Underground Warfare 1914-1918

by Simon Jones

  Effective listening was usually only possible if work stopped on the listener’s side. This would be done either between shifts or during specified listening periods, when an officer would enter the gallery alone for a period of perhaps half an hour. At Givenchy in 1915, for example, the Germans stopped all work for twenty-five minutes every two hours.21 Listeners, especially when using the geophone, had to learn to recognize the sounds of a range of underground activities. Picking and shovelling were the most common sounds heard, along with the knocking in of timbers, the dragging of bags of spoil along the tunnel, or the pushing of a wheeled trolley. Two men picking at once could indicate that a gallery was being enlarged to form a charge chamber. The dragging or tramming of bags up the gallery to the face would indicate explosives, followed by the further bringing up of bags of spoil for tamping, possibly accompanied by the knocking out of timbers being salvaged from a gallery to be blown. Most ominous and threatening for a listener, after a period of such activity, was silence. This indicated that a charge was laid and tamped and that the enemy was waiting to blow. To disguise this tell-tale silence, miners would continue with false picking in an adjacent gallery until the last minute before blowing, to persuade the enemy that it was safe to remain below. Both sides used dummy picks, operated with a long rope, and the British captured one in the German mining store in Fricourt. It is unlikely, however, that these subterfuges fooled experienced listeners. Another means of deception was the use of work on two levels, used, most famously, by the Australians at Hill 60 to disguise any sounds from the deep Berlin Tunnel. Occasionally, when miners came up against the timbers of an enemy gallery, they were able to carry on protracted listening in an effort to gain some useful intelligence. In June 1916, after they broke into a German shaft head, the British recorded the conversation of German miners for four days, but little of interest was learned.22

  The danger of poisonous or flammable gas released by explosions was seriously underestimated by both sides in 1915. As charges grew larger in size, so the quantities of gas, in particular carbon monoxide and methane, that were released by explosions underground increased. Carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless and as well as flooding mining systems could also flow up a shaft to gas men on the surface, even causing them to collapse and fall down the shaft. Many succumbed before they were aware, while others might suffer a headache and drowsiness or giddiness. It also caused temporary or permanent mental aberration. Often men became argumentative or violent, physically attacking their rescuers, or hysterical and childish. The mental confusion might last for many weeks. A British officer who was rescued unconscious came round after several hours and was quarrelsome, shrieking and swearing. Later he had no recollection of his accident and was oblivious to his surroundings. After six months his mother told doctors how she had to help him on his bad days and remind him how to carry out simple tasks such as tying his shoelaces.23

  The use of shallow mining to mask the sound of deep mining, US adaption from a French manual. From Trounce, Notes on Military Mining.

