Were These WW1 Underground Tunnels The Worst Place To Fight?

[Music] [Applause] the first world war will always be remembered for its trenches but plenty of fighting occurred even deeper down in tunnels recently a 300 meter tunnel dug by the germans has been discovered near the village of crayon this tunnel is yet to be excavated but i've been to see some of the tunnels built by the allies that survived to this day i've come to one of the best preserved first world war battlefields now you can still see the shape of the allied front line and this fence is here to protect people because there's still a lot of unexploded first world war explosives right in there so you can't walk across there now but the reason i'm here is not to look at the battlefield on the surface but to find out what went on below i've come to a place now which demonstrates just how far the war had moved on in the years since it had begun in 1914 these are the massive tunnels under vimy ridge burrowed out of the chalk which the canadians used to score one of the most breathtaking victories of the water that point this is vimy ridge it's one of the most prominent massive features on this part of the western front it's like there's miles of flat farmland and then this huge ridge rises up out of it like a wave breaking the germans had very very strong positions on top of that ridge and it was given and it was the canadian's job to get them off it if you want a job doing properly you've got to ask the canadians in this life and what the canadians took this approach that would change the way the british attacked on the western front they managed something that previously hadn't really been done before which was a very quick very successful attack which comprehensively drove the germans back they did so by tunneling through this stuff they used the fact that the me is built on chalk porous but quite stable chalk so you could tunnel deep into this ridge line you could create communication trenches you could bring the supplies forward that were required to launch a big assault like this and perhaps most importantly of all you could burrow deep under german lines lay around about 13 massive mines under those german lines that would all be detonated at one particular point and they detonated those mines on the morning of april the 9th 1917 it was easter monday they were meant to go the day before easter sunday but they've been a terrible snowstorm so the ground was still thick with snow they detonated these mines giant explosions and all these tunnels were packed with infantrymen that was close as possible to german lines and when the mines blew up they were able to jump out make only the short distance across no man's land and take those objectives they were then able to beat off any german counter-attacks it was a limited well-rehearsed perfectly planned operation and it contained the seeds of all future successes against the germans but look at this warrant of tunnels down here right which way should we go these tunnels were excavated by welsh miners because they were the best miners in the world at the time they're experienced digging through chalk and they could do about six meters a day and there are 10 kilometers of tunnels down here that just gives you a sense of the scale of the preparation scale the effort required to break through these german positions this was an operation years in the making but it was an operation so successful that the german high command had to completely reassess the way that they were going to defend against british and commonwealth troops who were gaining in confidence gaining an expertise with every passing month of the war look at that crawl space there sometimes they didn't need to build tunnels big enough for infantry battalions to go through so only the miners would need to just crawl from one tunnel to the next terrifying it's hard to i mean there's many jobs in world war one that were appalling but i think living and operating here in these underground spaces was pretty bad don't forget the germans knew about they had their own sappers their own miners they knew that the allies were trying to do this and so there were mines counter mines attempts to collapse each other's tunnels and very occasionally two tunnels would meet and then be brutal medieval hand-to-hand fighting in pitch blackness down here as two desperate groups of young men fought for their lives even though the 9th of april goes down as one of the most successful days in the allied war effort to that point still worth remembering that around about 2 400 canadians lost their lives in that one day it's the single bloodiest day in the history of canada but the first second and third division did achieve most of their objectives by the morning that short dash across no man's land thanks these tunnels really paying off but the fourth division struggled so there were lessons to learn and they still did not have the ability to completely and decisively break through german lines that would take more months of brutal warfare [Music] i've come to the town of aras and i'm now going 20 meters underground to look at something truly remarkable even by western front standards [Music] these vast caverns are actually man-made they're quarries they were mined by quarrymen in the 17th and 18th century for the limestone to build the magnificent buildings of aras which sits above me now when the british took over this part of the front line at the beginning of 1916 they realized that these huge ancient quarries would be the perfect bunkers basically underground hideouts for the men in the army sparing them the brutal destructive fire of the germans which was laying waste to the whole city of aras above remarkably that the town the people of aris sort of forgot about these quarries they were used during the second world war as air raid shelters and they were locked up and because it was the british army that ran this place during the war the town people didn't really have much of a connection with it the townsfolk had been largely evacuated and they were discovered in the 1990s by the rs archaeologist and it's then been turned into a beautiful high-tech visitor attraction museum and it's well worth the visit it's only been open a few years sometimes i think nothing connects you with the lives of those men in the first world war like the graffiti they left behind it's so personal it's so humorous and it's in the strangest places we've come into one of the caverns now and this is a new zealand tunneler you can see the nose there either big chin there