Army & Navy: Eyes for the Guns

The U.S. Army was showing signs of the imagination, sensible planning and deadly precision that makes an army great. Last week, at Fort Sill, Okla., the artillery opened a school—the first such regular school—to train pilots for grasshopper planes.

To hit an enemy over the hill and around the corner, artillery has to put an observer where he can correct fire. This was easy from a balloon. But in 1942 high-powered planes have made balloons dangerously obsolete. Using commercial flivvers, artillery pilots hop up & down behind their own lines—just long enough to see where the shots are falling, and to radio corrections. Two graduate pilots and a full-time mechanic go to every field-artillery battalion.

They fly so low that their camouflaged wings are hard to see from above, land on small clearings or dirt roads and scurry under trees. Sometimes, landed on too small a clearing, they must wait like sailboats for a favorable take-off wind. The thin-skinned grasshoppers carry no machine guns; in the air they would be easy meat if surprised by a hedgehopping enemy fighter.

Grasshopper school is divided evenly into flying and maintenance. Every pilot must know how to stitch torn wing surfaces, splice struts, fix the carburetor. Grasshopping is tough on tiny planes.

Physical requirements are lower than for the Air Corps. Eyesight: 20/40 correctible to 20/20. Age: under 30 from civilian life, or under 32 from Army personnel. Graduates become staff sergeants and learn to sing verses to the tune of the Caisson Song:

“Into action we will go,

Flying too damn low and slow;

We’re the eyes of the Artillery.”

To knock out an enemy artillery has to shoot fast. Tanks won’t wait. French artillery seldom got a bead on German spearheads. As recently as last year, it took about 30 minutes for divisional artillery to fire effectively on a target. Now U.S. artillery has learned how to do the trick in less than five minutes.

The trick is first to know the relative position of every gun, then to choose a common base point somewhere ahead. One gun gets the range in less than two minutes by correcting fire with the aid of the grasshoppers, or in no time at all if the area has been mapped and surveyed. A fire-directing center can then put every gun on the target in another two or three minutes. Reporting on the use of the Fort Sill method on Bataan, General MacArthur declared: “Massing fire, using a direction center, has been, proven beyond question. The Japanese were checkmated and seemed completely bewildered.”