 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Essay Eight
Ammunition
At the conclusion of every fire mission, the S-3 had a standard litany: "Cease
firing, end of mission; report number of rounds fired.”
The executive officer of each
firing battery that had taken part in the mission made a quick check and reported how
much and what kind of ammunition had been expended, and the S-3 tallied it in a kind of
running inventory, so that he would know how much to requisition for the following day.
Late in the afternoon the ammunition train commander, Lt Nick Nobles, would
come to pick up the requisition and prepare to make his nightly trek back to the
Ammunition Supply Point (ASP) to load the ammunition and deliver it to the firing
batteries by daybreak.
He had eighteen trucks with ammunition trailers at his disposal, and I suppose he
took only as many as he needed to carry the number of rounds he was to pick up. Each
truck had a driver and a small crew of ammunition handlers, selected for muscle rather
than intellect.
Theoretically, each truck was supposed to carry only two and a half tons of
weight, and its trailer another ton and a half. In practice it turned out that the truck was
impossible to handle with a loaded trailer, but that it worked quite well with the truck
itself heavily overloaded, so the ammo handlers would load four tons on the truck and use
the trailers to store their bedrolls. I doubt if they bothered to haul the trailers back to the
ASP.
We learn by training and experience. In Texas, all our truck drivers had been
carefully trained to drive in convoy with a minimum distance between vehicles of "twice
your speedometer reading in yards," and to travel at no more than 25 mph. Experience in
combat said otherwise. Nick Nobles' instructions to his well-trained and experienced
drivers was, "Put your bumper under the tailgate of the truck ahead and go like hell!"
That admonition seemed to work, even though each nightly trip took the little
convoy to an ASP behind the Light Line, where they could use headlights, then back into
the combat zone, where they could use only blackout lights. On the way back, they had to
halt at the Light Line long enough to adjust their eyes to the dark.
What did they carry? Well, they carried all kinds of ammunition, but since we
cannon-cockers hardly ever had occasion to fire our carbines and pistols and only
infrequently our anti-aircraft machine guns, most of their load was 105mm howitzer
rounds, each round in a cylindrical black fiber case, two cases to a wooden crate, which
was about all one brawny man could lift.
I'm not sure of the exact figures, but I believe the four tons that a truck would
carry did not amount to more than about 120 rounds, including the packing. At that rate,
the whole train could carry only about 2,100 rounds in one load, and since it was often a
thirty mile or so round trip to the ASP, hauling ammunition in times of maximum firing
was expensive in time, manpower, and gasoline. We tried to use ammunition
economically.
139
|
 |
|