Chapter 18: Supporting a War of Movement in Northern France
Progress by American units after D-day depended on the maintenance of existing lines of communications. Fortunately, the French road and rail nets were highly developed and for the most part immediately usable by combat elements. ADSEC engineers were the first to tackle the damage from German demolitions and Allied bombing, turning over their responsibilities to their brethren in the COMZ area of operations as the front lines moved across France. Engineers constructed gasoline and oil pipelines simultaneously in a constant struggle to keep pace with the racing tactical units through the end of September.
Highways
Immediately following the D-day landings in northern France, corps and First Army engineer combat battalions were to assume responsibility for road construction—corps engineers making emergency repairs only, and army engineers restoring bituminous surfaces. Bridging was to be of the military type, Bailey ‘or treadway, to be replaced by timber bridges as rapidly as possible.1 As soon as an army rear boundary became established, road construction and maintenance were to be turned over to AD-SEC. From D-day to D plus 90 the ADSEC engineer, Col. Emerson C. Itschner, planned to use four general service regiments, adding special equipment such as asphalt mixers and containers to their tables of equipment.
Road maps provided encouraging information about French roads to the engineers planning support of combat forces in northern France. The Routes Nationales were the French equivalent of numbered U.S. highways. Some of them dated from the Napoleonic era; all had a solid base of granite block surfaced with tarmac. The Chemins Departmentaux, comparable to numbered state roads in the United States were also of good quality, although the engineers knew little about their substructure. Both types seemed suitable for military traffic but were narrow by U.S. standards. The width of the national highways varied from twenty to twenty-six feet, that of the departmental roads from ten to twenty feet.2 Route N–13,
Colonel Itschner
which ran from Cherbourg southeast to Carentan and thence east behind the invasion beaches to Bayeux and beyond, received special attention in the planning. Another key route, N-800, led south from Cherbourg to Périers, where it turned southeast to St. Lô.3
The ADSEC general service regiments began landing on the Continent at the end of June, but because of the slow advance to St. Lô during the hedgerow fighting before the breakout on 26 July, combat engineers undertook most highway repairs inland of the beaches. (Charts 4 and 5) The two ADSEC engineer general service regiments landing at OMAHA (the 355th and 365th) spent their first month repairing roads leading to beach dumps. Those landing at UTAH (the 95th and 341st) undertook the first ADSEC highway repairs performed on the Continent, beginning their work south of Cherbourg on 7 July. The 341st General Service Regiment was most experienced in road building and maintenance, having worked on the Alcan highway. To it went the difficult task of reconstructing N-13, running southeast from Cherbourg about fifteen miles to Valognes, and N-800, running south about the same distance to Bricquebec. These roads were sorely needed to move men, equipment, and supplies to the new battlefront after the fall of Cherbourg. Using crushed rock and asphalt, the men filled craters made by Allied bombs and shells and shored up the edges of pavement broken down under the pounding of heavy traffic. The work went on while the routes were carrying nearly 3,000 vehicles in a 24-hour period. To make up for the late arrival of some of its equipment the 341st Engineers improvised, using captured German equipment to assemble asphalt batching plants and a German cook wagon to heat tar.
Following the breakout at St. Lô and the formation of Third Army on 1 August, the 341st stayed close behind Third Army, repairing roads around Périers and maintaining those in the vital, narrow bottlenecks in the Coutances-Avranches area. In one ten-mile stretch of the main supply route running south from Périers to Avranches, the engineers laid more than 5,000 tons of stone in six days, working in shifts through daylight hours so intently that they “hardly saw armored division after division, the supply columns and a large part of the First Army move through the gap in the dust or mud.”4
Chart 4: Office Of The Chief Engineer, ETOUSA, 1 August 1944
Chart 4: Office of the Chief Engineer, ETOUSA, 1 October 1944
Except on the Cotentin peninsula south of Cherbourg to Avranches, highway reconstruction proved less difficult than ADSEC planners had expected. The primary roads stood up well under the pounding they received, and the Germans had not damaged highways or highway bridges to the extent feared. After the breakout, the armies moving across northern France encountered good roads that needed little work. Highway repair became mainly drainage and pothole filling on the Red Ball supply routes. Because of lessening requirements and the increased availability of prisoner of war and civilian labor, the four general service regiments earmarked for road building could be diverted to other work. The 365th transferred to hospital construction during most of the summer, and in mid-August the mission of the 341st, 355th, and 95th Engineer General Service Regiments changed from highway to railroad repair, which had by then become ADSEC’s highest priority.5
Railways
