The Underground War (1998).
The British tunnellers of the Western Front in the First World War.
Note: This is a shortened transcript I created of a video discussing clay kickers and tunneling operations in World War I. I’ve trimmed some sections for brevity and clarity. The full video is linked at the bottom if you’d like to watch it in its entirety.
Simon Jones (Curator, Kings Liverpool Regiment Museum): The nature and scale of trench warfare during the First World War was shocking at the time and continues to shock historians. What is less well known about, but is equally remarkable, is the scale of the labour and endeavour that occurred underground beneath the front line in an entirely secret and hidden warfare. Today, if you visit the Western Front, you will see peaceful and tranquil fields that betray little of what occurred during the First World War. In those fields, there remain many thousands of miles of dugouts, subways and tunnels.
Voice Over: —A 3,000 mile network of tunnels dug by both sides in a highly secret war within it’s walls. By late autumn 1914, the Allies had halted the German offensive. Within three months, all movements had stalled. The great armies of the First World War were in position and the Western Front was born. Dreadful losses and the grip of winter forced both sides to dig in and wait for spring. Three years of stalemate had begun. The deadlock inevitably raised the thought of a traditional military tactic in taking the war underground, tunnelling beneath enemy lines. But British commanders were reticent.
Jones: There certainly was a belief that tunnelling could be avoided, that if the British didn't start it, then the Germans wouldn't. However, it was simply German tactical doctrine that if trenches were 100 yards or less apart, then they would automatically start tunnelling.
VO: And so, in secret, they started an underground war for the next three years that would increase in scale and ferocity. The full truth about the British response remained an official secret until 1962. Even now, its history is still being uncovered in the archives of the Royal Engineers at Chatham. Peter Barden has been researching the Underground War for more than 20 years. It's his ambition to locate and explore one of the most important Allied tunnel systems of the war, the Underground Complex at Mount Sorrel, near the Belgian city of Ypres
Peter Barden: The Royal Engineers kept such detailed maps and plans that by overlaying the originals onto today's map and taking measurements and bearings, we know we can pinpoint the tunnels to within a yard or two. In the Flanders area, all underground systems were built in solid timber, often English oak. And these workings have been full of water since 1918, which is a great preservative. So, with a bit of luck, we expect to be able to explore both the tunnels and the dugouts. The biggest dugouts house 5,000 men and more. They're amazing structures.
VO: Here, too [archives of the Royal Engineers at Chatham], are filed the stories of the clay kickers, the miners who went to war.
Barden: It would be nice to find some tunnelers [to speak to]. It won't be very easy, though, because they would all be at least 100 years old now. But it's possible.
VO: There were men like Lieutenant John Westcott, who fought a hand-to-hand battle in the dark under Mount Sorrel. And there were unsung heroes. Sapper William Hackett, who won a posthumous VC for refusing to leave an injured comrade. And the Tunnelling War's extrovert and dynamic architect, John Norton Griffiths.
Anne Morgan (Granddaughter & Biographer of Sir John Norton-Griffiths): He [Griffiths] was action itself. And he saw the war coming in 1914, early on. And he saw the generals dithering. And the politicians dithering.
VO: In civilian life, Norton Griffiths was a contractor. His company was building sewers in the clay beneath Manchester, similar ground to Flanders. He was convinced that clay kicking, a process devised for digging small tunnels swiftly, would be ideal for military meaning.
Jones: So what Norton Griffiths wanted the army to do was simply to take his clay kickers to the front line trenches and let them really get on with digging towards the Germans.
VO: In a letter to the War Office in December 1914, he suggested the formation of the “Moles” civilian tunnelling units under his charge, coal miners for the Somme Chalk and clay kickers for the Flanders Clay. The idea was shelved.
Morgan: So the letters were filed under ”M” for Moles and forgotten.
VO: December 20th, the Germans stole the initiative. They tunnelled beneath Allied trenches at Festubert near the French- Belgian border and exploded ten mines.
