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Ray Wright and the Survey Section
For some reason I have never understood, the battalion survey officer was listed
as Assistant S-2, which I suppose meant that the S-2 was to supervise his activities. In
practice, at least in the 915th, the survey officer ran an autonomous operation and was
directly responsible to the battalion commander. This was a good thing, for at the time I
was first assigned to be S-2, I didn't know anything useful about artillery survey.
When I took ROTC in college, they taught plane-table surveying, a primitive
variety whose only good point was that the equipment used was cheap. But I didn't even
learn that, for the captain in charge felt that extra equitation (horseback riding) would be
more useful to me in battle. He was wrong. From the time I joined the 90th Infantry
Division, I never saw a horse.
On the first Saturday afternoon after the 915th started basic training, I was
directed to layout a volleyball court for the recruits to use for fun and games. Seeing an
excuse to practice with the battery surveying equipment, I went to the supply room and
took out an aiming circle, a hundred-foot tape, and a set of taping pins. These pins were
about ten inches long, with a loop at one end to pass the tape through and a sharp point at
the other end to stick into the ground. With the help of a couple of bored recruits, I laid
out the most precisely measured, square cornered, volleyball court in Camp Barkeley. Of
course, by the time we were through, it was getting too dark to play anyhow.
Then I collected up the equipment to turn in. I carefully retracted the telescoping
legs of the aiming circle, loosened the ball and socket joint that held the head in place,
and eased it into the case, turning the head until it fit precisely into the pads inside the
case and its lid. Meanwhile my two assistants reeled up the tape and collected the pins. I
counted the pins. There were eleven.
"Look around," I told my little crew. "We seem to be short one pin."
"No, sir. I've kept track, and that's all we had."
"Use your head," I told them. "Nothing comes in sets of eleven. Either there are
supposed to be a dozen, and we're short one, or there are ten and we have one too many.
Keep looking."
And we did, until I saw S/Sgt Reynolds, the Chief of Detail, and asked whether
there were ten or twelve taping pins in a set.
"Eleven, sir. You see, that's so you'll know when you've taped a thousand feet, or
ten tapes. There's a pin at the beginning of each hundred feet-that's ten-and an eleventh
one at the end of the last hundred. "
So ended my first lesson in surveying.
There are several reasons for field artillery survey, but the most important is to
locate the firing batteries in relationship to each other, so that when you have established
the distance and direction of a particular target from one battery, either by firing at it or
finding it on a map, you can quickly measure the same information for the other batteries,
and so be able to fire them all at the same target.
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