How did the now banned antipersonnel mine appear and what role it played in wars

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1998, Ottawa signed the Convention on the Banning of Antipersonnel Mines and Booby Traps. This document imposed an absolute taboo on the production and resale of this type of weapon to other countries. Over the entire period of active use of anti-personnel explosive devices, millions of people have been seriously affected by this insidious weapon. Mines are considered an inhumane method of warfare, but the overwhelming majority of states continue to actively use them. Fear of invisible danger is perhaps the main damaging factor of this weapon. Therefore, stopping the advance of entire divisions with mines is cheap and cheerful.

The ancestor of mines from China and balls of gunpowder

The Chinese are considered to be the creators of mines. The first antipersonnel mine recorded in written sources was called "earth thunder" in the Celestial Empire. This explosive device was a hollow sphere filled with a mixture of gunpowder and bullets. The balls were buried in the ground to a depth of about half a meter at equal distances from each other. A gray-impregnated string connected the ignition devices of the balls in series. When the end of the rope was set on fire, the mines exploded one by one, hitting the approaching enemy with bullets.

Another Chinese device of this type was an iron ball with a mixture of gunpowder and pieces of iron inside. The Chinese called it "the bee hive". The ball was also buried in the ground with the same method of actuation as in the case of the "earth thunder". At the beginning of the 13th century, explosive mines, more or less similar to modern ones, protected the Chinese from the invasions of the Mongol Kublai Khan. Earthen containers full of gunpowder were disguised under a small layer of soil and crushed stone along the city walls. They were activated by means of a wick impregnated with saltpeter, or by means of a device similar to the lock of a flintlock gun. Enemy warriors approaching the city clung to the stretched lace with their foot, the flint was released with a trigger, and the spark that arose detonated a mine.

The first use by the Russians and stone-throwing land mines

Russian troops began using mines to defeat the enemy in the middle of the 19th century. Then Russia got bogged down in the Caucasus military clashes with the army of Shamil. At the Argun River, enemy artillerymen got into the habit of rolling out guns at night to fire at the Russian camp, located 700 meters away. Then military engineers laid mines on that site, which were blown up by means of an electric fuse, as soon as the enemy took their usual positions. The Russians used in those skirmishes a stone-throwing land mine similar to the ancient Chinese one.

The device consisted of an electric igniter with a platinum incandescent bridge, and a galvanic cell was used as a current source. During the conflict in Little Chechnya, the experience of detonating with an electric method was repeated. We learned how to activate a powder charge and chemical fuses by the Vlasov tube method. The principle was simple - a glass tube with sulfuric acid was inserted into a cardboard tube containing a mixture of sugar and berthollet's salt. The glass tube was crushed, and the chemical reaction of the mixture of substances led to a flash. Vlasov pipes were used by the Russian army until the First World War.

Antipersonnel mines appeared in the Russo-Turkish War in 1877-1878. A box or keg full of dynamite or gunpowder was buried in the ground along with an auto-explosive device. The wire rod was attached to the lever, and when the latter moved, the tube ignited, followed by the explosion of a land mine.

The experience of the First World War and the view of the Bolsheviks

In Russia, the Bolsheviks assigned a rather serious role to mine weapons. In the fall of 1918, a mine-blasting brigade was formed near Petrograd, and a military technical school was opened on the basis of an engineering school, which graduated specialists in mine-blasting business. In 1919, an engineering range was organized in Petrograd for the purpose of fundamental research on the properties of known explosives and the development of new ones. A specialized laboratory also started operating at the test site.

The reason for the close attention of the new political leadership to mine weapons was the Russian-German front-line skirmishes of 1917-18. The Russian army, which was unable to resist the Germans, had only one method of confrontation - land mines. During the Civil War, the Reds quite often used mines, mostly anti-vehicle (railway) and object mines. In Pskov, taken by the Germans, during the explosions of object mines, more than half a thousand German soldiers were killed and wounded. River mines were also widely used, disrupting the advance of the White forces towards Petrograd in off-road conditions. In 1919, the Moscow lines were defended by antipersonnel land mines.

All the mines used by the Red Army during that period were homemade. In the 1920s, due to the difficult economic situation in the country, mine weapons stopped at the stage of development and experimental research. By the 1930s, the Soviet military leadership had developed initial ideas about the role of mine weapons in modern wars, on the basis of which they formulated the tactical and technical requirements for engineering ammunition. In 1936, the first samples of a delayed-action fuse with a delay from 12 hours to 35 days entered service with the Red Army.

Minefields of the Great Patriotic War

In the Soviet-Finnish war (1939-1940), the Red Army men were faced with the fact that enemy ski units penetrate into the Russian rear through narrow necks, and it was not impossible to tightly close the front line with infantry. To combat such sabotage, an anti-ski wooden mine was quickly developed and put into practice, and soon an improved version - an anti-personnel high-explosive fragmentation mine. The next development was a guided jumping anti-personnel mine.

In all its glory, the combat effectiveness of mine weapons showed itself on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. Besides the widespread minefields on both sides, there was another point. There was an invisible confrontation between Hitler's miners and Soviet sappers. At the time of the retreat, the Wehrmacht left behind itself deadly "surprises" with a clockwork mechanism, the detection and neutralization of which fell on the shoulders of the Red Army. An infernal cacophony of mine explosions accompanied the entire course of the war. But the experience gained during that period was strengthened over time, and today Russian mine specialists have international authority.

Well, at the end of World War II, when the Soviet army took Berlin, it surprised more than frightened the Germans.