Clearing Minefields with Human Beings November 13, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
So a hundred infantry have to get across a field to their objective and safety, only they know that the field has been planted with mines. How do you clear the field? The simplest (and most horrible) thing to do would be to send your troops forward down a plotted route with gaps of ten metres between each man and accept the five or six casualties among those who go ahead as the price of war. This, of course, presupposes that those out front accept the role that you give them and that the rest of your men don’t lose their nerve when body parts are hurled their way. But have there really been examples in history where armies have cleared minefields with their own soldiers? Here are four well attested examples: the Norwegian instance is not really ‘their own soldiers’ but anyway…
Eastern Front, 1941-1945: the Soviet army institutionalized ‘tramplers’, soldiers in punishment battalions who were expected to walk across minefields and live or die with the consequences. Zhukov, for example, spoke to Eisenhower about this (and by some accounts with Alexander).*
Norway, 1944-1945: Almost three hundred German Prisoners of War were killed while clearing mines in the country after the end of hostilities, an almost incredibly number. By one account Germans were forced to run around ‘cleared’ fields to make sure that they had got every single mine… Norway suffered particularly bad war damage during the occupation: but even so this seems an unusual lapse in taste on the part of the Scandinavians.
Iran, 1980-1988: the Iranian Islamist government was attacked by Iraq in 1980. By 1981 Iran had run into grievous problems and with lots of soldiers but few weapons began to use ‘human wave’ attacks to clear the way for professional soldiers. The Iranians deliberately employed more marginal members of society for these attacks including the elderly and children, the Basij.
Chechnya, 2000: In early 2000 the Chechen rebel army was holed up in Grozny and was in trouble. Russian forces had surrounded the city and it looked as if the rebels would not just be defeated, but that they would be annihilated. In this desperate situation the Chechens started a break out on the last day of January in a snowstorm. The problem was that there was a minefield in the way…. Several hundred Chechens died crossing the minefield: the martyrdom of those who went ahead has become the stuff of Chechen legend.
There must be others…: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
*The quotation ‘There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out channels through which our vehicles can go.’ Crusade in Europe
15 Nov 2015: Louis K writes in: Not exactly the same but close: I am not sure if this is 100% true: After the war, there were quite a lot of unattended minefields still laying around in the Netherlands. Part of these were supposedly cleared by “volunteers” from the NSB camps. That is: ex-NSB (dutch national-socialists, and other colaborators rounded up after the war). They were paid for every mine they found, and defused. However, at a certain point also german POW’s were used for this. So when these POW’s came to a known (marked) ex-german minefield, they rolled out their standard tapes, used for the laying of those fileds in a standard pattern, and were able to clear the field in record time (and claim the money for this…). This was considered very unfair by the dutch colaborators, who, until then, had to do this by “proding”, or a crude british hand-me-down mine detector.
KMH writes: This is may be a variation on the idea of initially using your least effective troops on the front (or battle lines) to hopefully wear down the enemy so the real
troops will have a better chance of victory. I am wondering if a bullet shot from a rifle would have set off a mine. If so, the infantry could have tried firing at
short predetermined distances to detect mines’ presence.
