Vampire dugout
What started out as simple blast shelters turned over time into subterranean hospitals, mess rooms, chapels, kitchens, workshops, blacksmiths, as well as bedrooms where exhausted soldiers could rest.
[4] Needing shelter for their troops on Passendale Ridge, the Allied High Command in January 1918 moved 25,000 specialist tunnellers of the Royal Engineers and 50,000 attached infantry to the north-east of Ypres.
Most of the men involved had prepared and taken part in the Battle of Messines (7–14 June 1917), where they had dug 26 deep mines as well as nearly 200 individual shelter structures at depths of 30 metres (98 ft) into the local blue clay.
The level of these World War I underground activities can be gauged by the fact that by March 1918, more people lived beneath the surface in the Ypres area than reside above ground in the town today.
[6] Located 14 metres (46 ft) below Flanders and dug over a period of four months by 171st Tunnelling Company, the Royal Engineers used I beams and reclaimed railway line in a D-type sett structure.
[7] Vampire became operational from early April 1918, first housing the 100th Brigade of the British 33rd Division, then the 16th King's Royal Rifle Corps and then the 9th Battalion Highland Light Infantry Regiment.
The gradual expansion of the commercial extraction activities by the Terca Zonnebeke N.V. brickworks factory has over time led to the rediscovery of several World War I underground structures.
[3] Today the district of Zonnebeke and its five villages – located at the centre of the area devastated by the Battle of Passchendaele – have the largest concentration of recorded World War I underground constructions.
They were accompanied by the battlefield archaeologists Tony Pollard and Iain Banks, the geophysicist Malcolm Weale and a camera team tasked with filming the excavations for a television documentary.
[2] Working from original trench maps, using geophysical survey and extensive digging with a mechanical excavator, Pollard and Banks managed to identify the entrance shaft of Vampire on the seventh and last day of their investigation.
[7] In spring 2008 the team returned to Zonnebeke with a larger group, including members of Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service who would later carry out a training exercise in the dugout's tunnels.
[2] The excavation was eventually broadcast on UK television as "The Lost WWI Bunker" (Time Team Special 33, aired on 10 November 2008), and was also shown on the Science Channel in the United States.
