Chapter 7: Chemical Warfare Service Units
The Chemical Warfare Service provided service units for all theaters of operations during World War II. In so doing, it had in mind primarily its responsibility for providing the United States Armed Forces with the capability of defending themselves against gas attack and retaliating effectively in kind. The task of maintaining readiness for gas warfare in the field embraced a number of contributory missions. Chemical warfare matériel, whether defensive, like gas masks and protective clothing, or offensive, like toxic agents and the munitions to deliver them, had to be provided through depots and dumps; this required units trained to handle, repair, and issue such items. Teams trained and equipped for the systematic decontamination of service area installations after gas attack were essential in a gas warfare situation. Defensive measures also included the availability of freshly processed permeable protective clothing for troops called on to execute missions in a contaminated area; hence the need for processing teams and equipment to insure an adequate supply of impregnated uniforms. Gas warfare intelligence was dependent on the presence in theaters of technicians and laboratories capable of determining the nature of gas attacks and assessing the significance of captured matériel. Finally, the prosecution of a gas offensive demanded close maintenance and supply support for the combat elements responsible, whether they were mortar battalions or Air Forces bombers.
The needs of gas warfare readiness, therefore, set the pattern for prewar CWS planning for service units. The prescribed standard for a wartime situation, in which the existence or at least the imminence of gas warfare was taken for granted, called for the assignment of a chemical depot company, decontamination company, laboratory company, impregnating company (as the processing company was then called) , and maintenance company to each field army, with additional
base depot chemical facilities under the control of the army communications zone.1 By the time the United States entered the war, the CWS had come, perforce, to adjust its standards to meet the needs of gas warfare preparedness in situations which, for the time being, at least, did not include gas. The normal basis of assigning maintenance companies remained the field army, but the other units were henceforth to be assigned to theaters of operation, either for retention under direct theater control or for further assignment to agencies within the theater. CWS air service units were provided for assignment to theater air forces. In addition to these specialized companies, the CWS began at the outset of the war to provide composite companies capable of undertaking all of these service missions for field armies through a system of specialized teams of platoon size or less.
Somewhat more than a year after Pearl Harbor, with large-scale land action against the enemy taking place as yet only in the Southwest Pacific and North Africa, a CWS report showed a total of 19 service units of all types sent to all overseas destinations, including some in the Western Hemisphere. Of these 19, the Southwest Pacific had received a composite company, decontamination companies, a laboratory, a maintenance, and a depot company. A depot company, a maintenance company, and a decontamination platoon had gone to North Africa. Only 2 processing companies had left the zone of interior; both were in the United Kingdom.2 By the middle of 1944, with major Allied offensive campaigns in process all over the world, the current troop basis included an authorization for 128 CWS ground service units, about 25 more than the total number included in theater CWS plans, so far as these had been formulated. There were 102 service units actually in the theaters as of 31 July 1944, compared with the 101 deemed necessary by the Chief, CWS, for a nongas situation. A total of 64 additional CWS units were on duty overseas with the Army Air Forces. In general, the supply of CWS service units was adequate for “insurance” purposes, considering the fact that gas had not been used by the enemy and that there was no particular indication of a sudden change in that situation. Had there been a sudden shift to gas warfare conditions, service unit requirements would have been seriously above existing theater capabilities in some instances, most
notably in the need for processing companies. The European and Mediterranean theaters alone would have required a total of two dozen additional processing companies to meet an all-out resort to gas warfare by Germany.3
But with gas warfare no more than a grim possibility, it was not surprising that theaters were willing to spread their chemical service units somewhat thin. It was inevitable, also, that those service missions which were not directly dependent on the presence or threat of gas should come to the fore. Two of these, both unanticipated in prewar planning, came to be of particular importance: the provision of close maintenance and supply support for 4.2-inch mortars firing HE and the storing, mixing, filling, and loading of airborne incendiary munitions. The hard-won acceptance of the flame thrower as an effective weapon in the Pacific theaters brought with it the need for flame thrower maintenance and fuel supply. The demonstrated value of CWS screening smokes led to the requirement for stockage of smoke mixtures and maintenance of smoke generators. The immediate relevance of all these services to the needs of combat gave them prominence, but the basic gas warfare readiness mission was not forgotten. Depot companies continued to see to it that a gas mask in good working order was available for every soldier, processing companies maintained theater reserve stocks of impregnated clothing, and laboratory companies worked steadily at the tasks of evaluating enemy chemical warfare matériel and providing technical surveillance for American stocks.
As one of the consequences of serving as insurance against the outbreak of gas warfare CWS service units acquired an assortment of responsibilities of immediate urgency, but often unrelated to their basic missions. The decontamination companies, which never functioned as such overseas, were particularly prone to this sort of development. Their equipment, which lent itself to the carrying and dispensing of water, became the basis for their utilization as shower units, among other things. Similarly, the impregnating plants of the processing companies bore enough of a functional relationship to laundry machinery to enable companies to supplement quartermaster laundry service when their own processing mission was in abeyance. Sometimes it was CWS training rather than organic equipment that seemed to point the way to new missions for service units. More than one chemical
service company found itself, after a brief training period, operating smoke lines, and in two cases CWS service troops joined mortar units. Laboratory companies turned to developing or testing field expedients ranging from camouflage dye to flame thrower tanks and found time to perform an impressive variety of miscellaneous technical chores for other services.
The development of new missions, even more than the ordinary exigencies of active theaters, frequently demanded a high degree of flexibility in CWS service units. More often than not, flexibility in response was obtained at the expense of the proper organization of the unit and consequently with a good deal of difficulty. For the most part, each type of company was set up to operate as a unit under the control of the company commander. Each subordinate element was organized, manned, and equipped for a specific range of specialized tasks contributory to the main task. Ad hoc rearrangement of manpower and equipment to meet new demands resulted in administrative problems which often interfered with the unit’s effectiveness. The requirement for flexibility was met to some degree by the formation of the composite companies, with their cellular structure designed to permit each cell to operate independently of the others. The experience of the Pacific theaters was to lead to greater reliance on these all-purpose organizations and to demands for still more flexibility of structure and employment. In this respect this experience pointed the way toward postwar doctrine.
The Chemical Laboratory Company
Seven Chemical Warfare Service laboratory companies saw service overseas between 1941 and 1945. The essential mission of the laboratory company in the field was to analyze and evaluate enemy chemical materiel and to maintain technical surveillance over CWS supplies. These functions made it a major source of technical intelligence, both as to enemy capabilities for chemical warfare and the storage life of CWS ammunition and protective items. At first conceived of as a more or less mobile entity capable of following an army in the field, it was in practice treated as a semifixed installation of a theater communications zone, a status better suited to its more than ten tons of laboratory equipment.
However bulky its equipment, a laboratory company was not a large unit. Its prescribed strength at the time the United States entered World War II was only 86-14 officers and 72 enlisted men—and the tendency of subsequent years was toward a still more restricted personnel roster. Indeed, the first laboratory company to go overseas, en route at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, was authorized no more than 78 officers and men in its movement orders.4 By the end of 1943, in accordance with a TOE of the preceding July, laboratory companies were reorganized to consist of 8 officers and 51 enlisted men. The enlisted strength was set at 50 the following year.5 The original laboratory company was organized rather loosely into headquarters, chemical, and physical sections, the headquarters organization including, in addition to the major commanding, an officer in charge of chemical intelligence. The 1943 reorganization, while cutting the strength of the company, doubled the number of its subdivisions. There were, henceforth, in addition to the headquarters unit, sections designated organic, analytical, chemical engineering, toxicology, and intelligence. This setup was designed for a more effective division of labor in handling the work facing a company in the field.
Once established and operating, usually in or near a major urban center, the chemical laboratory company acted as a research center and technical clearinghouse for the entire theater. In performance of its principal mission, it examined captured enemy chemical munitions and protective items, studied the behavior of American chemical matériel under theater conditions, surveyed items in storage for possible deterioration, collected chemical intelligence from captured enemy personnel and documents, and made regular reports of its various findings and activities to OCCWS. It was from the reports of the 45th Chemical Laboratory Company in the spring of 1945 that the Chemical Warfare Service first learned of the existence and structure of the new German nerve gases, the so-called G agents. When not engaged in its principal chemical mission, the laboratory served the theater as a general-purpose research establishment, carrying out whatever projects its equipment and technical personnel were capable of handling.
