Chapter 25: Conclusion
U.S. Army engineers unquestionably fulfilled their traditional mission in the Mediterranean and European theaters in World War II. In their massive construction program in England, they housed the Allied armies preparing for the main thrust against German forces in the west. In combat zones in both theaters, engineer work on beaches and in bridging, rail and road construction, and mine clearance permitted the tactical advance of combat elements. Diverse specialty units from water purification to engineer pipeline companies also contributed to the success. In the communications zones, constant rehabilitation of harbors and of lines of communications guaranteed the movement of Army supply in unprecedented volume and provided facilities for other service branches. Of course, none of these accomplishments was without drawback or fault. Like the rest of the Army throughout the war, the engineers learned and relearned lessons constantly, often in the face of enemy fire.
During the interwar period the Corps of Engineers had acquiesced in the almost inevitable allocation of limited funds to combat arms at the expense of combat support elements. In the small American Army of the 1930s, training had consistently favored combat engineering and the quick engagement of the enemy to produce a decision in a short time, all at the expense of a thorough grounding in administrative functions and the methods of building and maintaining a rear area service of supply. When the first engineers went overseas, the want of properly schooled supply personnel and of a comprehensive system of supply management compounded the material shortages that plagued them. The engineers in England in 1941 wrestled with their early logistical problems without much application of one of the chief American contributions to warfare: a business sense of organization, efficiency, and planning foresight. The lack of trained depot troops and of an adequate and standardized inventory procedure continued on the Continent later in the war and contributed to the shipping crisis of the fall of 1944. Improvement was slow, and at the close of the war the ETO chief engineer called for a revamping of engineer supply doctrine, policy, and operating procedures.
A problem as basic as the supply shortages was the alarmingly low level of engineering and construction experience among new engineer officers and troops arriving in England after 1942. Though aviation engineer units could learn their jobs by doing them in England, combat and construction engineers
had barely enough time during the BOLERO buildup to learn the rudiments of their trade as they would practice it under fire. Officers in the theater perforce absorbed an education in the technical side of their work and at the same time in the art of leadership. The training of engineers overseas also suffered from the uncertainties of strategic direction through 1942 and 1943; the TORCH operation committed many of the most accomplished engineers to the war in North Africa.
The ETOUSA command structure that first evolved in England with the theater chief engineer subordinate to the theater services of supply echelon persisted to the end of the war in northern Europe. Though the peculiarities of that arrangement placed General Moore at an organizational level from which he could advise General Eisenhower on engineer affairs only through General Lee, he, like the other technical chiefs in the theater, accommodated himself to this system, and it never exercised an untoward effect on engineer operations. Similarly, the sometimes tangled lines of authority for the engineers in North Africa saw resolution only in the last year of the war, but here too other considerations were more important to engineer performance than the top-level organization.
The evolution and the employment of major new engineer organizations and units in the theaters met with mixed success. With the enemy in possession of ports on the Continent and with North African harbors of any consequence under Vichy control, gaining a foothold in either area involved amphibious operations. The amphibian brigades the engineers developed to meet the demands of seaborne invasion were original in concept, but only partially realized their true potential in European and North African operations. In contrast to the Pacific, where engineers retained their boat regiments, the truncation of the brigades in Europe limited their performance; when the Navy insisted on running all the landing craft to be employed in beach operations, the Army brigades lost their organic boat elements. The division of labor remained, however; all activities on the seaward side of a landing operation were the responsibility of the Navy and everything on shore remained the province of the Army. No single authority controlled the entire expanse between the ships offshore and the inland supply dumps. The history of amphibious operations after TORCH saw continuous efforts to provide this control by placing on the beach an organization whose writ would extend seaward and landward from the traditional division point of Army and Navy authority during an assault landing—the high-water mark on the beach. In subsequent invasions, joint Army-Navy organizations were formed to manage traffic from offshore and to move supply across the beaches quickly. These arrangements brought ashore not only naval demolitions experts with Army engineers, but also an entire self-contained organization, the engineer special brigade, with the functions of obstacle demolition, firefighting, ordnance disposal, medical service, quartermaster duties, vehicle maintenance, signals, and traffic management. Despite the loss of the boat regiments, the engineers adapted to an amphibious doctrine and an assault function with organizations unknown in the Army before the war.
Through the war in Europe, as in
other theaters, the engineers struggled with demands of unprecedented complexity on their unit structure. The triangular division with its assigned engineer battalion proved itself in battle in North Africa, Italy, and northern Europe. But the introduction in the theaters of other new and specialized engineer functions during the press of combat created command and organizational problems that began to see some resolution only toward the conflict’s end. The evolution of units along the group concept reflected efforts to tailor engineer commands to meet the exigencies of modern war. The direct borrowing of techniques and manpower from the national industrial base brought the latest industrial methods and devices into military use rapidly, but the absorbing of these features into a regular military organization involved trial, error, and time.
