Chapter 8: Essential Services to the Line
In addition to provisioning and equipping the American Army, the Quartermaster Corps had the collateral mission of furnishing services which contributed to the welfare and morale of the troops, promoted the economy of supply, and augmented the labor force. In a protracted campaign, seriously handicapped by shipping shortages and by a relatively low supply priority, a systematic program of recovery, repair, and reissue of all repairable equipment was an absolute necessity. Other QM services, while provided on a scale that appeared luxurious to the less fortunate soldiers of other nations, more than paid for themselves in terms of health, morale, and increased combat efficiency. American civilian standards and concepts of human dignity, sanitation, and material comfort were retained in the U.S. Army; indeed one could argue that they had been reinforced during military training. Under the circumstances, the Army would have been shortsighted and wasteful had it ignored such essential services as graves registration, salvage, baths, and laundries. The highest tribute to their worth was indicated by postwar plans to integrate these services more effectively and permanently into the Quartermaster Corps.
Traditions in Caring for the Dead1
In honoring men who give their lives on the battlefield, the American Graves Registration Service can look back upon the ancient Mediterranean world for the origin of many of the traditions which pervade present burial customs. Accounts of funerary rites and of rudimentary systems of recovery and identification occupy an honored place in the literary works of the Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. Yet, from ancient to modern times, homage was usually reserved for a famed commander or for a group of anonymous dead who had saved the day for their people. As recently as Napoleon’s day most of the rank and file had been either cremated or buried in unmarked graves, interred en masse under mounds of limed earth, or dumped unceremoniously into abandoned wells.
The American soldier was subject to the same fate until about a century ago. In 1850 Congress created a precedent for the establishment of permanent cemeteries abroad when it appropriated
funds for the erection of a Mexican War shrine. It stood at the head of a common grave wherein 750 American dead were interred after they had been exhumed from their battlefield graves along the road to Mexico City. Today this monument stands as a reminder that American burial procedures of that day were hopelessly inadequate. In 1862, for the first time, the United States took steps to provide each of its soldier dead with what might be regarded as an individual shrine in the midst of a larger, if less personal, national cemetery.
In 1876 another step was taken. The Secretary of War formally charged the Quartermaster General with the responsibility of supervising the national cemetery system, and centralized all mortuary records in the Quartermaster’s Department. Unquestionably, the records themselves began to acquire a more profound meaning to those who analyzed them than was attached to a mere file of the names and ranks of deceased soldiers. The burial lists not only fulfilled their role of building morale among the relatives and friends of the dead, but as time passed these records also came to have considerable value as operational statistics. Gradually, all echelons of command built up figures on their loss experiences, and this information entered more and more into plans for providing replacements. Commanders began to realize that it was to their advantage to perfect procedures for the recovery and identification of the dead. Metal identification tags had been sold to individual soldiers during the Civil War, and were officially sponsored at the regimental level within many units during the Spanish-American War. That conflict demonstrated the need for a uniform, Army-wide procedure, and a general order of 1906 directed the Quartermaster’s Department to issue an aluminum identification tag to each officer and enlisted man.2 The end of the war with Spain marked another precedent in that pains were taken to return as many of the dead as possible from an overseas theater, a program that was greatly expanded after World Wars I and II.
World War I brought a theater graves registration service into being. For the first time such a service provided units to act in direct support of combat troops and a headquarters staff section at the chief quartermaster’s level to keep systematic mortuary records and to supervise the maintenance of temporary cemeteries. In 1924, a series of regulations appeared in the Army Regulation series 30, representing a serious effort to evaluate the lessons of World War I. The authors attempted to anticipate future demands for such a wartime service and to define the mission that a chief quartermaster would have under a theater commander. These regulations further called for the development of a specialized service unit suited to carry out the necessary work in the field. Nevertheless, American graves registration service on the eve of Pearl Harbor had made only a few paper improvements over the system of 1917 and 1918.3
When the United States became
involved in World War II an overseas quartermaster had two primary tools to carry out his graves registration mission. The first was a regularly constituted service unit. Based on T/O 10-297, dated 1 November 1940, a QM graves registration company, consisting of a headquarters section and four platoons, was theoretically to support a corps of three divisions. It had an aggregate strength of 130, of whom five were officers. They were not responsible for the collection of battlefield dead. This mission remained with tactical units. The other tool, Technical Manual 10630, appeared on 23 September 1941, at a time when neither a G-1 nor a G-4 officer at any staff level clearly understood which officer would have the overall supervision of the burial function within a command. Unfortunately, the 1941 manual failed to reflect German field experience after the speedy victories over Poland, France, and Norway. By the time of Pearl Harbor, German doctrine had developed to the point where graves registration service, in both its command and staff arrangement, was placed at the highest field level.4 The German system had the dual advantage of building morale at home and of providing operational data. German manuals repeatedly warned every commander of the danger of allowing graves registration service troops to become calloused or emotionally disturbed because of their tasks. Staffs of supervisory personnel were to be changed frequently, rested, and returned to the field, but never to their old duties. In contrast, American graves registration service remained a staff function and the major advantage it enjoyed over other field work was that of having little, if anything, to unlearn.
Development of Graves Registration Service
The fighting forces of 1942 and early 1943 in Bataan, the Solomons, and North Africa were obliged to improvise their graves registration service at every step. TORCH field orders specified that tactical units would collect and bury their own dead, that graves were to be carefully marked and reported to unit commanders, that unit commanders would provide the blanks for reporting burials, and that unit commanders were to make frequent checks to see that the troops had identification tags, properly marked and worn. Plans for the Western Task Force included the assignment of the recently activated 46th and 47th Graves Registration Companies, but because of shipping restrictions these units remained behind in the United States. Consequently, graves registration became an added responsibility of combat commanders whose primary concern was with their living men. Before sailing, most commanders had no time to familiarize themselves with TM 10-630 or the AR 30 series of 1924. In fact, most of this literature was not in unit files at sailing time. Even with it, commanders would have been handicapped because there was no over-all staff agency to interpret the procedures or supervise a graves registration service.5
On 8 November 1942, French
resistance demanded the undivided attention of TORCH commanders. Unit chaplains handled graves registration with the assistance of noncommissioned officers and enlisted men from either the combat elements or medical detachments. After action reports revealed that commanders objected to the employment of combat soldiers for the recovery and burial of their own dead, and desired the assignment of specialized graves registration units. At Oran, McNamara, after his G-3 had disapproved a graves registration platoon on his original troop list, was immediately confronted with the task of reburying 400 dead who had been slaughtered in Oran Harbor. On the outskirts of Oran he selected a site near a civilian cemetery, obtained the services of engineers, and turned the detailed work over to an assistant, who laid out the military cemetery at Sidi Chami and supervised and reported the burials. The assistant had one complaint against TM 10-630. It was ideal for the superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery, but worthless for telling how a temporary burial ground should be laid out.6
In the hasty planning for SATIN Task Force, the II Corps did not entirely overlook the lessons of the TORCH landings. On 20 December 1942 it distributed a three-page pamphlet which outlined procedures to be followed in Tunisia. This document stressed stricter compliance with the requirement for reporting burials and assigned this responsibility to a graves registration officer who was to be appointed in each regiment, separate battalion, or company. But this vaguely worded pamphlet made no provisions for the assignment of burial details, for transportation in evacuating the dead, or for methods of identifying remains. As in TORCH, the authors assumed that all graves registration officers were familiar with the basic manuals. In December 1942, few, if any, such publications had reached the theater.
Once again, during the Tunisian fighting, assignments as graves registration officers fell largely to chaplains. Only in the Eastern Base Section were quartermasters available for this duty and even they always performed it in addition to other work. Both chaplains and base section quartermasters continued to lack technically trained personnel needed to assist them. In Tunisia, Lt. Col. Edward R. Martin, Chaplain Corps, became the 1st Infantry Division’s graves registration officer and excerpts from his after action reports indicate that his subordinates hired native laborers to dig and fill the graves and to evacuate the dead by pack train to collecting points. Martin reported that his chaplains often personally supervised the details of evacuation and burial, not infrequently ending their work late at night.
Under this system the II Corps improvised graves registration until early 1943, when two events alleviated the situation. First, the 46th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company, which had originally been earmarked to make the TORCH landing in November 1942, arrived at Constantine on 2 March 1943. Working under the supervision of the II Corps G-1, one platoon of the 46th, perhaps the first to be committed in the war with Germany, supported the 1st
Division in the Gafsa–El Guettar sector from 16 March to 6 April 1943. Secondly, coincident with the 46th’s appearance, NATOUSA announced a theater graves registration service on 1 April 1943. To head it, Middleswart later named Col. Thomas R. Howard, QMC, as theater graves registration service officer, and subordinates soon were designated in each base section. Colonel Howard’s duty was to coordinate field activities and maintain control of the theater’s burial files. Howard did not assign units to combat organizations because this was a G-1, NATOUSA, function. Graves registration officers within divisions and higher units and graves registration companies were responsible to unit quartermasters who, in turn, coordinated with a base section quartermaster.
Benefits from the new organization were not felt until the II Corps moved into northern Tunisia. In the meantime, the graves registration service in base sections settled down into operating on standard procedures for securing mortuary supplies, temporary sites, and a mortician’s services. But within the II Corps there still were not enough regularly constituted units, with adequate transportation, to relieve the combat troops of their role in graves registration. The most advanced positions reached by specialists were collecting points. While this situation did not satisfy those who wanted to spare the combat troops the demoralizing experience of handling their own dead, the establishment of collecting points was a giant stride in improving the evacuation of remains. The system set a precedent to be adopted in subsequent campaigns and made for speedier and more efficient identification, which in turn reduced the number of unknown dead.
Graves registration planning for Sicily began early in 1943, before all the lessons of the Tunisian campaign had come to hand. The Seventh Army therefore studied the shortcomings of TORCH and hoped that trained Quartermaster graves registration platoons would be on hand for the invasion of Sicily. Planners also had reason to expect that the infantry and armored divisions to be redeployed from Tunisia would by trial and error obtain experience that could be properly applied to an amphibious operation. Dated 20 June 1943, plans for HUSKY’S task force assigned responsibility to each company, battalion, regiment, and division, as well as to hospitals, depots, and other separate establishments for the appointment of a graves registration officer, who, in turn, was to be responsible to the unit quartermaster. In addition to these staff officers, each subtask force was to create a provisional graves registration platoon if regularly constituted platoons were not available from the United States. A provisional platoon was to consist of a headquarters and three seven-man sections.
By D-day, six platoons were available, providing at least one in support of each of the assault divisions. Between D-day and D plus four, each subtask force, with the exception of one infantry division, fielded a platoon from the 48th Graves Registration Company. This time the continuous evacuation of the dead was facilitated by more vehicles. The relatively prompt establishment of collecting points demonstrated that the divisions which came out of Tunisia had learned their lessons well.
