War Underground
Description
Renowned military historian Earl Hess offers the first book dedicated to the history of underground tactics and strategy in warfare from antiquity to the present.
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.
In War Underground, Hess 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.
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Person
Earl J. Hess is professor emeritus at Lincoln Memorial University. He is the author of thirty-six books, including Civil War Field Artillery: Promise and Performance on the Battlefield and, most recently, July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, with Kansas.
Content
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. The Near East and Greece
2. Rome
3. Medieval Mining
4. Gunpowder
5. The Maturation of Mine Warfare
6. The New World and the Napoleonic Era
7. Sebastopol, India, and Electrical Detonation
8. The American Civil War
9. Before the Great War
10. Underground Warfare on the Western Front
11. The Materials and Methods of Mining in World War I
12. 1916
13. 1917
14. Other Fronts of World War I
15. After the Great War
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
