And speaking of mortars...

...my baggage followed me to Antietam battlefield last week.

The Monday after my father died I drove from the rural town in southeastern Pennsylvania where my parents have lived for the past decade south and west to the hilly border of south-central Maryland, to the old Civil War battlefield of Sharpsburg (as the rebels called it) along the Antietam Creek.

I needed a day away from the room where I'd spent the past three days watching my old man die, and although I wrote about the fight back in 2008 I'd never been to the actual field. Given the park-like setting of these old battlegrounds it seemed like a good place to find peace.

And the park is, as all these parks memorializing the battles long ago in this most brutal of America's industrial wars seem to be, very pretty and pastoral. The stone soldiers and green-barreled cannon always seem to be a little sheepish, as if silently apologizing for reminding you of the vicious slaughter that they commemorate.

So I spent a pleasant idle day driving and wandering around the old battlefield, marveling at the suicidal bravery of those men on both sides who walked upright into a storm of rifle-musket and cannon fire. I stood by the narrow stone bridge now named after one of the U.S. Army's least competent general officers and tried to figure out how I as a sergeant of 1862 would have convinced my platoon to advance over that beaten zone and couldn't imagine it. Christ, what an awful nightmare.

But the place where my backstory caught up with me was near what had been the center of the fight, what has become known as Bloody Lane.

Here's what the Park Service says about this place:

"The Sunken Road, as it was known to area residents prior to the Battle of Antietam, was a dirt farm lane which was used primarily by farmers to bypass Sharpsburg and been worn down over the years by rain and wagon traffic. On September 17, 1862, Confederate Maj. Gen. Daniel Harvey Hill placed his division of approximately 2,600 men along the road, piled fence rails on the embankment to further strengthen the position and waited for the advance of the Union army. As Federal troops moved to reinforce the fighting in the West Woods, Union Maj. Gen. William H. French and his 5,500 men veered south, towards Hill's position along the Sunken Road. As French's men approached the Sunken Road, the Confederate troops staggered them with a powerful volley delivered at a range of less than one hundred yards.

Union and Confederate troops dug in. For nearly four hours, from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., bitter fighting raged along this road as French, supported by Gen. Israel B. Richardson`s division, sought to drive the Southerners back. Outnumbered but with a well-defended position, the Confederates in the road stood their ground for most of the morning. Finally, the Federals were able to overwhelm Hill's men, successfully driving them from this strong position and piercing the center of the Confederacy's line. However, the Federals did not follow up this success with additional attacks, and confusion and sheer exhaustion ended the fighting in this part of the battlefield. In three hours of combat, 5,500 soldiers were killed or wounded and neither side gained a decisive advantage. The Sunken Road was now Bloody Lane."

The stroll through the fields down to Bloody Lane was quick and pleasant, the sun warm on my shoulders and the shade of hedgerows noisy with the chipping of the sparrows. But the Lane itself came as something of a surprise.

I had imagined the feature as a sort of natural field fortification; deep, narrow, and with a long slope down to the east in front of it. This would have satisfied the conventional image of the Lane as a fearsome barrier and perfect killzone. The actual topography of the Lane and the ground imediately to the east is very different.

For one thing, the Lane runs along a natural swale with high ground to both east and west. A D.H. Hill private with an Enfield rifle-musket standing in the bottom waiting for French's guys to come at him would have seen this:

The field of fire from the Lane to the crest of the high ground to the northeast is maybe 30 meters, and nowhere more than 50. Hill's troopers' fire commanded a distance that a guy with a strong arm could have hucked a rock.

Now that surprised me.

I had imagined that the Union attack had to push across hundreds of yards of beaten zone, a sort of American St. Privat, and that bloody slog was what had given Bloody Lane its name. But, no. The Yanks had a perfectly good piece of dead ground close enough to have had the whole dang brigade dug into shallow foxholes covering the Reb positions whilst the battalion mortars dropped baseplates in defilade 200 meters to the rear and just fucking pasted the living shit out of every sonofabitch in that sunken road.

