Re: Mines and Animals

----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Barclay <kaladorn@magma.ca>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 4:44 PM
Subject: Mines and Animals

> IIRC the WW2 Germans tried exploding dogs
> (dogs with AT charges strapped to them).
> From what I understand, they made one
> unfortunate mistake: In training them to run
> over and lie under tanks, they used German
> Panzers of some variety instead of T-34s.
> Extrapolate this into the battelfield (chaos,
> confusion, scared animals) and the results were
> about what you'd expect.
>
> Though rat-mobile-claymore swarms seems like
> a disturbing idea.
SNIP!
>
> T.

The mine-dogs were a Soviet idea- they were kept starving and fed,
minimally, under tanks with the engines running. As for the business
about
them being ineffective due to being trained under the wrong type of tank
(Soviet diesels instead of German petrol engines, so they associated the
wrong smell with food) is a German story, which I think is a wee story
to
cheer the troops, for the following reasons:
1) The RKKA used mine-dogs until 1943, when they were on the offensive
and
such an emergency defensive weapon was no longer useful. The Russians
claimed that 16 dogs at Kursk killed 12 German tanks.
2) The Germans shot all dogs on sight in case they were mines
3) How would they know how the dogs were trained? If from POWs how could
they trust such info?
4) The RKKA had plenty of petrol driven AFVs
5) The Russians had a lot of knowledge of dog training techniques
(Pavlov!)
and were subtle enough to "train" German explosives sniffers to ignore
explosives (Partisans sprinkled tiny fragments of explosive around
targets;
the dog would detect these and would then be punished for its "mistake".
The
dogs soon learned not to warn of explosives at all.

Rob Paul