Back to Fort Sill in place and time

George Rebane

We got home yesterday afternoon from a visit to Ft Sill, OK and Denver, CO, a trip that also let us catch up with a lot of what’s happening in the country.  Ft Sill is the world’s preeminent artillery development and training center.  If you are an American cannon cocker or tactical missile man (Army or Marine), you have gone through Ft Sill.  The place is located on an ideal patch of land that has little use for things other than maneuvering guns and impacting shells.  All of us who graduated from there agreed that ‘if the world needed an enema, then they’d stick the tube …’, you know the rest.

The Army base itself is a small, well-kept city home to thousands of GIs and their dependents.  We also train our allies’ artillery officers there, so you see a lot of different uniforms on base.  On this occasion the historical (pre-Civil War) fort hosted the veterans who served in Babenhausen, Germany during the Cold War from the 1940s to the 1980s.  Babenhausen was already well-established in American history by the time WW2 ended.

Located in Hessen, Babenhausen was the home base of the Hessians who fought ineffectively (cf. Washington crossing the Delaware) for the British in our Revolutionary War when King George III got a deal for mercenaries he couldn’t refuse from a long lost German cousin who ran into some money problems.  (see also ‘Babenhausen Remembers’)

So this time our reunion brought us all back to the prairie and windswept hills of southern Oklahoma where we learned the fine art of artillery – working the guns, calculating fire direction solutions, and calling in ‘fire missions’ from the observation posts.  I even invented a new way to attack enemy patrols and demonstrated the method on a colony of very surprised prairie dogs.  As we visited the museums and training sites, every one of us relived special memories from our first active duty station as young second lieutenants.  For me standing next to a firing 105mm howitzer and talking to the battery commander was a real blast from the past.  The Army made a special dispensation for us and our wives by letting us get right into the firing battery site while the guns were servicing fire missions the impact of whose shells we could see on a hillside four klicks inside the impact area.  We even got to pass around a fully fused 105mm HE round – I don’t remember them being so heavy when I was a young buck.

The world’s militaries have reduced the calibers of their artillery arsenals over the years.  We used to fire everything from 75mm pack howitzers to 175mm guns with various configurations of 155mm and 8 in weapons thrown in for good measure.  Today, this has been reduced to only 105mm and 155mm.  But the sophistication of the new terminally guided rounds is close to awesome.  For example, we now have a 155mm round that sprouts a stabilizing turbine and canards when it leaves the muzzle.  It has a control computer that uses input target coordinates and GPS to guide itself to the target flying a complex profile that even includes terrain following.  For about $100K a pop (a little play on words here) you can put one of these puppies through a window fifteen miles away, and ruin the rest of the day for the ragheads who were inside holding a meeting.

All fire direction today is, of course, machine computed.  However, the Fire Direction Officer assured me that they still have a set of artillery slipsticks to manually compute a fire control solution (azimuth, elevation, time of flight, height of burst, charge, …) in case all else fails – e.g. an enemy EMP.  That warmed the cockles of me heart since in my day all we had was these slide rules, protractors, and tables in field manuals, and for you techies, can you still spell C-O-R-I-O-L-I-S?

I remember during live firing exercises when I was tasked to be a battery safety officer, we were the last ones to hit the sack at night – actually about 1am in the morning.  Army protocol called for all live fire missions to be physically checked and approved by a commissioned officer.  We were the last ones to look through the sights, check the inserted charge, and settings on the fused round before it was rammed.  It was then when the gun was properly aimed and the crew out of the path of recoil that we raised our hand to let the battery exec give the command to fire.

And all that had to be done very rapidly so that ‘safetying a piece’ would not noticeably add to the all important seconds from receiving ‘Fire Mission!’ to ‘(Round) On the Way!’  That is me with my hand up on one of our 175mm SPs at NATO’s Grafenwöhr Training Area (same place where Rommel’s Afrika Corps and German armies have been training for centuries).  I had again put my future on the line by assuring all that the very big projectile leaving the muzzle would explode safely somewhere 20 miles away inside the impact area.

 

Less than five years before, a young lieutenant in a similar position had allowed a howitzer to fire its HE shell into a bivouac tent killing 16 troopers.  He and no one else manning the piece noticed that one extra charge bag had been tied into the stack of charges which caused the round to completely overshoot the impact area and land on the other side miles away in the middle of an encampment.  Starting with the safety officer, several people went to Leavenworth (Army prison), and many more up the chain of command had their careers terminated.

