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Authors: Ronald J. Glasser
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said, “you are officers. It is our job here at Fort Sill to make you artillery officers, so we shall start at the beginning.”
Survey, phone communication, laying the base piece, laying the battery, setting up the FDC, setting up the exec post, registering the guns, grids, firing from fixed points, scales, tables, logarithms, trigonometry—it went on every day: lectures, tests, discussions, reviews.
“Gentlemen,” the Major said, standing in front of the demonstration table until the class was completely quiet, “there are four kinds of fuses. Point detonating: it will,” he said, pointing to the first cone-shaped tube in front of him, “detonate on contact, though the pressure necessary for that detonation can be varied. Timed”—he pointed to the second—“the times can be changed—two seconds out of the barrel, five seconds. Delayed”—he picked up the third—“if the leg units are pushing the enemy, and they’re turning but don’t have a blocking force on the flanks, you can lay shells with these fuses into the flanking areas. These time fuses can be used as an instant mine field, any delay you want. This one,” he said, pointing toward the fourth, “this is the beauty—variable time. It is radar-controlled. On its way down, impulses are sent out from the detonator, and the time it takes these impulses to get back to the falling shell is measured and computed, and when the time span is equal to whatever height you’ve set, it will detonate.”
He waited a moment. “You just set the range on the fuse for whatever height you want. Set the fuse for the height of twenty meters, and it will flatten everything within fifty meters.”
“Gentlemen,” the Major said the next day, the Oklahoma landscape shimmering behind him as he stood by the small platform at the base of a howitzer, “there are four kinds of shells: high-explosive, white-phosphorous, smoke, and anti-personnel. This,” he said, pointing to a shell standing on the platform in front of him, “is an antipersonnel round. It was developed after Korea and it will stop your batteries from being overrun. Inside each shell are 10,000 feathered stainless steel darts. It is detonated by a specially timed fuse that sets itself when the shell is spinning at 1500 rpm’s. This is approximately the rpm’s the fired shell will be rotating at when it has traversed one half the barrel length of a 105-mm howitzer. In the time it takes to traverse the rest of the barrel length, the fuse detonates and the shell casing, of special construction, twirls off the round much as the casing off a can of sardines. By the time the round leaves the barrel, the casing is completely gone and the 10,000 darts come blowing out the barrel.” He stopped for a moment. “Just crank down the gun to zero elevation...”
Macabe stared at the cannon, anchored so firmly into the ground in front of him.
“Now, gentlemen,” the Major said, “we are scheduled this hour to talk about FADAK—the artillery computer. It can, as you know, read maps, terrain, weather condition, meteorological situations. It can register your gun, and if you want, it can shoot it.”
During the whole time not one instructor specifically mentioned Nam; they stayed away from any mention of killing and death, though there were allusions, such as, “Most of you will be using grid coordinates for your fire missions; locations from known points are used only in the European theater of operations” and “White phosphorous should be considered as much a psychological weapon as a pyrogenic one.”
The classroom work went on for two weeks, with officer training in between. Macabe was getting bored and a bit fed up with the academics of it all. It was getting to be just like college all over again. But things changed when they went out to the artillery range, a great hilly area at the eastern edge of the fort. They went in their combat gear. After a four-mile hike and a quick talk on safety
Survey, phone communication, laying the base piece, laying the battery, setting up the FDC, setting up the exec post, registering the guns, grids, firing from fixed points, scales, tables, logarithms, trigonometry—it went on every day: lectures, tests, discussions, reviews.
“Gentlemen,” the Major said, standing in front of the demonstration table until the class was completely quiet, “there are four kinds of fuses. Point detonating: it will,” he said, pointing to the first cone-shaped tube in front of him, “detonate on contact, though the pressure necessary for that detonation can be varied. Timed”—he pointed to the second—“the times can be changed—two seconds out of the barrel, five seconds. Delayed”—he picked up the third—“if the leg units are pushing the enemy, and they’re turning but don’t have a blocking force on the flanks, you can lay shells with these fuses into the flanking areas. These time fuses can be used as an instant mine field, any delay you want. This one,” he said, pointing toward the fourth, “this is the beauty—variable time. It is radar-controlled. On its way down, impulses are sent out from the detonator, and the time it takes these impulses to get back to the falling shell is measured and computed, and when the time span is equal to whatever height you’ve set, it will detonate.”
He waited a moment. “You just set the range on the fuse for whatever height you want. Set the fuse for the height of twenty meters, and it will flatten everything within fifty meters.”
“Gentlemen,” the Major said the next day, the Oklahoma landscape shimmering behind him as he stood by the small platform at the base of a howitzer, “there are four kinds of shells: high-explosive, white-phosphorous, smoke, and anti-personnel. This,” he said, pointing to a shell standing on the platform in front of him, “is an antipersonnel round. It was developed after Korea and it will stop your batteries from being overrun. Inside each shell are 10,000 feathered stainless steel darts. It is detonated by a specially timed fuse that sets itself when the shell is spinning at 1500 rpm’s. This is approximately the rpm’s the fired shell will be rotating at when it has traversed one half the barrel length of a 105-mm howitzer. In the time it takes to traverse the rest of the barrel length, the fuse detonates and the shell casing, of special construction, twirls off the round much as the casing off a can of sardines. By the time the round leaves the barrel, the casing is completely gone and the 10,000 darts come blowing out the barrel.” He stopped for a moment. “Just crank down the gun to zero elevation...”
Macabe stared at the cannon, anchored so firmly into the ground in front of him.
“Now, gentlemen,” the Major said, “we are scheduled this hour to talk about FADAK—the artillery computer. It can, as you know, read maps, terrain, weather condition, meteorological situations. It can register your gun, and if you want, it can shoot it.”
During the whole time not one instructor specifically mentioned Nam; they stayed away from any mention of killing and death, though there were allusions, such as, “Most of you will be using grid coordinates for your fire missions; locations from known points are used only in the European theater of operations” and “White phosphorous should be considered as much a psychological weapon as a pyrogenic one.”
The classroom work went on for two weeks, with officer training in between. Macabe was getting bored and a bit fed up with the academics of it all. It was getting to be just like college all over again. But things changed when they went out to the artillery range, a great hilly area at the eastern edge of the fort. They went in their combat gear. After a four-mile hike and a quick talk on safety
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