In sharp contrast, the uninitiated 45th
Infantry Division, which had staged for HUSKY in the United States and only briefly touched North Africa, reflected its lack of experience. Not until it arrived at Oran did this unit give serious thought to the problem. When the division commander finally appointed a graves registration officer, the man had neither the requisite training nor experience for his assignment. When he distributed mortuary supplies such as temporary markers, bed sacks, and personal effects bags among the units, they failed to understand their use. Furthermore, the 45th repeated the errors of TORCH by assigning a special service officer and two chaplains as regimental graves registration officers—men who by profession, temperament, and supply experience were the least fitted for the task. The 45th also failed to provide vehicles or fatigue details at the assault beaches. The results were unsatisfactory in the extreme and, reviewing his experience, the division graves registration officer recommended that for an amphibious operation trained platoons together with their vehicles should arrive on D-day, that graves registration functions should be assigned to the division quartermaster, and that a special Quartermaster service unit should be on hand to dig graves. With the exception of the 45th Division’s graves registration experience, the Sicilian campaign marked the end of improvisation.
The Italian campaign taken as a whole represents a special case in the development of graves registration service. From Salerno to Leghorn the Fifth Army used the divisional system of evacuating and burying the dead in army cemeteries. Combat units evacuated their dead to divisional collecting points located very close to Quartermaster supply points where attached graves registration platoons assumed responsibility for further identification of the remains, prepared mortuary records, and attended to burials in army cemeteries. In part the relatively low number of isolated burials and a corresponding high percentage of positive identification in Italy may be attributed to Fifth Army’s superior planning for the use of combat personnel in the recovery of 22,953 American dead and to the efficient evacuation work of the veteran 46th, 47th, and 48th Graves Registration Companies. This system prevailed until August 1944 when the companies reverted to army control. In Italy the tactical situation also assisted the recovery and evacuation system. ‘Host of the battles were positional. Despite transport difficulties over mountainous terrain, stationary warfare favored Quartermaster efforts to restrict isolated burials—twelve by V-E Day—and afforded opportunities for identification of unknown dead that seldom obtained in a war of movement.
Reconstitution of the Seventh Army in June 1944 took VI Corps headquarters with three veteran infantry divisions, the 3rd, 36th, and 45th, for the southern France operation. Three platoons of the 46th Graves Registration Company, each attached to a division, were expected to evacuate the dead through independent collecting points to a division cemetery. In the first week ashore, each division established a cemetery. Within a week of laying out its cemetery, each division was sixty miles beyond its collecting point. Evacuation of the dead lagged. On 27 September 1944 the VI Corps took action, establishing a
Temporary American cemetery near Cassino. Flag is at half-mast for the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 16 April 1945.
centrally located corps collecting point, and thus for a time ended the classic Mediterranean concept of divisional unity. After the war of movement was over, the corps system was dropped.
On 5 October, the Seventh Army established a cemetery at Epinal. But the location was only accessible to the VI Corps, not to the XV Corps, which with the attached 3041st Graves Registration Company recently had been shifted from the Third to the Seventh Army. Organizationally, the XV Corps used an evacuation system different from that of the VI Corps. The 3041st established a corps collecting point at Charmes, and after detailing 43 men to handle burial operations at Epinal divided its remaining strength among detachments of 5 to 11 men for operating several collecting points, but they were identified more with corps sectors than with specific divisional areas. Meantime the VI Corps retained its organization of platoon attachments to divisions. As more and more divisions joined these two corps, the development of the 3041st’s method of operations was arrested. The system of an attached graves registration platoon behind each division became a uniform one. In effect, the Seventh Army adopted the battle-tested procedures of the Mediterranean war.
Identification Procedures and Cemeteries
While conforming to the humanitarian premises of the Geneva Convention, the American Graves Registration Service had to provide an evacuation system swift enough to prevent demoralization of troops but slow enough to assure the most accurate identification possible. Success depended largely on technical
competence. Notwithstanding the zeal of chaplains who were assigned graves registration responsibilities in North Africa, untrained combat personnel were not qualified and in subsequent campaigns the task of identification was relegated to specialists in the rear.
Experience in the Tunisian campaign demonstrated the need to revise current identification procedures. Regulations dating back to prewar days provided that reports of interment would bear the fingerprints of only one hand of the deceased, while the fingerprint files of The Adjutant General’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were based on mathematical formulae which required the prints of both hands. If ten prints were available, a positive identification could be made by a final search of less than 200 separate files, but the fingerprints from one hand alone required a search through many thousands of files and presented an ‘insurmountable task in time of war. By mid-March 1943 the War Department had sent revised instructions to all theaters.7 Normally, the existence of two dog tags was sufficient to establish a positive identification. But men were known to exchange tags and it became customary to check a man’s tags against his personal letters, driver’s license, and membership cards. If no discrepancies were revealed, the body was wrapped in a mattress cover and evacuated. The absence of dog tags meant the beginning of a wider search. After all papers on the body were carefully studied, the time and place of death were checked against operational records to determine which unit had been in the area. The likeliest parent organization was asked to report the names of all missing persons on the specified day and to send someone to the collecting point to examine the unidentified body.8
In addition to the study of tooth charts, fingerprints, and other physical characteristics, Capt. Steven F. Capasso of the 47th Graves Registration Company developed new techniques for obtaining legible fingerprints from bodies long interred. Another technique made it possible to cleanse the clothing of those interred as unknowns. Previously such garments were disposed of after a cursory examination. Upon being cleaned, clothes often revealed hidden laundry marks. Because the likelihood of duplicating a laundry mark was less than one in a quarter of a million, this was a useful clue to the identity of a body. Recognizing the importance of such clues, before the Salerno landing Truscott ordered his 3rd Division infantrymen to place their serial number inside both leggings.
Reviewing the success of identification procedures, Sullivan and his graves registration officer noted that the problem of identifying remains taken from badly damaged tanks was another that had been largely solved. Useful data included the tank’s serial number, the position of the remains within the wreckage, and the status of other crew members. As always, familiarity with the units and troops within the area was another aid in successful identification which, by the end of hostilities, had
brought the Fifth Army’s factor of “unidentified remains” to an all-time low of 1.1 percent.
The final phase in wartime graves registration activities involved the burial of the dead in accessible and attractive temporary cemeteries. Every measure was taken to reduce the number of isolated burials, both by rapid evacuation of remains and by constant search for and disinterment of those decedents who had been individually buried either by civilians or the enemy. A limited number of isolated burials was inevitable, particularly in beachhead operations. Center Task Force, for example, buried its dead in eight different places during the first few days ashore, but McNamara concentrated all bodies in military cemeteries at Arzew and Oran before the end of the first week. At Gafsa in Tunisia, for five dollars in cash and ten pounds of tea, a regimental chaplain of the 1st Infantry Division “bought” a tract of land which later became the Gafsa cemetery. The effort to minimize isolated burials was demonstrated again in Sicily by the sd Infantry Division, which opened a burial ground at Licata on D plus 1, and continued to evacuate remains to this cemetery until it was a hundred miles behind the front. Not until the 3rd Division reached Palermo was another cemetery established. Meanwhile the 1st Division opened a burial site at Gela on D plus 1, and buried, in the following three weeks, fifteen hundred American, Allied, and enemy dead. During the eastward thrust of Seventh Army, when the enemy retired across the Strait of Messina, the attacking divisions opened at least five temporary burial grounds, one of which, Caronia, later became the concentrated burial plot.
To students of military history, a map of U.S. military cemeteries in Italy reveals a great deal about the nature of the Fifth Army’s campaigns. Noting that seven of the thirteen cemeteries were clustered in the 150 miles between Paestum and Anzio, one might correctly conclude that actions over this western watershed of the Apennines were prolonged and costly. Since the 150-200-mile stretch north of Rome included only two cemeteries—at Tarquina and Follonica—and these largely held the remains of airmen, it was apparent that the Fifth Army had swept to the Arno quickly. The Gothic Line battles forced the opening of large cemeteries again, at Castelfiorentino, Mount Beni, and Mirandola. That there were only half as many burial sites along the Gothic Line as along the Winter Line may be attributed to the stabilization of the front as well as to the fact that in August 1944 the Fifth Army had assumed control over burial sites as part of a personnel economy drive.9 Similarly, a map of France will reveal that, after the initial landings east of Marseille, Seventh Army encountered little resistance in the Rhône valley except at Montélimar. Cemeteries at Épinal, at Saint Juan near Besançon, and at Hochfelden near Saverne commemorate the Seventh Army’s winter battles in the Vosges.10
In the base sections, a graves registration company rarely, if ever, worked as a unit in one cemetery. Three of the companies which saw the longest service in the theater were broken down into detachments and platoons and scattered
over widely dispersed locations. The 47th, which arrived in North Africa in the spring of 1943, was subdivided into twenty groups, several of which consisted of only two enlisted men who were assigned to inactive cemeteries. The 602nd Graves Registration Company detailed its members late in the summer of 1943 to sites throughout eastern Algeria and Tunisia. One detachment took over the II Corps cemetery on the Mateur–Bedja highway, another went to the cemetery at Tunis, the third to Constantine, while the fourth remained in Mateur with the company headquarters to search the countryside for isolated graves and to evacuate the dead from the many hospitals nearby. On occasion cemeterial work was of an emergency nature. Such was the case when elements of the 602nd raced to Bougie, Algeria, in anticipation of establishing a cemetery for dead expected to be washed ashore from a sunken transport. When the unit left North Africa, its various detachments deployed over a large area, including Corsica, the islands of Ischia, Ponza, and Ventotene off Naples, and along the eastern watershed of Italy. In November 1944 the 602nd airlifted several teams to Greece, Bulgaria, and Rumania to investigate the fate of American pilots who failed to return from sorties over Balkan oil fields. In Italy, the work was shared with the 3044th, the 2611th, the 2612th, and 2613th Graves Registration Companies. Behind Seventh Army, the 48th, 605th and 610th Graves Registration Companies searched the countryside and maintained cemeteries in southern France.
Detachments assigned to temporary cemeteries conducted all activities except the performance of religious rites. In normal cases, they identified the deceased before the body was evacuated to the cemetery. If both dog tags were still available, one was left on the body, the other nailed to the grave marker. If not, embossed metal plates were secured to each marker, while copies of the interment report were placed in sealed waterproof containers and deposited in each grave. This report contained a complete history of the decedent, including all details relative to the manner of death, objects found on the body, tooth charts, fingerprints, and other pertinent information.
