The Last Full Measure (32 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
THE LOCKDOWN OF
the Western Front in 1915 ushered in not only trench warfare but also its close relative, subterranean warfare. Mining had been used ever since there were walls to undermine, and in the pregunpowder era the attackers relied on physically weakening walls by creating voids beneath them that would lead to collapse. The advent of gunpowder added the more active ingredient of explosive demolition, the most significant prior to World War I being that blown under the Confederate earthworks defending Petersburg, Virginia, on July 30, 1864, when 8,000 pounds of gunpowder blew a crater 170 feet long and 30 feet deep, killing about three hundred Confederate soldiers in the process.
The development of high-powered explosives such as ammonal offered the possibility of even greater potential damage, and the British in particular invested heavily in mining on the Western Front. The work, though, was not for the faint of heart:
First of all you go down three or four ladders … It’s a terrible long way down, and of course you go alone … I didn’t go far up the gallery where they were working because you can’t easily pass along, but the RE [Royal Engineers responsible for British mining operations] officer took me along a gallery that is not being worked, and there, all alone, at the end of it was a man sitting. He was simply sitting, listening. Then I listened through his stethoscope thing
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… and I could hear the Boche working as plainly as anything.… as we went away and left him he looked round at us with staring eyes just like a hunted animal.… Of course, while you hear them working, it’s all right, they won’t blow. But if you don’t hear them! God, I wouldn’t like to be an RE. It’s an awful game.
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It was a particularly vicious form of combat. Miners and counterminers would break into each others’ tunnels and galleries and fight hand-to-hand with coshes, sharpened spades, pistols, or
rifles with sawn-off barrels and shortened butts. Counterminers would constantly seek to blow up their counterparts with small mines—camouflets—which even if they did not kill by blast inflicted an even more terrible death by entombment.
The point of it all, though, was to accumulate sufficient explosive beneath the enemy trenches to blow them to kingdom come. The Germans blew ten mines under the Indian Corps at Givenchy on December 20, 1914, causing many deaths.
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On April 17, 1915, the British blew the top off Hill 60 in the Ypres Salient, beating competing German miners to the punch. But the first truly mighty blast came on the first day of the battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, at 7:20 a.m., when the British Hawthorn Ridge mine containing about 40,000 pounds of ammonal went off. The explosion could be heard in London. The official history of the German 119th Reserve Regiment records: “During the bombardment there was a terrible explosion which for the moment completely drowned the thunder of the artillery.… More than three sections of No. 9 Company were blown into the air, and the neighboring dugouts were broken in or blocked … and a gigantic crater … gaped like an open wound on the side of the hill.”
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An even bigger blow, however, came at Messines a year later, on June 7, 1917. Twenty-three mines containing a combined 1 million pounds of explosive spread across a 10-mile front were detonated simultaneously. Major Walter Kranz was watching from a little way behind the German front line on Messines Ridge and saw “nineteen gigantic roses with carmine petals, or as enormous mushrooms, which rose up slowly and majestically out of the ground and then split into pieces with a mighty roar, sending up multi-colored columns of flame mixed with a mass of earth and splinters high into the sky.”
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From the British trenches there “appeared a great green meadow, slowly, taking its time, not hurrying, a smooth curved dome of grass, heaving up, up,
up like a rising cake; then, like a cake, it cracked, cracked visibly with bursting brown seams; still the dome rose, towering ten, twenty feet up … and then with a roar the black smoke hurtled into the air, followed by masses of pink flame.”
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Ten thousand or so Germans were killed, and “many of the men never came to earth again, except as a rain of blood.”
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The huge craters themselves became a unique part of the topography of combat—battlegrounds within the battleground. And as it had been with the crater at Petersburg in the American Civil War, the struggle for their control was bitterly and bloodily contested because they could provide vantage points, particularly for snipers, as well as refuges for stranded infantrymen. George Coppard witnessed the blowing of the mine beneath the German Hohenzollern Redoubt in the final stages of the battle of Loos at the end of September 1915. Once the debris had fallen (“a risk to friend and foe alike”),
the storming party rushed forward to capture the hot and smoking crater. The German flanks bristled with machine guns, and it was a safe bet that they would take a toll of some of our boys before they reached the crater. Those who made it literally dug in their toes to prevent themselves sliding backwards down the steep slope behind them. They lined the rim nearest the enemy, desperately prepared to die in defence of their meager gain.… A fierce bombing exchange would break out. Many of the bombs over-shot the rim of the crater and, landing on the bottom, blasted fragments up the slope.… Both sides employed snipers at vantage points on the flanks and their deadly work added to the terror.… The casualty rate rose rapidly for the first hour after the capture of a crater as alarm spread to neighbouring craters and trenches. Inspired by mutual hate and desperation, the volume of fire from short-range weapons
increased, creating an almost impossible demand for stretcher-bearers. Crater fighters were considered to have a pretty mean chance of survival, twelve hours being reckoned as the limit.
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WITH THE STRANGULATION
of fluid battle and the onset of the rigor mortis of trench warfare, inventive minds turned to what might be called a miniaturized imitation of open warfare: trench raiding. The object was usually to capture enemy troops for interrogation, or simply to inflict demoralizing casualties. It was also employed, in the absence of full-throated battle, to “blood” inexperienced units and have them prove their fighting mettle, and to keep experienced but inactive troops on their toes. To many men, however, it was simply another example of the brass finding ways to get them killed.
