We had been having daytime mortar training for some time now. The 60-mm Mortar is an Infantryman’s ace-in-the-hole. Sort of. The larger 81-mm and 120-mm units packed more oomph, it is true – but they were crankier to set up and fire and so were relegated to Battalion and Regimental “Mortar Companies” who specialized in them. The 60-mm was everyone’s friend though, so we had lots of drill with it.
Mortars are simplicity themselves. You have a rectangular metal base-plate upon which rests a 60-mm-diameter hollow metal tube or barrel. This in turn, is supported near its front end by an adjustable bipod. Mortars are designed for high-angle fire: with them you can lob explosive rounds out there in front of you – arcing high over intervening ridges, brush, streams or whatnot that may be impeding your advance.
Thus, you fire them sight unseen at an enemy - also unseen – over any intervening obstacles between your two forces.
The mortar round is essentially propelled out of its barrel kinda like a cannon shot. They come packed so many to the wooden case. In action, your mortar crew comes running up on the double, carrying the base plate, tube, and bipod (and leveling sights) separately – trailed by one or two “ammo carriers” lugging up the wooden ammo boxes.
Sgt. Depp would hiss, “Mortar crew: forward and set-up behind clump of tall grass immediately in front of me.”
We would rise as a group out of the pine needles back in the woods and run forward all crouched over, to slam down the base plate in the designated spot, click the tube onto it, adjust the bipods – and wait for further orders....
They were not long in coming:
“Not there you dag-gone Yankee idiots, you... Tree burst! Tree burst! You want you should die in the shade or something..?.”
I would look at Bert. His sweaty face in burnt cork told me nothing: he was just looking back at me. Shorty Metcalf always lay down with his face into the ground – like an anteater. He just waited for us to decide what to do. It would be okay with him. He had ridden boxcars all over the U.S. in his time, been hassled by Railroad Bulls in every one-tank town west of the Mississip’ I guess. “Tree bursts” – potential or otherwise – whatever they were, well – he could take them in stride, too. Shorty never rattled – but sometimes you wondered, too, if he really understood...
Bert and I both rolled over and stared straight up: “G-a-aw-w-d DAMN!,” he said. “They told us about this yesterday, remember?”
“Remember what?” I said. “Seems to me for a Southern Baptist, you getting a mite tart with the tongue..... Maybe I will write your Momma!” (pause) “Besides in this fucking heat and chiggers, I can’t even remember my own name anymore...”
“The branches,“ he said. “The branches! Look at them!”
My eyes came into focus. We had “thrown down” right under the spreading canopy of a big old Live Oak tree! Yesterday’s blackboard drill in the Pecan Grove (see elsewhere) came back to me: “Never set-up a mortar station underneath an overspreading tree canopy or branches!” A-h-h-h-h-h! Now I remembered; if you do this – just once even, the H.E. (high explosive) round may very well hit one of those same branches on its way outbound – thus bursting prematurely right over your heads and killing the lot of you! A sorry lesson learned in actual combat – passed along to us in the Sacred Pecan Grove – our version of the precincts where once, presumably, the philosophic elders of Athens passed along similar advices to the hoplites of yore. We had got suckered into the trap!
I couldn’t see Depp – but I knew he was back there hidden in the brush, sucking on a long grass straw – sliding it in and out of his mouth, and savoring his triumph! There’d be some extra-extras to do tonight when we got back...
Bert got us going again. “Alright! Everyone...UP! And move over about 50 feet to the right!”
Back under clear skies again.
Redding had joined us by now. “Shorty!” he said. “you go up front and ob-serve!”.
What he was referring to was a long earth berm that stretched clear across the mortar range at this position. Maybe about 20 feet high, say. High enough that you could not see over it and what was beyond. What was beyond was a cleared off plain – about the size of a football field. Way out around the 50-yard line was a village – an honest to God village!
A village of dollhouses!
Tiny, scaled-down true-to-life houses. Hundreds of them – all laid out in a tiny town or village.
