I know exactly why you're here. You've got that
itch. Oh, yeah. That deep burning curiosity to
understand how the world works. But you know
you don't want to drown in a sea of textbooks
and academic jargon to get there. Everybody wants
that. Right. You want the good stuff, the facts,
the context, those aha moments. And you want
it to actually make sense. Well, welcome to today's
custom tailored deep dive. We've got a truly
fascinating stack of sources for you today. We
really do. We're pulling from a comprehensive
historical account of the Battle of Messines,
which was fought on the Western Front from June
7th to the 14th in 1917. Now, when most people
think of World War I, they picture the same things.
Muddy trenches. Muddy trenches, blowing whistles,
and completely senseless frontal assaults. But
the mission of our deep dive today is to explore
how this specific battle became a masterclass
in meticulous planning, scientific innovation,
and a truly terrifying technological scale. Okay,
let's unpack this. It is vital. I mean really
vital that we reframe how we look at this particular
period of history. Messines was not just another
tragic muddy stalemate. What we're looking at
here is a profound shift in modern warfare. It
really was. The British military took geology,
aviation, and explosive engineering and they
integrated them on a scale that had quite literally
never been seen in human history up to that point.
In a fur. It's a textbook example of treating
warfare as an exact calculated science. And to
understand the science, I think we first have
to understand the geography. Yeah. Let's set
the scene for you. It's 1917, and we are in the
Ypres salient in Belgium. The British Second
Army desperately needs to capture what's called
the Messines -Witchetty Ridge. Right, the ridge.
And if you look at the topography of the area,
the heights are actually pretty subtle. It's
an area of low ridges and dips, but they act
almost like the raised lip of a saucer wrapped
right around the city of Ypres. And that saucer
lip dictated everything that happened in this
sector because the German 4th Army held that
high ground. From that ridge they had complete
unimpeded observation over the British defenses
and all the back areas behind the lines. They
could see everything. Everything. Every supply
wagon, every troop movement, every single artillery
piece coming and going. The British needed to
take this ridge for two massive strategic reasons.
First down south, the French army was in a state
of absolute crisis. They were mutinying, right?
Exactly. Following a disastrous campaign called
the Navelle Offensive Morale had completely collapsed.
This led to widespread mutinies among the French
troops. The Allied line was incredibly vulnerable.
Wow. So a British offensive up in Flanders would
force the Germans to move their reserves away
from the French, giving them time to recover.
So they essentially had to create a distraction
up north to save the whole alliance down south.
Precisely that. And the second reason was that
the British were planning a much larger northern
operation, which history remembers as the infamous
Battle of Passchendaele. They simply could not
launch that massive offensive while the Germans
were still looking down their throats from the
scenes read. I tried to picture it like you're
trying to plan a massive surprise party in a
glass house. A glass house, yeah. And your neighbor
who absolutely hates you is watching your every
move from a hill with a pair of high powered
binoculars. You cannot do anything. You can't
bring in the cake. You can't hide the guests
until you go up there and take that hill. You
just have to blind them first. That is a perfect
analogy for the problem facing General Sir Herbert
Plimmer. He commanded the British Second Army.
And what's fascinating here is the sheer sophistication
of his approach to solving it. Plumer didn't
just order his infantry to charge up the hill
and hope for the best. No, he definitely did
not. He centralized his artillery and essentially
turned the entire battlefield into a massive
deadly laboratory. I was reading about the artillery
innovations, and it's mind -blowing how they
figured out where to shoot. I mean, if the Germans
are hiding their guns on the reverse slope of
this ridge, how did the British even know what
they were aiming at? That is where the science
comes into play. They deployed cutting edge techniques
that seem incredibly modern for 1917. First,
they mapped the entire area on brand new, highly
accurate 1 to 10 ,000 scale maps. But to find
the hidden guns, they used something called sound
ranging. Wait, you mean they literally listened
for the artillery? Literally listened, yes. How
does that even work without modern computers?
I mean, it's 1917. It was pure mathematics and
physics. They strung up a series of specialized
microphones along the front line. When a hidden
German gun fired, the sound wave of the boom
would reach each microphone at a slightly different
millisecond. By measuring those microscopic time
differences, mathematicians working right there
behind the lines could triangulate the exact
position of the gun that fired. That's insane.
And they combined this with flash spotting, which
meant using surveying instruments called theodolites
to physically measure the angles of the muzzle
flashes on the horizon at night. That is incredible.
