Denying the Ground: Booby Traps, Barriers and Mines

A shotgun rigged with a tripwire so that it fires when disturbed, with nobody present to pull the trigger. Owners used them from at least the eighteenth century against grave robbers and trespassers, and the 1825 case Bird v. Holbrook held an owner liable for the injuries. They were outlawed in England in 1827, yet appeared again on the Cold War inner German border.

An oversized foothold trap whose spring-loaded jaws clamp on a leg, set on estates to catch poachers and thieves. Soldiers of the First World War reported meeting them in no man's land. England outlawed them in 1827, and the American case Katko v. Briney later held that human safety outweighed an owner's interest in protecting mere property.

Wire obstacles first saw significant wartime use in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, along the fifty-mile Moron-Jucaro line in Cuba. Facing wire shortages in the First World War, Germany developed a flat form with triangular cutting edges punched from steel strip, faster to make than barbed wire and resistant to the wire cutters of the day.

The Belgian Gate, a steel frame about three meters wide and two high on rollers, designed in 1933 by Leon-Edmond de Cointet de Fillain for the Maginot Line. Belgium ordered 77,000 modified examples in 1936, and after 1940 about 23,408 captured ones were set along more than 4,340 kilometers of the Atlantic Wall.

Obstacle Z.1, tubular steel erected on English beaches in the Second World War anti-invasion preparations. Set first at the half-tide mark against landing craft, it was later moved to the high-water mark to stop tanks. Britain installed more than 15,000 miles of tube, using half the country's scaffolding steel output.

A horizontally bored pipe packed with explosive, conceived by Lieutenant-General Andrew McNaughton from Canadian diamond-drilling techniques and proven by mid-1940. Britain laid about 40,000 feet of it during the invasion crisis. Its value was concealment: buried, it was virtually invisible from the air, so defenders could leave a route apparently open.

A rail vehicle with a hook-shaped plough hauled by a locomotive to tear up ties and bend rails, denying a railway to a pursuing enemy. The Russian Imperial Army used such equipment retreating from Galicia and Poland in the First World War, and German forces used it in Italy and on the Eastern Front. It is distinct from the Union tactic called Sherman's neckties.

Here the obstacle becomes doctrine: a land area sown with explosive charges, mines and other obstacles. A primary belt is a continuous barrier across an entire front ordered by division-level or higher command, while a subsidiary belt adds depth or guards a flank against outflanking movement.

A Soviet directional mine from the early 1960s, named for its 100-meter lethal range. A bowl-shaped sheet-metal body with a webbing handle drives about 450 steel rods outward from 2 kilograms of explosive. It was used in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia and copied as the Vietnamese MDH-10 and Cambodian KN-10.

Entering service in 1965, this Soviet mine copies the American M18 Claymore with differences. Its plastic body holds 700 grams of RDX behind roughly 540 steel balls or 485 rods, fired in a 54-degree arc to a lethal range of 50 meters. Folding legs let it stand on the ground or be fixed to a tree.

A Yugoslav directional mine built along the lines of the M18A1 Claymore, with 900 grams of TNT-based explosive behind roughly 650 steel balls. It throws fragments through a 60-degree arc to 40 to 50 meters and can be command-detonated from as far as 30 meters, showing how widely the Claymore pattern was copied.

A large rectangular British anti-tank mine in service from 1969. Its elongated shape raises the odds that a passing vehicle triggers it, so a field can be laid at half the density of circular mines. In one comparison 30 personnel laid 655 bar mines in 60 minutes, against 90 personnel needing 150 minutes for 1,250 circular mines.

A British system ordered in 1995 and first deployed in 1999, built on Volcano scatterable-mine technology. An Alvis Stormer carries up to 40 dispensers of six mines each and scatters a minefield to its sides and rear on the move, every mine with a programmable self-destruct timer. Britain withdrew it in 2013 and 2014; Ukraine also operates it.

A networked American munitions system letting an operator command a field of hand-placed munitions from up to 1,500 meters. A tripwire sends an alert and the operator decides whether to fire. Originally built with a victim-activated mode, it was reconfigured in 2004 into a man-in-the-loop-only weapon to match United States landmine policy.