Edward P. F. Rose

Royal Holloway, University of London | RHUL · Department of Earth Sciences

42nd Geological Section of the South African Engineer Corps was a unique unit that supported British armed forces during World War II. It was co-founded and led for most of the war by Gordon Lyall Paver (1913–1988), one of the few ‘British’ officers serving specifically as geologists during the war to achieve the rank of major. Born in South Africa...

The term ‘military geology’, translated from German after earlier use in French and Spanish publications, entered the English language via American publications from 1917 onwards, initially after the USA entered World War I. It was widely used in the USA and, in direct or indirect translation, in several European countries additional to Germany and...

During the nineteenth century, geology was perceived by the British Army as a military science, and two geological survey departments outside Great Britain were pioneered by Royal Engineer officers in the rank of captain: J. W. Pringle, J. E. Portlock and Henry James nearly successively in Ireland between 1826 and 1846; H. G. Lyons in Egypt from 18...

During the Second World War, the central Mediterranean island of Malta was famously besieged by the Italian navy and intensively bombed by Italian and later German air forces, from June 1940 until Allied victory in North Africa in May 1943 brought an end to the siege. It was then scheduled as a staging post to support the Allied invasion of Sicily...

Malta, an island in the central Mediterranean Sea, was fortified as a base for the Knights Hospitaller 1530–1798 and to provide major harbours for the British Royal Navy after 1813. Men with British military associations (all subsequently to attain some distinction in public and/or academic life) were amongst the many pioneers of Maltese geology wh...

Military applications of geology became apparent within the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century, and were developed during the First World War and more extensively during the Second, incidentally by some officers with links to Canada. In the nineteenth century, three Royal Engineer major-generals with geological interests had served there...

A collective volume on Strategic and Military Geography, Military Maps, Military Cartography and Military Geology

Compared with the Normandy coast that was subject to Allied assault on D-Day, 6 June 1944, the Channel Islands were even more intensively fortified. A similar amphibious and/or aerial assault on the Islands would also have proved very costly in terms of casualties. Compared with the British fortress of Gibraltar at the western entrance to the Medit...

Second Lieutenant (later Captain) Walther Klüpfel arrived on Jersey in July 1941: a 53-year-old university professor experienced in commercial as well as academic geology, and a veteran military geologist of World War I. Assigned as the sole geologist within a multi-disciplinary Fortress Engineer Staff for most of the next 3 years, seven of his sur...

Support for the fortification of Guernsey was provided by five geologists of the German Army’s military geological service, each with the status (equivalent to major or captain) of a Technischer Kriegsverwaltungsrat (TKVR): a uniformed ‘Technical War Administration Officer’. A report with military engineering geology and water-supply maps for the i...

Historically, the British Channel Islands lay outside the scope of the national geological surveys of both Great Britain and France but were studied by a succession of geologists, British, French, and local, from at least 1811 onwards. These established that the islands reveal a terrain different from other regions of the British Isles and form par...

Geological support for the fortification of Alderney came principally from the German Army. During 1941 it came from Second Lieutenant Walther Klüpfel on Jersey, subsequently from the ‘Technical War Administration Officers’ (TKVRs) Walter Wetzel and Friedrich Röhrer in Paris. During 1942 it came first from Lance Corporal (later TKVR) Dieter Hoenes...

Professor Karl Georg Schmidt of Karlsruhe visited the Channel Islands for at least 5 weeks from mid-April to late May 1942. A 40-year-old official of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe), who had served as a military geologist from the start of the war, on secondment from academic employment, he compiled two known reports. The first defined general pri...

German armed forces made use of about 400 geologists who served as such during World War II: the largest number of any nation in wartime. Most served as military geologists (Wehrgeologen) within the German Army, in an organization first developed in World War I. By November 1943 this comprised 40 teams of geologists, mostly led by a uniformed offic...

A Field Works Office (Feldbauamt) was established by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) on Guernsey by April 1942, containing at least one geologist appointed to serve as such, as a uniformed official equivalent in rank to an Air Force captain. Dr. Hans Schneider held the appointment until at least late July 1943, guided initially by a visit from his...

British armed forces made professional use of only two military geologists as staff officers in World War I, and only two in World War II until June 1943, when appointment of Captain (later Major) J.V. Stephens broke new ground. Stephens landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943, D-Day of the Allied invasion. He served successively in Sicily and mainland It...

