Battle Beneath the Trenches

Battle Beneath the Trenches PDF Author: Robert Johns
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473855306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Undermining the positions of the enemy is one of the most ancient activities. For almost 3000 years even before 1914, it was a popular siege-breaking technique. During the Great War, arguably the greatest siege the world had ever seen, it presented a conflict environment that perfectly favoured the skills of the military miner. During 1915, the Western Front was established as a static line that grew into a huge network of defence-in-depth earthworks. Siege conditions demanded siege tactics and as the ground was everywhere mineable, the Western Front was a prime candidate for underground warfare.Royal Engineer tunnelling companies were specialist units of the Corps of Royal Engineers within the British Army, formed to dig attacking tunnels under enemy lines during the First World War. The Cornish Miners were one of these specialist units recruited from the tin mines of Cornwall.In February 1915, eight Tunnelling Companies were created and operational in Flanders from March 1915. By mid-1916, the British Army had around 25,000 trained tunnellers, mostly volunteers taken from mining communities. This is their story.

Battle Beneath the Trenches

Battle Beneath the Trenches PDF Author: Robert Johns
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473855306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Get Book Here

Book Description
Undermining the positions of the enemy is one of the most ancient activities. For almost 3000 years even before 1914, it was a popular siege-breaking technique. During the Great War, arguably the greatest siege the world had ever seen, it presented a conflict environment that perfectly favoured the skills of the military miner. During 1915, the Western Front was established as a static line that grew into a huge network of defence-in-depth earthworks. Siege conditions demanded siege tactics and as the ground was everywhere mineable, the Western Front was a prime candidate for underground warfare.Royal Engineer tunnelling companies were specialist units of the Corps of Royal Engineers within the British Army, formed to dig attacking tunnels under enemy lines during the First World War. The Cornish Miners were one of these specialist units recruited from the tin mines of Cornwall.In February 1915, eight Tunnelling Companies were created and operational in Flanders from March 1915. By mid-1916, the British Army had around 25,000 trained tunnellers, mostly volunteers taken from mining communities. This is their story.

Beneath Flanders Fields

Beneath Flanders Fields PDF Author: Peter Barton
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773529496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
"The product of over twenty-five years of research, Beneath Flanders Fields illustrates the evolution of military mining, leading to its deployment in the greatest siege in military history - in the trenches of the Western Front." "In the words of the tunnellers themselves, and through previously unpublished photographs - many in colour - as well as contemporary plans and drawings, this book reveals how this most intense of battles was fought - and won. Few on the surface knew the horrific details of the tunnellers' work, yet this silent, claustrophobic conflict was a barbaric struggle that raged day and night for almost two and a half years, and one which generated mental and physical stresses often far beyond those suffered by the infantry in the trenches. On 7 June 1917 at Messines Ridge, the tension was broken with the opening of the most dramatic mine offensive in history."--BOOK JACKET.

Beneath Hill 60

Beneath Hill 60 PDF Author: Will Davies
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 1864715847
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The story of the Australian miners and soldiers who tunnelled under Hill 60 near Ypres and eventually broke through to create a new frontline. On 7 June 1917, 19 massive mines shattered the Messines ridge near Ypres. Ten thousand German soldiers died and the largest man-made explosion in history up until that time smashed open the German frontline. Two of these mines, at Hill 60 and the Caterpillar, were fired my men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, made up of miners and engineers rather than parade-ground soldiers. This is the untold, devastatingly brutal story of the battle underground during the First World War, where men suffocated in the blue-grey clay, drowned in the liquid chalk, choked on the poisonous air or died violently in the darkness and foetid air in hand-to-hand fighting. Written by Will Davies, bestselling author of Somme Mud and In The Footsteps of Private Lynch, Beneath Hill 60 tells the complete and inspiring story behind the major motion picture.

Beneath Flanders Fields

Beneath Flanders Fields PDF Author: Peter Barton
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773573119
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The result of over twenty-five years of research, Beneath Flanders Fields reveals how this intense underground battle was fought and won. The authors give the first full account of mine warfare in World War I through the words of the tunnellers themselves as well as plans, drawings, and previously unpublished archive photographs, many in colour. Beneath Flanders Fields also shows how military mining evolved. The tunnellers constructed hundreds of deep dugouts that housed tens of thousands of troops. Often electrically lit and ventilated, these tunnels incorporated headquarters, cookhouses, soup kitchens, hospitals, drying rooms, and workshops. A few dugouts survive today, a final physical legacy of the Great War, and are presented for the first time in photographs in Beneath Flanders Fields.

