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Trench warfare
World war 1 is known for it's brutal trench warfare in which opposing forces were dug in in front of each other in trench lines due to lack of mobility(Tanks, vehicles) with no man's land in between. Trenches were protected with barbed wires from enemy assault and no mans land was fully exposed to artillery fire from both sides.
The defender held the advantage in this form of warfare. Attacks even if successful suffered severe casualties
The result of trench warfare was stalemate. The defender usually held his position while attacker could not make a breach in the defenses in most of the cases. Attacks were made with soldiers charging through no man's land towards enemy trenches only to be slaughtered with machine gun and artillery fire.
Breaking the stalemate (Use of tunnel warfare)
Due to lack of tanks( which only came into action in 1917) and air power, some innovative response to the attacker's problem was required. That innovative response was tunnel warfare.
This also came to be known as military mining.
Conducting tunnel warfare:
Tunnel warfare meant to dig tunnels across no man's land and place mines or explosives beneath the enemy trenches and detonate them which resulted in that particular section of trench being blown up. Take advantage of the confusion and casualties among enemy ranks and charge through no man's land and hope for the best.
Diagram explaining Tunnel warfare
Sometimes, it could take as long as a year(or even more) to dig a tunnel and place a mine.
First use of tunnel warfare in WW1
Germans started the use of tunnel warfare first.
On 21 December 1914, at Givenchy-lès-la Bassée the Germans secretly dug shallow tunnels across No Man’s Land and exploded ten small but deadly mines( Camouflets) beneath the primitive trenches of the Indian Sirhind Brigade. As the news spread up and down the line, alarm increased: how could this new and unexpected threat be countered? It couldn’t – adequately – for at that time the British had no military mining corps. Further German blows in the new year spurred the British to react with uncharacteristic alacrity.
The allies responded by forming their own tunneling companies by March 1915 and deployed them at Flanders.By the close of that year mine warfare was more or less continuous wherever opposing trench lines lay within mutual striking distance. It had already become a 24- hour a day, 365-day a year operation.
Australian tunnellers in Ypres sector
By mid-1916 the British had around 25,000 trained tunnellers. Almost twice that number of ‘attached infantry’ worked permanently alongside them acting as beasts of burden, fetching and carrying the many essential elements of mining paraphernalia, pumping air and water and removing spoil – the earth produced by the digging of the tunnels.
Group photo of British tunnellers
The miners were practically civilians with little to no military training.
Shafts
The standard and most simple shafts were built entirely in timber and conformed to centuries-old designs. Although adequate in firm and dry conditions, the varying geological nature of the Flanders battlefields demanded new techniques to cope with the serious problem of bad ground, particularly the layer of quicksand known as the Kemmel Sands, an integral component of the geological make up of all the ridges around Ieper. For the Germans, occupying almost all the most advantageous positions on the ridge tops, this stratum was a serious headache. Tunnelling in the dry strata above the Kemmel Sands was simple, swift and easy, but sinking a shaft through the schwimmsands, as they were known (the British called them running sands), to reach the dry and firm clay geology beneath, was found to be unfeasible: the constantly shifting ground made timber structures almost impossible both to stabilise and waterproof. The sands, which were trapped between the dry stratum above and impervious clay beneath, were also under great geophysical pressure, and often ‘fountained’ when pierced. Believing that the British faced the same insoluble engineering problem, the Pioniere made few efforts to break through the schwimmsands until the spring of 1916.
Illustration of steel ‘tubbed’ shaft construction. Drawn by Andy Gammon
What the Germans had failed to realise was that their enemy had conquered the geology by using cylindrical steel shafts known as ‘tubbing’. Tubbing arrived in sections which were bolted together to form a watertight tube. These were sunk through the wet sands (see illustration above) to the dry clay beneath either by the gravitational action of their own weight, or by jacks. Once the steel had reached the dry clay it was again safe to continue the work in timber. The system was quick, simple, strong, stable and waterproof – and allowed the British to delve deep into the Flanders clay in many places where their enemy believed it to be impossible. Critically, the British first used steel shafts as early as May 1915 – almost a full year before the Pioniere. By the spring of 1916 when the Germans were forced to sink watertight shafts in steel (and concrete) because the British had started blowing deep mines, the subterranean war was effectively lost to them. In this ‘year of German ignorance’ the Tunnellers had been able to secretly drive many deep galleries and plant the greatest mines in the history of warfare.
A steel ‘tubbed’ shaft at Lancashire farm near Ypres
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