Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

MINE CLEARANCE AT EL ALAMEIN , 1942

203

Minefield Drills The minefield Drills that evolved in the School of Mine Clearance were taught throughout the 8th Army, and in the light of experience, were later modified and adapted in other theatres. Lessons taught at the School covered the whole sequence of operations – the plotting of known minefields from records or aerial and ground reconnaissance; the location and removal of the individual mines within the gaps to be made and the marking of the cleared area. For these latter stages, it was necessary that the drill should be simple, automatic and as near fool- proof as possible. It was found that if it did not conform to these conditions, men, from familiarity with the dangers, and from weariness or nerve strain from continuous employment on the work, became careless and the casualty rate rose. Despite the widespread use of aerial photographs and other methods, the only effective way of discovering the leading edge of the enemy’s minefield was to go ‘snooping around’. This usually entailed a Sapper officer armed with a compass, binoculars and a notepad, who would wander off into the afternoon haze, which provided some cover and when the enemy was more likely to lie low; then as the haze cleared in the early evening, he would take compass bearings of whatever was visible, do a little probing and sometimes ‘steal’ a mine for identification, then in the darkness return to his own lines. 23 Areas where metal was detected by a mine detector were carefully probed with the tip of a bayonet, to determine if a mine was present; the probing had to continue until the object that set off the detector was found. The deliberate and continuous sweeping with detectors, each man going forward slowly and intently, eyes on the ground, earphones on the head, while the noise of battle crashed around him, and then the cold-blooded investigation and lifting of the mines, no man knowing when some new invention of the enemy would blow him to eternity, proved a terrific strain on the men employed . 24 Some mines, referred to as minimum metal mines, were constructed with as little as 1 gram of metal in order to make them difficult to detect. The work of mine clearance to provide adequate access lanes through minefields, though not so spectacular as some other tasks that fell to the lot of the Sappers, may well be counted as one of the greatest epics of the El Alamein Line breakout in October 1942. Other Methods Besides the investigations carried out by the School, Sapper units, and indeed all arms, were seeking for any means, mechanical or otherwise to solve the problem of efficiently locating buried mines. The success of the Polish detector and the flail or ‘Scorpion’ bore witness to this enterprise and ingenuity. 25 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, many scientists and engineers

23 J. Latimer, Alamein (London: John Murray, 2002), p. 167. 24 Pakenham-Walsh, pp. 369-370. 25 Ibid., p. 370