But...that was the problem. French and Richardson's people didn't have mortars.

Or, at least, not the sort of mortars I expect to have providing me with indirect fire support and blowing hell out of enemy revetments like this. Somewhere they had what were called "coehorn" mortars, but those things were probably stuck somewhere in the field trains miles away. Their supporting field artillery might have had a couple of howitzers stuck in somewhere, but their arc of fire was probably little more than a shallow rainbow that would have - assuming that the grunts could have worked out some way of running back to the battery to adjust the fall of shot - like as not either missed long or buried their shells in the front slope of the Lane.

So.

The Bloody Lane Problem is just another occasion of the problem that American Civil War infantry had throughout the war; they just flat out didn't have any means or methods of quickly throwing effective quantities of high explosive into a hastily dug-in enemy. That problem was solved by the "trench mortar" forty years later...and the defenders responded by digging narrower and deeper trenches and roofing them over. No military technology is decisive for very long; human ingenuity is simply too ingenious. But in 1862 the rifled musket was the King of Battle, and the only way to winkle some bastards with Springfields or Enfields out from behind a wall or a fence, or out of a sunken lane, was with human muscle behind another Springfield, or Enfield backed up with direct-firing cannon artillery.

So the poor sods died in their thousands and tens of thousands assaulting Bloody Lane and the Mule Shoe and the stone bridge just a couple of miles away.

We Americans love our military technology. If anything, we tend to think that there's a technical solution to damn near any military problem. Bloody Lane, though, is a good reminder that sometimes the problem is that the technological solution won't work, or can't be applied, or just isn't there, and that the price of "politics by other means" will then be paid in full, and in blood.

TFT

The reason this blog is called "Graphic Firing Table" is because when I started it I was an artilleryman in the Oregon National Guard.

I explained back then what a GFT was and what it did, and it seemed like a good sort of title for something like a blog that delivers opinions and ideas like projectiles into the aether. I didn't talk about the other form of manual fire direction computation (as opposed to an actual computer, which was then and now the primary method of fire direction in use in the U.S. Army); this is a "Tabular Firing Table" or TFT, simply a book that contains table after table of information; this stuff includes things like corrections for wind, atmospheric pressue, temperature, elevation differences between the gun and the target, and barrel wear.

Eventually you get to "Table F", which, depending on projectile type, fuze type, and charge provides an elevation for the gun barrel and a setting for the fuze.

Anyway, the point of this post is that right now I'm reading the last of Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy", Guns at Last Light, and came across this bit of history buried in his discussion of the autumn battles along the German frontier:

"The shortfall partly reflected the inability of U.S. plants to meet demand: a 155mm shell required forty separate manufacturing procedures. The more common 105mm howitzer ammunition was produced and shipped under twelve hundred different lot numbers, each with minor variations in propellant that affected accuracy. (First Army was to spend 25,000 man-hours in the early fall sorting jumbled ammunition to avoid catastrophic short barrages."

I was horrified when I read this.

One of the first things you get hammered into you when you learn fire direction is that you have to know the characteristics of your projectile and propellant. Changes in ammunition type, changes in fuze type, changes in propellant type can all have enormous effects on the point of impact of the round. Shoot a high explosive round using gun data calculated for an illumination round and you might sail hundreds of meters beyond your plotted target; shoot an HE round on data calculated for a white phosphorus round and it impacts tens or hundreds of meters short. Same with propellant. One lot might send the round 10% further than another, a third 10% less.

This is the great advantage of the modern ballistic computer. It can store data from hundreds of ammunition lots, freeing the fire direction crew from having to sort through all that shit.

But in 1944 the battery FDC's didn't have a computer. They had a bunch of guys, a chart board, and a bunch of TFTs.

The idea of trying to sort out twelve hundred individual ammo lots?

Gah. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

Anyway, the Atkinson book is damn good, worth a read for anyone interested in the period and the command and control issues of the Allied advance on Germany through Western Europe. Not a tactical primer but terrific on limning the times and peoples and giving you a sense of what happened and why.

