|
WORLD WAR II SUN COMPASS HANDED DOWN TO CORPS FROM GLOBETROTTING ENIGMA OF A MAN
 Sun compass inside case
The British Army used one to guide its vehicles against Rommel’s Afrika Corps in Libya and Egypt’s western desert in 1942.
And the Los Angeles District used one--maybe by coastal spotters or antiaircraft artillerymen on the Palos Verdes Peninsula looking for enemy planes and subs after Pearl Harbor.
The sun compass was the forerunner of today’s Global Positioning System. Thanks to the thoughtfulness of Sharon Clanton, niece of a former Corps employee, the late Leslie Clanton, the Los Angeles District recently acquired (or reacquired) one in mint condition.
Leslie Clanton, who died at age 75 in Las Vegas in 1993 from injuries suffered in a van accident, became a man of mystery after he finished his World War II military service. With no fixed abode, a Reno post office box, passports stamped with visas for off-limits Iron Curtain countries, a Belgian driver’s license and a Citroen he left parked in front of Sharon’s parents’ home in Santa Monica, Leslie was mostly on the road.  Sun compass with case open
She remains uncertain about when or where her uncle worked for the Corps. All she knows is that when she collected his things from friends in Pahrump, Nev., after he died, the sun compass—“C. of E./U.S.A.”--stamped on the olive drab wooden box holding it--was among possessions he had kept in his van.
In any case, the 1944 sun compass will be donated to the USACE Headquarters Museum in Washington, D.C. Curator Eric Reinert, who says he’d been “doodling around” with the idea of a compass display, hopes to set up a small exhibit for six or eights months at the Headquarters building. He also plans to photograph the L.A. sun compass and others to post an online version of the exhibit at the Office of History Web site.
Then, according to Dr. Fred-Otto Egeler, L.A. District public affairs chief, the sun compass will be housed in the California Military Reserve Museum in Sacramento; Dr. Egeler is a major in the reserve.
A sun compass “is a mechanical device which utilizes the azimuth of the sun to obtain true direction,” its 29-page 1943 maintenance manual states. “The instrument is ruggedly built and can be used on any type of vehicle on which it can be mounted properly. The sun compass has many definite advantages over the magnetic compass.”The U.S. Geologic Survey described one of its predecessors in the 1920s, a device called a Baldwin’s sun graph used for field navigation. A decade or so later, a Bagnold sun compass also was developed in Europe, according to Jack Valenti of the Long-Range Desert Group, a British outfit that seeks to preserve the history of the Brits in the North Africa campaign.
In the early 1940s, a Lansing, Mich., firm called Abrams Instrument Co. began turning out “compass, sun, universal type, Abrams model SC-1.”
 (From left-to-right) Leslie George Clanton 3 Nov 1918, Richard Guy Clanton 9 Aug 1914, Robert Ott Clanton 29 Oct 1911
The SC-1 seems to have been first used in the North African desert. “B24 Liberator bombers were equipped with this instrument so that, in case of a crash, the survivors could orientate themselves in the desert,” Francois Pineau, a French researcher, reports on his Web site. “It was used in the Philippines by the U.S. Army. The British and Australian Armies also used the sun compass. There is some evidence, not definitive, that the German Army also used a similar instrument.
“In addition, some polar expeditions used it up to the ‘70s. The Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions used American Army surplus sun compasses. Several accounts confirm that a sun compass was still used on expeditions in the Sahara at the end of the ‘70s.”
Sturdy and mechanically simple, the sun compass wasn't affected by local magnetic forces. It was mounted on whatever vehicle was handy. But it had one drawback: It could only be used in sunlight so that shadows caused by the sun could point out the right direction; “or by sighting on the north star at night when it is not cloudy,” the maintenance manual states.After Pearl Harbor, Pvt. Leslie Clanton, uncle of Sharon (who gave the sun compass to the District), served with the 78th Antiaircraft Artillery Searchlight Battery, based at San Pedro's Fort MacArthur. He “maintained and operated” an SCR-268 radar unit for long periods,” according to his military records, and also operated a “distant electric control station during alerts and missions.”
The radar system was “expressly designed for fixed antiaircraft defenses, such as coastal batteries,” says a Web site devoted to one of those World War II battalions. That meant Pvt. Clanton probably would have done his duty somewhere on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific, at Fort Mac.
The radar was one leg of a tripod defense system that also included a 60-inch-diameter searchlight and some of the big guns facing out toward the ocean. In theory, the radar would pinpoint the location of an approaching hostile aircraft; a spotlight synchronized to the radar would then illumine the target for the newly installed 155-mm and three-inch antiaircraft guns.
 Leslie Clanton at Tombstone, AZ, March 1990 Besides enemy aircraft, enemy ships were also in the crosshairs of coastal defenders—and they proved to be much more of a threat than anything from the skies. During the course of the war, 19 Japanese submarines were sighted from the California coast, and 12 allied ships were sunk between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the museum’s Janesic relates.
Spotters like Clanton thus had to watch for subs and other hostile ships, and the sun compass would have been a handy daytime tool for that duty. “They had to find the range (of vessels) and how high off the surf they were,” says Janesic.
Pvt. Clanton manned the coastal batteries only from August to May 1942 before he and his unit were shipped to the Pacific. Among other awards he received in that theater were the Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal, Philippine Liberation Ribbon and a Bronze Star.
 Sharon Clanton with sun compass
His duties, his records say, consisted of “maintain(ing) situation map, encoding & decoding messages, operation of converter M 209, assist(ing) in organizing and maintaining CP [command post], teach(ing) classes in recognition of aircraft & armored vehicles and orientation.”By the end of the war, the M 209 had become the cryptographic equivalent of the Jeep for Army intelligence personnel. It was a rugged, 6-pound, hand-operated machine used to encode and decipher tactical messages. Like the sun compass, the M 209 had been used extensively in the 1942 invasion of North Africa. And like the sun compass, the code machine could be hauled around by soldiers in a hurry.
So after he mustered out, Clanton could point to expertise in a variety of intelligence roles. Among his posthumous papers were three expired passports, each filled with stamps and visas from around the world. Sharon says her uncle was also into soaring and regularly attended the Experimental Aircraft Assn. fly-in held each year in his home state of Wisconsin.
 Mike Tharp interviewing Sharon Clanton
Curiously, inside the box holding the sun compass and two training manuals was a piece of scrap paper with two handwritten sets of numbers:
34 01 45
118 30 30
Latitude and longitude. Did Leslie Clanton leave a last clue to unlock the secret of his cloak-and-dagger life-on-the-run?
Maybe he did. The coordinates are the address of his older brother Richard, Sharon’s father, where he parked his French car while he roamed the world.
Leslie’s final azimuth was a house in Santa Monica. |
