Mines were just that, originally, and a common feature of fortification and siegecraft. Oman described the process as follows: ‘The besieger removed as much earth as he could carry away from beneath some exposed corner of the fortifications, and shored up the hole with beams. He then filled the space between the beams with straw and brushwood, and set fire to it. When the supports were consumed, the wall crumbled downwards into the hole, and a breach was produced.’ Over time explosives added to the effects of this technique and mining of the traditional sort continued into WW I. Mining was particularly important in the Messines ridge attack of 1917. Because of the similar purpose, any submarine or subterranean explosive device came to be known as a ‘mine’. At sea they became extremely effective means of denying a passage to the enemy, sinking several warships at Gallipoli, or, as used in the Russo-Japanese war, to channel an attacker into machine guns' lines of fire. The indiscriminate use of naval mining at Port Arthur during this war caused damage to neutral shipping and resulted in the 1907 Hague Convention (see Geneva and Hague Conventions) ‘Relative to the Laying of Automatic Submarine Contact Mines’. It was to be several decades before another type of mine was to figure so prominently in debate about the conduct of warfare.
With the advent of ‘land ships’ (tanks) to land warfare, the use of mines to disable them was a logical extension of their naval role. By the middle of WW II, the use of mines had become a central feature of land warfare and continued to figure prominently in the operational doctrine of armies through much of the 20th century. Mines, be they anti-armour, anti-vehicle, or anti-personnel, could have a variety of uses. They might be laid on a key area or feature, such as a hill or a road, in order to deny any operational advantage to the enemy or to delay movement. They might also be laid sporadically in order to harass enemy vehicles and troops and, once again, to slow down movement. But the prime use of mines would be to provide ‘protective’ or ‘tactical’ minefields. A protective minefield is one which would be laid in front of a key defended position and form part of the overall defensive plan. A tactical minefield is one which would block an enemy's advance and canalize his movement towards a ‘killing area’ observed by the defending force. In mine warfare, it is considered essential for both protective and tactical minefields to be covered by the direct and indirect fire weapons of the defending force in order to preserve the integrity of the feature. During the Cold War, the deployment of nuclear demolition mines was designed to block or otherwise eliminate possible enemy lines of advance entirely.
Anti-personnel mines (APM) originated as anti-handling devices attached to larger anti-armour or anti-vehicle mines. With only a little further effort, the anti-handling device became a weapon in its own right. If covered by fire, APMs could help to prevent or delay enemy breaching. They could also immobilize the crews and occupants of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles crippled in the minefield. Depending on the type of APM, the target might be an individual enemy soldier or a small group. In a macabre way, the effect of APMs could be maximized when the resulting casualties were wounded rather than killed: a soldier with his foot blown off is just as ineffective as a dead one, but his injury and distress might also have a psychological effect on his comrades. Furthermore, some of the victim's comrades would have to leave the battlefield in order to evacuate the casualty, who then became another burden on the enemy's medical and logistic services. While commanding the Eighth Army in North Africa in 1943, Montgomery accepted anti-armour mines as inevitable but saw that the APMs would require a ‘very robust mentality’ on the part of vulnerable infantry. APMs are hated by foot soldiers, and attrition by Vietcong mines set the stage for the atrocity at My Lai.
Easy to manufacture and deploy in huge numbers, but extremely difficult to map and recover, the APM presented a major challenge to international humanitarian law of armed conflict and the principles of discrimination and non-combatant immunity. The first attempt to regulate the use of APMs, the 1980 UN Convention on ‘Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects’, failed to solve the problem. During the 1990s, a popular international campaign to ban the production and use of APMs resulted in the December 1997 Ottawa Convention on the ‘Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction’.
Bibliography
- Oman, C. W. C., The Art of War in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1885)
— John P. Campbell