These tasks ranged from tests of Army Air Forces engine coolants to manufacture of a camouflage skin dye for jungle troops.6
The oldest of the laboratory companies was typical in its overseas experience. The 41st Chemical Laboratory had begun its existence as the 1st Chemical Company (Laboratory) in 1940 in the days before the laboratories were assigned the forties for numerical designation. From its ranks while in training at Edgewood Arsenal had come cadres for the second and third laboratories to be activated. In the spring of 1943 the company took ship for North Africa, arriving at Mers el Kébir near Oran early in May, as the Tunisia Campaign was approaching its end. Assigned at first to Fifth Army, the company spent several months at Marina, Algeria, just over the border from Fifth Army’s Moroccan headquarters, working under the supervision of the Fifth’s Chemical Officer, Colonel Barker. When Fifth Army embarked for Italy in September 1943, the 41st was retained in Africa at the disposal of theater headquarters in Algiers. After several weeks in a staging area near Oran, under assignment to Mediterranean Base Section, the company moved to more permanent quarters at Sidi Ferruch, near Algiers, and took up its role as a theater laboratory assigned to AFHQ. It remained there until after the fall of Rome.7
The principal business of the 41st in North Africa turned out to be surveillance of CWS matériel held in storage. When stored items developed unexpected reactions to aging in depots the laboratory was called upon for an explanation. An instance of this occurred in the spring of 1944 when the chemical officer of Seventh Army asked for an investigation of certain phosgene detector tubes, which had turned black. The 41st determined that the tubes, taken from the detector kit, M9, contained a highly unstable indicator chemical which had decomposed, and recommended replacement with tubes of a newer type.8 For the most part, though, surveillance consisted of sending inspection teams to the depots. A typical team might consist of an officer and two enlisted men.9 A surveillance program drawn up by the 41st in the spring of 1944 and scheduled for accomplishment before
the end of the year included thirty-four item examinations, ranging from bulk mustard to antidim sticks (for preventing mist on gas mask eyepieces).10
In July 1944 a few weeks after the fall of Rome, the 41st moved from its Algerian home to new quarters in the Italian capital. There it shared with a British Expeditionary Forces outfit, the South African 23rd Antigas Laboratory, the facilities of the Italian Military Chemical Institute. The surveillance responsibilities continued, including now a program for the test firing of mustard-filled mortar shells, instituted for the purpose of checking the ballistic properties of chemical ammunition kept in storage over long periods.11 Intelligence reports increased as more chemical equipment from enemy depots in Italy fell into American hands. Captured items included not only German matériel but also defensive chemical warfare items from countries occupied or controlled by the Germans. The 41st had the opportunity of studying and reporting on individual gas mask canisters, decontamination kits, and the like from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia in addition to German and Italian matériel. Nevertheless, as might have been expected in a less extensive theater, the intelligence functions of the 41st did not match in magnitude those of some of the laboratory companies in western Europe and the Pacific.12
In contrast to the comparatively routine transfer overseas of the 41st Laboratory, the process of getting the 3rd Chemical Field Laboratory Company (later redesignated the 42nd Chemical Laboratory Company) to a theater of operations was far from typical. The company came into being at Edgewood, Md., on 15 May 1941 with a complement of Reserve officers and a cadre drawn largely from the 1st Laboratory. After filling out its ranks with newly inducted selectees, the unit spent the summer and early fall in basic and specialized training. Rather suddenly, at the end of October 1941, it was ordered to the west coast to prepare for shipment overseas. On 21 November, the company embarked and sailed westward, the first CWS unit of the war to be dispatched overseas. The destination was given simply as PLUM, but it was not reached on schedule. PLUM was the Philippines,
and the troops were still at sea when the Japanese turned the Philippines into a theater of war. The convoy received orders diverting it to Australia and, as indicated above, docked at Brisbane on 22 December. The company was not to reach the Philippines for three and a half years.
In Brisbane the company settled down to work as a unit of Base Section 3, U.S. Army Forces in Australia. By the end of February the laboratory equipment had been set up in permanent quarters and organized technical work was under way. At first a substantial number of laboratory personnel were detailed for general duty with base section headquarters, but these demands slackened after the first few months and by midyear the company was able to pursue its mission at approximately full strength. It had become in the interim the 42nd Chemical Laboratory Company by redesignation effective April 12, 1942, and had moved to new quarters in buildings formerly occupied by a Brisbane hospital.13
According to one of its commanding officers, the 42nd possessed neither a clearly defined mission nor an effective training for field operations when it arrived in Australia.14 This did not prevent the company from serving as an all-purpose technical unit from the very outset. Before it had finished unpacking its equipment, it had received and responded to Air Corps queries on oxygen and rust inhibiters, Australian Army problems with Kieselguhr water filters, and base section demands for an ant exterminator. Not long thereafter it was at work on practical studies of petroleum bomb fillings. In September 1942, the 42nd took on a major assignment for the Quartermaster Corps—turning 100,000 pounds of fatigue uniforms into jungle green camouflage suits. A formula and procedure for dyeing the uniforms were developed in the course of a day by a 5-man team, and the dyeing itself was carried out under the supervision of company personnel.
By midsummer the 42nd, in addition to its routine analytical work, was engaged in several CWS research problems of a more generalized nature, including studies of nitrogen mustard, low temperature studies of mustard for high altitude spraying, and tests of the action of mustard and impregnite on fabric. Colonel Copthorne, chief chemical officer of USASOS, regarded this type of work as a necessary supplement to
the technical information he was receiving from the United States, so much so that he recommended to General Porter that field laboratory companies be declared branches of the Technical Division of Edgewood Arsenal. This attempt to formalize a research and development mission for the laboratory companies was met with a prompt and firm reminder that the mission of field laboratories was properly confined to testing friendly and captured chemical warfare equipment and identifying enemy toxic agents, should any be used. While this reminder may have served to set the record straight, it had little direct application to the multitude of miscellaneous technical problems which the 42nd by now regarded as its responsibilities. In a subsequent letter General Porter admitted as much; pure research aside, he said, the work of the 42nd could not be precisely circumscribed so as to deprive SWPA of the services it was performing.15
Fortified with official approval, the 42nd Chemical Laboratory Company increasingly continued to handle the theater’s laboratory needs. A report prepared in October 1943, summarizing the problems outside the normal mission area which the 42nd had undertaken since its arrival, listed over fifty tasks performed for the other technical services and the Air Corps. Some of these were of considerable magnitude. A skin dye for camouflage purposes was developed to meet a Quartermaster Corps requirement, and enough of it was manufactured to fill 150,000 2-ounce bottles. For Ordnance a considerable amount of analysis of defective items was done: propellant cartridges, mortar charges, and AN-M103 bomb fuzes. In addition, captured enemy explosives were analyzed, both for Ordnance and for the Navy. Counter Intelligence Corps received help from the laboratory in checking on several instances of suspected sabotage. Industrial analyses of many types were made—steels for the Air Corps, sand for the Engineers, soldering flux for Ordnance, soaps for Quartermaster. Even the Chemical Warfare Service benefited from the 42nd’s nonmission labors, if the manufacture of some 3,500 detonation tubes of assorted toxic agents for troop training be so considered.16
The miscellaneous field work of the 42nd, varied as it was, did not
prevent the company from carrying out the primary responsibilities of its mission. Its regular technical intelligence reports on captured Japanese chemical equipment began to appear as soon as its laboratory was set up, and continued thereafter, to the number of nearly fifty, during the two and a half years that elapsed before it prepared to leave Australia. Surveillance of theater stocks of CWS equipment was a continuing responsibility.17
Toward the end of September 1944 the 42nd was instructed to prepare itself and its equipment for transfer forward. Much of the regular laboratory work was accordingly discontinued, and the company spent the following months largely on garrison duty while waiting for movement orders. For a time it conducted advanced chemistry courses for its own personnel. Finally, in June 1945, with the reconquest of the Philippines nearly complete, the 42nd embarked for Luzon. It arrived in Manila on 21 June. By the time the laboratory was set up once again, the war had come to an end.18
Just as the experience of the 42nd demonstrated a tendency for the work of the laboratory in an isolated theater to broaden, the 43rd Chemical Laboratory, in a somewhat comparable situation, exemplified to a striking degree the ability of such a unit to extend its usefulness. In this case the functions of the unit were construed by the theater, at least in practice, to include a measure of research and development. Despite the official CWS policy which regarded development as the prerogative of the Technical Division at Edgewood, the 43rd, in the course of its work on “field expedients,” tended to make itself a development unit in the field.
The 43rd Chemical Laboratory Company, activated at Edgewood Arsenal on 26 August 1942,19 was ordered to Hawaii in December of 1943. Upon its arrival it was assigned to theater headquarters (Central Pacific Area) and stationed at Schofield Barracks, where the theater chemical officer, Colonel Unmacht, had laboratory facilities (manned by 8th Chemical Depot Company personnel) already in operation. The 43rd took over the existing laboratory functions, added its own equipment, and set to work.20 The immediate tasks were predominantly within the intelligence portion of the mission—the study and
description of captured Japanese chemical equipment. Nearly one hundred technical reports on captured matériel were to be made by the 43rd in the succeeding twenty months. Surveillance of theater chemical stocks led the company into a detailed study of deterioration in impregnated clothing. But before long larger problems began to absorb its attention.
