Mine Disposal Needed Skill, Courage, Luck

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 5

Mine Disposal Needed Skill, Courage, Luck

(Specially written for "The Press."]

pROM late 1940 until early 1943, Hugh Randal Syme was a person who could have been voted one of the most likely men in the world to die with his boots on.

This Australian, who became during the war Lieutenant Syme, George Gross, George Medal and Bar, was one of a small group of experts who were engaged in Britain on the absurdly dangerous task of making unexploded mines safe.

Lieutenant Syme did survive his tour of duty with the naval section known as Rendering Mines Safe, but this was due to his technical skills, his enormous courage—and his blind luck.

Hugh Randal Syme returned to civilian life to pur- ) sue a distinguished career in Melbourne. He died last month at the age of 63. I Mr Syme was the son of the former proprietor of the “Melbourne Age” newspaper. He became the general manager and a director of the company. His work in defusing bombs came to him almost by accident: Syme and three other Australian naval officers, having blindly volunteered, were selected as replacements for an unnamed top-secret team. They had just reached England in October, 1940. The volunteers were stunned by their appointment to the mine defusing squad. They at once recognised the ominous significance of the word “replacements.” It can be said, without resort to heroics, that the members of the mine squad worked continuosly with death.

The courage of these men was staggering. Their margin of safety was often nonexistent: sometimes they found themselves with 17 seconds in which to get to the specified point of safety 400 yards away—a

wildly impossible task in thigh-deep mud on the Humber estuary, or when digging a hole out of which only one's feet protruded, or when the fuse had already run for an unknown number of seconds. The most fantastic escapes were always the source of the greatest merriment. In Manchester, Syme had fled from a running fuse, straight through a window, through the glass and into a lane. Race To Survive He had fled the length of the lane, leaping in stockinged feet from rubbish tin to rubbish tin, unable to avoid them because they blocked the lane in dozens. At the end of the lane he had leapt a six-foot brick wall and fallen 20 feet into a quarry. The mine had not exploded because the whirring was not the mine at all. It was a clock on the mantelpiece, buzzing to itself before it struck the half-hour. In the most famous of his wartime operations Syme spent three days and nights defusing a German aerial mine in Primrose Hill. London. The mine had burrowed into

the retaining wall of a reservoir overlooking Regents park. If it blew up it would flood the park: there were many homes in danger.

Syme found that the mine was buried to its full depth: he would have to dig for it. He found a vertical shaft which the fallen mine had carved for itself. He peered into the shaft; its walls were smooth yellow clay, and there was the top of the mine, barely visible, nine feet down. The problem was vibration. Vibration could set the mine off. Syme considered digging a vertical shaft down to the fuse 11 or 12 feet underground, but he abandoned this idea—every piece of dislodged clay which fell on to the mine could put it off. He also gave up the idea of winching the mine to the surface. The answer when it came, was simple, Syme did not know that he had conceived a method of recovery never used before.

He paced out 10 feet down the slope. From here he would sap his way back towards the mine: he would come at it from below.

He planned to tunnel directly on to the fuse, disturbing the clay about the mine as little as possible until the fuse was withdrawn and made safe. After that he could tunnel in reasonable safety round to the other side of the mine, to the detonator.

The mine was the magnetic type. Syme prepared for the task with non magnetic tools. He dressed for labouringHis digging tools were nonmagnetic—they were wooden. They had belonged to a child. Syme climbed the embankment with his little wooden bucket and his little wooden spade. Down on his knees he began to dig. He worked all day, head first, wriggling out of the deepening hole to empty the spoil from his -bucket.

When night fell he waddled away from the hole, aching and filthy, having progressed to about his own length. The next day he carried on deepening his downwardlyinclined hole, pushing and wriggling and squirming in and out of the hole with each bucketful. Roped By Foot But the time would come, sooner or later, when he would reach the point from which he could not wriggle free from the clay—and there he would be, buried on a grave of his own digging. He arranged for a sailor to station himself in a ditch 300 yards from the mine. Syme knotted the end of a long length of rope to his right ankle and wriggled back into the clay, head first towards the mine. He filled the bucket, gave the rope a sharp tug, and the sailor dragged him out. At the end of the second day Syme reached the mine: but to his despair he found that instead of the bomb-fuse facing him it was the detonator.

The bomb-fuse was still far away, still locked up in the earth on the far side of the mine—and he had to deal with the bomb-fuse as the first step. Syme slept on the problem and decided that he would have to sap right round the mine and come at it from the other side. He and the sailor hoped he could be pulled round a curve.

Because it might be an acoustic weapon he had to get round the mine without touching it or knocking it or scraping it or becoming jammed. One careless blow from an elbow or a knee could dislodge the inertia weight and he would be dead before he knew it and Primrose Hill would be destroyed. Continual Danger If he did become jammed by any inadvertent positioning of his body there would be little that anyone could do about it. These dangers did not bear consideration, but they were there continually. He came at last, when the day was well advanced, to the white metal of the fuse and he had to remove the last trace of mud and grit before he could begin to render the weapon safe. Syme did render it safe, lying on his side, almost imprisoned underground. The achievement was not that final operation; it was the conception and the execution of the idea. The heroism was not the fire of one golden moment, but a sustained command during three long days over body, mind and spirit. All told, Lieutenant Syme and an Australian companion, Lieutenant J. S. Mould, G.C., G.M., handled more than 140 mines. What these men did was a work existing apart from one’s ordinary conception of what the human mind can bear. This was a job that went on and on and on, calling from its few practitioners a form and degree of courage which was positively spiritual.