This weapon was not designed to kill. Killing is too merciful and too cheap for the enemy. The German engineers who created this mine had a different logic in mind. A soldier torn in half only needs a grave. But a soldier deprived of his legs and what makes a man a man needs a hospital. surgeons, months of rehabilitation, [music] and remains a living reminder to all who are not yet wounded.
Lieutenant Colonel Sloan, author of a post-war study on mine warfare, would call it the most terrifying device the Allied forces encountered during the entire war. American infantry men would give it a name with the dark humor that helped them stay sane on the front lines, jumping Betty. But the French, who were the first to encounter this mine in September 1939, when the war was just beginning, would be the most accurate.
They would call it the silent soldier. A weapon that guards its position [music] without sleep or fatigue, knows no fear or mercy, and does not need a human to kill. Almost 2 million of these mines will leave German factories over the next 10 years. They will be sewn like grass on the beaches of Normandy, buried in Italian [music] soil, scattered across the eastern front.
And then when the war is over, someone will have to remove them with their bare hands. This is the story of how a small [music] steel cylinder became the most hated weapon of World War II. Germany in the early 1930s lived in the shadow of the Treaty of Versailles, which formerly prohibited it from having a modern army formally.
In practice, military engineers continued to work in closed laboratories, solving problems that did not officially exist. One of these problems seemed simple, to create a defensive weapon that did not require a soldier’s presence. an invisible sentry capable of guarding a position day and night in any weather without fatigue, fear, or pity.
Anti-personnel mines had been around for several decades by that time, but their effectiveness left much to be desired. A person would step on a mine, the mine would explode under their foot, and the person would die or lose a limb. One charge per victim. German engineers wondered how to change this [music] ratio.
How to make it so that one mine could hit several soldiers marching in formation at once. The answer came from a basic understanding of physics. An explosion at ground level [music] directs most of the energy into the ground, wasting it. But if the charge is raised to about 1 meter before detonation, the fragments will fly horizontally at the level of the most vulnerable parts of the human body.
The solution was elegant in its cruelty. A two-stage mechanism where a powder charge first ejects the mine from the ground and then the main TNT charge surrounded by a shell of steel balls detonates in the air. In 1935, the shrapnel mine 35 entered service with the Vermacht. The steel cylinder was 13 cm high and 10 cm in diameter, weighing about 4 kg.
Only three thin metal antenna of the fuse remained on the surface of the ground, practically invisible in the grass. A pressure of 7 kg activated the mechanism. The weight of a child On 7th September 1939, a week after the German invasion of Poland, the French army began a cautious offensive in the Sar region.
11 divisions crossed the border, fulfilling their allied obligations to a dying Poland. The main forces of the Vermacht were in the east, and French commanders expected an easy advance deep into German territory. The first few kilometers confirmed these expectations. German units withdrew without a fight, leaving empty trenches and untouched roads.
Intelligence reported no serious resistance. [music] And then the losses began. Soldiers fell for no apparent reason, without the sound of a shot, without the familiar whistle of a shell. Explosions came from somewhere below and simultaneously from within the ranks. As if the earth itself was attacking those who dared to walk on it.
The survivors described what was happening [music] in a confused and incredulous manner. A quiet click, a short pause of a few heartbeats, and then something flew out from under their feet and exploded right in front of their faces. Those who were within a radius of 20 m fell dead or mutilated. Those who stood further away were wounded by stray shrapnel and remained lying in the grass, afraid to move.
By 11th September, the offensive had stalled, not because of enemy counterattacks or a lack of supplies. 11 divisions withdrew to their starting positions because the soldiers refused to advance. [music] Every step became a lottery. Every meter of grass could hide death. And no orders could force a man to move where the ground itself kills.
French intelligence compiled the first descriptions of the new weapon and sent them to Allied headquarters. The device was given a nickname that would stick forever, the silent soldier. To understand why this mine was so terrifying, you need to examine it as [music] the Allied sappers did, pouringover captured samples with training diagrams [music] from 1943 in their hands.
The outer shell was a conventional steel cylinder. Inside was a second smaller diameter cylinder surrounded by a layer of steel balls or cut metal rods depending on the production batch. In the center of the inner cylinder was a charge of TNT weighing about 200 g. Below it was a chamber filled with black powder, the same old-fashioned powder used in musketss in the 18th century.
It was this powder that acted as the [music] lifting mechanism. The detonator was a masterpiece of deadly simplicity. Three metal prongs were connected to the percussion cap via a spring mechanism. Sufficient pressure compressed the spring. The cap struck the detonator and an irreversible process was set in motion.
