Download or read book Battle Beneath the Trenches written by Robert K. Johns and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undermining the positions of the enemy is one of the most ancient activities. For almost 3000 years even before 1914, it was a popular siege-breaking technique. During the Great War, arguably the greatest siege the world had ever seen, it presented a conflict environment that perfectly favoured the skills of the military miner. During 1915, the Western Front was established as a static line that grew into a huge network of defence-in-depth earthworks. Siege conditions demanded siege tactics and as the ground was everywhere mineable, the Western Front was a prime candidate for underground warfare.??Royal Engineer tunnelling companies were specialist units of the Corps of Royal Engineers within the British Army, formed to dig attacking tunnels under enemy lines during the First World War. The Cornish Miners were one of these specialist units recruited from the tin mines of Cornwall.??In February 1915, eight Tunnelling Companies were created and operational in Flanders from March 1915. By mid-1916, the British Army had around 25,000 trained tunnellers, mostly volunteers taken from mining communities. This is their story.

Download or read book Battle Beneath the Trenches written by Robert Johns and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undermining the positions of the enemy is one of the most ancient activities. For almost 3000 years even before 1914, it was a popular siege-breaking technique. During the Great War, arguably the greatest siege the world had ever seen, it presented a conflict environment that perfectly favoured the skills of the military miner. During 1915, the Western Front was established as a static line that grew into a huge network of defence-in-depth earthworks. Siege conditions demanded siege tactics and as the ground was everywhere mineable, the Western Front was a prime candidate for underground warfare.Royal Engineer tunnelling companies were specialist units of the Corps of Royal Engineers within the British Army, formed to dig attacking tunnels under enemy lines during the First World War. The Cornish Miners were one of these specialist units recruited from the tin mines of Cornwall.In February 1915, eight Tunnelling Companies were created and operational in Flanders from March 1915. By mid-1916, the British Army had around 25,000 trained tunnellers, mostly volunteers taken from mining communities. This is their story.

Download or read book Beneath Flanders Fields written by Peter Barton and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2005 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The product of over twenty-five years of research, Beneath Flanders Fields illustrates the evolution of military mining, leading to its deployment in the greatest siege in military history - in the trenches of the Western Front." "In the words of the tunnellers themselves, and through previously unpublished photographs - many in colour - as well as contemporary plans and drawings, this book reveals how this most intense of battles was fought - and won. Few on the surface knew the horrific details of the tunnellers' work, yet this silent, claustrophobic conflict was a barbaric struggle that raged day and night for almost two and a half years, and one which generated mental and physical stresses often far beyond those suffered by the infantry in the trenches. On 7 June 1917 at Messines Ridge, the tension was broken with the opening of the most dramatic mine offensive in history."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Beneath Hill 60 written by Will Davies and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the Australian miners and soldiers who tunnelled under Hill 60 near Ypres and eventually broke through to create a new frontline. On 7 June 1917, 19 massive mines shattered the Messines ridge near Ypres. Ten thousand German soldiers died and the largest man-made explosion in history up until that time smashed open the German frontline. Two of these mines, at Hill 60 and the Caterpillar, were fired my men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, made up of miners and engineers rather than parade-ground soldiers. This is the untold, devastatingly brutal story of the battle underground during the First World War, where men suffocated in the blue-grey clay, drowned in the liquid chalk, choked on the poisonous air or died violently in the darkness and foetid air in hand-to-hand fighting. Written by Will Davies, bestselling author of Somme Mud and In The Footsteps of Private Lynch, Beneath Hill 60 tells the complete and inspiring story behind the major motion picture.

Download or read book Beneath Flanders Fields written by Peter Barton and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2005-07-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 presented for the first time in photographs in Beneath Flanders Fields.

Download or read book Birdsong written by Sebastian Faulks and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-21 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mesmerising story of love and war spanning three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the 1990s In this "overpowering and beautiful novel" (The New Yorker), the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land. Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient, crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love.

Download or read book Back to the Front written by Stephen O'Shea and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War I is beyond the memory of almost everyone alive today. Yet it has left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century as it has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Western Front-the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to the border of France and Switzerland, a narrow swath of land in which so many million lives were lost. For journalist Stephen O'Shea, the legacy of the Great War is personal (both his grandfathers fought on the front lines) and cultural. Stunned by viewing the "immense wound" still visible on the battlefield of the Somme, and feeling that "history is too important to be left to the professionals," he set out to walk the entire 450 miles through no-man's-land to discover for himself and for his generation the meaning of the war. Back to the Front is a remarkable combination of vivid history and opinionated travel writing. As his walk progresses, O'Shea recreates the shocking battles of the Western Front, many now legendary-Passchendaele, the Somme, the Argonne, Verdun-and offers an impassioned perspective on the war, the state of the land, and the cultivation of memory. His consummate skill with words and details brings alive the players, famous and faceless, on that horrific stage, and makes us aware of why the Great War, indeed history itself, still matters. An evocative fusion of past and present, Back to the Front will resonate, for all who read it, as few other books on war ever have.

