by Simon Jones
The opening of the Verdun offensive increased the importance of Vauquois as an observation post and shortly afterward the Germans were to demonstrate their dominance by devastating the French positions above and below ground. On 3 March they detonated a mine on the eastern flank of the plateau of 16,500kg, which they had placed over 35m deep. The French had not detected this mine and three sappers were lost in a gallery and twelve infantry were missing in the posts:
I took the risk of crawling along the length of my first line. All the minor posts of the eastern extremity were blown up along with the communication trench; a whole corner of the Ridge disappeared in the void; the hole is 60 metres wide. It is almost unimaginable; the hill is sliced through, opened, in space... The first German line was blown away, it too; between it and us a crater opens which widens and grows deeper more and more towards the right. The depths of the broken ground are of a yellow and raw colour; an immense odour of mildew floats in the void. Over the whole of the top of the sunken lane and on the site of the minor posts there are accumulations of monstrous rocks, each one the size of a tomb. The lip of the crater is twenty metres wide, eight or ten metres thick. There we have a half-section buried alive, sealed in the ground, that neither the end of the war nor the flow of the centuries will ever convey to the military ossuaries. My men, my poor fellows, are in there crushed and contorted. And I do not yet know their names. And when we know them, no one will dare to make them public, and each family will imagine that a bullet passed, quickly and cleanly, through their dear one’s heart. (Lieutenant André Pézard, 46th Infantry Regiment)17
Four days afterwards noises of picking were heard near one of the buried posts and on 9 March, after six days underground, three men were rescued alive.
To retaliate, the French engineer command quickly prepared a strongly overcharged mine in the centre of the plateau. They were assisted by a technical section of the engineers from Versailles, the Service Électromécanique (SEM), with an experimental Bornet electric drill. This had to be carried in pieces more than 20m below ground and was powered by a generator installed in a dugout. The drill was capable of 15cm diameter bores of up to 50m in length, drilling at about 8 to 10m per hour. The principle was the same as the pre-war borers, but this device was capable of cutting through rock. At the end of the bore a small charge was exploded, disguised by blowing a charge in a neighbouring gallery or a bombardment on the surface, to create a cavity capable of holding a larger charge. This process was repeated several times until the cavity could hold 10 tonnes of explosive, which was inserted along the borehole. The French passed the bags by hand along the gallery so that the German listeners were not alerted by the sounds of explosives being dragged along the ground. The French were alone in continuing to use gunpowder for mining operations, which was both less powerful than ammonium nitrate explosives and also far more liable to explode accidentally. After 5 or 6 tonnes had been charged the atmosphere was laden with a highly dangerous mixture of explosive dust and, in the confined space of the gallery, probably set off by a candle, there was a violent explosion. The main charge, however, did not detonate and remarkably the French seem to have suffered no casualties. Listeners detected German activity in the vicinity and the French halted charging, immediately tamped and blew on 23 March. Most of the remains of Vauquois church were hurled into the air, about 60m of the German front line was destroyed and about 30m of the second line was damaged. Thirty German infantry disappeared. The French infantry occupied the southern lip of the crater, nearest their own line, but were forced back over the crater lip by German fire and counterattacks, which continued for the rest of the day. The lips were higher on the German side and the blow left them with improved observation over the French positions.
Bornet electric drill used at Vauquois. From École de Mines Supplément au Livre de l’Officier, 1917.
