LAND MINE DETECTOR

Grey River Argus, 17 February 1945, Page 6

LAND MINE DETECTOR

Modern Thriller !

In a recent 8.8. C. overseas broadcast, William Hall said: When war broke out, Mr. and Mrs. Tye, a young married couple, were living in a London district. He was a stone mason; she worked as an assistant in a twopenny lending library, handing out novels —romances, thrillers and detective stories —to customers who called in the little store. Every Thursday evening—her half-day—they used to go together to a movie show at the local cinema. As they sat together, side by side on plush upholstered seats, in the darkness of the cinema they little dreamt that they were going to take part themselves in a drama as thrilling as anything they’d seen on the screen or read in the books from the library.

He went away into the army; she got a job in an ordnance factory. Soon he was fighting overseas and she was experiencing the blitz at home. Among the many buildings damaged in the blitz was the local cinema, which had to close down because the auditorium was unsafe. He wrote letters home from time to time and she wrote to him. They sometimes felt like two little grains of sand separated in a great big world. But so far, thrilling enough as it was, their life was not very much different from that of many other young married couples. He got to Africa. She continued to travel each day by bus to the war plant where she worked.

But one day, in 1942, she got a fresh job nearer home. She was enrolled by a firm which had contracted with the Ministry of Supply to make a certain secret device which was urgently needed. She wrote to her husband to tell him about her new job but she didn’t tell him what they were making. Suburban passers-by saw strange machinery being moved into the damaged cinema and a handful of workers arriving. Among these workers was Mrs. Tye. She passed through the entrance where she and her husband had so often bought tickets and clocked into a very strange factory.

Under the gilded dome of the foyer, on the floor which had once been carpeted, and across which she and her husband had so often walked on Thursday evenings when they were out for pleasure, where a series now of long benches under shaded lamps. And there was a hum of electric motors. Men were walking about with long bamboo poles, wrapped around at. intervals with resin band, and some were plugging them into coil boxes. And men and women were working at the benches winding coils and wiring terminals. Some of the men were wearing earphones plugged into little strange boxes like radio sets and they were moving an oval flat box Io and fro at the end of a' stick and listening and carefully making notes. . Mrs. Tye was put to work winding electric coils at a bench. So many turnings there were in these coils that they had to be counted by machinery. There was an urgency about the job. What they were making was needed very quickly and so that

full co-operation could be got from the staff the management took the workers into their confidence. Mrs. Tye was told that they were making mine-detectors.

Meanwhile, away out in North Africa, soldiers—among them the exstone mason, Mr. Tye, were prodding and probing with bayonets to discover the hidden mines sown by Rommel’s troops. They were Working perilously through mine-fields probing about gingerly in the sand, liable at any moment to be caught by some booby trap and blown to pieces.

Time went on and Ihen one day Mrs. Tye received a letter from her husband, passed by the censor, which said:

“My company is now using some of the machines you make; they are stamped with the name and address of your firm anyway. Tell all the girls to make a perfect job of them, darling; we rely completely on their accuracy, in fact, half the Army does.”

Well, imagine Mrs. Tye’s feelings if you can, as she worked at her job after having received that letter. Like the rest of the women she worked from eight in the morning till eight at night and sometimes until nine. And not only every day; of the week but Sundays too until the supplies turned out eased the urgency of the demand. She was prepared to work until she dropped, at these highly sensitive delicate instruments. And should take great care not to make any mistake. She’d seen some samples of the type of mines which the devilish enemy had buried a few inches below the sand. Anti-tank mines which blew up with terrific power when pressed, destroying the tracks of the tanks and crippling them. Anti-per-sonnel mines which, concealed just below the surface of the sancf when stepped on, jumped up four feet into the air and then exploded, scattering steel balls all round. Sometimes, while she was working in that cinema foyer, she’d think of her husband out there in the desert among those terrible mines. A month later came another letter from her husband:

“We have done great work with the machines you make, darling; they are deadly accurate, and many a timn has our lives depended on them too; they have practically been responsible for our getting through Jerry’s minefields; they’re wonderful.” '

Now on Monday this week I met Mrs. Tye. I wns visiting this factory where she works. I had to have a special pass issued by the Ministry of Supply. The story of the mine-detec-tor can now be told. The big job has been done, although there are still areas in North Africa which are being cleared of mines. Rommel laid his mines as part of his delaying action but they didn’t delay us long enough. The Eighth Army got through too fast for him and he lost his Afrika Korps. It was this apparatus, manufactured in that suberban cinema, which literally paved the way for the victories of El Alamem, El Agheila. and Mareth.

