In a lot of the photos i have of U.S. Marnie fire bases, in vietnam, you can see in the back ground, near their "Guns, "wooden pegs in the ground with 4 numbers on them can any one tell me what they are for?

just taking a guess here, but what you describe sound like Survey Control Points (SCP). When an Artillery Bty is in the same place for a while, the Regimental Survey troops have time to bring in accurate fixation data. This helps the CP predict more accurate gun fire.

Nowadays, survey has all but been replaced by GPS.

Sounds more like quick-referance deflection stakes to me. The 4 #s are mils of deflection (azimuth). There are 6400 mils (360 degrees, 17 mils to 1 degree) in a circle. The stakes make quick referance for laying the gun on different azimuths for different fire missions since a fire base had 6400 mil, 360degree, capability.

Wow Gino, that was an interesting fact, would never have known. Arent you also an officer (real life) in an artillery company ??? I thought you may have said that once before.

Yes, I am an Artillery Officer, a Major, in the US Army.

I'm pretty sure Gino has it right. Vietnam was the first war that we wound up having artillery in fixed "fire support bases" for long periods of time in which it was standard practice to shoot fire missions with a "6400 mil" capability. (Or 360 degrees). Up until then, when a unit set up, there was a primary "azimuth of fire" and the guns were "layed" in that direction, which represented the center direction they would expect to be shooting, and you usually only fired probably about 30 degress left or right from that direction. The reason for that was, if you fired much more than that, you were firing into somebody else's sector, and that's a no-no.

Since you had one direction to shoot, you typically only needed one set of aiming stakes for reference. (I'm simplifying a bit here).

But once it became common practice to shoot 6400 mils, and the older style WWII howitzers had to be physically turned, you would set up multiple sets of aiming stakes to cover all directions. After you "shifted trails" (and the FDC knew exactly when to tell you you had to do that), you'd "re-lay" on the correct set of aiming stakes and off you'd go.

Gino is actually too young to remember all that stuff, but I took my Gunnery classes when "charts and darts" was STILL primary and FADAC was considered back up!


(I know, Gino. What's FADAC????????? :-) :-) :-) )

Here's my FDC from about 1974 That honkin' big OD thing which required a 3KW generator to run is a FADAC.



Tom

Tom,
I think I have seen a FADAC in a museum at Ft Sill. They said the dinosaurs used them. :-)

Still did charts and darts in OBC and OAC though. As you know, you have to know how to do it to understand what the AFATADS (Have you seen one of those? It's now on a laptop.) is doing. Still use it (the theory anyways, not actual charts and darts) for firing incident investigations too, which we have at least one per rotation here at NTC.

Your FDC looks great. Ol' Klingon Battle Axe looks cool. How did you make it?

Wonder how many followed what I just wrote. Hmm.

That looks like a Canadian Arty CP...from 1992

Thanks for the info the numbers are always 4 digit, ie 1200, 1600, 2400, with 00 ending the numbers.
In the photo's i have of Marnie fire bases, even on operation you can see the peg's( although he did tell me some opperations lasted weeks to months.
My mate told me the Marnies all had surplus ww2 and Korean war equipement, "Doing the hard yards on a shoe string budget".

If that is the case, they were definitely quick-referance deflection stakes. Numbers were most likely 6400 (N), 1600 (E), 3200 (S), and 4800 (W) or some variation of that. That gives you the cardinal directions and you can lay off them pretty easily and quickly for other deflections in between.

Tom!!!

You got yourself one nice looking "Freddy" there! I was a 13 Charlie stationed at Ft. Polk when Polk only had ONE 13C slot on post, that of the S-3s driver for 3rd Bn, 21st FA. Did dual duty, '3s driver and FDC'd with a bunch of Echos. Those were the days!!!

Gino, retired before I got to play with AFATADS . Went from Freddy to TACFIRE to LTACFIRE to IFSAS to retirement. Should've got a job with Litton!

Lou, it's Artillery BATTERIES........companies are for grunts and treadheads (and others) :-) :-)
(Just teasing my fellow brethren )

Mike (++) (++)

I have gone back and looked through the photo's i have, and there is numbers like 6200, 5200 on them, could they be any thing to do with different charge's? I will have to scan the photo's for you.

Mark, they are most certainly what Gino and the rest have been telling you.

The fact that they end in "00" is also a clue, as it is rare that mils are given in increments finer than 100 (for that sort of task).

I'm not sure I understand the how & why of putting mils on them if they were aiming stakes. When I crewed a 105, we would have 2 aiming points (usually front left & right rear), and sometimes a third one (far point) if we were dispersed and in heavy vegetation. But there was never any requirement to write down a bearing (azimuth) on the actual aiming stake.

