Book description
'Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one
- fire! Down goes the firing switch. At first, nothing. Then from
deep down there comes a low rumble, and it as if the world is
spliting apart...'
On 7th June 1917, nineteen massive mines exploded beneath Messines
Ridge near Ypres. The largest man-made explosion in history up until
that point shattered the landscape and smashed open the German lines.
Ten thousand German soldiers died.
Two of the mines - at Hill 60 and the Caterpillar - were fired by
men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, comprising miners and
engineers rather than parade-ground soldiers. Drawing on the diaries
of one of the key combatants, Benealth Hill 60 tells the
little-known, devastatingly brutal true story of this subterranean war
waged beneath the Western Front - a stygian battle-ground where men
drowned in viscous chalk, suffocated in the blue gray clay, choked on
poisonous air or died in the darkness, caught up up in vicious
hand-to-hand fighting...
Will Davies is an historian and film-maker. He edited the war
diaries of E P F Lynch into the acclaimed and bestselling memoir
Somme Mud, and wrote its companion volume, In the Footseps
of Private Lynch. He lives in Sydney.
