<Begin Segment 25>

TI: So let's go to the 522. So because you couldn't fly the airplanes, what job did you have in the artillery unit?

VW: Well, at first, I was just the maintenance guy maintaining the aircraft and so on. But then within about a couple of weeks, they transferred me into the Fire Direction Center. And that was... all those people in the Fire Direction Center were selected as being people that could really do the job in the Fire Direction Center, and I became a computer operator.

TI: And so when you say "computer operator," what does a computer operator do?

VW: Well, what that was involved, the target would come into the, to a board man who would layout on the board. He had all the maps, and he would layout the position of where they wanted to fire. And then with those, with those data, they would take (them) and give (them) to the computer people. There were three of us, one for each battery. There was A, B and C. And at first I had to be trained because I wasn't in the artillery. Only about a month and maybe a month and a half before we shipped out. So I had to be in the Fire Direction Center when we left Newport News and went into the artillery position as a computer operator. And Kagawa, guy by the name of Shoso Kagawa trained me on how to, to do the job as a computer operator. Taking the data, these data from the board man, and put (them) into the Fire Direction Center called "fire for effect." And when we said, "Fire for effect," we'd better be right, which we always were. And no friendly fire accidents ever.

TI: Okay, because as I understand it, so what you did was you had to make the calculations in terms of how to set the guns in terms of the altitude, you had to take things like altitude, wind, all those things into effect.

VW: Yeah, and deflection and so on and so forth, yeah. And then decide, and then they handed the, all the data to them, and then we made the decision of "fire for effect," and then it went to the operator, the radio operator, and he sent it to the guns. And you had to be right on that, and we always were.

TI: Now, when you say, "Fire for effect," I've heard some people say that the first round might be long, and then another one would be short, I mean, they would try to --

VW: That wasn't "fire for effect," though. That was location.

TI: I see.

VW: And there might be a smoke, a smoke shell, and then you go from there and you'd move it, and eventually you know right where the target was from the smoke shell. And then the next one had to be "fire for effect."

TI: So they would give you all that information. They would give you first a fire for a location and how far off it was, then you would make the calculations.

VW: Yes. And then it had to be "fire for effect." And then the gunners would adjust their, their guns so that it would be exactly on the target which we had, our board man had picked, (from) the forward observers, and then it would come to us. And then we'd take these data that he gave us, and we'd, we'd calculate it, and then send the "fire for effect." And it was always on the target.

TI: And how many location shots would you do before the "fire for effect"?

VW: Usually not more than two is about maximum, I'd say. But quite often we'd go just from one smoke shell. Or maybe even we didn't have to do that. Maybe from the previous target we would go to the next target. Maybe they were that close together, and we know how to maneuver that and get it onto this target and so on.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.