TOM MORGAN'S YPRES BATTLEFIELD GUIDE

HILL 60 - "Hell with the Lid Off"

When I was a small boy I lived with my great-uncle and great-aunt. They were the brother and sister of my grandparents. Uncle Tom was my grandmother's brother, and Aunt Lizzie was my grandfather's sister. I lived with them from about the age of five until I was sixteen.  

They were the possessors of the Family Bible - one of those large, illustrated editions which contained special sections at the beginning for recording family birth and death dates. This bible was also a repository of small, mostly thin items of memorabilia such as newspaper cuttings, important letters and so on. However there was one item kept in the bible for safe keeping which was always easy to find because it was slightly thicker than the rest and forced the pages apart a little, making it always fall open at that particular page. It was a small envelope filled with tiny, dried flowers and written on the envelope were the words, "Flowers from Hill 60, 1914-18 War."

A friend of my uncle had been wounded at Hill 60 in 1915 and, trapped out in the open, he had been obliged to keep as still as he could and wait until nightfall to see if he could make his way back to his own lines. Having spent most of the day afraid to move his head, he decided, when night fell and it was time to begin the crawl back to the British trenches, that he  would fill his pocket with the flowers which, for so many slow hours, had been the only things within his field of vision. He later gave some of the flowers to friends and relatives as keepsakes and the little packet kept in the family bible was my uncle's share.

I can't recall when I first saw these flowers but it must have been when I was very small  and the name must have stuck with me because I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't  know that Hill 60 was a place where soldiers had died in the World War. The name always fascinated me as a child - it seemed such a technological, modern name somehow.  

Hill 60 from the air in 1917. The large crater can be clearly seen, beside the railway line.

It's strange that such a terrible place - for it was certainly one of the most feared places in the whole of the Ypres salient, and one which was never quiet - should be so insignificant when you look at it.  "Hill" is certainly something of an exaggeration. From top to bottom, Hill 60 is not much higher than a bedroom window.  It was formed in the 1860s, when the railway came to Ypres and a line was built from the city to Comines. To get to Comines, the railway had to climb the Northern end of the Messines Ridge and, as steam engines are not very good at climbing hills, a cutting was dug to ease the gradient. The spoil from the work was dumped in three piles at the top of the climb, making three little hills. The biggest of these was marked on the British maps as "Hill" with its height above sea level in metres also given so it appeared as "Hill 60" and this became its name.

In their usual methodical way, the Germans, when they dug in in the first winter of the war, placed their trenches on the high ground almost surrounding Ypres like a skewed question-mark including the Messines Ridge. This gave them a distinct advantage in terms of observation and Hill 60 - a small hill on top of a small ridge - was a bonus. Having shelled away most of the trees and buildings between Hill 60 and Ypres, the Germans could take up their prismatic binoculars and enjoy an uninterrupted view of the city itself and the whole of the intervening countryside. The observation bonus is still obvious today. Standing on Hill 60 and looking towards Ypres, it's easy to appreciate how, in those days, an observer on the hill would be able to see almost any significant movement. I have often read in soldiers' memoirs how a group of men about a seemingly innocent task, not drawing attention to themselves in any way, would suddenly find themselves as the receiving end of a short and accurate period of artillery fire. Shells, it seemed, would often begin to fall upon a particular spot just as the men themselves reached it.  The view from Hill 60 shows how an artillery observer could amuse himself by indulging in a little personal sniping, even shelling unlucky individuals who just happened to be walking towards a point in a track on which he has previously registered his guns.

Harassing individuals or small groups is one thing however. Quite another is the ability to observe and monitor more potent movements of men and material from Ypres towards the trench-lines. A British officer who was able to enjoy the same view after his men had helped capture the hill in 1915 remarked that he thought it a wonder that the Germans had allowed anyone to live at all during the previous few months, so commanding was the view. Because of this, the Allies were prepared to risk a great deal to get the Germans off the crest of Hill 60 and the Germans, for their part, were extremely tenacious in holding onto it.

The first serious fighting took place early in the war, when the French army manned the Allied trenches around Hill 60. There was much small-scale shallow mining and the craters can still be seen, near the road. These craters date from the French occupation in 1915.