At the time the 43rd arrived in the Pacific theater, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps personnel were becoming increasingly anxious to acquire armored vehicles equipped with flame throwers for use against Japanese island emplacements. Rather than wait for Edgewood Arsenal, entangled in conflicting priorities and requirements, to provide the weapons, the theater went ahead on its own.21 The work was in its early stages when the 43rd appeared on the scene. In February 1944, after tests of the Anglo-Canadian Ronson flame thrower mounted on a Bren gun carrier had proved inconclusive, the project was placed in the hands of Colonel Unmacht, who assigned it to the 43rd. A task force from the company succeeded in redesigning the Ronson to make it a practical main armament weapon for the M3 tank. Mounted in a shroud simulating a howitzer, the Ronson flame thrower turned the quondam M3 into the Satan. By mid-May 1944, the task force had supervised the completion, test firing, and combat readying of twenty-four Satans for use by the marines in the Marianas.22
From flame throwers the 43rd moved on to an extensive consideration of flame thrower fuels. The development of thickened fuel—gasoline thickened to jelly by the addition of certain aluminum soaps—had proved to be essential to the effectiveness of flame throwers in the field. Napalm had been adopted as a standard thickener during the war, but in practice it appeared that field-thickened fuels tended to vary in characteristics and performance. Flame thrower fuels mixed in Hawaii and sent to the front lines, for example, were sometimes found to have had their viscosity more or less reduced by absorbed water, and any substantial change in viscosity involved an unacceptable lack of certainty of flame thrower range and performance. Assigned this problem, the 43rd determined that drying gasoline before mixing, and adding finely divided activated silica gel to the mix, would produce a fuel stabilized enough to be packaged, stored, and shipped successfully. This work, accompanied by a series of papers on the theory and manufacture of stabilized fuel, was completed in the summer of 1945, whereupon the
company proceeded to supervise the building of an activating plant at the chemical warfare depot and the mixing of 150,000 gallons of fuel, using silica gel salvaged from packaged motors, in which it had been enclosed as a desiccant.23
The research and development activity which these accomplishments characterized went beyond the specific mission of the laboratory, but was typical of the manner in which Colonel Unmacht as head of the theater CWS encouraged independent action to meet theater needs. It played a major role in winning for the 43rd a Meritorious Service Unit Award at the conclusion of hostilities.24
The Chemical Maintenance Company
Twenty maintenance companies were supplied to the ground forces overseas by the CWS before the end of the war. Though designed to serve field armies, they could also be, and frequently were, assigned to the Communications Zone. Their mission was third and fourth echelon maintenance of all CWS equipment and matériel, which could and did include everything from salvaging discarded gas masks to manufacturing parts for the 4.2-inch mortar. While maintenance companies were intended to function as salvage and repair centers near CWS Class II and IV depots, in practice some maintenance units assigned to field armies found it necessary to send their men forward beyond the army service area for close support of the front, in order to keep mortars and smoke generators in combat condition.
T/O 3-47, 1 April 1942, set the authorized strength of a maintenance company at 4 officers and 119 enlisted men, organized into a headquarters outfit, a 3-unit repair platoon, and a salvage platoon. The repair platoon was supposed to include all of the company’s skilled mechanics not assigned directly to headquarters, leaving the salvage platoon to operate principally with laborers. A revised organization table published in November 1944 showed a maintenance company pared down to 93 officers and men. The two platoons were redesignated gas mask repair and equipment repair, respectively, and nearly all the enlisted personnel authorized were classified according to specific skills.
The platoons were organized into functional sections.25 Nevertheless, experience in the field throughout the war showed that under the pressure of combat requirements the work of maintenance companies often left prescribed organizational patterns behind.
One of the more noteworthy service records of the war was that of the 12th Chemical Maintenance Company, which acquired eight battle credits in the course of assignments ranging from Tunisia through Sicily and Italy to central Europe. Activated 1 May 1942 at Fort Custer, Mich., the 12th went overseas in March 1943, landing at Casablanca on the 18th. It was assigned to Atlantic Base Section and its first job was running CWS supply dumps. In the last month of the Tunisia Campaign it operated in conjunction with advanced supply depots at Bone and Ouled Rahmoun in eastern Algeria and at Tabarka in Tunisia. It began to undertake more orthodox maintenance work—salvage and repair—in the days after the Tunisia Campaign ended.26
An advance detachment of the 12th, assigned to 3rd Division, landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943 at the outset of the invasion, in order to get a CWS supply dump functioning as soon as possible near the combat area. The rest of the company was in Sicily by the middle of July. During the month or so of fighting that followed before Sicily was won, the company provided the first example of close maintenance support of combat units by the CWS. The 12th’s maintenance and repair officer, Lieutenant Notorangelo, took a 10-man detachment into the combat zone near Sant’Agata in the second week of August to carry out on-the-spot maintenance for the 4.2-inch mortars of the 2nd Chemical Battalion. The battalion was supporting the infantry advance along the north coast of Sicily on the left wing of Seventh Army. The maintenance detachment later proceeded south to Randazzo, on the right wing, to perform the same service for the 3rd Chemical Battalion, after getting needed parts from a rear depot. At the same time, Lieutenant Notorangelo utilized this experience to provide the Chemical Officer, Seventh Army, with the first detailed figures available on attrition rates of mortar parts in combat.27
After a period of salvage and repair work in Palermo, marked by a concerted effort to get the required number of serviceable gas masks
ready for the coming campaign, the 12th followed the Allied forces into Italy early in November 1943. Setting up shop at the Fontanello Caves near Naples, the company reverted to its role of depot operator, storing incoming CWS supplies for Peninsular Base Section. It found time to re-establish its gas mask repair line, though, with the aid of some Italian civilian labor. In December the 12th responded to an emergency report from Fifth Army that mortar propellant charges were too damp to give accurate ranging. Discontinuing its gas mask line, the company set to work improvising a powder ring dryer and a shell reconditioning line and repacking the propellant rings in waterproofed cases. Two weeks after the operation began an explosion and fire wrecked the shops, though fortunately there were no major casualties. The 12th put its equipment together again at another depot near Casandrino, devised a more reliable powder ring dryer, and had its lines operating again within a week.28
Meanwhile, a mortar repair detachment had settled at Capua to service the mortar battalions attached to Fifth Army. In April 1944, the remainder of the company also moved to Capua. There they found the weapons repair section, commanded by Lieutenant Notorangelo, established at the erstwhile Royal Italian Arsenal, which the retreating Germans had wrecked before moving out. The section had joined other Fifth Army service troops in getting the installation in working order by salvaging usable machinery and acquiring additional equipment, Italian, American, or German, wherever possible. In effect, the 12th now had an arsenal of its own. It was fortunate that this was so, for the demands for smoke generator and mortar spare parts rose sharply under the pressure of the bitter Italian campaign of 1943–44. When the depots could not supply enough parts, the 12th’s Capua arsenal manufactured them. The Weapons Repair Section, making full use of the skills of a large working force of Italian civilian machinists, inaugurated this new mission with the fabrication of mortar cup forks. A number of other items were soon added to the list as the rugged terrain, long usage, and high ranges took their toll of the overworked 4.2-inch mortars. Shock absorber slides proved especially vulnerable. To keep the mortars in working condition, the 12th cast and machined new slides of bronze—after liberating the bronze from Italian naval
Capua Arsenal, as the Germans left it. Within thirty days it was producing mortar parts for the Fifth Army.
vessels in Naples harbor—which subsequently proved to be more durable than the brass slides they replaced. Tube caps and steel recoil springs were also prominent in the mortar parts output of the Capua arsenal. For the mechanical smoke generators and the power-driven decontaminating apparatus the weapons repairmen fabricated sprocket gears of several types, along with nuts, couplings, and the like.
The usual repair functions of a maintenance company were carried on side by side with the manufacture of spare parts. The Capua arsenal, as reconstructed by the 12th, contained a cradle rack for repairing 400-gallon tanks from power-driven decontaminating apparatus, a welding shop, a repair shop for vehicular components and chemical handling trucks, and sections for work on Esso and Besler mechanical smoke generators. The 12th’s gas mask repair sections occupied a shop of its own, with two production lines for the disassembly, repair, and reassembly of damaged or salvaged masks. A group of Italian
soldiers assisted in the operation of this facility, which turned out over 150,000 reconditioned masks in less than five months.
In September 1944, the 12th was assigned to Seventh Army, then engaged in pushing up the Rhone Valley from the coast of southern France to join the armies in the European Theater of Operations. By the end of the month, the company was in Dijon, serving as a unit of Continental Advance Section. A weapons repair group, designated as Detachment A, moved on to Épinal to resume close support of the mortar battalions. More work was done to improve the Capua shock absorber slide, including the addition of small amounts of phosphoric tin to the original bronze alloy. Mortar cup forks continued to be made. Portable flame throwers were reconditioned. By December the rest of the company reached Epinal, whereupon a reorganized and somewhat smaller Detachment A moved out to the front. It took up quarters near the command post of the 99th Chemical Mortar Battalion, then supporting Third Division on the Colmar front. Here, within range of German artillery, the detachment kept the battalion’s mortars in operating condition. The detachment remained with the battalion throughout the winter, and in March 1945, moving forward across the Saar with the front, became the first portion of the 12th to enter Germany. Before the end of the month it was across the Rhine. By the time the Germans surrendered, it had accompanied combat troops deep into southern Bavaria.29
A second close support group, Detachment B, left the main body of the 12th in mid-March to join the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion in Germany. The 87th had begun to take part in the advance across the Rhineland, and the detachment had to carry out its mission between rapid movements forward. Once across the Rhine, and before moving ahead to the 96th Chemical Mortar Battalion, Detachment B performed a final individual maintenance mission for the 87th on the eve of the battalion’s transfer to First Army. Together with the other forward elements of Seventh Army it had penetrated Austria before hostilities ended.30
Chemical maintenance companies were not as extensively utilized in the Pacific war as they were in Europe. Only two maintenance companies got west of Hawaii, and one of these, the 10th, ended the war
as a CWS general service company, a type of all-purpose support organization much favored in the Southwest Pacific Area. Before its conversion, however, the company had made important contributions in its original role. The 10th Chemical Maintenance Company, activated 1 July 1940 at Edgewood Arsenal, was sent overseas three months after Pearl Harbor as part of the forces assigned to rebuild Allied power in the Southwest Pacific. It reached Australia early in April 1942, and like the 42nd Chemical Laboratory Company joined Base Section 3 in Brisbane.
