Booknotes: War Underground

New Arrival:

• War Underground: A History of Military Mining in Siege Warfare by Earl J. Hess (UP of Kansas, 2025).

Until this point in his extensive military history writing career, the vast bulk of Earl Hess's studies of the technical aspects of warfare has been focused on the American Civil War. That concentrated lens shifted into a broader outlook in his 2023 book Civil War Torpedoes and the Global Development of Landmine Warfare and has widened even more in his latest study, War Underground: A History of Military Mining in Siege Warfare.

From the description: "From as early as ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese warfare to the battles of World War I, military mining was an essential component of siege warfare. Armies have tunneled underneath castle walls, dug trenches across no-man’s-land, and engineered confusing defensive countermines. These tactics for assaulting enemy fortifications and positions by creating underground access have adapted to changes in warfare, technology, geography, and culture. While its use diminished after 1918, when speed and movement took precedence over capturing strongpoints, military mining remains a viable strategy still deployed to this day. Although military historians have given mining marginal treatment in virtually every study of siege warfare, it has not yet been treated with depth or comprehensiveness as a subject in its own right. In this first book-length study of the subject, renowned military historian Earl Hess now fully addresses the topic of military mining from its earliest origins to the twenty-first century."

As referenced above, the 1914-18 Great War featured the pinnacle of military mining, its conduct on the Western Front being its most refined state in both technology and scale. Thus, Hess devotes five full chapters on World War I mining operations. Other chapters explore military mining during the Classical and Medieval periods as well as during the early to late black powder eras. Among the last is the American Civil War, which is explored in a single chapter almost thirty pages in length. Of course, the 1863 Vicksburg and 1864-65 Petersburg campaigns provide the focus for that examination. Fitting its diminished global significance in warfare, military mining after the Great War is summarized in a single chapter at the end of the volume. Supporting the text are numerous photographs and schematic drawings of mining activities.

In sum, Earl Hess's War Underground "offers a sweeping study of the use of offensive and defensive military mining in more than 300 sieges from around the world and across almost three millennia. The result is an impressively broad and comprehensive treatment of the grand history of military mining, which offers novel insights to the evolution and trajectory of the strategy since its ancient origins."