In the early days of World War I, the German army caused great casualties to the Allied forces by building a defensive line with the Maxim heavy machine gun known as the infantry harvester, and the British army lost nearly 60,000 people on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and had to pay a heavy price for every 100 meters advanced, even after the British put the world's first tank, the Mark I, into use, it could not completely change this situation, because the reliability of the Mark I tank was very poor at that time. After paying a heavy price, the Allies launched a series of blasting operations against German positions, including several times using 100 tons of explosives to directly blow up the entire mountain bag of German garrisons, one of which killed tens of thousands of German troops in an instant, and once blew up the world's largest man-made crater.
Allied forces detonated explosives buried under German positions
During the Battle of the Somme, the British and French allies used blasting operations to destroy the German defense line, when the German army used a small hill pack on the outskirts of the French town of Auvilleaire-La Boiselle to build a strong defensive line, and the mountain bag was surrounded by a flat open land, easy to defend and difficult to attack, and if the infantry large-scale charge casualties were absolutely not small. So the British and French allies used sappers to dig tunnels, put a hundred tons of explosives directly under the German butts and detonated, and the violent explosion instantly blew up the small hill where the German army was stationed, and it became a man-made giant pit, which is also considered to be the world's largest artificial crater. As shown below, you can imagine where the German troops stationed here at that time went!
A huge crater blown out on the outskirts of the French town of Ovilele-La Boiselles
With this successful "bombing" on the outskirts of the French town of Auvilleaire-La Boiselles, the Allied army fell in love with this way against the German positions, the most classic of which was the 60 Highland demolition battle described in the movie "Surprise Attack on The 60 Highlands". Highland 60 is located in the Meson Ridge in the Ypres region of western Belgium, surrounded by the same open land, easy to defend and difficult to attack, the German army at that time built countless complex trenches and strong bunkers on the mountain, with a commanding position to control the surrounding area, established a 10 km defensive line. In 1917, Tsarist Russia withdrew from World War I due to the outbreak of revolution in the country, allowing the German army to draw more troops against the Anglo-French coalition, and in order to preemptively attack, the British army decided to take the initiative in the Belgian Ypres region. At that time, the British army gathered a total of 210,000 people, and the German army had 120,000 people, although the British army had a great advantage in numbers, but the strong attack on the German defense line on Mason Hill would cause great casualties to the British army, and there was no absolute certainty that it could be taken, so the British army decided to use demolition warfare again.
With the help of geologists, sappers from Britain, Australia, and Canada dug dozens of tunnels from British positions under the Mason Ridge, with a total length of 5454 meters, which led to 26 detonation points, tunnels 20-30 meters above the ground, and the starting points were located under the main German fortifications, trying to detonate the German army. In fact, the Germans had already detected that the British sappers were digging tunnels and carried out anti-earth work, and also found one of the tunnels and destroyed it, but the Germans did not expect that the British army would dig dozens of tunnels to blow them up. The British had placed about 450 tons of explosives at the remaining 25 detonation points, the most important of which was 41 tons of explosives, and it would have been impossible for the Germans to know that they had so much explosives hidden under their butts before they were blown up.
In order to confuse the other side, the British army from 28 May 1917 intermittently shelled German positions on the Mason Ridge. On the evening of 6 June, Charles Harrington, chief of staff of the British Second Army, told reporters accompanying the army: "Gentlemen, we may not necessarily change history tomorrow, but we will certainly change geography. "In the early morning of June 7, the British bombarded the German positions on a large scale, making the German soldiers think that the British army was about to attack, at 2:50 a.m. the British army stopped shelling, the German soldiers ran from the fortifications to the trenches to prepare for the battle, at 3:10 a.m., the good play officially began, the Allied sappers pressed the detonator, the Mason Ridge was instantly blown up, the German fortifications were blown away, and 10,000 German troops died on the spot, most of them buried in the ground by the mud and sand that had been blown up. One of the 25 detonation sites failed due to water intake, and two others were not detonated for unknown reasons, and on July 17, 1955, the explosives at one of the detonations were accidentally detonated by lightning, but only one cow was killed, and the other unexploded point has not been found.