Beneath Flanders Fields: The Tunnellers' War 1914-18

by Peter Doyle, Johan Vandewalle, Peter Barton (I)

Below the battlefields of the Western Front, fifty thousand tunnellers, sewer workers, and miners were engaged in mine warfare in the Ypres Salient--a secret struggle beneath No Man's Land that combined daring engineering, technology, and science with calculated assassination. Few on the surface knew of the barbaric and claustraphobic work of the tunnellers, who not only suffered from mine explosions but regularly encountered hazardous gas and waterlogged ground. 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mine warfare in World War I through the words of the tunnellers themselves as well as plans, drawings, and previously unpublished archive photographs, many in colour.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 seen for the first time in photographs in Beneath Flanders Fields.

Genres: World War I, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb book. Very informative and relays great detail of the tunnels and work carried out by the Royal engineers.

[Dropbear123 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyment - 4/5 stars. Information - 5/5. Overall - 4.5/5

I really liked it. Very in-depth. Has a lot of info on all the aspects of tunnel warfare on the Western Front in WW1. Looks very well sourced. There are chapters on pre-WWI tunnel warfare like in medieval times or the American Civil War, prewar training for mining by military engineers and on things like the geology of Flanders. There is also a lot on the specifics of mining and countermining and on the specific dangers in the tunnels (encountering the enemy but also natural things like carbon monoxide). The book also has more chronological chapters covering that cover particular years and the big mining events. The German side is also discussed in pretty good detail, not just the British and Dominion miners. All through the book personal accounts are used pretty well, mostly British and Dominion but also some German.

There are a lot of pretty high quality photographs, diagrams of mines and dugouts should be made (some from the time, some made as examples) and also some geological cross sections.

I got the book for rather cheap so maybe I liked it more because of that. Online it seems to be a lot more expensive so I would only recomend it if you are specifically interested in WWI tunnel warfare, not as a random read.

[Edoardo Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's an old Pogues song, from the days when Shane McGowan had most of his teeth and much of his wits, called Down in the Ground where the Dead Men Go. The chorus runs, with Spider Stacey bashing an empty beer tray on his head for percussion, "I don't want to go down in the ground where the dead men go."

That was exactly where these men did go during the First World War, fighting a silent battle beneath the ground that remains virtually unknown to this day yet, eerily, remains still largely untouched beneath the fields of Flanders where above ground the scars of the war have disappeared beneath the plough.

This was a silent war, a dark war, a secret war, of tunnellers digging in absolute quiet under enemy lines to lay mines there, sending up volcanoes of earth and rock and bodies when they blew. For the troops, sheltering in trenches from the shells and artillery from above, to have the earth below erupt and swallow them was particularly demoralising.

Peter Barton and his co-authors do an extraordinary job of bringing this forgotten theatre of the War back to life, mingling first-hand reports and memoirs with broader history and recent archaeology, much of it their own. It was one theatre of the war where the British gained complete mastery, outengineering the Germans, and this underground dominance played a large part in the British victories of 1917.

A superb history of a largely unknown aspect of the war.

[Kristoffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book in the sources of a Wikipedia page that I searched for after reading an interesting news article about craters in Flanders. If you are reading this you likely know how these rabbit holes open.
I highly rate this book. But not for every reader. It’s somewhat like reading a textbook for a college course on subterranean warfare. I don’t mean this disparagingly. I simply mean that you can’t jump ahead to chapter IX and expect to find a page turner. You gotta start at the beginning and learn all the terms and stuff.
Very well researched. Amazing first person anecdotes just peppered all throughout. The drawings and maps are frickin’ great to pore over.
I didn’t order this book as someone with a huge interest in WWI or WWI Mine Warfare. I’m just a history buff that enjoys reading different takes on well covered subjects. This book fits the bill exceptionally.
-Not a quick read (In a good way).
-Fairly technical (In a marvelous way).
-Makes me glad my time in combat was above ground (before drones).

[Roger Barker]

An excellent insight into a period of history previously unknown in such depth the photographs are superb a thoroughly good read

[Bella]

Very interesting and informative but to be completely honest, I didn't read it cover to cover.