A 19 January 1944 agreement between the chief engineer, ETOUSA, and the chief of transportation made railroad reconstruction in northern France the responsibility of Colonel Itschner, the ADSEC engineer, to be performed at Transportation Corps request. Railroad reconstruction meant not only re-laying track but also reconstructing road culverts, bridges, and watering and coaling facilities. In southern France, responsibility for the construction and rehabilitation of railroads belonged not to the engineers, but to the 1st Military Railway Service (TC), to which engineer units were attached or assigned.6
After the Normandy landings, priority went first to the tracks within Cherbourg and second to lines leading from Cherbourg to Lison junction near Isigny, about forty miles southeast. A line was then to be reconstructed leading southwest from Lison junction via Coutances, Folligny, Avranches, and Dol (in Brittany) to Rennes, the first major depot area. The British were responsible for the rail line running east from Lison junction.7
Planners estimated that 75 percent of the track and all the bridges would have been destroyed and that necessary reconstruction would require 55 percent new ties and 90 percent new bridging material. All this material was to be of British origin, not only for tracks (standard British 75-pound flat-bottom rail) but also for bridges, because the U.S. Army had developed no military railway bridges. British designs went into production both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The types included in American planning were rolled steel joist (RSJ) spans, which came in lengths of 17, 21, 27, 31, and 35 feet; a 40-foot sectional girder bridge; a unit construction railway bridge (UCRB), in lengths from about 50 to 80 feet; and light steel trestling.8
The units earmarked for railroad construction included five engineer general service regiments, three engineer dump truck companies, and one engineer heavy ponton battalion for hauling materials and equipment. First
Army was to lend the ponton battalion to ADSEC. The training and equipment of the five general service regiments left something to be desired. Only the 332nd and 347th had attended the U.S.-British Railway Bridging School at King’s Newton. The remaining three had to rely on a thirty-day intensive training program which was provided to several types of specialized units during April 1944. The training was not very effective, for railway tools and special track fixtures were scarce and much of the available material had already been packed for the cross-Channel attack.9
The chief of Colonel Itschner’s Railroad Section, Lt. Col. A. D. Harvey, landed in Normandy on 11 June and immediately began reconnoitering railway lines near Isigny and Carentan, walking tracks when it was safe to do so. On 15 June he flew in a Piper Cub as low as 150 feet over the main line from Lison junction at Montebourg, a little more than halfway up the peninsula, to Cherbourg. He found that damage to tracks and yards, usually inflicted by Allied bombing, was much less than expected and that, except for a bridge over the Vire River near the Lison junction, the railway bridges would not be difficult to repair.10 This and later reconnaissance trips showed that earlier estimates on the amount of material required could be revised downward. Two events after the landing also forced Itschner to alter the engineers’ railroad reconstruction plan—the late capture of Cherbourg, which deferred railroad work there from mid-June to the end of the month, and the late arrival of the engineer general service regiments earmarked for railroad repair.
Railroad rehabilitation on the Continent began at the Carentan yards on 17 June, with the 1055th Engineer Port Construction and Repair Group in charge. During the following week that group also furnished a detachment to direct a crew of civilians at the Lison junction yards, and the 342nd Engineer General Service Regiment went to work on the line north from Carentan. The group also began repairing the Vire River railroad bridge. On 26 June the 1055th moved three locomotives from Lison to Isigny—the first U.S. railroad operation on the Continent.
The 332nd Engineer General Service Regiment, scheduled to arrive on 14 June, did not land at UTAH Beach until the twenty-eighth. The regiment worked at Cherbourg on port reconstruction, while railroad work in that city became the responsibility of the 347th Engineer General Service Regiment, which arrived on the Continent about the same time. Other general service regiments earmarked for railroad work arrived soon thereafter, but not all were employed as planned. The 390th Engineer General Service Regiment performed track work between Cherbourg and Lison junction, but the 392nd largely undertook engineer supply operations. The 354th worked on construction of the Couville railroad yards near Cherbourg, an assignment that original plans had not envisioned. The engineer heavy ponton battalion, hauling material and equipment, did not arrive until much later than planned, and when the unit reached France First Army assigned it another mission.11
After the Breakout
Until the breakout at St. Lô on 26 July, railroad reconstruction received relatively low priority, for distances were short and trucks could do the hauling from beaches to dumps and from dumps to forward areas. After the breakout the tempo accelerated. Within a few days the general service regiment most experienced in railroad work, the 347th, came down from Cherbourg and took on the task of opening lines to St. Lô and beyond to Coutances. After the capture of Coutances on 29 July, urgent priority went to rebuilding the line south to Third Army’s railhead at Folligny. In the fifty days following the St. Lô breakout, railroad reconstruction became the ADSEC engineer’s primary mission.
