Damien Finlayson

When the Western Front stagnated into trench warfare, the opposing armies turned to a warfare method that went all the way back to Biblical times – tunneling under the enemy’s fortifications. The Allies and Germans recruited soldiers with tunneling and mining experience to dig toward the opposing lines, plant explosives, and blow craters into the trenchworks; this quickly lead to counter mining, with listeners outfitted with geophones trying to locate an enemy tunnel head so they could collapse it with an explosive charge of their own. The Germans had an advantage; when the realized the Western Front wasn’t going anywhere for a while they did a strategic retreat to what passed for high ground, which gave them a huge advantage in artillery observation posts. Thus a lot of the mining effort by the Allies was directed against these. Another use for mining was build approach tunnels. German artillery had registered on all the roads and pathways behind the Allied lines, and would shell (at night; nobody dared use them in the daytime) whenever they thought Allied units might be moving up to the front trenches. Thus the tunnelers built a lot of what were essentially pedestrian subways.

The Australian Government decided to contribute to their Commonwealth duty by providing their own Mining Corps, which departed with much fanfare, arrived in Europe, and discovered that although they may have known about mining in Australia they actually didn’t know very much about doing it under combat conditions. The Australian Mining Corps was broken up into individual units and spread around the front. However, one part of the Corps was a support company: The Australian Electrical and Mechanical Mining and Boring Company; the AEMM&BC quickly became dubbed the Alphabet Company.

The tunnels required lighting so the Alphabet Company strung rows of bulbs. They needed ventilation so the Alphabet Company installed fans. They filled with water (or more unpleasant substances; the tunnelers referred to the stuff that leaked downward out of decomposing bodies in No Man’s Land as “hero juice”) so the Alphabet Company installed pumps. All of these required power so the Alphabet Company dug “engine rooms” for electrical generators. The generators had to exhaust, of course, and the exhaust attracted attention from German artillery observers so the Alphabet Company routed the exhaust pipe well away from the actual engine room dugouts and often had to send people out at night to repair them.

And the tunnelers wanted to know how deep they had to dig to hit competent strata for tunneling – a thick green clay in some sectors and chalk in Flanders – and where they would encounter ground water. That led to the interesting position of “combat geologist”; Colonel Edgeworth David, Professor of Geology at the University of Sydney in civilian life, and Lieutenant Loftus Hills, formerly of the Tasmanian Geological Survey. David and Hills took to the job with enthusiasm, sometimes to the extent that their commanding officers had to remind them diplomatically that their job was supporting tunneling operations, not doing geological research. Colonel David, in particular, had to be withdrawn to the rear after he hurt himself when the lift he was using to explore the stratigraphy in a well broke and dropped him twenty meters. (Being a retired geologist myself I confess the most hazardous things that happened to me were a twisted ankle while doing field work and a bee sting during an environmental site assessment; I never had to deal with mustard gas or Minewerfer bombs launched by enemy geologists. Oh, and I got attacked by a flock of pigeons once).

The high point of the Allied mining operations was the Battle of Messines Ridge in 1917, in which a total of 454 metric tons of explosive were detonated in 19 mines, obliterating German positions. (There were supposed to be four more mines but they didn’t go off. One detonated in 1955 when a power pylon nearby was struck by lightning. The other three are still down there somewhere; one hopes the detonators and charges have decayed by now).

Author Damien Finlayson is described by his publisher as an “amateur historian”. This work is quite competent; Finlayson has explored all the unit histories and come up with maps of every campaign the Alphabet Corps was involved in, showing tunnel networks, the front lines of each side, and other significant points. Each chapter has a little bar chart at the beginning showing the duration of the Alphabet Company’s deployment in the area covered. There are human interest stories as well as the details of operations; Finlayson notes a number of the Australian soldiers became involved with local ladies, with illustrations to that effect from the company newsletter. Of course there’s tragedy as well; the entire First World War was a grand tragedy. The end material includes a roster of every soldier who served in the Alphabet Company, with numerous KIA, DOD, DOW, and DAI after the names (Killed in Action, Died of Disease, Died of Wounds, Died of Accidental Injuries). The aforementioned maps; photographs, and end notes. A intriguing account of an aspect of trench warfare that I’d never considered.… (meer)