This volume discusses how the German armed forces made effective use of military geologists to assist their fortification of the Channel Islands after their capture from the British in 1940. The book presents a unique case history of German geologist expertise applied to British terrain, intended to make the Islands into an impregnable fortress tha...

The year 2019 marks the 80 th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and the 75 th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy: respectively the first major conflict in which geologists were deployed professionally in uniform by opposing sides from the start of hostilities, and the first successful major amphibious assault whose planni...

During the Second World War, the Allied invasion of the French coast of Normandy on D‐Day, 6 June 1944, was the greatest amphibious assault in world history. An article in Geology Today (v.11, for 1995, pp.58–63) marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, on 8 May 1945, by describing how British military geologists had participate...

‘Bill’ Wager, after undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, became a lecturer at the University of Reading in southern England in 1929. He was granted leave in the 1930s to participate in lengthy expeditions that explored the geology of Greenland, an island largely within the Arctic Circle. With friends made on those...

The International Association for Military Geosciences (IAMG) was founded in 2013 at Aviemore in Scotland, during the 10th International Conference on Military Geosciences. The conference series had begun in 1994 in the United States, with subsequent almost biennial meetings alternating between Europe and North America. Initially, geological in the...

Within British and Commonwealth forces of the Second World War, 42nd Geological Section was the only unit in which geologists and geophysicists deployed as a team into campaign areas. Water supply was a problem in many arid or semi-arid regions, and the section used geophysical methods (primarily surveys by electrical resistivity) to locate optimum...

Napoleon Bonaparte was, in 1798, the first general to include geologists as such on a military operation. Within the UK, the following century saw geology taught, and national geological mapping initiated, as a military science. Nevertheless, military geologists were not deployed on a battlefield until World War I, first by the German and Austro-Hu...

During the war of 1939-45, intelligence was gleaned from aerial photographs by a newly founded organization that developed into the Allied Central Interpretation Unit. This was based primarily at Danesfield House (known as Royal Air Force Medmenham) some 50 km west of London, in Buckinghamshire. At least six British geoscientists (and at least one...

Eight Quarrying Companies Royal Engineers were raised during World War II, the first four in 1940. Unable to deploy to France as planned, these were used initially for bomb disposal, but from January 1941 companies 851 and 854 (succeeded in 1942 by 857) quarried stone for the construction of two military ports in western Scotland. In early to mid-1...

170 Tunnelling Company Royal Engineers left England in January 1940 to excavate bomb-proof military headquarters in northern France. Expansion into companies 170, 171, 172 and 173 was delayed when the British Expeditionary Force was defeated and evacuated, but completed in England in July to excavate accommodation underground for regional headquart...

Quarrying Companies were a new type of unit first raised within the Royal Engineers in World War I. Thirteen served in northern France, on the Western Front: Two from late 1916 (198 and 199 Quarrying Companies) and 11 more from 1917 (320-329 and 348 Quarrying Companies). Recruited from Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Island of Guernsey, each...

Gibraltar, a 6km2 peninsula jutting south from Spain at the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, is dominated by its 424 m-high Rock: famous as a landmark to seafarers since ancient times. Twenty-five years ago, an article in Geology Today (1991, v.7, pp.95–101) interpreted the Rock as a partly overturned mass of Early Jurassic dolomitic lime...

The Battle of Waterloo was fought nearly 18 km south of Brussels in Belgium, between the forces of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and a coalition army of British, German, Dutch and Belgian troops led by the British Duke of Wellington, joined later in the day by a Prussian army led by Gebhard von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstatt. One of the great...

The central text of this paper has been transcribed directly from the handwritten, unpublished ‘Abstract of Notes' by Tannatt William Edgeworth David (1858–1934), an Australian geologist of great distinction, from which he lectured at the Geological Society of London on 26 February 1919. He was then en route home to Australia after serving on the W...

Potential military applications of geology became apparent in Europe by the late eighteenth century, notably to Napoleon Bonaparte. In the United Kingdom, nineteenth-century practice was commonly to teach elementary geology to army officer cadets, and in twentieth-century conflicts to deploy a single uniformed geologist as a staff officer within ea...

Découvrir le littoral du Calvados en soulignant le lien entre paysages géologiques et évènements historiques de l’été 1944 est l’approche originale proposée dans ce guide. Si la Pointe du Hoc, le littoral d’Omaha ou encore Arromanches-les-Bains sont des lieux désormais connus de tous pour les faits historiques qui s’y sont déroulés en juin 1944, ce...