Truth —it. has often been said —is stranger than fiction. And I can certainly sav that I never have visited a cinema which has thrilled me more than this one which I’ve seen this week and which chance has turned

into a war factory. Scraps of old movie posters still flap on the walls outside. And inside the building some of the partitions have been made from old boards which carry big coloured pictures of cinema stars —some of them upside down. Just, inside the door, where the box-office used to be and where the prices of admission arc still displayed, is a rack for time cards and a. clocking-in-machine. What is left of the heavy chandelier hangs from the centre of the foyer dome but the benches are illumfmated by florescent daylight lamps—long bars of light—and the women sit at the benches on high steel factory chairsUp one of the imitation Corinthian pillars a thermometer has been printed showing the rising production each week and the first urgent target—now long since passed. But you’ll probably be feeling as impatient as I was to know what the mine-detector is, what it looks like and how it works. Well, imagine a flat, oval box about the size of a meat dish and a bamboo pole stuck into if. You get hold of it by, the pole and hold the box near to the ground. You feel as if you were handling one of those extensions which can be lilted to an electric vacuum sweeper. On I your back is strapped a webbing knapsack containing an amplifier and batteries and on your head are a pair of earphones. Now on the stick handle is a switch or tuner and there are leads running from the flat b’ox to the amplifier and ear phones. The oval box contains two electric coils which send out magnetic waves. Now you move the box backwards and ' forwards and to and fro just above the ground—just as if you were sucking up dust —and when the juice is switched on your ear-phones make a sort of hissing sound. But if you ret near to anything made of metal the hissing sound changes into a shrill high-pitched hum. And the nearer you get and the shriller the warning hum until it becomes quite howl. It doesn’t matter whether the metal is covered or not, it will detect its presence. There are two sizes made of this detector, one with a long pole for getting a long sweep and for working when you are standing up—say, at night—and one with a short stick for use when crawling under fire. So as to give a longer sweep, the longer pole has a balancing weight at the buttend, and to make it easier to carry, there are some webbing straps to fasten to your belt.

This is how the detecting parties usually work. A patch eight yards wide is cleared first through a minefield and tapes are laid on the ground. Two parties of detectors start at the same time, on c at the edge of the minefield, the other some distance across. They work- in pairs witli an assistant whose job it is Io place markers over the mines when they are found—little white flags—pegs with a bit of rag on the end. And tapes are laid as they go along. At a safe distance come the mine lifters whose dangerous job it is to dig out the mines and remove the detonators, rendering them safe, and at the same time they keep a sharp lookout for enemy booby traps. They have to be very careful when digging up a mine because there may be another mine just underneath which is set to go off when the other is lifted. And then bringing up the rear are men with signboards which they lay. along the edges of the lane, red towards the minefield, white towards the cleared land. If a forty yard lane must bo cleared they work in the same way but. with more parties. The detector is made in’ separate parts. If anything should go wrong one part can be placed without having to repair the whole machine.

Every second is precious. The vital coils are set in tropical wax which won’t melt .in high temperatures. Although delicately made and highly sensitive so as to record reactions to hidden mines the apparatus has to be strong and capable of standing up to rough handling. It may be interesting for you to know that the polos are made by fish-ing-rod makers, the castings by a firm which used to make models for advertising whisky, and the coil boxes by a firm which made church organs. Th e detector has been developed from an invention by two Polish officers. The Germans and the Russians have mine-detectors 100, but this latest British one is an improvement.

Most of the workers at. the factory are women. They are specially suited for the work because of their delicate touch. I talked to many of them. I cam e across three sisters working together. Some of the women are getting on in years. One, Mrs. Brophy, is mother of sixteen children and grandmother of ten, and she’s been putting in full time since the factory started. But Mrs. Brophy seems to have overdone it. She’s off sick this week, in hospital. Proudest of all is Gladys Tye, whose husband has used these detectors so effectively. She hasjiis word for it that many lives have been saved and much valuable time.

Som e day—she hopes—she will sit with her hubby again in that cinema, not on steel factory chairs but on soft plush armchairs in the repaired auditorium, and there will be carpets down again, and lights sparkling outside. and there’ll be chocolates and ice-cream, and they’ll sit ba'ck together and enjoy the drama and romance of the screen all the more because of their suffering, their long separation, and the dangers through which they have passed. Maybe they’ll be more critical of the drama of the screen after all this, but I doubt it. Like most English folk they’ll probably relax and they’ll probably be happy in their own quiet way and very tolerant.