[Lafayette C Curtis]

Where should I look if I wish to read primary accounts of underground fighting? I'm not asking for a specific period--anything from the Stone Age down to Iraq or Afghanistan is fine with me, as long as it contains first-hand description of what happens when men actually fight underground rather than merely using underground tunnels as movement routes or as minign/countermining devices. Of course, I don't mind accounts of countermining gone wrong and turning into a hand-to-hand scrum in the dark.

Thanks beforehand!

[Martin Wilkinson]

[Kyro R. Lantsberger]

I have a book on the Crusades by a French historian, Regine Pernoud. This book has a section about sieges that talks about combat engineering in this era where sappers would try to go underneath walls and try to collapse them by cave in. CounterSappers would be building intercept tunnels to thwart this attempt. I will check the bibliography to see what sources are drawn from in those chapters.

[Allen Andrews]

I can reccomend this book, which seemed to have a fairly accurate account of the tunnel warfare in Vietnam:

The Tunnels of Cu Chi: A Harrowing Account of America's "Tunnel Rats" in the Underground Battlefields of Vietnam

By Tom Mangold and John Penycate

[Richard Fay]

Hello all!

I know this isn't a primary source, but Paul Knight talks about fighting in the mines in Henry V's 1415 campaign (during the siege of Harfleur, I believe) in Henry V and the Conquest of France 1416-53. He states that Henry used to visit the mines on at least one occasion when he had to fight a raiding party. The French would apparently build counter-mines to intercept the English mines, and hand-to-hand combat would ensue. Talk it with a grain of salt, though, because I couldn't find these details in other sources. They just talk in general about the mining by the English being thwarted by French counter-mining and raids.

Stay safe!

[George Hill]

There was something in WW1 where there was a particular area with tunnels and counter tunnels, the primary weapon being the bomb. You would dig, and listen, and when you thought you heard someone else digging, you would set off a bomb to drop their tunnel ontop of them. (Presumably after evacuating your own.)

[Geoff Wood]

[Elling Polden]

There was some underground fighting in Vietnam, clearing out VC bunker and tunnell systems.
Ought to be some fist hand accounts armound about that.

[Lafayette C Curtis]

I'm already fairly familiar with the more conventional types of mining--the tunnels used to create a breach in the wall or to collapse opposing tunnels. Camouflets, too, are no strange things to me. What I'm wondering about is the accounts of men personally killing each other in the tunnels, whether with hand-to-hand weapons, missile weapons, or grenades and the like.

That book about the Tunnel Rats, of course, is going into my wish list. I'll try checking out Geoff's WWI book if he's lucky enough to find the title. BTW, does anybody know of primary sources on Suleyman the Magnificent's siege of Vienna? (The 16th-century one, not the 1683 one.) I also heard some things about tunnel fighting there, but have never been able to locate any quotations from men who participated in or personally witnessed such fighting.

[Geoff Wood]

[Russ Ellis]