I just listened to an excerpt of Bill Cheall's memoirs on the Fighting Through podcast and was somewhat surprised to hear of the crew of a disabled Crab tank who got out, cleared a path through a minefield, and taped it. For some reason I'd never thought that Crab tank crews might have been trained to clear mines on foot, but of course it makes perfect sense. Did they have metal detectors assigned to them as well? This also makes me wonder what other training members of the 79th received. For instance, were AVRE crew members trained on explosives? And was this sort of training universal among vehicle crews or e.g. did only Crab tank crews get mine clearing training?
My dad (mortarman in an AVRE of 77 Assault Squadron, 79th Armoured) was certainly trained to defuse mines and shells, which he and his crew did, dismounted on D-Day. All of his crew were Royal Engineers, except some drivers who had been transferred in from the Royal Armoured Corps. He was also trained to demolish obstacles using explosives of various types, destroy concrete structures with hollow and 'General Wade' charges and to blow wire with bangalore torpedoes. Their main job on the day was 'gapping' - creating obstacle free paths for vehicles and infantry to get off the beach. All the troops in the assault regiments and I'm pretty sure all RE's, had infantry basic training and were expected to fight as infantry if called upon to do so - plenty of examples of bailed crews doing this on D-Day and after. His actual trade in the Royal Engineers was electrician - later on in Korea he was a sergeant storesman, nominally in charge of tools for his squadron, but that didn't stop them being given rifles when the Chinese invaded.The Engineers built roads, water supplies and bridges, but, as his commanding officer told me, he was always better at blowing them up. No wonder he was useless at changing plugs and switches!