Battles Long Ago: Clatsop Plains 1942

Clatsop Plains (The Shelling of Ft. Stevens) Date: 21 JUN 1942

Forces Engaged: Empire of Japan - B1-type (Otsu-gata) fleet submarine I-25; 17 x Type 95 "Long Lance" torpedoes, 1 x 5.5"/50cal deck gun, 94 officers and enlisted crewmen under Commander Tagami Meiji

United States of America - Units of the Coast Artillery, U.S. Army., manning the harbor defense guns emplaced at Fort Stevens, Oregon.

So far as I can tell the batteries at Fort Stevens were heavily manned on the night of 21 JUN. The garrison consisted of most of the 1st Battalion, 18th Coast Artillery (U.S. Army) and the 249th Coast Artillery battalion, Oregon Army National Guard in federal service.

C Battery, 1/18th CA appears to have been detached with 4 x 12" railway mortars to Brown's Point further up the mouth of the Columbia River in January, 1942, but the remaining batteries; HHSB, A, and B, 1/18th CA and HHSB, A, B, and C 249th CA (ORARNG) were on duty at Ft. Stevens that night. In addition the cadre of a new Coast Artillery unit, the 267th CA, had arrived on 12 JUN to prepare for the arrival of the remainder of the unit in August.

The strength report for 30 JUN 1942 lists 129 officers, 5 warrant officers, and 2,194 enlisted men. Of these, the most closely involved were the artillerymen manning Battery Russell under one CPT Woods; which unit was crewing the guns I have not been able to determine.

Battery Russell, which faced the Pacific, mounted two M1900 10" rifled cannon on what was known as a "disappearing" carriage. This contraption was basically a set of folding legs that could be lowered to load the cannon and then raised above the emplacement parapet to fire, making the gun difficult to hit with the low-angle, flat-trajectory naval guns typical of the turn-of-the-19th-century when the cannon were manufactured.

The total armament of Ft. Stevens that night consisted of:

Battery Russell's two 10" cannon;
A total of eight 12" mortars: 4 x M1918 mortars mounted on railway cars and another 4 M1890 type emplaced in Battery Clark, and
Battery Pratt's two 6" M1897MI cannon.

The commander of the Harbor Defenses of the Columbia River was one COL Doney, CA...

...and all of this military might was part of the U.S. Army's Ninth Coast Artillery District commanded by MG Wilson far away and safe in his bed on the night of 21 JUN...

The Campaign: It's frankly hard to call the events of 21 JUN 1942 much of a "battle", much less as part of a "campaign". I wanted to tell the story as a curiosity and as a favorite part of Oregon history that is usually forgotten. It was an oddity in an odd moment in the Great Pacific War, but one that was serious enough to the people who lived through it, and so perhaps I should give the moment a bit of historical context.

But here's the problem.

The events of 21 JUN 42 make absolutely no frigging sense to me from a military standpoint.

Let's walk back the spring of 1942 a bit, shall we?

The two enemies had very different strategic objectives, and their military plans reflected that.

The Japanese needed the U.S. Navy off their ass so they could complete the subjugation of the Philippines and the seizure of the "Southern Resource Area" otherwise known as the Dutch East Indies colonies and the lovely petroleum hidden thereunder.

The United States needed to hold off the Japanese in the central Pacific until the Pacific Fleet could recover from the beating the received at Pearl Harbor, keep their lines of supply to Australia open (and that country un-invaded, although the Japanese had no real plans to do so the U.S. couldn't be sure of that), and then figure out how to pry open the Japanese defensive network that the Empire had flung out across the southwestern and western Pacific beginning after the First World War.

The wild card was the U.S. strategic intelligence gathered through various codebreaking schemes, which enabled the U.S. to anticipate the Japanese plan to stage a decisive engagement with the U.S. carriers in the central Pacific. This engagement went off as planned, but as we all know the decision was against the Kido Butai, which lost four fleet carrier decks and hundreds of talented fliers in the course of several days in June.

