Though the First World War was fought across three continents and the major oceans of the world, its principal theatres of war were situated within Europe. Here, two main power blocks, the Allies or Entente Powers (principally France, Russia, Great Britain – joined later by Italy and USA) were arraigned against the Central Powers (principally Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). In order to reduce the impact of the two-front war, the German strategy was to defeat France before Russia had time to fully engage on the Eastern Front, and as such enacted the Schlieffen Plan of 1905, which was intended to encircle Paris within days of invasion and destroy the French intent to carry on. Subject to modification and delay, the Schlieffen Plan never achieved its aims, and instead, led to the next phase of the war, the creation of the Western Front and the birth of trench warfare.
After some early battles of movement, when both sides attempted to turn each other’s flanks, the front lines became relatively fixed, and from this point trench warfare became the norm. For the most part, similar trench systems were employed by the main protagonists on the Western Front. Fire trenches on both sides were usually arranged in successive parallel rows, with the front line, support line and reserve line all connected by the communication trenches, the main thoroughfares of trench warfare (Fig. 1). As the war proceeded, so trench warfare assumed complex proportions to give the maximum confidence of ‘defence in depth’.
Fig. 1. Typical layout of trench fortifications on the Western Front, resulting in a mutual siege that was hard to break (Image: Peter Doyle)
In ideal circumstances, trenches were to be planned, laid out and traced across ground so as to take in natural characteristics and use them to advantage. The British Field Defences manual, published by the General Staff in 1908 recommended: ‘The ideal site for trenches is one from which the best fire effect can be obtained, in combination with complete concealment of the trenches … As such positions will rarely be found, the best compromise must be sought’. For the German High Command, committed to ensuring their trench lines were the strongest, the use of natural features as strongpoints was the most important factor and consequently topographic features of the landscape were used extensively to create a challenging fortress, as defined in the 1916 manual Stellungsbau, naturally a point of some discussion by the British General Staff:
Great use has been made by the Germans of natural strong points, such as villages, farms, and woods. In the villages, the borders and interior have been strongly organised, generally for all round defence, and a particularly desperate resistance has been offered in them. The normal procedure, when taking up a new position, is to fix on a general line of natural strong points, and to prepare these for defence first and then to join them up by fire trenches, without much regard to the field of fire of the latter.
This was certainly the case on the Somme, a landscape north of the river that lent its name to a tract of land in northern France, and to the 1916 battle that would fiercely resonate with people from the Commonwealth, even today. Here, natural topographical features, many of them a function of the natural chalk ground found in the rich landscape of Picardy, were built into the German line on the Somme to great effect. The combination of ravines, spurs and woods became significant obstacles in 1916, as the Germans had exploited them in accordance with their 1916 military manual:
Every suitable spot must be utilised for defence and be prepared beforehand for this purpose. Such places are called strongpoints (large, defended areas including villages, copses, etc, which may often be closed.
With the establishment of trench warfare, and the creation of a ‘mutual siege’ across France and Flanders, it followed that military mining – a centuries-old approach to siege breaking – would be employed. Military mines are any underground system intended for offensive action through explosion, or indeed of defensive action to counter enemy mining. In the Great War, the first attempts at breaking the siege through mining were developed in 1914, with engineer companies waking to the need to destroy strong points, or to break the line through cratering at the surface. From December 1914 onwards, mining and tunnelling was carried out by specialist mining units on both sides with heavily fought over sectors in France and Flanders. Nevertheless, it would burst onto the stage when deployed at the Somme in 1916, with some of the largest explosions ever registered.
The Battle of the Somme was one of the most significant and costly battles of the First World War. A Franco-British battle fought with Germany in northern France, the Somme was intended to be part of a co-ordinated Allied attempt to attack the Central Powers (specifically Germany and Austria-Hungary) on all Fronts. With the French under severe attack from the opening of the Verdun Offensive in February 1916, the battle would become, to a large part, British led. It commenced on 1 July 1916, and by its end, on 18 November 1916, some one million men had lost their lives.
For Britain in particular, the battle has achieved great cultural significance, associated as it has become with the introduction of a volunteer citizen army – units of ‘Pals’ battalions amongst others – to a combat role, and the high level of combat losses experienced by them upon the first day of the conflict, when infamously the British suffered 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them killed in action. Significantly, aspects of the battle was captured on film by official cinematographer Geoffrey Malins, who used both front-line footage and staged scenes to present a vision of the war that had never been seen before – and achieved a huge box-office success with some 20 million people viewing The Battle of the Somme, shown to the British public before the battle was actually over. An important part of this film was the explosion of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge, situated under a ‘redoubt’ or strong point in the German trench system. Malins’ film of the explosion of the mine marking the start of the Battle of the Somme on 1st July 1916 (Fig. 2) is arguably one of the most significant pieces of combat footage ever filmed, and the significance of The Battle of the Somme is such that the film was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World register of cultural artefacts in 2005.