I wonder if the stakes might be directional aids for another purpose? Arc markers for defence of the gun position perhaps? Or markers to provide a quick refernce to the bearing where the far aiming point is located? Quick bearing reference for the Artillery Safety double check?

Definitely quick referance for deflection. They are more for the crew to verify they are pointed in the right direction than anything else. A secondary sanity check. I'm sure they still had near & far aiming stakes and DAPs out there too to lay off of. They could also be used in the ways that Graeme mentions as well.

The powder charge increment has nothing to do with direction. Charge is a function of range and angle of fire. It is calculated at the FDC and the gun crews are told what charge to use for each fire mission.

In Nam, how many gun's did they have to a battery? And would they all be the same, ie 105mm?
I remember my son's grand father telling me that he used both 105mm and 155mm. In his photos of Nam, it looks like the old M101, 105mm Howitzers.
Was it only the 105mm ammo boxes used to make a lot of the structures on base.

Vitenam Fire Bases had a mix of calibers. The outer ring was usually 107mm (4.2", or four-deuce) mortars. Next in was 105mm's, M101 for USMC and M102s for US Army. Inner ring was long shooters, either 155mm (M114 or M53 for USMC, M109s for US Army, some M59 Long Toms were used early on too), or Army M107s (175mm) and M110s (210mm, 8") for the heavy stuff. Believe a battery was still 8 guns then. Also, any wood that was usable was used in constructing stuff. Lots of sandbags too.

Actually I'm pretty sure that any 105mm or 155mm battery would probably have consisted of only 6 guns not 8. Direct Support units (which is the mission usually conducted by those units due to range) generally had 6 tubes instead of the 8 which Gino is more familiar with. We generally didn't divide the "Firing Battery" into two separate platoons, but operated all 6 guns as a unit, unless we sent a single gun forward with the Advance Party as a "hot gun".

I never got over to Vietnam (commissioned about 1-2 years too late) but I'm pretty sure that the 105 and 155 mm units were NOT mixed within a single UNIT. However I believe that there WERE some composite batteries which mixed the 8" howitzer and the 175mm gun but I'm not sure if a battery had both, or whether the mixing was done with batteries being "pure". When I got to Germany, it was standard practice for these units to be in a "General Support" role and there were usually only 4 guns per battery. You don't like to have a single FDC computing firing data for two different calibers, as the data is different, at least for charge and "quadrant" (elevation), to hit the same point. Too easy to make a mistake on both ends, FDC or the guns. But I suppose you could manage.

It's a little confusing since when you use mils for "azimuth" (compass directions) 0 or 6400 is North, but for some reason, when you lay an artillery piece, the "base deflection" (middle of sector if you will) is generally 3200. (Don't get me STARTED with the LARS rule :-) :-) ) And your base deflection is ALWAYS the same, regardless of what "compass" direction the tubes are pointed when layed.

I BELIEVE the reason you use 3200 and NOT 6400 is because if you go left or right, you'd be going back and forth between "big numbers" and "small numbers" so to keep it simple they used 3200 instead.

The numbers mentioned make PERFECT sense, since if I recall the maximum amount you could generally deflect the old split trail without shifting the trails was....................400 mils! So if you ever had to shoot a mission more than 400 mils from 3200, you'd need a reference to tell you you were at 2800, 2400 etc.

I DON'T know if it was common practice to orient the guns in Vietnam along any of the "cardinal" compass directions, such as due north etc. What I DO know is that because of how calls for fire were translated by the FDC into Fire Commands for the guns, it really doesn't make any difference one way or the other. It's absolutely no faster if your "base defelection" is "true north" or a random number. The ONLY thing you try to do (if possible) is to lay the guns in the "most likely direction of fire," especially in a split trail piece so you can minimize any shifting.

The stakes in the photo are almost certainly for use in quickly "re-laying" the gun after you had to shift trails. They are almost certainly not for any different powder charges.

As Graeme indicated you use aiming stakes to check your deflection (direction). There is usually one at about 50 meters from the gun and another twice that distance, but they are on the same line. Standard practice at that time was to have a "primary" (we usually used a "collimator" placed about 5 - 10 meters away, and used aiming stakes as a backup. And we also always picked out a distant object that was easy to find and didn't move (church steeple etc) as an additional back up. That way if your collimator got kicked over and one of your aiming stakes fell down, you could re-lay without having to have the XO go out to the aiming circle. If you were in a "conventional" setting with little chance of multiple axes of fire, you wouldn't need to set out all the additional references, you'd only need the one set, because you'd never be firing much different than 3200.

Gino: Ah, yes, the "Klingon Battle Axe"!!! (Didn't really know that much about Klingons back then so I had to think about that one!!)