In addition to preparing the bodies for and fulfilling the task of burial, and mailing personal items to the Quartermaster Personal Effects Depot in Kansas City, Missouri, cemeterial units beautified the grounds as quickly as possible. Landscaping, installation of lawn sprinkler and drainage systems, planting of shrubbery and trees, erecting of flagpoles, and constructing of ways, walls, and walks were all part of standard engineering procedure. Progress was frequently delayed by adverse weather, inadequate facilities for grading roads, lack of trucks for hauling rocks, and the limited number of grave markers.
Although handicapped by scant information on men who were missing and perhaps buried in isolated graves, if indeed the lone casualty was buried at all, base section cemeterial units pursued all clues as to the whereabouts of such soldiers. Sometimes graves were found in the fields where wild growth obscured them from view; others, particularly those of air force casualties, were occasionally found in small-town cemeteries where bodies of a single crew rested in a common grave. Seeking the
victims of airplane accidents, graves registration troops climbed the rocks and peaks of mountains. The successful removal of bodies from such inaccessible places frequently required pack mules as well as the strong backs of human beings. Often searching parties learned that battlefield dangers persisted long after the combat forces had left. Where the fighting was bitter and the snows were deep—as in the precipitous peaks around Mignano—teams postponed recovery work until spring, when mechanical detectors would work more effectively against mines and precautionary measures could be taken before booby-trapped bodies were removed. While crossing part of the Anzio beachhead which was known to be mined, for example, one such party lost three of its members as the result of an accidental detonation. As late as January 1945 the 3044th Graves Registration Company at the Nettuno cemetery reported that “the search of battlefields for and the conducting of investigations into the isolated burials ... constitute the intensified operational program with which this organization was and is still occupied.” The monthly rate of recoveries and interments at this one cemetery, by that time some 200 miles behind the front, amounted to approximately 100 American, Allied, and enemy dead.
Salvage, Recovery, and Repair Programs
If supply inventories were to be maintained, financial and shipping economies effected, and training and intelligence advantages gained from captured enemy materiel, a systematic procedure for recovery, segregation, and classification of repairable equipment was indispensable. In addition to its value for supplying the combat zone, prisoners of war, and direct civilian relief, an active salvage program served as a source of scrap lead, brass, copper, and rubber, vital to production in the United States. Scrap metals, paper, and lumber that were not needed by American producers or by the Army could be sold locally, thereby providing a monetary return. Such sales were also a small stimulant to industrial recovery and personal comfort in North Africa and Italy. Because the enemy had swept these areas of raw materials, irreparable salvage usually brought high prices. Torn flour sacks and worn-out barracks bags sold for one dollar each, waste cardboard and paper brought five cents per pound, and natives frequently offered to buy worn shoes and clothing at triple the price of new articles in the United States.
The supervision exercised by Ramsey at the AFHQ and NATOUSA levels and by Middleswart at SOS NATOUSA became an integral part of a continuous and concerted program calling for the prompt recovery, repair, and re-use of unserviceable property, whether Allied or enemy, and for the utilization of battlefield scrap. Throughout the theater their supervision in no way relieved the commanders of salvage discipline. Organizationally, Ramsey was exclusively concerned with captured enemy materiel and Middleswart with United States property. On 1 March 1943 Middleswart assumed responsibility for the salvage and disposal of all waste materials except lumber, ammunition, and ammunition components. The latter, two materials moved through ammunition supply channels, and scrap lumber was an Engineer responsibility.
Middleswart set forth the objectives of War Department policy, laid down the conditions to be satisfied, and decentralized operations to each base section.11
A system of categories was set up to accelerate the evacuation of salvaged properties. New supplies were designated as Class A, used but still serviceable supplies as Class B, and unserviceable but repairable property as Class C. Supplies that were neither serviceable nor fit for reclamation were put in Class D. The first three classes were ultimately returned to the parent supply service for processing and reissue, while the quartermaster salvage officer in each base section retained Class D. To refine salvage procedures still further, priorities were set up to govern the recovery of Allied and enemy supplies alike. Generally, AFHQ assigned jerricans and optical, signal, and electrical equipment the highest value, and the theater commander was permitted to retain any captured materials or equipment he desired for training purposes.
Before anything could be done with salvage it had to be cleared from the battlefield. Like all other aspects of logistical support, recovery work varied with terrain and tactical conditions. In a war of rapid movement or in mountain warfare problems were magnified, and when combat troops were too busy to clear their own sector this responsibility was given over to semimobile Quartermaster salvage collection companies. To effect a smoother transfer, a steady effort was made to move Quartermaster salvage collectors closer to the front and also to lighten their work by sending into the advance areas mobile salvage repair companies capable of making repairs on the spot. Two other types of Quartermaster units—laundry companies and sterilization and bath companies—became partners in the salvage program.12
Salvage recovery lagged behind all other Quartermaster services in North Africa. A year after TORCH the War Department was alarmed at the mounting piles of unprocessed scrap metal in Oran, Bizerte, and Palermo. The scrap was not flowing to the United States. An Army Service Forces officer arrived in Oran to survey the situation and found that recovery techniques had long been the heart of the problem. He challenged NATOUSA’s policy of continuing to make the Quartermaster organization completely responsible for the recovery program. Specialists at Eastern Base Section had for a considerable period been aware that salvage in Tunisia consisted largely of ordnance matériel, most of which proved too large, too heavy, and too specialized to be handled by the two collecting companies as they were then staffed, equipped, and trained. Company four-ton salvage wreckers could not move tanks, airplanes, and bridging equipment from the countryside to major roads and from the roads to salvage yards. To help them, the collectors had
borrowed ordnance wreckers and recovery vehicles as well as signal and engineering equipment. Without cutting torches, bolt clippers, and heavy jacks, as well as technicians capable of cutting heavy metals or deactivating the ingenious mines and booby traps frequently attached to abandoned equipment, the work was slow.
For a long time NATOUSA resisted suggestions that heavy salvage work be transferred to the Ordnance Department. It proposed instead to create a Quartermaster salvage recovery company (special) which would have the personnel and tools to move tank hulks, disassemble them, cut armor plate, bolts, and rivets, and strip, recover, and prepare scrap for shipment. NATOUSA planned to use the special unit for completing the job in Tunisia, then in Sicily, and finally in Italy. But on 8 September 1943 NATOUSA itself restricted the activation of provisional units, and the special recovery company stayed on paper. A fortnight later, the War Department revised the Table of Organization of the regular collecting company. While a step in the right direction, this change still left the company woefully inadequate to handle heavy salvage jobs such as had been encountered in Tunisia.13
It was mid-February 1943 before the 226th Salvage Collection Company arrived in Tunisia. Since the II Corps was withdrawing behind Kasserine Pass and an effective recovery program was impossible, the 226th had little to do at first. McNamara clung to his original salvage plan. Once fighting had dwindled, this called for the divisions to recover and evacuate their own salvage. Then rear-bound trucks would reduce the divisional piles by hauling scrap to Tébessa, where the 226th would classify and repair it. But if the plan was simple, its execution was not. By mid-April the II Corps had left behind an area in central Tunisia covering more than 3,000 square miles, twice fought over and littered with damaged and abandoned equipment. Shuttling combat troops to the Bizerte front had left little time for salvage recovery.
Salvage discipline within the 1st Armored Division, to cite only one example, was poor. Units failed either to deposit their waste materials along the main supply routes or evacuate them to corps dumps. A month after Bizerte’s fall the El Guettar—Gafsa battlefield was still strewn with hundreds of tons of valuable property. One officer wrote: “We are wasting millions of dollars in failing to pick up material from the battlefield ... our trucks carry ammunition and supplies to the front and then return unloaded.” Another quipped that the evacuation program would have been considerably improved if soldiers had hunted for salvage as they did for souvenirs. Hungry for battlefield mementos, American soldiers stripped prisoners, dead or alive. One soldier was seen removing the Nazi swastika from a Messerschmitt’s tail with the aid of a kitchen type of can opener. In their search for altimeters, clocks, speedometers, and name plates on newly
captured airplanes, looters often left behind a mass of unidentifiable junk for intelligence teams to survey.14
After Bizerte fell, SOS NATOUSA instituted an elaborate battlefield clearance program. At first the mission was assigned to the few remaining combat troops. But without making much progress the infantry left for Sicily. The job then fell to Eastern Base Section’s General Depot 4. Under a single command, teams of ordnance, engineer, transportation, signal, and medical troops worked side by side with the 226th and 227th QM Salvage Collection Companies. The battlefield was marked off into sectors following the grid system found on military maps. Eastern Base Section assigned each surveying team a sector to reconnoiter. Teams were instructed to provide overlays indicating the location and nature of salvage. By making a map mosaic, recovery points were determined. When the 226th and 227th completed their task, mom long tons had been evacuated, the bulk of it spent ammunition. Of the remaining tonnage, to percent included motor parts, to percent gasoline containers, 2 percent clothing, and 15 percent miscellaneous scrap. From metals unwanted in the United States, NATOUSA realized a sum of almost two million dollars by sales to French authorities.15
Salvage collection in Sicily during the course of the campaign improved slightly. The first collecting company, the 232nd, landed in Palermo on 6 August 1943. A backlog of accumulated clothing, shoes, and typewriters for repair—not collecting—faced the 232nd. To the combat units “QM’s were QM’s” and it made no difference that the 232nd was a collecting unit if there was a big repair job to be done. So without any trained repairmen, without equipment, and without directions, the 232nd began collecting spare parts, secondhand machines, and tools to repair clothing, shoes, and typewriters. Late in August, the men of the 232nd became collectors once again. Even then the unexpected dogged their steps. The 232nd was a light salvage company, but heavy work faced it beyond Palermo. As in Tunisia, quartermasters found that more trucks and larger wreckers were needed to handle battered tanks, field guns, and self-propelled artillery. Cutting through this heavy material with torches was barely possible, but took too long and was too expensive; demolition was faster and easier. Two experts from a nearby Ordnance bomb disposal company therefore were attached to the 232nd. Teamwork had the happy effect of helping both services. In blowing heavy scrap into pieces, the concussions in the junk piles set off a few hidden booby traps and land mines.
