The Artillery Board

The arcs and the gridded paper

The board and a director

Tools secured at the back of the board

I remember another iconic British artillery innovation. The Artillery Board. My batch of artillery officers commissioned into the Federation Artillery Regiments would be the last batch of GPOs to use the Arty Board in the command post as the primary plotter. The fire Control Plotter was just being introduced in 1964. I would believe the Arty Board is still being used today by artillery safety officers.

  The Arty Board is made of wood and is about 30 inches square and weighs a ton. It has alluminium range and bearing arcs placed on top of gridded sheet of paper. The scale used is 1:25,000. Grid references are plotted on it and the arcs displyed the bearings and range to the plotted GR. It was believed that the Arty Board was first used by the British artillery in 1915 during the Great War. If Galileo Galilei was a gunner he would have designed the board much earlier.

The board is really large and clumsy. Yet I had seen the Arty Board despatched down in parashutes with the British airborne Bty on an exercise in the Larkhill range. I believe the Arty Board woud make excellent para-wings if it was strapped onto the backs of the TARA personnel. Maj Chong Kok Hing and I would loved to use the Arty Board as our majong table, but we could not get hold of a used and boarded-out Arty Board. The Arty Board last a life time. It had stopped many unsafe rounds being fired.

Allen Lai