Jones: The effects of the first blow, the first German mine blows against the British line was one of quite considerable shock and surprise. If you consider that in trench warfare, the only safe place was to dig underground and that a trench and a dugout could give considerable security to the infantrymen from both rifle machine gun bullets but also shell fire. Once the earth beneath him [soldiers] was actually being undermined, this really robbed him of that security.
VO: Now the British had to retaliate. [Herbert] Kitchener [Britain's Secretary of State for War] summoned Norton Griffiths.
Morgan: He stormed into Kitchener's dressed in a mixture of hunting kit and uniform and took a tool from the fire, got down on the floor on his back and started to demonstrate what he meant by clay kicking.
VO: Kitchener instantly demanded 10,000 clay kickers, but there were barely 1,000 in the country. Coal miners were also in short supply, as in wartime mining was a reserved occupation. And besides, to the War Office, the notion of recruiting an army of untrained, free-thinking men was as unsettling as the methods of Norton Griffiths himself. The generals feared an undisciplined mob.
Jones: I think what GHQ [general headquarters— main center from which a military operation is controlled] were fearful of was that war itself is a terrifying business and unless men are well- trained, well-drilled and well-disciplined, you simply cannot fight a war.
Fred Francis (174 Tunnelling company): They said to me, would you volunteer to dig a mine under the German trench? I said, you must be barmy asking me to do that. But I say, I was always a silly bugger like that, volunteering.
VO: With Norton Griffiths in charge, recruitment began. Specialist tunnelling companies were formed under the auspices of the Royal Engineers. He wanted older, more experienced, steady men and ignored War Office objections by offering them six shillings a day— six times an infantryman's pay.
Bert Fearns (170 Tunneling company): Most of the tunnellers were from the north-east, Northumberland way, or South Wales. And most of them were small, they were very physically broad, fit men.
Colonel Norman Dillon Mc (178 Tunnelling Company): Just odds and ends. They were picked for their particular skill at that particular job. You couldn't take a platoon of a Guards and say: “You will get on mining”, It doesn't work that way.
Fred Francis: That's one thing that the First War did for me. It got me out of the damp pits and never been back since. AndI won't be going back either.
VO: On February 19th, 1915, almost two months after the Festubert mines and many subsequent attacks, Norton Griffiths finally took his first draft of clay kickers to the front.
Jones: In a matter of days, they were taken from the sewers of Manchester to the trenches of Belgium and were immediately set to work. They were really bringing civilians into war as bad as it would get. In the winter of 1914, the conditions at the front were quite appalling.
VO: By March 1915, the first tunneling company was installed on the Western Front. Eventually there would be 25,000 men working underground, with twice as many infantry in support.
Bert Fearns (tunneler): They [infantry] were the experts, we [miners] were the labourers. And- uh- we were treated as such. No pain to be polite if I don’t put it that way. We were an unnecessary bloody nuisance.
Donald Hodge (178 Tunneling Company): We were there to do a job, and that was our be- all and end- all, really. Had to justify it, you're going here, you're going to do this, and that was that.
George Louth (178 Tunneling Company): All of a sudden they said, anybody here can use a shovel? I said—volunteered—which you shouldn't do, but I did, because I thought it was something different. One or two other chaps done the same. So we were all sent to this pit, which was 80 feet down. Then we had to walk along probably about a mile.
Jones: I think the infantry initially perhaps may not have welcomed tunnellers arriving in their sector, unless the Germans were already active. Once, however, the Germans began to blow mines, then the infantry would become quite desperatefor tunnellers to go and counteract the effects of them.
VO: The German mining threat was growing rapidly.
Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall (172 Tunneling Company): They were tunnelling one way, we were tunnelling the other, bothfor the same purpose. That's for them to blow up our front line, and for us to blow up their front line.