First and most important was reconstruction of the yards at St. Lô, which Allied bombing had almost entirely destroyed. So complete was the destruction in one section that engineers had to obtain plans from the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer before they could start re-laying track. On 4 August two companies of the 347th began work at St. Lô, using rail, fittings, and ballast either salvaged from unused lines or hauled from beach dumps in trucks. On the same day, a third company of the 347th began rebuilding the double-track, three-span, masonry-arch railway bridge over the Vire River on the Lison–St. Lô line. Bombing had demolished the center span and damaged another. The engineers, who had not yet received any military bridging, replaced the center span with a timber trestle bridge—the first timber trestle the 347th Engineers built—and repaired the damaged span by fitting face stone and keystones and filling in with concrete.12
Simultaneously with the jobs in the St. Lô area, the engineers began rehabilitating two single-track lines, one south of St. Lô and the other west. The track running to Vire, about twenty miles southeast of St. Lô, was to provide an alternate route behind the armies. The track on the west, from La Haye-du-Puits to Coutances, would bring forward supplies from Cherbourg. But the ADSEC engineer completed neither of these efforts. The Vire line, which a company of the 347th Engineers started to repair, was turned over to the British. The 2nd Battalion, 390th Engineers, began work on the line to Coutances with engineers from the Transportation Corps’ Military Railway Service (MRS), but before the line was complete MRS assumed full responsibility—ADSEC units were needed elsewhere, and ADSEC had to commit all its scarce railway troops to supplying ammunition and gasoline to Third Army.
The Third Army was already swinging east toward Paris when the 347th Engineer General Service Regiment began reconstruction of the Coutances–Folligny rail line. At Coutances, where Allied bombers had done considerable damage, Company D of the 347th encountered a damaged high viaduct railroad bridge—the first of many found in France. A six-span, single-track, masonry-arch structure with one span missing eighty feet over the Soulle River, the bridge provided the first opportunity to employ the British unit construction
railway bridge. Using the special launching nose, the engineers launched a fifty-foot unit to span the arch opening. Then they installed a timber strut just below the unit to resist thrusts from adjacent arches-carrying the weight of heavy locomotives. In the meantime, the 347th Engineers had begun to repair a demolished concrete-arch railway bridge over a highway just south of Coutances, completing the work on 12 August.13 On the same day General Patton put the engineers to a grueling test.
Supporting Patton’s Thrust Toward Paris
What was later described as “perhaps the most dramatic achievement of Engineers in railroad construction” began after sunset on 12 August when Colonel Itschner received surprising instructions from Third Army: “Gen Patton has broken through and is striking rapidly for Paris. He says his men can get along without food, but his tanks and trucks won’t run without gas. Therefore the railroad must be constructed into Le Mans by Tuesday mid-night. Today is Saturday. Use one man per foot to make the repairs if necessary.”14 The message meant that a railroad 135 miles long, with seven bridges down, three railroad yards badly bombed, track damaged in many places, and few, if any, watering and coaling facilities available, had to be reconstructed in seventy-five hours. Normally the job would have taken months.
Colonel Itschner had on hand only 2,000 men working on the line running from Coutances to Folligny—the 347th Engineer General Service Regiment and the 2nd Battalion of the 390th. The latter had just begun restoring the yards at Formigny, a few miles south of OMAHA Beach, where the air forces had completely destroyed a large German troop train shortly after D-day. An additional 8,500 men were available to Itschner for his formidable task, but they were scattered widely, some as far away as Cherbourg. Moreover, the only means of communication with the widely separated units was by a messenger in a jeep.15
The first step was to fly over the railroad net from Folligny to Le Mans to select the lines that could be repaired in the shortest time. The most direct route led south from Folligny via Avranches, Pontaubault, and Fougères to Vitre, where it turned east via Laval to Le Mans. Itschner had to rule out this route, for two bridges along it had been so badly bombed, piers as well as spans, that they could never be reconstructed in time. One was a forty-foot-high bridge over the Selune River at Pontaubault, the other a ninety-foot-high bridge over the Mayenne at Laval. To bypass both, the engineers planned to open a single-track line turning east just north of Pontaubault to St. Hilaire-du-Harcouet and then south to a point beyond Fougères, from there east to Mayenne, and on south to La Chapelle-Anthenaise (beyond Laval). Here the line was to connect with the double-track railroad
to Le Mans. Five bridges were down along the planned route.16
