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Upstarts
"And one time when one of them thought he had a target and called for fire, it
turned out those were our own troops, and I nearly got court-martialed for shooting at
'em. So now I'm afraid to fire at all, because I can't be sure when it's safe!"
"Tsk, tsk. I know it ain't easy."
The captain probably appreciated the sympathy, but he wanted more. "Sir, I don't
feel that I'm doing my job, and I don't know how to get it done. I was wondering if you
had any suggestions. "
Peach looked up at the branches of the hedgerow tree they sat under and thought
for a moment. "Hmm. You have six guns, haven't you?"
"Yes, sir."
"That's half as many as I have. How are you fixed for ammunition?"
"Got plenty of it. I tell you, aside from registration, we haven't done hardly any
firing. "
"Wow!" said Peach, definitely interested. "We're limited to ten rounds per gun per
day."
"Is that so? I hadn't heard anything about us being rationed. Maybe it doesn't
apply to infantry units."
"Well, Captain, I'll tell you what I'll do. If you'll send me two good men to stay
with my fire direction center and learn to be computors, and lay me two telephone lines
from your position, I'll treat you as if you were one of my batteries, and promise you
plenty of chance to shoot. "
The Captain brightened. "Consider it done, Major! And thanks for letting me be
part of your team."
"Glad to have you aboard, Captain. And maybe we could figure out a way to
share your ammunition. . . ."
And so, until almost the end of the war, I except for a few special operations, the
915th FA Bn had four firing batteries instead of three, and 18 howitzers instead of 12.
There was one minor problem: we stuck a pin in the firing chart for each battery position,
patriotically coded red for A Battery, white for B, and blue for C. T/4 Devlin, the
horizontal control operator, solved the difficulty by finding a shamrock-green pin,
sticking it in, and penciling in beside it the letters "Cn."
Note 1. Either just before or just after the end of WW II, the Cannon Company's
howitzers were replaced with an entirely different weapon, a 4.2" mortar. It threw a shell
about the same size as a 105, but aside from that it was completely different, so our joint
operations were no longer possible.
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