VO: John Norton Griffiths was now recruiting furiously, both in Britain and on the Western Front itself, where many miners were already in uniform, having volunteered for infantry regiments at the outbreak of war. He poached them, with his offer of six shillings a-day
Jones: Norton Griffiths' working methods were really completely at odds with traditional army methods that deferred to rank, hierarchy, chain of command…driving around in his Rolls Royce and getting things done with a mixture of cajoling, threats, bluster and charm.
VO: At all costs, tunnelling had to be kept going around the clock.
Jones: The Tunneling War has been likened to the largest civil engineering contract ever carried out under conditions of most extreme danger.
George Louth (tunneler): We went down there every night and worked eight hours. And we had to walk back, I suppose, a couple of miles to a rest each day. then go back again the next night. We had to walk the two miles every night, eight on our own,under gunfire. We never found out what the problem of the mine was. They don't tell you that, that's all secret. That's all secret, that was.
VO: Very few were told what they were doing. be captured with such knowledge could lead to the waste of months, evenyears of toil. Secrecy was paramount, and so was silence.
Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall (tunneler): If you stopped, you could hear the Germans, other side, tunneling, you could hear them,tunneling next to you. And I was buying that man, standing there ready in case they broke, that broke through, so that Icould shoot and, well, you kill them as quick as you can, or else one of the two, either you or them.
VO: Lieutenant John Westacott's account details several underground breakthroughs. In June 1916, he led four of his meninto enemy tunnels, their purpose, to explore and destroy. Almost discovered, they hid as four German miners passed by.
Lieutenant John Westacott [written account]: The Germans came past us, torches flashing, heavy footwear clumping on the wood floor. Stealthily, we crept around a corner, following their footsteps, gaining on them. The Germans paused— one seeing the torches of a second party of our men. They challenged them and, not getting a reply, fired a shot. Our second party fired back. They were trapped. The Germans turned and came face to face with us.
VO: On that occasion, they won the day, but they were not always so lucky. Later the same year, Westacott and his sergeant emerged from the shaft into their front line trench. It was full of Germans. Unbeknownst to the tunnelers, the enemy had captured the line during the night. Diving back down the shaft, they sounded the alarms.
Lieutenant John Westacott [written account cont’]: All hell broke loose, the Germans kept dropping more and more men down after us, piling on top of their own dead and wounded. We had a terrible scrap down there, using candles and torches. We were often fighting in the dark. Groping for epaulets on German shoulders was the only way to tell friend from foe. We used knuckle knives, very handy. When the infantry recaptured the trench, some of us had been fighting for over 20 hours. We were so sick and weary from the gas and the smell of blood. We had lost 60 out of 80 men. We couldn't have taken much more.
VO: Some 2,000 Allied tunnellers died in the war. The biggest killer was invisible. Every underground explosion trappedcarbon monoxide gas in the was odourless and lethal. The tunnellers used canaries to warn of its presence. They clippedthe claws so the bird would topple over when affected, rather than grip its perch in rigor mortis. A tunneller's life depended on the length of a canary's claws. Entombment, hand-to-hand fighting and gas. All the time digging, where there was no night and no day beneath the wasteland.
Colonel Norman Dillon (tunneler): I think the worst part is finding a way. It is so easy to get completely lost. The (?) was so deep in mud it took 12 hours to get a wounded man from the trench line to an ambulance. I was many times on the track, and nothingbut dead mules, dead men, dead horses, nothing.
VO: The enemy wanted Mount Sorrel [1.9 miles east of Ypres, Belgium] badly. It would complete their domination of the high ground overlooking Ypres.