But the main feature was the delay. Almost 4 seconds passed between the moment of activation and the mind being ejected from the ground. Enough time for a person to take another step or two away from the point of activation. Enough time for his comrades to approach at the sound of an incomprehensible [music] click.
Then black powder ejected the inner cylinder to a height of 90 cm to 1.5 m. Three detonators fired almost simultaneously [music] in the air and 350 steel balls scattered horizontally in all directions at a speed sufficient to pierce a human body. The explosion’s height was calculated with anatomical precision. the level of the pelvis, thighs, and lower abdomen.
Where large arteries and vital organs are concentrated, where injuries rarely kill instantly, but almost always [ __ ] for the rest of one’s [music] life. The mine was not designed to kill instantly. It was designed to create invalids. A dead soldier only needs a grave. A wounded soldier needs evacuation, surgeons, hospitals, and months of rehabilitation, and he remains a living reminder to those who are not yet wounded.
The success in SAR convinced the German command of the effectiveness of the new weapon. Production of the Shrapnau mine reached industrial scale and by the middle of the war mines were being supplied [music] by several factories throughout Germany. Markings on captured samples indicated Munich, Berlin, [music] and dozens of other production sites.
By 1945, total production would exceed 1,900,000 [music] units. But prevalent use began with the arrival of Irwin Raml as inspector of coastal defense. The field marshall understood what many in Berlin did not. The concrete bunkers of the Atlantic wall and coastal batteries would not stop the Allied invasion. There were too few of them.
The line of defense was too long and the enemy’s superiority in the air and at sea was [music] too obvious. Another solution was needed. Raml bet on mines. On the islands of San Malo off the coast of Normandy, where Allied intelligence suspected the presence of heavy artillery batteries, he gave an order that would go down in military history.
Smines were to be sewn like grass. Not hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands. By June 1944, the west coast of France had become the most extensive minefield in history. Shrapnel mines surrounded every bunker, blocked every path, and waited in the sand of every beach where infantry could land.
They were combined with heavy teller anti-tank mines, creating traps within traps. If an armored vehicle was blown up by an [music] anti-tank mine, the crew had nowhere to go. Getting out of the car meant [music] stepping into a field of jumping death. Meanwhile, French engineer Pierre Deland, who had fled to America after the fall of France, was trying to help the Allies create their own version of the German weapon.
He brought with him the blueprints for the Modell 1939, a French copy of the Smine. The Americans [music] launched their own version, designated M2, into production. It was a failure. The design proved unreliable. The mechanism was temperamental [music] and the mine regularly malfunctioned in combat conditions.
To create a working analog, the Americans had to wait until the end of the war and capture German samples. On the 6th of June, 1944, when the first landing craft approached the Normandy coast, hundreds of thousands of silent soldiers were waiting under the sand. The landing at Utah Beach was relatively successful compared to the bloody [music] carnage at neighboring Omaha Beach.
But even here, the mines took their toll. The 12th Infantry Regiment reported that most of the casualties on the first day were caused not by German fire, but by minefields. After securing the beach, work began that would prove to be no less dangerous than the assault itself. Mine clearance was carried out using primitive methods.
Metal detectors existed, but they were cumbersome, temperamental, and unavailable to most infantry units. The primary tool of the sapper remained the bayonet knife. It was stuck into the sand at a 30° angle, probing the ground centimeter by centimeter [music] in search of a metal casing.
Upon discovering a mine, thesapper would insert a regular sewing needle into the fuse hole instead of the safety pin and carefully unscrew the mechanism. One wrong move meant those very for seconds. In the dunes near the village of Pupville, the Americans diffused 15,000 mines in just the first few days after landing. 15,000 steel cylinders on [music] one stretch of coastline.
But the numbers did not convey the main point. The psychological effect of bouncing Betty surpassed its lethal force. Allied soldiers quickly realized that the war with the Germans and the war with the mines were two different wars. And the second one did not end when the enemy retreated. Every field, every forest, every crossroads could hide death.
Rumors and legends multiplied faster than the command could refute them. The most persistent myth was the belief that a mind would not explode until you removed your foot. You could stand still and wait for help. This was untrue, born of a desperate desire to believe in a chance of survival.
The mechanism was activated by pressure, not by its absence. Whether you ran or froze, the result was the same. The only way to survive activation was to instantly fall face down and pray that the horizontal stream of shrapnel would pass over your head. British soldiers gave the mine a nickname that described the nature of the injuries more clearly than any medical report.
