Fire control tower

The Atlantic Wall in German-occupied Europe during World War II included fire control towers.

The overall plan document for the harbor defenses contained a list that linked the tactical numbers of all batteries to their names.

When an enemy surface craft was detected, bearings to it were measured from a pair of towers, using instruments like azimuth scopes or depression position finders.

[d][1] A fire control tower was usually five to ten stories tall, depending on the height of the site at which it was built and the area it had to cover.

Often made of poured concrete, its lower floors were usually unoccupied and were capped by occupied observation levels.

Site 131-1A had electric lights, phones, and radio communications, and a time interval bell that was used for coordinating fire control information.

These distances were plugged into the triangulation equations for the pair of stations involved in sighting on a particular target in order to compute its position.

[h] As the target ship moved along the coast, different pairs of fire control stations (and therefore different baselines) would come into play.