On an evening of June 1917, a group of reporters
gathered at the Western Front to get the latest information about a massive offensive
the British Command was about to launch. Excited, British Major General Charles Harington
told them [QUOTE]: "Gentlemen, I do not know whether we shall change history tomorrow.
But we shall certainly alter the geography." For nearly two years, British
miners had worked non-stop, burrowing under German lines near the Belgian
village of Messines. Vast kilometers of intricate and deep tunnels were dug to be packed
with thousands of pounds of explosives. On June 7, 1917, 19 enormous mines
buried below the German line in the Messines ridge were detonated. The result
was an escalated series of explosions that sent kilometric amounts of soil,
concrete, and soldiers up into the air. The blasts were so massive that they
could be heard in France and England. This was the Great War's most lethal explosion: over 10,000 German soldiers
perished in less than 5 minutes. A Heroic Beginning The Great War began in 1914, and it was received
with patriotic feelings in most countries. German, French, Austrian, British,
and Russian young men dashed to their closest recruiting offices to enlist
and serve their nations and empires. Most of the enlisted men, whose
ages ranged between 18 to 25 years, had a poetic notion of war. They had grown up hearing their fathers' and
grandfathers' tales of how they had faced the enemy lines with fixed bayonets or stood in a
square formation against a furious cavalry charge. The young men thought they would
wage war using Napoleonic tactics, quickly conquering glory and returning home
to show off their medals. But they were wrong. This was the 20th century, and a
new style of warfare would be born, more violent and less
honorable than any seen before. During the first year of the war, military
commanders from all countries struggled to adapt to the new war. Cavalry and
infantry charges were quickly decimated by the first machine guns and the
artillery cannons' accurate fire. Thousands of casualties could
accumulate in mere minutes. Even though casualties escalated quickly, the
territorial gain against the enemy was minimal. This led to an epoch better
known as trench warfare. Forces were amassed in a series of defensive
lines where soldiers lived, slept, and died. The Messines Offensive To break the monotonous stalemate and the
mass-kamikaze charges against the enemy, German, British, and French
commanders turned to mine warfare, which effectively broke the enemy defenses. Through deep and intricate tunnels,
military engineers dug below No Man's Land to reach the opposing line and
conduct stealthy attacks at night. These tunnels were also useful for placing
explosives that would collapse the trenches, burying supplies and vital
communication lines upon detonation. Although used scarcely at
first in the Western Front, the British decided to take mine warfare to the
next level. As far back as the last days of 1915, the British forces began to conduct mining
operations in individual sections of the Ypres Salient battlefield to disseminate
German strongholds near Messines, Belgium. In late 1915, the fighting was centered
around the Belgian city of Flanders. It was common for armies to dig between 10-20
feet below the surface to plant explosives. Still, the Britons, desperate to break
the stalemate, were more ambitious. The British Expeditionary Force
engineer-in-chief, Brigadier George Fowke, proposed to dig from 60 to
90 feet below the surface to prevent the Germans from finding out
what the British were up to in Ypres. He suggested British officers dig two tunnels
under Messines that went under the Douve River. The objective was to detonate
explosives below enemy lines. Fowke envisioned that the digging
could be done in roughly six months. His proposal was approved on January 6, 1916. His tunneling op was going to be part of the
German defenses' capture of the Messines Ridge. The aim was to remove the German Army from the
high ground on Ypres Salient's southern flank. The southern flank was of extreme tactical
importance because it enabled the Germans to gain intelligence on the British maneuvers
from watching British positions in the north. If the British forces succeeded, they
could eliminate the German advantage, take the high ground for their benefit and
release some pressure on the French Army, just like the Expeditionary Force did
during the Somme's Battle a year before. Clay-kicking George Fowkes's plan for
this deep mining operation was inspired by Major John Norton-Griffiths, who modernized the clay kicking technique and
founded the first tunneling companies in England. Clay-kicking, also known as working on the cross, was a method of digging tunnels, roads, and
railways in strong clay-based soil structures. The technique became essential for developing
the London Underground System. It was broadly used during the Victorian age to renovate the
ancient sewerage systems of many English cities. Instead of using picks or mattocks intended
for use against rigid soil structures, clay-clicking worked favorably
with soft clay structures. And more importantly, it was silent, which
was precisely what the British forces required to avoid raising any German
suspicions at the frontlines. The technique also involved leg
power, which required less effort, and was quicker to get the job done. When the war broke out in 1914, Norton-Griffiths
was contacted by Britain's Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, to send some of his most
experienced clay-kickers to help the war effort and instruct military engineers. These men would eventually become
the Royal Engineers' Company, tasked with digging the tunnels
for Fowkes's plan at Ypres. In her book 'They Called it Passchendaele,'
British historian Lyn MacDonald collected Corporal Tom Newell's testimony, a clay-kicker from the
171st Tunnelling Company. He described (QUOTE): "To be a good clay-kicker, you had
to be long-legged, young, and strong. At the age of 21, I was all three. You lay on
a wooden cross made out of a plank with the cross-strut just behind your shoulders.