To prevent such accidents – BTW, artillery battalions suffered a training death rate of about three soldiers every two years – safety officers must precompute all the boundary solutions from a given firing point into the impact area before firing commences the next morning.  And to make the most area available for the forward observers, this requires the solution of many ‘corners’ for each possible charge.  To make a long story short, after a hard day in the field, we safety officers would gather around a warm stove in the middle of the night to work out the solutions and write them carefully onto 3x5 cards.  Why so late at night?  Well, because this is the Army, and the next day’s firing positions were not known until the colonels (battalion and regiment commanders) met after dinner to dicker and make their selections.  Then, after the inevitable delays, we lieutenants at the firing batteries got the word.  If you’ve been in the service, you know the drill.

Anyway, this gives an example of the skills and jobs that a newly fletched artillery officer was taught at Ft Sill.  Artillery is the most technically demanding of the combat branches in any army, and they try to cram a lot of stuff into your heads during your training and certification.  As a Lucky Strike Extra, did you know that all artillery officers are also certified land surveyors?  Yep, we tramped our butts off surveying the bejeezus out of those Oklahoma hills, and woe be to you if your survey did not ‘close’.  Lots of (now) fun memories for all of us during the four days we spent at dear old Ft Sill.

The more sobering part of the visit was seeing all my old comrades getting older and more rickety.  Some already sporting canes and walkers, and one even in a wheelchair.  We are all in our seventies, but still see ourselves as young, in shape, and able to stay awake for over 48 hours straight, and incredibly muscular.  We could all single-handedly heft a 155mm round (about 103 lbs) and have it rammed into the breech from our arms.  Not any more.

Jo Ann and I bid goodbyes to our mates and left Ft Sill on Sunday morning, driving over the vast Texas panhandle and up the east side of the Rockies to Pueblo, CO for the overnight before pressing on to Denver the next morning.  There we visited our oldest granddaughter who has presented us with three great grandchildren with the fourth due next March.  Along with a Great Dane and a Maine Coon cat, she and her hubby (software engineer) live in a Denver ‘four square’ house that was built in 1905.

And then Tuesday (yesterday) morning we threw ourselves again onto the mercies of our 21st century air transportation system at the Denver airport, and were quickly reminded once more of Islam ascendant.  But that’s a different and ongoing story.

Comments

[don bessee]

Thanks for your Service Dr. R! It is amazing what DARPA and our folks come up with. I remember reading about the development of the proximity fuse in WW2. It is still amazing they were able to develop a miniature transmitter, receiver set that could survive the muzzle blast effects on the shell much less the G forces. The amazing munitions that are in the field are much like science fiction in real life. God Bless the Troops in the field and lets hope we can get the budget acquisition process back on track soon, hopefully before 0 is gone. Nice to see the Saudis purchases of modern US ships that can free up our boats from anti sub and mine clearing in the Arabian Gulf.

[George Rebane]

The VT (proximity) fuse does indeed have some hardy electronics in it. Few realize that artillery fuses have two interlocks that must be actuated before the fuse becomes functional and can detonate the round. These are linear ('setback') and centripetal ('rotation') accelerations of magnitudes present during the projectile being pushed through a rifled barrel during firing. Until then, a fused round is quite safe to handle, and even bounce around.

BTW, mine clearing is still done best by Flipper (Tursiops Truncatus) the training of which critters still goes on in the Navy's marine mammal program after forty years. I don't think I've described my extensive involvement in that program, but one day I will. Here's a description that is mostly correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Marine_Mammal_Program

[don bessee]

Not surprised, like many accomplished folks you do not feel the need to blow your own horn unlike many we see on the web. ROFLOL The web is changing the way we communicate.

[Walt]

Tell us the truth Doc. your just checking the wind direction.
Damn. I wish I had that parked in my driveway.

[Fuzz]

Dr. Rebane, I add my thanks for your service. My brother-in-law works in weapons development at Lawrence Livermore National Lab...been there almost 30 years. The unit where he works is the finest of it's type in the world....other countries go there for testing and data. He has a very high security clearance and is sworn to secrecy but he will occasionally say something like, "You would not believe what I'm working on." I know he's been involved with lasers in the past. I imagine it could be very high tech Star Wars type stuff.

[George Rebane]

Fuzz 1139am - And our thanks should go to your bro-in-law, and others like him who are doing work to keep the US secure against a lot of bad guys out there, some of whom are also very bright. Right now there is a lot of work going on in developing the weapons and tactics to fight satellite vs satellite battles in complex orbits in order to deny your enemy the ability to communicate, position, and observe. The next Pearl Harbor will most likely be in space.

[don bessee]

With troops in the field and air ops across the middle east 0 veto's the defense bill.