On 23 November 1939 at Shoeburyness, a German secret weapon was rendered safe by Lt Cdr John Ouvry and CPO Charles Baldwin with assistance from Lt Cdr R C Lewis and AB A L Vearncombe. For weeks previously, Allied ships had been blowing up for no apparent reason and all shipping in and out of Britain was at a standstill. The Admiralty feared that unless the cause could be identified and stopped, Britain would be forced to surrender within six weeks.
The Admiralty suspected the new weapon was a new form of mine and when one was dropped by the Luftwaffe in error on the mudflats of Shoeburyness instead of in shallow water, they lost no time in sending a team from HMS VERNON, the experts in torpedo and mine warfare, to investigate. Churchill personally briefed Ouvry that his life was was expendable.
The VERNON team confirmed their suspicions. The new weapon was a Type A magnetic mine. A ship only had to pass near it to detonate the mine and it was breaking the backs of the ships rather than blowing off the bows as was customary with contact mines. Unaware of whether the mine was armed or booby trapped, Ouvry and Baldwin spent a nervous two hours stripping the mine and its delayed action fuze. There were in fact two such mines and Lewis and Vearncombe observed from a safe distance so that they could learn from Ouvry's and Baldwin's (possible fatal) experience to defuze the second mine. Ouvry was awarded the DSO for his actions and Baldwin the DSM. The King was surprised that they could not be awarded the VC, but was advised that the team didn't qualify as they were not in the face of the enemy. Confused between the distinction of facing bullets from the enemy or several hundredweight of explosive left by the enemy, the King soon instituted the George Cross and George medal for such situations and visited HMS VERNON to make the awards, the first naval awards of WW2.
After dissecting the mine at HMS VERNON the following day, the Admiralty scientists quickly came up with a solution called degaussing to protect both merchant shipping and the Royal Navy from magnetic mines, a method still employed by warships today. The Germans meanwhile, learned of their mistake and began a cat and mouse war of developing more sophisticated mines to counter the RN's own countermeasures.
The heroics of the Royal Navy's Rendering Mines Safe teams are not widely known. I have tried to correct this by publishing a thrilling novel on their actions, They Have No Graves as Yet. It has been described as exceptional and compelling.
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