17-4-23 Garand Picture of the Day

[browningautorifle]

Would the mine often have to be blown up to be made safe, perhaps they were normally just marked with a flag or were the fuses not normally a problem to remove?

A minefield is an obstacle that's intention is to channel the enemy into a specific killing ground and deny them approach...

Mines would be detected and marked for ease of passing by. If possible they would be disarmed but imagine the fine threads of a screw in mechanism being covered with fine dirt, how they now don't want to turn. There are anti lift devices used as well, and trip wires. Anti lift we called some of these...you could rig a mine to go off with about three different settings, pressure, pressure release and pull wire. It could be rigged to the whole rest of the mine field so when one goes off they all do. Imagine an acre of mines all going at once? You can command detonate as well. There was a minefield I had to traverse during duty almost daily at one point that had several different and many outdated mines. You could see them because the ground had settled. I'm not sure they could have been safely handled, the only way to deal with those is to set a simple charge beside them and blow in place. The problem with the anti pers that jump up is they throw shrapnel so far, it turns it into quite a difficult affair. By my time the flail tanks were gone, they were the best thing I could imagine. The current Leopards have a mine plow or a dozer blade to attach to the front for mines. The Engineers have many neat rigs for mine disposal, I wasn't Engineers though... Easiest way to dispose is to blow them in place...