The Rehoboth-Dewey Chamber of Commerce is putting on their fourth Beach Goes Red, White & Blue annual event on Saturday, June 8, 2019. Fort Miles will be displaying some of our WWII equipment from 11 AM to 3:30 PM and later at the Rehoboth Beach Bandstand Area: the 90mm gun, the searchlight, a Deuce, and a Half Cargo Truck. The searchlight will be operate in the day and evening. At noon, men and women in “attractive” uniforms from a USO Troupe will be singing. As you all know, lots of food, fries, and ice cream will be vended. See the Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Chamber of Commerce website for a sample of these uniforms and a full schedule of the day’s events.
Here are a couple of equipment descriptions and histories:
The 90 MM Gun
A 90mm (3.5 inch diameter shell) anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun will be on display at the Rehoboth Beach Goes Red, White, & Blue celebration. This gun has impressive statistics. It shoots a round automatically every three seconds. The round leaves the gun at 1840 miles per hour (2.4 times the speed of sound) giving it a vertical range of 33,000 feet, which is the maximum altitude the best bomber of WWII could fly (ours, the B-29). The gun entered service in 1943, two years after the U. S. declared war on Germany and Japan.
The purposes of this gun were to repel a German invasion and to simply repel an attack on Fort Miles, where great defensive assets were stationed. Invasions start by aerial attack, then by beach-landing armament, like tanks. The gun worked in conjunction with a searchlight, because later in the war both sides developed means to fly bombers at night. This gun was also effective against tanks. Of course, it would scare the daylights out of advancing troops and challenge their command structure.
The Searchlight
The searchlight is one of the important tools used at Fort Miles during World War II to help defend the Delaware coastline and surrounding communities such as Lewes and Rehoboth Beach against potential German Nation attacks. The 140-hp engine-generator set put out 100 kilowatts of power into a flaming carbon arc so that our troops could search for and dissuade amphibious landings or German bombers seeking to destroy our costal defense. The carbon arc technology, invented in 1800, was first used in the 1870’s for building and street lighting before the advent of the incandescent (Edison) lamp. The German troops were always nearby with their U-boats, sinking our merchant shipping off the Atlantic coast and the islands south of Florida. They wanted to destroy Fort Miles so the German surface fleet could proceed up the Delaware Bay and destroy the huge fuel depots in Delaware and Philadelphia – fuel that was sent to England and used to power our ever-growing fleet and air power. This design of searchlight, minus the engine-generator, has also been used by the entertainment industry for movie openings and by cities for celebrations – like Rehoboth Beach Goes Red, White, & Blue!
Download a copy of the Bandstand Diagram.