As an early arrival in the theater, one of the 10th’s original tasks was to assist the 62nd Chemical Depot Company in the operation of CWS depots in Australia. It was not long before special maintenance problems resulting from waging war in a tropical environment began to dominate the scene. A major example was the discouraging failure in combat of the M1A1 portable flame thrower in the course of the Papua Campaign. The 10th spent the greater part of 1943 putting the discredited weapon through an extensive series of tests, in the course of which all flame throwers in the SWPA were thoroughly overhauled.31 It became clear that tropical heat and humidity were the flame thrower’s chief enemies. Pinhole corrosion of the nitrogen, hydrogen, and fuel cylinders, occurring in 75 percent of the weapons examined, led to leakage, low pressure, and consequent failure in the field. Corrosion resulting from moisture attacked other components as well, and batteries deteriorated readily when exposed to jungle climate.32
The 10th set to work to clear up as many of these defects as possible. There was no quick solution for the problem of pinholes in the cylinders. All that could be done was to repair those cylinders which were not excessively corroded and replace the rest, insofar as supplies permitted. In order to make it possible for troops to spot flame throwers with defective cylinders before attempting to use them in combat, pressure gages and adapters to fit all types of commercial pressure
cylinders were added to the flame thrower service kits.33 The problems resulting from wet electrical systems were met by waterproofing the weapon effectively enough to enable it to stand total immersion and still retain its usefulness. The company’s own tests of the results of its waterproofing project included the firing during rainfall of random samples of waterproofed weapons after keeping them under water for about seventeen hours. It was able to report by October of 1943 that, given adequate pressure in the cylinders, the flame throwers which it had waterproofed and checked would function as intended regardless of moisture.34
While the work on flame throwers was of major importance, it was far from constituting the only large-scale project of the 10th in Australia. Reconditioning of depot stocks was a continuing task. Providing waterproof seals for gas mask canisters kept the company busy on more than one occasion. Some 180,000 canisters of one type were waterproofed in late 1943 and early 1944; the company historian permitted himself the remark that the job had become somewhat monotonous after the first hundred thousand. By April 1944, however, the 10th found itself somewhat short of CWS assignments and tending more and more toward ordinary garrison details as the focus of war moved northward toward the Philippines. At last the company itself moved northward, to New Guinea, in August 1944, and shortly thereafter was reorganized. Pressure toward the streamlining of rear area service units in the theater had been reflected in proposals to replace the CWS depot, maintenance, and decontamination units with general service companies capable of meeting all of these requirements as they arose. Though the European theater commanders had been unimpressed with the idea, it seemed sufficiently attractive in the special circumstances of the Southwest Pacific to cause it to be adopted in the case of a few selected units, as soon as an appropriate table of organization was published. This event occurred in the summer of 1944, and the 10th, just arrived in New Guinea and past the critical period in its
maintenance mission, was one of the units to experience the change. As of i November 1944 it was reorganized as the 10th Chemical Warfare General Service Company. The remainder of its war service, including an additional eight months in New Guinea and the last month of the war in Luzon, was spent under that name.35
The Chemical Depot Company
Chemical depot companies played a key role in the movement of CWS matériel in the overseas theaters. The basic mission of these units, some twenty of which saw overseas service, was to act as CWS supply centers, either for field armies or for communications zone commands. This included receiving, storing, and issuing chemical supplies, certain salvage operations, and operating filling lines for certain chemical munitions. A depot company was a good-sized outfit, with a total strength of almost 200 men. When in the field, it was not unusual for a company to resolve itself into a group of detachments handling a series of assignments simultaneously. A company assigned to a theater headquarters, on the other hand, was also capable of serving many needs, ranging from technical training to theater supply.
As organized under TOE 3-67, 28 May 1942, the 184 officers and men of a depot company constituted a small headquarters unit, an administration platoon controlling three record, storage, and maintenance sections, and three service platoons for guard and labor functions. This plan was substantially altered by the next edition of the TOE,
6 October 1943, which shifted administrative functions to an enlarged headquarters unit, turned the former administrative platoon into a 52-man maintenance organization, and assigned all remaining storage, surveillance, and handling responsibilities to the service platoons, now reduced to two. By the end of the following year emphasis was being placed on the supply and munitions filling missions, with a consequent conversion to a uniform 3-platoon organization totaling 155 officers and men.36 Operating under a headquarters unit charged with basic administration, the three service platoons, each divided into ammunition, toxic gas, and general supply sections, were nonetheless capable
of acting independently if the need arose, providing the company commander with three ready-made units for detached service.
The 8th Chemical Depot Company had a notable record as one such theater supply agency. It was activated at Fort Shafter in March of 1942 for the specific purpose of operating the supply functions of the Hawaiian Chemical Warfare Depot for the department chemical officer. These were of considerable magnitude. Under Colonel Unmacht’s vigorous leadership, the depot had already completed the substantial task of obtaining and distributing enough service gas masks to provide adequate protection to troops in the event of a new Pearl Harbor in chemical warfare.37 By the time the 8th was activated the depot was in full swing as the only central distribution agency in the department for CWS supplies. It maintained subdepots for local troops on the islands of Hawaii, Kauai, and Maui. In addition to discharging its supply mission, the depot served as a third and fourth echelon maintenance center, a function performed in 1944–45 by the 10th Chemical Maintenance Company.38
Along with its other responsibilities, the 8th found itself on activation with an impregnating plant already in full operation. Colonel Unmacht had had an experimental impregnating plant--one shipped to Hawaii at some earlier date—put in operating condition shortly before Pearl Harbor. One of his first acts after the attack was to order the plant into active operation, in order to provide protective clothing for the troops then in Hawaii. The plant, designated No. 5, was manned by men of Company A, 1st Separate Chemical Battalion, the only force then available for the purpose. When Colonel Unmacht got his depot company activated, it was given the additional duty of running No. 5 until an impregnating company should arrive. As Plant No. 5 demonstrated a high degree of mechanical unreliability, the depot company was generally engaged in emergency repairs. For a time it took over and operated two small Navy impregnating plants at Pearl Harbor. By January 1943 a new plant, No. 8, had been shipped to the Islands, and a new building had been constructed to house it. The new facilities tended to ease the task of the depot company somewhat, but not until January 1944 was the 8th finally able to turn this unscheduled responsibility over to a newly arrived unit,
the 110th Chemical Processing Company, and concentrate on its supply mission.39
As a supply unit, the 8th was responsible for seeing to it that all troops sent forward from Hawaii were properly equipped with CWS matériel. It kept subdepots and forward areas supplied. The unit sometimes found it necessary to handle bulk toxics in operations involving transfer from damaged containers, or from ton containers to drums. In the course of these handling operations, three enlisted men of the 8th designed and built a handling cart for more expeditiously moving 150-pound cylinders.40
The 8th assisted the 43rd Laboratory Company in manufacturing the first batches of the stabilized flame thrower fuel (napalm plus activated silica gel) developed by the latter unit in 1945. In the summer of that year the Hawaiian Chemical Warfare Depot built its own unit for the activation of the silica gel. The 8th had this unit operating at a rate of one ton per day during the last weeks of the war. Between May and August of 1945 the depot manufactured a total of 226,343 gallons of fuel.41
Of great importance to the theater CWS was the 8th’s secondary mission of training cadres for new units. Among these were supply detachments activated to help shoulder the burden of CWS depot management in Hawaii and general service companies destined for combat support in the Western Pacific. In the last year of the war the 8th trained and supplied to other units enough officers and enlisted men to have doubled its own authorized strength.
In contrast to the role of the 8th as a theater headquarters supply element was that of the 6th Chemical Depot Company, a unit which operated many installations without ever permanently establishing itself at any of them. It was a depot company on the move, following American combat forces from England to Germany by way of North Africa, Italy, and France.