Elements of eleven different engineer general service regiments worked simultaneously on the line. The experience of the 332nd Engineer General Service Regiment illustrates the urgency with which the engineers moved to the scene. The 332nd, then at Cherbourg, received orders at 0300 on 13 August to proceed to Mayenne. Two companies took the 0700 train to Carentan, then moved to Mayenne by truck. Upon arrival, the unit set up a pup tent bivouac in a hayfield nearby and quickly began work on the railroad. Some of the 9,000 engineer troops required to open the line did not arrive on the project until twenty-four hours before the deadline, and equipment moved slowly on the congested roads. Yet the work proceeded so swiftly that as the deadline approached Colonel Itschner had only one serious cause for concern—an eighty-foot single-track bridge at St. Hilaire-du-Harcouet.17
With a well-placed charge the Germans had blown the south end of the bridge from its abutment, dropping it into the Selune River. The 347th Engineer General Service Regiment cut off the damaged end, jacked up the bridge and placed it onto a pier built of ties in the form of a crib. This the unit accomplished in three days, during which many of the men had no sleep at all. When General Moore and Colonel Itschner flew over the St. Hilaire bridge site on an inspection trip six hours before the deadline of midnight 15 August, they saw spelled out on the ground in white cement, “Will finish at 2000.” The first gasoline-loaded train left the Folligny area at 1900 on 15 August, passed over the St. Hilaire bridge shortly before midnight, and after many delays was at Le Mans on 17 August. Thirty trains followed at thirty-minute intervals.18
Even while the emergency single-track line was being opened, engineers were working on the bridges at Pontaubault and Laval to provide a more permanent and serviceable line to Le Mans. These major bridges, which units of the 332nd Engineer General Service Regiment reconstructed, were the most ambitious bridging projects yet undertaken. Each bridge had one badly damaged concrete pier that had to be replaced by a light steel trestling pier, and each bridge required two UCRB spans. The Pontaubault bridge was ready on 22 August, rebuilt in twelve days; that at Laval, where work continued at night under floodlights, was ready in fourteen days, and the first train crossed on 31 August.19
The ADSEC Engineer Groups
About the time the rush job for General Patton was completed, the size of the ADSEC area and the increased volume of railroad reconstruction made it necessary for the ADSEC engineer’s Railroad Division, which up to that time had handled all reconnaissance, plans,
procurement, project assignments, and inspections, to delegate many of these responsibilities to subordinate units. Therefore, on 23 August ADSEC created three provisional engineer groups, ADSEC Engineer Groups A, B, and C. Each had an experienced general service regiment as a nucleus, with one or more additional regiments attached, and each was commanded by the senior regimental commander. Although each unit retained its identity for administrative functions, the group commander, aided by the staff of the nucleus regiment, handled all operational matters, including work assignments, supply, and reconnaissance.
The nucleus of Group A was the 332nd Engineer General Service Regiment, whose commanding officer, Col. Helmer Swenholt, became group commander. Attached were the 392nd, 375th, and 389th Engineer General Service Regiments. Group B, commanded by Col. Harry Hulen, had the 347th Engineer General Service Regiment as the nucleus, with the 377th Engineer General Service Regiment attached. Col. Edward H. Coe commanded Group C, whose nucleus was the 341st General Service Regiment, with the 355th and 95th attached. Of the nine general service regiments in the three groups, five had engineer dump truck companies attached, and one had an attached engineer welding detachment (provisional).
During the last week of August, elements of the three groups were working on almost all rail lines between Pontaubault and the Seine. Groups A and B set to repairing the main double-track Vire-Argentan-Dreux-VersaillesJuvisy line and a bridge crossing the Seine at Juvisy. Group C worked farther south in support of Third Army to open the Chartres-Orleans-Montargis line. On 27 August the group received an urgent mission to open immediately a single-track line between Rambouillet and Versailles, the first line into Paris. Two companies of the 341st Engineer General Service Regiment, working twenty hours straight, completed the job the following day. Lt. Col. E. Warren Heilig of the 341st Engineers and his driver, Pvt. Harry Smith, were hailed by great crowds as the first Americans to enter Versailles on the heels of the retreating Germans.20
During the period of fast pursuit, Allied bombing and artillery fire caused most of the track damage. Until the engineers reached the area east of Metz, where German track destruction was severe—some of it occasioned by the “track ripper,” a huge hook pulled by locomotives—the main problem was bridges.21 The worst destruction Group A encountered was at a bridge over the Eure River near Dreux, about thirty miles west of Paris. All that remained of a five-span, 300-foot masonry-arch structure was a pile of splintered wreckage and two damaged abutments well over 200 feet apart. This bridge had a strange history. According to a story the engineers heard, the French had destroyed the bridge in 1939. Later, the Germans repaired it, replacing the masonry arches with steel beams and wooden piers. During the rush to the Seine, Allied bombers attacked the bridge repeatedly. Bombs falling wide of the mark became so dangerous to the local population that the French Forces of the Interior put demolition charges on the bridge and blew it up.