Edward Battersby Bailey (1881-1965), Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, visited the 6-km2Gibraltar peninsula twice in 1943, in transit from/to England and the Mediterranean island of Malta. He spent only five days in total on Gibraltar, but submitted two influential reports to its Fortress Headquarters, guided by rock features expo...

The 1860s marked a period of intense early interest in the antiquity of man, and so cave archaeology, in England and elsewhere. Systematic cave archaeology was initiated on Gibraltar in 1863 by a former infantry officer, Frederick Brome, the governor of the military prison, and his discoveries prompted cave exploration and local geological interest...

The rocky peninsula of Gibraltar juts south from Spain at the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Long famous as a landmark, it was ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and progressively developed as a naval and military base. Thomas James, a Royal Artillery officer stationed on Gibraltar from 1749 to 1755, was the first...

Military applications of geology first became apparent in Napoleonic times. Indeed, the first general to take geologists as such on campaign was Bonaparte himself. The French army he led into Egypt in 1798 was accompanied by a civilian Commission of Sciences and Arts that included Déodat de Dolomieu (after whom the mineral dolomite was later named)...

In 1942 the US Geological Survey formed a Military Geology Unit (MGU) at Washington, DC of in-house and other earth scientists and engineers to gather terrain and related strategic intelligence. MGU compiled reports containing data about regions outside the USA as tables, text and maps for use by Allied forces, especially American and British. Bene...

The military aspects of hydrogeology can be categorized into five main fields: the use of groundwater to provide a water supply for combatants and to sustain the infrastructure and defence establishments supporting them; the influence of near-surface water as a hazard affecting mobility, tunnelling and the placing and detection of mines; contaminat...

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)...

To drill boreholes for water supply, the Royal Engineers raised ten 'Boring Sections' between September 1939 and May 1943, eight in the UK, two in Egypt. While supporting campaigns in World War II, two deployed briefly to France, seven served widely within the Middle East (one of these in Iraq and Iran and later Malta, the others mostly operating f...

The islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark lie close to the Normandy coast of France. They expose a largely Precambrian crystalline basement of metamorphic and igneous rocks - Jersey and Alderney also expose some early Palaeozoic clastic sediments - and all have a thin but widespread Quaternary sedimentary cover. The three largest islands w...

In 2003, three British reserve army geologists contributed hydrogeological advice to assist planning for the Coalition invasion of Iraq by predicting likely groundwater and drilling conditions. In consequence, 521 Specialist Team Royal Engineers (Water Development) was deployed in theatre soon after hostilities began, to provide a water supply infr...

Between November 1917 and June 1918, 12 maps at 1:10 000 scale of western Belgium (part of the British-occupied sector of the Western Front) were printed for the British army. These classified the ground according to its suitability for the excavation of dug-outs. Compilation was largely by the Welsh-born Australian T. W. Edgeworth David, using pre...

During World War II, between September 1943 and April 1944, temporary Royal Engineers officers W. B. R. King and F. W. Shotton remotely generated water supply maps at a scale of 1:50 000 for coastal areas of northern France eastward from the Cherbourg peninsula to Calais: the first series of British groundwater development potential maps. These map...

At the time the Geological Society was founded in 1807, Europe had entered the latter half of some 23 years of near-contiuuous warfare, in which the overall scale and intensity were wholly new. Wars from 1792 to 1815 affected the careers of many well-known geologists in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Influential early members of the Societ...

Military need has been a positive driver to the development of the modern day, and now mature, science of hydrogeology. The important synergy between geology and water supply was appreciated by military men in the mid-nineteenth century but the first real test of this learning only took place in the First World War. German, British and American geo...

Innovations for the British Army during World War I included use of a military geologist to compile 'water supply' maps and to guide well drilling. Between June 1915 and November 1918, W. B. R. King served as a staff lieutenant at General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force deployed on the Western Front. He pioneered British development...

F.W. Shotton, FRS, Professor of Geology at the University of Sheffield 1945-1949, and at Birmingham 1949-1974, is best known for his research on Pleistocene geology of the English Midlands. However, during the Second World War he became a distinguished military geologist. From May 1941 to September 1943, based in Egypt, he used hydrogeology to guid...

Between November 1943 and June 1946, at least 16 geologists assisted the Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD), a British military unit primarily of geographers, under Royal Navy auspices, to prepare reports and geotechnical maps to guide planning of Allied military operations. Reports assessing terrain factors were generated with geologist...

