Fatfox9's Blog

Group 3: Rope Party

The Rope Party were the next group to start work in the morning and followed the Protection Party.  They carried spools of nylon cord which were more or less 50 meters long.  We had three of these spools, one for each of the three lines to be worked (A, B, C) or Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Lines.  If you read previous posts you will understand this better.

Each rope had a different number of knots tied into them as follows:

Alpha Line Rope: 1 knot every 3 meters

Bravo Line Rope: 1 knot every 2 meters

Charlie Line Rope: 1 knot ever 1 meters

From this you can do the rough maths for 1,000 meters if you work on 3 mines per knot.  Works out to about 5,500 mines.  We normally laid about 3,000 mines per day.  Of course if you were a badly resourced crew you would find extra knots in the rope as a result of breaks and joins and this could make things dodgy and confusing on the ground.

Some minefields worked on double-density cluster layouts plus other nasty devices but they are completely other animals and I will discuss these at a later time.  These types of minefield hurt many of our boys and were treacherous, sinister places to work.

For the purpose of this blog I have made the line nearest the enemy Line C and work always started on this line first in the morning so if you were an idle wanker you made sure you got into the A Line.  This meant you had about 20 additional minutes to smoke and talk crap to your mates before you started work.  The fact that you would have to work that time in at the end of the day after the B and C Lines were finished did not make an iota of difference to the devious Sapper brain.  In all honesty the Echelon Method of working did not begin to really matter until the laying party started to work in the Charlie Line, and the Rope Parties could quite safely work on all three Lines at the same time without any danger to personnel.

After the dannert coil had been removed from the minefield, the Rope Party hooked up their rope to the metal picket left in the ground the day before as the start point, and began walking the line off the spool  for the next 50 metres.  They would then put a small metal pin in the ground, hook the line onto it and continue for another 50 metres.  This they continued doing until they had pulled the line out enough times to achieve the days laying objective.  All three lines carried out this action.

At this point it is extremely important to note that there will be live mines adjacent to the initial start point of the day (the last clusters from the previous days work), and there would always be an NCO or switched on Sapper controlling these start-up activities.  A foot out of place here or a moments inattention could be very tragic indeed and fuck everyones whole day up.  And yes, it did happen.

Group 4: Digging Party

From the number of knots shown above you can see the 3 Lines had 3 different densities of mines.  At each knot a mine “cluster” was dug.  A “cluster” consisted of 3 holes dug with a badza (a type of hoe), one at 12 o’clock, one at 3 o’clock, and one at 9 o’clock.  I do not want to go deeply into the science of number of “mines per meter front” at this stage but you can see that by adjusting the number of knots on each Line, the probabability of standing on a mine within any given meter of the minefield frontage can increase or decrease.  Simple Sapper Stuff.

It therefore goes without saying that the next group into the minefield was the Digging Party.

Here is a badza.  They caused bad blisters to hands not wearing gloves.  I know, I dug, I had blisters.  Many of them.  Our medics took much glee in injecting merthiolate into them.  Ours were a bit more modern but you get the idea (theswift.org):

Here is a bottle of Merthiolate……it burns like shit when injected into a blister caused by a badza.  This bottle looks like it just came out of a medics bag (flickr):

Here is a diagram showing mine clusters and the Rope and Digging Parties:

If this looks confusing to you just remember we had to work in here and at this time there are not even any live mines on the diagram!

The Digging Party had to start immediately after the Rope Party and actually chased them.  The Rope Party could not move on to the next 50 meter run before the Digging Party had dug the last cluster of the current run or they would not know where to dig.  Again digging parties could work on all three Lines at once but very soon the importance of the Echelon Method will be seen very clearly.  The Digging Party were also responsible for breaking-up any clumps of soil excavated as well as remove any rocks.  Clumps of soils and rocks/stones were not very useful when covering armed mines.  A very good friend of mine, Charlie McQuillan, was badly injured when a large clump of soild soil contacted the ignitor of a mine he had just armed.  A sad day indeed but thankfully he lived to tell the tale.

Thats it for today.  In the next post we will talk about the Laying and Arming Parties.  Many people think they are one and the same but they are not.

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© Mark Richard Craig and Fatfox9’s Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.