Fig. 2. The Hawthorn Ridge Mine exploding beneath the Hawthorn Ridge on 1st July 1916 with a vast amount of material being hurled into the air, as filmed by Geoffrey Malins. (Image: Imperial War Museum)
The Somme Offensive of 1916 saw the use of a coordinated effort to destroy strongpoints in the line through the use of deep offensive mines, together with a scheme of shallow tunnels, known as ‘Russian saps’ intended to provide cover for the attacking infantry, who would emerge from them into No Man’s Land but were never used. Seven British tunnelling companies (174th, 178th, 179th, 181st, 185th and 252nd) – units of specialist military tunnelling engineers – were given orders to assist the offensive action by digging and laying nine large explosive mines (in addition a number of smaller charges) to destroy German frontline strongpoints created in line with Stellungsbau at Beaumont Hamel (Hawthorn Ridge), La Boisselle (Y Sap, Glory Hole, Lochnagar), Fricourt (Triple Tambour), Mametz (East and West) and Carnoy (Kasino Point).
Moving into the sector in advance of the offensive, British miners in the main took over from the work of the French engineers, who had conducted mining operations against the Germans from at least 1915. Here, mining was inhibited by the nature of the chalk, clays and sands that determined the topography and landscape of the region. Farther to the north, in trench lines that arced around the beleaguered Belgian city of Ypres (now Ieper), arguably the most successful mining exploited the Ypres Clay that lay beneath the city – the exact equivalent of the London Clay through which the London underground travels today. It was in this medium that the approach known as ‘clay-kicking’ was deployed, a specialist technique that allowed miners to work rapidly and silently, and drive galleries without recourse to picks and shovels. But on the Somme, where clay kicking was not possible in the harder chalk ground, miners used short-handled picks and shovels. Tunnelled galleries hewn with picks were self-supporting, with added timber being only necessary to prevent collapse of sections of roof. Under these conditions the British miners worked their way steadily towards the German lines, targeting the strong points that were intended to stand in the way of any Allied assault.
At one location at least, in a tract of land so pitted with craters and filled with debris close to the village of La Boisselle that it known to the British as ‘The Glory Hole’, there had been intense underground warfare that left the landscape that it was mostly impassable. Galleries taken from the French were at depths of around some 20-30 feet, and to avoid intersecting with the German workings, these were deepened to around 40 feet. The offensive mine galleries were cut through the chalk at a relatively high rate – even though cutting through the mid-levels of the chalk they met much harder levels of flint.
It was intended that each of the Somme mines would not only destroy the German strongpoints – but would be ‘overcharged’ with explosives, in order to create craters with pronounced lips that were huge compared with previous explosions, thereby providing a ‘temporary breastwork’ for the attacking troops in no man’s land – if they could reach the craters first. The British General Staff gave implicit instructions that craters formed from the explosion of mines should be seized as quickly as possible, in order to be turned into such a strongpoints, their upturned crater rims creating considerable obstacles that would dominate the immediate area. It was expected that crater rims thus produced would be ‘consolidated’, with directions to excavate trenches in the forward lip, and with barbed wire and other obstacles placed to aid in the defence, while recognising that this represented a challenging task.
The mine at Hawthorn Ridge was intended to destroy a particularly strong set of trench works – the Hawthorn Redoubt – that the Germans had constructed forward of the destroyed village of Beaumont Hamel, likely to be troublesome in any frontal assault (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. The trench lines and fortifications at Hawthorn Ridge (Image: Peter Doyle)
To attack this underground, the mine gallery, dug by the 252 Tunnelling Company, was 80 feet deep and was, commencing on 4 April 1916, making good progress before hitting particularly flint-rich chalks that impeded progress. By 22 June 1916, the mine was finished and some 40,000lbs of the explosive ammonal was in place. This was an ‘overcharged’ mine which was designed to not only destroy the German surface works, but also to bury adjacent trenches with debris, and build up a lip that could be defended by the attackers. Concerns over the fall of these very debris would cause the explosion of the mine to be mishandled, leading to post-battle recriminations and a post-war investigation by the British Official Historian, James Edmonds.
‘Zero Hour’ for the first day of the Battle of the Somme was set at 7.30 am on 1st July 1916; at this point, it was expected that the mines would be detonated to destroy the strong-points, that the infantry would advance to capture the craters, and that the artillery would support them by raining fire down on the German trenches in a series of ‘lifts’. While it might be expected that Hawthorn Redoubt mine would be fired at Zero Hour, thereby coming as a complete surprise to the Germans, it was actually exploded ten minutes in advance of Zero, an act that would have ‘important and direful circumstances’, and which was described as a ‘colossal blunder’ by post-war commentators.