Barden: The Germans took this position twice and were driven out twice, a huge loss of And each attack was preceded by a gigantic barrage. And the trenches were completely destroyed. And they were retaken quite quickly. But when they came back, there was nothing left. The shafts were full of water, they were full of corpses. And they found it difficult to even find the trenches
VO: At Mount Sorrel, the opposing lines were barely 50 yards apart. They ran through woods and fields, along the crest of a low hill. Deep beneath was the labyrinth. There were several entrances in the Allied front line. Some were shafts, some staircases. These led to shallow defensive workings with many listening posts, tunnellers quarters and rescue stations, each separate area protected by a special gas door. Further shafts led to deeper workings. In these cramped tunnels, directly beneath no man's land, were more listening posts. Beyond, probing far beneath the enemy lines, the fighting tunnels. The sharp end. At the end of these, a chamber packed with high explosives.
Ted Rimmer (Kings Liverpool Regiment): We were six of us on patrol, and this damn big shell dropped right by us. Can you imagine that? I was terrified. We all crouched down, you know, waiting for it to go off. It was a dud. I was thinking— I’ll never see home again, you know. And I thought this was the end, you know? You know, I was terrified. We were all terrified. I only breathed a sigh of relief when it didn't go off. We soon scrambled away from there. Don't you worry.
Donald Hodge (tunneler): We were down there, head to tail, on our hands and knees. And when we came out, we couldn't stand up because we'd been in that hands and knees position for We just couldn't stand. It was the most horrible job that I had on the Western Front, I believe. I faced many a shell and sniper, but I never liked(?) my knees.
George Louth (tunneler): The air got weaker as you went, the further you went, the weaker it got because of the poor bloke that was using the pump. He had to keep going all day, all the eight hours. Keep pumping, because if he had stopped, I would have been finished.
Colonel Norman Dillon (tunneler): Tick, tick, tick. somebody’s picking away. It's rather an eerie feeling. You know, this chap with the pick is out to kill you.
Barden: The infantry only got a tablespoonful [of Rum], But these guys [tunnelers], because of the pressure—every four hours, they could drink as much rum as they wanted. And in Westcott's diary, he says that the pressure was so intense that he wouldn't get out of bed in the morning before his servant had brought him a mug of rum. Before he got out of bed! One of the biggest problems was that, in the silence, their imagination would start playing tricks on them. And they'd be able to hear their own heart beating. And think that was the sound of possibly the Germans closeby.
Colonel Norman Dillon (tunneler): Part of one's job, as an officer, was to sit with these listening things on your ears. And you could hear the Germans getting a bit nearer…a bit nearer…a bit nearer..then your mind was racing. Should I get out? Should I stay here and tell them what's going on? Or what? If you stay there too long, you might be there forever.
John Laister (171 Tunneling Company): He (?) spoke in a whisper. He said, ‘We're going to blow it up.” I said, “What?” He said, “We're going to blow it up.” So I said, “Are you still picking?” He said, “Bloody good luck, John.”
Donald Hodge: It was really a case of who blew first, whether it was us who were going to be buried or the Germans
Jones: Only one Victoria Cross was awarded to the tunnellers, to Sapper Hackett, who was awarded his medal posthumously for refusing to leave a buried comrade on the grounds that he was a tunneller and couldn't do so, and was later buried by the tunnel collapse. The tunnellers often lost out because of the secrecy of their operations, especially so during the preparation for the deep and long tunnels for the Messines[—west Flanders] operation, when a dozen tunnellers were buried alive at Petit Bois. And after about five and a half days, they managed to break back into the and they found 11 men dead and one man, Sapper Bedsen, still alive. Sapper Bedsen certainly never got a Medal. The tunnellers who carried out the rescue under extremely hazardous conditions never got recognised either, even though their commanding officer put in recommendations. And he was told that it was because the Messines operation was so secret that no awards could bemade.
