Access to the Hawthorn Crater is obtained from the Auchonvillers — Beaumont-Hamel road. The path rises very steeply from the side of the road and is confined within a very narrow set of barbed wire fences. This path can be quite treacherous, especially when the ground is wet, and it is quite likely that you will slip, and the barbed wire may well do its worst. It is worth emphasising the point, therefore, that you ensure that your tetanus jab is up to date! When one reaches the end of the path, there is further fencing around the perimeter of the crater, and you have to duck and weave to make progress. The physical contortions involved are not helped by the overhanging branches and assorted thickets waiting to spring out at you. There is a path of sorts down into the crater, but it is full of undergrowth and trees and also — in my experience — remnants of shells and mortar bombs. You enter the crater very much at your own risk. However the journey up the hill is worthwhile, if only to get a better idea of the observation the Germans had over the British lines, and in particular Jacob’s Ladder and the Sunken Road. An altogether more accessible viewing point is Hawthorn Ridge Cemetery No 1; this point is also handily close to the site of the shaft for the mine.
The mine crater that is now such a prominent feature of Hawthorn Ridge because of the shrubbery and trees that have grown around and in it played a vital part in the disastrous British attack in this sector of the 29th Division attack on July 1st. But before discussing the history of this crater it is worth looking briefly at the role that mine warfare played in the war in the British Army up to this date.
A view of the Hawthorn Crater to-day from the rear of the Sunken Road.
When the war settled down after the initial frenetic rushes, attacks and counter-attacks of 1914, both sides found themselves occupying fortified earthworks, with varying degrees of geographical domination. To help to solve local tactical problems both sides used mines to gain some advantage over the other. Some of the most brutal fighting of the war took place in the struggle to dominate the crater that was created — and indeed often in the tunnels themselves as one side or the other broke into an enemy’s workings.
The British, as in so many aspects of mass warfare, were rather slower than the Germans and the French in organising specialist Tunnelling Companies, despite the fact that the huge British mining industry with both its engineering and worker expertise should have placed them on at least an equal footing with these powers. However, the companies came into existence in February 1915 when a series of reverses caused by German superiority in this particular art of warfare made their need an overwhelming necessity. The first year or so of these tunnelling companies saw them in action in the Ypres sector (where the names of The Bluff, Hill 60 and St Eloi still mean so much in this regard), in the area north of La Bassee and from the spring of 1916 in the Souchez and Vimy Ridge part of the Front.
Most of the work in this early period was of a limited, and generally defensive nature — to foil German mining by blowing camouflets. These limited charges were designed to destroy enemy galleries, or pre-empt them from blowing their own mine. Other charges were designed to provide very limited improvements to our front line positions and on rare occasions to support trench raids. The Somme gave the Tunnellers their first real chance to assist in a major offensive action.
They had a threefold purpose. Firstly the intention was to harry German mining operations and reduce them to the barest minimum. Secondly they were to prepare a number of British mines to assist the attack, generally to remove formidable German defensive positions — usually with good fields of observation, generally redoubts (miniature earthwork fortresses) and often in a position to dictate the battleground over a considerable distance. Thirdly they were to construct Russian Saps. Russian Saps were widely used during the Crimean War, hence their name. They were shallow tunnels — often only a foot or so underground — carved out towards the enemy line. They were then opened up at the vital moment of the assault, thus providing new communication trenches as close to the German line as was practicable. These saps were especially relevant on the Somme because the distance between the two sides, No Man’s Land, was often so wide — five hundred yards was not uncommon. Some of these saps had branches and complete mortar positions pre-positioned in them.
The horrors of working underground in the nerve-wracking business of mine warfare.
The Hawthorn Mine was designed to remove a German redoubt that protruded from the German line, and which provided them with dominating views over much of the north side of the 29th Division sector. 252 Tunnelling Company was responsible for the VIII Corps Front that stretched from Hebuterne to just above Hamel, north of the Ancre. By April they had nineteen hundred attached infantry, often making use of the mining skills available in the Pals Battalions coming into the sector, such as the Barnsley Pals. On Hawthorn Ridge there were already two defensive mines, but now the need to destroy the Hawthorn Redoubt made it necessary to prepare an offensive mine, dug from a shaft near Pilk Street, and known as H.3 (the defensive mines were H.1 and H.2). It was seventy five feet deep, and headed almost directly for the German strongpoint some three hundred metres away. The Tunnellers, a history of the Tunnelling Companies, goes on to describe their efforts, “By the end of May the gallery had been driven out over nine hundred feet, and was giving considerable trouble on account of the hardness of the chalk and the large amount of flints in the face. From this point (ie only one hundred and fifty feet from the enemy) it was essential that the work should proceed silently and, in order to facilitate this, the face was drenched with water to soften it, and the chalk and flint prised out with a bayonet, the lumps being caught by the hand to prevent them falling on to the floor with a thud, and so disclosing our position. In due course the drive reached its objective, and a chamber was constructed; into this was loaded a charge of 40,600 pounds of ammonal (it would take six three ton lorries to carry that now); all was in readiness for Zero.”
See Map 6
The charge was a considerable one; it was what is termed an ‘overcharged’ mine; that is, more explosive than was necessary to blow the mine was put in to create a greater output of earth, and thus a bigger crater lip. In this case the lip was eighteen feet above the old ground level, and thereby created a new breastwork for the infantry and protected them from enfilading (fire from the side) fire.