You would think that a Japanese fleet submarine would have been gawdamn busy in the month of June; scouting for the Combined Fleet, harrying the U.S. convoys supplying it's Midway task forces, sinking American carriers or some damn thing that supported Yamamoto's Operation Mai tactical plan for Midway.

But you'd be wrong, neh?

Instead of hunting Yankee sailors, in June '42 the I-25 and her crew were farkling about off the Northwest coast, because...

Would you believe - the Dolittle Raid?

The most common explanation I've read for the overall mission of the I-25's Third War Patrol was to commit mayhem along the U.S. Left Coast in retaliation for the audacity of the gringos bombing the Imperial homeland.

I'm not sure if I believe it. Except for one thing; the overall strategic fucktardry of the 大日本帝国海軍 (Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kaigun)'s submarine forces.

And that was with a hell of a submersible force at the beginning of the war; the IJN had a total of 63 fleet subs on 8 DEC 41, including some of the most powerful in the world at the time.

Even a web page about Japanese imperial submarines has to admit that "(g)iven their (advantages in) size, range, speed, and torpedoes, Japanese submarines achieved surprisingly little."

The common explanation is that the Japanese had no real idea what to do with their subs other than throw them at enemy warships. And they did a fairly decent job of this in 1942.

But pitting slow submerged submarines (and remember that WW2 subs were really "submersibles" - they were actually pretty damn poor at doing anything submerged outside of running slow and silent for a damn short time until their batteries ran down and fumes and lack of oxygen overcame their crews, not to mention the incredible stench from the bilges where who-the-hell knew what awful swill floated - at least by 1942 most navy subs had actual heads, unlike the WW1 varieties where the crewmen used the bilges for a shitter) against sonar-equipped escorts is a mug's game.

And - remember, the WW2 subs had to spend a LOT of time on the surface - the U.S. naval air arm and long-distance reconnaissance aircraft got real good real fast at pickling off a depth charge or eight on whatever hapless Japanese sub they could find, and they found a lot of 'em.

But for the rest of it, the Japanese widdled their submarine force away in all sorts of pointless missions; resupply, snoop-and-pooping, lurking outside U.S. naval bases hoping to sneak a torpedo up the skirt of some careless Yankee...and, I suspect, this mission.

And the Third War Patrol really was pretty pointless. Listen, here's the itinerary for the I-25's 1942 West Coast Tour;

11 MAY 42: Departs Yokosuka.

27-30 MAY 42: Recons Kodiak, Dutch Harbor and USN units in Alaska in support of the Operation AL, the Aleutian diversion for the Battle of Midway. But the submarine is nowhere near the Aleutians during the actual operation - she's en-route to Oregon

14 JUN 42: On station off the coast of Oregon. I-25 is reported to "have launched a number of false bamboo periscopes to confuse the ASW vessels in the vicinity". Frankly, the bamboo-periscope thing sounds like a piece of slap-a-Jap racism except it's almost too bizarre for that so it may well be true.

Okay, pay attention, here's the odd bit, now:

18 JUN 1942: The web page listing I-25's movements during this time says: "ComSubRon 1 (RADM Yamazaki) orders the I-25 and the I-26 to shell military targets on the American west coast."

Frankly, that doesn't make sense to me if the point of this patrol was Revenge! for the Dolittle Raid. This seems like the kind of brilliant fucking idea some staff pogue comes up with for the combat types to try out. I wonder how the phrase "Trust me! This'll go slicker'n water of a cat's ass!" translates into Japanese? I think this entire operation was some REMF's idea of a killer career move. But that's just me; your mileage may vary. What do you think?

Anyway,

20-21 JUN 1942: torpedoes a British freighter northwest of the mouth of the Columbia, and attacks two other vessels, sinking none.

21 JUN 1942: fires 17 rounds of 5.5" at Fort Stevens on the N coast of Oregon, but inflicts no significant damage. (One dud shell landed near the golf course on Delaura Beach Road and is now a memorial) The Japanese actually intended to shell the "American submarine base at Astoria."

