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March Order
LnOs as well as the firing batteries, the firing chart set up, and a start made on firing a
registration (an esoteric but necessary procedure whose function would take too long to
explain here).
The "ideal conditions" I mentioned for moving in two to three hours included
clear weather, personnel and equipment relatively healthy, and good dry roads with very
little other traffic on them. In the absence of any of these, it took longer.
I recall one day in late winter in the Ardennes. We had sent "A" Battery the
March Order and told them to report when ready to move. In good weather, this should
have taken less than ten minutes, but at this time the snow was melting and there had
been some rain showers. The roads ranged from poor to non-existent.
We waited twenty minutes before radioing them to ask if they were ready yet.
They weren't. We repeated the inquiry every ten minutes or so, and finally after three-
quarters of an hour, I drove over to build a fire under them. What I found was four trucks,
each spinning all six wheels in the slimy clay mud, trying to pull the howitzers out onto
the trail, but only digging deeper ruts in the ground and slathering the displaced mud all
over the grunting cannoneers who were trying to help by pushing the howitzer.
I also found Lt Van den Bark, the Battery Executive, looking angry and frustrated.
He was a man with a short fuse, and he greeted me with a snarl. "Well, you got any
suggestions?"
I had one, but they had thought of it already: the truck drivers had fastened their
winch cables to trees in attempt to winch the trucks and howitzers out of the morass. I
said, "No," and slunk away. In another half hour they reported ready to move.
I was once asked how much of our time we spent moving and setting up, how
much shooting, and how much sitting around waiting for fire missions or something else
to happen. I wouldn't even be able to guess how much time we spent at which, but each
activity seemed to come in bunches. The one I remember most was sitting around
waiting, but I'm not sure whether there was more of it, or it just seemed like more of it
because it was so boring. As for shooting, there were only half a dozen days when our
twelve pieces (howitzers) fired more than two thousand rounds total. Days like that kept
everyone, including Service Battery's Ammunition Train, hopping. And on at least 81
days, we did not fire at all.
*****
While we were still at Camp Barkeley, someone decreed that all the junior
infantry officers would rotate at observing an artillery firing battery doing its thing in a
field exercise. One infantry lieutenant described his impressions later:
It seemed to me that artillerymen were the laziest soldiers I had ever seen.
They just sat around or did little piddling things until somebody hollered
"Fire Mission!" Then they suddenly became the most energetic soldiers I
had seen, until the fire mission was over, when they went back to doing
nothing. [Sounds like a fire department, doesn't it?] I made up my mind
that the only two things that could get any action out of an artilleryman
were "Fire Mission" and "Chow.”
73
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