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Upstarts
As I believe I mentioned somewhere before, Lt Wright was one of only three
officers in the battalion who never came in for a tongue-lashing from Costain.
We learned to take him for granted. When a survey came in, it never occurred to
anyone that it might be flawed. Not until January 1945.
When we made our mid-winter move up to the Bulge and got maps of
Luxembourg and Belgium to replace the ones I had buried, we found them far less
reliable than the ones of France and even of Germany. We were in mountainous country,
with many steep slopes, and the biggest problem was with the contour lines. A contour
line is a line on a map, every point of which is the same elevation above sea level. If one
took a butcher knife and sliced a hill into horizontal slices, it would be cutting along
contour lines. These contour lines are important because you have to know the difference
in altitude between the gun and the target as well as the horizontal distance to know how
to set the elevation angle of the cannon. The contour lines on our maps tended to be
vague and discontinuous, so that it was hard to see which ones connected to each other.
Fortunately, certain key points on the terrain, like road intersections and mountain tops,
were marked with numbers to indicate their elevations.
We made a move, and I had a registration fired, for the purpose of determining
what minor corrections had to be made in firing from the new position for mysterious
reasons. As the observer sent back orders to adjust the fire, I became more and more
incredulous. This was not going to be a minor correction; it was grossly out of whack! I
got in touch with the observer and made caustic suggestions about his eyesight. He
offered to let me come up and see if I could do any better. "The battery must be screwing
up," he suggested.
I called the battery executive at the firing battery and demanded that he check the
elevation of the gun firing. He could find nothing wrong. I checked everyone in the FDC,
the HCO, the VCO, and the battery computor, and everything seemed OK. But the results
of the registration were outlandish.
Finally, as a last effort, I called for Lt Wright. "Ray, I have never had to say this
before, and believe me, I never expect to say it again. But there is something wrong with
your survey!"
He looked stricken, licked his lips as I explained why I thought so, and hastened
away to gather up his crew. An hour later, he came in with a new survey. Everything was
exactly like the first one, except for one thing. He had started originally from a road
junction with a spot elevation marked on the map as 225 meters. This second time he
started from a bench mark, and it turned out that the road junction was actually 325
meters above sea level. The batteries were 100 meters higher than we had thought about
the height of a 25 story building. No wonder our results hadn't fit!
After that life with the Survey Section went on as usual: new problems with each
survey, all solved with deceptive ease. We again assumed that every survey would be
quick and perfect. And 1st Lieutenant Wright, arguably our most efficient officer, was
stuck in a job with no promotion in sight.
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