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This story is taken from an interview with Robert Adams at the 2nd Batt RIR event, Campbell College, and has been added to the site with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was Bruce Logan.
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[UXB]
We had no problem with that. I don’t recall us ever having a problem with unexploded bombs.

The Germans had a very dangerous mine. A shrapnel mine, the S-mine. It jumped up out of the ground. It jumped up out of the ground about 4 ½ ft, then dropped to 3ft and exploded. And it sent ball-bearings, shot like ball-bearings. It could kill at 50 yards. A very dangerous weapon.
It would kill, it was very very high-velocity. VERY dangerous.
1942 we encountered them, the Afrika Korps had them in North Africa.
They were easy enough to defuse once you found them. You use mine-detectors, which are electronic devices, and they … you scan the ground with these devices, and when they encountered a mine we heard a screech in the earphones. And that told us where the mine was, and you could do this to them. The Germans had a practice of boobytrapping the mines. We had to search underneath the mines, to make sure there were no clusters underneath.

But late in 1942, early in 1943, the Italians introduced a mine which was the explosives contained within a wooden box. And the mine-detectors were virtually unusable. VERY little metal about it. We had to revert to the old 1914 method. The bayonet. Probing with the bayonet.
They were Italian. About 12 inches square and 6 inches deep. And they had a detonator in each corner. And the ordinary AT mine would take the weight of a vehicle to set it off. But with these ones, a man’s foot could set it off.
They were very dangerous and very very destructive.

[were those mines intended to kill the sappers?]
Not engineers specifically but just general infantry. Kill off the enemy …

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