Jack Calder - Mines

Transcript

Well, I suppose one of the instances would have been where we went out to try and map a mine field. Now, the Germans used... They were very meticulous with their mine fields. They used two types of bombs, one that they called a Teller which was purely for tanks. You could stand on one and it wouldn't matter, the other was your anti-personnel mine. An anti-personnel mine was three little spikes, much thinner than that. Much thinner, three little spikes sticking up out of the ground like that and they'd be up about that much out of the ground and what you'd do is go out.... You'd crawl out on your tummy and you'd go off the bomb.

You'd denote that onto your map, the engineers would come up and they would delouse that. What happened with those, the ones, was this... If you touched downwards one of those three prongs, it would create an explosion and that explosion would blow up a cylinder to knee height. Only up to knee height. And when it got to knee height, it would explode and throw 300 odd ball bearings just out like that, which meant that if anybody was standing up they got it in their knees. A couple of our fellows got hit.

So getting back to the clearance, if you found them, you would get the engineers to clear them. Through that we would then get a track through their mine field and we could go up to... Nearly up to where they were, find out what they were doing so that our people back would be able to throw mortar bombs into them, or the artillery could throw shells into them. That was one of the things that you'd do on a patrol. It was always at nighttime