THE amazing true exploits of father and son miners from Wallsend who tunnelled under the German trenches on the Western Front during World War I will be told on the big screen next month when the movie Beneath Hill 60 opens in cinemas around the country in the lead-up to Anzac Day.
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And helping to transform their unsung heroism into a $9 million motion picture are two former Hunter men, screenwriter David Roach and costume designer Ian Sparke.
"Beneath Hill 60" tells the remarkable story of Captain Oliver Woodward, a Queensland miner who earned the Military Cross for his service with the 1st Australian Tunnellers Corp, a battalion of miners and engineers recruited to tunnel silently under the German lines in France and Belgium in 1916.
Among the tunnellers were Walter Fitzgerald Sneddon, who enlisted on July 7, 1915, and his father, James Brown Sneddon, who joined on October 30 the same year.
Both were experienced coalminers from Wallsend.
Their mission was to detonate a massive store of explosives 30 metres underground and plunge the German troops in the trenches above into chaos.
At 3.10am on June 7, 1917, their work culminated in what was then the largest man-made explosion in history as a series of 19 underground bombs, totalling 450,000 kilograms of high explosive secretly placed in Allied tunnels under German lines along the Messines ridge in the Ypres area of Belgium, were detonated in a mighty eruption that was reportedly felt in London, 200 kilometres away.
An estimated 700 Germans died instantly and thousands more were injured or taken prisoner, shocked and unable to fight.
"Beneath Hill 60", directed by actor Jeremy Sims and starring "Love My Way's" Brendan Cowell, "Underbelly's" Gyton Grantley and "The Black Robe's" Aden Young, was shot in Townsville last year.
It has its world premiere in Sydney on April 8 and opens nationally on April 15.
The film was scripted by David Roach, co-writer, producer and editor of Yahoo Serious's hit 1988 comedy "Young Einstein".
Roach, who first met Serious at Newcastle Art School, also collaborated with the film-maker on his follow-up films "Reckless Kelly" (1993) and "Mr Accident" (2000).
Roach based his "Beneath Hill 60" screenplay on Captain Woodward's diary entries but was also inspired by the true story of the Sneddons from Wallsend.
"Once you start writing a film about World War I, you soon realise that there are so many stories, and so much information and so much research, that you can pretty easily get lost in it because it is so fascinating," Roach says in the current issue of "Filmink" magazine.
"I knew that the majority of [the film] would be set underground in these tiny tunnels, and that forced me back to the characters and the dialogue and the real stories of these men."
Former Hunter Valley man Ian Sparke was responsible for the historical accuracy of hundreds of British, Australian and German uniforms.
The Maitland-born, Dungog-raised military history enthusiast owns Australia's largest wardrobe of military uniforms and props.
Now based in Queensland, Sparke has previously lent his expertise to History Channel docu-dramas "Beyond Kokoda" and "Long Tan" and such Hollywood-backed films as "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and Steven Spielberg's upcoming World War II TV mini-series "The Pacific".
