EMO!!!!Stark wrote:Anyway, I still want to read his emo blog. I'm bored and I can't sleep.
We picked up a target coming in. Through my headphones, I was ordered to elevate the gun. The elevation was set electrically and my job was to keep the manual dial exactly on the electrical dial. My school friend had to do the same for the line of sight. Pjotr, our Russian loader, already had the shell in the breech, ready to fire. Unteroffizier Sturmegger, who came from Vienna, pulled the firing cord - one round every eight seconds. We kept on firing but then there was the dull clang of a bell. What had happened? Someone had allowed a shell to hit the tower of the stadium and strike the bell which had called the youth of the world to the Olympic Games in 1936. The 'someone' was me. I had allowed the elevation of the gun to drop too low. The barrel had knocked away the wooden wall which would have stopped us firing in that direction.
My battery commander was nearly disciplined for this mistake, but he was deemed not responsible for the error of a high-school boy who was a keener artilleryman than a Latin student.
During the fighting in Berlin at the end of the war, the bell tower was destroyed. The bell itself was recovered and today it stands beside the main entrance to the stadium, still with a hole in it from an 88-millimetre shell. The angle of the hole in the bell is the same angle at which we were firing on 22 November - 24.25 degrees.
