Clearing Mines and Roadblocks
My Father's War in Real Time
The 399th combat team along with Company C of the engineers headed back across the Vosges Mountains through the Saverne Gap. The men thought they were going into reserve. Why else go backward, away from Strasbourg and the Rhine? As the Story of the Century pointed out, “there are times when it is well that clairvoyance is not a human capability.”1 On December 2, the 399th along with Gordon’s company of engineers moved through the “panoramic countryside with its story book valleys”2 and entered the Low Vosges, whose hills looked remarkably like the Catskills of Delaware County, New York, that Dad knew so well.
Soon enough, they realized what they were getting into. This was the German army with its back against the West Wall of the homeland, the German army that thought the Americans didn’t have the stomach for a fight. If they just made it costly enough, the Americans would negotiate an end or even realize the real enemy was the Soviet Union. The Germans did everything they could to slow the Americans down every step of the way—and that meant a lot of work for the engineers, both German and American. Depending on which side was on defense, they built barriers, laid minefields, and created booby traps. The other side cleared them, usually under fire.
Clearing abatis and pulling mines were literally all in a day’s work for Dad’s platoon, day after day in December. Dad’s morning report for December 3 reads:
Removed abatis 100 yards on road to Fromuhl. Found blown bridges. S mines. Pvt. Harry Johnson was wounded by steel pellet in S mine explosion. T/5 Nicholas Skotti, attached medic, amputated a Frenchman’s leg in the S-mine field and cared for him and Johnson without regard to his own personal safety. Recommendation [for a medal].
ABATIS
In an era of motorized warfare, controlling the roads was paramount. Though a roadblock could be piles of stone rubble, dirt, craters, and explosives, the preferred roadblock in the Low Vosges with its abundance of trees was an “abatis.” An abatis was a mounded tangle of felled trees—sometimes created with axes and chainsaws, and sometimes they wrapped the trunk of a large tree with explosives and blew it down. The branches were wired together so that pulling them or plowing them aside wasn’t a simple matter. It wasn’t just the tangle. The wires were booby trapped with explosives. Quite often, if there had been time, the whole approach to check it out was mined, and the roadbed underneath the abatis planted with the mines that were designed to blow up the larger vehicles used to pull on the tangle. As on December 3, an abatis could stretch for 100 yards up a road—quite often where the road was narrow and the barrier couldn’t be avoided. But if an abatis did appear where the shoulder looked walkable and drivable, that shoulder was heavily mined.
If the infantry was in a hurry and the abatis wasn’t that long, one approach was just to blow the whole thing to smithereens, getting rid of the mines and the tangle of trees in one great roaring whomp that would rain wood chunks down for half a minute.3
Later, especially during Nordwind, the engineers had to build their own abatis. There was an art in dropping the trees into the roadbed with the minimum of time wasted in dragging very long, very heavy, and very awkward branched trees around—aided by the fact the steep sides of the roads were heavily forested. I realized in reading this that one of the skills Dad was proud of had been honed in the war. My parents had a wood-burning stove when they lived in the Catskill hills on an old farmstead. Dad cut down trees in the woodlot, and he was very proud of his ability to back cut a tree just so, so that when he finished the main cut, the tree would drop exactly where he wanted it to lie. When I was helping him, he’d point to the spot and sure enough, down it would come, precisely there. I realize now that he’d done that with hundreds of trees during the winter of 1944-1945.
T.C. remembered that getting near a roadblock was a great place for drawing fire:
We were out looking at a roadblock, Bell and the Lt. Col [Zehner, commander of the 1st Battalion]. He was a wild man, took foolish risks. I was driving and up there with them. I should have stayed back out of there and let them go. But the Germans started shelling the place. We all dived at the same fox hole at the same time. Bell went first. The colonel landed next, and I landed right on top of him. And he was a smaller man than I was. I said, “Colonel, I am sorry. I hope I didn’t hurt you” and he said “I’m glad you covered me.”