Company F, 332nd Engineer General Service Regiment, aided by elements of Companies C and D, rebuilt the bridge between 25 August and 9 September. The engineers placed five steel deck-type spans on four light steel trestle piers—seventy-foot-long unit construction railway bridge spans at each end and three I-beams in the center. The steel trestle piers in the center rested on existing concrete footings; those at the end of the bridge sat on footings the engineers made with compacted rubble. At first the bridge carried only a single track, but the engineers later completed a double-track bridge by increasing the width of the piers and building a duplicate superstructure on the widened section. The engineers assembled the additional spans on the ground and lifted them into place because the usual nose-launching method would have required halting traffic along the single-track line.22
For the first crossing of the Seine River south of Paris at Juvisy, the engineers faced the widest body of water they had yet encountered. (Map 20) No unit construction launching equipment was available for the four sixty-foot UCRB spans required to cover gaps in the existing bridge, gaps created when the Germans dropped two 120-foot lattice girder spans into the river. Group B’s 347th Engineer General Service Regiment solved the problem by assembling the UCRB spans and towers for light steel trestling piers on shore. This procedure saved time in the long run, because it permitted superstructure assembly to proceed simultaneously with wreckage clearance and pier foundation work. When the piers were ready, the engineers put the spans and towers aboard a French derrick barge, pushed it out to the site with tugs, and set the equipment in place in a matter of minutes. Speed was essential because until the bridge was in, Third Army operations east of Metz could not be supplied. The engineers completed the bridge on 6 September, forty-eight hours ahead of schedule.23
Bridge reconstruction east of Paris posed different problems. Bridges were usually longer and lower, so timber-pile trestles frequently could be erected on the debris of the old bridge, a distinct advantage. On the other hand, supply became more difficult because the long distance from the beaches made it impracticable to haul forward such material as UCRB spans. The engineers had to depend on materials obtained locally or captured from the Germans. The new conditions were exemplified in the reconstruction of the bridge over the Marne River Canal at Vitry. Two companies of Group C’s 341st Engineer General Service Regiment repaired it in six days beginning 5 September, working around the clock and using floodlights at night. Two ninety-foot spans of the three-span masonry-arch bridge had received direct hits from Allied bombers as two German freight trains were crossing it on adjacent tracks. Cars, track, and stone were piled in the water. Instead of attempting to remove or build through the rubble, the engineers used the debris to carry wood sills upon which bents were set to support a stringer-type bridge. For spans, the engineers employed captured German
Map 20: Beyond the Seine, 1944
I-beams and a prefabricated deck girder span found in a railroad yard.24
Fifty days after the breakthrough at St. Lô the rail net in the Third Army sector extended to Verdun on the Metz line and to Toul on the line to Nancy. In the First Army sector, the line was open from Paris northeast through Soissons, Laon, Hirson, Marienbourg, Charleroi, Gembloux, and Landen to Liege. (Map 21)
The first train to cross the border into Belgium was the regimental headquarters train of the 332nd Engineer General Service Regiment. On 25 August Colonel Swenholt, the regimental commander (also commander of Group A), decided to move his headquarters and the administration section of Headquarters and Service Company to the La Hutte–Coulombiers area near Le Mans by train to save precious gasoline and tires. He used a German hospital train augmented with a few French cars and drawn by Transportation Corps locomotives. Pulling out of the village in some style after the townspeople had decked it with flowers, the train rolled over the Eure River bridge near Dreux on 9 September and continued to Paris via Versailles. Beyond Paris the engineers had to depend upon French locomotives and crews. Problems with the locomotives soon developed, and when the train reached the Belgian border more trouble arose, for the French crews objected to going into Belgium. Acquiring a German freight locomotive and recruiting crews from his own units, Colonel Swenholt got the twenty steel cars and five boxcars under way from Hirson shortly after midnight on 12 September and reached Charleroi, Belgium, at 2000 the same day. After a stay of four days in Charleroi, during which the engineers were so mobbed by welcoming Belgians that the gendarmes had to be called out, the headquarters train arrived at Liege in the early morning of 17 September 1944.25
Pipelines
By 12 August 1944, the day General Patton demanded railroad reconstruction from Folligny to Le Mans to carry gasoline in the dash toward Paris, the pipeline designed to bring bulk POL forward from the ports ran only as far as St. Lô. ADSEC engineer units, whose mission was to construct pipelines, storage tanks, and pumping stations and then to operate them, began landing on OMAHA Beach shortly after D-day.26 The largest unit in the POL organization was the 359th Engineer General Service Regiment, with Company A of the 358th Engineer General Service Regiment attached. Other components were seven engineer petroleum distribution companies—the 698th, 786th, 787th, 788th, 790th, 1374th, and 1375th; two engineer fire-fighting platoons; and a squad from an engineer camouflage battalion. The 358th and 359th General Service Regiments were not assigned to bulk POL supply on the Continent until well after their arrival in England in late 1943. The regiments were generally inexperienced in pipeline operations and had insufficient time and equipment for adequate training. On the other hand, the petroleum distribution companies had been
Map 21: Railways in use and Red Ball Express, September 1944
recruited largely from oilfield workers and had received specialized training in the United States. In late spring of 1944 the 787th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company instructed the two general service regiments in pipeline construction and operation.