So by doing all that math, how much of the German
artillery were they actually able to locate?
The combination of those techniques allowed the
British to plot a staggering 90 % of the hidden
German artillery positions. 90%. 90%. It was
an absolute revolution in counter battery fire.
But they didn't just rely on the guys on the
ground doing math. The coordination in the air
blew me away. For 1917, having 300 aircraft dominating
the skies just seems so futuristic. Oh, the air
war was deeply integrated into the artillery
plan. British planes used wireless interception
to track the German artillery spotters. They
implemented strict wireless protocols so that
hundreds of British planes wouldn't interfere
with each other's radio signals while calling
in artillery coordinates. And my absolute favorite
detail from the sources, when the battle actually
started, these planes flew so low over the battlefield
to track the advancing British troops that they
could identify them by specific flares the soldiers
lit on the ground. They had be right on top of
them. Right. Some of them flew so low they were
tragically shot down by their own side's artillery
barrage, which brings us to the firepower itself.
Before the infantry even stepped foot out of
their trenches, the British unleashed hell. Just
how big was this preliminary bombardment? The
British assembled 2 ,230 guns and howitzers.
In the week leading up to the attack, they fired
over 3 .5 million shells onto the ridge. Wow.
Let that number sink in for a moment. Three and
a half million. It's hard to even picture that.
The goal? was to systematically vaporize the
German barbed wire, shatter their concrete strong
points, and absolutely destroy those 630 German
artillery pieces they had so carefully mapped
out with the sound ranging. OK, here's where
it gets really interesting, though, because as
terrifying as 3 .5 million shells raining down
from the sky is the real nightmare was brewing
right beneath the Germans feet. The Underground
War. This is what the Battle of Messines is most
famous for. This was not just some soldiers with
shovels digging a trench in the mud. To pull
this off, they had to bring in top -tier military
geologists, right? They absolutely did. You can't
just dig anywhere in Flanders. The water table
is so high it's practically a swamp. Right. The
British brought in experts. including a renowned
geologist named Edgeworth David, to map out the
subterranean layers. They identified a specific
geological stratum, a layer of waterproof blue
clay that sat roughly 80 to 120 feet underground.
Getting down there and digging horizontal tunnels
through clay while an artillery bombardment shakes
the earth above you sounds intensely claustrophobic.
It was an unbelievable feat of subterranean engineering,
and it sparked a tense, terrifying cat and mouse
game in the pitch black. You had specialized
mining units from Britain, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand. They drifted nearly 6 ,000 yards
of galleries deep beneath the German lines. 6
,000 yards? And they were using hand -cranked
boring machines to minimize noise. Because the
Germans were not entirely oblivious to this.
Because they were countermining, right? Digging
their own tunnels to find the British. Yes. The
Germans were desperately trying to listen for
the sound of British digging. At one point, German
tunnelers actually broke through and found one
of the British mines at a place called Le Petit
Duf farm. They completely wrecked the explosive
chamber with a counter charge. Fighting hand
to hand or setting off explosives 100 feet underground
in a collapsed tunnel is just a horrifying reality
to try and picture. But even with the Germans
discovering that one location, the British still
managed to lay 26 massive mines. And they packed
them with over 400 long tons of an explosive
called Ammonal. It's massive. Just how big were
these individual charges? The scale is almost
difficult to comprehend. One of the absolute
biggest was the Spanbrook Molen Mine, which today
is known as the Lone Tree Crater. The British
packed 91 ,000 pounds of Amunal into a single
chamber at the end of a gallery, 88 feet below
the surface. The German troops holding the ridge
actually suspected something was wrong, didn't
they? They did. Their morale was already heavily
depressed by the relentless bombardment above
ground, and the psychological terror of knowing
the earth beneath you might explode at any moment
was taking a massive toll. I can't imagine. But
the German High Command insisted. The ridge had
to be held at all costs, keeping their men directly
over the danger zone. Which brings us to zero
hour. I want to paint this picture for you because
the sensory details from the source material
are just haunting. It's the morning of June 7th,
1917. At about 3 .0 in the morning, the routine
British night firing just stops. Completely stops.