Shorty climbed up on the berm (keeping his profile low, of course) Of course. And signaled us his find: he silently straight-armed the direction of the village with his right arm from his vantage point up on the berm, then held up five fingers: fifty yards (ten each). The mortars were capable of 1000 yards or even much better – but for training here, we used “practice rounds” that fell far closer.
Now, Depp was suddenly – miraculously – hissing at us again from another nearby clump: “Set your sight levels for 50 yards.” he said, “and FIRE a round!”
Mortar rounds were propelled by a charge that looked for all the world like a slightly oversize shotgun shell. You stuck this shell in a hole in the base of the round (in the fins) and then you dropped it down the tube. It slid down the tube backwards, till the shotgun shell primer hit a tit or protuberance in the bottom of the tube – a firing pin – at which point the propellant exploded and drove the round back up and out of the tube on its way.
Sounds simple. But there were (of course) certain refinements. Like right now at the beginning of our education, we were firing “dummy” rounds: they went out in a high arc, then fell straight down on the dollhouses... depending on how well the guy level-sighting the unit had managed to translate Shorty’s frantic waves into proper angular components and distance.
But we were lucky: our round plopped down “thud” into the middle of the dollhouses (no explosions – just a “thud” as it was a dummy round). Depp hissed at Redding. Redding turned to us and mumbled over his false teeth: “Fire three for effect!” (The “f’s” almost did him in – or rather his teeth “out” if you will...).
Bingo! Right on target! We had partly undone our boo-boo under the tree limbs...
And so it went for many days. Gradually we worked up to live rounds. Now live rounds had a pin you had to pull to arm the fuze. To do this you put your thumb and your forefinger over opposed “buttons” on either side of the round and pulled the pin. Now the round was armed! If you removed your fingers from the depressed “buttons”, the thing would go hot and burst after so many seconds or on impact (I’ve kind of forgotten a few of the details).
Anyhow: Rule One: when loading live rounds NEVER let the buttons pop out or you are fucked! What you did – or what the “loader” did - was then slip the base of the round into the mouth of the tube and rather gently lower it down until the edge of the buttons got under the lip of the mortar tube-rim, then take his hand away, and the round would then slide on down the tube with the walls of the tube keeping the buttons depressed. It then hit the tit at the bottom – Bam! – the propellant charge ignited and the round shot back up the tube and as it cleared the mouth, the buttons could now spring free, arming the round as it sped on its way. (The real fun was when you got a dud H.E. – didn’t fire – and then you had to tip the tube up backwards you see, and slide the round back out ever so slowly (!) until the loader or someone with steady hands could grab it as it emerged from the tube and get fingers over the g.d. buttons...). Whew!
“Crump!” “Crump!” the H.E. fell out on the range before us – now we were dropping them five hundred yards out on old car wrecks, and bombed out tanks and other targets set down-range for our training...
About our twelfth week or so, came night firing for mortars.
I remember it all so well: we moved out from the Quad after dark and there was a long, hot interminable hike with full field gear to some godforsaken mortar range a million miles from nowhere back in the boonies. It was pitch black. You couldn’t see anyone or anything. Besides we had all this burnt cork on our faces...
I was really tired and didn’t want to play anymore.
"...An' if your 'eels are blistered an' they feels to 'urt like 'ell,
You drop some tallow in your socks an' that will make 'em well."
Our crew moved into some shadowy position in wet grass and weeds – mosquitoes humming like demons in under our helmets. Against a starry sky, I could make out dim figures here and there on the berm: officers this time and some noncoms come to supervise the evenings’ proceedings.
We waited. Now and then a glare lit up the sky and then burned out: some crews were firing illumination shells – one of the nighttime jobs for mortar crews... Then we were up to bat. In the dark you could not really tell who was who or which crew was which crew.
Someone said, “Time to load this sucker!”
I must have snapped. All the stupid hot marches, the long days in the heat, Maggie’s Drawers, extra KP, moving garbage pits to and fro, etc. ... it all got to me! I decided as I guess they say today, “To make a Statement!”