In that same year the British took over the sector. Hill 60 already had a fearsome reputation and more than lived up to this under the new occupancy. In 1915, especially around April and May, the hill was the scene of some of the most brutal fighting as possession of the hill passed to and fro. At times, the gentle slopes were littered with corpses and the place was a nightmarish place of smoke, noise and  the horror of hand-to-hand fighting. Attack followed counter-attack as the armies struggled to gain or maintain supremacy, and with men caught out in the open during these actions, every square metre of Hill 60 became the scene of somebody's private battle and, possibly, of someone's unknown grave.

This period of feverish activity ended with the Germans still in control of the hill, and major attacks ceased for a while but all the same, Hill 60 was never quiet. With the enemies so close, it was always a place of high tension and danger. It was always a place to be feared, and no-one took any unnecessary risks there. There was always enough risk as it was. For example, the 1st Battalion of the Dorsets lost 16 men in a very short time one day in June, 1915 when the Germans opened a whirlwind bombardment for no apparent reason. The bombardment ended as suddenly as it had begun, without being followed by any attack or raid.  There was a trench marked on the map as "Trench 39" which ran round the hill roughly following the line of the far side of the road as it is today and the Dorsets were in the section which lay between the present day museum and the railway bridge with the main weight of the bombardment being directed at them. After the shelling had stopped the Dorsets took stock of the damage. Large sections of the trench had been blown in and would have to be repaired that night.  16 men had been killed. One was found in eight pieces.  Two couldn't be found at all, at the time. Their bodies were found later, over a hundred yards away, on the other side of the railway. This was a typical "quiet" day on Hill 60.

Hill 60 was chosen as the position of the most northerly of the mines placed under the Messines Ridge in preparation for what came to be known as the Battle of Messines, which opened on 7th June, 1917. The underground gallery dug to lay the mine, was 1,380 feet long - one of the longest of the Messines Mines, and the Hill 60 tunnellers soberly declared that their target was Germany itself, and their tunnel was officially known as "The Berlin Sap." Quite apart from the considerable distance to be dug to reach a spot below the strongest German positions on Hill 60, the tunnellers had more work to do, because just before it reached Hill 60, the tunnel branched to provide a second gallery running off to another mine placed beneath the position known as "The Caterpillar" which was the second "hill" formed from the spoil from the railway cutting, on the opposite side of the track. (From the air, it can be seen that the Caterpillar crater is water-filled, unlike the Hill 60 one which is always dry. The many tunnels which still lie under the hill allow rainwater to drain away easily, so the Hill 60 crater remains a dry, saucer-shaped one.)

The tunnellers placed their charges - 45,700 pounds of ammonal plus 7,800 pounds of guncotton making a total of 53,500 pounds, under Hill 60 and 70,000 pounds of ammonal under the Caterpillar - and moved on to the next phase, that of protecting their tunnels from German counter-mining. The Hill 60 mine would have to lie in wait for ten months before it was detonated, and the caterpillar mine, eight months.  On the day, both  mines exploded correctly and on time. Immediately afterwards British troops stormed the hill and captured it.  It remained in British hands until the German advance of 1918.

Hill 60 Today
In contrast to its earlier evil reputation, Hill 60 is known as a quiet spot now, even in these days of growing numbers of battlefield visitors, and if you do visit, you will probably find that you have the place more or less to yourself.  This makes it something of a secret place for the duration of your visit, and this makes it easier for you to look and think. After the war, it was left as it was, a memorial to the thousands of soldiers who still lie on it, buried or blown to pieces in the surface fighting, or buried in the many tunnels below it. The shell-holes and craters, their outlines softened by the hand of nature, are still there, along with the smashed remains of concrete German dugouts and one fairly intact British one (built on the top of an earlier, German one) which looks like a sinister, alien face. The view across country to Ypres is still impressive.