Searching teams, augmented by Italians, hunted for scrap steel and aluminum on the basis of sections marked off on a map of Sicily by the base section salvage officer. The 232nd searched the Italian quartermaster depot at San Cataldo, the ration dumps at Prizzi, the rail yards at Napola, and the airfield
complex around Trapani. All salvage collected was hauled daily to the nearest railroad siding and loaded on flatcars. At Palermo, the 232nd cut the metal scrap to size and prepared it for shipment to other ports for final disposition.16
The Italian campaign provided a better example of battlefield clearance and, even more, of salvage repair in combat than had that in North Africa. Commanded by Capt. Harris J. North, the 230th Salvage Collecting Company was the key organization of its type under Sullivan’s command. The 230th came to be known respectfully as “Fifth Army’s junkmen.” Arriving in Naples on to October 1943, it sent one platoon to Avellino and left another in Naples. The remainder of the company moved to Caserta where it operated the Fifth Army base salvage depot until April 1944. North subdivided his base depot into three operational sections. A receiving section segregated such items as headgear, webbing, and herringbone twill clothing; the classification section determined the serviceability and reparability of individual pieces; and the shipping section moved the materials to the next destination. Two new classifications were added by Fifth Army to the four used in North Africa: enemy salvage, now obtained in ever-increasing quantities, was designated Class I; Class X was a further refinement of Class C, and included those items which were to be repaired but distributed only to noncombat groups such as Italian service troops and working civilians.
The evacuation of salvage utilized the return trip of the ration transport system. At ration railheads troops of the 230th maintained well-guarded and sheltered salvage dumps, where they could sack or bundle unpackaged materials. From these recovery points they delivered clothing which could be readily used to the nearby mobile laundries For cleaning. These in turn transferred laundered articles to the clothing exchanges. Salvage requiring additional processing moved from the ration railheads to the army base dump aboard homebound trucks or freight cars. Teams from the 230th often received special assignments. As in Tunisia, they plotted the fields over which the Fifth Army had passed. Section by section, village by village, house by house, they carried out their assignments. The teams promptly transmitted to ordnance experts information as to the location of ammunition dumps, unexploded bombs, projectiles, booby traps, and wrecked vehicles.
South of Cassino combat salvage operations assumed proportions which Sullivan described as “tremendous, apparently far beyond our capacity to handle. The stuff is coming down off the mountains at the rate of about twelve to fourteen truckloads a day.” During two weeks in January 1944 his teams recovered and repaired more than a million dollars’ worth of quartermaster supplies. Because divisions encountered difficulties in clearing their sectors, corps troops helped them. From December 1943 to March 1944, the II Corps dispatched special trucks to divisions possessing salvage in quantities beyond the transport means of the quartermaster company and sent out another fleet of vehicles to
police roadsides. For almost a month in the spring of 1944 the II Corps detailed 150 Italian service troops to battlefield clearance while another group of Italians using pack trains evacuated salvage from advance positions. Salvage teams reconnoitered mountain trails as well as roads for supplies which had been abandoned or scattered when vehicles overturned or mules bolted. In these relatively remote regions salvage parties arranged for speedy evacuation of property lest it be lost to the vagaries of the weather or to battlefield scavengers.17
At Anzio, where the full complement of services could not be maintained, the recovery program was necessarily less thorough. Here collectors were so few that they could not be used to locate or evacuate discarded supplies. Fatigue details could only separate the salvage brought in by the combat units and ship by LSTs bound for Naples that which required repair.18
Throughout all these recovery operations one work steadily progressed: salvage repair. The Fifth Army advanced what the 232nd had begun in Palermo. Although Sullivan received no repair companies during the first nine months in Italy, he knew that sufficient quantities of quartermaster equipment would be available to him only if he conducted processing and renovation work. Secondhand items rather than new supplies could be used while older equipment was being repaired. To this end, the 230th initiated a program far beyond its original mission. By exploitation of local resources, by improvisation of sundry types of equipment, and by using space wherever it could be found, this versatile unit began the repair of clothing, tools, office machines, helmets, mess kits and canteens, stoves, saddles and harnesses, gasoline and water cans, webbing, cots, and tents. Indeed the Fifth Army to a considerable extent liberated itself from Peninsular Base Section’s reclamation program.19
Sullivan’s first salvage repair depot opened at Caserta in October 1943. From the receipt and classification of the various items to their ultimate disposition, it operated on an assembly line plan. For the renovation of clothing, by far the most extensive of repair activities, space was utilized wherever it was found. A spaghetti factory provided shop space for drying thousands of pieces of clothing under heating pipes. In terms of volume, starting with field jackets and continuing in successive order, wool trousers, fatigue trousers, fatigue suits, fatigue jackets, wool shirts, wool underwear, overcoats, and combat jackets were the major clothing items repaired. Many obstacles had to be overcome before the clothing repair depot worked smoothly. Caserta lacked electricity. Flatirons had to be heated
over crude charcoal stoves which required constant fanning. Mending of clothing depended on the employment of Italian women who either brought their own sewing machines to the factory or took work home. In either place the seamstresses worked in unheated rooms. At the factory the stone floors and glassless windows added to the workers’ chill and discomfort. Quartermasters provided partial relief by covering the factory’s open windows with cellophane from salvaged protective gas capes and by permitting the seamstresses to wear some of the mended clothing.
All branches of the salvage depot demonstrated their ingenuity in the recovery of serviceable parts from irreparable equipment and their placement in usable equipment—a process which was known as “cannibalization”—and in the improvisation of new items and tools. By using wool from a badly worn blanket and the zipper from an old field jacket, seamstresses tailored vests for combat infantrymen. The workers exploited the smallest of scrap goods. To cushion the telltale jingle of two clanging aluminum dog tags swinging freely around the neck chain of men on night patrols, needleworkers fashioned tiny cloth pouches. Every week, on the average, artisans thumped out dents in 1,500 aluminum mess kits and reclaimed Boo canteen cups. Corroded kits were dipped in a lye solution, then rinsed, redipped in a weak nitric acid solution, rinsed again, and hung up to dry. Soldiers who passed the shop were unaware that the shiny, new-looking kits had been a heap of blackened scrap metal a few hours before. Eighty-five percent of all aluminum kits could be repaired and returned to stock. By dint of 145 pounds of compressed air per inch, workers restored depressed aluminum canteens. In a separate yard, tents—critical items throughout the war—were dried, classified, patched, strengthened in the seams, provided with new rope, and waterproofed, sometimes within a matter of hours. A single typewriter shop, employing skilled Italian repairmen, boasted that it drew no new spare parts. All were cannibalized from Class D machines.20
Repair projects eventually exceeded the 230th’s capacity. The strain was even greater during the sweep to the Arno. To lend assistance, Peninsular Base Section released the 299th Salvage Repair Company from the depot at Secondigliano in July 1944. Sullivan pressed the company into work at his army depot and restored the 230th to its collecting chores. Accompanying Fifth Army up the peninsula, stopping temporarily at Civitavecchia and Piombino, the 299th finally settled in Florence where it passed the second winter, training and supervising fifteen hundred employees and amassing approximately 400,000 square feet of working space.
Late in 1944 MTOUSA believed that the Fifth Army should be relieved of all those facilities which Peninsular Base Section could staff and operate. Sullivan fought the proposal; insisting that he was unprepared to relinquish his repair train until the army advanced, he argued:
... If I can repair every last item of Fifth Army Salvage within the Army area and still keep my installations mobile, I intend to do so. If PBS would follow us closely with closely supporting installations where evacuation would be simplified, I would have no objection to reducing my activity to the minimum. My salvage has immediate value to the Army. If long lines of communication with no intermediate base establishments are in the picture, I think a plan to ship everything to the rear is ridiculous. Also if salvage were shipped to the rear and I could get resupply without voluminous requisition, verification, reverification and long waiting I would not object. I haven’t been convinced to date that such will ever be the case while PBS operates as it does.21
The 900,000 articles of Class C equipment repaired within the army’s boundaries, Sullivan held, represented stores which were either in constant demand or essential because of seasonal or sudden weather changes. Local repair meant a speedier turnover of used equipment and a reduction in calls for new supplies. Furthermore, Sullivan issued Class C clothing in response to urgent unfilled requisitions. The Fifth Army, for example, issued field jackets, underwear, shoes, and leggings to French, Brazilian, and Italian troops within hours after NATOUSA had approved the delivery of equipment originally intended for American troops alone. Similarly, Sullivan replenished without delay all the 88th Division’s stocks which had been burned by an incendiary bomb. Finally, the savings in transportation provided him with another justification. In little more than a year
2,200 truckloads of Class C clothing had been renovated within Sullivan’s salvage works. Considerable quantities now lay in the Class II and IV depot awaiting issue. To the Fifth Army, this represented a saving of 341,000 truck-miles.22
Improvements in combat zone salvage repair did not end with the establishment of repair works inside the army area. Experience in North Africa, where the field range became clogged because of prolonged use of leaded gasoline, taught that substantial savings of time and supplies could be achieved if mobile repair sections roved among the commands. Shortly after arriving in Naples, Sullivan formed a mobile four-man team equipped with adequate tools and parts to visit units on a prearranged schedule and help them inspect and maintain field ranges. A 2½-ton truck bed was rebuilt as a workshop fitted out with a bench, a parts cabinet, and a rack for welding and cutting tools. Enlisted men who had been given specialized training at one of the depots took their journeymen’s training with a regiment in the 34th Infantry Division. Sullivan put them to work on the field range project, and between December 1943 and April 1944 they restored almost fifteen hundred ranges to service. In May and June the team reconditioned every field range belonging to the 88th Infantry Division.
Sullivan inaugurated two other programs in 1944. Both were rewarding. A typewriter and office machine repair team, carrying tools, an air compressor, and a trailer-mounted work bench, traveled among the units of the II and IV
Corps. The mechanics repaired ten machines a day. In northern Italy Sullivan organized two mobile shoe repair teams, one of which was assigned to each of the corps. During a thirty-four day period in October and November 1944, the unit working for the II Corps in the vicinity of the ration dump received 4,000 pairs of shoes, of which 2,700 were repaired and 1,300 classed as salvage. Its accomplishments received well-deserved publicity through the armed forces’ radio network.23
Although the Fifth Army’s programs were the more praised because they reflected what could be achieved along a static, mountainous front, salvage and repair activities in the base sections yielded greater returns in volume. While fighting raged in Tunisia, Mediterranean Base Section operated nine salvage dumps, one in each of the major supply centers at Oujda, Arzew, Mostaganem, Perrégaux, Relizane, Orleansville, and Algiers, and two in Oran. One of the Oran depots specialized in cloth and leather items, the other in scrap metals of all shapes and sizes, including even toothpaste tubes.
