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Foreword
either, and at first they tended to shoot at anything that moved. In consequence, it turned out that
the only place for an observer was with the forward infantry elements. You couldn't see anything
there either, but you at least could see as much as the infantry could, and you were available
when needed. And you were sometimes a sort of hostage, lest the artillery committed some
impropriety such as firing on its own troops.)
And you could send word back to the slavering Bn S-2 about where the elements of your
company were. Maybe.
There are three things a FA unit must be able to do: move, communicate, and shoot.
Communications probably caused more problems than the other two put together. All the radios I
mentioned above operated using one of two electrical sources: the jeep battery or a battery pack,
used when you are away from the jeep. When you were traveling in the jeep, you could use the
radio any time, but when you got out, things got harder. The battery pack and the radio weighed
about forty pounds each, and had to be carried by hand for moving on foot, which is mostly how
infantry moves. The radio was then out of service until you stopped long enough to assemble the
two parts and check in. To make things even harder, the infantry (especially at first) often
objected to an artilleryman raising the radio's high whip antenna. It was thought to draw fire,
either because the enemy could see it or because they could "home in" on it electronically.
Until it was set up, however, the Bn S-2 could call his lungs out, but those at the other
end could neither hear nor answer.
Telephone, though more satisfactory to talk over, is even more tedious. First, telephone
wire has to be laid up to wherever the infantry commander decides to stop, and then it must be
maintained. Traffic, especially tanks, will chew up wire, so it has to be repaired often. Enemy
artillery and mortar fire are devastating to wire too, and in the case of the light wire the FO's
carried, even a heavy-footed infantryman could accidentally break it.
In consequence, I spent a lot of time on radio and telephone trying to get some response
from our people up front, while our sweating wire crews were out trying to find what was wrong
with the wire and fix it." It was particularly frustrating because our telephone line to Div Arty
always seemed to work, and their S-2 was constantly on my back to find out where the troops
were. I later found that this was because the division G-3¹ was constantly on his back, having
found out that we were more likely to know than the infantry regimental headquarters was.
Every couple of days I would get so tired of being chewed out for not knowing where
they were that I would abandon the situation map and the telephone to Technical Sergeant
Johnson, the operations sergeant, and go forward by jeep and foot to find out for myself. ' It was
a cowardly thing to do, but it got me out of communications for awhile, and Sgt Johnson could
always blame everything on me.
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