TOM MORGAN

Spanbroekmolen Mine-Crater

This mine crater sits on the top of a small rise a couple of kilometres outside the village of Wijtschaete ("Whitesheet" to the troops). It was one of the craters blown at the beginning of the Battle of Messines, at 3.20 a.m.on 7th June, 1917. The mine was one of 19 detonated simultaneously along the Messines Ridge, each under a significant German strongpoint.

The battle of Messines, the planning for which was entrusted to General Plumer, was a resounding success.  Plumer went to great pains to ensure that everyone knew his part in the coming battle. In this he diverted from the plan which had been used on the Somme the previous year, when only the officers knew the specific details. When the officers (expected to lead from the front and wearing conspicuously different uniform from the men) were picked off first, the men following them were at a loss as to what to do next.  This would not happen at Messines.  In addition, Plumer made his plans with a clear objective - to capture and hold the ridge - that was all. There was no place in Plumer's carefully-laid plans for any unprepared, opportunist (and possibly costly) follow-up. The attack was not designed to herald a breakthrough. "Bite and Hold" was a phrase used at the time, and the nineteen mines were to be the first and most savaging bites of all.

The mining operations had not gone unnoticed. The Germans knew that the Allies were digging. They had mine galleries of their own. Undergound, in fact, there was warfare of a kind just as sinister as on the surface. The miners dug not only their main galleries to the chambers where they laid their charges, but also shallower, defensive galleries, which they could use to protect their mines. There was much exploratory digging, and listening in silent, dark, cramped tunnel-heads, trying to determine if the other side were digging and, if so, how quicky and in which direction.  The most nerve-wracking moment was when the enemy digging stopped, as this might mean that a small destructive charge had been placed, not intended to break the surface, but to crush the galleries below and entomb the men working there. The miners used small, portable charges called Camouflets for this purpose. Even when the miners had finished their work, and their mine had been successfully laid - 60 tons  of explosive material in the case of Spanbroekmolen - and  the electric wires for firing were in place and the tunnel blocked by several walls of sandbags with air-spaces between them, their job was not over. They still had to protect their work until it was needed, to listen for the sounds of exploratory digging from the other side and take action to counter this threat. On more than one occasion Allied and German tunnels met undergound, and there was furious hand-to-hand fighting in the total darkness of the cramped galleries.  The Spanbroekmolen mine fell victim to this insidious counter-mining when, few weeks before the planned firing of the mines, the Germans fired an underground charge which blew in several hundred feet of the main Spanbroekmolen tunnel.  As the tunnellers, wearing breathing apparatus, inspected the damage, they saw to their dismay that the firing-wires had been broken and that the neat, boarded tunnel had been reduced to a broken shambles. It was obvious that the tunnel could never be re-opened. The only option was to dig another gallery, by-passing the damaged section, so that the firing circuits could be re-connected. The officers who would have the job of firing the mine spent the last few hours testing and re-testing the circuits with a torch battery, its feeble charge being strong enough to give a reading, but not enough to fire the detonators.

Some of the other mines to be used in the attack had been lying underground for almost a year, with some doubts as to the condition of the explosive charges.  The repairs at Spanbroekmolen were completed with, literally, only hours to spare, with a very makeshift detonation system.  At all the mined positions, there were no guarantees that the mines would explode as required. In fact, the soldiers waiting in the trenches at the foot of the ridge had been warned that they could not depend absolutely on the mines working as planned, and their orders were to leave their trenches and attack whenther the mines went up or not. In fact, the Spanbroekmolen mine was fifteen seconds late, by which time the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division had already left their trenches and begun to race across No-Man's Land and some of them were killed by falling debris. They are buried in Lone Tree cemetery nearby.

In the event, all the mines exploded as planned. From the natural grandstand of Kemmel Hill, some miles away, the Generals watched as the Messines Ridge seemed to be borne aloft on nineteen great pillars of fire. The sound of the simultaneous explosions was clearly heard in London. Immediately following the detonations, troops left their trenches and raced across No-Man's Land, where they usually found a broken enemy, soldiers clinging to their legs, begging to be captured and taken away from the horror of the smoking craters.

There is no-one left who, having been there, can try to describe the visual impact of the mine's explosion - the sight of a German blockhouse as big as one of the coaches which stops at the crater today, spinning over and over as it was hurled into the air, the clods of earth as big as motor-cars landing and bursting apart in the surrounding fields (some of them causing casualties among the troops who were half-way across No-Man's Land at the time,) the sickening lurches as the shock-waves moved across the countryside, the deafening roar and, literally above all, the dense cloud of fire, gas, smoke and vaporised men forcing its way skyward and then hanging there, like a glowing monster in the sky. Such a peaceful place. Such indescribable horror. Doing our best to picture the scene, and multiplying it nineteen-fold, will give us a vague and misty idea of what happened on the Messines Ridge that morning. No maniac ever dreamed anything like it.

Spanbroekmolen is the largest of the remaining craters and. like most of them, is now water-filled, a peaceful pool, containing huge goldfish and surrounded by trees. The lip caused by the debris from the crater falling to earth is a large one. In fact, the road around the crater is itself built into the lip. I have heard it said that the mine was deliberately over-charged, that is, it was packed with more explosive material than was strictly necessary to break the surface, so that the debris from the mine would be thrown higher into the air and, as it fell, would create a larger than usual lip, which could then be incorporated into the British fortifications which would have to be built into the position after the successful capture of the crater.

Not long after the war, there was talk of filling in the Messines craters, and "Tubby" Clayton, the founder of Talbot House, the "Everyman's Club" at Poperinghe, suggested that at least one of them should be preserved as a memorial. As a result Lord Wakefield, the owner of the Castrol Oil Company, purchased the crater and gave it to Talbot House and the Toc-H movement, which still owns it today. The crater is known as the Pool of Peace. A stone near the gate records this ownership and also gives the dimensions of the crater:

Sap Started - 1st January, 1916

Completed - 26th June, 1916

Depth of Charge - 88 feet

Charge - 91,000 pounds Ammonal

Length of Gallery - 1,710 feet

Diameter at Ground Level - 250 feet

Width of Rim - 90 feet

Depth Below Normal Ground Level - 40 feet

Height of Rim - 13 feet

Diameter of Complete Obliteration - 430 feet

Copyright © Tom Morgan, November, 2002.

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