11 July 1942: Returns Yokosuka.

And that was that.

So I'm not sure if there really was much of a "plan" involved here. I think some staff puke attached to Submarine Squadron One got a wild hair up his ass after hearing about the fiasco that was Yamamoto's brilliant Midway operation and wanted one of his guys to kill some Yankees, ANY Yankees, goddamnit.

So Commander Meiji got his orders and the boys at Battery Russell got a rude awakening on a Sunday night.

The Sources: The usual; official records, war diaries, personal accounts, letters, newspapers, all the literary appurtenances of living in a literate society.

Of the written sources in particular I'd like to recommend Panic! at Fort Stevens by Bert Webber; a nice little illustrated account of the night, and probably the single volume specific to the event. Available from the Columbia River Maritime Museum (a pretty terrific place, as well...) here.

There's several good on-line places to read about the night of 21 JUN. The Wiki entry is perhaps the worst place to begin. It's a great example of "bad" Wiki; sparse, missing the Webber primary source, and contains a reference to a supposed B-17 attack that I frankly consider unlikely.

Somebody named Dale Fehrenger has a nice account of the evening featuring quotes from CPT Wood, the Battery Russell commander, and other participants. There are a handful of what look like factual inaccuracies (the B1 submarines are listed at 94 crew, not 108...but, then, wartime units tend to find places for people and equipment they're not "supposed" to have, so, there...)

An outfit called the "Coast Defense Study Group" has a great site for information on Fort Stevens here. Well worth a look, especially the terrific pictures.


The Engagement: The round tale of the night of Sunday, 21 JUN, is quickly told. But indulge me; I want to set the table a little bit.

First, the defenses.

The coastal guns at Ft. Stevens in 1942 - in fact, all around the mouth of the Columbia - were still largely sited and their fields of fire planned with the Spanish-American War parameters of naval architecture in mind.

The forts around the river mouth; Ft. Stevens on Clatsop Spit to the south, Ft. Canby on the south end of the Long Beach peninsula to the north, and the smaller Ft. Columbia just southeast of Chinook, Washington (also on the north bank) were designed engage an enemy force actually entering the harbor. Look at the fields of fire for the active Ft. Stevens batteries. Here's Battery Pratt's 2 x 6" guns;

And here's another pair of 6-inchers, these mounted on Battery Murphy at Ft. Columbia:

The real smashing was expected to have been done by the high-angle fire of the 12" mortars crashing down through wooden decks; as you can see, these weapons had considerably better arc of fire, although their range was not much longer than the much smaller 6-inchers:

(These diagrams are all from an archived 1937 document titled Annexes to Harbor Defense Project, Harbor Defenses of the Columbia viewable at the Coast Defense Study Group website) There is nothing listed in this annex for Battery Russell - since in '37 the battery was officially out of service - but the maximum range for a 10" M1900 is listed as 14,000 yards. So the arc of fire of Russell would have probably looked something like this:

You'll notice the red circle?

That's I-25's 5.5"/50 deck gun. Designed twenty years after the M1900, with half the size it has almost half again the range; 21,600 yards.

We'll get back to that in a moment.

So it must have been a pretty lazy Sunday night for the boys at Fort Stevens. Astoria, Hammond, and Warrenton - the closest towns - were still pretty rural places in '42, lots of fishing, clamming, and crabbing. Some saltgrass sorts of agriculture and dairying. The waterfront bars were known to be tough, and you were likely to get into a fight if you used the wrong look at some Finn pissed off from a long day and no fish. Or a different sort of look at his daughter.

But the lucky few were back from pass, probably telling the usual lies GIs have always told about the drinking and fucking heroics, while the post settled into the early lights-out routines. Sentries shook their heads and squinted into the dark of a June night. The busy day noises died away and the nighttime sounds took over; the distant surf booming and hissing, the sound of crickets and the whine of mosquitoes, occasional sounds of cars or trucks on the Coast Highway out in the eastern darkness.