The cross was wedged into the tunnel so that you were lying at an angle of
45° with your feet towards the face. You worked with a sharp-pointed spade with
a foot-rest on either side above the blade, and you drove the blade into
the clay, kicked the clay out, and on to another section,
moving forward all the time. With the old broad-bladed pick, we could
only get forward at best 6ft on every shift, but when the clay-kicking method was introduced, we were advancing as much as
12ft or even 14ft on a shift." Besides the kicker, the clay-kicking
teams consisted of the bagger, who filled sandbags with the
excavated clay, and the trammer, who manned a small trolley on rails that
would take the spoil back to the shaft. The bags filled with clay were then taken to
the surface and used as trench protection. The Messines Mines Under the Royal Engineers' control, the mine
galleries under Messines were built by British, Canadian, and Australian Tunneling
companies. They all tried to prevent the German Army from knowing that they were
tunneling in the deeper layer of blue clay. In almost 2 years of continuous tunneling,
German counter-mining units found several mines and British tunnels, which often led to
close counter encounters between both forces. To the British advantage, German
units never discovered the deep mines that were being packed with explosives. Captain Greener of the 175th Tunnelling
Company recounted to MacDonald in her book (QUOTE): "You'd shift 30
or 40 sandbags in a shift, or more, and you couldn't dispose
of the dirt during the daytime. It had to come out at night…You had to take it
out and distribute it as best you could at night, behind the trenches, well away from the line,
so that the trenches didn't look any different. The Hill 60 explosion In total, 21 mines were planted under
German lines on the Messines Ridge. More than one million pounds of explosives
were distributed between each mine. The largest mine, Spanbroekmolen,
contained 41 tons of ammonal. On June 6, 1917, before the British
offensive was launched to capture the Ridge, British Maj. Gen. Charles Harington told
journalists (QUOTE): "Gentlemen, I do not know whether we shall change history tomorrow.
But we shall certainly alter the geography." The time set for the mines to
go off was 3:10am on June 7. Not all friendly units were notified of the
colossal explosion that was about to happen. To keep the surprise element, only a
few officers and specific companies were alerted of the detonation. Nonetheless, everyone was ordered to be ready
to advance. The offensive had to make the most out of the surprise attack and capture
enemy ground when the explosion occurred. At 3:10am, the order was greenlighted. Soldiers with individual devices
began detonating the 21 explosions, and Messines became hell on Earth.
The ground shook as every explosion was
triggered with a slow interval between them. Then, the Earth erupted with tremendous
force around the German lines. Soil, wood, steel, supplies, and soldiers
were violently shot up to the skies. For the Germans soldiers
standing right above the mines, it was over instantly. They were pulverized. The
survivors of the explosions were not so lucky. They were buried alive by the
debris that fell from the skies and the enormous cavities
created by the detonation. More than 10,000 German soldiers
perished during the first five minutes of the consecutive explosions.
Lieutenant J Todd of 11th battalion told
MacDonald (QUOTE): "It was an appalling moment. We all had the feeling, 'It's not going!'
And then a most remarkable thing happened… The ground on which I was lying started to
go up and down, just like an earthquake. It lasted for seconds, and then, suddenly
in front of us, the Hill 60 mine went up." The Aftermath Three hours after the detonation,
the Messines Ridge was captured. The battle lasted 7 days. On June 14,
the zone fell under British control. It was a tactical success that caused a
tremendous impact on the morale of both sides. Weeks later, the Ypres Offensive
was launched on July 31. This time, the Germans counterattacked fiercely. Although the explosion at Messines Ridge was
the largest man-made explosion to that date, it was forgotten by more tragic
battles such as the Somme, Passchendaele, and Verdun, where over 200,000
lives were lost in the course of each encounter.
Just for comparison, if this were to happen at Wrigley Field today, about one quarter of the fans would be killed.