  During the second half of 1915 there were frequent occurrences of men descending to rescue comrades and themselves succumbing to carbon monoxide. Such rescue attempts in tunnels filled with carbon monoxide by men unprotected by breathing apparatus frequently led to more deaths. An example of many such incidents occurred at La Boisselle on 9 December 1915, when the British blew a charge against the 1st Reserve Company of the 13th Wurttemberg Pioneers. What followed was a nightmarish scene of frantic confusion. Georg Maier, a Pioneer on duty at the central listening post, had, immediately before the blow, descended a 15m shaft, a microphone apparently having detected British activity. His orders were to go to the tunnel face, where the particular microphone was located, to establish the direction of the sounds. He had only got about a metre along the tunnel when the explosion occurred, pinning him to the ground and collapsing the last 3m of the shaft behind him. Immediately after the explosion, Tunnel-Corporal Rubensdörfer arrived to ascertain the damage and, hearing Maier’s groans and cries for help, alerted men in the mine dugout at the tunnel entrance. Lance-Sergeant Dimmler took command and brought breathing apparatus and rescue equipment to the shaft and with the available men began to clear the damage to reach Maier. After a short time Lieutenant Stolze, the duty officer, took over and, while Dimmler continued in the shaft, divided all men between the shaft, operating the fans to clear the gas and as reliefs. With great difficulty they managed to get an air hose close to Georg Maier and, using a bellows, supply some fresh air to him. By 6.45pm, three and three-quarter hours after the blow, Lance-Sergeant Hämmerle and Corporal Jacob Maier squeezed through a hole to the injured man and found him trapped by the feet but alive. However, the gas soon forced the two men to leave the gallery and they were relieved by Pioneers Zimmermann and Schmiederer. Zimmerman worked at the face to free Georg Maier, but the gas forced him to leave after just ten minutes. Schmiederer continued enlarging the opening and, despite warnings, stayed in the gallery. Lieutenant Stolze was also forced to withdraw and his place was taken by Corporal Koch. Pioneer Fegert reached Schmiederer and managed to give the trapped man some alcohol, and he showed signs of life by groaning and catching his breath. Suddenly a white cloud of powerful fumes swept up the gallery and brought such an intense heat that Fegert and Schmiederer were forced to leave the injured Maier. The cause appears to have been a secondary explosion of gas, probably methane, released by the blow. Fegert squeezed back through the gap into the shaft and tried to pull Schmiederer through behind him, but Fegert collapsed and had to be pulled up the shaft, leaving Schmiederer unconscious at the opening. Corporal Koch also had to be pulled up, overcome with gas. Pioneers Kastler, Kieninger and Schulze descended the shaft, but Kastler and Kieninger immediately collapsed unconscious. Schulze called on Corporal Sieber to throw him down a harness as he had the unconscious Schmiederer in his arms. Sieber brought it down himself and placed it around Schmiederer, but by this time Schulze was also unconscious. Sieber was now himself on the verge of collapse and called for help, at which point Corporal Rehm descended and brought him to the surface. Rehm returned down with Pioneer Mohr, who tied a rope around one of the men and then ascended to pull him up. Rehm had now collapsed and Mohr went down again and brought him back up. Mohr returned with Pioneer Mauch, who brought the unconscious Schulze halfway up the shaft, from where Mohr helped. Mohr then collapsed, and Mauch had to let Schulze fall in order to save Mohr. He tied Mohr by the feet to the shaft rope and succeeded with the help of some other pioneers in hauling him out. Pioneers Blattner and Kakuschte now tried to rescue the men at the bottom of the shaft, but the fumes, coming more strongly from the gallery, showed that the tunnels were on fire. At 8am Lieutenant Stolze ordered that no one was to descend the shaft. As well as Georg Maier, Schmiederer, Kastler, Kieninger and Schulze perished.24

  The proper equipping and training of rescue teams went some way to preventing such unnecessary casualties. Mine gas was a recognized hazard in military mining well before 1914, but the apparatus used by the military had been superseded by civilian developments. The helmets fed by air-pumps such as the Applegarth Aérophore sent to France by the British in 1915 were found to be of little use. The demand was for self-contained re-breathing apparatus, in which the wearer carried on his person a cylinder of compressed air and a cartridge of sodium carbonate, which ‘scrubbed’ the carbon dioxide from exhaled air, which was saved in a rubberized bag. The wearer added air from the cylinder into the bag according to need. The Germans issued large numbers of the Dräger set, which lasted for half an hour, as they were also used to protect key infantry against poison gas employed on the surface, and in 1916 they introduced

  a military version, the Army Foul Air Breathing Apparatus (HSS).

  The German Army Breathing Apparatus. Self-contained breathing apparatus which worked on the principle of storing in a bag (7) exhaled breath, from which carbon dioxide had been removed by carbonate of soda in a container (6). Oxygen would be ad
ded from a cylinder (4) which could be increased by the wearer using a valve (3). From Feld=AnweisungHeeres=Sauerstoff= Schutzgerät, 1917.

  The French issued their own version of the Dräger, worn here by a Sapper. From École de Mines et d’Explosifs, 1925.

  The British equivalent was the Salvus set, although the Tunnelling Companies favoured a larger version, the Proto set, which could last for forty-five minutes. In each mining sector rescue stations were established, similar to those found in civilian mines. The British appear to have been the most thorough in their rescue preparations, establishing schools in each of the Armies of the BEF at the beginning of 1916 to train officers and men in the use of the apparatus and rescue procedures. The instructors were often civilian mine rescue specialists, such as Lieutenant Rex Smart at the 1st Army School, formerly of the Dudley Mine Rescue Station.