Out in the greater darkness of the Pacific Ocean I-25 had surfaced some time before 2330. I could find no record of her course or speed, but I suspect that she was probably cruising slowly southwards, for reasons I'll explain later.

It must have been a nerve-wracking moment. The enemy's landmass, presumably loaded with pantsloads of scary dangerous aircraft, soldiers, and sailors lay less than 4 miles to port. The sub had used the local fishing fleet to slip through the sea mines and past the guardships, but there was no disguising the danger. The gun crew presumably had their helmets strapped on tight and their kapok vests over their summer whites as they cranked the cannon around and elevated the muzzle.

The number one man jammed the first round into the breech and the assistant gunner slammed the breech closed. The gun captain probably looked up at the bridge, and someone, possibly even the captain himself, barked 暖炉!

Open fire!

The crewmen said later that they didn't bother to use the 5.5" gunsight; their target was blacked out, anyway, and, besides, it's hard to miss the ground with a shell.

A long tongue of flame strobed the night, the first round spiraled out of the gun muzzle and then the crew waited impatiently until the bloom of fire announced the first enemy cannon round to land on a continental United States fortification since 1865.

Let's let CPT Woods take up the story.

Things went pretty crazy in the first moments under fire. Troops ran to their guns half-dressed or undressed, sirens screamed, one of the searchlight flicked on and raked the water only to snap off after an officer threatened to shoot it out for giving away the emplacement's position. Battery Russell was loaded and ready to fire within several minutes and CPT Woods requested permission to open fire from the central fire direction center at Main Post.

"While waiting for the order to return fire,"

the Fehrenger article runs,

"Captain Wood and his men considered their options. Since they couldn’'t tell exactly where the shots were coming from, they decided to focus on the flashes from the submarine and fire their guns over and under the flashes, like field artillery pieces. If they weren'’t able to hit the sub, that approach should at least scare it away.

Eventually a response was received: “Do not fire. – I say again; do not fire.”

Wood’s men were unhappy. There was grumbling from soldiers at the guns and in the ammunition rooms below. Richard Emery, who was a soldier at Fort Stevens that night, said, “"We were frustrated. There was a lot of anger. We felt that we should have been able to fire back."

Apparently the combination of darkness and a target that consisted of a moving series of flashes had resulted in a poor plot in the FDC; I-25 was plotted as out of range of Russell's 10-inchers, and if Battery Russell couldn't hit her none of the Stevens batteries could.

But given the reported elevation of I-25's deck gun and the strike of the rounds it's likely that the submarine was no more than 13,000 to 15,000 yards away; possibly out of range, but possibly not. The lack of radar guidance for the older cannons was shown to be a critical flaw. The U.S. batteries remained silent.

At 2345 I-25 fired the last of 17 rounds. Her gun crew secured the cannon for dive, and the deck crew went below save for lookouts and the conning party. The submarine turned west, heading out to sea, and back to Japan. She slipped past several small boats, presumably fishermen, and, diesels thumming, began to pick up speed as she headed for home.

The cannonade of Clatsop Plains was over.

The Outcome: Utterly trivial; a minor Japanese tactical and propaganda "victory", if you will, but meaningless outside of an exciting evening for the participants and a black eye for the Coast Artillery Corps.

The Impact: Physical? Well...some craters on the beach, shell fragments all around Battery Russell, including damage to the backstop of a baseball diamond about 100 yards away.

A near-miss on a beach house where three kids peed themselves for the first time since toddlerhood.

A power line was scored, eventually rusted through, and broke.

That powerline, by the way, was on Delaura Beach Road, some considerable distance south of the initial impacts around Russell. See?

Which is why I suspect that I-25 was cruising slowly south as she fired; a random MPI like that doesn't make sense unless she was drifting south, in my opinion. No matter, really, except the site is monumented today:

But emotional?

For all that the actual military damage that I-25 did that night, the real impact of her attack (and the September aerial bombing by her E14Y1 "Glen" floatplane) was in the minds of Americans, who saw one more damn Jap attack after another (given the shelling of oil facilities in southern California in February, and now this...) The shelling probably contributed to the fear that imprisoned thousands of Japanese-Americans all over the West Coast, and helped fan the overall ruthlessness that characterized the Pacific War.