Most engineer POL units had the mission of installing and operating the Major POL System at Cherbourg, constructing or rehabilitating facilities for receiving, storing, and dispensing fuel. Most POL was to be delivered dockside by tankers, but some was to come in through British lines laid on the floor of the Channel from the Isle of Wight to the Continent, a system called PLUTO (Pipeline Under the Ocean). From Cherbourg south the engineers were to lay three six-inch pipelines, two for motor gasoline (MT 80) and one for aviation gasoline (avgas), with pump stations, tank farms, and dispensing facilities at La Haye-du-Puits, Coutances, Avranches, Fougères, and Laval. Lines for motor fuel were to extend from Fougères to Rennes and from Laval to Chateaubriant. But because construction for the major system could not begin until Cherbourg was captured, the engineers were to put the Minor POL System into operation shortly after D-day at two points east of OMAHA—Ste. Honorine-des-Pertes, the easternmost town in the American sector, and Port-en-Bessin, at the edge of the British beach area.27
The Minor POL System
The first POL engineers ashore at OMAHA were two companies of the 359th General Service Regiment and two petroleum distribution companies, the 698th and 786th. An advance party of officers landed early in the evening of 9 June and proceeded east to the assigned bivouac area—an apple orchard near the village of Huppain, somewhat inland and about halfway between Ste. Honorine-des-Pertes and Port-en-Bessin. In the next two days a convoy with the rest of the first elements came in over the narrow cliffside road to Huppain. As the last men of the 786th
[Map merged onto previous page]
Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company landed at OMAHA on 11 June, they saw that the “wet, flat strip of sand was littered up and down the coast as far as the men could see. Machinery, guns, tools, clothes, and the innumerable odds and ends that came ashore with the assault were scattered and strewn as tho by some incredible wind. Broken landing boats [were] flung beside burnt-out tanks whose tracks were already bright with rust. [DUKWs,] bent like metal toys, spotted the foot of the sheer cliffs descending from the fortified hills.” That night after the petroleum engineers had settled down in the bivouac at Huppain, German fighter-bombers roared low over them but dropped no bombs.28
At that time, the engineers had a scant ten days to get the first POL system in operation. Bulk deliveries of POL, which had been handled in cans during and immediately after the invasion, were scheduled to begin on D plus 15.29
At Ste. Honorine-des-Pertes the engineers
were to install two six-inch ship-to-shore submarine pipelines known as TOMBOLAs to receive gasoline and diesel fuel from tankers at a deep-water anchorage and carry it to five bolted steel tanks onshore. One tank, holding 10,000 barrels of gasoline, was for Army use; four 5,000-barrel tanks, one for gasoline and three for diesel fuel, were for the Navy. Pump stations and four-inch lines would carry the Army gasoline to an inland tank farm at Mt. Cauvin, a hill about two miles south of Huppain and equidistant from Ste. Honorine-des-Pertes and Port-en-Bessin. The Navy fuel was to go to the MULBERRY at OMAHA.
Port-en-Bessin had two moles where shallow-draft tankers could tie up. While the British used the easternmost, the engineers were to install two six-inch discharge lines at the other—one for motor gasoline and one for aviation gasoline—and to erect two 1,000-barrel tanks, one for each type. Two pump stations were required, as well as two six-inch delivery lines running to the tank farm at Mt. Cauvin.
Mt. Cauvin needed considerable work, including tankage for 30,000 barrels of motor gasoline, a six-inch gravity line and six tank truck filling risers, pump stations, and two four-inch lines connecting with British lines. In addition, one four-inch pipeline was to be constructed south to Balleroy, with a booster station on the way at Crouay. Balleroy, an important filling station, would have two terminal storage tanks (one holding 1,000 barrels and the other 5,000 barrels), dispensing lines and connections to permit loading six tank trucks simultaneously, and decanting connections where quartermaster troops could fill five-gallon cans.