The German western flanking tunnel (Stollen 1b), in progress since November 1915, was pushed ahead in difficult conditions in a gallery 80cm in height and 150cm wide. Former Pioneer Herman Hoppe recalled in 1969 that they worked without shirts and had to use oxygen cylinders at the face because the air was so bad. By mid-February the gallery was 86m in length and the Germans prepared a chamber 5m long, 4.5m wide and 2.7m in height to take a massive 50 tonne charge. Five railway trucks were needed to bring up the explosives. It was the largest mine charge of the entire war, larger than the 43.2 tonne St Eloi mine blown by the British at the Battle of Messines in June 1917. Charging began on 25 February and, with tamping, took thirty men three and a half weeks. Hoppe described how the yellow powder of the Westfalit and Astralit explosive came in packages about 25cm long, which they stacked like bricks. Five hundred detonators were used, with three separate sets of leads. The tamping included a 6m barrier of concrete and extended for 80m in total, almost the entire length of the tunnel, requiring 25,000 sandbags with wooden barriers every 5m.18
The Germans fired the mine on 14 May 1916. Hoppe remembered the moment of detonation:
… the whole mountain rocked. One could feel it at Varennes and beyond like an earthquake. With the debris a leg with the buttocks came over us flying through the air. In my diary it says that four Frenchmen were thrown over which I am not sure about now. But I definitely saw the leg.19
The crater was almost 60m in diameter, destroying the French lines for 35m right back to the third line and pulverising the French underground shelters and their occupants. One hundred and eight men were missing, mostly from the 9th Company of the 46th Infantry Regiment. Three mine shafts and galleries disappeared and with them nine miners.
It is an upheaval so beyond measure, such a complete eradication, such an absolute transformation, as to seem at first too powerful to enter familiar eyes. I do not comprehend, I cannot. This emptiness crushes me. (Lieutenant André Pézard)20
Despite the massive destruction that the mine had wrought on the French positions, the Germans did not coordinate this mine with any attempt to force the French from the ridge. The only explanation for this is that the Germans wished to secure their hold on the ridge, but it nevertheless suited them to allow the French a small foothold. Two days after the blow General Halloin, commanding the French 5th Corps, issued orders that it was essential to give more power and energy to mining at Vauquois, to catch up with, or even overtake, the Germans and that it should be possible to blow 100 tonnes at the same time with combined charges. The commander of Company 5/1 studied a project to open a breach of 130m in the German lines in the centre of the ridge, to gain observation over the northern slope and to destroy the deep German underground shelters. He planned four charges laid in galleries dug using compressed air-powered drills: two 30 tonne charges would be placed at 25 and 23m depths in two branches from the E4 gallery. Two others of 10 tonnes and 20 tonnes would be at 25m depth at the head of E18. The plan was supported by General Valdant, commanding 10th Division, but would require 250 workers, who were not available. The scheme was abandoned.
French High Command, on the contrary, prescribed a purely defensive attitude to mining, while acknowledging that energetic action was needed to combat the deeper German galleries. Therefore the creation of a second system at a lower level was ordered and the engineers began six new attack galleries from shafts about 30m behind the front line. These had to be inclined downwards at 45 degrees to reach a depth of 30m by the time they passed the French front line. The engineers had to rely on less skilled infantry pioneers to carry this out, whose work was slower. They also had to keep the shafts in the front line in operation, where the fight with the Germans continued unabated. Daily bombardments by well-observed German mortar fire impeded progress by frequently blowing in the entrances of galleries. In May the French tackled this problem by constructing new concealed entrances linked to the front line workings some 15m back.
From April 1916 the Germans deepened their mine system yet further by driving three tunnels, Ost, Mittel and West, at 42m depth into the steep northern slope. They blew a large mine on
20 July, increasing the crater of 14 May in size and further threatening the French galleries in the west. In the east, on 7 June, the French infantry had felt three jolts which they suspected were due to German underground blasting. Lieutenant Pézard described their desperate desire to leave Vauquois; it was a wish that was fulfilled fifteen days later when the 46th Regiment left the ridge for good. The Germans blew another large mine in the east on 26 July, creating a 50m-wide crater which overlapped that of 3 March.
In August 1916 the three French engineer Companies were relieved after over a year at Vauquois, during which time they had lost 215 men killed, and were replaced by Companies 27/51, 16/3 and 27/1. Company 27/51 blew a charge of 10 tonnes gunpowder and 1 tonne dynamite on 19 August, creating a 40m wide crater, although the Germans had detected the work and evacuated their front line and shelters. Over the following three days 1/Pi 30 blew five charges in return. In September Captain Mathey, commanding the 27/1, proposed creating a third system of galleries, which started on the French rear slope, in imitation of the Germans. Three inclined galleries, X, Y and Z, were begun which would pass beneath the French front line at 38m depth. At the end of September the French got electric power and compressed air to these three galleries, allowing the use of pneumatic picks and electric winches. A 40cm rail line was installed on 19 November. These measures went some way towards compensating for the French lack of labour, but the power supply was insufficient for all winches and they had to be used alternately.