Mind you, the Japanese could do ruthless. And did.

For all that this was just a ridiculous and silly scrap, overall it was a pretty goddamn awful war.

Oh, and interesting - note that in the World's Probably Even Then Worst Newspaper the number of shells is listed as nine. Other U.S. eyewitnesses said eleven; almost no one said 17. Chances are that over a third of the Japanese shells landed in the water, or the soft ground typical of Clatsop Plains and didn't explode.

But perhaps the most significant fatality of that night was the Coast Artillery itself.

The inability of the coastal forts to keep off their insignificant attacker was a painful remainder that the era of naval gunnery was all but over. Aircraft would patrol the coasts from now on, and by 1944 almost all of the old batteries at Ft. Stevens were abandoned.

A pair of newer 5-inch guns were installed and quietly decommissioned within a year.

Ft. Stevens, Ft. Canby, and Ft. Columbia were all leased or sold within the next several decades; there are no active coastal defense installations in the United States.

The Coast Artillery Corps itself, which had been split off from the Field Artillery only in 1907, lived only another eight years and was merged back with the redlegs of the FA. Ironically, several old Coast Artillery posts were used in the Fifties as sites for CIM-10 Bomarc launchers, perhaps the last true heir to the fortified cannon defenses.

In a moment of panic fear of yellow hordes swarming ashore a renewed energy was applied to coastal defenses along the West Coast, however, including another layer of barbed wire entanglements along the beach.

The wire is said to have been buried under sand or washed away within a year and was never repaired or replace as it became starkly clear that the Japanese weren't going to visit.

What did remain tangled in the wreck of the Peter Iredale, however, and is said to have remained a hell of a nuisance for several years.

Ft. Stevens has been turned into a state park, where on nice summer days you can drive around the old concrete batteries and hear about the excitement of the night of 21 JUL. Oddly, the popular attraction of late has become the restoration of the older earthwork, built during the Civil War, and the swarms of black powder reenactors who show up to fight impossible blue-gray battles over weekends in July.

Battery Russell stands empty amid the riot of salal and Oregon grape that has grown up and through the silent flash doors to the magazines.

A plastic and wooden replica of the old M1900 cannon sits in simulated ferocity in the slowly decaying concrete of one of the revetments,

While timber grows from the old formation area, and in defiance of first sergeants long gone the walls are stained and scribbled with names and declarations of love, foolishness, and ferocity.

CPT Woods command post still looks out on the restless Pacific, the only Japanese vessels within its gunsights now the immense slab-sided car carriers bringing Mitsubishis whose intent is purely harmless. In the cool woodlands outside the zeeee of the hermit thrush echoes the whisper of the nightfire of seventy years ago.

H&I

I have an odd sort of love-hate for Michael Yon.

He is one of the few journalists really willing to spend a LOT of time in some of the filthiest ass-end parts of the world finding out what's happening there. He also knows soldiers and soldiering in a sort of latter-day Ernie Pyle way, and I like that.

On the downside, he's a sort of dirty-boot Bob Kaplan, Tom Clancy with a notepad, a guy who's never met gee-whiz cool Aaaaaarmy training he didn't love. He's sort of a man-size eleven-year-old that way, and he commonly mistakes technical and tactical proficiency for strategic and geopolitical competence, and he always assumes that the GI's are the epitome of studly cool and the fuzzy-wuzzies are dirty rats.I love the fact that he has some great pictures and a nice little article about the gunners at FOB Frontenac (although, Mike? That'd be "Cobra Battery, 1st Battalion, 17th Artillery - the 17th Infantry are those guys walking around with the teeny little bullet launchers, remember?).

