Well not really. I was going to put this in general questions but I thought there probably isn’t a single correct answer and it would be interesting to see what people come up with.
Inspired by a scenario I’ve seen in at least a couple of different movies, in the interests of plot an individual finds that he has stepped on and activated an anti-personnel landmine but it has not yet detonated and won’t do so until he lifts his foot off the mechanism (I have no idea if such landmines work that way in real life), he is far from help and assistance and will have to use his wits and ingenuity to save himself.
Is it possible, or is he screwed with a capital SCREWED?
Does the type of mine make a difference? From the straight explosive variety to those particularly unpleasant types that leap into the air before detonating.
I have my own ideas for a possible solution but I’d be interested in seeing what other people come up with first.
In reality, almost all mines detonate immediately.
Because of how they work, you get a few seconds of delay on something like a WW2-era German S-mine (the “Bouncing Betty”), but the detonating process is started whether you’re still standing on it or not. All you can really do is fall to the ground and get as flat as you can.
In your scenario, I’d imagine you may be able to dig around the device until it is exposed, slide your foot off the pressure plate, replacing it with a rock or something, and run away.
Yeah, I kind of imagined thats how they might work, why give your enemy the even theoretical chance to avoid it?
Thats similar to what I imagined, keep pressure on it and dig a pit alongside it, hope you can push it the device over quickly enough so that what it goes off the blast isn’t directed directly at you.
Landmines are primarily area denial weapons. Even if it is theoretically possible to escape getting blown up, you’ve still tied up the squad trying to get the victim free, and ensured that they aren’t going to head any deeper into the minefield.
IME, there are several ways to “fuse” a mine depending on what you’ve got in your bag of tricks. My squad once came across a cache of five 55 gallon drums each containing gasoline in West VietNam. I rigged a pressure release trigger under several drums and a trip wire trigger under another drum. I hung the wire (fishline, actually) in such a manner as it’d be easily detected. I figured Charlie would want to recover the components and explosive for his own use. So he’d want to move a drum or two out of the way before he tackled the one with the tripwire going to it.
We were about 3 klicks away when we heard the whoosh and saw several flaming fuel drums rocketing into the sky.
Soldiers virtually never travel alone. The idea of a delayed action mine is that other soldiers will come in to assist the trapped soldier and the mine will probably kill several of them when it goes off.
The Vietnam War movie, The Boys in Company C has a scene similar to this. Soldier steps on mine, hears click and freezes. After standing there for a long time trying to figure out what to do, other soldiers decide to put ammo cans on mine to approximate guys weight to keep it from going off. They do this and then run.
My memory of this is kind of vague. The movie came out in 1978 and I remember seeing it on TV when I was a kid and I don’t think I’ve seen it since then, although it’s possible I saw it again when I was older. I think this is pretty much how the scene happened, though.
OK, so there are some anti-personnel mines that really do work as depicted in the movies? Ie there is a click as the person steps on it and it is activated but it doesn’t actually detonate until they remove their foot from the mechanism?
This thread was inspired by what I believe was a made-for-tv movie I watched a long time ago. All I vaguely recall was that a handful of disparate soldiers found themselves together deep in an isolated no-mans-land area of a country at war, it ended with one of the characters standing on an activated mine with all the others either dead or gone as night closed in. The implication was that help wouldn’t be coming and that if he wanted to escape he’d have to come up with something clever himself.
Great, now I’m wondering what that movie/tv program was.
I could not tell you whether there are any (the “Bouncing Betty” in particular was incorrectly stated to work this way by US propaganda), I was just mentioning that the threat of the next land mine is for some purposes as effective as the blast of the first.
I don’t really know. I’ve never had any personal experience with mines. But I would assume there must be something noticeable when you step on one because the purpose of the mine is to make you stop in place.
On a side note, here’s another thing about anti-personnel mines: many of them are not designed to kill you. They’re actually more effective if they just wound you badly. Say eight soldiers are out on patrol and one of them steps on a mine. If it blows up and kills that soldier, the other seven can continue on their mission. But if the mine explodes and blows the soldier’s foot off, then he’s removed from the mission and so are two or three of the other soldiers as they carry him back to their base for medical treatment.
I believe it was in the book “Bloods”, which chronicled black soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam, that an army engineer described exactly this situation.
He was called in to help a guy who had stepped on a mine, felt the plunger depress, and then stood still. He ended up tying a rope around him and having a group of guys yank him off really fast. He survived.
I always thought it was a completely bullshit trope but I once looked into it and found that a very few mines could possibly work that way. Not very many. I’ll have to look into it a little deeper because I can’t remember where I found the information.
Yes, he is screwed. According to a friend of a friend there are no such mines and I suppose that he knows what he is talking about being a mine disposal instructor.
I just saw a trailer for the movie The Monuments Men. One of the scenes in the trailer depicted Matt Damon’s character standing on an unexploded landmine.
IANAEODTechnician, but I’d say your best bet is to be wearing thick-soled boots and ballistic shorts (they make them, they look like diapers, but they’re supposed to protect one of your key junctions from blasts from below).
I can definitely see this being a possible way to set up a mine, but it strikes me as being more complicated for no particular gain (sure you might tie up the squad as they try to get their buddy off the mine, but if the mine explodes, one or more of the squad is now wounded, and the explosion alerts you to their presence if you didn’t know about them already). As far as complicated goes, consider that a mine is a device that if designed properly, will probably completely destroy itself in use. Why not design the trigger to be mechanically simpler so there is less to fail while minimizing cost?
I’ve read that some mines, rather than carrying explosives, simply would launch a flare (sometimes attached to a whistle), for the express purpose of alerting sentries to the presence of an enemy force (or a deer, whichever).
