WITH THE AUSTRALIAN MINERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17325, 27 May 1918, Page 7

WITH THE AUSTRALIAN MINERS

THE GREAT FIGHT UNDER HILL 60. HOW THEY OUTWITTED THE ENEMY. (From F. M. Cutlack, Assistant Official Correspondent with A.1.F.) BRITISH HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, February 7. When you look buck over our own side of the line from the positions we captured from the Germans last year, you wonder how on earth, with the Germans wo ever managed to carry on in the old trenches. At Viniv, Loos, Messines, and Ypres the outstanding German advantage of ground in the old positions is most striking. Consider Hill 60, for instanceone of the best instances. From there the Germans could look straight down on all tho area, around Zillebeke, and from near by he could see right into tile Lille gale of Ypres. For two years and a-half he must have watohed every movement wo made in that old salient. One wonders •what the Germans would have done there had the positions been reversed, upd if their infantry would have endured what the British infantry did for over 30 months. HILL 60 There is not a battalion in the British army which does not know that heap of mud, that vast mangled graveyard. It was the scene of some of the first bitter lighting of the trench wax; it saw some of tho first poison gas; it saw some of the earliest, if not actually the first, mining warfare. With tho opening of the spring campaign of 1915, one of tile first movements was a British attack on Hill 60 —just prior to tho launching of the first German gas attack on the other side' of the salient. We took the hill and lost it again, and thereafter each side set about mining to blow it up —we in order to displace the German garrison, they in order to counter our mining and to obstruct by mt-ns of craters what small view we had of their lines. The top of the hill has since been blown away into the air ovor and over again, and churned up by artillery bombardment for more than three years. It was a graveyard even in April, 1915, and the opening fighting here of that spring exposed the bodies of British Guardsmen, Frenchmen, Belgians, and Germans — men who had fallen in the skirmishes ■which drove the invaders back to Zandvoorde, and in tho frenzied Prussian attacks against the little Old Army in the first _ battle of Ypres. The early mineblowing and trench digging of the first spring uncovered lots of these graves, and our infantry closed them again in the parapets with chloride of lime, and here and there in the trench walls you could read a pencilled peg inscribed: "Here lies a bra ve British soldier," or "Here lies three Germans." And that was three years ago. THE RAILWAY CUTTING. Hill 60 itself was not strictly speaking a hill. It and the Caterpillar and the Dump were all mounds of spoil from the YpresComines railway cutting, where the railway runs through the rising ground of the Zandvoorde Ridge, and that ridge is part of the same little watershed which has Passchendaele at the northern end of it and Messines at the southern. Hill 60 was the large sprawling mound on the left side of the cutting; on the right side the Caterpillar was within the German lines and the rectangular Dump -was in ours. Hill 60 was about equidistant between the two. The railway cutting, about 20ft deep at the bridge (where our line crossed it), ran at right angles through both lines. THE GREAT MINES. Mining went on in the bowels of that old spoil dump from 1915 onwards. Up on top the development from the early jam-tin bomb to the Mills hand grenade has not been greater than the improvement imderground in mining implements and devices. _ Nothing stimulates scientific invention like war. The mole-men fought and manoeuvred against each other with constantly increasing skill—a.ll the left-hand side of the cutting was honeycombed with galleries, and some were even started on tha right. Then the Canadian Tunnellers arrived on the soene in 1916. and they drove in on a great system which aimed practically at blowing the ridge off the map, and the Germans with it. At the entrance of the cutting on our side, about 400 yards down from the hill, was the Larchwood— another famous name,—and from the Larchwood ran out the upper infantry tunnel system. Tho sap heads &nd outer galleries of this system met a German system, and here most of the early mine fighting ensued. _ From the Larchwood the Canadians tunnelled out on an intermediate level branching from their long Berlin Gallery which drove out straight from the Larchwood parallel with the railway cutting. Past the German front line and under the cutting tho Berlin ran down to the junction, and from the Junction they drove two main deep galleries—one to the A Mine beneath the German support line, and the other to the Caterpillar. They put 55,5001b of explosive in the one and 70.0001b of explosive in the other. The charging of these mines was completed early in August, 1916 Owing to the depth of these galleries and to the fact that contemporaneously other workings were being continued on the upper levels, the Germans seem not to have heard the Canadians during the preparing of these enormous mines, and the Caterpillar apparently remained unsuspected to the last point. 11l the galleries reaching out from the upper systems each side was constantly mining and counter-mining, feeling for and warding off 'the other manoevring in tight, laborious little passages, with wits sharpened, to a sixth sense, a mole sense, in. sense unknown to humans of the upper air. Sometimes it was a mine they blew, sometimes it was a camouflct—the game was to entrap the other in either. It should be here explained that a mine is an explosion which penetrates the upper crust and forms a crater, and a camouflet (known to the infantry as a camelfleet) is an entirely subterranean explosion which blows in galleries. The Canadians, nearly a year in advance' prepared two of tho great convulsions which ruptured a whole hillside and signalled the opening of our assault in the battle of Messines Observatorv Ridge. ARRIVAL OF THE AU&I'RALIANS. in November, 1916, an Australian 'i'unr.ellmg Company took over from tho Canadians, and somewhere about this timo the underground warfare at Hill 60 broke out utresh and with great fury. Probably in some raids—and there was one ruid in whicn they penetrated our lines nearly to the Larchwood and had our upper workings temporarily at their mercy. Tho enemy soon began working desperately on the * left side of the railway cutting. As has already been explained, the Caterpillar charge on tho right side he never once suspected. Day and riight he oould be heard picking and shovelling beyond the Berlin gallery and tho ramifications of tho infantry system. Most of tho ensuing months of mine lighting took place in the upper levels. Any doubts about his object soon disappeared. Ho tore about in the clay, digging and blowing camouflets, liko a wild beast on the Bcent. On our side the Australian Tunnellei's listened and dug and blew back and led him on with false diggings, often in hideous danger, but playing the game splendidly to the last, with the on© object of saving the big mines and their galleries from discovery. Thin nerve-racking fi"h't lasted for over six months. Tho incidents of it and. the denouement, must be told" in another article.