big chin big nose i like this guy he's obviously related to me and then he's wearing this iconic new zealand hat it was known as a lemon squeezer it's called the wellington tunnels not because well not directly because of the iron duke who would have marched near here after his victory at waterloo but because a huge amount of tunnelling here was done by new zealand tunnelers and they gave each cave system and and area names corresponding to cities in new zealand so we've got wellington here we've got auckland further north and then we've got other new zealand cities further south as well so that's what gives this place its underground geography it was capable at its peak of holding around 25 000 troops down here it was a it was a vast underground city that in fact was the pre-war population of aras and at times this would have been crammed with men sheltering from german bombardment or preparing for an offensive 20 kilometers worth of tunnels were dug there are so many little pieces of evidence taking us back to the time of the first world war the black writing here to the latrine of course very important if you've got that many men down here uh maintenance of health and hygiene vitally important to everyone to know exactly where to go to the toilets very useful to know easy to get lost down here lots of numbers on these pillars and then i like these these are the burn marks from the candles were then placed on the little ledge there so there would have been some electricity down here but a lot of it was lit by candlelight it would have been eerie imagine lit by candles the thump and shudder of heavy artillery hitting above it would have felt both quite comforting down here but also pretty alien probably quite scary for lots of people so this is a first world war tunnel leading from one big quarry to other quarries these ones are called nelson and blenheim the reason they're called that is because they are cities in new zealand that are south of wellington which this is the wellington quarry it's a bit ironic that these quarries are all named after famous moments largely in anglo-french history like admiral nelson and the battle of blenheim even though of course we're now in france allied to the french by 1916. one thing they've found plenty of down here is picks lots and lots of the heads of pickaxes those were the vital tool it was all done by hand it said the new zealand tunnels could dig about 60 meters a day down here it's impressive i like the way they've recreated the audio down here it gives a very eerie sense of what it must have been like when it was stuff full of british and commonwealth troops you've got reconstructed bunks here so they've been stacked in like sardines and as well as objects found on the battlefield from 100 years ago so the quarries the big cavernous spaces are from the 17th century but these linking tunnels were dug during the first world war both by brits but also notably by new zealand tunnelers and together they joined up all of these quarries into one vast underground city this is very exciting this bit here this bit is not open to the public so it's almost like the soldiers have just left [Applause] still lots of detritus from the war although it feels pretty secure and solid down here there's evidence now that pretty significant collapse and even though these tunnels were deep underground obviously the constant bombardment this area received did weaken some of these structures some amazing graffiti here this says it all really a sapper which is a military word for a minor or tunneler t collins there's his number the date 26th of the second 1917 i think and n said new zealand engineers tunneling company this is one of the legendary new zealand tunnelers that was down here i haven't left his mark one thing i like about being down these tunnels you can't get lost because the good old british army made sure everyone knew where everyone was at all times two blenheim arrow so we're going to the blenheim quarry next you can see these electricity cables up here these are actually from the second world war when it was a shelter for french civilians but there would have been cables here during the british period but they were removed when the front line rolled forward the british stripped these tunnels and took nearly everything with them except they're all tin cans nest tins ammo cases all the detritus that accompanied the armies of the western front you think of the millions of tons of supplies required to keep this army here in france and belgium right where we're going entrenching tools look at this boots can you imagine how exciting it must have been being the aras regional archaeologist the 1990s and uncovering these tunnels that have been lost to history i mean they say being an archaeologist isn't like big indiana jones but i think on this occasion they might be wrong whoa look at this okay i see a sign to blenheim through here here we go entrance to blenheim with the second world war second world war mark is ever either now this was a tunnel dug by the new zealand tunnelers another small little tunnel mined out which joined a big quarry to this next quarry so that was nelson quarry let's see what blenheim's got to offer it's amazing thing that these tunnels still run under aras today how much of the legacy the first war is still hidden from most of us we go about our daily lives but it's still lurking there and then we've got all sorts of graffiti here this remarkable look at this one okay so like king shropshire infantry that's good oh it's good to see light infantryman down here my great-grandfather was in the summer saturday infantry wow look at this there's the different numbers of cultures and languages and ethnic groups in the mighty british empire at the time where it stretched from the pacific islands to northern canada india they had all been down here jostling alongside each other fighting for the king emperor weird some pictures of women here by the looks of things maybe a sweetheart that's a beautiful one there somebody's sweetheart or a pinup i think this looks a lot like charlie chaplin i think the graffiti sometimes can take you closer to these men who are now dead 100 years since than almost anything else [Music] [Applause] welcome to the history hit youtube channel which we are relaunching we've got all the best exclusive content 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Channel: History Hit

Views: 90,389

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Id: 8bC_ugno10I

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021