Lacking organic repairmen for the renovation and repair of clothing and equipment during the first few months in North Africa, the Mediterranean Base salvage officer negotiated with contractors for laundry and dry cleaning at Oujda, for shoe repairing at Sidi Bel Abbès and Oran, and for both services at Algiers. Later, when space and equipment from several semimobile trailers became available, he terminated the contracts and combined a variety of services in a single plant. This effort was short-lived. The quantity of salvage increased the longer Tunisian operations continued, and soon the job exceeded the capabilities of military manpower. Again, the salvage officer resorted to civilian contracts. Algerian and Moroccan natives, French and Spanish refugees, and Italian prisoners of war comprised the labor forces. Their work was satisfactory only when supervision was strict and sustained. Because of language barriers, American methods and work standards were difficult to communicate. Since there was no alternative to using whatever labor was available, the salvage program was often inefficiently carried out. Workers in the coastal cities were unable to cope with the muddy and torn tents retrieved from southern Tunisia, which accumulated in mounting piles. Finally, during several trips into the desert the salvage officer recruited nomadic Arab tentmakers whose methods were primitive but fairly effective. Adding their handiwork to that of day laborers who either brightened the tents with brushes and on scrubbing boards or folded and packed them for reissue, quartermasters soon restored what had once been a deteriorating heap of canvas and cord.
Salvage developed into a big business at Naples. Lt. Col. William E. Ela, having arrived on 3 October 1943 from Casablanca, was named Chief, Salvage
and Reclamation Branch, Quartermaster Section, Peninsular Base Section. Subsequently Ela supervised 8 laundry companies, 5 salvage repair companies, 4 salvage collecting companies, 1 sterilization company, and 2 fumigation and bath companies. Later 6 Italian POW companies, 7 Italian service units, 23 German POW companies, and 4,000 civilians joined in Ela’s program. At Bagnoli, west of Naples, the 819th Sterilization and Bath Company became the first to engage in salvage work by receiving and classifying clothing and equipment ten days after the fall of Naples. Because Ela’s spreading works attracted enemy aircraft and jeopardized the safety of the nearby medical center, he moved his depot ten miles inland to a former Italian barracks in Secondigliano, on the highway leading out of Naples to Aversa. Here the depot lay close to Sullivan’s salvage dump. On 16 November 1943 the 299th Salvage Repair Company arrived at Secondigliano, and within ten days it was repairing 500 pairs of shoes daily, processing 600 garments, servicing 220 office machines, and renovating 90 tents. By the first week in December more than 2,000 tons of clothing in need of mending had accumulated at the depot. Meantime Ela rented 30 sewing machines from an Italian merchant, canvassed Naples for typewriter repairmen, advertised for baling machines, and imported a surplus shoe repair trailer and crew from Atlantic Base Section in Morocco.
With each passing month the 299th encountered extraordinary problems and additional tasks. Within minutes enemy bombers in December converted 500 tons of quartermaster equipment into 250 tons of salvage. Of this remainder the 299th reclaimed 80 percent. The incident gave birth to Ela’s first Neapolitan labor force, which mushroomed from 200 employees in 1943 to a maximum of 2,200 in 1945. In January 1944 whipping winds weakened and wrenched more than 4,000 wall tents. These were promptly patched by the 220th Salvage Repair Company, which had recently arrived from Tunisia. From Anzio the 299th and 220th received daily as many as too trucks, loaded indiscriminately with battlefield litter which had to be sorted and classified before moving along the repair cycle. In April salvage tonnage rose. Relief was provided by the addition of the 219th Repair Company. May brought a tidal wave of winter woolens as the troops donned summer-weight uniforms. On the eve of the taking of Rome, Ela reported to Bare that well over 80 percent of all salvage at Secondigliano had gone back into stock. Although the results of his first six months in Naples were impressive, Colonel Ela concluded that “the salvage program is still in its infancy. As the campaign is well in its second year, the quantity of clothing and equipage that require salvage is constantly increasing.”24
There was a lull in the fighting in July 1944, following the capture of Leghorn. As already noted, the opportunity was taken to shift the 299th forward to the Fifth Army. Meanwhile the 219th and 220th Salvage Repair Companies, the 819th Sterilization and Bath Company, and the 2nd Italian Salvage Repair Company carried the heavy load at Naples, where most of Seventh Army
Table 5: Salvage Repair by Peninsular Base Section: Selected Items, 1 December 1943–30 June 1945
| Item | Number | Estimated Savings | Unit Cost |
| Total | 5,830,488 | $15,134,506 | |
| Shirts, cotton khaki | 1,193,412 | 1,766,433 | $1.89 |
| Trousers | 1,034,175 | 2,044,276 | 2.40 |
| Shirts, wool | 866,702 | 2,093,511 | 4.35 |
| Trousers, wool | 1,064,052 | 2,777,770 | 4.85 |
| Boots, combat | 1,318,267 | 2,260,535 | 6.74 |
| Raincoats | 280,720 | 291,589 | 4.51 |
| Tents, pyramid | 73,160 | 3,900,392 | 80.00 |
* Estimated savings were based upon difference between cost of making repairs and the value of new items in the zone of interior. Thus even the cost of transatlantic shipping was excluded, and the value of supplies at the far end of a long and hazardous logistical pipeline was completely ignored. Possibly the prices paid by Italians at U.S. Army auctions of “unrepairable” salvage reflected true values more accurately. At Naples late in 1943, shoes, service, Class D, were sold for $15.00 a pair. The unit cost (new) for this item was $9.95.
Source: (1) Hist QM PBS, p. 165. (2) Price List, AR 30-3000, 16 Oct 44.
embarked for the DRAGOON operation. During this same period the capacity of the 220th was multiplied many times by converting it from a mobile to a fixed unit. This step elevated most of its men to foremen over Italian workers, but the 220th retained its mobile trailers, sending them forward to Leghorn with a skilled cadre in September.25 During the next month the major portion of the unit was reunited in that city and two Italian repair companies also arrived, taking over the operation of the tent, shoe, and webbing shops. At Leghorn, Ela’s repairmen and supervisors had an excellent location with covered shop space exceeding 70,000 square feet. It was laid out to permit production line operations. Gradually more equipment was obtained including cranes and conveyors to handle the mounting stacks of jerricans and oil drums. Within a few months the workload at Leghorn justified the construction of two large temporary buildings, expanding the indoor working space to more than 100,000 square feet. Repair of jerricans passed the 800-cans-a-day mark in February 1945, and by April the Leghorn depot was returning 1,000 bales of salvage clothing a day to stock.26
Peninsular Base Section conservatively estimated that during the period from 1 December 1943 to 30 June 1945 a representative portion of its salvage operations, involving only seven major items, had saved the U.S. Army over $15,000,000. (Table 5) While Ela’s program had stressed reclamation and return of articles to stock, the disposal of goods that had either outlived their usefulness or were
unwanted in the United States was an activity not to be ignored. From an initial sale of $50.00 worth of fats and greases to a Neapolitan soapmaker in December 1943, Ela’s sales activities expanded to an enterprise that had grossed two million dollars by May 1945. At public auctions quartermasters gave Italians the opportunity to obtain bottles, rags, tin cans, scrap rubber, and even heavy metal plates. Aircraft provided Italian industry with a sizable amount of scrap aluminum. Garbage and spoiled foods were sold for feed to animals and for the manufacture of soap. In February 1944, the Remount Service rejected 110 horses and mules. The animals were herded into a rural district. Handbills were circulated. The first auction proved as popular with the Italians as it was profitable ($50,000.00) to the Americans. So Ela repeated the auctions at six-week intervals.
In November 1944 Allied commissioners replaced the auctions with a different system. In order to obtain a wider and more equitable distribution than had proved possible by public sales, which unavoidably favored a comparatively few high bidders, Italian authorities designated the industries which could buy Class D salvage. Although the larger part of the scrap metals went into Italian industrial rehabilitation, much was returned to the U.S. Army in the form of aluminum pistons, butcher knives, chisels, space heaters, grates, drawbars and spare parts.27
Salvage units had low priorities for the DRAGOON operation, and arrived rather late in southern France. When separate troop lists were set up for CONAD and Delta Base on 25 September 1944, only three salvage repair companies and no collecting companies were available to the two headquarters. By late October, typewriter, clothing, and shoe repair installations were operating in the Dijon area, but the major salvage center of CONAD was established at Vesoul during the following month. Here the 223rd Salvage Repair Company supervised the activities of two service companies, and ultimately of five Italian salvage companies, received the valuable assistance of several laundry units, and coordinated activities with a French salvage installation. It repaired tents, mess kits, field ranges, and jerricans and received an average of forty carloads of salvage each week from Seventh Army and three carloads from 1st French Army. Meanwhile the 227th Salvage Collecting Company and the 232nd and 592nd Salvage Repair Companies operated still farther forward, at Sarrebourg, Nancy, and Lunéville. Because of transportation shortages, salvage repair operations were concentrated in the forward area to a maximum extent. In October and November, when the new M-1943 clothing was being issued and vast amounts of older garments were turned in, Delta Base loaned the 3068th Salvage Repair Company to CONAD. By early December this unit had returned from Vesoul to Marseille, where its main duties were repairs for service troops within the base section.28
Spare Parts
Of the many logistical lessons, one of the most difficult to communicate was
that a highly mechanized army depended almost as much on an uninterrupted flow of spare and interchangeable parts as it did on rations, fuels, and ammunition. For quartermasters, the lesson came early in North Africa when mechanical difficulties of the field range and bakery oven were compounded by the absence of replacement parts. After Tunisia the first replacement factor study which Middleswart presented to the War Department embraced parts for the field range. He listed ninety-five separate items that were in short supply, presumably because War Department allowances as of June 1943 did not reflect Tunisian experience. Shortages reappeared in Sicily. Even when the theater was eighteen months old and machinery was that much more worn, little improvement could be claimed.29 In a tone of desperation Sullivan wrote to Middleswart on the eve of the breakthrough toward Rome:
The question of repair parts for our laundry, bakeries, S&B units, etc., has been brought to my attention. I have written you regarding the problem and discussed it with you on your visits here.... Why can’t you get repair parts? We have requisitions still outstanding from as far back as October of last year, with requisitions for each month thereafter submitted and no parts received. ... We have been able to keep our units going by improvisation and sheer luck. ... However this cannot go on indefinitely.30
Unpleasant as this situation was, Sullivan made no attempt to keep it a secret; only the day before he had dispatched a stern note to OQMG:
... the flow of spare parts for the present laundries, British bakeries, sterilization and bath units, and for other mechanical units put out by the Quartermaster is terrible beyond words. ... Now please, find out who is responsible for the supply of spare parts to the mechanical units ... go around to this gentleman and tell him that we don’t need any more production until they get caught up on spare parts.31
The Quartermaster General sought to determine whether the spare parts had been shipped to NATOUSA or sidetracked at New York. From the available records, General Gregory claimed that enough parts had been shipped to provide for one year’s maintenance. He concluded that the shortage was attributable to a faulty distribution system within the theater, to a high mortality rate resulting from continuous operation of equipment, and to a lack of efficient maintenance and operating personnel. NATOUSA did not deny that logistical hazards contributed to the lag between the submission of requisitions and the delivery of parts. Time was lost Sullivan pointed out, when vessels Were diverted from their original destinations. The relatively few boxes of spare parts were difficult to spot amidst the thousands of commodity containers.