Total silence. The sudden quiet on the Western
Front is so profound that the soldiers standing
in the trenches can actually hear birdsong in
the dark. And that silence was a highly deliberate
psychological tactic. It lulled the German defenders
into a false sense of security. Experiencing
that sudden quiet, many of the German troops
actually left their deep concrete shelters and
returned to their forward positions. Oh no. They
assumed the artillery had stopped because a British
infantry assault was coming and they need to
demand the breastworks to repel it. And then
at exactly 3 .10 a .m. the ground opens up, 19
of the deep mines detonate. But the source points
out they didn't all go off at the exact same
millisecond. They were detonated sequentially
over a period of 19 seconds. Why wouldn't you
just blow them all up at once for maximum impact?
That 19 second stagger was a brilliant and devastating
design choice. If you detonate them all at once,
you get one massive localized upward blast. By
staggering the detonations over 19 seconds, the
engineers created overlapping seismic waves that
physically rippled through the earth. So it was
like a wave. Exactly. It essentially mimicked
a massive sustained earthquake, liquefying the
ground and multiplying the destructive force.
The human cost of that is staggering. The source
states roughly 10 ,000 German soldiers were killed
instantly in the blasts. It remains the deadliest
non -nuclear man -made explosion in recorded
history. Let's just sit with that for a second.
10 ,000 lives extinguished in 19 seconds just
from the earth beneath them ceasing to exist.
It is a level of sudden devastation that is incredibly
difficult to process. And the physical shockwave
was so massive that it caused panic among German
troops 15 miles away in the city of Lille. The
reports even mention that the acoustic shockwave
was heard as far away as London and Dublin. London
and Dublin, yes. One second you're standing in
a trench listening to birds and the next a man
-made earthquake rips the ridge apart and the
instant those 19 mines went off the British artillery
resumed firing at its absolute maximum rate.
What happened next? That artillery fire provided
the shield for the infantry advance. Roughly
80 ,000 British, Australian, and New Zealand
troops surged up the slope. They were protected
by what is known as a creeping barrage. Could
you break down exactly how a creeping barrage
works for someone who might not be familiar with
World War I tactics? Certainly. Instead of just
firing at the enemy trenches and then stopping
when your own troops attack a creeping barrage
is a moving wall of high explosives and shrapnel.
Okay. The artillery fires continuously, but they
adjust their aim to physically move the curtain
of explosions forward at a set pace, in this
case about 100 yards every two minutes. So the
troops are walking right behind it. The advancing
infantry has to walk immediately behind that
moving wall of fire. If they walk too fast, they're
killed by their own artillery. If they walk too
slow, the enemy has time to climb out of their
bunkers and man their machine guns. The coordination
required for that without radios for the infantry
is wild. The dust and smoke from the mines and
this creeping barrage were so thick that it completely
blinded the surviving German defenders. They
couldn't see anything beyond 100 yards. But the
British didn't just walk blindly in a straight
line either, did they? They used some new infantry
tactics. They utilized what they called pillbox
fighting. This was a crucial evolution. Previously,
a massive attack with thousands of men might
get completely bogged down by a single surviving
machine gun nest. Right. Holding up the whole
line. Exactly. At Messines, the leading troops
were trained specifically to bypass those heavy
strong points. They used portable Lewis machine
guns and rifle grenades to suppress the defenders
keeping their heads down and just kept moving
forward. Specialized mopping up parties came
up from behind to surround and secure the bypassed
positions. That makes so much more sense. They
even integrated new Mark IV tanks and cavalry
patrols to support the advance. It seems like
it totally overwhelmed the German defense. But
from the German perspective, they had recently
redesigned their entire defensive philosophy
into what they called the Flandernstallung. What
was that and why didn't it work? The Flandernstallung
was a system of defense in depth. The old way
of defending a trench was to pack all your soldiers
into the very front line, which meant they all
died when the artillery hit. Makes sense to change
that. Right. So defense in depth meant holding
the front line very lightly and keeping your
main forces miles further back in support and
reserve. When the enemy attacked and took the
first line, these massive reserve units called
Eingreif or intervention divisions would launch
rapid, overwhelming counterattacks to crush the
exhausted attackers. So why didn't these Eingreif
divisions just sweep in and push the British
back off the ridge? Because the theory completely
collapsed under the sheer scientific weight of
the British plan. The German frontline troops
were entirely vaporized by the mines or instantly
overrun by the creeping barrage. When the German
Eingrief divisions tried to move forward from
the rear to launch their counterattack, they
had to march through the incredibly accurate
British artillery fire we discussed earlier.
