3 October 1942 Part 1

3 October 1942 Channel Islands Sea Defence diary

Weather: wind from 225°, 1 metres per second.

10:00–11:45: the four guns of Batterie Steinbruch were tested with thirteen rounds. No defects. The battery was thereby conditionally ready for action. Three gun emplacements remained unfinished, allowing only temporary ammunition storage. Telephone lines from the post to the guns were also provisional. The repeatedly requested E.U./S.V. indicator was still missing [source designations retained].

19:30: several aircraft bombed ships in Alderney harbour without hits. Batterie Elsass’s anti-aircraft weapons joined the defence without observed hits. No losses.

Construction, Naval Artillery Battalion 604 — Batterie Mirus. One damping motor installed in each of the four gun-elevation systems. At Nos. 3 and 4 the missing high-pressure pipes for the blow-out apparatus in the emplacement’s circular ammunition track were fitted. The guns were being accepted by the Weapons Engineering Test Establishment of Kiel Naval Dockyard. Backfilling continued at all guns; ammunition-replenishment bunkers begun. Interior work in all accommodation rooms and work on the fire-control crew’s accommodation bunker continued.

Batterie Strassburg: expansion of the auxiliary fire-control post could not begin because no construction timber was available. Batterie Steinbruch: auxiliary post nearing completion; command-transmission equipment provisionally laid at all four guns; construction proceeding to programme.

Naval Artillery Battalion 605 — Batterie West. Fire-control post: working base laid, no progress on accommodation bunker. Turret 1: formwork removed. Turret 2: structure ready for pouring. Turret 3: shuttering continued. Turret 4: unchanged from previous week. Machinery bunker: working base laid. Galley and communal room: shuttering of galley cellar. Northern double fence and Flanders-type fence completed; seaward Flanders fence begun. Positions for all-round defence under construction.

T-1022 Roll 2422, PG 37996, scans 0522–0523.