Crumps and Camouflets

CRUMPS AND CAMOUFLETS: Australian Tunnelling Companies on the Western Front

Damien Finlayson

Big Sky Publishing, 2010, 480pp

Many readers will be familiar with the exploits of Australia’s ‘tunnel rats’ in Vietnam, members of the Royal Australian Engineers who explored tunnel complexes found by the 1st Australian Task Force. Fifty years earlier another band of Australian engineers fought their underground war on the Western Front.  Damien Finlayson tells the story of that earlier band. One of his relatives, 2nd Lieutenant Robert Finlayson, was killed in 1917 while serving with the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company.

Finlayson starts with a discussion of the place of mining in the First World War, the raising of the Australian Mining Corps in 1915, and its disbandment and separation into three tunnelling companies in 1916. He then recounts the exploits of those companies and the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Mining and Boring Company, nicknamed the Alphabet Company. Some readers might be familiar with part of the story, told in the recent film Beneath Hill 60.

Unlike the tunnel rats of Vietnam, the Western Front tunnellers did not usually explore enemy tunnels (though Finlayson records some daring exploits in German tunnels). Rather, they excavated tunnels, often for offensive mines, but also for defensive purposes.

Offensive mining on the Western Front is mentioned in the Australian Official Histories, but these do not give a feel for the extent of these operations, well beyond the Messines Ridge area, which Finlayson covers in detail. Also, the Official Histories do not say much about defensive mining operations or the employment of tunnelling companies to construct tunnels (to give protected access to forward trenches) and general-purpose dugouts for accommodation, headquarters, or medical facilities.

Finlayson’s account covers the Messines Ridge mines, mostly constructed by Canadian and British tunnellers, some of which were defended by Australians until the attack commenced. Those who visit the Western Front might be aware that not all of the Messines mines were detonated in 1917. Finlayson records that five remain below Belgian soil, packed with around 70,000 kilograms of high explosive.  In 1955 lightning detonated a mine in the area. He also covers the actions of Australian tunnellers on the Belgian coast, an area little mentioned in Australian accounts of the First World War.

The personal level is covered as well – some kind of prize for devotion to duty should surely go to the digger on listening watch in a defensive tunnel who was trapped by the explosion of a German defensive mine, but continued to maintain his watch logbook while waiting for rescue!

In the last months of the war, and after it ended, the tunnellers mainly cleared German mines and booby traps. While engaged in these tasks in December 1918, a small group of armed Australian tunnellers took the opportunity to march in formation across the unguarded German border, then discreetly withdraw before attracting the attention of higher authority.

There are some minor production issues.  Some maps are printed at far too small a scale.  The automatic spellchecker apparently confused a mine entrance – an adit – with an audit.  In an apparent Freudian slip, Lieutenant General Haking, under whose command the 5th Australian Division fought at Fromelles, is occasionally rendered as ‘Hacking’.  Otherwise the production standard is excellent.

In 1942, Lieutenant General Morshead chose a new colour patch for the 9th Australian Division, shaped as a ‘T’ to commemorate the division’s service in Tobruk. Morshead served on the Western Front. Did he realise that the tunnelling companies had used this shape, and that the colour patch of the 9th Division engineers was a squat version of the Mining Corps patch, with the grey background of the 2nd AIF?

JOHN DONOVAN