Preface

Trench warfare during 1914 to 1918 was fought as much beneath the ground as above it. Tunnelling offered a means of bypassing the machine guns and field defences, while underground shelters provided a refuge from shells. The deep networks of tunnels were the secret domain of the men who created them and their mystery, and perhaps also the close-knit nature of miners, means that this work has remained little-known.

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