Profs and Pints Online presents: “World War Beneath the Earth,” a deep exploration of World War I’s subterranean conflicts, with Simon Jones, historian and battlefield guide, lecturer at Liverpool and Leicester Universities, and author of Underground Warfare, 1914–1918.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Soldiers often resorted to a troglodyte existence to survive the hellish shellfire and poison-gas attacks of World War One. The underground tunnels and dugouts they constructed housed barracks, headquarters, telephone exchanges, and even hospitals. They became both a target and means of attack.

Learn about the astonishing bravery and ingenuity that went into such subterranean warfare from Simon Jones, a British scholar who has extensively studied World War One’s battlefields and in December gave an excellent Profs and Pints talk on the Christmas truce of 1914.

Jones will describe how during the 1916 Battle of the Somme, German defenders survived a week-long bombardment by sheltering in deep dugouts, and then emerged to inflict on the British Army the worse losses it has ever suffered in a single day. The Allies in turn devised tactics to trap the Germans underground, capture complete tunnel systems, and transform such systems into death-traps.

Both sides in the war tried to break its stalemate by using the ancient methods of siege warfare and mining under no man's land to plant explosives beneath their opponents’ positions. Attacks were preceded by the detonation of massive mines, with infantry racing to capture the enormous craters that such blasts produced. The skills of miners and mining engineers who had harnessed the latest technology reached a destructive crescendo in 1917 at Messines, when the allies simultaneously detonated beneath the German lines nineteen mines totaling a million pounds of explosives.

You’ll be amazed by what has been unearthed by historians’ research on the war below.

Profs & Pints Online: World War Beneath the Earth