The engineer group concept forsook the traditional regimental structure for one based on function and extreme flexibility. As a tactical headquarters with its engineer battalions attached rather than assigned to it, the group was a loose organization that allowed the rapid transfer of specialty units in and out of the command for specific tasks. Heavy equipment belonging to the group’s battalions was generally concentrated in a separate supply pool that took the place of the regiment’s headquarters and service company so that the individual battalions could travel light.
The pronounced advantages in flexibility and mobility achieved by the engineer battalions in this fashion were not entirely unqualified. The rapid introduction of the group concept produced widely disparate ideas as to the command arrangements between headquarters and subordinate attached units; doctrine on group tactics was lacking, and the shifting of units from one group to another frequently caused more administrative confusion and morale problems than were acceptable. The burden on independent battalion commanders for planning and carrying out work was too great for the staffs they had available to them. The group concept was also so unevenly applied in the field that widely divergent practices held sway in Italy and in northwestern Europe. Though this did not affect the performance of the units as much as other factors such as shortages of manpower, engineers in the European theater who gathered after the war to discuss their experiences decided that the concept had been overused and imperfectly applied; they voted to retain the desirable features of the engineer group in a more formal military unit with a regimental designation.1
Quite aside from the problems of new engineer functions to be performed, some lack of technical experience also surfaced among officers as the war progressed despite an excellent engineer reserve establishment. The rapid expansion of the officer corps and the often hasty training of candidates at home produced situations in the field in which engineer troops had more technical know-how than some of their officers. Highly specialized organizations such as port construction and repair groups and petroleum distribution companies at first benefited from
the crash recruiting campaigns among the marine technicians and wildcatters of civilian industry. As with the general service regiments first sent to England, the result was often a concentration of scarce talent in a few units. Units formed later had the pick of the draft and of qualified officers, but, however well motivated, these men had to learn much of their work after they had reached the theaters of operations.
Though the petroleum distribution companies also suffered this disadvantage, the reasons for their sometimes slow progress lay elsewhere. Pipeline construction could never keep up with the tactical units in their race across northern France after the breakout from the lodgment area of Normandy. The unexpectedly rapid advance from southern France likewise outran the pipeline that was to carry fuel forward to the combat elements. Even with more manpower and a surplus of pipeline material, a rapidly changing tactical situation imposed impossible construction demands upon the petroleum distribution companies in the field. Gasoline-starved armored divisions were sending truck convoys on 250-mile supply runs to the closest pipehead through August and early September 1944.
The systems nevertheless proved themselves. Without them, POL supply lines would have relied on truck and road capacity that was equally taxed during the pursuit warfare of late summer 1944. In the slower moving Italian campaign, pipeline troops had more success in keeping pace with the fighting units they were supplying despite the rugged terrain. The chief engineer of the Mediterranean theater considered them among the best special engineer troops in the Peninsular Base Section.2
The engineers in Europe and North Africa quickly learned the value of modern heavy equipment in combat support and in rear area operations. The versatile engineer bulldozer, which became the symbol of the American ability to tackle seemingly impossible jobs, was indispensable in all aspects of road and airfield construction. Supplemented by graders and rollers that leveled roads and fields in short order and by huge rock crushers to provide aggregate from quarries, the dozer consistently enabled the engineers to rehabilitate older lines of communications or to create new ones at great speed. Without their large and powerful machinery, in fact, the engineers could not have coped with their assignments. Constant revision of the standard TOEs for equipment through the war reflected the trend toward ever heavier machinery. At the war’s end, engineer officers recommended that the D-7 Caterpillar dozer be standard in all units, replacing any lighter machines.
Similar sentiments prevailed on the use of trucks, which grew larger and heavier in American and British inventories as the war went on. The humble 2½-ton dump truck was always in short supply for the engineers. Adaptable to a number of uses, including the easy transport of oil pipeline sections, the dump trucks were valuable enough to prompt demands for their substitution for cargo vehicles of the same size. The Brockway trucks issued to engineer heavy ponton units to transport bridge sets and floats also contributed
to the trend toward larger and heavier vehicles.
The tactical bridging with which the American Army experimented in 1940 in imitation of German examples proved itself in combat, but one of the most rewarding measures of the war was the adoption of the British Bailey bridge. Besides providing a common heavy bridge for both British and U.S. Armies, the Bailey was far more versatile than any American design and proved itself even as a floating ponton structure. In another application of modern technique to an engineer function, the use of light aircraft for observation and photographic surveillance added much to the process of estimating bridging and road-building requirements along projected lines of advance that still lay in enemy territory. In Europe, the engineers could also harness a steel production capacity to their own use. Contracts with French firms supplemented the American supply, especially of I-beam stringers for heavy railway bridging.