The 6th was activated at Fort Sam Houston on 25 March 1942. After a brief training period, the company embarked for an overseas assignment on the 1st of July and arrived in Scotland on the 12th. Within a few days the company, the first of its kind to reach the European theater, was in quarters at two points in southwestern
England, under assignment to the newly created Southern Base Section of the theater Services of Supply. It set to work almost at once, sending out detachments to establish chemical sections at general depots for handling Class II and IV CWS supplies, as well as for constructing two depots for chemical munitions. This procedure of operating several installations at once through self-sufficient detachments was to be a consistent pattern in the operation of the 6th throughout its service overseas.42
The 6th was the CWS unit depot assigned to II Corps in the fall of 1942 for operations in North Africa. It arrived in Oran from England early in December 1942, and immediately took over a depot previously established by corps headquarters. As the North African campaign developed, the 6th began setting up new installations, after the manner of its English experience. The Oran depot, for Class II and IV supplies, remained company headquarters for the time being, while detachments set up and operated depots eastward along the North African seaboard as far as the Tunisian border, turning them over in due course to relieving units. The company used anything available for storage—garages, factories, sheds—and resorted to open storage when necessary. For chemical munitions, however, open storage was the rule, rather than the exception.43
The 6th remained in North Africa during the month-long Sicilian campaign, but was reassigned to Fifth Army immediately afterwards in anticipation of the invasion of Italy. Nine of the company’s enlisted men, temporarily attached to the 531st Engineer Shore Regiment, went ashore at Salerno on D-day, 9 September 1943, with the assault troops. Operating in two groups, they took charge of identifying, storing, and issuing CWS matériel brought over the beaches on the first three days of the invasion. By the 8th of October the 6th was in Naples.
The 6th spent almost a year in Italy, in the course of which it was at one time or another responsible for over thirty supply points. It had general responsibility for all chemical depot needs of Fifth Army. Company headquarters, originally in the Naples area, was shifted northward repeatedly, reaching Piombino in northern Tuscany by midsummer of 1944. In the interval the company supplied two
detachments for service with the Anzio–Nettuno assault force. The first of these landed at Nettuno on D-day, 22 January 1944, the second joined it on 23 January. During the months of bitter fighting that followed, the beachhead detachment of the 6th, augmented from time to time, handled 12,000 tons of CWS munitions. In the same period, Headquarters Detachment was enlarging the scope of its usual duties by manufacturing some 10,000 Molotov cocktails out of napalm and glass bottles.44
In July 1944, the 6th was assigned to Seventh Army, in order to participate for a third time in an invasion—in this case the assault on the Mediterranean coast of France. Three detachments, attached respectively to the 3rd, 36th, and 45th Divisions, VI Corps, landed with the initial assault forces on 15 August and carried out the unusual mission of organizing chemical supply on the beaches. Company headquarters followed two weeks later and moved northward almost at once to Grenoble, where it set up a depot for Class II and IV CWS supplies before moving forward again. Meanwhile a detachment had gotten a base depot at Marseille under way for Continental Base Command, the supply and service agency of the invasion period. Other detachments handled CWS supply at successive ammunition supply points as Seventh Army advanced toward Alsace.45
The 6th remained with Seventh Army through the winter of 1944–45 (during which the partial withdrawal of American forces in Alsace to meet the threat of the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes temporarily forced the 6th, like some other forward units, to move its headquarters back) , and advanced with it into Germany in the spring. In the meantime, it found time to organize and conduct a training program to convert a French smoke generator company to a chemical depot unit.46 The end of the war found the company operating several depots in the Seventh Army area of the southern Rhineland. Immediately after the end of hostilities, the 6th set up Rheinau CWS Depot before preparing to go home.47
The Chemical Decontamination Company
The chemical decontamination company was a specialized organization designed to counter the threat of crippling gas attacks on rear area service facilities. While the services of a company were expected to be available to combat troops under gas attack if the situation permitted, the primary mission was confined to installations in the service area, on the assumption that combat units should have the capability to meet a tactical gas situation with their own resources. Decontamination companies were not assigned by any precise formula (the recommended ratio was one company per 100,000 strength) and were intended, while maintaining a headquarters in a service area, to send out detachments to either service or combat zones at their own discretion. As organized under TOE 3-217 (1 April 1942) , a company included 4 officers and 200 enlisted men, functioning as three 60-man platoons of three sections apiece, plus company headquarters. The table was changed on 12 October 1943 to provide for four 33-man platoons, reducing the total company strength to 170, and making the 10-man section the smallest operating unit, instead of having a further subdivision into squads, as formerly provided. The basic function of the section was to operate a 400-gallon power-driven decontaminating apparatus, a truck-mounted sprayer designed to heat and distribute a slurry of bleaching powder and water.
The abstention of the belligerents from gas warfare left the decontamination companies without a primary mission to perform. In consequence, while keeping themselves in readiness for possible future gas emergencies, the companies sent overseas found themselves assigned to a variety of tasks. Theater and army chemical officers welcomed their presence when CWS-trained units were needed for munitions handling, smoke screening, or depot labor. Other elements of the armed forces discovered that the power-driven decontaminating apparatus had more than one use; thereafter, decontamination units were sometimes engaged in giving showers, handling water, and wetting down dusty roads. Occasionally, decontamination companies were pressed into service totally unrelated to their training or equipment. One such unit eventually became part of a G-2 task force in ETO.
The 21st Chemical Decontamination Company was one of the most active of those whose overseas service lay principally in the CWS mission area. The 21st, activated at Camp Bowie, Tex., in March 1942,
began its overseas experience when its 1st Platoon, detached for the purpose, joined Western Task Force in Casablanca on 18 November of the same year, ten days after the first assault forces had landed in North Africa. The task force chemical officer, Colonel Barker, used the platoon to set up his CWS depot. The platoon had had no specific training for this mission, but with the administrative aid of a detail from the task force chemical section it set up a depot nonetheless. By January 1943 it was able to find the additional time to assist in the program of CW schooling begun by Colonel Barker.48
In May 1943 the rest of the 21st reached Casablanca. By that time the company’s 1st Platoon had gone forward to Algeria, and the company itself followed within a month. The company and platoon alike were destined for the Sicily Campaign and accordingly were earmarked for assignment to Seventh Army.49 They arrived in Sicily during July, the 1st Platoon going direct to Palermo (which had been occupied on the 22nd) , the remainder of the company landing on the south shore. By August the company had been reunited at Palermo, but only to split up into detachments stationed along the Sicilian north coast where they handled CWS supplies. Together with elements of the 63rd Chemical Depot Company and the 12th Chemical Maintenance Company, the several platoons of the 21st implemented the CWS supply plan by setting up and operating a series of ammunition supply points extending as far east as Campofelice, some thirty miles beyond Palermo.50 The 21st also supervised the operation of the CWS Class II depot in Palermo until relieved by the 63rd Depot Company in October.
The 21st remained in Sicily for about ten months after the conclusion of the Sicily Campaign, under assignment to Island Base Section. During the period it was kept busy on various CWS tasks under the supervision of the IBS chemical officer, including such work as gas mask reconditioning and the maintenance of a smoke line as part of the defense plan for Palermo harbor.51 By June of 1944 CWS stocks in Sicily had been closed out, and the 21st went to Italy to prepare for reassignment to Seventh Army and the campaign in southern France.
The role of the 21st in the Seventh Army’s campaign from the beaches of the Riviera to the heart of Germany was to be that of a
smoke unit. There was time for only a brief training period before the company joined the assault forces. In the initial assault, a platoon of the 21st accompanied each of the three assault divisions, company headquarters and the remaining platoon being held in reserve.52 The mission in this instance was to provide smoke cover for supply dumps on and near the beaches, as needed. On D-day, August 15, groups of men from the 21st went ashore with the first assault wave carrying (or towing) smoke pots with them. Smoke lines were set up several hundred yards inland as soon as possible. Two weeks later the 21st was moved, in two installments, to Marseille to provide smoke cover for the port. For its work on the beaches, the company received a commendation.53
As the campaign advanced northward toward Alsace and Germany, the 21st continued to function as a smoke generator outfit. Equipped with smoke pots and M2 mechanical smoke generators, it provided detachments for smoke coverage throughout the autumn of 1944 for the Army supply routes. Toward the close of the winter campaign in Alsace, the company once again found itself in a battle zone when it provided screening for the troops, American and French, of the XXI Corps front during the final cleaning up of the Colmar Pocket.54
Though the 21st had become accustomed to its smoke mission by the spring of 1945, it had reverted to its original role by the end of the war. As American troops drove across Germany in April and May of 1945, they seized intact a number of chemical warfare depots. The task of safeguarding and managing these important and potentially hazardous acquisitions was an appropriate one for a decontamination company. Accordingly, a detachment of the 21st took over initial gas security and munition inventory responsibility at the Wildflecken site in April. By the time the war ended, the company was in charge of gas security for the principal German chemical depot at St. Georgen, deep in Bavaria.55
The overseas experience of the 31st Chemical Decontamination Company was in decided contrast to that of the 21st. Both gained
honors for front-line combat. But while the 21st served in direct support of CWS missions as supply and smoke troops when not fulfilling their original purpose, the secondary missions ultimately acquired by the 31st turned out to be somewhat farther afield.
The 31st was activated at Camp Bowie, Tex., in July 1942. After a training period which included some instruction in amphibious operations, it embarked for Great Britain, arriving early in January 1944. Its assignment was to First Army’s 6th Engineer Special Brigade, a collection of units destined for the assault wave of the Normandy invasion. With them it underwent further training in invasion tactics throughout most of the two months immediately preceding the start of the campaign.
