Gunners eyes and ears
Pinpointing enemy artillery by methods old and new,is the highly specialised role of 94 Locating Regiment.
SEVENTEEN years ago young Keith Willers, then just 18, arrived at the German town of Celle on his first posting. He was not impressed. Yet today Bombardier Willers is still serving in the same town and with the same unit, 94 Locating Regiment, Royal Artillery. And he is married to a local girl. He may well be the current record holder for continuous service in one German posting but there are many other members of the regiment who have spent more than a decade in Celle. The reason is 94's highly specialist role. It is the Army's only locating regiment and the only other unit like it is 22 Locating Battery, an independent battery based at Larkhill.
Out on the Hohne ranges.gunners get the Midge ready for its flight
Says the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Crossley: "We have lived here for nearly 20 years, probably longer than any other unit in Germany. We have families who know no other home and a lot of soldiers spend their whole Army service in Celle."
Many of the gunners have German wives and Celle boasts a number of former members of the regiment now in Germany's "civvy street." To train a man properly in the skills used by the regiment can take about three years so he is unlikely to transfer to a unit where he would not use those skills.
The strength of the Celle link is a strong regimental spirit and good relationships with the townspeople—the freedom of Celle was granted to 94 several years ago. But Colonel Crossley concedes there are drawbacks: "We do tend to get the same thing over and over again, tend to exercise in the same sort of places and run into the same sort of problems.
Top: Last-minute checks before the drone goes on its programmed
flight.
Right: "We have lift-off!" MIDGE is captured in the air by the camera.
"Because of this we make efforts to get soldiers away to train in other
parts of the world. We run a meteorological station at Suffield in Canada
for the whole of the summer and this year we have trained in Denmark and
Holland as well as adventurous training in France and Norway. And about
80 per cent of the soldiers have done at least one tour in Northern Ireland."
"Locating" as practised by 94 Regiment is divided into four sections.
Most of its men are specialists in only one of these and there is little
interchange. Grouped together at Celle are all the Royal Artillery's medium
and long-range surveillance and locating devices. The regiment's three
batteries each have a troop or section of each skill. Most spectacular
is the MIDGE drone system, which takes off with the excitement of a mini-Apollo
launch, flies a pre-determined route over enemy territory and returns
to a specific landing site.
MIDGE homing beacon which sends out a signal to bring it down.
The photographs it takes, not only of artillery targets, are photo-interpreted and the information relayed back. Use of drones gives a divisional commander in time of war the ability not only to see over the next hill but over several hills beyond. The MIDGE replaces a propeller-driven drone which did not have the same speed or range and was much more vulnerable to attack. Now in its third season of training with the MIDGE, 94 Locating Regiment reckons that from the asking of a question by divisional headquarters to the time of answer is only about an hour—a vast improvement on any previous method. An older art, which goes back to the trenches of World War One, is sound-ranging. Basically, methods have not changed too much in the last 60 years. A series of microphones is surveyed into position and can be activated to pick up the sound of enemy guns. From the microphone responses fed back by radio and reproduced in a form looking not unlike a seismograph or cardiograph,
Above: Staff-Sgt Barry Sanders lowers sound-ranging microphone into hole.
Above: An outside view of command post for sound-raniging
being cleared.
Below: What it is like inside. The sound-rangers check film being
fed in.
the sound-range operators can calculate the position of the enemy artillery. Three rounds are fired at the supplied grid reference and then if necessary the position is adjusted to be even closer so that enemy guns can be knocked out. Though old, the system works well and so far no-one has found a more effective way of locating enemy guns. The only change in recent years has been the introduction of radio links between the microphones and back to the command post. Before that a mammoth cable-laying task was involved. Working closely with the sound-rangers are the regiment's surveyors. Their main task is to provide accurate fixation and orientation for all units of the divisional artillery. In recent years they have adopted a system of pre-surveyed points, maintaining these and regularly checking to ensure that they retain up-to-date information. And finally there is weather-forecasting. Gunners need up-to-the-minute weather information—just like a golf ball
A shell can be affected by wind speed and direction; air pressure and
temperature can also change its destination. Since 1974, 94 Locating Regiment
has used the AMETS system, said to be the best portable meteorological
station in the world. Data is obtained by sending up a balloon carrying
a small radio transmitter, The balloon is tracked by radar to check wind
speed and direction and the radio feeds information on temperature. All
of this information goes into a computer in the AMETS system and results
can be fed to all gunner regiments in tape form. "We can now produce a
message within minutes of the balloon going up and within an hour we can
have all the information we need," says Colonel Crossley. "This very new
and accurate information has improved the accuracy of artillery fire enormously."
Recently an equivalent German unit was entertained for the day at Celle.
Beobachtung's Battalion No 1 also uses MIDGE drones and the two units
have been able to help each other with the loan of films, cameras and
so on. At Celle the Germans were shown the remainder of 94's equipment
and then took part in football, skittles, volleyball and tug-of-war competitions.
A cup was presented and it is hoped to make the day an annual event. The
regiment's home, Taunton Barracks, is more than 100 years old, dating
back to the Franco-Prussian war. Pickelhaubers and German military discipline
were the order of the day for martinet is muted today at Celle—it is the
technological age and the soldiers who live in those gaunt barrack blocks
can provide information to our forces which would have been completely
unobtainable in Bismarck's day.