Staff photo by Ben Benton/Chattanooga Times Free Press – From left, Military Munitions Response Program manager Denny Timmons, Arnold Engineering Development Center public affairs director Jason Austin, Chris Elkins, with AEDC’s Natural Resources project, and Phil Couch, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Ordnance and Explosive safety specialist, talk about upcoming efforts to sweep more than 500 acres of property for training mines and other unexploded ordinance this spring. In the foreground are three of 19 M1B1 anti-tank training mines found so far.ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn.-In the early 1940s, an M4 Sherman tank trundled along a trail in the woods at the U.S. Army’s Camp Forrest near Tullahoma, Tenn.
As the tank neared a narrow spot, a plume of red smoke spewed from a training mine on one side of the trail, indicating the war machine was “dead.” Soldiers spring out in ambush.
The training mine was not the only one near the tank, but it was the only one triggered that day. The others remained behind.
One of them turned up in September 2009, when a security officer walking on a recreational trail at what’s now the Arnold Engineering Development Center found what military folks call “unexploded ordnance.”
It was identified as a practice tank mine from World War II maneuvers.