As soon as they crossed to the western side of the Vosges, Dad’s good friend Willie Williams, who was a platoon leader for Company A of the engineers, got into an ugly firefight. Willie was a small frail man. It’s important to remember how much was asked of people who were not from central casting in a Hollywood war movie. As the morning report described it,
The third platoon under Lt. Williams, moved with the point of infantry in an advance to the northwest of Weinberg. The objective was the capture and removal of a roadblock. The advance was pinned down by many types of enemy fire and the platoon of engineers was subjected to heavy concentrations of enemy mortar, small arms, and artillery fire nearly the whole day. The platoon was only able to withdraw near dark through mortar fire.
MINES
The cheapest and so the most common way to slow down an advance was a minefield. Mines were everywhere and they were feared. When Carl and Wallis heard that my sister and I were going on a 100th Division battlefield tour, they just shook their heads. Wallis told me they couldn’t pay him enough to go back there. He’d be scared to put his foot down anywhere in the Vosges. As a rifleman in the 399th wrote home in December 1944, “It is very interesting here but damn unhealthy. I dread road mines more than I do enemy artillery.”4 Unlike artillery, mines were everywhere and all the time. A good foxhole was some defense against all but a direct hit from artillery, but there was no defense against mines except not to move.
One of the universal complaints about the Stateside training was the failure of the Army to teach the men about mines. One 399th rifleman recalled his squad’s first night at the front. They climbed a slope in the dark, rolled out their sleeping bags in a clearing under the pine trees, and fell asleep. Early in the morning he woke up to a loud explosion and a piercing cry of “medic, medic.” He had no idea what to think, sitting up in his sleeping bag, staring around, when a second cry went up. Soon someone’s yelled, “don’t move, don’t move.” No part of their training had warned them. They’d unrolled their sleeping bags in a minefield. It was of course precisely because it was an attractive clearing in the woods that the Germans had mined it. The men had been incredibly lucky to fall asleep, but the first men who got up in the morning had taken an unlucky step too far. The squad had to wait there, petrified, listening to the cries of their mates, until the engineers had cleared a path, marked by unrolled bandages.5
The Army had known since before Pearl Harbor that they’d need a way to deal with mines, which as far as they knew would always be encased in metal. Rather than develop a detector from scratch, they checked out treasure-hunting hobbyists, chose one already in use, and—pressed for time—put it into mass production.6 It used two radio beams to penetrate the soil. The beams cancelled each other out until they hit metal, which broke the connection. When the connection broke, it would start to beep, increasing in volume as the signal got stronger. It had a pie-shaped coil under a flat wooden disk that was 18 inches in diameter, weighing about 9 pounds, at the end of a six-foot handle. The man using it wore a knapsack with the dry cell batteries that powered the magnetic field. He wore earphones that weighed 7.5 pounds to listen to the beep.7 It had to be swung from side to side like an “outdoor carpet sweeper,” which quickly became tiring. The earphones gave off a mind-numbing monotonous hum that reached an ear-shattering shriek if it detected something.8 Riflemen would tease the new recruits who still had their full field packs with “what are you, engineers? Why are you carrying all that goddam junk?”9 Being weighed down with excess junk and standing straight up swinging the detector was not conducive to survival at the front.
