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No sterilizers (mechanisms which detonated the weapon after a preset period of time) were used on any of the mines.

Any one know how we protected ourselves from these mines??? Would have thought they would want a sterilizer after 90 day? How would we have dealt with these if we had invaded Japan?

Our first advantage would have been that since we laid the mines, we knew about where they were. But only about.

60 years after the war, and despite massive postwar minesweeping opertions, there are still plenty of areas in the Pacific where the Sailing Directions caution against anchoring or other activites that may disturb the bottom due to the hazard of unswept mines.

Found this from 1946

30,000 Japanese Mines Loose (New York Times, Aug. 25, 1946)
Tokyo. Pacific mariners were warned today that some 30,000 mines had broken loose from Japanese minefields and were floating in trade currents. The mines explode by magnetic or pressure influence and remain dangerous to shipping for five years.

The magnetic mine was the most dangerous and destructive type. All steel ships have magnetism built into them. When a steel vessel passes over a magnetic mine, the magnetic forces in the ship trigger a mechanism in the mine that sets off an explosion under the hull.

To counteract these mines, some ships were degaussed. Thick bands of electrical wire, aligned with the main deck, were fastened around the length of the vessel. The wire was energized with an electric current that neutralized the ship's magnetism. This system saved countless numbers of ships from destruction.

From my limited knowledge I'll say this; Countries often mined their own harbors, we even mined our eastern shore during WWII. EOD work still continues to this day to clear mines around the world and don't forget our mine sweepers of the Navy. Europe was mined extensively not to mention bomb with many that didn't detonate. The cost of war unfortunately.

I think had we gone with the invasion of Japan instead of the bombs, Gator Navy is right, at least we knew where ours were and minesweepers and divers I suppose would have been used as well.

We can be even more grateful war on that scale hasn't occurred on US soil. I imagine we still deal with some ordnance from the civil war.

Self-destructing mines are designed to automatically explode after a preset time. They are used largely by military forces to shape the battlefield and to be destroyed once troops have moved beyond areas of confrontation. They are intended to minimize the long-term scope of danger to civilians. However, one of the limitations of these self-destructing mines is that they are not sufficiently reliable. Civilians are frequently maimed or killed if they are near the epicenter of an explosion at the time of self-denotation.

Self-neutralizing mines, a variation of self-destructing mines, are also designed to reduce the danger of land mines. These mines defuse themselves after a period of time without exploding. However, their neutralizing mechanism is not 100 percent assured and individuals who locate these mines are unable to determine whether or not they have been neutralized. Combined, these two factors make self-neutralizing mines an even less favorable alternative than self-destructing mines.

You've forced me to learn more. LOL. It's a good thing.

I'm taking an uneducated guess here. From what I've been reading there was a limit to the time period for automatic detonation. One article said up to fifteen days. Perhaps we didn't know how long the areas would need to be mined and chose to not use sterilizers.