MINESWEEPING WORK.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 August 1919, Page 9

MINESWEEPING WORK.

CLEARING THE SEAS. * , LARGE FORCE ENGAGED, A FORMIDABLE TASK. London, May 17There arc at present 430 British minesweepers at work, mainly on .the many targe British minefields in the North Sea, The mines laid in the German Bight are now being swept up by the Germans. Given a fine summer, it is hoped to complete the sweeping of all moored mines of the clearance allotted ,to Britain l>y the end of November. In many of the minefields the mines lie very shallow, and therefore arc dangerous to the sweepers, who can only attack them with theoretical safety on the rise of the tide and in calm weather. Even with every precaution, accidents occasionally occur, but the spirit of the men is as iplendid as ever. The total requirements of volunteers for the Mine/Clearance Service have now practically been completed. There are still some signalmen required. Several officers and men have gone to the Mediterranean, where there ib plenty of work still to be done in the Northern Aegean, and in thosa ports of the Black Sea where it is posr sible for the merchant ships to trade.

t, British-moored mines still exist off the Belgian, Danish, Dutch, German, and Norwegian coas,ts, and, of course, within the Baltic.

British minesweepers are at work In I Norway and in Holland, and the United States Navy is now collecting a force to clear the large minefield which they laid between the Orkneys and Norway. Drifting mines will continue to be prevalent until all the moored mines are swept. The moored mines break away in gales and drift very quickly in all sorts of directions according to winds and tides. When adrift, however, they do not constitute anything like the danger one would imagine, and the losses of ships by hitting drifting mines aw remarkably small.i The bow wave of a vessel appear* to turn the mine from Impact, and the chance of hitting a drifting mine is infinitesimal. Most of these drifting mines find their way to the [ Dutch, Danish, German, and Norwegian coasts, but in strong easterly winds we get a few on our coasts. There are 600 officers and 14,000 men now busy in clearing up the mines, and these consist entirely of volunteers, nearly 00 per cent, of whom are the old minesweepers we regarded so highly in the war.

Upwards of, 100,000 mines have been laid in the North Sea during the war, and it will be realised that a large number of these have isunk without exploding, although every effort is made to explode mines rather than sink them. These Bunken mines are in some cases still dangerous, and constitute a danger to fishing vessels, who may pick them up in their trawls, with the result th.at they sometimes explode when the trawl is being hauled in. Endeavor has been made to render them Innocuous, as far as possible, by "harrowing" the bottom with a special kind of sweep, but owing to the enormous expanse of ground to be covered it is not possible to carry this out universally. An apparatus has, however, now been invented, which, although it reduces to a certain extent the amount of fish which are caught in a trawl, prevents a mine from entering it. Unfortunately, for the former reason, it is not generally popular amongst the fishermen.