Mines at Vauquois in October 1916. German positions are in the north, with no man’s land formed entirely of mine craters. The Germans have abandoned their front line shafts and are driving deep galleries from their rear slope. The French were still reliant on their front line shafts for defence. A/ indicates a German blown mine, F/ a French blown mine. From Amis de Vauquois, La Butte Meurtrie. (Collection Amis de Vauquois)
On 16 November the French D3 deep incline, underway since June, entered service and the French believed that they could take on the Germans. However, despite daily listening and a strong camouflet of 3.5 tonnes, the Germans responded with a charge ten times greater from the end of Kaiser Stollen on 10 December, forming a 70m crater and destroying four of the E shafts and much of the French front line and underground shelters. Fifty men were rescued but twenty-one were not found.
In September the Germans completed a gallery, Gotteberg, to protect the sector where the French had blown on 23 March. At the end of 1916, the Germans still had the advantage, gained through superior equipment, personnel and mortars, to systematically put shaft entrances out of action. Poor weather prevented aircraft observation, which would have alerted the French to the increase in spoil on the northern slope. The new German galleries were 10m beneath the deepest French workings and the French were unable to surprise the Germans. When they heard the French the Germans stopped work and used activity in the upper galleries to disguise the lower work. They could blow to a range of 30m without fear of retaliation from the French systems at 20 and 30m depth (see cross section). The French were forced to abandon the last seven shafts put into service, or to destroy them when blowing camouflets, owing to the short distance from the shafts to the ends of their galleries. Their radius of rupture was only 20 to 25m and caused very little damage to the German galleries. The French system of D shafts, intended to fight at 35ft depth, was barely in service before it was outclassed by the German galleries. The shafts were either abandoned or rendered unusable by German camouflets. To make matters worse the new X, Y and Z attack galleries passed beneath the French front lines at only 25, 20 and 30m instead of the planned 38m, owing to a levelling error by Captain Mathey.
At the end of 1916 the French began work on a series of new galleries, only one of which was started from the rear slope. This was a new deep gallery (V) on the eastern flank, driven on a steep gradient of 70 per cent and equipped with an electric winch and fan. In addition four major listening galleries were started from in, or near, the front line and a 22-tonne camouflet was to be blown from D1 to destroy a deep German gallery between D1 and D6. The camouflet was to be 11 tonnes gunpowder and 11 tonnes cheddite, but on 31 December, during charging, the powder went off and the blast killed thirty-six men at work in the gallery.
In January the French engineers were again relieved when there was a change of corps. Company 8/14 took over mines in the west, 8/64 in the centre and the mining company M5, afterwards M5/T, of which the commander had only moderate experience, in the east. In order to preserve some continuity Mathey remained in command. The French made efforts to regain the advantage and the driving of galleries took on an increasingly mechanized character to compensate for a permanent lack of labour. The Service Électromécanique operated generators, compressors, ventilators, pumps, winches, drills and borers, but electrical output remained inadequate. There was 1,800m of compressed air piping from the French rear position at the Mamelon Blanc feeding the pneumatic picks and pumps in the galleries. During the winter these were affected by freezing weather and rising water also flooded some of the galleries.
The V gallery in the extreme east was quickly begun, but only after the work was established was it found that the entrance was subject to flanking fire from the Bois de Cheppy, by which time it was too late to change the location. The lack of labour and delay in installing the 40cm railway hampered the removal of spoil. Work on the new listening galleries was hardly begun before one was halted by a German camouflet. Nevertheless the French planned new galleries, S and T, from their rear slope and began a ‘revenge gallery’ branched from X in reply to the German 35tonne mine of 10 December, creating a diversion by drilling from another branch. Despite a German camouflet on 5 February, the French were able to charge with 5.7 tonnes to destroy two German workings to the north-east and north-west.