Shortly after noon on D-day a 25-man detachment from the 31st landed in Normandy with the 149th Engineer Combat Battalion and joined the battle which had been in progress on OMAHA Beach since dawn, its primary mission being reconnaissance against the possible gassing of the landing site by the Germans. By the time the remainder of the company landed on the following day, seven of the detachment’s personnel, including its commander, 1st Lt. Stanley Boggs, had been wounded. When the absence of gas warfare had been confirmed, the company joined other service troops in policing the beach and unloading ammunition. It was able to move to a bivouac area on 12 June (D plus 6), by which time it was busy with a variety of emergency tasks—assembling supply dumps, guarding prisoners, and finding new uses for its big power-driven decontaminating tanks. It employed them to wet down dust, to haul water, to fight fires, and to provide showers.56
In the last week of July the battle moved out of Normandy, and by mid-August the Germans were rapidly retreating across France. As the German policy of abstention from gas warfare continued to be confirmed by events, the necessity for the retention of decontamination units by the engineer special brigades declined. On August 10th, the 31st was reassigned, this time to an unexpected destination. It was detailed to Headquarters, Special Troops, 12th Army Group, to serve as headquarters troops for a special intelligence force being organized by the 12th Army Group G-2. This so-called T-Force was designed to operate as a front-line agency directly behind the advancing combat troops, where they were to seize enemy documents and round up agents
and collaborators before they escaped.57 The 31st turned in all its CWS unit equipment, including its decontamination tanks, drew in exchange an additional supply of cargo trucks and jeeps, and departed, for practical purposes no longer a CWS unit, for the first T-Force objective—Paris. On August 23, it reached the front line at Rambouillet. The objective was entered on August 25th, in the vanguard of the Allied troops. The 31st, one of the first American service units in the liberated capital, had T-Force headquarters set up in the Petit Palais before midnight of that day. That action marked the beginning of more than eight months of constant movement. T-Force headquarters left Paris for the east on 7 September. Between that date and the German surrender the following May, the 31st occupied fourteen successive stations in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Germany. It had all the usual headquarters administrative duties to keep it occupied—operating messes, providing mail and payroll services, supplying the force with clerks, maintaining a motor pool, and assuring internal security.
The 31st continued in its new role until T-Force ceased to function on 6 May 1945, the day before the instrument of surrender was signed at Reims. The company was en route for Wiesbaden at the time. On its arrival it joined 12th Army Group’s Special Troops and performed such missions as operating trucks and guarding prisoners of war for three weeks until it was returned to the United States for redeployment to the Pacific. It was training for that purpose when the war ended.58
The Chemical Processing Company
The chemical processing company was a basic element in defense against gas warfare. Its primary mission was to keep available to theater chemical officers a supply of permeable protective clothing adequately and recently impregnated with chlorinating compounds so as to protect the wearer from the effects of vesicant vapor or droplets. Companies were designed for assignment to theaters for location in the communications zone, generally near a chemical depot.
A company consisted of a total of 146 men, organized on a 2-platoon basis. Each platoon was the organizational equivalent of a processing plant and contained three functional sections for continuous 3-shift
operation. Accordingly, the company possessed two impregnating plants (either the M1 type employing acetylene tetrachloride as a solvent or the M2 water suspension type).59 The impregnating plants were semifixed industrial installations of impressive size, not unlike commercial laundries. An Mr plant, for example, included two 400-gallon solution tanks, a pre-dryer, two final dryers, and an impregnator, recognizably related to laundry-type drying and washing machines respectively, solvent recovery apparatus, a steam generator unit, complete with boiler and oil burner, an electric generator unit, a fuel tank, a water pump, and such auxiliary items as work tables, tool kits, and spare parts—the total equipment load approximating fifty tons. It could be installed only in a building with a floor heavy enough to support it and large enough to provide adequate work space. In practice, this meant a building with the equivalent of a 4-inch reinforced concrete floor and about 3,600 square feet of floor space. Installation required the skills and labor needed to handle heavy machinery, four or five separate piping systems, and electrical wiring.60 The equipment and techniques involved in the impregnation of clothing were enough like those of quartermaster laundries to provide the processing companies with ready-made secondary missions—laundering, dry-cleaning, waterproofing, dyeing, and comparable service functions—which were to keep many companies profitably occupied during periods when their primary mission was not in requisition. But less obvious duties were not wanting. Like other service troops, processing companies were drawn upon for whatever labors were required at the time. Depot assignments were not uncommon. Two units, the 113th and the 120th Chemical Processing Companies, had nearly all their men detailed for a time to the 87th and 81st Chemical Mortar Battalions respectively to provide additional support for the mortar teams. They served with the battalions throughout the Normandy and Northern France Campaigns. Another, the 109th, did construction work with the engineers. But a due regard for the possible outbreak of gas warfare and the corresponding requirement in every theater for reserve supplies of impregnated clothing kept processing companies occupied with their primary mission fairly often.
The experience of the 105th Chemical Processing Company may be cited to demonstrate the work of a typical unit. The 105th was
Plant of 105th chemical processing company, Brisbane, Australia
activated in August 1942 at Edgewood Arsenal and trained there and at Camp Sibert. In mid-May 1943, the company embarked from New York for Brisbane, Australia, via the Panama Canal. It arrived a month later, marched out to Camp Doomben, and went to work for the chemical warfare depot and base section headquarters pending arrival of its impregnation plants.61
Personnel of the 105th got their first taste of processing in the field when the bulk of the company’s first platoon went to Sydney to help the theater provide a reserve of some 70,000 protective uniforms for its troops. The 62nd Chemical Depot Company was in charge of the effort, which consisted of getting a non-operating improvised impregnating plant in working condition. The detachment spent a week on the task before the setup, manufactured from standard laundry equipment, was ready for its first load. Thenceforth, the unit kept the plant running at full prescribed rates, some 8,000 pounds of clothing per 24-hour run. It remained on the job until mid-February 1944,
when, with the mission virtually complete, it rejoined the rest of the company.62
The rest of the 105th had been kept busy, meanwhile, on details for the theater chemical officer. One detachment, for example, went to Columboola, two hundred miles west of Brisbane, to provide storage and perform surveillance for 29,000 mustard-filled bombs, a task involving a good deal of decontamination work when leakers were found. The company’s first organic impregnating plant, an M1, arrived in January 1944, and the men went to work to provide a building for it at the CWS center near Brisbane. Before the end of March, after essential piping was finally acquired, the plant was ready for operation, and the 105th proceeded with its primary mission.
Not long thereafter the 1st Platoon was again detached, this time for duty at Base A, Milne Bay, New Guinea. At this more forward base it set up an impregnating plant to help protect the combat forces clearing the way to the Philippines against possible gas attack. The 2nd Platoon continued operating the company’s M1 plant in Brisbane, for the most part on a 24-hour basis. Its output of protective clothing continued until the beginning of October 1944, when it was ordered to cease operations and prepare for movement. For the next few months, while awaiting movement orders, the los th kept itself busy with miscellaneous jobs for the 62nd Chemical Service Company and the local Ordnance service center. At Milne Bay, meanwhile, the company’s 1st Detachment, now well behind the new front in Leyte, had been diverted to laundry and dry-cleaning operations, together with depot work.63
In mid-June 1945, the 1 o 5th finally received its long delayed orders and moved forward to Luzon. At the same time the 1st Detachment left Milne Bay and rejoined the company at the CWS training center near Manila. The training center needed them, but not for processing; it was in the midst of a hurried construction program to house a CWS school and garrison. The 105th, well accustomed to construction jobs, pitched in and was hard at work building facilities when hostilities ended.
Another processing company in the Southwest Pacific Area, the 103rd, though its overseas experience was much like that of the 105th,
found itself for a time with a new mission. The 103rd, which had also been activated at Edgewood in August 1942, was sent to Hollandia, New Guinea, in July 1944. There, at a base captured from the Japanese only three months before, it was to be comparatively close to combat organizations.
An immediate need of the combat troops was protection against mite-born scrub typhus. The answer appeared to be impregnation of uniforms with an insecticide. Accordingly, the 103rd, once it had its two impregnating plants set up, was put to work mite-proofing all available uniforms with dimethyl phthalate. Not until this task was complete, in mid-October, did the company turn to its normal processing missions. But by that time theater requirements for protective clothing were taking second place to more routine needs. The base quartermaster required assistance in meeting his laundering mission, so that the 103rd began devoting the bulk of its time to laundry. By December 1944, the company’s plants were working full time as laundries for base units and hospitals. These duties, continued for the next six months at rates in excess of 150,000 pounds of laundry per month, earned the 103rd a Meritorious Service Unit Plaque before it went to Luzon for miscellaneous service assignments just before the Japanese surrender.64
The Chemical Service Company
For the greater part of the war the type of unit ultimately designated as a chemical service company was known as a chemical composite company.65 The purpose of the composite company was to provide field organizations of divisional size with a CWS service organization capable of simultaneously operating supply points, doing third and fourth echelon maintenance, running a field laboratory and a field impregnating program, and providing at least a nucleus of trained men for decontamination. Furthermore, the composite company was expected to be able to put its entire manpower of over 200 into any one of these tasks should the situation require. The goal was flexibility: a versatile unit, not too tightly organized, which could meet CWS service needs for smaller combat forces or isolated fronts. The war in the Pacific was emphatically of such a nature, and it was in the Pacific that most composite companies saw service.