VO: The Messines operation was conceived to relieve pressure on the Belgian city of Ypres which lay within a salient, a bulge in the line, which the Allies sought to straighten. In April 1915, Norton Griffiths arrived to propose an ambitious plan. His tunnellers would help break the stranglehold on the beleaguered city. To the southeast of Ypres lay the German-held Messines Ridge. Norton Griffith's proposal was to create the biggest explosion in a man-made earthquake, and shake them off it. Over two years, 11 tunnels would be secretly dug, several of half-a-mile long and up to 120 feet deep. Then 22 giant charges would be triggered,followed by a huge ground and artillery attack….To reach these depths, shafts have to be sunk deep into the blue Flanders clay.
Jones: Offices, brigade headquarters with telephone exchanges, dressing stations could be installed underground. And by 1917, dugouts were being specially prepared for infantry attacks that would accommodate whole battalions of a thousand men. Even whole brigades of 5,000 or more men could be accommodated underground so that they could be brought up safe and unobserved, ready for an attack.
Ted Rimmer (Kings Liverpool Regiment): All the dugouts there were damp and cold. Cold is my dugout, wet are my feet, waiting for whizzbangs to send me to sleep. (laughs)
Donald Hodge (tunneller): Somehow there was a resignation about things, it was as though we knew it had to happen, there was no escape, and you just did it. You accepted anything. Very often, if it was cold, you'd have your grey coat with you, and get under that, and you could light a cigarette, and you were at peace with the world then.
Fred Francis (tunneler): On one occasion we had a very deep dugout, and we'd got an old blazer from somewhere, and we had a bit of fire on to keep us warm, and it was my turn to go up on the top, and as soon as I got in the fresh air, I became unconscious. I dropped flat on my face, and I was mud from head to foot, and I thought— Oh hell, miles from home…how the hell am I going to get clean?
(?) :Some chaps would sleep, we just chatted. You won't be surprised to find that women were part of it[conversation]. Food was a very big subject, about what we were going to have when we'd come out of the army. They all had their own mother's favorite dishes. Nobody made Lancaster hot pots like my mum. And we just went into dreamland
VO: Here [underground] men lived and died, wrote…letters to families and lovers, tended the wounded. At night they climbed the stairs to bury their comrades, and all the time the tunnellers were digging ever further beneath the enemy. And by June 1917, all roads led to Messines.
Morgan: There was a little drawing of how to build a tunnel and where to place an explosive. There was an arrow from that going up and it said, to heaven. (laughs)
VO: At dawn on June the 7th, 1917, 19 charges totalling almost a million pounds of explosive were detonated.
Bert Fearns (tunneler): All of a sudden it was as though somebody had left a torch. It started at one end and just shot along.
Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall (tunneler): And the dirt goes up in the air, oh, 50 yards.
John Laister (tunneler): Yes. It was like a mountain of bodies going up and coming down. It was like a mountain standing in the sky—I'll never forget it as long as I live. I thought, how many people could have gone up with that lot?
VO: So John Norton Griffiths finally got his earthquake. The effect was monstrous. An estimated 10,000 German soldierslost their lives in a moment. The blast was heard by Lloyd George in Downing Street and by Norton Griffiths at homewith his family in Brighton.
Jones: The mines had the effect of completely neutralising any defences that the Germans had For example, the concretepillboxes were simply hurled physically into the air. Germans were obviously completely disorientated and there areaccounts of men being found wandering around in no man's land or in the remains of their front line trenches, weepingand bewildered. This must have had considerable impact on German morale, knowing that their miners underground could not prevent the British tunnellers from blowing them up. Mining therefore contributed to the attrition—the attritional warfare that gradually wore down the Germans and ultimately paid off.
Morgan: Deep inside him [Griffiths], he must have known that the whole war was completely unjust and unnecessary— and he wanted it over as quickly as possible. And if it meant blowing up Germans, well, too bad.
VO: The great mines had been instrumental in achieving a model victory, the Allies' first true success of the war. But now the front lines were becoming mobile, making the work of the tunnellers obsolete. There was no longer a place for their very special brand of warfare. Messines had been their finest and final hour. Within months, the ridge was back in enemy hands. The underground war was over and destined to be forgotten.
original video: