Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  The British, having made the usual protestations about beastliness and unfairness, promptly opened a factory in Wembley to manufacture flame-projectors of their own. Each of the flame sections of the Special Brigade RE had, by late June 1916, one large and four portable contraptions. The main limitation of these weapons was their range – not much more than around thirty yards for the large version, and less for the portable. While they could have been of great help to an attacker for the clearing of dugouts and bunkers, they had to be carried across no man’s land first, and the operator was an easy target owing to both his inability to move quickly and his distinctive silhouette. A solution might have been to fit the devices in tanks, as was done with the ‘crocodile’ in the Second World War, but the vulnerability of such a weapon to an artillery strike might have made it difficult to persuade crews to man it.

  Flame-projectors were used increasingly but sporadically by both sides until the end of the war, with mixed results. Concurrently with their attack on the 8th Rifle Brigade, the Germans managed to gain a foothold on Hill 62 – an area of vital ground to the defenders of the Ypres salient – by the use of flame-throwers; but difficulty in following up prevented them from exploiting the advantage gained, and the area was recaptured by the British on 9 August. In June 1916 the Germans again attacked in the same area with flame, but a stout defence by Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry prevented them holding the ground taken.11

  On the opening day of the Somme offensive, 1 July 1916, there was an area of mine craters, occupied by the Germans and forward of their main line, on the British 18 Division’s front. This potential obstruction was neutralised by the use of a large flame-projector positioned at the end of a sap, the operation being supervised by the redoubtable Major Livens, RE, inventor of the gas-projector. The sap itself had been created using another British invention, the ‘pipe-pusher’. This device used a hydraulic jack to push a pipe full of ammonal explosive in the horizontal direction required at a depth of four to five feet below ground. Once the requisite distance was reached, the explosive content of the pipe was detonated and the resultant ditch turned quickly into a communication trench.

  Flame-throwers continued to be used sporadically by each side, but there is little mention of them in either of the two great mobile offensives: that of the Germans in spring 1918 and that of the Allies in August of the same year, when the portable versions might have been useful for clearing bunkers and (for the Germans) as an anti-tank weapon. The reasons appear to be the difficulty flame-thrower operators had in keeping up with the infantry, and the weapon’s very limited range – about twenty-five yards. It would take a further war to produce a flame-thrower that was sufficiently portable, effective and plentiful to be of any great benefit in battle.

  Mining, or tunnelling, was a military art that dated back centuries. Wellington had used sappers to mine under the walls of Burgos Castle in 1812, with mixed success. In this war it was, once again, the Germans who initiated tunnelling as a technique on the Western Front. In December 1914 the Sirhind Brigade, part of the Lahore Division of the Indian Corps, was holding a sector of the front just north of Richebourg-l’Avoué. This brigade was new to France, having disembarked at Marseille from Egypt on 1 December, and arrived in the battle area still wearing tropical uniforms six days later. On 19 December the brigade was involved in severe fighting north-east of Givenchy as part of Sir John French’s harassing attacks all along the British front. The Sirhind Brigade had briefly taken parts of the German lines, but by shortly after dusk the men were back in their own trenches and there seemed to be a lull in the pace of operations. For some time there had been rumours about German tunnelling, and reports from the Royal Flying Corps had indicated that there were attempts to hide excavated spoil behind the German lines. No definite evidence as to what this meant was forthcoming, and the men who had paid a short visit to the German positions on 19 December saw no signs of tunnelling from there. All night it poured with rain, so heavily that fire-steps were washed away and such pumps that were available were overwhelmed by the torrents of water. At first light on 20 December German artillery and trench mortars began a bombardment all along the Indian Corps line, and two German infantry attacks were made on Givenchy and La Quinque Rue, only to be beaten off.

  At about 0900 hours there was a series of terrific explosions along the Sirhind Brigade front, and earth, revetting material and bodies went flying into the air. A company of the 1st Battalion 1st Gurkha Rifles and half a company of the 1st Battalion Highland Light Infantry were simply obliterated: blown to pieces or buried in collapsing trenches. Strong German infantry attacks followed and the fighting went on all day, with the Sirhind Brigade eventually driven back to their reserve lines where they held on grimly with ever-depleting manpower. The situation was not restored until timely support could be given by Haig’s I Corps on 22 December.

  We now know that the Germans had tunnelled under the Indian lines and had placed charges of gunpowder (old-fashioned black powder, the material Wellington had used at Burgos a century before) at the end of their tunnels. Ten of these charges were successfully detonated, each of 110 pounds of explosive. By later standards this was a paltry amount – a mere squib – but its total surprise, and the shock it created, precipitated what almost became a major German success. While nobody liked being shot at or shelled, at least you knew it was coming. The thought that one might be going innocuously about one’s business – eating a sandwich, cleaning a rifle, reading a book, sitting on the latrine, or lying fast asleep – when at any moment and without warning one’s whole world might erupt in noise, debris, death and destruction was not good for morale. The mining war had begun.

  Ever since the siege of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War the British army had studied mining in a modern context, but there were no dedicated tunnelling units in the BEF, and the existing Royal Engineer field companies were far too busy with other vital matters to devote large numbers of men to the activity. On 3 December Lieutenant General Sir Henry Rawlinson, General Officer Commanding IV Corps, had asked for a mining battalion to be formed, and the events of 20 December hastened thinking on the matter. On 28 December action to form tunnelling units began: brigades were to form their own mining sections as a temporary measure and the War Office agreed to send out 500 men experienced in tunnelling. The driving spirit was Major J. Norton-Griffiths, an MP with mining interests who had managed to circumvent Kitchener’s dislike of private armies and who was now an officer of the 2nd King Edward’s Horse, largely raised by him. Norton-Griffiths took charge of the recruitment of miners, many of them so-called clay-kickers, that is, experienced in tunnelling through clay rather than rock. Norton-Griffiths was not a professional soldier – indeed with his political connections he was regarded as somewhat of a nuisance – but as so often happens in war, the coming of the hour brought forth the man. Norton-Griffiths bounced around between England and France, using his own London office as the recruiting centre for miners, and by the middle of 1915 there were twenty tunnelling companies on the Western Front. In most cases the company commander was a regular officer of the Royal Engineers while the company officers were mining or colliery engineers, civil engineers or men with previous experience of mining or tunnelling. As most of the soldiers were recruited straight from civilian employment, with only a rudimentary training in the peculiarities of army life, there were misunderstandings. Norton-Griffiths had recruited men at varying rates of pay, dependent upon their mining qualifications. On one occasion representatives of the men informed their company commander that they were concerned about the eroding of pay differentials and that they intended to down tools until the dispute was resolved. The company commander explained that this procedure might be all very well in the mines of Lancashire. The army, however, in its quaint way, would regard it as mutiny, which carried the death penalty. Work was instantly resumed.

  At the height of the war on the Western Front there were twenty-five British tunnelling compa
nies, three Canadian, three Australian and one from New Zealand. As each company numbered up to a thousand men, this was the equivalent of two divisions burrowing away far underground, fighting their own private war, with those above them entirely oblivious to what was going on except when one of the more impressive mines was blown.

  There were two types of mining carried out by both sides: defensive and offensive. Defensive mining, as practised by the British, consisted of sinking a number of shafts along a designated sector, usually to a depth of forty feet or so, and connecting them up by what was known as a gallery. From this gallery a number of tunnels would be driven out in the direction of the German lines, and at the end of each tunnel crouched two or three men whose task it was to listen for enemy tunnelling. At first the Mark I ear, pressed against the face of the tunnel, was used as the detection instrument, and later a tinful of water in which was placed a stick, the latter gripped between the teeth. Eventually a variation of the doctor’s stethoscope was used. If enemy tunnelling was detected then a team would tunnel out as fast and as silently as possible towards the German tunnel, with the aim of either blowing it in or breaking into it and killing the enemy miners in hand-to-hand combat. Initially the British too used black powder, but this swiftly gave way to ammonal, a much safer and more reliable explosive, which came in tins and could be more easily manhandled.

  Offensive mining involved tunnelling beneath the enemy trenches and placing explosives at the end of the tunnel, to be set off by electrical detonators at the opportune moment, usually in conjunction with an attack above ground. In Flanders the surface layer was of water-bearing clay, and any tunnelling through this was difficult, dangerous and slow, as pumps had to be used to remove the water and the tunnel had to be shored up to prevent it collapsing. Underneath this water-bearing layer, however, was a layer of blue clay, which still had to be shored up but which did not hold water, and most tunnelling was done through this. Further south, when the British line at last extended well out of Flanders, the chalk downs of the Somme were relatively easy to tunnel through as the chalk drained well and shoring did not have to be used along the entire length of a tunnel.

  Blowing increasingly larger mines under the enemy positions had three main aims: firstly to collapse dugouts and bunkers and kill the infantry in them; secondly to cause confusion and dislocation of command and control systems; and thirdly to blow a crater in the enemy lines which, if seized by friendly infantry, could form a strongpoint within the enemy defences. It has to be said that while the British were much better at producing the craters, the Germans were much better at seizing them.

  On 1 July 1916 eighteen mines were blown by the British at 0728 hours, two minutes before zero hour (a nineteenth was, controversially, blown earlier). One of the largest, on the high g round overlooking the village of La Boisselle, actually consisted of a Y-shaped tunnel, with the two mines sixty feet apart. The tunnel took three months to dig and the two mines contained no less than 60,000 pounds of ammonal between them. The explosion, when it came, was spectacular. It was said that the roar was clearly heard in Whitehall (unlikely – the mandarins of Whitehall rarely arrived in their offices before 0900). In any event, a great mountain of debris rose up into the air, crashing down again for hundreds of yards around. A crater 450 feet across was created, 100 yards of German trench ceased to exist, and it is estimated that nine German dugouts were destroyed, causing several hundred casualties. Despite the devastation around them, the Germans reacted more quickly than did the British. The crater was not seized, and the area not captured until two days later.