The question that exercised the minds of VIII Corps Headquarters was the timing of the detonation of the mine. Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston (nicknamed Hunter-Bunter) wanted to fire it some four hours before zero, thereby enabling the crater to be captured and consolidated before the general attack, but also to allow initial German alarm to calm down before the main assault at 7.30 am. This suggestion was vetoed by GHQ. The Inspector of Mines argued against the plan on the basis that the British had not yet ‘made a good show’ at occupying a crater; the Germans on the other hand were experts in the art. Eventually a compromise was reached that the mine should be fired ten minutes before the attack, which was transparently of little value to anyone, except perhaps to some on the 29th Division staff, who felt that if the mine was fired at the time of the attack that the advancing infantry might be hit by descending debris — a fear which was relatively groundless, as previous experience on other fronts had shown. Not only did the mine give a clear warning to the Germans, but because of the associated rush to occupy the crater by the British, the Heavy Artillery was ordered to lift off the front line on the whole of the 29th Division front at that time — as well as a good deal of the 18 pounder field artillery. Thus the Germans coming out of their dugouts were able to occupy their trenches with relative impunity.
The Hawthorn Redoubt mine erupts, 7.20 am 1 July, 1916.
The blast destroyed the redoubt, blew up several sections of German infantry, and stove in several large dugouts, entombing a number of occupants. But it was a tactically catastrophic event on this sector’s front, and the consequences to the men attacking in the Sunken Road and further south towards the edge of Y Ravine may be readily appreciated by standing on the perimeter of the crater. The Germans were already undoubtedly aware of the imminence of the British attack — the obvious lanes (and these were too few and led to bunching) in the British wire was as clear a signal as any. What it did was also to allow them almost unhindered occupation of their main trenches without the fear of artillery fire — and for several minutes before the actual attack proper. The 2/Royal Fusiliers and 16/Middlesex, the battalions attacking this particular area, were to suffer 561 and 549 casualties respectively; there would have been about 800 of them involved in each battalion in the attack.
The German Regiment on Hawthorn Ridge gives this account of the early moments of the attack. “During the intense bombardment there was a teriffic explosion which for the moment completely drowned the thunder of the artillery. A great cloud of smoke rose up from the trenches of No. 9 Company, followed by a tremendous shower of stones, which seemed to fall from the sky over all our position. More than three sections of No. 9 Company were blown into the air, and the neighbouring dugouts were broken in and blocked. The ground all round was white with the debris of chalk as if it had been snowing, and a gigantic crater, over fifty yards in diameter and some sixty feet deep gaped like an open wound in the side of the hill. This explosion was the signal for the infantry attack, and everybody got ready and stood on the lower steps of the dugouts, and we rushed up the steps and out into the crater positions. Ahead of us wave after wave of British troops were crawling out of their trenches and coming forward towards us at a walk, their bayonets glistening in the sun.”
John Masefield wrote a memorable account of a progress along the Somme battlefront, The Old Front Line, in 1917. At the end of March 1917 he wrote of the crater, “…we saw the immense and awful crater of Beaumont, which is one hundred yards long, twenty deep and fifty across, but though it is very terrible, it is less imposing than the Boiselle one, because it is not one vast white hole, but streaky, red and white, and so looks like a butcher’s shop instead of an immense white sepulchre.”
The front at Beaumont Hamel remained stable until the death throes of the Battle of the Somme in November 1916. Then the crater was to have the notable distinction of being fired again. The decision to reopen existing workings was not greeted with enormous enthusiasm, as the Germans should have been well aware of what had gone on; however, the old H.3 Gallery was reopened, and was made usable for some distance until the old tunnel was found to be crushed because of the July 1st explosion. A branch was made and a chamber excavated which used 30,000 pounds of explosive. A number of new saps were constructed from trenches on both sides of the Beaumont Road — from North, Hunter and South Streets and Beaumont.
‘… the immense and awful crater of Beaumont…’ Hawthorn Crater in early 1917.
The Germans were not idle — they fired camouflets, and two soldiers who went into the gallery to investigate, without the benefit of their ‘Proto’ apparatus (a primitive oxygen mask and cylinder system) were killed by gas poisoning. The British had even more grandiose plans; a great new tunnel was projected, nicknamed the Great Eastern Tunnel, which would go at depth of one hundred and eighty feet under Beaumont Hamel itself, with the shaft at White City. The time factor (it was thought that it would take six months to construct it) put paid to that idea. Besides firing camouflets, the Germans also kept up a heavy barrage, but despite this, and the occasional entombment of soldiers under ground when entrances got blown in (such as occurred in First Avenue Tunnel, all eventually rescued), the mines and saps were maintained.
The second firing of the Hawthorn Mine succeeded in breaking into the old crater, destroying most of its occupants, and the debris was such that it caused considerable damage to the neighbouring German trenches and dugouts. This second firing was to be the prelude to an altogther happier result for British arms which will be considered later in this book. That this is a double crater is just about perceptible when one gets to the bottom of today’s silent but eloquent reminder of the efforts of the Tunnelling Companies.
(Over the page) British troops in a ditch which served as a communication trench during the preliminary bombardment prior to the attack on Beaumont Hamel, 1 July 1916.