Beneath the Killing Fields

Beneath the Killing Fields PDF Author: Matthew Leonard
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 147388411X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Beneath the Killing Fields of the Western Front still lies a hidden landscape of industrialised conflict virtually untouched since 1918. This subterranean world is an ambiguous environment filled with material culture that that objectifies the scope and depth of human interaction with the diverse conflict landscapes of modern war. Covering the military reasoning for taking the war underground, as well as exploring the way that human beings interacted with these extraordinary alien environments, this book provides a more all-encompassing overview of the Western Front. The underground war was intrinsic to trench warfare and involved far more than simply trying to destroy the enemys trenches from below. It also served as a home to thousands of men, protecting them from the metallic landscapes of the surface. With the aid of cutting edge fieldwork conducted by the author in these subterranean locales, this book combines military history, archaeology and anthropology together with primary data and unique imagery of British, French, German and American underground defences in order to explore the realities of subterranean warfare on the Western Front, and the effects on the human body and mind that living and fighting underground inevitably entailed.

Eye-Deep in Hell

Eye-Deep in Hell PDF Author: John Ellis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801839474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
A detailed reconstruction of life and death in the trenches of World War I, describing the construction and physical and spiritual environment of the trenches and the soldiers' daily routine.

Birdsong

Birdsong PDF Author: Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307820386
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mesmerising story of love and war spanning three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the 1990s In this "overpowering and beautiful novel" (The New Yorker), the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land. Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient, crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love.

Back to the Front

Back to the Front PDF Author: Stephen O'Shea
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802719090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
World War I is beyond the memory of almost everyone alive today. Yet it has left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century as it has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Western Front-the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to the border of France and Switzerland, a narrow swath of land in which so many million lives were lost. For journalist Stephen O'Shea, the legacy of the Great War is personal (both his grandfathers fought on the front lines) and cultural. Stunned by viewing the "immense wound" still visible on the battlefield of the Somme, and feeling that "history is too important to be left to the professionals," he set out to walk the entire 450 miles through no-man's-land to discover for himself and for his generation the meaning of the war. Back to the Front is a remarkable combination of vivid history and opinionated travel writing. As his walk progresses, O'Shea recreates the shocking battles of the Western Front, many now legendary-Passchendaele, the Somme, the Argonne, Verdun-and offers an impassioned perspective on the war, the state of the land, and the cultivation of memory. His consummate skill with words and details brings alive the players, famous and faceless, on that horrific stage, and makes us aware of why the Great War, indeed history itself, still matters. An evocative fusion of past and present, Back to the Front will resonate, for all who read it, as few other books on war ever have.

The Battle Book of Ypres

The Battle Book of Ypres PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ieper (Belgium)
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description


Directing the Tunnellers' War

Directing the Tunnellers' War PDF Author: Phillip Robinson
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526714434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A first-hand account of the underground work of the First World War—from the firing of mines to constructing subways to bureaucratic mishaps. With a background in mining and tunneling, Major H. R. Dixon was transferred to GHQ in Montreuil to handle mining plans and records. In due course he was appointed to a small group of Royal Engineers’ officers who operated as the eyes and ears of the Inspector of Mines. His activity in this role is particularly important for the period after the June 1917 Messines Offensive, when the use of mining for blows against the enemy substantially diminished—indeed, all but disappeared—and the tunneling companies were reallocated to a new range of tasks. Dixon was at the centre of staff activity that set about countering the effects of the German Kaiserslacht offensives in March, April and May 1918, and the preparations for a possible German breakthrough to the channel ports. Subsequently, with the allied advances of the ‘Last Hundred Days’, he became considerably occupied by the hazards of dealing with delayed action mines and booby traps. His manuscript, produced in 1933, remained no more than a draft until it was rescued some time ago by one of the editors from the Royal Engineers’ archives at Chatham. It recounts, by means of numerous humorous anecdotes, the personalities and work of the staff at GHQ, ranging from humble clerks and the misdemeanors of his batman to senior officers. He brings to life the exceptional endeavours of the often maligned senior staff and the individual characteristics of many senior staff officers who are otherwise but shadows in accounts of the Great War.