The mine sweeper helped just enough that they kept using it, but it didn’t do a good job. The signal couldn’t reach below 6 to 12 inches.10 It was fragile, and it couldn’t be used in the rain, a bad feature in the rain-soaked Vosges.11 In Italy it just plain didn’t work at all because the soil was rich in iron and it never stopped shrieking. In France, the roads were covered with shrapnel so there was plenty of useless shrieking to endure.12
It did help with classic metal mines. One classic metal mine was the much-dreaded S mine or Schrapnellminen—the infamous Bouncing Betty mine. It had a metal casing buried upright in the ground with three ways to set it off--a pressure plate, or three wires poking out of the ground that made contact if stepped on, or a trip wire that pulled the release. When a foot touched the wires together or pushed down on the pressure plate, a small detonator went off, propelling the metal case up into the air about three feet high. A second explosion went off in the air 3.9 seconds later, propelling 360 ball bearings at high velocity in a circle around it. At 20 yards it was lethal. At 150 yards it could still rip into a man’s gut and, most notoriously, his genitals. Some called them “castrator mines.” For the engineers, the S mines were fairly simple to disarm. The pressure plate models could be disarmed by very carefully slipping a piece of metal—a nail, a stiff wire, or the pin from a grenade--into a hole. The tripwire models were electrical and cutting one wire—carefully—would prevent contact while the detonator was removed. But working in a minefield could never be safe, especially with everything going on around them. On December 3, Private Joyce in B Company of the 325th Engineers was killed and four others wounded when, as the morning reports say, “an S-mine was detonated by PFC Joyce in his attempt to get out of the way of an on-coming artillery truck.”
Perhaps the biggest flaw in Army planning for mines was that it didn’t foresee that the Germans, once they realized the Americans had metal detectors, would switch to nonmetallic mines. The Germans developed an array of mine types, and the combat engineers had to develop the technical expertise to find and disarm them all in combat conditions, in the rain and snow and cold. The dreaded S mines themselves started to be made of pottery.
The other most common mine was the Schu mine. The shell was made of wood, a small-hinged box around 5 inches square. When it was armed, a slot in the lid pressed down on a pin, keeping it in place. If someone stepped on the barely buried box, the shift of the lid would cause the pin to move, setting off the detonator. They were cheap to make, and the Germans made them by the tens of thousands. They were small because they carried just enough explosive force to blow off a soldier’s foot. GIs inevitably called them “shoe” mines. It was ingenious as well as cheap. The soldier would lie in the minefield screaming in pain while the entire unit stopped until a way could be cleared. The wounded soldier needed stretcher bearers to get to an aid station. That way, one cheap mine removed three men from the front. Since the whole point was to delay the enemy, Schu mines, meant to maim, were in some ways more effective than the more lethal mines.
One soldier in the 399th recalled that he always shuffled along, never really stepping down in hopes of finding a mine before it found him. The historian of the 399th Regimental combat team refers to the men as "paddlefeet." In part, he was referring to the shoepacs--the rubber and leather overshoes—which gave them large feet. But I suspect it also referred to the men shuffling through France.
The Schu mine still had some metal parts, so the Germans kept working on ever more ingenious mines, such as mines made entirely of glass. The morning reports mention that Dad’s platoon suddenly encountered a new type that winter that they had to figure out on the fly—Topf mines, made with no metal at all. The casing was bakelite—the "plastic" made of sawdust and tar—and the fuse was made of a glass vial that crushed under foot. Acid ate through the connector and set it off. The man who stepped on it continued on, but the squad behind him got hit with the explosion.
Large mines on roads were designed to let people through and, when the coast seemed clear, take out the unwary vehicle following along behind. The most ubiquitous of these mines were the Tellerminen, so called because they were large and round like a Teller, German for plate. Anything less than 350 pounds could pass over the pressure detonator without a problem. Anything more, and a pound of TNT went off, enough to knock the tracks off a Sherman tank or take out a jeep or truck. Here too there was a less detectable wooden version and a Bakelite version that went off with 250 pounds of pressure. It seems odd so relatively small a blast could stop a tank, but once when we were watching the war on the History Channel, Dad went into a rant about the criminally inept design of the Sherman tank. The plates of the tank tracks were held together with only two small hooks, so a relatively small explosion blew the track apart, turning the tank into a sitting duck. The Sherman had too little armor. It was famous for bursting into flames when struck by a shell. The GIs called them Ronson lighters, for the butane cigarette lighter whose motto was “lights every time.” A tank that survived its first encounter with the Germans was covered in anything at all the crew could get their hands on to add protection. Hollywood makes tanks look invincible, but a frequent sight on the battlefield was a combat engineer slowly walking along swinging the mine detector while a tank poked along behind him.
