The redoubt was built after the end of the Battle of Albert (25–29 September 1914) and as French and later British attacks on the Western Front became more formidable, the Germans added fortifications and trench positions near the original lines around Hawthorn Ridge.

The success of the German defence of the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt crater contributed to the failure of the British attack on the rest of the VIII Corps front.

The British reopened the tunnel beneath the Hawthorn Ridge crater three days later and reloaded the mine with explosives for the Battle of the Ancre (13–18 November).

[1][2] Underground warfare began on the Somme front, which continued when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) took over from the French Second Army at the end of July 1915.

[4] On the Somme front, a construction plan of January 1915, by which Falkenhayn intended to provide the western armies with a means to economise on infantry, had been completed.

[6] On the night of 6/7 April a German raid by II Battalion, Reserve Infantry Regiment 119 (RIR 119) took place near Y Ravine, against the 2nd South Wales Borderers of the 29th Division and caused 112 casualties, for a loss of three killed and one man wounded.

[7] After the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915, construction of a third line another 3,000 yd (2,700 m) back from the Stützpunktlinie had been begun in February 1916 and was nearly complete on the Somme front by 1 July.

The Somme defences had two inherent weaknesses which the rebuilding had not remedied: The first was that the front trenches were on a forward slope, lined by white chalk from the subsoil and easily seen by ground observers.

In 1916, the front of VIII Corps lay opposite the line from Beaucourt to Serre, facing the series of ridges and valleys, beyond the German positions to the east.

The German front had several shallow salients, flanks, a bastion at the west end of Y Ravine and cover in the valleys to the east.

Two other tunnels, First Avenue and Mary, named after the communications trenches leading into them, were Russian saps dug to within 30 yd (27 m) of the German front line, ready to be opened at 2:00 a.m. on 1 July, as emplacements for batteries of Stokes mortars.

The VIII Corps commander, Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, wanted the mine to be sprung four hours before the offensive began so that the crater could be captured and consolidated in time for the alarm on the German side to have died down.

Opinion in the 29th Division was that time was needed for the débris from the great mine to fall to earth, although it was demonstrated that all but dust had returned to the ground within twenty seconds.

Firing the mine early conformed to the plan to occupy the crater quickly but it required the heavy artillery bombardment of the redoubt and adjacent trenches to lift during the assault.

[18] A witness to the detonation of the Hawthorn Ridge mine was British cinematographer Geoffrey Malins, who filmed the 29th Division attack.

Malins set up on the side of the White City trenches, about 0.5 mi (0.80 km) from Hawthorn Ridge, ready for the explosion at 7:20 a.m., The ground where I stood gave a mighty convulsion.

Higher and higher it rose, and with a horrible grinding roar the earth settles back upon itself, leaving in its place a mountain of smoke.As soon as the mine was sprung, the bombardment on the German front line by heavy artillery lifted and Stokes mortars, which had been placed in advanced sites, along with four more in the sunken lane in no man's land, began a hurricane bombardment on the front trench.

The ground all round was white with the debris of chalk, as if it had been snowing and a gigantic crater, over fifty yards in diameter and some sixty feet deep gaped like an open wound in the side of the hill.The detonation was the signal for the German infantry to stand-to at their shelter entrances.

The rest of the 9th Company in Stollen (deep-mined dug-outs) survived but the entrances were blocked and the troops inside were not rescued until after the British attack.

The British divisions forming up in no man's land to reach the jumping-off position 100 yd (91 m) short of the German front line, were caught in the machine-gun fire and suffered many casualties.

[25] The Scottish troops moved past the east end of Y Ravine and reached the first objective at 6:45 a.m. with a stray party from the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division.

The left flank brigade was held up by uncut wire to the south of Hawthorn Crater and by massed machine-gun fire north of the Auchonvillers–Beaumont-Hamel road.

[26] The detonation of the Hawthorn Ridge mine, ten minutes before the general attack commenced, was not considered to be the main cause of the lack of surprise on 1 July.

Lanes had been cut through the British wire, bridges had been placed over rear trenches several days earlier and a bombardment had been fired at 5:00 a.m. each morning for a week.

Troops had been slow to emerge from cover and were overrun, no initiative being shown by unit leaders or the divisional command, which failed to act until the 1st Army headquarters intervened.