The Allied victory in Europe in May 1945 marked the end of an 11-month campaign which began with the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 - D-Day. Geologists participated in both the planning and operational phases of the campaign. Geological factors influenced the trafficability of the Normandy beaches, site selection for temporary airfields, quarr...

Serial variation between Micraster populations from successive zones in the Upper Cretaceous Chalk of Europe is widely cited as evidence for evolution at the species level, whether changes between species are interpreted as gradual or punctuational. That these changes were adaptive and represent an improved functional efficiency with time is also n...

Most people have heard of the Rock of Gibraltar, yet few know anything of its geology. Recent studies now interpret the Rock as a partly overturned mass of Jurassic limestone, thrust into position during continent-continent collision by about 15–20 million years ago, and shaped largely by shoreline processes active during Pleistocene tectonic uplif...

Between November 1943 and May 1946, geologists assisted the Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD) to prepare reports and maps to guide planning of British military operations in Europe and the Far East. Early reports were illustrated by pre-war geological maps reprinted by the Geographical Section, General Staff, (GSGS), later reports by ne...

Preparatory work for the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, included the creation of groundwater development potential maps for a large part of coastal northern France at a scale of 1:50 000, followed by summary maps covering coastal and inland areas eastwards into the Low Countries at a scale of 1:250000. All these maps were compil...

During the Second World War, British military geologists assisted planning for the Allied liberation of Normandy by generating specialist maps – supporting the greatest amphibious operation in world history. Maps of the landing beaches at a scale of 1:5000 indicated natural hazards to cross-beach vehicle mobility. Maps of northwest Europe at 1:1000...

Investigation of groundwater resources in Jersey and Guernsey has been driven by different needs in three phases: the first, an intensive phase, took place between 1940 and 1945, when the islands were occupied by German armed forces; the second in the 1970s, in response to increasing reliance on, and demand for groundwater; and the third between 19...

Napoleon Bonaparte was in 1798 the first general to involve geologists as such in a military campaign. But geologists were attached to his army as civilians, without military rank or command function. In contrast, the Prussian general (later Field Marshal) Gebhard von Blücher has generally been credited with first making use of a geologist in milit...

During the German occupation of the Channel Islands, military geologists produced specialist maps to support their development as part of the Atlantic Wall: the line of fortifications marking the western boundary of German-occupied Europe. For Jersey, maps showed features of groundwater and quarry sites for building materials, primarily at a scale...

Groundwater maps for Jersey were prepared by the military geologist Walther Klüpfel in 1942, during the Second World War German occupation of the Channel Islands. Previously deemed untraceable, these maps are currently preserved in Germany at the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, and include arguably the earliest hydrogeological map...

During the Second World War, the German army developed the largest organization of any nation ever to contribute military applications of earth science in wartime. In the summer of 1940, its military geologists assisted planning for potentially the greatest amphibious assault to that time in history by preparing maps which analysed the terrain of s...

During the 19th Century, the British military pioneered geological mapping and teaching, and the operational use of Norton tube wells. In the First World War, the British army appointed its first military hydrogeologist to serve as such, to develop water-supply maps for Belgium and northern France and guide deployment of Royal Engineer units drilli...

The 6 km(2) peninsula of Gibraltar is unusual hydrogeologically as, in effect, a small but high limestone island, subject to a Mediterranean climate of cool wet winters and warm dry summers. Provision of an adequate water supply for its town and garrison has been a continuing problem, particularly as the population has grown from about 3000 in the...

Several geologists accompanied the army of Napoleon Bonaparte that landed in Egypt in 1798 – indicating that perception of the military value of geology is almost as old as Earth science itself.

During World War II the German army developed the largest organization to be used by any nation to contribute military applications of earth science in wartime. In the summer of 1940 two of its military geologist “groups” as well as units of military geographers focused their activities on preparations for Operation Sealion - the cross-Channel inva...

Forbes' Quarry, on the Rock of Gibraltar, yielded a human skull in 1848, one of the earliest Neanderthal skeletal remains known to science. Fragments of a second Gibraltar skull, that of a child, were described from Devil's Tower rock shelter in 1928 and have recently been reconstructed and reinterpreted to emphasize the distinction of Homo neander...

