The Dark Reason Bouncing Betties Exploded at Waist Height

Forget the Stuka's Scream. The Bouncing Betty Gave NO Warning For two seconds after the click under his boot, nothing happened. That silence is why so many men died standing still, waiting for a rescue the mechanism was never going to allow. This is the German S-mine, the Schrapnellmine the Allies nicknamed the Bouncing Betty. We take one apart from the click to the burst: the roughly four-second delay, the black powder charge that threw it to waist height, and the 350 or so steel balls it fired at the level of a man's body. We walk through why it was engineered to wound instead of kill, what the fragmentation did to men standing in the open, the detection war that ran through El Alamein, the engineers who cleared these on their knees, and the copies it spawned, including the Vietnam mine that inherited its name. Nearly 1.93 million were built. Some are still in the ground. More forensic breakdowns of WW1 and WW2 weapons every week:    / @nomanslandchannel