9th Company, Columbia, Ft. Stevens, Ore.,
June 10, 1918.
"I am still in the office at headquarters and it looks
as if I were going to stay there. I get out what we call here
a
Consolidated Morning Report, which shows what all the men
in the companies in the three forts of these defenses, Ft. Stevens,
Canby and Columbia, are doing, whether they are on special duty,
or absent, or sick, or acting as officers, non-commissioned officers,
cooks, mechanics and all that, and every man must be accounted
for. My report has to be signed by the Adjutant and Coast Defense
Commander, and I cannot begin work in the mornings until it comes
back from their offices - and that may happen at any time from
nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. It came back
last Sunday at twelve o'clock, and of course I was there all
afternoon.
"At the present time our company is all upon special
duty and we do no drilling at all. We and the 16th Company each
had a battery of two ten-inch guns assigned to us when we
came and now we are dismantling them and taking the gun barrels
down. The war is really on. The gun barrels weigh 30 tons each
and we are taking them down to send to France where they will
be mounted on railroad cars or tractors and be part of the heavy
artillery. I do not think that they will replace them with this
model as the sea shore has changed quite a bit and I doubt if
these guns here would ever have been used for service in case
of real emergency. The Ninth has been having quite a time getting
them down as they are difficult to handle without large cranes,
but we have two down and the others on the way. It meant that
we had to build a railroad up to the concrete gun emplacements
so that they could be loaded on the cars right from the gun-carriages.
The 16th is doing the railroad building and I hope they like
working on the section."