Field ArTillery - US Army Center Of Military History

216 The OrganizaTiOnal hisTOry Of field arTillery
of the Honest Johns and Cor porals was the time needed to occupy a position and
fire. Generally, three battalions each of Honest Johns and Corporals were allotted
to a corps. 17
A battalion practiced four methods of operational deployment. The first was
for the battalion to operate in a single area, its batteries colocated until the mission
was accomplished, thereby not only reducing command, adminis trative, mess,
local security, and launcher reloading problems but also making it possible to
engage targets of opportunity in a minimum amount of time. Its main disadvantage
was the increased possibility of the entire unit being detected and destroyed by
the enemy and, if that failed, the impending need to displace immediately from
the now compromised firing site. The second was for the battalion to split off
the firing battery, thereby on the one hand reducing the former’s vulnerability
to enemy attack but on the other hand making administrative, mess, and other
command functions to the latter more complicated. The third, a variation of the
first, in volved deploying the battalion to an assembly area with natural cover or
camouflage and then temporarily relocating the firing batteries to predesignated
firing positions to execute their mission. In this way, with the firing batteries
separated for only short periods of time, centralized battalion functions remained
unhampered and the assembly area essentially secure. The fourth entailed deploying
the firing batteries in their initial firing positions. After the mission was
completed, the elements would displace to the vicinity of their alternate firing
positions for reloading, thus being ready to attack targets of opportunity without
any appreci able loss in time. But survey and communications problems were
more pronounced than in the other three methods, and displacement was just as
difficult as in the third method. Also, sustained and maximum rates of fire were
hard to achieve. Army leaders felt, however, that the high degree of protection
against nuclear attack outweighed these disadvantages. 18 On balance, the method
employed thus depended on the tactical situa tion, the operational mission, and
the current intelligence on enemy capabilities.
From the Redstone to Satellites
Shortly after von Braun and the German team moved from Texas to Redstone
Arsenal in 1950, they began work on the missile that later became known as the
Redstone, named for the arsenal. Although early studies had contemplated a missile
with a range of several hundred miles, the Ordnance Department decided
that it should be equipped with a thermonuclear warhead larger and heavier than
originally specified, thus reducing the range of the proposed missile to around 175
nautical miles (324.1 kilometers). Operational from 1958 to 1964 and with a range
of 200 miles (321.8 kilometers), the Redstone was a liquid-fueled missile that had a
self-contained inertial guidance system. It was to supplement and extend the range
17 Ibid., p. 106; TOE 6–525C, 1 Mar 1956; TOE 6–525D, 5 Dec 1958.
18 Kenneth B. Stark, “Methods of Deploying Cannon and Missile Field Artillery,” Artillery Trends,
October 1958, pp. 5–8; DeShazo, “Field Artillery Missiles,” pp. 106–07.