Evening Star Newspaper, April 27, 1930, Page 91

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. 'C, APRIL 27, 1930. 17 sSmm—c- Navy's Big Berthas During World War This terriffic detona- tion, with its blind- ing flash, made it nrecessary to do all the firing during the daytime. The flash at night would have made too good a tar- get for the Germans. Just too late. This improved model of 14-inch, 50-caliber naval gun was completed shortly after the armistice, never reached France, but was turned over to coast defense work. ounly place where we could fire at our maximum rarze was Sandy Hook. We fired our first shot April 30, 1918, with a special trainful of high dignitaries from Wash- ington looking on. The thing worked perfectly. We were jubilant. We left that night for Eddy- astone to dismantle the gun car preparatory to sailing for France. Then our troubles began. We had planned to land in the British zone and reply to the Dunkirk bombardment. But the German drive for the channel parts was on and the British reported they didn’t have a safe port for us to land. So we asked Gen. Pershing if he wanted us. He told us to come ahead as fast as we could, but, he added in effect, “Don’'t ask me how.’ Those weren't his exact words, of course, but tha was their meaning. We sent the officers and men over ahead, and finally managed to ship our own gun cars and equipment from Newport News. St. Nazaire was the debarkation port selected, because it was equipped with heavy cranes. Things didn't go smoothly at St. Nazaire. They assigned us to barracks, and we found the barracks full of potatoes. We had to build our own barracks out of empty packing cases. We had to lay the harbor railroad tracks all over, so they'd stand the weight of our gun cars. To put the gun cars together we needed com- pressed air, and there wasn’t any, so we sal- vaged an old, leaky stationary boiler, rigged up a pipe line and compressed our own. HEN we discovered that our stuff wasn't coming over in sections, and some of the needed pieces didn't come on the first ship. We had to wait. At last we were all ready to hop to it and assemble our gun cars. And then we discovered that we had no blue prints. A full set had been mailed, but they never got to us. I don’t know where they are to this day. If the men hadn't kept notebooks showing how the various parts went together, we never would have been able to do it. Then we found that there were no rivets. When we opened the packages marked “rivets” we found they were full of stove bolts. We had to put together 72 cars, each one of which needed between 500 and 1,200 rivets to hold it together—and they had sent us stove bolts. We borrowed rivets from all over France and drew them down to the proper size by hand. And with them we got our cars together. Then we found the Prench were doubtful about letting us use their railroads. They were afraid we'd ruin them B.ut we inspected track and bridges for miles around, and finally per- suaded them to take the chance. GIN. PERSHING visited us, inspected our cars and told us that he hoped to have our guns afplached directly to the American Army eventually. First, however, he said, we were to be under direct orders of Marshal Foch. The French wanted us to go up and knock out the Big Berthas that were shelling Paris. _ They were in a hurry about it; begged us to send up two guns, at least, even if we had to delay assembling the other three. We worked night and day, and by August 11 we had one complete gun car and train ready to move. We wired the French high command that we were all set gnd asked them where they wanted us. Back came the discouraging word, “Don’t come yet. Await further orders.” That was hard to take, but there wasn't any- thing we could do but wait. August 18, when we were finally ordered to get going with train No. 1, with train No. 2 fol- lowing the next day. Our destination was Helles-Mouchy, about halfway between Paris and Amiens and over 350 miles from St. Na- zaire. It was the most thrilling railroad trip 1 ever made. We held down to a speed of 6 miles an hour out of respect to the French fear that we'd wreck their roadbeds. Wherever we went a crowd gathered. The French made a great fuss over us. At some towns they decorated our guns with flowers and wreaths. OUR French engineers weren’t quite so happy. They were worried to death every time we came to a bridge, and they kept calling to us to go more slowly when we entered the yards. We reached Helles-Mouchy with Battery No. 1 on August 23. We went through Paris without seeing it—went through on their famous un- derground belt line railroad. In that long labyrinth of tunnels a French railroad official held us up. He crawled along underneath our locomotive and discovered certain nuts and bolts that hung down so far they might foul some special fitting in the tunnel. He started to make a long speech, but we cut the bolts off with oxyacetylene before he got half through, and went on. Then we had another French official to deal with. On our railroad map the French had marked all unsafe bridges in red ink. Then they routed us across one of those bridges. We crossed it—and then a Prench official caught us. He was deeply horrified. The only way to - remove that mistake from the record was for us to go back, across the same unsafe bridge, and take another route. We did it. There were hot boxes, too. We had to sling hammocks over the side so that sailors could lie right next to the bearings and feed oil in through a tube. R WELL, anyhow, we got to Helles-Mouchy and the French artillery officers received us - with open arms. They had, they said, good news for us. The Germans had stopped their long-range bombardment and drawn their Big - Berthas back out of range. We hated to break it to the gobs, but when we did they were philosophical. “Oh, well, they heard we were coming and skipped out,” they said. We waftted until . The German airplanes were interested in us, They flew over as soon a§ we arrived, and wa got aerial bombardments every night. Soon we reached Rethondes, in the forest of Compiegne, the very spot where, two months later, the Ger.. mans signed the armistice. Gun No. 2 came up, and we made ready to open fire. It was on September 6 that we fired our first shot at the Germans. We laid our gun on Tergnier, a German railroad center 41,000 yards away. Of course, we couldn’'t see it. All set, we waited to hear from the Prench aviator who had been assigned to help us. An admiral wears a major-general's stars. Rear Admiral Charles P. Plunkett escorting Franklin P. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, now Governor of New York, through the naval gun railway yards. Wl: waited and waited and never heara from him. So, finally, we got tired, and let fly with the first shell that we had aimed at Ger- mans. Incidentally, this was the first Ameri- can-made shell to be fired from an American- made gun in Prance. I don’t know just where that shot fell. Be- fore we could fire another the French called us up and told us to cease firing, as French troops were entering Tergnier. “Huh!” said the gobs. “Scared ’em again!” We moved up to Fontenoy-Ambleny that night, in the midst of a German air bombard- ment that damaged the track and made it necessary for us to feel our way along with scouts. We pulled in next morning and pre- pared a new gun pit within range of our new . objective. . - A big German ammunition dump just west TheAmerican Navy’s Largest WarjJob Was Done on Dry Landin France, When It Fired One- Ton Shells From Gigantic Guns, Cutting Germany’s Main Line of Sup- ply and Retreat. of Laon was our objective. Gun No. 2 limbered up and fired 22 shells at it, with the help of French aerial observation. Then came a mes- sage from the French. “That’s enough,” they said. “Fini, ammuni- tion dump.” Gun No. 1, meanwhile, was going into action. During the German retreat from Mortiers this gun fired 199 of its great shells, undergoing & terrific aerial bombardment as the Germans tried frantically to knock it out. No. 1 was in a cemetery on the edge of Soissons, and for two weeks it took a hammering every night. But it kept on with its job. Bofl‘H guns helped see the Germans out of Laon. We were ordered to concentrate on the railroads leading out of that city, and we did. I should point out that we fired only in the daytime. The terrific flash the big guns made at night would have located them perfectly for the Ger- man aviators. But in the daylight we kept busy, flinging 47 big shells on a German railroad yard in four and one-half hours one day, and then adding 30 more the next day. By this time the German army was awake to the menace of these big guns, and that night we got a heavy bombardment. One shell struck 16 feet from gun No. 1, cutting the train air line, breaking off a piece of casting and peppering things generally. When the shelling stopped we moved the gun back a bit. Then we got out our shovels and made some dugouts. Our sleeping cars were armored, but they never would have stopped a direct hit. On October 12 the French entered Laon, and two days later Ensign Roger Allen and I went up to see what our shells had done. It wasn’t hard to find the shell holes. They were from 40 to 70 feet across. One hit had wrecked a three-track railroad line for 100 feet, tearing up the rails, shattering and blowing an enormous hole in the roadbed. We found a freight train we had hit. One car had been lifted up and thrown on top of another, while a third had been blown 30 feet away. We learned from French inhabitants that we hit a movie theater full of soldiers. Forty had been killed outright and 60 more badly wound- ed—by one shell! MOST of our firing was “off the map.” This was a rather complicated job. We had to use mathematics and we had to get full weather reports from all points in our vicinity. But we made an excellent record. We found our average range error was only 151 yards, and the average deflection error was only 51; and since most of our targets were big things, like railroad yards and ammunition dumps, and since we worked out a method of scattering our shots, you can see that so low an average of error wouldn't hurt a bit. We had won our spurs under the French. Now, late in October, Gen. Pershing sent for us to help him on the Meuse-Argonne. We realized our highest ambition when all five of our land battleships assembled in a “fleet” under my command to work with the American Army. Pershing's objective was the web of railroad lines connecting the German Rhineland with the front in France by way of Longuyon, Mont- medy and Sedan. When we got to the fromt the Americans were still so far from the nearest of these railway junctions, Montmedy, that mo other guns could reach that far. So there was our job, made to order for us. Longuyon and Montmedy were our best tar- gets. Three main raiiroads from Germany met at Longuyon and ran out in one main trunk line to Sedan—a line that the German general, von der Marwitz called “the principal life artery of the front.” All the railroads in this vicinity were vital to the Germans, and you couldn’t hit one of them without making a lot of trouble. Longuyon was a detraining point, with a big railway yard and many storehouses. Montmedy was on the main line from Metz to Sedan, had a big railway yard and contained the head- quarters of the German 7th Army. The first guns we were able to get in posi- tion were guns Nos. 3, 4 and 5. They dug their pits at Thierville, near Verdun, and en .Continued on Sizteenth Page