Army & Navy – Seagoing Field Artillery

Sailors on a trim, haze-grey U.S. destroyer cheered as two seamen pulled away the stencil to show off a new decoration on the side of a forward gun turret. It was the white silhouette of a medium “Tiger” German tank, official recognition that their ship had destroyed one of the enemy tanks which gave Major General Terry Allen’s “Fighting First” Division a rough time during the initial hours at Gela.

The trophy did not mark the first time that enemy tanks had been destroyed by naval fire— another destroyer claimed four tanks during the Sicilian landings, and naval guns got most of the 17 tanks destroyed around Gela in one day.* But it spotlighted how the 5-and 6-inch weapons of U.S. destroyers and light cruisers and the 15-inch rifles of a British monitor supplemented Army field artillery in the invasion’s early hours. Naval bombardment of shore targets is not new; but at Sicily ships knocked out tanks and guns they could not see and supported infantry hidden by two and three miles of terrain. The British monitor shelled targets ten miles inland.

Most credit for the operation goes to what the Navy calls its shore fire-control parties, made up mainly of young “Feather Merchants,” nickname for Naval Reserve officers. Sensing the amphibious demands of the coming war, the Navy started training shore fire-control officers three years ago, tried them out in the Southwest Pacific, the Aleutians and North Africa. Sicily was their first big test.

Carrying lightweight portable radios borrowed from the U.S. Forest Service, fire-control parties went ashore in the first waves, one party to each assault battalion. With them were Army Signal Corps officers.

Established at command posts, they advised Army commanders what support they could request from naval fire. Once the Army selected targets, they radioed range and other firing data back to their ships. Each shore party included men for observation posts, often located in the tops of olive trees, who spotted fire and radioed back adjustments to bring it dead on target.

At one point in the bombardment a cruiser was ordered to change position. It refused. Its explanation may mark a new chapter in naval history: “I’ve got 20 enemy tanks under fire.”

* One of the earliest and shortest land-sea battles on record was a naval rout and cavalry triumph. In 1818 José Antonio Páez, a crack horseman and guerrilla leader under Simon Bolivar, sent 50 of his llaneros against a flotilla of Spanish gunboats anchored in the middle of the Apure river in Venezuela. Waving spears and howling like Oriental dervishes, they swam their barebacked white horses through the swift, brown waters. Astonished Spaniards fired a few random shots and then jumped overboard in panic. Páez took every boat, without losing a man.