Dale Ellis, North Ogden, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, July 16, 2003: Saving the legacy tape no. 636

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D L I 1 int that. W d go into that and th y d pty it all ut d d th ir r _ 1r h n til it up again. That happened two or three tim we had t g int th t. th r thin I should have mentioned those kind of mines weren t th only kind m1n th t ut there. The ones we were mainly concerned with were the big on that w r an h r d down. BEC: You described them as a big ball with spikes coming out. DAL: You've probably seen pictures of them. They show them, occasionally. It took ninety pounds of pressure to break those and that's what blew the mine up. That was the detonator, those horns on the mine. You'd hit into those with ninety pounds of pressure and you'd break them off and that would explode the mine. That was the idea. Anyway, they also had, they called them acoustic mines, or what did they call them? They were the kind that were in the area that would explode, but you didn't have to hit them. It was the vibrations you'd be sending out, the ships as they'd go in to a certain area. These things would eventually unwind, so to speak. I mean they had a certain device that would trigger them. It would take so many vibrations to do that. As they moved closer and closer, why, they'd set these off, see? About the time the ships got there, they'd explode. Also, they had magnetic mines. Magnetism would set them off. Every once in a while, they'd send us through a channel to demagnetize the ship. The ship would build up magnetism over a certain period of time and so they'd send us in to demagnetize, because that would cause these other mines to be triggered. So, we weren't mainly concerned about those, but we knew that they existed there somewhere. BEC: When you were in Tokyo, did you go ashore? DAL: Yes, well that's where that picture was taken, you know. 32