“Ridgway and I climbed a ladder inside the tower to the belfry, spoke to the sergeant observer there, and looked over the landscape on the German side of the river. Then Ridgway turned to the sergeant and at length asked him to put a mortar concentration on a point of woods a few hundred yards away on the German side. The sergeant, unperturbed, cranked his field telephone and spoke to someone at the mortar position in the fields behind the church. "Joe," he said, "remember the dead horse we used as an aiming point yesterday? This target is about fifty over and 100 left. Ten rounds when you're ready." The rounds were in the air almost at once, and their accuracy was impeccable; but I was far from happy about the way my sergeant had shortcut the standard methods of adjusting fire as prescribed in the mortar manual. Although an artilleryman and not the expert on infantry weapons which Ridgway was, I was sure the "dead horse" method of adjustment was not in the book.”

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 94

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Ridgway and I climbed a ladder inside the tower to the belfry, spoke to the sergeant observer there, and looked over th…" by Maxwell D. Taylor?
Maxwell D. Taylor photo
Maxwell D. Taylor 41
United States general 1901–1987

Related quotes

Maxwell D. Taylor photo
Rudyard Kipling photo
Eoin Colfer photo
Louis Brandeis photo

“I spoke with him [Brandeis] at length, in German. I saw he's a very great man who can't bear injustice being done to anyone, anywhere…His soul is hewn of the purest marble.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Abraham Isaac Kook, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution, Yehuda Mirsky (2014).

Robert Graves photo
Alfred, Lord Tennyson photo
Rudyard Kipling photo
John Flanagan photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“And two I remember off Sandy Koufax. One over the right field fence at the Coliseum, the other here at Forbes Field. This one hit a transformer on the left-field light tower on the way up and it stopped. No telling how far it might have gone. And you remember I came within a few inches of putting one on the right field roof here.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As paraphrased and quoted in "The Scoreboard: Big Day For Two Pirates; Stargell Started Streak Against Roberts; Clemente's Friend Retrieves Ball; Longest Drive In Wrigley Field" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=z3wqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Tk8EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6610%2C2693224 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Monday, June 6, 1966), p. 36.
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1966</big>
Context: [Clemente] goes back to the ball he hit in Wrigley Field, Chicago. He rates this one No. 1 for distance, perhaps 600 feet. Clemente, himself, paced off the distance from the centerfield wall to the scoreboard right above and when he was shown the spot where the ball landed, he knew this was No. 1. "I hit one off Sam Jones one night over the left-center fence at Candlestick Park and that was a good one," he said. "And two I remember off Sandy Koufax. One over the right field fence at the Coliseum, the other here at Forbes Field. This one hit a transformer on the left-field light tower on the way up and it stopped. No telling how far it might have gone. And you remember I came within a few inches of putting one on the right field roof here.".

Irvine Welsh photo

Related topics