They were horribly delayed, the roads were gone,
and they were utterly decimated before they could
even reach the frontline fighting. It sounds
like a perfectly executed, flawless plan, but
war is still just absolute chaos no matter how
much science you apply. There is this striking
anecdote from the source material about the friction
on the battlefield. Late in the day, near a place
called Blauport Beek, there was a massive mix
-up. Australian troops were holding a line and
British troops were moving in to relieve them.
And that is exactly where the fog of war asserts
itself. The British saw the Australians moving
back and assumed it was a German counter -attack
breaking through, so they called down an emergency
SOS artillery barrage on them. At the exact same
time, the Australians saw the British moving
forward, thought they were the German counterattack,
and also called down an SOS barrage. So you had
British and Australian troops mistakenly calling
down heavy artillery on each other for two hours?
Two hours, yes. Two hours of surviving this meticulously
planned battle, only to be shelled by your own
side because of a visual misunderstanding in
the smoke. It really highlights that even in
a perfectly planned victory, the reality on the
ground is terrifying and uncontrollable. No matter
how many 1 to 10 ,000 scale maps you draw or
how beautifully you time your creeping barrage,
human error, severed communication lines, and
the fog of war will always interfere. Yet despite
that confusion, the overall operation was an
undeniable success. It really was. The British
took all their initial objectives in less than
12 hours. They captured over 7 ,000 German prisoners,
48 guns, and hundreds of machine guns. General
Plumer's scientific laboratory of a battle had
actually worked. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, though, we have to look at the human
cost and the strategic debate that has raged
among historians ever since. The victory at Messines
was brilliant, but it was certainly not bloodless.
No, definitely not. The British and ANZAC forces
suffered roughly 24 ,000 casualties, while the
Germans suffered somewhere between 21 ,000 and
26 ,000. And strategically after this stunning
success, the British paused. I suppose they had
it right. They had to rebuild all the roads and
supply lines over the ridge. They had just spent
a week completely obliterating with 3 .5 million
shells and 19 underground earthquakes. The infrastructure
was entirely erased. The delay required to consolidate
their gains and build new supply routes over
that devastated landscape meant that the larger
Northern Operation Passchendaele did not begin
until weeks later. Right. By the time it did,
the Germans had regrouped, the weather had turned,
and the British offensive bogged down into one
of the most tragic, muddy slogs of the entire
war. Many argued that the long pause after Messines
squandered the very momentum they had spent so
much effort to build. So what does this all mean?
For you listening today, why does a battle from
1917 matter? I think it is a profound testament
to the power of cross -disciplinary integration.
They didn't just look at the problem as a purely
military one. They used geologists to map the
deep earth aviators to control the sky, and mathematicians
to perfectly synchronize an unimaginable amount
of artillery. It shows how deeply understanding
your environment and applying rigorous science
can completely overwhelm an entrenched opponent.
But there is a physical legacy to all of this
too. A really memorable kind of crazy fact from
the source text. We mentioned they laid 26 mines
and 19 went off. The Germans found one, but several
of them just didn't detonate. They just sat there.
They were left to bury deep in the blue clay.
In 1955, decades after the war ended, a lightning
strike hit the ground at Messines and actually
traveled down to the earth, setting one of those
lost mines off. Decades later. Miraculously,
the only casualty was a very unlucky cow and
the wildest part. There is believed to be another
fully loaded abandoned mine still buried somewhere
beneath the Belgian countryside today. That unexploded
mine feels like a potent metaphor for the lingering
scars of the First World War just beneath the
surface of modern Europe. But before we wrap
up today, this raises an important question,
something we haven't touched on yet, but is deeply
connected to the source material. I'm intrigued.
The text briefly notes a British artilleryman
named Ronald Skirth. He fought at Messines, witnessing
this exact battle. And afterward, he became a
devoted pacifist, taking a solemn vow never to
take another human life. I want to pose a question
for you to mull over. When we look at Messines,
the breathtaking, terrifying pinnacle of human
engineering, geological mastery, and scientific
coordination, what does it say about the human
spirit that witnessing such a perfect technological
victory is exactly what drove some men to renounce
war entirely? Wow. How is it that our greatest
technological triumphs sometimes trigger our
deepest moral awakenings? That is a heavy, beautiful
thought to leave on. You really have to wonder
what it was like to stand there and watch the
earth literally shatter knowing human minds calculated
and planned every single second of it. Thank
you so much for joining us on this custom deep
dive into the sources today. Keep asking questions,
keep looking for the context, and to keep seeking
out those aha moments in history. We will catch
you next time.