Like most of the other stuff, in that set up, to include the safety chart, the FDC forms etc, I started with either a full size or a representation from good old FM 6-40 and reduced it on the copier until it was the right size. I scratch built the RDP out of styrene and glued the overlay on it. (I also have GFTs and a GST! Or are THOSE only in the FA museum at Ft Sill as well??

You can see a collimator near the first road wheel in this shot.


Tom

Yes, aiming circle was used to lay all the guns on the same azimuth (common direction). The Collimator is a separate aiming point for each gun. It has a scale in it that you place the sight onto and then you can set off the required mills of deflection on the gunners periscope and traverse till the numbers line up in the sight. That puts you on the proper azimuth of fire.

Tom, all great looking stuff. I was thinking heavy DS for the 8 gun batteries. Light/towed was always and still is 6. We have actually gone to 2 x 8 Paladin Batteries in the new Heavy Modular BDE concept now. Q-36 and Q-37 are now organic to the BDE and part of the DS BN as well.

One thing I got to thinking about that did cause me quite a bit of consternation at first. I mentioned the "LARS" rule for deflection, which means that unlike compass azimuth which got "larger" as you went clockwise to the right, in the US, the deflection of the guns got larger to the LEFT, tjus Left Add Right Subtract.

(Do the Marines still use their own "nautical" version of the LARS rule???? Port Increase, Starboard,,,,,,,well you get the picture!!!!)

I got a chance to be a safety officer for a German 8" unit and discovered that in THEIR system, deflection and azimuth BOTH increase to the right. (Their collimators are different of course.) The German gun and crew were being incorporated right in to the US unit. The FDC and I were having a HUGE problem until we figured out that we had to give the OPPOSITE value of change from the base deflection to the German crew so their TUBE would still be pointing in the same direction. May not sound like a big deal.


Until you shoot out of the safety box!!!!!

Tom

Try firing Soviet Artillery. As quadrant elevation increases, you actually depress the tube, as opposed to ours, in which you raise it.

Now THAT'S really counter-intuitive!!!!

Tom

Did they do this in Nam?
Wasn't that the reason Fire bases were set up?
Also how many people from an Artillary Unit( i know of the Foward observer "killer's") would go out on patrol with the Infantry?

I guess the concept of a "hot gun" might be traced back to Vietnam. Using a helicopter, you could airlift one or two howitzers (as opposed to the entire battery) to support a quick raid by airlifted infantry. Get in, get out quick, and out of the range of the fixed firebase. But I remember the term mostly from Europe, where the concept was to send one piece forward with the Advance Party into the new position which was to be occupied by the battery when it moved to provide some (hopefully!!) forward support to the advance.

Gino can comment on current doctrine, but I can tell you that during the Vietnam/Cold War period, the doctrine was that a Division would have 3 maneuver brigades and a maneuver brigade nominally would contain 3 maneuver battalions (generally a mix of infantry and tank). Each brigade would usually have one artillery battalion in a "Direct Support" role, meaning the maneuver commander had first call on the fires. Most often each of the maneuver battalions would have one of the 3 artillery batteries from the artillery battalion supporting it. Since each of those maneuver battalions generally had 3 maneuver companies, each one would get an artillery Foward Observer "team". This team was usually one (brand new) 2nd LT, one SGT and one driver/radio telephone operator.

When I was in Germany during the 70s, these three teams were all part of the three "letter batteries". That meant a battery (approx 90 or so and commanded by a Captain), would have 5 LTs, the senior was the Executive Officer/2nd in Command, who also "commanded" the guns, a Fire Direction Officer who ran the FDC, and the 3 forward observers.

I was in Germany from 1972 - 1977, and most units RARELY had all their LTs.

The other problem at the time was that as an FO, my vehicle was the good old M151A1 Jeep, and that was TOTALLY unsuitable for me to keep up with the Infantry/Tank Company Commander who ALWAYS traveled in a tracked vehicle. The Jeep had one "fixed" radio, and one which could be taken out of the mount and carried around on your back, but neither had the range to always get back to the FDC. It was not practical for the FO to ride around in a tank (there was actually a time when tank companies had one additional tank dedicated for the FO to be the Tank Commander of!!) and if I got out of my jeep to ride around in a 113, I'd either have to borrow one of the installed radios to try and talk to the FDC (and they only had enough for their OWN nets) or pack my portable with me in the APC.

Later on this led to the creation of the "Fire Support Team" concept and the current practice of a dedicated tracked vehicle specifically for the team.

I am not sure whether the people in the FST are still assigned to the letter batteries or are now all in the Headquarters Battery.

The other problem we always had was that since there was ONE three man team at the company, and every company had three platoons, we could never really do a good job providing support when the maneuver unit spread out.

Tom