But as I'm enjoying the pretty night fire pictures I come across this:

"Sometimes the crews fire “H & I” or “terrain denial” missions. Harassment and Interdiction missions are fired at terrain known to be used only by the enemy at certain times, and so anytime the enemy feels like rolling the dice, they can move into that terrain. Such missions also provide influence for “shaping” the battlefield. If the commander is trying to flush the enemy into a blunder—maybe an ambush—or maybe to cut them off from an escape route, he can have the guns pound into a gorge, say, that is used as an enemy route. Or maybe he just tries to persuade the enemy to take a route where we have sniper teams waiting. The battery can be used in many ways that do not include direct attacks on enemy formations."

Yes, indeed.

When I was just a mere slip of a redleg, my FDC Chief taught me that H&I fires in a LIC were the worst way of substituting motion for direction, a bad excuse for shooting unobserved rounds at a grid coordinate, a waste of rounds and a good way of pissing off the locals at you.We did this shit a lot in Vietnam, where my Chief got sick of it. Typically you had no eyes on the "target", which could be a trail junction, the edge of a treeline, a river ford, anywhere. And since you were also typically in the middle of a farming district, these were also typically used by local Romeos slipping out to see their hootchie Juliets, woodcutters, farmers, enemy runners, monkeys, roebucks...just about damn near anything. But the point was that - despite what Yon thinks - you never really knew. It was a statistic, a way that the artillery battalion or brigade could say "We fired XYZ missions on Targets Able, Fox and Whiskey"

I have no idea if H&I fire is any better in A-stan than it was in Vietnam. But the fact that we're doing it at all...?

Hmmm.

When Cannons Attack

This is when you get a "U" (for "untrained") on the collective task "load and fire cannon" portion of your METL.Let me be the first to say that one thing your Number 1 man is supposed to know is that you always stay out from behind the breech! Better a broken arm than a crushed sternum.

However, as sergeants and parents both know, there are some people you can tell and tell things to and the only way they learn them is to do the opposite and then the Bad Thing happens to them. The chagrined survivor, at that point, believes you.

It's a hard way to learn, but then, there are some people who only learn the hard way. I was one; my son is another. Life is not kind to us. But Life is neither inherantly kind nor cruel; it simply is, and as we are so we find it. I don't wish my own path on my son; much of it was difficult, embarassing or painful and much of that was my own fault. I can guide, I can explain, I can caution, I can try and prevent. But try as I might, I cannot divert the Wheel from his shoulders. And some day, as this poor young troop found, he may find himself hurled backwards with the hot, hard imprint of the breechblock in his chest thinking as the world flies past him in reverse:

"What the fu...!?"

I just hope he can get up, a wiser if less comfortable young man.

What the heck is a "Graphic Firing Table"

You this is me: adjust fire, over. Request target description...

It's a slide rule.

Actually, it's that thing you're looking at. So it's sorta kinda like a slide rule, only you can't use it to do your taxes. Assuming anyone uses a slide rule to do their taxes anymore (fogy alert: I remember my father using a slipstick to do HIS taxes when I was a kid. His first calculator, a massive Texas Instruments desk model could actually add, subtract, divide and multiply! It was infinitely cool, for 1972..)

A GFT, as it's usually called, is part of what's termed "Manual Gunnery" by the Army schoolhouse at Fort Sill. A fire direction computer (that's a person, BTW) uses the GFT to index range to target for a certain propellant charge to determine the elevation of the gun barrel that will allow me (the FDC Chief) to provide data to the guns. There's actually a lot more of this stuff, like "site" and angle of site and complimentary angle of site (and this is just the up-and-down, long-and-short range thingies - what FA types call "quadrant" - I'm not even going into the left-and-right data we call "deflection") which allow you to spoil somebody's day several klicks over the next hill, but it's only of interest to FA geeks like me and ol' Harry Truman.

Why the hell call a blog "Graphic Firing Table"?

Well, in my experience, a GFT is a simple but useful tool that helps you to commit broadcast mayhem. Kinda like a blog.

Hope that helps. Don't hesitate to write me with all of your manual gunnery questions! I am sort of like Dear Prudence with a chart board...

End of mission. Out.