The 1917 crater is still there, close to the railway cutting. The strong-point which used to be above the crater, with its machine-gun posts and  blockhouses, was vaporised in the explosion, of course, along with a garrison of about 600 Germans, but the smashed remains of other concrete fortifications can be seen here and there in the grass nearby.  The smaller craters of the relatively shallow mines dug by the French can also still be seen, among the trees nearer to the road.

photo from cigarette card courtesy of Martin Hornby

There are four significant memorials on Hill 60 - a lot for such a small place.  The first one the visitor is likely to notice is the one on the very top of the hill.  This is the Memorial to the Queen Victoria's Rifles - 9th (County of London) Battalion, the London Regiment.  This was a Territorial Army battalion and it was on Hill 60 that Lieutenant Geoffrey Harold Wooley became the first Territorial Army soldier to win the Victoria Cross (and the first of five men to win the VC at Hill 60) when, finding himself the only officer on the Hill, and with only a few men, he organised his small force and successfully held on to his trench until relieved, fighting off several attacks while doing so, and being under continuous shellfire the whole time.  Lieut. Wooley survived the war and was one of the VC holders chosen to form the Honour Guard at the funeral of the Unknown Warrior.  He became a priest after the war and died in 1968.

The Memorial was damaged during the second World War  and the one to be seen today is the restored version. The Queen Victoria's Rifles have their memorial in this prime spot on the Hill because after the war, they bought the land in order to ensure its preservation and for many years Hill 60 still had its trenches, shell-holes and dug-outs  accessible to visitors.  The Hill is now owned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission which maintains it as a memorial to the hundreds of missing soldiers known to be still buried there.

At the foot of the hill, near the road and quite close together are three more memorials. The smallest one is a long, low stone which gives a very good account of the wartime history of Hill 60.  Nearby, within a little enclosure is the Memorial to the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company.  Like the QVR Memorial on top of the Hill, this memorial was also damaged in the Second World War and has some bullet holes.

A little further along the road, at the far end of a small car-park, is the Memorial to the 14th Light Division. This originally stood in Railway Wood, some distance away from Hill 60 but it became threatened by encroaching vegetation and it was dismantled, restored and re-erected here on Hill 60 in 1978.

(A further memorial, from the second World War this time, can be seen just beside the railway bridge next to the car park. This remembers two Belgian civilians who were shot by the Germans.)

Of course, when we we consider what there is left at Hill 60 to remind us of the war years, we should not forget that several hundreds of soldiers still lie on the Hill, their bodies buried by shelling or lost in the underground tunnels, posts and dugouts. These men are still here, too. 

Just across the road is the Cafe/Museum, the modern-day desendant of an earlier one started by a small group of enterprising ex-servicemen who "stayed on" after the war. Outside you will see some rusting (though relatively complete) trench mortars, weapons which could be brought right up into the trenches and which enabled the German defenders of Hill 60 to bring artillery fire instantly to bear on the British trenches at the first sign of trouble.

The place where the tunnel  for the big 1917 mine began can still be found, too, but you will have to leave Hill 60 to find it. The site - the start of the Berlin sap - is just beyond the wall of Larch Wood (Railway Cutting) Cemetery, a few hundred metres away, where a plantation of larches once grew, and where a fold in the ground gave some cover for dugouts, with the smashed route of the railway being used as a communication trench from there.  To reach the cemetery, you will have to leave the Hill 60 site and turn left, crossing the railway bridge.  At the t-junction, turn right and look out for the sign (on the right of the road, and next to a little house) pointing the way to the Cemetery. The cemetery is difficult to get to by car as the approach is via a deeply-rutted farm track which crosses the railway at a crossing without barriers, so extreme care is needed, and there is little room to turn a car round for the return trip. But if you do enter the cemetery, walk down the long grass path and keep on walking  directly to the far wall. Look over it and the grassy hummock a few metres beyond is the place where the fabled Berlin Sap began. When the tunnel was being dug, the cemetery was already there. In walking to look for the remains of the tunnel entrance, you will have walked past the 16 Dorsets killed in the no-reason bombardment that day in June, 1915. They are buried  side-by-side in Plot 2, Row J and among these graves is that of 3/7283 Private Harry Woods, of Shaftesbury, Dorset, who was the man who was found in eight pieces.

I have mentioned Pte. Woods twice in this article and he is mentioned elsewhere on this site.  This is not because of any fascination with the exceptionally gory details of his death, but because of the inspiring circumstances of his burial, when his friends, shocked and shaken in the midst of the smoking ruins of their trench after the whirlwind bombardment, still  saw it as time well spent to collect his remains and carry them back to this little cememtery and bury him in his own grave, along with the others. For me, the grave of Pte. Woods typifies both the Horror of Hill 60 and the Spirit of Remembrance.  I have a photograph of his grave on my desk, always.

Copyright © Tom Morgan, January, 2003

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