Chapter 17

Preparing The Winter Line

(Late October and early November, 1943)

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Guns
To give you some background on how our Artillery would get on target, usually they
used our number-one gun. It was S/Sgt. Phil McClendon’s gun and had about the

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best crew. An order would come to fire at a certain place on a map or at a certain
range, elevation, and powder charge. These orders come from HQ or usually from
our FO's. They used telephones when they could get wire laid. This was to keep
transmissions from going out over the open airwaves. In tense situations, time was
essential and thee wasn’t time to encode messages. Over the radios, the Germans
sometimes could pick up the transmissions and act accordingly. But I would say
that over fifty per cent or more of our firemissions were handled by radio.

The orders would be for one gun to fire. Then the orders would be left or right so
many degrees, then over or short so much. When zeroed in, the other three guns
would set on those readings. Then maybe the order would be “fire ten rounds or
more for effect.” It depended on the size of the target. It might be to fire
airbursts for troops, or armor piercings for tanks, etc., or another shell for
buildings.

Even before we left the States, C Battery got the reputation for fast and accurate
firing. After we got in combat, they got even better. C was clocked as about the
best in the army. I am not exaggerating—it is a matter of record, a record we are
all immensely proud of. They divided up the “odd balls” so they wouldn’t all be on
one crew, but they all took great pride in their jobs. In fact, they sent observers
even from schools in the States to watch our boys fire. They were to bring the
info back and teach it. That didn’t work out too well, but that is another story I
will tell later.

If the orders were maybe to fire ten or more rounds, each crew tried to outdo the
others. I have seen them many times fire ten or more rounds, with the guns never
coming out of recoil. They learned to dig open pits and put logs at the back for the
tails to rest against. That kept them from digging into the mud so bad. They had
big recoil from the some 30-lb. shells. Those crews would throw out an empty on
the way back, insert another live shell at the end of the recoil, and fire it again
before the recoil was completed. They couldn’t do that long, as they would have to
stop and swab out the barrels with water to cool them down. As I have told you
before, there were some characters in our Battery but they got the job done.

I had also told you before that our original driver had to be shipped out. We were
lucky to draw a little Italian from Philadelphia. His name was Joseph Tatora. He
was very dependable and stayed through the rest of the war with us. He took care
of the radio car and kept it in top shape. Incidentally, we had to run the motor so
much to keep up the batteries that the motor had to be replaced three times
before we finally drew a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier late in the war. As our
driver spoke fluent Italian, we had our personal interpreter. Also he could get by in
French too.

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I was telling you about “C” firing at targets. It wasn’t always all guns firing at once.
Sometimes only one gun would fire at a time. As I had told you our shells were
equipped with seven powder chargers. If you were firing charges you knew the
target was a long way off and you were pretty safe. When it got down to charge
one with the guns at the highest elevation you knew things were getting tight. You
started to gather up and get ready to move as the enemy was close. We did a lot of
that type firing.

I am really giving you a run down on WWII. I had talked about getting supplies to
the infantry. Somebody got the idea of dropping them using fighting planes. That
didn’t work. They had to come in too fast and overshot the drop area. Then the
Germans got all those supplies. That was the only time they tried that until they
did work it in France. They made a partial success getting supplies to the “Last
Battalion”. They were cut off for a long time. The 443rd (a Hawaiian-Japanese
outfit)finally broke through and received them. They were Japanese Americans
and real fighters. We respected them a lot. I got to know several as we were
attached to them a while. Whoa! I am getting ahead of myself again.

Rocket launchers
I forget, but I think I told you in a previous letter about the first rocket launchers
we encountered? I looked it up and come up with some things I had forgot. The
official name was “Neubelwuffer”. It meant “smoke thrower” in German. But it
threw more than smoke. Fragments weren’t bad, but the concussion was brutal. It
could jerk you out of a hole. I was wrong about how many barrels it had. It was
usually six, so the song the guy wrote was “Hear the Six- Barrel pipe organ play the
Purple Heart Blues”. We called them “Screaming Meemies”. When they come
towards you the best I can describe it is two coyotes with their tails caught in a
rusty cultivator behind a runaway team. As they traveled slow, if the angle and
light was right you could see them coming. It was a bit unnerving as they were
170mm. The ungodly noise they made in flight didn’t help me either.

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