A Routine Task with No Immediate Results
If you are conducting a mining operation you are flying alone always at night, quite often in appalling weather. You may be flying over the sea for the entirety of your trip. There’s nothing to see. You drop your mines. What are you going to see? There’s no explosion. There’s no immediate damage. You come home again. You don’t know what the results of that operation are going to be. When you have a debrief from a bombing op, obviously you can say we dropped our bombs. We saw some massive explosions. Everywhere was on fire. Job done. We came home. When you’re doing a mining operation you haven’t got that sort of satisfaction if you like of seeing immediate results. So it’s dark. It’s a thankless task. It’s dangerous. The crews don’t really like doing it. But because it’s been given this image of being a much easier job than bombing, they tend not to hold that much store by it. That’s one of the reasons why in years to come it doesn’t get talked about so much. It’s considered to be a routine task with no immediate results. The mine might explode. It might sink a ship in twelve months time, two years time, who knows? Even though there were lots of results from mining from very early on, these results are not communicated to the crews. Morale is quite low. There are heavy losses. They don’t know what’s been achieved.
Between 638 and 864 ships were sunk by Royal Air Force aerial laid mines during World War II. German coastal trade and troop transports were strangled. Damaged ships took up space in dockyards and used scarce raw materials and maintenance personnel during their repairs.
Only ten U Boats were sunk by aerial laid mines. But mines forced the German Navy to spread out their U Boat training facilities and disrupted the preparation of submarine crews.
Air laid mines forced Germany to expend resources in mine sweeping and in coastal defences. At the beginning of the War in 1939, Germany had 22 mine sweepers. By April 1943 they’ve had to expand this to 400.
By the end of the War in 1945 an estimated 40% of German naval warfare is focussed on mine sweeping. Germany also has to divert anti-aircraft artillery away from defending other infrastructure to try and repel the bombers laying the mines.
Marine insurance rates for merchant shipping increased exponentially because so many ships were being sunk. The Germans relied on neutral crews, particularly Swedish, who eventually refuse to sail because it’s so dangerous, and eventually Sweden withdraws its ships from trading with Germany.
Coastal trade is forced inland to railways and road systems that were bombed by Bomber Command.
Comparing mine laying with attacks by Bomber Command on ports and harbours. it takes 104 direct attack sorties to sink one vessel. It takes 31 mine laying sorties to sink one vessel.
Like the crews dropping aerial mines silently into the darkness, there’s often nothing to see after making a good decision. Results may take days, months, or years to appear. Or never be seen.
That’s okay. You can always look back and track your good decision making process.
Feel each decision making rep building unconscious competence. Bulking up your instinct muscles.
Freeing up milliseconds, seconds, minutes … for creativity.
For becoming who you are.