Range Operations 59 



Not only that, but they found they got interested again in gun ammunition 

 for ships and ship guns for shore bombardment. They found they were using 

 up a lot of ammunition, and it's amazing how much of that ammunition was 

 reconditioned or reworked stuff that had been left over from World War II. 

 There were projectiles that had never been intended to be used with certain 

 types of fuzes. When explosive was put in them, it was for use with a kind of fuze 

 that wasn't what they wanted over there for the current application. Then they 

 would try to rig these up in some way so they could use them with the fuze that 

 they weren't intended to be used with originally. This kind of thing, using up 

 these pieces assembled in a little different way from the way they were designed 

 to be put together, produced some troubles. Then we had to hurry up and find 

 out why they blew up a turret or why they were blowing up guns or doing 

 things of this sort. We were very busy during that time. 



Also, the Navy began to buy a lot of rockets, and there were some compo- 

 nents they had to buy, and some ammunition they had to buy. However, the 

 Navy was going to use Army 8-inch projectiles because the Army had a lot on 

 hand, and we had to use them up instead of buying new ones. Then, they 

 wanted projectiles that were not intended to be used against ships at all but 

 purely against people, so we had to figure out what to do to make an 8-inch 

 projectile very good in that regard. It was thought to be especially nice if we 

 could use those old Army projectiles. There were many tricks of this sort. 

 During the Vietnam War, we werejust completely occupied with things of that 

 nature and finding out why things weren't working right. Of course, we had a 

 lot of production stuff come through — mainly small ammunition, but none of 

 the 8-inch. 



I would say during that period, then, quite a lot of money was made 

 available — practically all we needed to gear up for the acceptance work and 

 experimental work, too. There was a long period there, prior to Vietnam, when 

 the range was more or less just left standing and we didn't put any money or any 

 capital investment into significant improvement of the instrumentation or 

 equipment. Nobody felt there was going to be much use for it. 



Can you describe some of the primary types of ordnance under development and tested 

 during your career and relate their significance to the Fleet? 



Along with the development of bomb fuzes, there was also the development 

 of a series of what they called GP, or general-purpose, bombs. They were 

 heavier than the light-case bombs and were the bombs that would, hopefully, 

 take care of armor up to maybe 1 to \-Vi inches thick. They were versatile 

 bombs because they had enough explosive in them so that if you had a miss and 

 the bomb didn't go off on the plate, additional fuzes would cause the bomb to 

 detonate at a certain time after water impact and produce a mining effect 