In one area, mine warfare, German practice continued to excel until the end of the war. American methods were inferior by comparison; standard U.S. Army mines were usually smaller and far less ingenious in design than the German variety. The Teller antitank mine had twice the explosive charge of the American M-l antitank mine, which did little damage to German tank hulls, though it could wreck tracks that struck it. Smaller American antipersonnel mines were often unstable and dangerous to the engineers implanting them. Engineer training in mine warfare theory was more than adequate, but the men lacked the experience that would have made them experts. Captured or swept ordnance was always too danger ous to transport to the United States, and as a result many engineers came to the battlefield without having seen the devices they were to unearth and disarm. The engineers established countermine schools in the theaters and shared their own experience with the troops of other arms in an attempt to save lives and to establish standards for American mine warfare. The SCR-625 detector and such innovations as the Snake proved of more value than devices like the Scorpion flail, but the war ended with the engineers still relying on the one method of mine sweeping used from the start: a sharp-eyed veteran probing with a bayonet held at a thirty-degree angle. Units emplacing minefields were also notably absentminded about passing along specific detail on the location and the dimension of mined areas, leaving enemy and Allied troops to negotiate the field later. The Germans routinely recorded all minefields in minute detail and collected this information at the field army level with identical records going to a central land mine office in Germany. A postwar engineer investigating board recommended the American imitation of the German system, at least in establishing a centralized theater-level mine information network.3
Several considerations affected mapping throughout the operations in the Mediterranean and European theaters. Map quality was usually sufficient to satisfy the needs of the using combat elements during the hostilities. Maps obtained from British sources under wartime agreements and from French or even captured German stocks supported
planning and tactical operations; these sources were supplemented by maps derived from aerial photographs by American air forces. All of these methods had drawbacks, but served the purposes of Allied armies well enough.
Less satisfactory, although never an obstacle to operations, was the problem of map issue to using units. Each field army had difficulty in moving map stocks to the forward battalions, but the causes of the problem varied. Inevitably, pursuit warfare led to situations in which troops advanced into areas not depicted on the maps they carried for immediate operations. Pursuit operations also demanded more small-scale maps—those above l:50,000, which was the preferred tactical map in Europe. Static or siege operations required larger scale renditions of l:25,000 or even l:5,000.
Distribution’ units in the field handled more than 210 million maps of all sizes in the European theater alone, with the bulk of this number coming from presses in the United States; over 28 million maps were from the French Institut Geographique National. Troops used commercial road maps where they were available, and the theater sought to supply each vehicle with a local road map. Engineer authorities assembled at the end of the war estimated, however, that had the demands for any category of maps been even minimally higher, the strained distribution nets would not have met requirements.
Though highly publicized by both enemy and Allied sources, fortifications in Europe proved less formidable than anticipated. In the cases of the Atlantic Wall and the Siegfried Line, engineers proceeded with infantry teams to re- duce bunkers or, sometimes, to seal their defenders inside. Assaults on fortified positions showed that aggressive, well-trained engineer and infantry parties supported by flat-trajectory artillery fire or close tactical air cover could reduce the most forbidding German casemates. Engineers examining coastal defenses after assault landings discovered that naval fire was effective against concrete emplacements, but only direct hits or an impact close enough to shower the bunker interior with fragments brought decisive results.
Engineers performed well when they went into action as infantry. General Moore remarked after the war that the use of engineers in combat had been more frequent than he had anticipated. Although their celebrated performance in the German Ardennes offensive received considerable public attention, engineers were committed as infantry during tactical emergencies everywhere in Europe and North Africa. Their combat doctrine proved sound in the heat of battle. Engineers established perimeter defenses around bridgehead construction sites and served in active combat with infantry and as covering forces at roadblocks and minefields throughout the war.
Engineer strengths in the Mediterranean and in northern Europe varied as the strategic importance of the northern European campaigns grew and that of the Italian campaign declined. Nevertheless, the proportion of engineer troops to combat elements at the end of the war was not widely divergent in the two theaters. In the European theater there were 323,677 engineers—some 10.5 percent of the total theater strength of 3,065,505 on 30 April 1945. One man in nine in the ETO was an
engineer. In the Mediterranean the ratio was one in eleven. Engineers there numbered 44,467, or about 9 percent of the theater aggregate of 493,876 in the last month of the war. These figures can be contrasted with those for the Southwest Pacific, where one man in seven was an Army engineer. Despite the usual shortages in their numbers, the engineers were the largest single component of the divisional slice outside of regular combat troops.4
Their frequent shortages in men and equipment notwithstanding, the engineers met the exacting demands of the campaigns against German and Italian arms in North Africa and Europe. In a war calling for the closest integration of all combat and support arms for success in battle, the engineers were a competent and motivated force. They facilitated the concentration of Allied armies in England, helped move combat forces and their supply across hostile beaches, and supported the final decisive drives into the very heart of the Reich.