So Anyway

I don’t know if I’m going to use this yet but here’s an excerpt from Star Of The North by E.A. Stone.

There was no shortage of idiots on our side during the war.  One fellow actually wanted to ban sliced bread.  He was actually serious about this.  His excuse was that it would prevent wear on the production machinery.  It didn’t matter to him that without slicing to a regular thickness there would be a waste of bread.  A millimeter here or there and soon you would have a full loaf of bread.  Do this with millions of loaves and this would be a real problem.  Every bakery still in operation ignored the order but this idiot wouldn’t shut up and he was soon assigned to mine clearing duty.

Mine clearing?  No, I’m not kidding.

The primary method of clearing mines during the war was to crawl out and poke the ground ahead of you with a wooden stick.  When you found a mine you would mark the spot then go around and continue the search.  In contrast the Soviet method of clearing mines was to take prisoners from the gulag, usually Mexicans or other Central Americans who got on the wrong side of a commissar, and march them out across the minefield at gunpoint to deliberately detonate the mines.  A lot of the victims who survived the procedure were enthusiastic recruits for our side.  They mostly wanted to go home and they didn’t care how many Reds they had to kill to get there.