'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...

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 powerful new film.

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 Footseps of Private Lynch. He lives in Sydney.

Book Information
ISBN 9780857500496
Author Will Davies
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Bantam Books (Transworld Publishers a division of the Random House Group)
Publisher Transworld Publishers Ltd
Weight(grams) 209g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 127mm * 18mm