大象传媒

This story was recorded and posted by Mark Jeffers with permission from the author.

After this we were called to East Anglia in England to lay mines or to defuse them on the beaches, and wire bridges with explosives in case of an invasion. We had to make chambers in the bridges to house the charges and then wire each charge together. The roads at each end of the bridges were mined. We used Bangalore torpedoes and pushed them under the road at the base of a bridge. This was to make sure that both the bridge and its approach were both destroyed so enemy tanks could not cross without a major bridging task. A Bangalore is a long piece of tubular scaffolding stuffed with gelignite cartridges and a big length of fuse went all the way through it. You had to be very careful when defusing them because they sweated nitro-glycerine and if there was friction with iron they would have exploded. We had to use a very long stretch of rod with a brass spear at the end of it. It took a long time and so it was very tedious as you had to move very slowly. Canadian soldiers worked on the same jobs as us on the East Anglia coast and some became impatient causing one to explode killing several of them.

We always operated from Ely. The bridges had to be examined every week to ensure the fuses were inserted correctly and wired together.

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