Range Operations 65 



Did it kill both of them? 



No. They survived. Actually, so far as other accidents on the range, there 

 were some accidents with explosives. We had a man killed on Main Range, not 

 on firing, but on a personnel ejection test for an airplane. Martin-Baker, a 

 British firm, made a telescoping tube containing propellant that throws the 

 pilot out of the airplane. We were running some tests on these, temperature 

 conditioning and so forth, and one fellow did something wrong. The thing 

 fired, hit him in the chest, and killed him. 



A Lieutenant was killed way back by a fragment. Then someone, more 

 recently, was killed by armor. Actually, considering what happened on that 

 range, it is amazing the accidents were as few as they were. 



I remember the day they put the 16-inch projectile ashore near Nomini. 

 The probability of that happening is extremely small, but that day, it did. 



I also remember one time the Antiaircraft Fuze Battery was firing a test. The 

 firing officer looked all around and everything was fine — a beautiful blue-sky 

 day. Then they fired, and here came an airplane across the range and triggered 

 what we called a radio fuze — VT fuze. The plane reeled and flopped a little and 

 then came in and made a landing on our field. It was an Air Force trainer that 

 had blundered across the range. Normally, the firing officer would see him, but 

 he managed to come over the guy's shoulder, and he didn't see him until it was 

 just too late. The pilot had an observer with him. Neither one of the men had a 

 scratch, but the airplane looked like it had been sprinkled with a pepper shaker. 



There were a lot of close things like that during the war. I remember once 

 going to the Plate Battery with Russ Lyddane. We were going out there to do 

 something to the left of the Plate Battery where they ran fragmentation tests. 

 We were measuring something up there. We stopped and talked with the firing 

 officer and said, "We're going out front, and when you're ready to fire, call us 

 in, and we'll get out of the way." That was fine. We were out there working and 

 all of a sudden we heard an impact on the plate and a 5-inch round going 

 "whr . . . whr . . . whr. ..." So, we got on the phone and said, "Hey, what 

 goes?" They said, "Oh, we forgot you were out there." 



There's a certain amount of that type of thing. There was a time when I was 

 out with Commander Kiland, who was Experimental Officer, and we were 

 going to detonate, I think, a 500-pound bomb. We had the bomb all set up for 

 detonation. Back about 1000 feet at the bombproof of the Plate Battery was a 

 fellow who was holding up the firing line. That was to be the end of the line to 

 detonate. He held that line up to show that it was not connected to anything. 

 You don't connect to the firing squib on the bomb unless you see him holding 

 that up. Well, we had a guy back there holding the line who was not very bright. 

 Just out of luck we had a man from Ammunitions with us who was taking care of 

 the line to the bomb. He put the wires on his tongue and said, "These taste like 