During the Second World War, German militarygeologists assisted preparation for an invasion of Britain planned for September 1940. A military geology group deployed in support of the German 16th Army generated ten 1:50 000-scale water-supply maps plus accompanying explanatory texts to cover southeastern England. Two additional military geology unit...

The 116 km2 Channel island of Jersey was fortified by the British intermittently from the 13th to 19th centuries, and by the Germans more intensively during the Second World War — to form part of Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’. British castles, forts and towers were sited to counter potential amphibious attack by the French. German forces (which at their...

Benthic foraminifera are described for the first time from the Gibraltar Limestone Formation of the Rock of Gibraltar. The new species Siphovalvulina colomiS. gibraltarensisRiyadhella praeregularis occur with Duotaxis metula Kristan, Everticyclammina praevirguliana Fugagnoli, Siphovalvulina sp.,an atypically early example of Textulariopsis sp., and...

Peritidal carbonates of the Lower Jurassic (Liassic) Gibraltar Limestone Formation, which form the main mass of the Rock of Gibraltar, are replaced by fine and medium crystalline dolomites. Replacement occurs as massive bedded or laminated dolomites in the lower 100 m of an ≈460-m-thick platform succession. The fine crystalline dolomite has δ18Ο va...

The Rock of Gibraltar comprises two tectonically separated limbs of an isolated klippe of Liassic Gibraltar Limestone Formation. Both limbs have similar, c. 400 m thick sequences of inner carbonate platform facies arranged in high‐frequency, metre‐scale, shallowing‐upward, peritidal cycles with emergent, caliche caps. Four cycle types are recognize...

The first geologists employed in government service in Britain had military appointments: J. MacCulloch from 1809 to 1826 in England and Scotland, and J. W. Pringle followed by J. E. Portlock from 1826 to 1843 in Ireland. The founder of the British Geological Survey in 1835, and his successor as director-general in 1855, both had military origins....

The Geological Survey of Ireland is one of the oldest national geological surveys in the world Its founding superintendent, in 1826, Captain John W. Pringle, was a veteran Royal Engineer officer whose earlier and subsequent military activities have received scant attention from historians. A colonel's son, he made the army his career and served act...

British geologists participated for more than a year in the planning of “Operation Overlord,” the Allied invasion of northwest France. Following D-Day on June 6, 1944, they contributed to the subsequent 11-month operational phase in western Europe, including the initial 3-month battle for Normandy. Beachhead maps were prepared prior to the invasion...

A spiriferinid Liospiriferina rostrata, two rhynchonellids Gibbirhynchia correcta and Pontaltorhynchia schopeni gen. nov., a terebratulid Merophricus mediterranea, and a zeilleriid Calpella aretusa gen. nov., constitute the first invertebrate fauna to be described systematically from the ' Gibraltar Limestone'. This formation, a 600 m thick cyclic...

George Baker Alexander (1907-1980), a graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge, began research on the Carboniferous Limestone biostratigraphy of Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and West Yorkshire whilst based at the University of Leeds in 1930-1932 and Imperial College London in 1933-1934. He disappeared before the work was completed, for reasons unkno...

There was a closer relationship between the army and some of the founding fathers of British geology than is commonly realized. Military objectives and funding provided the stimulus for J. MacCulloch's 1836 geological map of Scotland, some early systematic teaching of geology, and arguably the first British engineering geology textbooks. From 1826,...

The hydrogeology of an aquifer within the dolomite/limestone formation that dominates the Gibraltar peninsula has been studied with a view to the possible development of contained groundwater resources that occur as a thin lens of fresh water overlying sea water. Recharge rates (calculated by soil moisture and chloride balance) could be of the orde...

Ground conditions and therefore geological factors have influenced many military operations throughout history, e.g. the Battle of Waterloo. Interest in geology is evident amongst military men from the late eighteenth century onwards, but during the nineteenth century military training more often provided the basis for a distinguished geological ca...

The mobile conflict of the Second World War demanded a greater range of British military geological expertise than hitherto, primarily in the North African, Italian and Northwest European campaigns but also in East Africa and the Far East, and in United Kingdom home defence. Most of the senior military geologists (W. B. R. King, F. W. Shotton, J. V...

The strong Jurassic limestone of Gibraltar is riddled with over 50 km of tunnels and chambers, mostly excavated within the 2.6-km-long main ridge of the Rock between 1782 and 1968 by British military engineers. German military engineers excavated tunnels within weaker Precambrian turbiditic metasediments during 1942-1945 similar to fortify the Chan...