Corporal Sidney Amatt of the Essex Regiment described the general idea:
They never asked for volunteers, they’d say, “You, you, you, and you,” and you suddenly found yourself in a raiding party. They went over at night, in silence, and the parties always arranged in the same way. Number one was the rifleman, who carried a rifle, a bayonet, and fifty rounds of ammunition and nothing else. The next man was a grenade thrower and he carried a haversack full of Mills hand bombs. The next man was also a bomb-thrower, he helped the first man replace his stock when it was exhausted. And the last man was a rifle and bayonet man.…
The idea was to crawl underneath the German wire and jump into their front-line trench. Then you’d dispose of whoever was holding it, by bayonet if possible, without
making any noise, or by clubbing over the head with the butt. Once you’d established yourself in the trench you’d wend your way round each bay. A rifleman would go first, and he’d stop at the next bay.… The bomb-thrower would then throw a grenade towards the next bay, and when that exploded the rifleman who was leading would dash into the trench and dispose of any occupants.…
… But the raiding parties were rarely successful because by the time we got halfway across no man’s land and come up against the Jerry wire, the Germans had usually realised something was going on and opened up their machine-guns on that area. So we’d have to scuttle back to our own lines before we all got killed.
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Captain Dunn records the risks of a raid at Cuinchy on April 25, 1916, undertaken by two companies of the Royal Welch:
Another raid has been planned by the C.O.… Fifty-five of B and C Companies are to go for the re-entrants of a small salient on the left of the road.… Things went wrong from the start. “Uncle” [one of the officers] sent his contingent up tail first, and so late that they barely got out in time. Then most of them followed Sergeant Joe Williams, who made off half-right, shouting, “Lead on, B Company: lead on, B Company.” They ran into uncut wire, were enfiladed by a machine-gun and Joe was killed. That gun was to have been kept quiet by the two new trench-mortars, the Stokes, detailed to protect the right flank, but both broke down when they began to fire. The few of B who followed their officers got into the enemy’s trench but found it empty. C Company’s 2 officers and 25 men also got in, but all they could bring away was an anti-gas apparatus. Both parties were heavily strafed from behind … a second sergeant was
left behind dead. Another of the dead was Earnshaw.… All four officers were wounded.… It was agreed afterwards that the previous day’s and the morning’s wire-cutting had made him [the Germans] wise, and he was ready—in his second line.
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In his play
Journey’s End
, R. C. Sheriff, who had served as an officer in the East Surreys and had been wounded at Passchendaele in 1917, has the action pivot on the disastrous outcome of a raid insisted on by headquarters even though it was known that the enemy had been forewarned. The company’s commanding officer, Stanhope, tries to dissuade his colonel:
STANHOPE:
Meanwhile the Boche are sitting over there with a dozen machine-guns trained on that hole [in their wire]—waiting for our fellows to come.
COLONEL:
Well, I can’t disobey orders.
STANHOPE:
Why didn’t the trench-mortars blow a dozen holes in different places—so the Boche wouldn’t know which we were going to use?
COLONEL:
It took three hours to blow that one. How could they blow a dozen in the time? It’s no good worrying about it now. It’s too late.
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If going out was risky, so was coming back, when nervous sentries could be as lethal as the enemy. Captain H. Blair describes the reception of his returning patrol:
Nearing our wire, I changed places with the corporal, he was leading and I was in rear, for I wanted to warn the
listening-post, who might not be expecting us after nearly six hours absence. Not a minute after our change of places two shots were fired from the post. The corporal was hit in the chest and stomach; he died, poor fellow, soon after being got back to the trench. The sentry told me he had been warned that only two had gone on patrol; spotting a third man, he inferred that we were being stalked, and fired. It was a tragic mischance that two snap-shots at 40 yards, by moonlight, at a crawling figure took effect.
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The British poet-soldier Siegfried Sassoon, feeling “intensely alive,” led a trench raid that ended for him when he foolishly decided “to take a peep at the surrounding country. This was a mistake which ought to have put an end to my terrestrial adventures, for no sooner had I popped my silly head out of the sap than I felt a stupendous blow in the back between my shoulders … to my surprise I discovered I wasn’t dead.”
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Sassoon’s fellow Royal Welch officer friend and fellow poet Robert Graves felt that night operations, whether trench raiding or patrolling in no-man’s-land, at least meant that friendly fire was more or less unaimed, and if one was wounded, the chances of survival were increased because field hospitals would not be overwhelmed with the casualties from a full-scale battle. On the other hand, notes Graves: “Patrolling had its peculiar risks. If a German patrol found a wounded man, they were as likely as not to cut his throat. The bowie-knife was a favourite German patrol weapon because of its silence. (We inclined more to the ‘cosh,’ a loaded stick.) The most important information that a patrol could bring back was to what regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if it were impossible to get a wounded enemy back without danger to oneself, he had to be stripped of his badges. To do that quickly and silently, it might be necessary first to cut his throat or beat in his skull.”
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