Download or read book War Beneath the Sea written by Peter Padfield and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-05-02 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for War Beneath the Sea "I am truly filled with awe and admiration...fascinating and a great contribution to the entire lore of submarines.... I wish I had written the book." ?Capt. Edward L. Beach, USN (Ret.) author of Run Silent, Run Deep "Peter Padfield is the best British naval historian of his generation now working. [His] book...will now become the standard work on the subject." ?Daily Telegraph (London) "Peter Padfield has produced by far the best and most complete critical history of the submarine operations of all the combatants in the Second World War, at the same time providing vivid narrative accounts of particular actions and events." ?Lloyd?s List (London) "An excellent account of submarine warfare in 1939?45... [it] recreates the tribulations and horrors of that especially brutal form of warfare within a sturdily analytical and often critical framework." ?The Economist "[A] marvelously complete and detailed study of World War II submarine warfare...an interesting, serious, and timely book." ?Houston Chronicle "A brilliant submarine warfare study." ?Military Review

Download or read book Beneath the Killing Fields written by Matthew Leonard and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2017-02-19 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the Killing Fields of the Western Front still lies a hidden landscape of industrialised conflict virtually untouched since 1918. This subterranean world is an ambiguous environment filled with material culture that that objectifies the scope and depth of human interaction with the diverse conflict landscapes of modern war. Covering the military reasoning for taking the war underground, as well as exploring the way that human beings interacted with these extraordinary alien environments, this book provides a more all-encompassing overview of the Western Front. The underground war was intrinsic to trench warfare and involved far more than simply trying to destroy the enemys trenches from below. It also served as a home to thousands of men, protecting them from the metallic landscapes of the surface. With the aid of cutting edge fieldwork conducted by the author in these subterranean locales, this book combines military history, archaeology and anthropology together with primary data and unique imagery of British, French, German and American underground defences in order to explore the realities of subterranean warfare on the Western Front, and the effects on the human body and mind that living and fighting underground inevitably entailed.

Download or read book Underground Warfare in World War I written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes accounts of mining by soldiers on both sides *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "It was a pretty gloomy business. We started sinking this shaft and it filled with water, so we pumped it out with hand pumps-lift and force. We got down about 10 feet or so. It was heartbreaking-I hated it. But I had to keep my men going. The Boche [Germans] saved us. We were making a lot of noise with spiling [timbering the tunnels]. The Boche opposite us were Saxons, rather friendly, and they put up a notice on a blackboard 'No good your mining. We've tried. It can't be done.' The notice was in English. I reported this to my OC and it went up to HQ and they stopped the mine." - Major General F. Gordon Hyland World War I, also known in its time as the "Great War" or the "War to End all Wars," was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite. Tens of millions of artillery shells and untold hundreds of millions of rifle and machine gun bullets were fired in a conflict that demonstrated man's capacity to kill each other on a heretofore unprecedented scale, and as always, such a war brought about technological innovation at a rate that made the boom of the Industrial Revolution seem stagnant. World War I was the first truly industrial war, and it created a paradigm which reached its zenith with World War II and towards which virtually all equipment, innovation and training were dedicated throughout the Cold War and the remainder of the 20th century. To this day, modern warfare remains synonymous with tanks and mass infantry battles, although a confrontation of this nature has not occurred (except briefly during Operation Desert Storm) since World War II. The enduring image of World War I is of men stuck in muddy trenches, and of vast armies deadlocked in a fight neither could win. It was a war of barbed wire, poison gas, and horrific losses as officers led their troops on mass charges across No Man's Land and into a hail of bullets. While these impressions are all too true, they hide the fact that trench warfare was dynamic and constantly evolving throughout the war as all armies struggled to find a way to break through the opposing lines. Most books and documentaries about the war focus on the carnage of the trenches, depicting the ceaseless bombardment and sniping, and the assaults and counterattacks that took millions of lives. This was the experience of most frontline soldiers during that great conflict, but it was not the only experience. There was another war going on beneath the trenches, a war of tunnels and mines fought by men who didn't see sunlight for days at a time and who lived in constant fear of cave-ins and enemy detection. These men, who had mostly been miners in civilian life, lived a twilight existence, working long hours in silence and near darkness while great battles raged overhead. They suffered from fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that they could be killed at any time by an unseen enemy. Despite this, they persevered, and the mines they laid under enemy trench systems turned the tide of at least one major battle. Underground Warfare in World War I: The History and Legacy of the Fighting Beneath and Between the Trenches examines one of the most forgotten aspects of the fighting on the ground during the Great War. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about World War I's underground warfare like never before.

