OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF FORT MACON

WORLD WAR II BATTERY COMMAND BUNKER (published in the Fall '06 Ramparts) by Paul Branch, Fort Macon Ranger/Historian

            Southwest of Fort Macon immediately behind the park office complex on a sand dune overlooking the ocean is a jumble of concrete slabs and walls partly covered in the sand.  Some of the walls and slabs lie splayed out at crazy angles.  Others point futilely into the air.  Still others lie flat almost covered in sand.  The site appears as a miniature Stonehenge.

            At first glance there is seemingly little sense to be made of this jumble of concrete.  However, if one looks closely enough it is possible to realize that these concrete pieces at one time fit together to form a structure.  Time, wind and sea have all worked their mischief over the years to reduce the structure to the condition in which it is now found.  Surprisingly, however, in its heyday the structure played an important part in the defense of Fort Macon in World War II.  It is the Battery Command (BC) station that directed the fire of the battery of two 6-inch guns that constituted the World War II defenses of Fort Macon from late 1942. 

            When World War II began in December, 1941, the US Army Coast Artillery troops returned to occupy Fort Macon State Park for the defense of Beaufort Harbor against the possible threat of German naval attack.  To command the approaches to Beaufort Inlet a battery of four 155 mm guns was placed as a temporary defense in the sand dunes southwest of the fort and south of the present office complex.  They protected the inlet during most of 1942, while the German “U-boat” submarine campaign raged just offshore.  However, this battery was intended only as a temporary defense until a permanent defense could be installed.

            Between September and November, 1942, Army Engineers constructed permanent defenses for Fort Macon.  These consisted of two 6-inch Navy guns on concrete emplacements in the dunes overlooking the ocean southwest of the fort.  To direct and control the fire of these guns the Battery Command (BC) station was built on a higher sand dune above and a short distance east of the 6-inch gun battery.

            The BC station consisted of a concrete bunker with a wooden plotting room attached.  The front part of the bunker contained a ten by ten-foot concrete-walled observation room.  At the rear of the bunker stood a range finding instrument looking out over the ocean.  A sixteen by eighteen-foot wood frame plotting room adjoined the rear of the concrete bunker.  Both the observation and plotting rooms had wooden roofs.

            The duty of the personnel manning the BC station was to determine the course, range and bearing of an offshore enemy vessel during an attack.  These would then be used to plot coordinates of the vessel’s location on a map in the plotting room.  The coordinates were then telephoned down to the gun battery to allow it to fire upon the enemy vessel.  Allowance was made in the coordinates for the speed and movement of the enemy vessel, and the time of flight of the battery’s projectiles to reach it.

            The range to a target from the BC station was determined by sighting with a range finding instrument known as the Depression Position Finder.  The instrument was installed on a concrete mount in the station and looked out over the ocean.  Determining the range involved the solution of an imaginary vertical right triangle between the Depression Position Finder and the target.  The instrument was mounted at a known, precise distance above sea level, which constituted the height of the right triangle.  The base line of the triangle (the actual range) was the distance from the target to a point directly under the instrument.  The hypotenuse was formed by the angle of the instrument’s line of sight looking down at the target.   Reading this angle, known as the “Depression Angle,” allowed the mathematical solution of the base line (range to target) of the vertical right triangle.

            Of course, Fort Macon’s defenses never fired a shot in anger during the war since the German submarines confined their activities to attacks on shipping offshore.  At the end of the war, the Army removed its troops, guns and equipment from Fort Macon.  The wooden plotting room part of the BC station was also removed.  Afterward, the empty concrete BC bunker and the two concrete emplacements for the 6-inch guns were left abandoned in place in the dunes.

            During Hurricane Hazel on October 15, 1954, vast amounts of the barrier sand dune system along the ocean front near the fort were swept away.  The gun mounts for the two 6-inch guns were undermined and toppled into the ocean.  During the hurricanes that occurred over the next six years, additional damage was done to the barrier dune system right up to the dune on which the BC bunker was located.  Hurricane Donna’s storm surge on September 11, 1960, appears to have been responsible for sweeping away much of the seaward face of this dune and causing the front of the BC bunker to be undermined.

            Over the decades that followed, wind erosion continued the process of cutting away the seaward front of the dune and further undermining the shifting sand that sustained the bunker’s walls.  Without support underneath to sustain its weight, the whole front part of the bunker eventually broke away from the rest of the structure.  It rolled forward down the slope onto its face, leaving portions of its side walls pointing into the air.  The other sections of the side walls, with the passage of time, have been further undermined until now they too are collapsed outward onto the sand or lie tilted outward at an angle.  This is the condition of the bunker today.  As such it is now difficult to realize what the bunker must have been like when it was whole.

            Thus the remains of the bunker lie where they have collapsed in the dunes, but still look out over the ocean that the structure originally helped defend.  It is now mostly forgotten.  Still, someone walking along the beach or through the sand dunes will sometimes notice this seemingly out-of-place Stonehenge-like structure on the sand dune and wonder to themselves: “What is that thing?”