Lewes, July 1942:
Perched near the top of an 80-foot-tall, concrete tower on Delaware’s ocean-lapped Cape Henlopen, U.S. Army Sgt. Bill Smith squinted uneasily into his azimuth height-finder.

A voice shouted: “Give the Plotting Room those bearings, sergeant! Move it! We’ve been ordered to sink that ship!”

Smith, a badly frightened 20-year-old gun-battery sergeant from the tiny Delaware hamlet of Bacon Switch, could hardly believe his ears.

The vessel he’d been focusing on, located about five miles east of Delaware Bay, carried a clear marking on her iron-gray hull: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

But once again, the loud voice from the battery commander echoed through the tense fire control tower: “Stand by to fire on the vessel!”

“My God,” Smith told himself, “”we’re about to blow up one of our own ships!”

In an agony of suspense, he peered into the crystal-glass lens of the height-finder. Gazing east over the sun-washed Atlantic, he studied the target-ship with growing horror. Surrounded by gulls and steaming placidly toward the mouth of the bay, the lumbering craft was already within easy reach of the cocked-and-loaded artillery guns. OK, what’s the bearing? Maybe 220, True? His face was running with sweat now, as the steel-lined tower baked in the relentless mid-morning heat.

“My heart was pounding so hard, I thought it would jump right out of my chest,” the 83-year-old Smith recalled during a recent interview, as he described the long ago moment in July 1942 when he was ordered to destroy what appeared to be an American ship. “At that instant, you see, I was absolutely convinced that the boat was one of ours. But the problem was that the crew had turned their radio off, and they’d completely ignored several orders to shut down their engines and run up their I.D. flag.

“At that point, in fact, I’d already directed the Plotting Room [located in a nearby bunker] to fire two warning shots over the ship. And there had been no response at all. Nothing. This was it. We were about 30 seconds away from firing our 90-millimeter guns for real, and we were gonna kill everybody on board.”

Pulse racing, the man in the concrete lookout — one of 11 such 1940s artillery “fire control” towers that still dot the Delaware coast from Lewes to Fenwick Island — began to holler into the phone: “Bearing!” and then “Range!” and then “Speed!”

Within half a minute, according to procedure, Smith’s findings would be relayed from the technicians in the Plotting Room to the “gun captain” who commanded the big, concrete-sunk artillery guns hidden behind the Cape Henlopen sand dunes. Directed by officers at the nearby Fort Miles military base (which had been recently completed in 1941), the guns were remarkably accurate — and capable of instantly shredding a ship’s hull into tangles of red-hot, spaghetti-like steel.

“That was a terrible moment for all of us,” says Smith, who would retire years later as a Delaware Army National Guard Colonel after winning a Bronze Star at the Battle of the Bulge in Germany. “Can you imagine how awful that felt — getting ready to shoot at your own sailors? But we didn’t have any choice, not really. The problem was that the Germans had been disguising some of their attack-ships as ordinary merchant marine vessels, and we couldn’t be sure that the ‘Army Corps of Engineers’ ship wasn’t also a disguised German surface warship.

“What a nightmare! The target was steaming toward Delaware Bay, and we couldn’t take a chance on allowing her to enter the [Delaware] river, where she could have threatened our vital wartime industries all along the Delaware Valley.

“There was no way out. We had to stop that ship.” And so he squinted into the azimuth range-finder, and he held his breath.

Like millions of other American youngsters, the kid from Bacon Switch was getting his first real taste of naval warfare, during the summer of 1942. Until this brutally difficult morning, his biggest enemies had been the leaking, pyramid-shaped tents in which he and the other members of “C Battery” (261st Coast Artillery Battalion) spent the muggy summer nights — along with the pesky sand flies that made every walk along the sand dunes a maddening exercise in slapping yourself. (“The files were so bad that one night at chow I thought we were having rice pudding — and it turned out to actually be mashed potatoes with sand flies in them!”)

Misery? You bet. But at least nobody had been killed — because the brutally efficient artillery pieces along the beach hadn’t been fired in anger yet. After all, the nation had only been at war since the attack on Pearl Harbor, the previous December, and at this point (mid-1942), the U.S. military was still gearing up for the great struggle that lay ahead. Meanwhile, the Germans had been scoring one naval success after the next, and the mighty German surface fleet now loomed as a fearsome military threat. Led by wolf-packs of marauding submarines and monster-sized battleships such as the Tirpitz, the Axis navy was capable of firing automobile-sized explosive shells more than 25 miles with deadly accuracy.

The German navy was a superbly disciplined killing machine, feared from Sevastopol to Boston Harbor.

And what did the U.S. military have to defend against Axis battleships so powerful that Delaware State Parks historian Lee Jennings has described them as “the nuclear weapons of their day”?