Debolakas. Those who survived an encounter with Bouncing Betty often remained men [music] in name only. The war in Europe ended in May 1945. But for the shrapnel mine 35, the work was just beginning. The west coast of Denmark turned out to be the [music] most heavily mined stretch of coastline on the continent.
Until the very end, Hitler was convinced that the main Allied invasion [music] would come here, as it was the shortest route to Berlin. 1 and a half million mines lay in the sand and dunes of Jutland, turning the beaches into an [music] impassible death zone. The civilian population could not return to the coastal villages.
Fishermen could not go out to sea. The land, liberated from occupation, remained occupied by mines. The British command made a decision that would spark decades of controversy. The mines would be cleared by German prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention of 1929 expressly prohibited the use of prisoners of war for dangerous work.
But lawyers found a loophole. German soldiers were reclassified as personnel who had surrendered voluntarily, which formally removed them from the protection of the convention. More than 2,000 Germans, many of whom were teenagers drafted in the last months of the war, went to the West [music] Coast. Training took several days.
There was no protective equipment. Bayonets and bare hands served as tools. The norm was six mines [music] per hour per person. Five young Germans crawled along the sand at arms length from each other, unscrewing the fuses from the mine casings that their own country had buried here a year earlier. Historian Thomas Tram [music] Patterson has reconstructed the statistics for those months.
Smines caused a 31% mortality rate among the sappers. By comparison, the wooden shoe anti-personnel [music] mines killed two out of every hundred. The jumping Betty proved equally deadly to those who said [music] it and those who tried to diffuse it. By October 1945, the work was officially completed. 1,300,000 mines had been extracted from Danish soil.
The cost was 149 dead, 165 seriously wounded, [music] and another 167 moderately wounded. In France, the scale was even greater. 48,000 German prisoners cleared 13 million mines at the cost of 1,79 lives. The mine created by German engineers in the 1930s ended its journey by killing German youths in the 1940s. American military engineers began working with captured samples immediately after Germany’s surrender.
The experience of war showed that the M2’s [music] own design had failed. While the German original worked flawlessly, the solution was obvious. In the 1950s, the M16 mine, which was almost an exact copy of the shrapnel mine, entered service with the US Army. It had the exact two-stage mechanism, the same steel balls and the same lift height.
The Soviet Union followed a similar path creating a series of OZM mines. The design was simplified with a cast iron casing replacing balls which itself [music] became a source of shrapnel upon detonation. Later the OZM72 appeared with steel rods even closer to the German prototype. These mines are still produced in Russia.
Yugoslavia developed the prom one. China created the type 69. Italy, Sweden, Belgium, and dozens of other countries released their own versions of the bouncing mine. All of them were direct descendants of that steel cylinder designed by German engineers in the early 1930s. The Vietnam War brought a new generation of victims to the bouncing Betty.
The American M16 and its Vietnamese counterparts waited in the jungles, in the rice fields, along the trails wherepatrols moved. Veteran Fred DS lost his arm to a bouncing mine in 1968 and devoted the rest of his life to helping wounded soldiers. The total number of people killed and injured by mines of this type in Vietnam alone exceeded 60,000.
In 1997, the international community signed the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines. The ability of jumping mines to maim rather than kill became one of the main arguments in favor of the ban. But not everyone signed the agreement. The United States, Russia, and China refused to join. Millions of mines [music] designed according to a principle invented by German engineers 90 years ago are still stored in the warehouses of these countries.
And in the ground of Libya, Egypt, and the former Warsaw packed countries, there are still mines that have been forgotten [music] or cannot be removed. German documentation indicated that Smines [music] had a shelf life of 2 to 7 years after installation. Practice shows that they can remain active for decades. A quiet click under the sole of a boot for seconds.
The shrapnel mine 35 was not the most potent weapon of World War II. It did not decide the outcome of battles or turn the tide of campaigns, but it was the most honest embodiment of what war becomes when engineering is directed toward causing maximum suffering with minimum means. Its creators solved a technical problem. How to disable several soldiers with a single charge? The answer was found in a precise understanding of human anatomy.
1 meter in height meant the level of the pelvis and thighs. In this area, injuries do not kill instantly, but break the body and destiny forever. It was not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. It was optimization. A disabled soldier cost the army more than a dead one and serves as a constant reminder to the living of what awaits them.
Almost 2 million of these mines were left by German factories over 10 years of production. Their descendants are still being produced today. The Ottawa Treaty limited their distribution, but did not destroy those that already exist, nor did it stop those who refused to sign it. Bouncing Betty remains not a museum exhibit, but an active weapon whose principle of striking a person at their most vulnerable spot has not become obsolete in nine decades.