Plans for expansion of the Minor POL System were partly shaped by the fuel needs of U.S. aircraft on the Continent. For aviation fuel, a four-inch line was to extend from Mt. Cauvin about twenty-eight miles west to Carentan, with booster stations on the way. At Carentan French fuel tanks with a capacity of 4,200 barrels were to be rehabilitated and dispensing facilities constructed. A similar line for motor vehicle gasoline was to run from Mt. Cauvin to St. Lô and Coutances, where the Minor and Major POL Systems would connect. At both St. Lô and Coutances, storage tanks and facilities to serve a quartermaster decanting station were to be constructed.29
Lack of supplies seriously handicapped the POL engineers who landed on OMAHA beginning 9 June. Construction materials expected to come in aboard a commodity-loaded coaster on 10 June did not arrive. By scouring OMAHA and UTAH beaches the engineers found enough scattered material to make a small start on 13 June. Two days later the first of eight LCTs, loaded with construction materials and sent forward when it became evident that the capture of Cherbourg would be delayed, arrived at Port-en-Bessin. Unfortunately, a storm that raged along the coast for three days wrecked two of the LCTs.
Mines the Germans had sown in the area also handicapped early operations. They had not been cleared because the combat engineers charged with this work had landed elsewhere. From one field
behind Ste. Honorine-des-Pertes the POL engineers removed more than a thousand mines, suffering six casualties, one fatal. Casualties would undoubtedly have been higher except for a “kindly, sharp-sighted little Frenchman,” Eugene Le Garre, who had a summer home near the beach at Ste. Honorine-des-Pertes. From his front porch he had watched the Germans plant their mines and had noted their locations. On fishing trips he had discovered underwater mines near the beaches and furnished information for which Allied engineers were grateful.30 The engineers also faced German snipers, whose bullets sometimes punctured pipelines. They often found that the elevations marked on their contour maps were incorrect, forcing drastic changes to the plans for tank sites. Nevertheless, by 23 June, the day the first tanker arrived at Port-en-Bessin, the POL engineers had their transmission, storage, and dispensing facilities ready. When the first TOMBOLA was launched at Ste. Honorine-des-Pertes three days later the engineers had extended a pipeline to the Balleroy storage area, where the POL troops had erected one tank and were installing dispensing facilities.31
After the capture of Cherbourg most POL engineers left work on the Minor POL System and proceeded toward Cherbourg via Bricquebec, where elements of the POL organization were already located. Company A of the 358th General Service Regiment and the 787th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company, for example, did not reach Huppain until 22 June and stayed only three days before moving west. After 1 July responsibility for the Minor POL System passed entirely to the 786th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company, the only engineer POL unit remaining in the area.
As the transfer to Cherbourg began, the 786th was pushing pipelines westward, following a railroad bed that ran from Bayeux to Carentan via St. Jean-de-Daye. Although trucks and trailers negotiated the rough railroad bed with difficulty, it was the most direct and level route west. By 9 July construction had advanced to Govin, within five miles of St. Jean-de-Daye, but there enemy small-arms fire halted the work. St. Jean-de-Daye had not yet been captured, and the line that was to run through the town had to be abandoned. After a temporary suspension of all construction, the 786th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company pushed a line for aviation fuel north from Govin to Carentan, arriving there on 24 July. South from Govin engineers constructed two pipelines, one for aviation fuel and another for motor gasoline, to tie in with the Major POL System at St. Lô. Early in August elements of the 1374th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company, which had reached Huppain in mid-July, worked at Carentan repairing civilian gasoline tanks and at St. Lô building a 10,000-barrel tank.
The Major POL System
Gasoline from the Cherbourg area began to flow into St. Lô on 11 August. While elements of the 359th Engineer General Service Regiment, with the 787th, 698th, and 1375th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Companies, reconstructed
POL facilities at Cherbourg, troops of the 359th General Service Regiment surveyed the pipeline route south.
Work on the pipelines to the front, beginning at the Hainneville tank farm in Cherbourg and undertaken mainly by the 2nd Battalion of the 359th, proceeded expeditiously, thanks to an increase in supplies and manpower. Close behind the combat troops, the engineers extended the lines to La Haye-du-Puits and Lessay by the beginning of August. The route of the pipelines changed with the breakthrough. Instead of swinging south via Coutances and Avranches to Laval, the pipelines were to run southeast to St. Lô, Vire, and Domfront, and then east to Alençon, Chartres, and Dourdan, to cross the Seine near Corbeil and go to Coubert near Paris.
