MINESWEEPER AT WORK

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 29 September 1943, Page 2

MINESWEEPER AT WORK

“NO GLAMOUR AND HIGHLY *2 DANGEROUS” The cobalt, sometimes clear greerr; Mediterranean was glassy calm. Th« sun burned down out of a cloudiest sky and shimmered back again off th<£ unbroken surface of the sea. All I coul«i hear or feel was the deep, even beAj of our Diesel engine, just like the drumming one hears in an Arab village, as the minesweeper plugged albiyit with our partner ship about half a mile on our beam, writes W. E. Mundy, a special correspondent of the LonctfjJi “Daily Telegraph,” on board a British minesweeper in the Mediterranean. It was now past noon; wft had been out sififce dawn, and what at first had seemed a hazardous job had now become monotonous. We had not seen even one lone Luftwaffe aeroplajae*though our gunners kept up their vjgj£ lant look-out the whole time. *■>*** Then, suddenly, a thudding, hollow Bolm. It seemed to last for minutes, while the air around me appeared to compress and my breathing quickened to a gasp. A great spout of sea and spray with dense black smoke and fumes shot skywards nearly 100 feet out of the still Mediterranean. I was sitting on the bridge in a wicker chair which the skipper had allowed me to carry up there (guests are rare aboard H.M. minesweepers). “Torpedoed,” I vaguely thought, recovering my scattered wits. (I must have dozed off.) “Mine,” said the skipper, laconically but reassuringly. “But they are not all so easy as that one.” FLOATING MINE EXPLODED I remembered then having heard the faint crack of a rifle from our companion ship. This mine had been a “sitter.” It had broken from its moorings, floated to the surface and a first lucky shot had touched it off. It was still a deadly menace to shipping, but some keen-eyed lookout had spotted it or perhaps our sound equipment had located it. I still do not know, as it does not do to ask the Royal Navy much about apparatus. The episode shocked me to the full realisation of how lacking in glamour but how highly dangerous is the job done by His Majesty’s minesweepers as tfcey keep the Mediterranean channels swept clear for the entry of British and Allied warships and merchant convoys carrying thousands of tons of war materials and food for the armies ashore. Minesweeping in this war has become an exact science as compared with the last war. Mines are now of three kinds—contact, magnetic, and acoustic—and they are far more complicated and difficult to deal with than in the old days. Since any or all of them may be used at some time the areas in /hich they can be laid had to be swept for all three kinds or, as the Navy says, “species.” Magnetic and acoustic mines may now be dropped from aircraft almost anywhere—in estuaries, rivers, channels, bays, or even docks—to which surface craft and submarine minelayers cannot penetrate.