Mine warfare at sea is an endless battle of wits . . . It is never static. He introduces a new mechanism and we have to crack it, because if we don’t crack it the minesweepers cannot sweep it, and if they cannot sweep it the ports are closed and this island starves.
Ivan Southall, Softly Tread the Brave
Across from the quarterdeck of the Naval School, Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), the EOD Memorial bears the names of the 343 military EOD technicians killed in the line of duty since the beginning of the EOD career field. The earliest casualty on the wall is Ensign John M. Howard, killed on 11 June 1942, at Corton Sands, England.1 On that day, Ensign Howard and the British officer he was assisting did not know the T-type, “Tommy,” mine variant they faced had been altered with a booby trap to thwart recovery and exploitation. What they did know was that German magnetic mines were extremely dangerous to handle and recovering them intact was crucial to the war effort.2
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1. Ensign Howard graduated from the Navy’s Mine Disposal School, class #3, in January 1942, and was one of a handful of American naval officers sent to England to learn mine disposal techniques. Even before the U.S. entry into the war, other Navy and Army officers similarly studied mine and bomb disposal under their British mentors. These pioneers established mine and bomb disposal schools in the United States.
2. F. Ashe Lincoln, Secret Naval Investigator: The Battle against Hitler’s Secret Underwater Weapons (Yorkshire: Frontline Books, 2017), 75.
3. Lincoln, Secret Naval Investigator, 6.
5. Chris O’Flaherty, Naval Minewarfare: Politics to Practicalities (United Kingdom: The Choir Press, 2019), 254, Annex C.
6. O’Flaherty, Naval Minewarfare, 255.
7. Joint Publication (JP) 3-15, Barriers, Obstacles, and Mine Warfare for Joint Operations (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, 5 March 2018), figure IV-2 and IV-5.
8. Nicholas Rankin, Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2011), 127.
9. Rankin, Ian Fleming’s Commandos, 266–67, 289–90, 305. The naval archive contained “the complete operational logs, war diaries, technical reports and administrative minutes of all German navy business from 1870 to date.”
10. Joint Publication (JP) 3-15, IV-6. 11., Secret Naval Investigator, 122.