  At Messines Ridge in June 1917 the British planted twenty-one mines, with a total of over one million pounds of explosive between them, under the German lines. The largest, near Spanbroekmolen, was eighty-eight feet underground and contained 91,000 pounds of ammonal. All these mines had been completed a year earlier, since when the firing circuits had been regularly checked by Royal Engineer officers to ensure that they would still function. At 0310 hours on 7 June 1917 the mines were blown. Nineteen went off, and again it was said that Prime Minister Lloyd George could feel the shock waves in his office in Downing Street. Again, this is unlikely. Energetic fellow though he was, Lloyd George would have been fast asleep at three o’clock in the morning, and that not in his office. The attack itself was a great success, but given that it was preceded by a seventeen-day artillery bombardment, in which two and a half million shells were fired during the last seven days alone; that it was supported by seventy-two Mark IV tanks; that the British had complete control of the skies thus preventing any German reconnaissance; and that the British were attacking with nine divisions against the Germans’ six, of which only two were on the ridge itself, it would have been a success anyway. Nevertheless the mines did cause confusion amongst the Germans – in Lille the tremors were thought to be an earthquake – and they certainly cheered the British attackers.12

  After the initial shock of the German tunnelling successes in 1914, the British quickly established superiority underground, a lead that they never lost. While defensive mining certainly did make a contribution to victory, offensive mining was perhaps not as cost-effective given the number of men employed in it. Withal, it was a lonely, dark, frightening, claustrophobic sort of war, working in a space rarely more than two feet wide and four feet high, with little chance of rescue if a tunnel collapsed or was blown in, as often happened. That view was not shared by all those who took part, however. As one old soldier told this author in 1973: ‘We had a kushi number. We were out of the rain, we didn’t do fatigues, the sergeant major never saw us, nobody worried about our dress, we didn’t have to get our hair cut, and we didn’t have to do sentry. Great it was!’ When one recalls that most of these men had come from the coal mines or from tunnelling for the underground railway or the London sewers, when health and safety at work was not a priority and where accidents were common, this underground warrior’s opinion becomes explicable. Army tunnellers were better fed, and at least as well paid and housed, as their civilian counterparts; safety was a major consideration of their officers; and the risk of being blown up by the Germans was probably only marginally greater than the chances of roof collapse, flooding or gas explosion in their civilian occupations.

  It was not only in the invention of new – and unsporting – weapons of war that the Germans were and are accused of beastliness. During the initial phase of the war, when the Germans were advancing through Belgium, British and French newspapers reported such atrocities as the mass rape of nuns, the cutting-off of women’s breasts, babies being bounced on German bayonets, and even the roasting of small children alive. As the Germans were not, at this stage of the war, short of food, this latter activity was presumably engaged in for the amusement of the troops.

  The Daily Mail of 12 April 1915 carried an extract from The Official Book of German Atrocities, and included brief case histories of the violation of women and young girls by German soldiers in Belgium. Miss Y was reported as having been ordered to undress by a German NCO prior to being violated on a mattress; at Corbeck-Loo a sixteen-year-old girl was raped by a succession of German soldiers and then bayoneted in the breast; a mother and daughter aged forty-five and eighty-nine were said to have been raped, the older woman dying a week later as a result; seven Germans raped a woman and then killed her at Wakerzeel. Additionally it was alleged that the German army were forcing Belgian women and children into the vanguard of their advance. The report ends with a rallying call: ‘British Men, Do you want Your women violated? Enlist today!’

  It is probably unnecessary to say that there is not the slightest shred of evidence to substantiate any of these increasingly lurid tales of individual nastiness, although it has to be said that rapes occasionally do occur in all armies. There is, however, ample evidence of officially condoned acts of terror during the initial invasion of Belgium, acts which, if committed in a later war, would have led to trials for war crimes. In 1870 the Prussian army had defeated the French r
egular forces and had accepted the surrender of the Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan. The war was over, but a French ‘Government of National Defence’ had refused to bow to the inevitable and declared that the struggle would go on, prosecuted by irregulars. These francs-tireurs, some in uniform and some in civilian clothes, forced the Prussians to devote almost one-third of their strength to guarding their lines of communication, and a great many Prussians were killed in ambush and by snipers. The Prussians, with some legal justification, regarded this as murder and took severe reprisals against the resistance movements.

  The lessons of 1871 had not been lost on the German commanders of 1914, and resistance by Belgian irregulars was punished by the shooting of hostages and the razing of particularly troublesome villages. Here the Germans were on much shakier legal ground. The laws of war, embodied in the Hague Convention of 1907, stated that belligerents were not allowed to move troops and war material across neutral territory. This portion of the convention went even further: neutral countries were forbidden to permit such movement, and there was a clear legal duty on the Belgians to resist. German protestations that ‘acts of terror’ committed against them by Belgian civilians, and the subsequent German reprisals, were the ‘fault of the Belgian government’ (which in any case denied civilian involvement) carry no weight: the Germans had no right to be in Belgium in the first place.13