Quartermaster operations were often seriously handicapped and at times suspended because spare parts failed to arrive. For example, in January 1944 Sullivan submitted requisitions to ETOUSA for a stock of spare parts for
British-made bakery equipment. After waiting for the parts for almost six months he was ready to replace the trailer-mounted British equipment with the far less mobile M1942 model. To Littlejohn, Sullivan wrote: “I do not intend to continue to be responsible for the maintenance of equipment for which I am unable to obtain spare parts.”32 Although Sullivan had repeated his order with regularity, the shipment was not made until June 1944, and then the containers were lost in transit. Not until November—ten months after the original request—were the parts successfully shipped by air. Difficulties originated in another quarter. In August 1944, a 66,000-pound shipment of spare parts for laundry equipment, presumably unloaded at Civitavecchia, was misplaced, and an extensive search of Fifth Army’s dumps failed to locate these urgently needed supplies. Middleswart’s remedy, in part at least, lay in the recommendation that his 75-day level of spare parts be raised to a 6-month level. This had the support of the OQMG but it was denied by Army Service Forces.33
Two spare parts depots, one in Oran and the other at Naples, were opened by NATOUSA in the spring of 1944. The former, Middleswart designated as his central depot, much to the chagrin of those who thought this vital stock should be situated “where the fighting is going on” and close enough to eliminate the two-month period in which spare parts were ferried from North Africa to Italy. The Neapolitan depot opened on 1 April 1944 and remained there until 1 January 1945, when it moved to Leghorn. Designed to issue salvaged supplies and spare parts for fixed laundries, typewriters, and office machines, as well as equipment for mobile laundries, sterilization and bath trailers, and refrigeration, bakery, and salvage repair vans, the depot ultimately carried twelve thousand different spare parts for almost sixty major items of Quartermaster equipment.34
Indicating how new problems grew out of solutions to old ones, the purchase of Italian machinery also led to the search for appropriate spare parts. A chore from the outset, this search became even more difficult as the demand rose. Not only were stocks more precious but parts dealers were also known to charge from five to ten times the original price; indeed, in some instances, the Quartermaster Section suspected that many errant parts appearing on the market had recently rested in their own depot racks. An attempt to fashion spare parts locally, on a contractual basis, was an imperfect solution since the prices were again high notwithstanding
the fact that the Americans furnished raw materials. Furthermore, the finished product was rarely engineered with sufficient precision to function properly when assembled in the larger piece of machinery.35
If the situation had improved by the end of 1944 or early 1945, it cannot be demonstrated by the evidence. Spare parts teams sent to the theater noted that the Fifth Army was not permitted to maintain stocks of replacement parts and that deliveries to Sullivan were still delayed by inadequate inventories at Peninsular Base Section. This was especially true of spare parts for mobile laundries, bakeries, clothing and textile repair units, and sterilization, bath, and shoe repair trailers. All too often, another observer noted, machinery worked only through the mending of tinkers or the improvising of technicians. Concluding that the spare parts problem was not generally understood, he thought it small consolation that “this feeling of frustration was not evident ... in any of the other Quartermaster activities.”36
Spare parts organization in the south of France followed the Mediterranean pattern. A single warehouse at Marseille contained all spare parts received from the United States. They were controlled items, sent forward only after requisitions were approved by the SOLOC quartermaster. After inspecting the installation in February 1945, General Littlejohn noted that it was “well organized, but has insufficient stocks. Specifically, has no bakery parts.” Meanwhile the CONAD quartermaster had arranged for the Ordnance Section to provide parts and to perform repairs on field ranges, stoves, and similar equipment. Beginning in mid-December 1944, both salvaged and captured materiel in these categories were turned over to that organization, which had requisitioned several French arsenals and automotive factories and had ample workshop facilities. The amounts involved, never more than thirty tons in a two week’s reporting period, were too small to appear in Ordnance activity reports, but represented a major service to the Quartermaster Section.37
Four-Legged Soldiers
In an Army moving toward complete mechanization, the reversion to pack trains and the use of war dogs appeared rather anomalous. The War Department had long debated the utility of horses and mules and procured fewer and fewer of them, but beginning early in 1942, it procured dogs in mounting numbers. In North Africa the Quartermaster Corps introduced the first of its four-legged soldiers—trained sentry dogs —to the battlefield on 8 November 1942. The 3rd Battalion, 10th Infantry, 3rd Division, had obtained four dogs from the Canine Section, Quartermaster Remount Depot, Front Royal, Virginia, before sailing. On board ship, handlers saw
their dogs for the first time, fed them C rations, and engaged in last-minute training. On D-day the dogs proved gun-shy and flinched with fear when the convoy was subjected to aerial bombardment and naval gunfire. Once ashore, each canine sentry clawed out his own foxhole immediately. Behind the lines in the stillness of the next two nights, the dogs walked post. Handlers now praised their sentry work, feeling that the war dogs had remained alert for a greater period of time than the men had. The 3rd Battalion’s commander, Maj. Charles E. Johnson, recommended that in the future dogs should have an opportunity to become accustomed to battle noises, training which he believed had been overlooked at Front Royal. Later, in Italy, a mine dog platoon failed at mine detection work, and commanders reported that they much preferred engineer experts with technical devices for the job. At the war’s end, five war dog platoons, the 33rd, 34th, 35th, 37th, and 38th had served with the Fifth Army, mostly in the Gothic Line. Judging from reports and statements by handlers, messenger and scout dogs were only desirable in static warfare.38
Interest in pack animals as carriers first became pressing when the II Corps deployed on the approaches to Bizerte. With the main roads of the Sedjenane valley interdicted by mines, the both Combat Team, 9th Division, ascended narrow trails so overgrown with scrub brush as to be impenetrable to vehicles. If the Bizerte offensive was to continue on terrain that was more suited to defensive operations, a less conventional method of supply had to be improvised.39 Describing the same problem after similar experience in Sicily, Maj. Gen. Clarence R. Huebner, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, wrote:
It is impossible for infantry to operate exclusively in tank country when there is danger of an enemy tank attack; therefore, infantry must seek out tank-proof localities. The tank-proof localities normally include commanding terrain. To enable the 81mm. mortar and its ammunition to follow the infantry into rough country, mules, equipped with ... pack saddles must be available.
Engineers normally follow closely behind the advancing infantry preparing trails which will permit supplies to be carried by ¼-ton C&R trucks. Until these trails are built, the only means of providing ammunition and rations is by mule or light animal transportation. Once these trails have been completed, the only use for the mule is to supply isolated patrols or detachments and to further the advance of the infantry elements.40
In Tunisia commanders and Quartermaster planners had not fully anticipated the use of pack animals. The beasts could not come from the United States. Shipping was already scarce and if vessels were altered to transport livestock and their forage, the problem of shipping would become even more involved. For
that reason animals, forage, and equipment had to come from the countryside. Finding offspring of the male donkey and mare was just the beginning of the problem. Few quartermasters reared in a machine age knew how to organize a pack train. Nor could they find many experienced muleteers among the combat troops. For the Sedjenane valley advance, the G-4 of II Corps provided a remount fund of $150,000. McNamara’s agents successfully negotiated in the towns of Le Kef, Souk el Arba, Aïn Draham, Bédja, Tabarka, Souk Ahras, and Bône for 218 mules, 95 donkeys, 28 horses, 285 packsaddle sets, and 24 tons of forage. The prices paid for animals and remount supplies mainly reflected their local value and the willingness of Arab owners to sell or rent them. Mules and horses rented for 50 francs ($1.00) per day, donkeys were purchased at prices ranging from $295 to $385, packsaddles were borrowed, and forage was furnished by the British as reciprocal aid.41
In Sicily, west of Mount Etna where the terrain was mountainous, the Seventh Army used mule trains even more extensively than the II Corps had done in Tunisia. A small number of animals came from Bizerte, but most of Patton’s 4,000 beasts of burden bore the brand of Mussolini’s army. Others were commandeered along the route of advance or were bought or rented from liberated Sicilians. The latter transaction marked an improvement over the II Corps’ methods. In company with an American veterinarian, procurement officers of the divisions traveled from town to town—Alimena, St. Caterina, Sierra di Falco, and San Catelda, to cite the itinerary of the 3rd Infantry Division’s procurement section—directing the native police to corral pack animals. In the presence of an official, an Italian veterinarian, and the animal’s owner, arrangements were made for the animals’ sale or rental. The customary fee was 50 lire per day, but each animal was appraised and an agreement reached that the owner would be paid a specified amount if the animal was lost or killed. The average prices were $150 per mule, $120 per horse, and $40 per donkey. The 3rd Division also rented carts and wagons at $60 and saddles at $40. With the understanding that their property would be returned, most owners painted or branded their animals. In Sicily, more than a third were killed by enemy action and many other animals were rendered unserviceable because of bad feet, saddlesores, or general debility.42
Animal transport also proved to be necessary in Italy. With years of experience behind them, the Germans were demonstrating the advantage that 4,000 animals per infantry division could give in terrain unfavorable to mechanized trains. General Clark saw the lesson. Having been in Italy less than a week, he told his chief of staff: “I am impressed with the pack train which the 3rd Division has. We are going to need more of this type of transportation.”
From Caserta, initially, Tate set the Fifth Army’s estimate at 1,300 mules. Filling the G-4 request was another matter. Sullivan’s first call on Painter asked for goo pack animals. For these the Quartermaster Section, Peninsular Base Section, wholly unfamiliar with animal matters, scoured the Neapolitan area for three weeks, sent agents to Sicily, and called upon the inexperienced Civil Affairs commissioners of AFHQ to set up an allocation policy on animals, forage, and equipment. Because of these hampering factors only 316 mules reached the Fifth Army during November 1943. Concurrently, the French Expeditionary Corps arrived, ascended into the Apennines, and, being more familiar with animal trains, insisted on receiving good remounts. In Naples, Painter immediately raised his estimates to 20,000 animals, searched for ex-cavalrymen to tend his animal lines, sought veterinarians, and called on Middleman to obtain a remount squadron from the United States.43
Painter was attempting to establish a remount service when most minds were on jeeps, trucks, and petroleum. The War Department, Middleman reported, carried no remount squadrons on its active rolls. Painter immediately sought relief from Italy’s manpower and U.S. replacement depots. Shoes, nails, halters, and saddles were just as scarce as men and mules, and at first a weird assortment of tack and gear was assembled. Initially, such good grain stocks as had not been carried off by the Germans
were claimed by Allied commissioners. Fields of local forage yielded roughage of poor quality. Having consumed poor Italian feed, the 3rd Division’s ill-shod mules lost some fifty pounds each during their first November fortnight of work. Two months later the situation was no better, and Clark wanted action. Each ascending ridge of the Apennines had cost many lives, and the squads holding the gains had to be supplied by pack animals or the outposts sacrificed.
