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This is a story of some of the action that took place about
the middle of August of 1944 involving one battery of armored
field artillery. I was the Battery Executive Officer, which means
that the six self-propelled 105mm Howitzers of the Battery were
my responsibility to conduct the fire missions as ordered.
At this time in our area of France the war was pretty hectic.
As is often the case in combat, your understanding of the war
(the "big picture" as we called it) is limited to what
you can see and hear in your immediate vicinity. Months later
we realized that the intense activity on the part of the Germans
was because they were nearly surrounded and about to be blocked
from any escape. The British and Canadians were coming south
from Caen and we were moving north toward Argenton.
We were doing a lot of firing against some heavy German resistance.
We were in a firing position somewhere in the vicinity of Carrouges
and Ranes and had been doing a lot of shooting in support of
our infantry and tanks. One day we heard artillery rounds being
fired by one gun from another unit behind us. The rounds sounded
as if they were just barely clearing us. I called our Fire Direction
Center at Battalion to see if they could find out who was doing
the shooting. They called back saying, "It's OK. They've
got a Forward Observer conducting the fire."
In a few minutes we were being heavily shelled by a lot more
than one gun. I got back on the phone to Battalion Fire Direction
Center to see if they could get the shelling stopped. They were
able to contact the unit doing the firing and had them cease
fire. There was another battery in the field just to our left
rear and during the shelling one incoming round hit one of their
ammunition trailers. It happened to be a trailer full of red
smoke shells. (One of the ways we called in the Air Corps P-47s
for an air strike was to fire a round of red smoke on a target
we wanted them to strafe and bomb.) We had gotten the shelling
stopped but here came the P-47s, three of them.
When our people saw the P-47s in the distance, they quickly began
to throw yellow smoke grenades and spread out cerise panels to
try to identify us as Americans. (Yellow smoke was used to identify
front line positions, and cerise panels were large day-glow orange
colored panels we displayed on the tops of vehicles when we were
on the road.) The smoke and orange panels were semi-effective.
The p-47s made just one strafing pass and did not drop any bombs.
We had five men wounded and one killed. After flagging down an
ambulance and getting the wounded evacuated, our "Friendly
Fire" experience was over and we went on with our part of
the war.
During this time there was a lot of confusion, especially
at night. One morning we found a German tank had bivouacked for
the night in the next field to us. We were able to get a good
shot into the rear end of the tank and knock it out.
The Germans were continuing their desperate efforts to escape
the coming encirclement. We heard that one of our air observers
in a Piper Cub air plane spotted a large column of vehicles and
troops displaying cerise panels. They seemed to be in a German
occupied area, and upon closer inspection, they turned out to
be a German column displaying captured orange panels. The P-47s
were called in and worked them over. That may have been the shot-up
column we saw near Ranes where there were knocked out horse-drawn
wagons and motor vehicles on both sides of the road for four
miles. We got some of the survivors as prisoners. We went on
to close what came to be called The Falaise Gap and got a short
break from combat in the form of a 48-hour maintenance break.
For those who might not be familiar with the guns we worked
with, our 105mm howitzers were made into self-propelled armored
artillery by being mounted onto a medium tank chassis, making
a full-tracked vehicle powered by a 400 horsepower, nine cylinder
Wright-Continental radial aircraft engine. A routine maintenance
procedure on these engines was to change the spark plugs. These
engines were designed for aircraft use to run at sustained high
speed, not stop-and-go as we used them. This resulted in spark
plug fouling requiring frequent changing. Instead of the spark
plugs screwing directly into a threaded hole in the aluminum
head, there was a steel threaded adapter to accept the plug.
Our maintenance people in the motor pool were working to change
the plugs in all six ranks and about ten o'clock in the evening
my Motor Sergeant, J.W. Murphy, came to me and said, "Lieutenant,
we've got a problem. We need a new tank engine. When we were
getting one plug out, the adapter came with it." That was
an irreparable problem, and changing a tank engine was normally
a job for a large Ordnance shop, and we didn't have one of those.
I called our Battalion Motor Officer, Capt. Harry Lee, and said,
"I need a tank engine." I told him the reason, he got
hold of our Ordnance Battalion and we received a big wooden crate
containing a new engine the next morning before breakfast.
Meanwhile Sgt. Murphy and his crew had worked most of the night
hanging tarps to maintain black-out conditions, removing the
old engine and then stripping parts off the old engine that would
be needed on the new one. The job was completed within 24 hours.
That's the kind of people we had in the Third Armored Division.
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