Word: sillness
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...changes, Capt. Magruder is being relieved of his duties to go to Fort Sill, Oklahoma as an aerial observer. Lt. Montsream, from Fort Ethan Allen, Vermont, is relieving First Lieut. Nelson T. Hoadley of his extra duties as company commander of Company C. Lieut Phelps, also from Fort Ethan Allen, is now commander of Company...
Slow Torture. Now a lieutenant colonel, Abbott Harrington Burns was only a month away from a construction clerk's job with an Arizona telephone company when he was assigned to a Fire Direction Center team at Fort Sill, Okla., in mid-November 1940. In self-defense against slow torture from intricate mathematics, Harry Burns one night experimented with a homemade paper slide rule. Most officers were unimpressed. But one major, George V. Keyser (now a brigadier commanding the 74th Field Artillery in Mississippi), saw the potentialities of Burns's Graphical Firing Table...
...Sill's Field Artillery School had not waited for Washington formalities. Experiments had proved that enlisted men, with grocery-store arithmetic and Harry Burns's G.F.T., could do computing that had demanded trained officers, complicated mathematics and 76 pages of firing tables in fine type. And they could do it more than 20 times as fast and far more accurately. With new Fire Direction Center techniques, G.F.T. tied together other artillery developments to deliver fire with wicked intensity and speed...
Massed artillery fire was old in World War I (Napoleon used it first), but standards set at Sill are incredible to oldtime two-percenters.* Twenty-five seconds after the target is pointed out, shells from a dozen 105s are on their way-an hour would be comparable 25 years ago. In routine exercises more than 100 guns obliterate targets 800 yards square less than five minutes after they are assigned-incredible by the standards at Soissons or Saint-Mihiel. Some of this speed-up comes from having changed the firing unit from the battery of four guns to the battalion...
...anticipated. Long before the War Department fully realized what time fire could do, Jess Balmer was calling for its use on a huge scale. North Africa proved his point-and led ground forces to multiply orders for time shells. Long before the War Department had recognized the G.F.T., Sill was turning out homemade ones, paper strips mounted on beaverboard. Young officers took them to Guadalcanal and Tunisia, Attu and Sicily. Last month Balmer's command won official commendation from Lieut. General Lesley J. McNair, head of Army Ground Forces: "Battle results . . . have demonstrated conclusively that the current artillery doctrines...