Honor Untarnished by Donald V Bennett William Forstchen

Author:Donald V Bennett, William Forstchen [Donald V Bennett, William Forstchen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

9

Getting Ready

I left that briefing with orders to proceed to Slapton Sands, on the coast of England near Portsmouth. Slapton was the testing ground for our invasion force. The beach and bluffs were rather similar to those in Normandy, and there the training was to take place for D day.

One of my gun crews, and the chiefs of each piece in my battalion, met me there. Our job was to figure out how to fire an M-7 from the open deck of an LCT in support of the infantry landing.

The plan was for four M-7s to be loaded on each LCT and accompany the first wave, laying down suppressive fire as we went in, until we stopped a thousand yards offshore. There the LCTs were to continue to fire until the initial landing area was secured, and then our landing craft would come in and lay my M-7s on the beach.

That, at least, was the plan.

The first question, which no one had yet to figure out, was how to fire a 105mm gun, mounted on a tank chassis, which was lashed to the deck of an open landing craft, and to do so without killing yourself or hitting another landing craft or killing your own men on the beach. Quite simply, it’s relatively easy to shoot an M-7 on the ground, once you’ve mastered the technique; it’s an entirely different game when at sea.

On the way down to Slapton I cooked up a scheme that I thought might do the job. I had to account for several factors. First was the up-and-down pitch of the boat, and the rocking back and forth. The LCT is fairly big, a rather cumbersome landing craft, and it rolls like a cork. It doesn’t slice through waves like a destroyer, it goes up the face of a wave, then over, and then wallows back down. In a matter of seconds the elevation of your gun might shift thirty degrees or more, and the traverse would shift just as wildly.

At Slapton we met up with our LCT training crew, a British unit commanded by a young lieutenant. We rolled our M-7 on board and lashed it down; otherwise, if the gun shifted due to the rocking of the boat, it’d go right through the side and we’d all be dead in the Channel, since this was still February.

It was fairly calm for the Channel that day, and we headed out to sea. Dead amidships, up on the top of the loading ramp on the landing craft, I had one of my men tie a firing stake, which is really nothing more than a stick to use as an aiming point, just like the front sight on a rifle.

Next I posted a man in the middle of the ship, armed with a huge cooking pot and a potato masher, not the German grenade, but the real thing, a big wooden tool used for mashing potatoes. He was the timer. Standing next to him was a man with a stopwatch.

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