Such persuasive appeals prodded the Fifth Army and Peninsular Base Section to accelerate the delivery of sound pack trains. Sullivan exhausted all local resources. Allied commissioners, who necessarily had to screen and control all animal bidders, hurried plans to obtain mules outside Italy. Two Sardinian trains, each containing boo animals, arrived on the mainland. Yet Italy itself remained the prime source of supply. Early in December 1943 Painter finally found an American officer to head the Quartermaster Remount Service, Peninsular Base Section. This man was Lt. Col. Sebe J. Houghton, an ex-cavalryman, who had served five years on the Cavalry Board in Washington.
Painter had created the Remount Service without the guidance of a War Department Table of Organization and Equipment or the established experiences of predecessors. Houghton quickly expanded the service. The 2610th and 6742nd Remount Depots, both overhead units, operated stations at Persano, Bagnoli, and Santa Maria. At the end of January Houghton’s agents were purchasing an average of 200 animals each week. On 27 February 1944 the 6742nd established the policy of keeping in its yard 10 percent of the total animal
strength of Fifth Army animals as replacements. Chutes, racks, fences, troughs, and cutting pens were built, and slowly from a small picket line the Remount Service began to grow until eventually it accumulated 15,000 pack animals, of which 11,000 were issued to combat troops. Thousands of animals also went through remount depots for reconditioning or disposal. Less than 2,900 animals arrived from the United States, and these did not work in the field until the last weeks of the war. The 10th Mountain Division had a strength of 200 French and Sardinian horses, 560 American horses, and Soo American mules. The 6742nd and the 2610th also struggled to fill their personnel rosters. Initially, Painter found all replacement depots closed to him. Gradually he received the men, but they were inexperienced and had to be trained on the job. Veterinarians were lacking until May 1944, when the first of them, Maj. Herbert F. Sibert, reported to Houghton. At the same time the first equipment arrived from the United States, consisting of medicines, nails, shoes, and clipping machines. Then the push for Rome began, trucks were used, and the Remount Service momentarily breathed more easily.44
In Italy, the requisitioning and pricing policy was similar to that in Sicily, but initially the scarcity of animals forced Houghton to modify the Army’s traditionally high physical standards. His agents paid as much as $250 for a horse or $300 for a mule that might carry one load of ammunition and then be suited only for the auction block. It might then be sold at a goo percent profit, its carcass later to appear in the black market. In the interests of expediency, too, Houghton had sacrificed his regard for camouflage. In Italy, black and brown mules were rarer than white and grey ones. Initially, pack trains of light-colored animals presented conspicuous targets on ground once held by the enemy and now carefully pinpointed by German artillery. Until an ingenious quartermaster conceived the idea of spraying the animals with a 5 percent solution of potassium permanganate, which effectively darkened and perfumed hair and hide for a month or more, white mules suffered high casualties.
Like good mules, good hay was also at a premium. Toward the end of April 1944 rather daring plans were worked out to get forage from the other side of the Volturno River. Special permission had to be obtained from the Fifth Army for a thousand “hay raiders”—Italian volunteers—to cross the river and enter the combat zone. The operation involved many carts, trucks, baling machines, and other equipment, but the harvest was worth the effort as some 3,500 tons of very scarce hay were gathered. It was placed in a new depot at Falcione Monragoni very close behind the lines.45
For the remainder of the war in Italy, Remount Service was essentially an American coordinating agency to insure that Italian mules and equipment were provided in sufficient quantities for Italian pack units. By the end of 1944, the muleteers of the Fifth Army’s fifteen pack companies, organized according to
American pack unit waiting for Italian muleteers to clear the trail. February 1944.
Italian T/O’s and administered by the 210th Italian Infantry Division, were almost entirely Italian. The fifteen companies were organized into five battalions which in turn were under the 20th Pack Group. In addition to muleteers, these units provided porters for the final stage of delivery to combat units. Each company contained an average of 11 officers and 380 enlisted men, and 260 mules and 12 riding horses. It normally supported a U.S. infantry battalion. There was little that was not of Italian origin. Peninsular Base Section’s stables at Persano, Santa Maria near Capua, Bagnoli, Grosseto, and Pisa were former Italian breeding agencies or race tracks. Most animal equipment was locally made. Feed bags, breast straps, bridles, canvas buckets, halters, and harness buckles originated in the small saddleries of Naples. Even the small and lightweight Italian pack carrier was preferred over the American cargo saddle that was too large for Italian breeds. As was the case in procuring other Class II and IV supplies, Painter, and later Bare, assisted Italian contractors by furnishing them raw materials. Canvas for feed bags was supplied. Coal and iron were
furnished those who forged snaps, rings, rivets, and mule and horse shoes, although the contractor sent his own labor to salvage yards for scrap metal. Similarly, the contractor who agreed to supply oats hired his own help for sacking feed, but the quartermaster provided the bags as well as the transportation to deliver the laborers to and from the job.
At the close of the Po valley campaign, there was an excess of animals. Having retreated hastily, the enemy abandoned thousands of fine draft and riding horses. Many had been brought from Germany and Austria early in the war. Others were of finest Italian breeds. When hostilities ended the Remount Service corralled all animals at San Martino De Spino, formerly an Italian cavalry school. Ultimately Allied commissioners distributed the captured animals among those farmers who had assisted in the liberation of Italy.46 The fact that the last stable closed without one epidemic ever having scourged Remount Service’s herds is evidence enough that quartermasters and veterinarians had accomplished their remount mission in Italy, especially when the multitude of stock sources is considered.
Remount service in southern France dated from 20 October 2944, when Col. Louis G. Gibney landed at Marseille with half of the 6742nd QM Remount Depot. Movement orders from Persano, Italy, had been issued at the beginning of the month, but covered only the ten
officers and fifty enlisted men of the detachment. There was a two weeks’ delay until shipping space could be found for 700 mules, an integral and invaluable part of the unit. At the Delta Base staging area, the depot assumed command over an Italian service unit, and was shortly redesignated the 6835th QM Remount Depot. After a month of comparative inactivity in the coastal area, the 6835th moved to Is-sur-Tille, a rail center near Dijon, where it came under CONAD command and was attached to the 71st QM Base Depot. On 25 November it received the designation Remount Depot Q-581, which had previously identified a similar installation at Pisa, Italy. At Is-sur-Tille, and later at Chaumont and Rambervillers, the 6835th kept a reserve of 600 mules and 50 horses at all times, and maintained a large veterinary hospital and rehabilitation farm. Horses were obtained by local procurement through French agencies and many more were captured and turned in by the combat units. There was an actual surplus of horses and a considerable number were shipped to Italy, but mules were scarce, most of them coming from the United States. Hay and forage were at first procured through French channels, but the quality was unsatisfactory, and beginning in December the depot obtained such supplies through the CONAD purchasing officer.47
Beginning in October 1944, Seventh Army troops in the Vosges encountered conditions similar to those in the
mountains of Italy, and requested pack units for forward support. The 513th QM Pack Company, a Negro unit, was transferred from Italy to the DRAGOON area, arriving in late November. It provided support for the infantry of the 45th and 103rd Divisions, and was the only unit of its type in the European theater.48 Organized under T/O 10-118, this unit had two officers and seventy-five enlisted men, or about one quarter of the strength of the Italian-type units. Since the U.S. unit did not perform porter service, its manpower was ample to handle its T/O allowance of 298 animals. The 513th proved able to handle its rated cargo capacity of twenty tons (five tons per platoon) with excellent efficiency as long as the round trip for the pack animals did not exceed one day.49
Clean Linens and Showers
Among the varied housekeeping duties performed by the Quartermaster Corps, helping the soldier to keep his body and his clothes clean was one of the most basic. But if this service was an obvious one, it was also relatively new. Before the turn of the twentieth century, a detachment at a post, camp, or station hired its own laundresses or made contracts with commercial laundries. In 1909 the Quartermaster Corps established post laundries with funds appropriated for general supplies. During World War I the overseas program expanded to provide delousing and bathing facilities as well. The American Expeditionary Forces realized considerable success with fixed laundries in the communications zone where they were established at the dozen largest salvage depots between Marseille and Brest, but in the use of mobile field units and mechanical devices the Americans lagged far behind the British and French. The best that could be done for the front-line soldier was to replace his soiled outer garments. Washing undergarments and socks remained an individual responsibility. Nothing illustrated the poverty of the bath and laundry program in the combat zone as dramatically as the results of inspections that followed the 1918 armistice. Reports showed that 90 percent of the fighting force had body lice, and a typhus epidemic was feared imminent.
Mobile and Static Laundries
In spite of this ominous development, the War Department gave only desultory consideration after the war to mobile laundries. Everyone knew that immaculate linen had never won battles. When the Medical Department sought assistance in planning for hospital laundry service, the Quartermaster Corps referred The Surgeon General to a laundry machinery manufacturer. This firm indicated that no mobile laundry blueprints were available. Not until after the fall of France in June 1940 did the War Department allocate funds for the purchase of experimental laundries. Shortly afterward new designs assembled a 6-unit laundry on a single vehicle, easily concealed and less vulnerable to air attack. In subsequent months, Quartermaster designers standardized a 10-unit semitrailer, capable of washing 125 pounds of clothing per hour. The War Department then activated laundry
companies, each with 16 semitrailer units, in increasing numbers.50
Throughout the TORCH operation, laundry and dry cleaning services were sadly inadequate. The earliest service units were few in number and NATO-USA necessarily assigned them to the large base section hospitals. Not until the restoration of facilities at major ports were the mobile laundries taken forward, and even then they moved with field hospitals as attachments. Only after cleaning hospital linens could laundry units serve the field forces, and the laundry’s sporadic assistance proved more a hindrance than a help when haste forced the return of loose and scrambled wash. For the most part, the field soldier scrubbed his own things or hired natives, who insisted that soap be provided and charged high prices.
By mid-April 1943 Middleswart had a total of 17 vans at his disposal, but these were too few to provide adequate service within three base sections. Most of the vans remained in Morocco where they had been combined with commercial laundries. With only 11 of its authorized 16 vans, Company D, 61st Laundry Battalion, was the first of its type to operate in Atlantic Base Section. At Casablanca this unit operated a large fixed laundry to which four semitrailers were attached. In January 1943 Company D deployed its other vans to Rabat, Fedala, Safi, and Casablanca when it appeared that the I Armored Corps would play a major security role in that part of Africa.
