strong field fortifications, involving earthworks, entrenchments and barbed wire, which were so resistant to attack that mining was also used against them. In the winter of 1904-05, when the opponents were facing one another on the banks of the Shaho river 100m apart, the Russians advanced by sapping and mining to capture the Japanese bridgehead. They also attempted this at the village of Li-chia-pu, where the positions were about 300m apart. In the final land action of the war, for three weeks in February to March 1905 until the Russians were forced to fall back, armies of over 300,000 on each side faced each other from entrenchments at Mukden on a forty-mile front.8
Japanese attack gallery and Russian countermine k, October 1904. The dotted line n shows the radius of rupture of a Russian charge l of 123kg. (From Zschokke, Handbuch der militärischen Sprengtechnik (1911).
The Russo-Japanese War led the armies of Europe to pay renewed attention to their ability to conduct a siege. The Germans held extensive siege exercises between 1908 and 1913 and that year issued new regulations. Moreover, the prospect of a war on two fronts against France and Russia led to an extension of the fortress system. Fortress battalions, and pioneer battalions in fortress areas, were given special training in siege operations and in time of war Fortress Pioneer regiments were to be formed. Interest in mining specifically, however, was more lukewarm in Germany. Previously the German mining and fortress warfare regulations contained detailed instructions. These included the use of boring machinery, procedures for listening duties and action on breaking into enemy galleries, where the use of stink balls made of hair, tow and sponge soaked in petrol was advocated.9 In the years before 1914 an abbreviated form of mining attack was preferred. The German demolition manual of 1911 (Sprengvorschrift) and the regulations for fortress warfare of 1913 contained less detailed instructions than previously.10
There was a general tendency for technical training to be downplayed in European armies, which was exacerbated by the introduction of conscript armies with short terms of service. In the German pioneers the normal period of service was two years, of which the first was devoted almost entirely to infantry training.11 Captain Toepfer, a German engineer officer, in assessing the role of technical troops in the Russo-Japanese war, argued in 1906 in the Kriegstechnische Zeitschrift that the war showed that it was impossible to assault the field fortifications constructed by the Russians, especially as the artillery preparations were, as a rule, inadequate. Building such extensive field fortifications was an error on the part of the Russians as they became an end in themselves, which imprisoned them: ‘they paralyzed action and obscured the view of the objective.’ Moreover, such field defences would require the weapons and tactics of siege warfare:
… it has been demonstrated that a well-fortified position cannot be taken by field-warfare alone. Only a continued fire of heavy artillery and a step-bystep advance of the infantry under the protection of this fire will bring about its fall.
He predicted that there would be a role for the sapper and miner, not only in fortress warfare, but also against such field entrenchments:
It has been suggested that in fighting against well-fortified field positions a method similar to that of the fight against fortresses is necessary, which will not only bring the artillery, but also the technical troops into action and at the same time bring them recognition.12
The Anglo-Boer South African War of 1899-1902 had also shown the difficulty of attacking field fortifications, especially barbed wire. In the years before the First World War, however, responses to the power of such obstacles, entrenchments
and the defensive power of the machine gun were countered by doctrines of rapid mobility and moral force. In assessing the German regulations for field fortifications in respect of the experience of the Russo-Japanese war, a commentator in the Militär Wochenblatt in 1910 was confident that obstacles used during that war, including wire entanglements and mining, would not feature in a European war. The rapid movement that would characterise a future war would not allow such extensive works to be completed, nor would the adversary display such a passive attitude as the Russians:
We shall never see a war in Europe like that in Manchuria, still less like that in South Africa. Such extended and strongly fortified positions will never be reproduced in Europe.13
This attitude was shared in France, Germany’s potential adversary. A French assessment of the German army regulations, revised during 1906-09, contained a brief section on the assault on field fortifications. Heavy fire from howitzers over several days would be joined, at dawn on the day of the assault, by infantry and machine-gun fire, forcing the enemy to burrow in his trenches, during which time the obstacles could be destroyed and the assault delivered. For the author, however, the Germans need not even have considered having to carry out an assault on field or permanent fortifications:
Such are the principal prescriptions of this very special form of combat, which resembles much more a siege operation than a field operation… In a war between France and Germany we do not anticipate a battle of such nature. The fortified places are already quite numerous, and an army that would shut itself up in a permanent defensive position would be inviting destruction.
