Thank you, veteran surveyors!

Written By Kari Campbell

Surveyors were key to the birth of our country, serving in the Revolutionary War and signing the Declaration of Independence.  Since that time, surveyors have continued to serve our country, both in peacetime and in conflict.

George Washington created the Geographer of the Army position in 1777 and established a fortress at West Point in 1778, which later became the United States Military Academy (the first engineering school in the United States).

Civil War Surveyor Veterans

Mumper & Co, photographer. Gen. Warren, view on Round Top / Mumper & Co., photo. artists, Baltimore St., Gettysburg, Pa. Pennsylvania United States Gettysburg, None. [Gettysburg, pa.: mumper & co., photo. artists, baltimore st., between 1888 and 1900?] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

To help explore and map the west, the Corps of Topological Engineers was established at West Point. During the Civil War, these trained topographers proved essential to the Union victory. One graduate, Gouverneur K. Warren, was both a civil engineer and a US Army General. Warren is remembered for arranging a last-minute defense of a strategic position during the Battle of Gettysburg. This position, named Little Round Top, was a 650-foot hill that had been cleared of trees. During the heat of battle, Meade sent General Warren to assess the situation. Drawing on his background as a map-maker and engineer, Warren quickly realized the importance of the position. If taken, Confederate troops could have rolled up the entire Union line.  He immediately sent for help and was reinforced by troops including Lt. Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain’s 358-man 20th Maine Regiment, who was told to hold the line at the left flank of the hill at all costs. And hold the line he did, becoming one of the heroes of Gettysburg.

World War II

United States War Department. (1945) Battles and campaigns: World War II, European and African theater. [Washington, D.C.: War Dept., ?] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress,

Surveyors were crucial to military success during World War II, as described in this previous post about Operation Overlord.

Another story of surveying bravery is the tale of U.S. Army veteran Al Sorrentino, described in this 2014 article in the Palm Springs Desert Sun: Sorrentino was a member of a 6-man survey team composed of a transit operator, a recorder, a front and a rear rod man and a front and a rear tapeman (measures distance between transit and rod). This group was part of the 174th Field Artillery Battalion made up of three firing batteries.  Sorrentino was assigned to Battery C. Since the guns could not actually see the enemy, they had to plot where guns were to be placed. His team was broken into teams and sent out as scouts.  "We would go into the enemy territory under the cover of either dusk or darkness and try to figure out where the enemy would come into play. We'd pick out a particular object in the general area. It could be a tree standing by itself, it could be a rock, and we would estimate the range and elevation to this point."

"We would ask the number two gun to send out one round and then we would see where that round fell, and if it ran short of our point or to the right we would then ask the gun to turn or raise elevation. Once we got that point, we'd ask them at what range and elevation they fired that shell. Then we waited for the enemy to come into our particular area we were scouting."

"Say the enemy came 500 yards to the left. We knew the base point, so we estimated where the enemy was and then by element of surprise we asked all four guns to send down a barrage. Once the shell hit, then they (the enemy) would disperse."

"We would go to the front lines for only two days and two nights at a time. Then we would be relieved. The only sleep we would get — one of us would nap for just a few minutes or half-hour while the others were still on duty. While at the front lines, while we were observing the enemy, we could hear Germans walking around us and we were lucky they never did fall into our foxholes — if they did, I either wouldn't have been here today or I would have been captured.”

Sorrentino and his crew continued scouting positions during the Battle Normandy, the Battle for Brest, the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of the Rhine. It was after these battles where the battalion discovered the Ohrdruf concentration camp. The soldiers loaded a group of townspeople (who claimed not to know what was going in the camp) into trucks and gave them a tour. The battalion then made its way through Nuremberg and Munich, and on May 9, they got word that the Germans had surrendered on May 8, 1945. Sorrentino’s unit was waiting to be shipped out to the Pacific when they got word that the Japanese had surrendered on August 14, 1945. Sorrentino passed away on February 12, 2016 at age 92.

Vietnam

Unlike the WWII tactics of blanketing grid squares with overwhelming artillery fire, artillery in the Viet Nam war required far more precision. This strategy required knowing the position and orientation of firing batteries and targets. When a fire base was established, the first task fell to the surveyors to establish direction. Position was established by traversing from known control points or picking coordinates from a map.

Eighty to ninety percent of enemy casualties in Vietnam were from artillery fire, therefore the enemy went out of its way to neutralize forward observers who called in artillery strikes. Once position and direction were established, the surveyors’ work was done, making them available for other tasks. Some surveyors spent a lot of time as a forward observer, a very risky task. Surveyors were supposed to have infantry support, but often didn’t, so they had to become skilled in defending themselves through the use of mortars and the Vietnam workhorse, the 105mm howitzer.

In addition to coordinating artillery fire, surveyors were crucial in surveying for roads and bridges in a country with very little infrastructure – a monumental and dangerous task.

Today, surveyors continue to serve proudly, providing key contributions through geo-spatial interpretation, surveying, architectural and structural drawing, field combat strategy, aerial photo interpretation and more.

Berntsen’s bronze survey marker with Arabic text, mid 70s.

Berntsen has supported military surveyors for decades

Back in the mid-seventies, the US government contacted Berntsen to see if it could create some survey disks for a project in Saudi Arabia. The disks needed to include Arabic text and the country’s coat of arms. At the time, survey markers were stamped with standard English characters, so Berntsen invented a new approach to add artwork to markers – and the rest is history.

It all came to pass because of U.S. military surveyors!

 

For more information about surveyors in Viet Nam, check out these narratives housed at the Library of Congress:

Jan T. McGregor, geodesy topographic surveyor

Charles Orville Hoiness, topographical surveyor and map surveyor

Bruce C Fosburgh, artillery surveyor and base defense shift leader at Phu Loi

Kari Campbell
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