And how!
Now you have to understand that in every box of mortar rounds, there is a handful of “increments” as we called them. This is extra propellant that you can (judiciously!) add to the barrel if you want to increase the range of the round. In other words, so many extra increments down the tube equals so many extra hundred yards further the round will fly. The mortars today may be more refined – doubtless are – but that is basically how we learned it back then.
These increments, by the way, were little paper-and-glassine packets of an orange powder. Now, really want to date yourself? These little packets looked exactly like the coloring agent that came with the (also another wartime product) white or colorless margarine sticks that passed for “butter” in those days. Remember them? Little packets of an orange powder colorant that one was to add to the sticks when one got home from market, by stirring the colorant into the margarine mass, to get the traditional sought-for yellow hue.
But the glassine packets in the mortar round cases were no mere colorants! They gave an added “boost” to the range – and we were always warned “...not to put too many down the tube at once.”
But I had had it. No one could see, no one knew who was where or what anyone was doing. It was a Chinese fire drill in the dark Georgia woods and I said to myself, “Enough already!”... and I reached down into the mortar case and grabbed a handful of increments and dropped them all down the tube at once...
What happened next was wondrous to behold!
The loader slid a round down the barrel... it slid down and hit the pin and KA-BOOM! I mean bigtime KA-BOOM! Big, big time! I mean a tongue of flame leaped out of the mouth of that mortar like it was a French 75! For a split second all you could see was dirty, burnt-cork smeared, faces in a sort of ghastly blue glare – then total darkness again. That’s when the noise began. It started low and got higher and higher in pitch. Like a thousand mosquitoes tuning up at once. Like a wine glass when you rub a wet finger around its rim. A high-pitched ongoing hum you could yards away! The steel tube in fact WAS ringing in a harmonic of some type just like a big wineglass...
“Jee-sus!” I heard several officers say from way up on the berm. “What is THAT?” Dark shapes began to run around and converge generally toward our position – but some ran right on by.. in the dark it was hard to know with so many crews up to the line, some waiting, some withdrawing, just who was which and where and how.
Best of all: there was no answering “BOOM!” from out on the range before us. Total silence. Nothing....
I rolled over in the grass and decided I would meander back to the weapons carriers drawn up some distance behind us – blackout light slits barely discernible in the gloom...I thought it maybe prudent to blend in with the crowd bring up fresh cases of shells...
Depp never found out who was responsible, of course (or I would not be here, of course). I would be doing time in the Columbus Stockade yet.
‘Way down in Columbus, Gawhgah! Oh! to be back in Tennessee..
Way down in Columbus Stockade – my friends all turned their backs on me..”
But none of my Squad buddies turned their backs on me. But, too, I have sometimes since wondered if that might be more because it was so pitch dark no one had seen anything – or was it really true ‘buddies-to-the-end”?
Sigh. I’ll never “know” I guess...
Next day, after Retreat, Depp came into the barracks with an announcement: “Jest so y’all’s Yankee misfits here know... they found where that daggone shell got to other night out on the range. An’ don’ none of you fool me: I KNOW it wuz someone from Third Platoon here!”
His beady eyes ran over the crowd – but did not linger unduly long on me. I breathed a bit easier.
“It hit a target shed on a rifle range a long way away through the woods – not even next to the mortar range,” he said.
“Blew it all to hell,” he added. I’m probably wrong, but I think – I just like to think anyway – that a fleeting smile played around his lips and that somehow, someway, Depp was in some bizarre fashion, proud of his charges!
I’ll never know that, either. As he would have said... “Dang!”
The sergeant arst no questions, but 'e winked the other eye,
'E sez to me, " 'Shun!" an' I shunted, the same as in days gone by;
For 'e saw the set o' my shoulders, an' I couldn't 'elp 'oldin' straight
When me an' the other rookies come under the barrik-gate.
Scrape Here for more 'Barrel...'