The major system consisted of three pipelines, two for 80-octane and one for 100-octane aviation fuel. Construction of the 80-octane lines got priority because of the greater demand for motor fuel. Except at highway and railroad crossings, where welded lines went underground, engineers laid the pipelines on the ground and connected each section with victaulic couplings. Whenever possible, the route followed a hard-surfaced road along which POL construction material could be transported. In the early days in Normandy the pipelines followed road shoulders because the engineers did not have time to break through the hedgerows and remove mines from the fields. But here the lines fell victim to errant drivers, and traffic accidents nearly always involved a section of the pipe. The engineers soon learned to lay the pipelines on the other side of the hedgerows, where they escaped damage and still followed the line of communications.32
Construction from St. Lô went on simultaneously along three segments of the route: St. Lô to Vire, Vire to Dom-front, and Domfront to Alençon. By the end of August the engineers had pushed one 80-octane line, the “Pioneer” six-inch line, as far as Alençon, eighty-one miles from St. Lô; a second 80-octane line had reached Domfront, and the aviation gas line was approaching Domfront. The need for speed and the inexperience of some of the POL engineers resulted, at times, in poor construction. Breaks occurred when the engineers were careless with couplings or left openings through which small animals entered the line or into which other troops threw such objects as C-ration cans. Breaks in the line north of Dom front on 29 August made it necessary for combat forces to draw all gasoline at St. Lô until repairs could be made. Interruptions to the work were inevitable when the engineers ran into minefields and suffered casualties or encountered pockets of enemy resistance. Fuel losses from holes punched in the line by black market operators and saboteurs became frequent as the lines moved east, while breaks resulting from ramming by trucks and tanks increased as the traffic built up.33
When the advance party of the 359th General Service Regiment reached the bombed-out city of Alençon on 20 August, it ran into clouds of dust from hundreds of vehicles rolling over the rubble in the streets. A tremendous acceleration of traffic came a week later with
Map 22: POL pipelines, September 1944
the inauguration of the Red Ball Express, an around-the-clock operation to carry supplies (except bulk POL) to the front. The engineers soon felt the effect of Red Ball on pipeline construction. Faced with the urgent needs of the advancing armies, COMZ chose to divert to Red Ball many truck units needed to carry pipeline construction materials to the POL engineers. At the end of August COMZ gave high priority to the rail movement of POL engineer materials, and within ten days the engineers received enough material in the Alençon–Chartres area to permit construction to continue. But by then the slowdown of pipeline construction had already contributed to the critical gasoline shortages that developed early in September.34
New POL Organization
By the third week in August the engineer force working on the major and minor pipeline systems included three general service regiments, the 358th, 359th, and 368th; a battalion of a fourth, the 364th; and nine petroleum distribution companies, the 698th, 786th, 787th, 788th, 790th, 1374th, 1375th, 1376th, and 1377th. With attached truck companies, welding detachments, and firefighting platoons, the force numbered more than 7,000 men. On 23 August ADSEC organized this engineer force into the Military Pipeline Group (Provisional) under the command of Col. John L. Person of the 359th. (Map 22)
Enough troops were available to operate the systems, but by mid-September, after a brief spurt of moving construction materials by rail had ended, transportation to move the pipe forward was
Decanting area on the oil pipeline in Antwerp, Belgium
lacking. The Major POL System had advanced to Chartres, but the ADSEC engineer estimated that available trucks and trailers could deliver no more than seven to eight miles of pipe per day.35
The lack of transportation to move POL construction supplies made it increasingly difficult for the pipelines to keep up when ADSEC headquarters moved forward. This posed a problem of control. For a time, base sections operated parts of the system in their respective areas, but the division of responsibility was unworkable because the POL system was essentially an entity unto itself. When ADSEC moved to
Reims early in September, the entire POL system fell outside the ADSEC area and was likely to remain so for some time. Therefore, on 23 September 1944, the Military Pipeline Group (Provisional) passed to the control of Headquarters, Communications Zone, and was renamed the Military Pipeline Service (MPLS). Colonel Person continued as commander.36
COMZ instituted a number of helpful changes, dividing the pipeline area into districts, with commanding officers of the experienced engineer petroleum distribution companies in charge. COMZ also set up schools in each district for
the less experienced engineers of the general service regiments, took steps to reduce pilferage, and, most important, provided first a courier service and later a telephone service for better communications among the POL engineers who had hitherto been operating, as one expressed it, “by smoke signals.” In addition, an airlift from the United States brought in a number of sorely needed spare parts.37
The problem of moving the construction materials forward remained vexing. By 6 October 1944, the Major POL System was in operation to Coubert, across the Seine about twenty miles southeast of Paris. The period of rapid pursuit was over, and other supplies, notably ammunition, had priority over POL. Planners then decided to terminate the major system at Coubert, at least for some time, and to concentrate on shorter pipelines based at Le Havre and Antwerp. Coubert remained the end of the line until January 1945.38
Farther east of Paris, Allied armies were approaching the German border by mid-September. The engineers expected formidable obstacles in the fortified belts of the Siegfried Line and in the Rhine River to say nothing of the terrain between them, heavily crisscrossed with watercourses large and small.