Qualla: Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917)

Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917): Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Staff writers, Public domain. At ten past three on the morning of 7 June 1917, the British artillery went quiet. The bombardment that had hammered Messines Ridge for days simply stopped, and in the silence that followed, men in the British trenches heard a nightingale. Then the world below the German front line came apart. Nineteen mines, packed and tamped over two years by British, Canadian and Australian tunnellers, fired within the space of twenty seconds along a fourteen-kilometre arc south of Ypres. The blast was heard in London. The shock wave registered as an earthquake at the Lille University geology department, sixty kilometres away. Beneath the soft Flanders clay, in the moment before the fuses reached their charges, thousands of young German soldiers were standing their watch.

Image: Staff writers | Public domain

Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917): Two Years in the Blue Clay

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ViennaUK, CC BY-SA 4.0. The scheme began on a piece of paper in September 1915. Brigadier George Fowke, the British Expeditionary Force's engineer-in-chief, proposed to dig under the Messines roads and detonate the ridge from below, an idea inspired by the civilian tunnelling engineer John Norton-Griffi...

Image: ViennaUK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917): The Boys at Their Watch

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wernervc, CC BY-SA 4.0. Above the chambers, the men of the German XIX (2nd Royal Saxon) Corps held a front-line system that their own officers had begun to suspect was doomed. Oberstleutnant Füßlein, the German mining commander, reported on 10 May 1917 that the British had probably loaded large mines at...

Image: Wernervc | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917): Twenty Seconds

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ViennaUK, CC BY-SA 4.0. General Sir Charles Harington, Plumer's chief of staff, told the press on the evening of 6 June: "Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography." At 3:10 a.m. the fuses reached the charges. The Spanbroekmolen mine, ninety-one thousand po...

Image: ViennaUK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917): What the Earth Kept

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit René Defonseca (1897 - 1967), CC BY-SA 4.0. Twenty-one mines had been charged in total. Two were abandoned: La Petite Douve Farm, found by German counter-miners in August 1916, and Peckham 2, lost to a tunnel collapse. Four more, the Birdcage group near Le Pelerin, were not fired on 7 June because the Germans on that secti...

Image: René Defonseca (1897 - 1967) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mines in the Battle of Messines (1917): Standing on the Craters

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit René Defonseca (1897 - 1967), CC BY-SA 4.0. Two days after the battle, General Maximilian von Laffert, commander of Gruppe Wijtschate, was sacked. He died of a heart attack eleven days later. The German official history later placed the Messines mines second in its list of reasons for the defeat. In 1929, Hermann von Kuhl,...

Image: René Defonseca (1897 - 1967) | CC BY-SA 4.0