However the mine got found, the engineers had the utterly nerve-wracking task of probing in the soil to get the exact location of the mines. They’d gently slide a blade—a trench knife or bayonet—at a low angle into the soil so there would be no pressure on the top of the mine. When they encountered resistance, they’d attempt to defuse it and pull it. If there was a need for speed, they’d just mark the location and move on, trying to mark a path through the minefield.
When I was a little girl, my sister and I sometimes wanted to be something adventurous for Hallowe’en—a pirate or a highwayman, which meant we needed a sword. We carried an epee that was kicking around in the closet at the foot of the attic stairs. It had a thin blade, three or so feet long, with a full hilt. Mom helped us spray paint it gold, and we taped a wad of cotton to the end so no one came to a nasty end. We’d spread our haul of candy out before Dad, who always got first pick of our pirate booty. One day, after his death, my sister startled me by telling me that our “toy” was a souvenir of the war. And I realized why he’d kept it. He’d “liberated” it from somewhere because he immediately saw its use as a probe for mines. It was a souvenir of his survival.
Quite often the engineers were called in to take care of a minefield that had been discovered because someone had walked into it. As T.C. told me, when they arrived to work, there’d be body parts on the ground and up in the trees. With all the dangers and tricks meant to deceive the unwary, haste was fatal. They needed to outthink the German engineer who was trying to outthink them. If they saw a carelessly placed mine, there was likely to be another mine carefully hidden below it. Mines were booby trapped so when one was defused and pulled, another mine went off next to it. Antipersonnel mines were interspersed with antitank mines. But noticing tiny details or listening to the faintest gut whisperings took a patience and inner quiet that was very hard to come by in combat, with the infantry stalled, commanders demanding action, bullets flying, and artillery screaming in. The engineers did some of their minefield clearing at night but that hardly made it any safer.
Dad said that it was a sixth sense that got him through the war. He’d study the ground and just have a feeling—a stone in the road with a rough side up, not worn smooth by traffic, or a leaf not quite matted down the way it should be in the rain, a slight mark on a tree among the forest of trees--a mark that might have been left by the German engineers to signal a minefield to their own side. Taking the time to let the sixth sense work made all the difference. Haste was the enemy.
One source of haste came from the impatience of the upper echelon and nothing frustrated a commander more than a lowly subordinate gumming up the works. One sergeant in the third platoon of Company C told me why Jim Bagley, though an officer, meant so much to him. One time, he and another squad member were picked up in the jeep and taken to the 399th Battalion Headquarters where he found Capt. Bagley and the hot-headed colonel:
Seems the Infantry had run into a mined road that was preventing any advance. The Infantry Colonel was a blustering fool, in my estimation, and ordered us to go down the road into German territory and pull every mine we saw. He did not want us to take any precautions. Just yank them up. Capt Bagley spoke up to him and told him we were well trained and knew our business. And that he should let us do the job right. After a bit more bluster he agreed. We went ahead, found and carefully removed a lot of mines, and went back to report to Bagley that the road was cleared. I am ever thankful to that man for speaking up for his troops. Many other officers would not have. He recommended me and my buddy for the Bronze Star for our action.13
Refusal to listen to underlings was all too common in the Army. Dad was telling stories to me after he started going to reunions in the 1970s. One day, one story led to another, until he recalled the time a major and his driver pulled up next to him in their command car. Dad waved them down and warned the major that the road had not yet been swept for mines. “Nonsense, lieutenant, get out of my way,” he replied. Dad had to step back and let them go. Suddenly, Dad stopped talking, stared off at the corner of the room, and the story telling was over for the day.
Story of the Century p. 71
399th p. 54
Story of the Century p. 78
Knight
“Forgotten Memories of World War II, Sam L. Resnick”
Builders and Fighters p. 161
Builders p. 164
Rottman, 2010, p. 29
Longacre p. 105
Builders p. 164
Builders p. 165
Builders p. 168
Email February 10, 2000