A careful analysis of why this decision was undertaken has most recently been completed by historian Simon Jones. There was evidence to suggest that a case had been made for the mine to be exploded some four hours before Zero Hour – or even at 18.00 the previous day. But as this required the crater to be captured and held in No Man’s Land, this was vetoed by GHQ, as the British had never ‘made a good show’ at capturing craters in previous engagements, despite the explicit instructions given by the General Staff. According to Jones, the relevant commanders of the 29th Division – the infantry charged with attacking the front at Beaumont Hamel and ultimately taking Hawthorn Crater – were concerned that falling debris would be a serious risk to the soldiers if the mine was detonated exactly at Zero Hour. This was the first time such a huge mine had been detonated, and there was a distinct sense of reaching into the unknown. It was agreed that the mine should be detonated at 7.20 to give the earth time to settle, and so it was that the mine was fired ten minutes before Zero hour, on 1st July 1916.
Famously, the cinematographer Malins and recorded his feelings after the mine was detonated in his book How I Filmed the War:
The ground where I stood gave a mighty convulsion, it rocked and swayed. I gripped hold of my tripod to steady myself. Then, for all the world like a gigantic sponge, the earth rose in the air to the height of hundreds of feet. Higher and higher it rose, and with a horrible, grinding roar the earth fell back upon itself, leaving in its place a mountain of smoke.
The overcharged mine certainly succeeded in destroying the Hawthorn Redoubt, garrisoned by Wurttemberg infantrymen of the 119th Reserve Infantry Regiment, and in creating a gigantic crater:
More than three sections of No 9 Company were blown into the air and the neighbouring dugouts were broken in and blocked. The ground all round was white with the debris of chalk as if it had been snowing, and a gigantic crater, over fifty yards in diameter and some sixty feet deep, gaped like an open wound in the side of the hill.
But in achieving the aim of creating a British position in no man’s land, it failed. On explosion, two platoons of soldiers from ‘Z’ Company, 2nd Royal Fusiliers rushed forwards to capture the crater as instructed – but, as recorded in the regimental history, the ‘enemy forestalled them on the farther top of the crater and prevented farther advance’. It noted, however, that ‘very few of our men reached as far as the enemy barbed wire.’
Thus, though the explosion had destroyed the redoubt, it was a failure. The early explosion had alerted the Germans that the infantry attack was imminent, and the new crater provided the defending troops with an opportunity to re-create a strongpoint farther out in No Man’s Land – something the British had hoped to do in their attack. This was to have a terrible effect. Lieutenant V.F.S. Hawkins reported: ‘Beaumont Hamel opposite the 29th Division was a veritable fortress. The 29th Division never got near the Hun Line’ By noon of the first day of the Somme battle, any chance of gaining the crater by the British was gone, with the plans to consolidate it abandoned. Following the failure of the British attack, the Germans proceeded to incorporate the crater into their lines, ‘fortifying it with dug-outs’ and making ‘considerable use of it both as an observation post and as a position for snipers’. It would take a second mine, exploded at 5.45 am on 13 November 1916, to dislodge the defenders and allow the capture of Beaumont Hamel. Today, the two sub-craters at Hawthorn Ridge (Fig. 4) survive in the landscape as a testimony to these two actions in 1916. They are located 200m west of the village of Beaumont Hamel on the Somme.
Fig. 4. Sketch map showing summary of research findings. As well as the two craters identified, German-constructed defensive firebays and traverses were located, and probably post-crater formation Allied shell ordnance holes. (Image: Wisniewski et al. (2024))
In 2018, the Hawthorn Crater Association was formed in order to clear, preserve and protect this iconic site, as well as to promote research and information sharing. Prior to this the crater had lurked, overgrown and difficult to comprehend, on a chalk ridge close to many of the iconic battlefield sites. Working with the Association, I represented Goldsmiths (and LSBU), in a team of scientists, archaeologists and historians from Keele and Staffordshire, to accurately map out the crater, unlock its secrets, and learn more of its story. Our study, published in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology, was the first multi-disciplinary scientific investigation to be undertaken at the Hawthorn Crater once the Hawthorn Ridge Crater Association took physical possession of the land in 2018. Using advanced technology and archaeological techniques backed up by documentary research, we identified evidence of trench fortification, barbed wire, communication equipment, shallow tunnels and steel trench reinforcements - all of them German, all of them evidence of the failure of the British to capture their prize. Not to mention evidence of the dominance of the Germans not only in consolidating the mine crater, but in transforming it into a set of defensive works that would have a dramatic impact on the inability of the British to progress to success in July 1916.
All very relevant today: the futility of trench warfare for Ukraine; the futility of blasting aside underground fortifications for Gaza.