The first organizational scheme for composite companies provided for specialized sections of considerable bulk, averaging almost forty men apiece, fairly closely tied in to company headquarters, and presumably meant to remain intact during operations.66 Within a short time reports from the Southwest Pacific declared that more flexibility was needed and that in actual practice existing units were usually split up into smaller groups. Such detachments usually suffered from the lack of an appropriate administrative organization and organic equipment. The problem was that the concept of cellular structure had been modified by too great a dependence on the administrative and internal support capabilities of the unit as a whole. The cells were not self-sufficient, and clearly they needed to be. In July 1943 a new organization plan was devised, making more explicit use of the principle of cellular structure—that is, of flexible organization based on small specialized teams capable of extended independent operations—than had previously been the case. The new pattern, applicable alike for separate platoons, companies, or battalions, was promulgated by TOE 3-500, 19 July 1943, and provided a choice of several types of such teams, varying in size from one to sixty-six men, for the CWS functions of maintenance, depot operations, decontamination, processing, and laboratory work. The War Department also authorized teams which could operate as headquarters for units composed of operational teams and support teams to operate messes and to provide automotive maintenance. Separate equipment allowances were listed for each type of team. This arrangement was intended to make possible the formation of composite units of a size directly related to the type of mission required and the size of the force to be supported. A further refinement of cellular organization was made when the TOE was reissued in December 1944 in order to provide still greater flexibility, principally in the area of administrative and maintenance teams.67
Hence, the service units that the CWS placed overseas, for the most part in the Pacific, were far from uniform in size, makeup, or functions. In some cases, rather than maintain company organizations for scattered service detachments, companies were inactivated and their
93rd Chemical Composite Company testing flame thrower fuels, Milne Bay, New Guinea
elements reconstituted as separate service platoons, as TOE 3-500 had provided for.68 Sixth Army, in the course of its campaign on Luzon in 1945, attached chemical service platoons to its divisions; the missions of such a divisional platoon included reconditioning 4.2-inch mortar ammunition (the checking and cleaning of shells being of particular importance in the corrosive environment of the tropics), service and maintenance of portable flame throwers (together with training their operators) , manning a smoke pot line, repairing gas masks, preparing napalm, performing second and third echelon maintenance of mortars, providing chemical warfare intelligence, and using the power-driven decontaminating apparatus as a water carrier and portable shower. Such an attached platoon was regarded by Sixth Army as an essential part of the combat division.69
One of the few exceptions to the rule that CWS composite companies went to the Pacific was the 92nd Chemical Composite Company. Activated at the end of 1942 at Camp Sibert, the 92nd was organized on the basis of TOE 3-277 when it went overseas the following spring. It was destined for the North African theater. Its debarkation point, reached on 10 May 1943, was Casablanca, but it soon moved forward to Mateur in newly won Tunisia. There its depot section took over the CWS section of General Depot 6, Eastern Base Section, and its impregnation section set up an open storage depot. The laboratory section assembled its equipment in a garage and went to work on captured chemical matériel. The maintenance section set up a repair shop and began work on gas masks, flame throwers, and decontaminators, both portable and power driven. During the summer the units followed EBS headquarters from Mateur to Bizerte but otherwise they maintained their activities through 1943 uninterrupted, save for an occasional air raid. The company formed a principal CWS rear echelon support for both the Sicilian and the Italian invasions.
In February 1944 the 92nd was reorganized under the new TOE 3-500, utilizing an organizational scheme under which the laboratory section was discontinued entirely, leaving the company with a repair team, a maintenance and salvage section, a decontamination team, and three supply (depot) teams, as well as a headquarters and mess.70 The following month, despite the new organization, a detachment amounting to about half of one of the supply teams (and taking about half of the team’s equipment) left for depot duties with Northern Base Section in Corsica, not to rejoin the company until January 1945. Another depot team, together with the decontamination team, was sent, as Detachment A, to Island Base Section in Palermo. The bulk of the company spent a few weeks closing out its depot and maintenance installations before being itself transferred in May to Mediterranean Base Section at Oran.71
The 92nd’s mission at Oran was primarily the creation of a consolidated CWS depot near MBS headquarters. Four outlying depots were closed out and their stocks moved to the new central installation, a former engineer storage center with ample facilities. It took more than a month to get the 4,000 tons of CWS matériel crated,
A Chemical Service Company laboratory, New Guinea
consolidated, stored, and properly maintained. When the job was complete and the depot, plus an attached CWS maintenance shop, was in good running order, the 92nd turned the facilities over to another unit and prepared to leave for its next assignment, Peninsular Base Section in Italy.72
In Italy the 92nd served again primarily as a depot unit. Upon its arrival in mid-August 1944, it was sent to the CWS depot near Bagnoli; Detachment A had already arrived from Sicily to take over the depot at Santa Maria and move its stocks to Bagnoli for consolidation. The maintenance mission was resumed in September, when a detachment went north to set up and run a CWS maintenance shop at PBS Forward Echelon, Leghorn. This left the rest of the company with the Bagnoli depot as its sole responsibility, except for the gas mask repair section, which operated in conjunction with the storage facility. The decontamination team had become, in effect, another depot team. Depot administration, however, came to include training
as well. An Italian service battalion was stationed at the depot under control of the 92nd for training in depot operation, as well as for the sake of the additional labor supply. Depot work included both Class II and IV storage at the main installations and open storage of Class V matériel at a site near Naples. The provision of trained security details for shipment and storage of toxic munitions gave men of the decontamination team recurring practice in their primary mission. A less common opportunity for the use of their skills came in spring, when the team decontaminated the area used by the 41st Chemical Laboratory Company for testing mustard-filled mortar shells.73
The 92nd remained on the job as a depot-maintenance outfit at Bagnoli and Leghorn for the remainder of the war. The cessation of hostilities in Europe did not reduce the company’s workload for some time. The Leghorn detachment, much depleted by personnel transfers, acquired control of a German prisoner of war battalion to help it rehabilitate, box, and ship matériel to the Far East, a task accomplished ahead of schedule. The Bagnoli portion of the company celebrated the end of the war by disposing of its supply of toxics through the winter of 1945–46, sinking the matériel in deep water off the island of Ischia. It was not until the spring of 1946 that the 92nd, by then possessed of a Meritorious Service Unit Plaque, was ready for inactivation.
More typical of the experience of composite companies was the overseas record of the 240th. Activated in August 1943, at Camp Sibert, the 240th Chemical Composite Company was reorganized under TOE 3-500 the following February. Under this setup, the company had a total of no less than twenty-two cellular teams, including at least one for each of the following CWS service missions: maintenance, supply, decontamination, and processing. The last of these was represented by only a single unit, and the laboratory function was omitted altogether, leaving the company organized primarily for depot and maintenance work, with decontamination capabilities when needed. The 240th, after reorganization, had a total strength of just over 200 men. Toward the end of May 1944, it embarked from Portland, Ore., for the Southwest Pacific Area, and arrived in Finschhafen, New Guinea, a month later for assignment to Sixth Army.
On arrival, the 240th went into bivouac at Cape Cretin and began functioning for the time being as a depot unit, helping out with the
operation of the CWS depot at Finschhafen’s Base F. Meanwhile, the Chemical Officer, Sixth Army, decided that the 240th, like other composite companies so assigned, could be best utilized as four separate service units, of a size and composition suitable to the support of a reinforced division. Accordingly, in mid-August, the company became the parent of Units 1 through 4. Unit 1 was weighted toward the maintenance and depot functions, as was Unit 4, though the latter also had impregnation specialists. Unit 2 was largely drawn from the impregnation team, with smaller numbers representing the other service missions. Unit 3 was almost entirely a maintenance outfit, except for one small depot team. Company headquarters personnel were divided between units 1, 2, and 4.74 All four units were destined to participate as divisional support elements in amphibious assaults.
