A Look at an Often-Invisible Side of History.

War Underground provides a valuable overview of an often-overlooked aspect of warfare: literally undermining enemies by tunneling beneath them. The author does an admirable job of describing how mining has been used to collapse walls and defensive positions, to devastate them with explosions from below, and to enable soldiers to emerge and strike behind enemy lines. He makes it easy for an unfamiliar reader to grasp key technical terms, while also clearly differentiating this tactic from the planting of explosive land mines, with which it is often confounded.

The book presents a compendium of major tunneling events, mostly in the European-Mediterranean region, from the beginnings of recorded history through the First World War. It provides vivid, clear descriptions of mining in the context of numerous sieges and across static fronts. Underground lighting, ventilation, and navigation were not easy, and miners had to continually prop up the tunnels to prevent cave-ins. The author explains how this dirty, invisible work built on developments in civilian mining, and often employed civilian miners. Before the advent of gunpowder, miners typically set fire to the wooden supports they had previously emplaced, causing the walls and defenses above to collapse. Once explosives became available, these were placed in mines extending under enemy fortifications, with dirt or sandbags placed behind them to limit the amount of explosive energy dissipating down the vacant tunnel. The result was that the defenders were blown sky-high, often creating a crater that the attacker’s forces would attempt to cross, as happened at the Siege of Petersburg during the American Civil War. A recurring theme across the millennia is that even when mines demolished enemy defenses, attackers often failed to exploit this advantage by rushing forces through the resulting gap, due to insufficient coordination.

The book also describes the variety of countermeasures used against mining. One of the earliest, mentioned by Herodotus, entailed placing shields against the earth to detect vibrations, helping to indicate where mining was taking place. Mining was often fought by countermining: defenders dug tunnels that intersected with those of the attackers, often leading to hand-to-hand combat underground. In later ages, defenders could tunnel close to the attacker’s tunnels, then detonate explosives to cause cave-ins before contact was made.

A third of the book covers the First World War, reflecting the fact that more miles of tunnels were likely dug in that conflict than in all previous ones combined. Mining was extensively used in attempts to break the stalemate on the Western Front, and also occurred in locations from the Dolomites to Gallipoli. Aside from the spectacular British destruction of Messines Ridge in 1917 by a series of explosive mines, the underground component of the Great War rarely gets as much attention as it merits. World War I mining, even when it involved occasional large explosions or underground combat, is less conducive to novels and films than the exploits of early aircraft or the relentless battles on the surface.

The author indicates that though military mining has become less frequent since World War I, it has been used in battlefields from Spain to Korea and Vietnam to Gaza, often enabling a weaker force to hide from an adversary dominating the surface and air. The tactics and lessons of underground warfare remain relevant to today’s warfighters. They will be well-served by reading War Underground, a clear, accessible book about an often-invisible side of history.

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