Along the Delaware seacoast, guarding the approaches to Philadelphia and its heavy industry, the Pentagon strategists would be forced to rely on a series of 11 spindly towers made of ordinary concrete. Inside those stifling towers, artillery specialists like “buck sergeant” Bill Smith climbed 150 steel ladder-steps each day to scan the Atlantic for the sight they dreaded most — killer ships bristling with sea cannon and bearing the image of Hitler’s oceangoing juggernaut.

Says historian Jennings, while describing the reality that Smith and his fellow-soldiers confronted in the spring and summer of ’42: “The men working in the towers were in deadly earnest, and for good reason. If one of those big ships had appeared on the horizon, those guys could have been turned into piles of mush in a hurry. It was very dangerous, and they didn’t know what each new day would bring.”

Until this July morning, Smith had tasted fear only once or twice — during guard duty at night on the beach, when the sound of a snapping twig could have meant that submarine-dispatched German skin-divers were crawling along the sand, cradling automatic weapons in their arms. Those moments had been intense — “Our M-1’s were fully loaded and we’d been told to shoot to kill” — but they’d lasted only for a couple of seconds, and they’d taken place in the relative security of a bristling U.S Army encampment.

But this was different.

Suddenly, Smith was faced with the situation a soldier fears most: Being forced to pull the trigger on your own troops, in a situation that would mean life or death.

Squinting over the height-finder lens, he shouted into the mouthpiece at the men in the Plotting Room:

“Stand by for bearing, range, speed!”

In a flash, he’d locked the height-finder’s scope onto the intruding ship. “Bearing, coming up on 225, True!”

The clock ticked. Smith felt a drop of perspiration go trickling into one eye. Was this really happening to him? Now he was holding his breath, and his knuckles had gone bone-white against the side of the range-finder
telescope …

They were less than 10 seconds from firing the first live rounds from the gun-emplacements at Fort Miles, when a booming voice shouted over the telephone and nearly deafened Smith on the spot.

“Halt! Halt! Do NOT fire!”

At the very last moment, the crew aboard the Army Corps of Engineers supply ship had gotten the word and had slammed their engines into neutral, while also running up the specially coded flag that would prove their “bona fides” to the Army brass.

Remembering that instant, the former Army sergeant from Bacon Switch just shakes his head. “I’ll always be grateful for the fact that we didn’t fire those guns,” says Smith, who lives today in peaceful retirement in Newark, Del.

“I saw a lot of terrible things later during the war, things that are difficult to forget. But at least I was spared the tragedy of having to kill some of our own boys.

“I’ve never forgotten that day in the Lewes tower — or the relief I felt when we sent the word down to the gun-bunker: ‘Do not fire!’”

How to sink a ship from 25 miles away

Built in 1941 at a cost of $22 million, Fort Miles and its system of 11 fire-control towers provided a crucial line of defense against German surface ships that could have attacked major U.S. shipbuilding and war industries in Wilmington and Philadelphia.

The Delaware coast guns had a range of up to 25 miles, and the largest — the big “16-inchers” (the measurement describes the diameter of the barrel) — were so powerful that their concussion sometimes broke windows in nearby Lewes.

The U.S. Army’s coastal towers were never used to target submarines, only surface ships. More than 2,000 soldiers manned the complex system of observation towers, bunker-based “plotting rooms” and gun batteries hidden in the sand dunes only a few hundred yards from the water’s edge.

The targeting of enemy ships began when one of the three or four spotters assigned to each tower during a shift focused in on a vessel with a telescope-like “azimuth range-finder.” Spotters in two different towers took a series of compass readings on the target and relayed the information to the plotters in the bunkers. There, specially trained soldiers used trigonometric equations to “triangulate” the target’s location, based on the compass information.

After factoring in wind speed and barometric pressure (which would affect the flight of the shell), the plotters sent firing instructions to the gunners in the dunes.

Next step: The gunners adjusted their weapons in line with the “triangulation” input and began firing. By correcting for mistakes as they watched the shells land, the spotters and plotters gradually “walked” the shells closer and closer to the target.

It was hot, tedious, nerve-wracking work. Typically, the spotters spent eight hours per shift inside the hastily erected towers, which were only 17 feet in diameter and made of reinforced concrete walls built to a thickness of 1 foot.

Each tower took eight days to build, and when they were finally completed in 1941, they formed the key element in a system that could hit distant ships with surprising accuracy. The Delaware coast artillery pieces ranged in size from 90mm to 16 inches during the Second World War — but they were never fired in anger, because the Germans ultimately decided against a coastal assault.

“During the early years of the war, we were really worried that the Germans might attack along the Delaware coast,” says 86-year-old Ralph H. Trader Jr., a U.S. Army warrant officer who helped supply the guns at Fort Miles during 1942 and 1943. “We maintained a total blackout at night, and it seemed like a real possibility that the German navy might start firing at us.

“But if they had, we’d have been ready! The spotters in the towers did a terrific job and the entire system worked like clockwork. We took it very seriously, because we knew we were defending America from attack.”

Freelance writer Tom Nugent is a national contract correspondent for the Washington Post, and writes for numerous other publications.