大象传媒

My great uncle Eddie was one of 4 brothers , 3 of them joined the Army.The other could not because he was a senior engineer building Rolls Royce aircraft engines, he was really upset about this but was not allowed. Two of his brothers joined the Camerons and Eddie elisted in the Royal Engineers and was eventually posted to North Africa.
All of them survived the war with no injury.
One of his jobs was to find and make safe the mines that had been left by the German and Italian forces as they were pushed back by the Allied divisions.

The minefields were everywhere and we soon became very good at finding them, once you knew where it was it was fairly easy to deal with them. We concentrated on creating safe paths for trucks and tanks and people to move about. These paths were lined with on each side by wires with warning signs attached.
It must have looked really strange to see people and trucks moving up and down the paths while in the fields we were crawling on our bellies or carefully walking foreward sweeping with mine detectors. The one I used was an old Italian model that had been left behind during their retreat. As the need for speed increased we had to stop defusing the mines and had to detonate them instead, we used local Arabs who were in as much danger as us from the mines to work with us, they located them and we safely blew them up.
The really dangerous stuff like unexploded bonbs were dealt with by highly trained specialists.

The worst thing we had to do was to deal with Booby Traps that had been left mainly in houses. A tap would be left dripping with a detonator primed to go off when someone tried to turn it off.
The common one was to leave a door half open with a wire attached to an explosive charge designed to go off when the door was moved.
The way to do this was simply to attach a line to the wire and give it a tug. A lot of soldiers got killed by these when they tried to deal with the traps themselves, particulary as there was often a second charge attached to the wire and hidden in a place where the soldiers would shelter when the booby trap was being detonated. This is why we got called into deal with these, although I once spent 4 hours baking in a latrine block, convinced that I set a trip wire. It turned out to be just an old wire going nowhere.

By Lorna Bell Netherlee Primary School

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