Download or read book Eye Deep in Hell written by John Ellis and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1989-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed reconstruction of life and death in the trenches of World War I, describing the construction and physical and spiritual environment of the trenches and the soldiers' daily routine.

Download or read book A Light Beyond the Trenches written by Alan Hlad and published by A John Scognamiglio Book. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A German Red Cross nurse joins the world's first guide dog training school for the blind and begins a quest to show a Jewish pianist who was blinded on the battlefield that life is worth living"--

Download or read book Digging the Trenches written by Andrew Robertshaw and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, illustrated survey of the latest in battlefield archaeology reveals “intimate insight into the realities of life” during WWI (Current Archaeology). Modern methods of archaeological, historical, and forensic research have transformed our understanding of the Great War. In Digging the Trenches, battlefield archaeologists Andrew Robertshaw and David Kenyon introduce the reader to this exciting new field and explore many of the remarkable projects that have been undertaken. Robertshaw and Kenyon show how archaeology can be used to reveal the positions of trenches, dugouts and other battlefield features, as well as what life on the Western Front was really like. They also show how individual soldiers are coming into focus as forensic investigation is so highly developed that individuals can be identified and their fates discovered. “An excellent introduction to the subject…Digging the Trenches is essential reading.”—Gary Sheffield, Military Illustrated “What a splendid book this is.”—Neil Faulkner, Current Archaeology

Download or read book A Yankee in the Trenches written by Robert Derby Holmes and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-09-04 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "A Yankee in the Trenches" by Robert Derby Holmes. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book Trench Fighting Classic Reprint written by UNKNOWN. AUTHOR and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Trench Fighting Again, in the Russo - Japanese War, trenches were used, and in this war barbed-wire entangle ments played a considerable part. To come down to the present day, ' all soldiers Of all countries are taught that the Object Of a soldier in a battle is to press home in the quickest possible way to the final assault; that is, to get at close grips with the enemy and despatch him with the bayonet. The Official handbook Of one of our noted mili tary Powers in 1913 described this assault as follows: A soldier Should only dig in (entrench) About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Download or read book Blood in the Trenches written by A. Radclyffe Dugmore and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by Captain A. Radclyffe Dugmore of the King's Own Light Infantry, this personal memoir provides an excellent account of the Great War up to the Battle of the Somme. A wide ranging and perceptive relation of events, Radclyffe Dugmore's pedigree as a professional writer shines through. In 1914, Radclyffe Dugmore travelled to Belgium as a civilian observer where he was wounded before spending a brief time in German captivity. These experiences gained Radclyffe Dugmore a highly unusual viewpoint for the opening battles of the war, that of a civilian, and later as a participant on the?front lines of the Somme.??Originally published under the title When The Somme Ran Red in 1918, Radclyffe Dugmore's memoir has sadly been long out of print. Yet what the author modestly described as 'Being a very egotistical account of my own personal experiences and observations from the early days of the war in Belgium to the Great Battle of the Somme in July, 1916' proves to be anything but that, consisting of a fascinating and rare account, sympathetically dedicated to the memory of the officers and men of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry who fell in the Battle of the Somme.??This new re-print of Radclyffe Dugmore's classic volume is a worthy addition to the primary source literature of the Great War, and casts new light on the experiences of the brave men who saw the terror of the Battle of the Somme first hand.

Download or read book A World Undone written by G. J. Meyer and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2007-05-29 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Drawing on exhaustive research, this intimate account details how World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world “Thundering, magnificent . . . [A World Undone] is a book of true greatness that prompts moments of sheer joy and pleasure. . . . It will earn generations of admirers.”—The Washington Times On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with England as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in the First World War: four long years of slaughter, physical and moral exhaustion, and the near collapse of a civilization that until 1914 had dominated the globe. Praise for A World Undone “Meyer’s sketches of the British Cabinet, the Russian Empire, the aging Austro-Hungarian Empire . . . are lifelike and plausible. His account of the tragic folly of Gallipoli is masterful. . . . [A World Undone] has an instructive value that can scarcely be measured”—Los Angeles Times “An original and very readable account of one of the most significant and often misunderstood events of the last century.”—Steve Gillon, resident historian, The History Channel