page_title: Tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers
section_title: Battle of the Somme
hierarchical_section_title: Tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers / Operations / Battle of the Somme
caption_attribution_description: Español: Voladura de la primera galería subterránea bajo el campo de batalla del Somme. 7:20 de la mañana, 1 de julio de 1916. The explosion of the mine beneath Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt on July 1, 1916. See Image:Hawthorn Ridge mine 1 July 1916 2.jpg for a later photograph in this sequence.
context_page_description: 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 stalemate situation in the early part of the war led to the deployment of tunnel warfare. After the first German Empire attacks on 21 December 1914, through shallow tunnels underneath no man's land and exploding ten mines under the trenches of the Indian Sirhind Brigade, the British began forming suitable units. 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 coal mining communities. Almost twice that number of "attached infantry" worked permanently alongside the trained miners acting as 'beasts of burden'.
  From the spring of 1917 the whole war became more mobile, with grand offensives at Arras, Messines and Passchendaele. There was no longer a place for a tactic that depended upon total stasis for its employment.
context_section_description: In the Somme sector of the Western Front, local but very fierce underground fighting had taken place in the winter of 1914 and spring of 1915 at La Boisselle, Fricourt, Bois Français and Carnoy. As part of the Allied preparations for the Battle of the Somme (1 July – 18 November 1916), the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers made two major contributions to the opening attack: Firstly, they placed a number of mines beneath the German front lines, laid deep in the chalk and overcharged to throw up high lips for screening and to give advantage to the attackers when (or if) they captured them. Secondly, they prepared a series of shallow Russian saps from the British front line into no man's land, which would be opened at Zero Hour and allow the infantry to attack the German positions from a comparatively short distance. Thirdly, members of the 183rd company also dug a tunnel for a Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, one of 4 installed in preparation for the battle.
  For the start of the battle on 1 July 1916, the Royal Engineers planned to fire a group of eight large and eleven small mines along the Somme front line. The most important of them were beneath Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt at Beaumont-Hamel, beneath a German field fortification known as Schwabenhöhe just south of La Boisselle and three in a sector named The Tambour near Fricourt. The Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt mine, which consisted of 40,000 pounds (18,000 kg) of explosives, was the first to be detonated. This led to the successful filming of the explosion by British cinematographer Geoffrey Malins, who was filming the 29th Division's attack on that day. Despite their colossal size, the largest of the mines fired on 1 July 1916 failed to help sufficiently neutralise the German defences. At La Boisselle, the ruined village was meant to fall in 20 minutes, but by the end of the first day of the battle, it had not been taken while the III Corps divisions had lost more than 11,000 casualties. At Mash Valley, the attackers lost 5,100 men before noon, and at Sausage Valley near the crater of the Lochnagar mine, there were over 6,000 casualties – the highest concentration on the entire battlefield. The III Corps' 34th Division suffered the worst losses of any unit that day.
caption: The explosion of the mine beneath the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, 1 July 1916. Photo by Ernest Brooks.
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