On 24 February the Germans blew a mine in the mid-west of the ridge, destroying a French shaft, damaging two others and confirming French fears of major German deep workings. On 9 March, the French urgently considered a plan to lay three enormous mines to destroy the German galleries and surface positions and to give up the Vauquois position in favour of the Mamelon Blanc position. This involved placing three charges 60m apart, each of either 144 tonnes at 40m depth or 280 tonnes at 50m. This was not adopted, as it was estimated that the mines would only partly destroy the German surface and underground positions and the craters could then be used by the Germans as cover for maintaining their occupation of the ridge. To be effective the charges would have to be placed behind the northern lip of the craters which formed no man’s land, which was impossible to achieve, and if the French had that degree of freedom underground there would be no need for them to give up the ridge. On 9 March they decided to dig a fourth and final deep gallery, W, between X and V to reach 50m depth. The Germans blew a mine on 19 March, making a 60m crater and destroying two French shafts as well as the infantry and engineers’ shelters. It was to be the last of the large German mines. The French, however, were making some progress with their deep galleries. In February their X gallery came into service, in April Y, Z and T, and in June V and S. On 30 June the French blew what was to be their last mine to break surface, which destroyed a German machine-gun dugout. At these deep levels even massive charges no longer broke surface to form craters and mine warfare became an almost entirely underground affair. Its immediate purpose was no longer to attack surface positions, but purely to destroy the enemy galleries and kill the mining personnel. Using sensitive listening apparatus both sides tried to blow camouflets to cause maximum casualties to the miners of the opposing sides. When charges did not break surface or find enemy galleries there was frequently nowhere for the gas generated by the explosion to vent, in which case spherical voids were formed which the miners might then break into. In February the French discovered one 10m in diameter; the Germans used a 6m cavity as a listening chamber for several days before destroying it. By this time the Germans did not attempt to recover the bodies of their men killed by camouflets. Pion
eer Tschörtner, posted to 1/Pi 30 at the beginning of 1917, explained the reasoning in an interview in 1970:
Pioneer Damman was buried by a French blow. We walled him up. We always did it that way because we no longer recovered people. Once we unearthed one. He had been surprised in a squatting position by a French blow not during the usual time for blows. The head sat in the right upper corner, the trunk was beneath and the legs were gone. We always closed the galleries after that.21
In the summer of 1917 the Germans worked on driving three new galleries deeper than any previously used. Rader Stollen in the east, Mittel II Stollen in the centre and Treppen Stollen to the west were to pass beneath the level of the sandstone gaize, through layers of clay and green sand, to reach limestone at over 100m depth. After driving horizontally into the hillside 42m beneath the level of the summit, they were steeply inclined to reach about 60m depth before doubling back and by March 1918 reached 95m.
In June 1917, the French decided to discontinue active mining on the west end of Vauquois ridge. The chief engineer of the 31st Corps recommended the adoption of a purely passive attitude, reacting only if the German miners became too threatening. The commander of the 64th Division, holding the line above ground, also approved a report by his commander of engineers to ‘put to sleep’ mine warfare in the whole Vauquois sector. From that date the French proposed to carry out only maintenance work and monitoring. There remained the problem of German threats. If the French were to blow a German gallery approaching their workings it would reawaken mine warfare, which the French could not then counter, as their system was insufficiently developed and had been allowed to flood. It thus proved extremely difficult for the French to disengage from mine warfare at Vauquois. Their attack galleries were within a few metres of the German lines and were inevitably met by German miners. On 26 June a German borer broke into the head of the French T gallery. The French constructed a barricade and brought in dynamite, but the Germans blew as they were doing this, burying a corporal and wounding, gassing and concussing an officer. The French attempted to continue laying a charge but the Germans blew again, killing a corporal and a sapper, and then blew a third time the following day.
