page_title: Hill 60 (Ypres)
section_title: June: Battle of Messines
hierarchical_section_title: Hill 60 (Ypres) / World War I / 1917 / June: Battle of Messines
caption_attribution_description: English: Hill 60, Ypres, Belgium: battlefield memorial park with crater of the British deep mine fired at Hill 60 on 7 June 1917
context_page_description: Hill 60 is a World War I battlefield memorial site and park in the Zwarteleen area of Zillebeke south of Ypres, Belgium. It is located about 4.6 kilometres from the centre of Ypres and directly on the railway line to Comines. Before World War I the hill was known locally as Côte des Amants. The site comprises two areas of raised land separated by the railway line; the northern area was known by soldiers as Hill 60 while the southern part was known as The Caterpillar.
context_section_description: After the Battle of Hill 60 (April–May 1915), Tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers (RE) took up mining operations under the hill and the neighbouring ground on a much more ambitious scale. Deep mining under the German galleries beneath Hill 60 began in late August 1915, with the 175th Tunnelling Company, which began a gallery 220 yards (200 m) behind the British front line and passed 90 feet (27 m) beneath the German positions. The British underground works consisted of an access gallery (Berlin Tunnel) leading to two mine chambers, Hill 60 A (beneath Hill 60) and Hill 60 B (beneath The Caterpillar), to be loaded with explosives and detonated at the appointed time. The 3rd Canadian Tunnelling Company took over in April 1916 and completed the galleries, the Hill 60 mine being charged with explosives in July 1916 and the branch gallery under The Caterpillar in October.
  By October 1916, the mine under Hill 60 held 53,300 pounds (24,200 kg) of explosives and that under The Caterpillar 70,000 pounds (32,000 kg), despite water-logging and the demolition by a camouflet of 200 feet (61 m) of a German gallery above the British diggings, which endangered the British deep galleries. The 1st Australian Tunnelling Company took over in November 1916 and maintained the mines beneath Hill 60 and The Caterpillar over the winter and months of underground fighting until June 1917, when they were fired along with the rest of the mines under Messines Ridge at the beginning of the Battle of Messines (7–14 June 1917). When the mines were detonated at 3:10 a.m. on 7 June 1917, 990,000 pounds (450,000 kg) of explosives went off under the German positions, demolishing a large part of Hill 60 and killing c. 10,000 German soldiers between Ypres and Ploegsteert.
  Suddenly at dawn, as a signal for all of our guns to open fire, there rose out of the dark ridge of Messines and 'Whitesheet' and that ill-famed Hill 60, enormous volumes of scarlet flame [...] throwing up high towers of earth and smoke all lighted by the flame, spilling over into fountains of fierce colour, so that many of our soldiers waiting for the assault were thrown to the ground. The German troops were stunned, dazed and horror-stricken if there  [sic] were not killed outright. Many of them lay dead in the great craters opened by the mines.
  — Philip Gibbs
  The Battle of Messines was conducted by the British Second Army (General Herbert Plumer) and forced the German army to move reserves to Flanders from the Arras and Aisne fronts, which relieved pressure on the French. The objective of the attack was to capture the German defences on the ridge, which ran from Ploegsteert Wood in the south through Messines and Wytschaete to Mount Sorrel and deprive the 4th Army of the high ground south of Ypres. The ridge commanded the British defences and back areas further north, from which the British intended to conduct the "Northern Operation", an advance to Passchendaele Ridge, then capture the Belgian coast up to the Dutch frontier.
caption: Crater of the Hill 60 mine detonated as part of the Mines in the 1917 Battle of Messines
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