Unit i, suitably enough, was the first to be committed. Toward the end of August it was earmarked for the mid-September invasion of Morotai, midway between New Guinea and the Philippines. Its mission was to set up CWS supply dumps on the beaches to collect, store, and salvage CWS matériel and to provide second and third echelon maintenance for chemical equipment.75 The Morotai task force, named TRADEWIND, assembled for staging at Maffin Bay in Wakde-Sarmi sector of northwestern New Guinea before the end of August. On II September the unit’s depot team, including five maintenance men attached to infantry regiments to support flame thrower operations, embarked with the assault forces and landed with them on Morotai on the morning of 15 September. There was little organized Japanese resistance on the island as the combat troops moved rapidly forward and the service units, after some initial trouble with the approaches to the beaches, began organizing support areas.76 The depot team of Unit I of the 240th, working like the rest of the task force under sporadic enemy air attack, brought up ammunition to a CWS mortar platoon, set up its bivouac area, and arranged for its dump to be situated near the ordnance supply site. It was busy for the next few days locating and storing matériel, principally signal and incendiary grenades.77
The remainder of Unit 1 joined the depot team on Morotai on 11 October, by which time the operation had been declared over and the work of building an air base was well under way. The unit continued operation of the CWS dump, put up warehouses with space for maintenance operations, and did a brisk business in picking up and reconditioning gas masks. The unit remained in place on Morotai, attached to the 31st Division, until the last week in January 1945, when it joined the 33rd Division and embarked for Luzon.78
Unit 2’s first mission was not long behind that of Unit 1. This unit left New Guinea for Los Negros in the Admiralties at the beginning of October 1944, to join the 1st Cavalry Division as part of Sixth Army’s invasion force for the reconquest of the Philippines. It promptly re-embarked to join the Leyte invasion convoy. A-day for Leyte was 20 October, and that morning the 1st Cavalry Division landed as the northernmost element of the assault, securing White Beach just south of Tacloban, the island’s capital. Unit 2 reached Leyte and landed at White Beach on A plus 2, 22 October, by which time the division was driving the enemy out of the Tacloban area. The unit’s first task was getting 4.2-inch mortar ammunition to the 85th Chemical Mortar Battalion, in the course of which operation it ran a beach ammunition dump. By mid-November it was in Tacloban, setting up a divisional CWS depot. The operation of this supply point constituted Unit 2’s mission for the remainder of the Leyte Campaign. At the end of January 1945 the unit was attached to XI Corps, which joined Sixth Army’s Luzon Campaign by landing near San Narciso on 29 January to cut off Bataan. Unit 2 landed with the corps and set up a corps chemical warfare depot.
Unit 3, after being first assigned to and then withdrawn from the Morotai invasion force, remained at the Maffin Bay staging area for the time being, providing depot support and flame thrower maintenance for the 123rd Regimental Combat Team, then engaged in local operations against the Japanese. In mid-November the unit went to Sansapor, at the northwest tip of New Guinea, to join the 6th Division, part of the force being staged for the invasion of Luzon. It spent the next weeks loading mortar shells and other CWS supplies on ships; inspecting, reconditioning, and test firing flame throwers; and training. The task force of which it was a part embarked on 30 December 1944.
On the morning of 9 January 1945 the combat troops landed on the shores of Lingayen Gulf, north of Manila, 6th Division holding the center of the beachhead. There was no immediate enemy opposition. The men of Unit 3 began reaching the beaches some three hours after the first assault and immediately set to work organizing a CWS beach dump. A consolidated chemical dump for the 6th Division’s beachhead was in operation by the next morning, supporting the division’s 4.2-inch mortar companies. Five days later a detachment set up an advance depot fifteen miles inland, and the task of moving mortar shells, grenades, and flame thrower fuel off the beaches was begun. A second inland depot was set up the following week, replacing the first. Regular forward movements of supply points followed at intervals of a few days. The unit’s repairmen were kept busy maintaining the division’s flame throwers. Supply and maintenance operations in close support of 6th Division continued without a break until the division was relieved on 30 April after three and a half months in action.79
Unit 4 remained at Cape Cretin, New Guinea, until mid-November 1944. At that time, having been attached to the 40th Division, it proceeded to the division’s stage area at Cape Gloucester, New Britain. The 40th, like the 6th, was scheduled to participate in the Luzon landings, and Unit 4, like Unit 3, spent the last weeks of November 1944 checking and loading mortar ammunition. The unit also placed 5-man teams on detached duty with each of two mortar companies attached to the division. The 40th Division landed on the southwestern flank of Sixth Army’s assault on the shore of Lingayen Gulf on the morning of 9 January. Two hours after the first assault wave hit the beach, personnel of Unit 4 began arriving ashore. The unit soon had a depot for Class II and Class IV CWS supplies in the town of Lingayen and an ammunition dump operating in conjunction with the divisional ordnance supply point. Both depot and ammunition dump were moved forward after two weeks, by which time the detachments had rejoined the main group, bringing Unit 4 up to its full strength. It continued in support of the 40th Division throughout February 1945.80
By that time the 240th Chemical Composite Company had long ceased to be a unit in any operational sense. Its four segments were
all on Luzon, but each was in support of a different outfit. Sixth Army had already come to the conclusion that it required nothing of composite companies save the provision of platoon-size detachments for close divisional support. Under the circumstances there was little reason to retain company organization, especially in view of the fact that the basic TOE 3-500 could apply as well to an independent platoon as to a company. As had already happened in other cases, the decision was made to disband the 240th as a company and activate its units as separate composite platoons. Accordingly, as of 12 February 1945 the 240th Chemical Composite Company ceased to exist. In its place there appeared, organized under the current TOE 3—500 (15 December 1944) , the 240th Chemical Service Platoon, formerly Unit 1, and the 236th, 237th, and 238th Chemical Service Platoons, the erstwhile Units 2,3, and 4, respectively. From then on the four platoons were for all practical purposes divisional chemical warfare elements and served through the remainder of the Philippines campaign in that capacity.81
Chemical Air Service Companies
As in other respects, so in the field of chemical service operations the Army Air Forces functioned as a separate entity. The Air Forces had major CWS functions, as a potential principal user of toxic agents in the event of gas warfare, as a participant in smoke missions, and as the utilizer of the new CWS strategic weapon, the incendiary bomb. To assist in the execution of these chemical missions, the CWS organized and sent into the field several types of service units especially designed for Air Forces’ needs. Included among those seeing overseas service were chemical depot companies, chemical maintenance companies (both types bearing the additional designation “Aviation”) , and the many chemical companies designated simply “Air Operations,” one hundred of which were activated between 1942 and 1945. Half of these saw service in overseas theaters. Four of the fourteen maintenance companies, aviation, and all of the twenty depot companies, aviation, also went overseas.
The air depot companies, like their ground counterparts, had as their principal mission the storage, surveillance, and preparation for issue
Loading liquid smoke into an M10 smoke tank for aircraft, New Guinea
of CWS materiel, in this case primarily bulk toxics, smoke mixtures, and incendiaries. Normal assignment was on the basis of one per AAF general depot when, as was usually the case, the depot in consideration was intended for storage and issue of chemical supply in appreciable quantities. A typical air depot company, the 754th, assigned to the VIII Air Force Service Command in England, had four sections: administrative, chemical, incendiary, and security maintenance.82 The last three of these were respectively in charge of storage, surveillance, and filling of chemicals and chemical ammunition, storage and surveillance of incendiaries, and repair, maintenance, defense, and security details for the depot. The proper execution of these tasks called for a good deal of technical proficiency, especially in the handling and surveillance of toxics. Another air depot company in that command, the
763rd, found that a depot company might be responsible not only for filling mustard bombs but for making up such items as M47A1 incendiary bombs as well, using bomb casings, gasoline, and thickener.83
Chemical companies, air operations, in their organization and mission presented certain parallels to the composite companies of the ground forces. Like the latter, they were meant for close support of combat units and were organized on a cellular basis, with platoons (four to the company) capable of performing like missions on a self-sustaining basis when attached separately to units of appropriate size. The major missions of air operations companies were to maintain CWS ammunition storage dumps, to prepare and arm chemical munitions for combat use and (in practice) to load such munitions on the using aircraft. The recommended normal basis of assignment was one air operations company per group or one platoon per squadron. A platoon consisted of a headquarters team and four identical operations teams, which were essentially toxic-filling outfits. In addition to its headquarters and its four platoons, the air operations company included a distributing point section to operate its dump; this group included at least two men trained in decontamination techniques and equipped with a power-driven decontaminating apparatus.84 The processes involved in handling, arming, and loading CWS bombs, bomb clusters, and spray tanks required a good deal of technical training and special equipment.85
Air operations companies were not infrequently faced with unanticipated tasks. For example, companies in the SWPA used a newly developed spray tank (the E2B2 5, produced by the Far East Air Force Service Command) not only for smoke operations but for the spraying of DDT over areas rendered hazardous by the presence of insect-borne malaria or typhus.86
In the last months of the Pacific war aerial incendiaries played an increasingly important role in both the strategical and tactical spheres. The assault on Iwo Jima, for example, was preceded by a 10-week bombardment by planes based in the Marianas; incendiary bomb clusters formed a significant part of their load. Air operations
companies supporting the bomber formations increased the supply of incendiaries by improvising fire bombs from 55-gallon drums filled with napalm and armed with an M15 WP grenade and an all-ways fuze. The fuzing of this unfamiliar weapon was the source of so much concern to the air crews that at first they insisted that CWS personnel accompany the flights to keep an eye on the incendiaries. The air operations companies always loaded incendiaries into planes and, when necessary, were called upon to modify bomb bays to accommodate particular types of incendiary bomb clusters.87 In the early months of 1945 incendiary raids on a vast scale carried the war direct to the industrial centers of Japan. In their support of these crippling blows, the air operations companies contributed significantly to the final victory.