  The British in particular used animals for detecting carbon monoxide. In 1915 rabbits were most readily available and one would be lowered down a shaft to test the air before descending. Later the British used mice and canaries and each tunnelling company bred its own stocks, under the charge of an older miner. The 2nd Army instructor, G.F.F. Eagar, favoured mice, which men were trained to keep in their pockets and bring out to climb over their hands so they could more easily detect the changes in their behaviour.25 Smart preferred canaries as they more readily displayed symptoms of a lack of chirpiness, panting and falling off the perch. The claws were kept clipped, otherwise the reaction to bad air was for the bird to grip the perch tightly. The clipped claws ensured that it fell to the bottom of the cage as a clear warning. However, on being brought into the fresh air the birds usually revived quickly. Mulqueen recalled an incident in 1915 which was immortalized as a cartoon in the 172 Company magazine (see below):

  I remember on one occasion I was making a tour during the night shift and in one heading I found the men working, although the canary was flat on its back with its feet in the air. I wanted to know what they meant by continuing to work under such conditions and the sapper in charge expressed the view of the shift when he said ‘That bloody bird ain’t got no guts, sir’. Needless to say the shift was quickly chased out.26

  Men were fond of the mice and canaries, but a story was often told of the escaped canary whose presence in no man’s land threatened to warn the Germans of the presence of miners in the sector. When snipers failed to remove the bird a trench mortar was successfully employed. In exceptional cases miners would use the breathing apparatus to carry out mining tasks. The most extended use of Proto apparatus was for charging a mine at Hill 70 in September 1916, where Smart took over a mine-charging operation in order to halt a German drive that threatened to undermine the British front line. Two shifts spent a total of forty-three hours underground, each man wearing breathing apparatus for about ten hours, during which time they charged and tamped 5,000lbs of ammonal.27 The most difficult rescue attempted by the British was at the Béthune collieries in September 1917. At the Fosse 8 pit the mine system extended beneath both front lines and part was still worked by French coal miners. The Germans attempted to deny the mine to the French by releasing chlorine and chloropicrin gas, which killed a number of miners and a guard from 170 Tunnelling Company. Tunneller rescue squads had to turn back 1,600yds into the mine because the gas was so concentrated that it penetrated their respirators. The medical officer to the Tunnelling Companies, Colonel D. Dale Logan, improvised gas masks from the facepieces of German masks and two British box filters.28

  Cartoon illustrating Mulqueen’s experience with tunnellers continuing to work after the canary had died, which appeared in the Christmas 1915 edition of the 172 Tunnelling Company magazine, Just a Small One (RE Museum).

  Technology, especially explosives, the geophone and modern rescue equipment, had a major impact on the effectiveness of the miners and contributed to elevating military mining in 1916–17 to a scale and devastating power not reached before or since. The technology went hand in hand with the employment by both sides of many thousands of skilled men. Significantly, attempts at mechanisation largely failed and could not replace the skill and muscle of the experienced miner, working by hand at the face using methods identical to those of his medieval counterpart.

  Chapter 9

  Tunnels and the Infantry Attack

  As well as being a means of placing explosives beneath the enemy, mining could also potentially provide a concealed and protected means of attacking troops crossing no man’s land. In pre-war practice, saps dug towards the enemy positions during a siege might need to be covered or ‘blinded’ by a covering of timber and earth. Where the soil allowed it, the sap might be dug forward wholly underground, at a depth of 25 or 30cm, without timber support. In the French Army these were known as ‘sape russe’ and the name was adopted by the British as the Russian sap. The saps were shallow enough for the top cover to be quickly broken down so that it could be used as a communication trench.1

