Beneath Hill 60: The Extraordinary True Story of the Secret War Being Waged Beneath the Trenches of the Western Front - Softcover

Davies, Will

Softcover

ISBN 10: 085750049X ISBN 13: 9780857500496

Publisher: Bantam, 2011

Synopsis

The extraordinary little-known true story of the cat-and-mouse war waged beneath the trenches of the Western Front and the subject of a major new film.

"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 is as if the world is splitting apart."

On June 7th, 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, Beneath 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 in vicious hand-to-hand fighting.

About this title

About the Author:

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 Footsteps of Private Lynch. He lives in Sydney

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 085750049X
• ISBN 13: 9780857500496
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300