Groundwater as a military resource: pioneering British military well boring and hydrogeology in World War I

Abstract

The first British Army hydrogeologist to be deployed as such on a battlefield was Lieutenant W.B.R. King, in June 1915 on the Western Front. There, the British Expeditionary Force, in Belgium and northern France, expanded at its peak to five armies: 1.5 million men and 0.5 million horses/mules, each man/animal requiring on average 10 gallons (45 l) per day of potable water. A ‘Water Boring Section Royal Engineers’ was eventually raised for each army, equipped with American-made ‘portable’ drilling rigs, and utilizing air-lift pumps. These innovations and King's pioneering ‘water supply’ maps facilitated the development of the British Army's first operational ability to exploit groundwater from deep aquifers, primarily those in Cretaceous Chalk, by drilling >470 boreholes. Additionally, in 1915, a report by three ‘British’ Geological Survey officers helped guide limited boring within Allied amphibious landing areas on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey. A civilian water adviser, Arthur Beeby Thompson, transferred from Gallipoli to the Balkans in January 1916 and thereafter used geology to guide significant groundwater abstraction by siting 125 military boreholes and 211 Norton tube wells. From 1915, the Director of the Geological Survey of Egypt, W.F. Hume, provided similar guidance for campaigns from Egypt into Palestine.

Military aspects of hydrogeology: an introduction and overview

“…In the Gallipoli campaign during World War I, troops of the 1st Australian Division sometimes operated at an extreme of as little as 1.5 l/day/man of potable water (Rose 2012a). However, under normal conditions, and especially in non-arid regions such as the Western Front across Belgium and northern France, demand was much higher.…”

“…The initial task of W.B.R. King, when appointed the first British military geologist soon after the start of World War I, was therefore to study information available at the Geological Survey of Great Britain on the geology and hydrogeology of Belgium and Northern France, with particular regard to borings for water (Rose 2012a). Similarly, in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England planned for September 1940 but eventually abandoned, German geologists compiled a large number of 'water supply' maps and explanatory leaflets based on British topographical and geological maps published by the Ordnance and Geological Surveys (Willig & Häusler 2012b (Dow & Rose 2012).…”

“…Water supply was a problem to combatants in the Palestine Campaign of World War I (Rose 2012a;Willig & Häusler 2012a ). More extensive problems were encountered by forces on both sides campaigning in North Africa during World War II.…”

“…As millions of troops were concentrated into a relatively narrow and static zone of operations, groundwater locally became an essential source of water supply and its contamination a hazard to health. Rose (2012a) shows how, at the start of the war, the British Army lacked the means to exploit groundwater from deep aquifers under operational conditions, but unprecedented high troop concentrations led to the importation of 'portable' drilling rigs from the USA to equip units of Royal Engineers for this purpose. With the means to exploit deep aquifers it looked to the Geological Survey of Great Britain (since re-named the British Geological Survey) for help (Mather 2012b;Rose 2012a), leading to the appointment from 1915 of Lieutenant (later Captain) W.B.R.…”

“…1. 'Abraham's Well', Beersheva, Israel: an ancient well site re-developed for 20th-century use, arguably the site of the earliest known dispute over groundwater rights, and one of the objectives of the British military advance from Egypt in World War I (Rose 2012a ). Photograph from E.P.F.…”