  In the spring and summer of 1915, the French used Russian saps as a means of getting close to the German positions undetected. After the capture of Carency and Neuville St Vaast during the Second Battle of Artois in May 1915, a third attack was made by the French on 25 September 1915 in combination with their attack at Champagne and the British attack at Loos. An attack on the forward slope of Vimy Ridge was to be the Third Battle of Artois. In front of Neuville St Vaast, French attempts to take German positions at Hill 123 and the Cinq-Chemins, where the German front line occupied a sunken road (adjacent to the route of the present A26), had failed. The 3rd Corps commander, General Hache, proposed in August ‘a new and very special process’ involving attack using sapping above and below ground.2 The problem, as identified by Hache, was that if the French succeeded in capturing the sunken lane, the Germans would still be able to launch counterattacks from the rear and flanks owing to the large number of communication trenches to the position. They would cut off the French using an artillery barrage on the captured ground and through lack of their own communication trenches to the sunken lane the French would not be able to reinforce them. The novelty of Hache’s scheme lay in the wide front in which the sapping attack was applied and the large number of saps which he proposed to dig. The proposal called for a sap about every 40m, or seventy saps on the whole front of the 3rd Corps. The attack was to be made in a ‘sure and methodical way’. First a starting parallel was to be pushed to within 50m of the sunken road and then a large number of Russian saps were to be pushed forward to within a few metres of the sunken lane, which troops could capture with grenades. The multiple saps would then provide the means of maintaining supply to the captured position across the German artillery barrage. The rate of advance was to be initially 10m per 24 hours, increasing to 15m. Therefore fifteen to twenty days would be required to prepare for the attack.

  The shallow ‘Russian sap’ as originally employed by the French (measurements in feet). From ‘Sapping Operations’ by Captain A. Gay.

  Work had started on all parts of the 3rd Corps front by 8 August, on average 130m from the German lines. The French plan was to advance the front line an average of 80m and create a new trench, scheduled to be established on about 18 August. This line, designated in siege parlance the ‘parallèle de départ’, was to be the starting point of the Russian saps, which were then advanced to the sunken road. Six hundred men were to work day and night on the saps. It was anticipated that the work would attract the attention of the Germans, who would bombard and possibly also raid it. Hache asked that the heavy artillery of the 10th Army be available for counter-battery work to reduce the artillery fire on the sapping, which it was anticipated might be costly. The sappers were to be protected by covering troops with grenades against German raiders.3

  The saps prepared for the attack of 25 September 1915 on the eastern slope of Vimy Ridge, visible on a trench map of May 1918.

  Hache’s plan was adopted, to be prepared for the attack ultimately made on 25 September 1915. The saps were dug by parties from the i
nfantry, including men who were to make the attack. Vincent Martin, of the 119th Regiment, described the saps:

  Initially underground saps starting from the first line trench about twenty to twenty-five metres apart beneath a thickness of 50cm of earth and driven to emerge in front of the enemy roughly within twenty-five metres of him; from each sap we could only emerge one man at a time. In advance of the excavation work, the enemy is warned by the spoil heaps and is wary of our intentions…4

  As the saps got closer to the German lines, several men were killed or wounded each day by hand grenades, rifle grenades and mortars. During the sapping underground sounds were heard, but the Germans do not seem to have mined against the saps. By mid-September there were frequent grenade fights between the sap heads and the German trenches. It is not clear, however, exactly how the Russian saps were intended to be used in the attack. Although Martin refers to emerging from the saps, the attackers were to launch from the parallels. The records contain no reference to opening the saps into the sunken road with charges, bored or otherwise, and it is not clear when or how the saps were opened. On the night of 23 September, engineers attempted to place explosive charges beneath the German wire, which the artillery had not sufficiently gapped. The Engineer Companies 3/1 and 3/1 bis were to place long charges (like Bangalore torpedoes), but the saps were not sufficiently advanced. Only five could be charged and only one fired successfully, blowing a breach of 7m. The failure of the others was attributed to the appalling weather, which was wet and stormy. The operation was postponed to the following night, when seventy-two charges were taken into the saps, pushed or carried by engineers described as crawling up the saps. Of these fifty blew sufficiently to allow the passage of troops through the wire.5