Initially, D Company refused to accept individual laundry bundles. On a scheduled day of each week, each unit of the I Armored Corps assembled its fatigues, white cottons, and woolens in separate mattress covers and hauled them to the laundry. Thirty-six hours later the roughdry wash was ready. Then the unit separated each individual’s bundle according to the standard Army laundry mark of the soldier’s surname initial and the last four digits of his serial number. By this process once a week each soldier received a laundered shirt, a pair of trousers or a complete fatigue suit, a pair of socks, a towel, an undershirt, and a pair of underdrawers. Daily linen service was given only to dispensaries and hospitals. To handle one large hospital’s laundry, French authorities scheduled an evening shift of workers at one of their military laundries. In the summer of 1943, Atlantic Base Section received equipment for several large laundries, each capable of serving 10,000 men, and a 2,500-man dry cleaning plant. Using packing and crating materials, engineers erected a fixed plant to house the new equipment.
In areas as comparatively undeveloped as North Africa and Sicily, laundry officers encountered countless difficulties in using commercial facilities. Soap powders, bleaches, and soda ash had to be
imported as well as steamfitters to repair antiquated boilers and plumbing. So inadequate were the local plants that even the smallest were commandeered. In Casablanca, a shop operated by one laundress was taken over, notwithstanding the need to assign two soldiers who saw that her operations were not interrupted, correct amounts of soap were measured, only soldiers were served, and just prices were charged. Local conditions were not always at fault. In TORCH planning quartermasters had completely overlooked one aspect of the dry cleaning trade. Civilian shops refused to accept orders unless first issued cleaning fluid. Quartermaster sought such solvents in Ordnance shops. Politely, the issue was refused because solvents were needed for cleaning weapons and engines. When the first two convoys failed to bring Quartermaster cleaning fluids, laundry officers lost their contracts. In Sicily the unsanitary condition of village laundries made it impossible to use them even temporarily. Military laundries assigned to repair and salvage work had to ask that their full load of equipment be forwarded from North Africa.51
In Italy the laundry and dry cleaning service developed tremendously under Colonel Ela’s guiding hand. His laundries had a dual purpose within the salvage program, that of providing clean linen for hospitals, troops, and organizations, and that of washing clothing and equipment turned in for renovation or rags. On 6 October 1943 the first unit in Naples, the 496th Laundry Company, arrived at the site of Mussolini’s fairgrounds near Bagnoli. Bags of soiled hospital bedclothes greeted them. For a time a lily pad pool was the only source of water, and sixteen trailers dropped their hoses into this single reservoir. Three weeks later, the 497th debarked at the Bagnoli pier, and in the absence of its own vans it commandeered two civilian laundries in order to help the 496th.
Because of the widespread destruction in Naples—where boiler rooms had been blasted by bombs, buildings gutted by fire, and equipment rusted from exposure —engineers completely reconstructed several laundries. In others, they replaced roofs, floors, and windows. Extractors and steamers were rebuilt from salvaged sheet metal and plate. Gears were redesigned and cut in local machine shops. Searching for sources of electricity, Ela learned that weeks would pass before high-tension lines could be restrung to his main plant. Further investigation revealed that an underground conduit had once been laid in the vicinity. Engineers located the line, found it usable, and averted considerable delay.
The 497th opened the first fixed military laundry in Naples on 29 November 1943. Two days later the first ironed sheets and pillowcases brightened beds of base section hospitals. Working around the clock, seven days per week, the 497th eventually freshened linens for thirty-two hospitals, all of which received twenty-four-hour service. Notwithstanding the relief afforded by the renovated plants, construction began in June 1944 to house a 10,000-man laundry. It eventually became one of the largest works of its kind in the theater. Elements of the 424th operated it.
Until the Anzio front became static, casualties there were high and hospitals busy. Enemy shellbursts seriously damaged both the hospital and its attached laundry thereby adding to the workload of Neapolitan laundries. Nevertheless, it was decided not to replace the expensive and scarce washing machinery on the beachhead. Thereafter Ela took advantage of the LST shuttle service. When working at maximum efficiency, fifteen 2½-ton trucks relayed the complete linen supply of one Anzio hospital to Naples and returned a fresh stock to the beachhead twenty-four hours later.52
Ela’s laundrymen, collecting the woolens of winter, followed the Fifth Army to the Arno. In July and August base section laundries handled twelve million pounds, the highest figure of the campaign. The 496th was one of the few Quartermaster units to halt in Rome, where it served a large base hospital and one of Italy’s favorite rest camps. When the enemy retired from Leghorn and Pisa, Ela’s search for commercial laundries was complicated by the widespread devastation. In all of Leghorn, a city of 125,000, he found one small laundry and dry cleaning plant intact. In historic Pisa, on the other hand, a former clothing factory was undamaged and fourteen woolpresses remained in the building. Operations were temporarily thwarted when the Arno inundated Pisa with four feet of water. Installation of new equipment for a 10,000-man plant was shortly undertaken thereafter. By mid-December, the 631st Laundry Company had tested the machinery, hired Italian operators, and trained them as sorters, markers, and ironers. Business opened on 1 January 1945. Using a floor plan which permitted a circular flow of work, the 631st supervised production with a minimum of interference, reaching an output of 8,000 pieces daily, plus 2,000 to 3,000 salvaged garments returned to stock. For a while the Pisa plant was close enough to the front to handle dry cleaning for the combat soldier. Over the plant’s counters, combat air crews and base section troops enjoyed a considerable amount of personalized service. In Florence, which, like Pisa, had suffered comparatively little damage, another civilian plant was utilized. By the end of the Italian campaign nine companies, plus a separate platoon, were operating laundries which stretched from Naples to Pistoia. Supplementing the many fixed laundries were mobile units supervised by several American enlisted men and one officer and employing Italian Army service units and later German prisoners of war. In Italy the monthly wash of Peninsular Base Section’s laundries rose from a half-million pounds in January 1944 to more than ten million pounds in May 1945.53
Although the bulk of laundry work was performed in the base section, and troops there were the beneficiaries of a laundry and dry cleaning service which closely resembled that in the United States, the combat soldiers were not altogether neglected. Mobile laundries went into the combat zone, but primarily to supplement a shower program. The roughdry wash and issue of used items were necessary features of a large-scale field operation. Nevertheless it was possible to provide a degree
of cleanliness under field conditions that virtually eliminated louse-borne diseases from the Italian front.
Since the first laundrymen ashore in southern France were veterans of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, they brought typical Mediterranean procedures to the DRAGOON area. The 549th QM Laundry Company, a VI Corps unit, landed on D-day and kept close behind the combat troops during their swift northward advance. The headquarters and two platoons of the 498th QM Laundry Company, also Mediterranean veterans, had two civilian laundries in operation in Marseille by mid-September. By the end of that month the 3rd Platoon had been assigned to CONAD and departed for Dijon. There it operated a civilian laundry and assumed control over two Italian laundry companies, the 7159th and 7169th, during October. For closer coordination with the salvage repair program, which involved a large-scale renovation of clothing, most of these laundry units moved to Vesoul in late October. The 898th Semimobile Laundry Company from northern France and the 7172nd Italian Laundry Company had also assembled there by the time that southern France became part of the European theater.54
Bath and Clothing Exchange Program
In the combat zone—where soldiers were constantly exposed to dirt and sand, water and oil, sweat and blood—the bath program was as difficult to implement as was the laundry program. Few of the 100,000 men in the II Corps could bathe in Tunisia, and fewer still in Sicily, where no shower equipment was available. This lesson was not lost to Sullivan and, while still in French Morocco, he sought ways of providing a 300,000-man force with a bath and clean clothing program. As each soldier was necessarily burdened with a resupply of barracks bag clothing, most of which would be better used if part of a steadily rotating inventory, Sullivan proposed to combine the features of a clothing exchange and a bathing system.55
This concept became even more compelling after the Fifth Army landed at Salerno. The first sterilization and bath company did not arrive for two months, few divisions were in rest areas, and the bath unit could be exploited only by service and rear echelon troops. To compound the frustrations, when the 3rd Infantry Division retired from the line after the hard-fought Volturno battle, the heavy rains made it impossible to use the existing equipment and the men bathed only under a shower improvised by engineers.56
By this time, Colonel Tate, the G-4 of Fifth Army, was echoing Sullivan’s sentiments for a bath-clothing exchange program. Presenting the idea to the G-4’s of the II and VI Corps, Tate wrote:
I am confident that under the present system, there is a great waste of clothing due to: (1) The individual soldier discarding all but his most immediate needs when under pressure of combat; (2) throwing away soiled clothing when changes are made due to inability to have such clothing laundered in forward areas. ... I am convinced that all clothing, except that worn
by the soldier, plus one change of underwear and socks, should be withdrawn ... and carried in bulk, split between Regimental and Divisional trains, as a reserve to replace soiled and worn clothing as needed.57
Sullivan promptly instituted this system in the Naples rest area. He directed Colonel Currey of the 94th Quartermaster Battalion to carry out the program “in spirit as well as in word.” In the interests of speed Sullivan set aside a basic supply of clothing for 5,000 men. Eager that every man derive the benefits of the new program, he encouraged Currey to station guards at all tent exits and prevent any soldier from departing with his dirty clothing. Exchanges opened in the Fifth Army’s rest centers on 20 November 1943 and, after the second week, Colonel Currey reported to Sullivan that more than 4,000 men had used the facilities. To these men, the 94th had issued fifteen different types of clothing, from shoelaces to overcoats, in quantities varying from two bath towels to 3,243 pairs of wool socks. Noting the contribution of this innovation to the health, welfare, and morale of this command, Clark acknowledged its immediate success in a letter to The Quartermaster General.58 Reflecting his own pleasure, General Ryder, commander of the 34th Infantry Division, spelled out the earliest details of the program. He wrote to Clark:
The soldier walked into the undressing tent, where he disrobed, placing the clothing for which he required no replacement, together with his valuables or personal property, in a bag which he would redeem by means of a tag prior to leaving the unit. He was then given a cake of soap, took his shower, came out, was given a towel, and then was given clean clothes from the skin out, consisting of underwear, sox, shirt, and trousers, and, if required, field jacket, leggings and shoes. The entire operation took place under canvas and the tents were well heated, including the dressing tent. The unit, operating in this manner, serviced two thousand individuals per day.
Hoping that the tents could be brought closer to the front, Ryder recommended that a similar unit with a capacity of 900 to 1,000 individuals per day be attached to each infantry division. Given such facilities and a favorable tactical situation, every soldier could be processed through the exchange once every two weeks. Other division commanders were interviewed. They concurred with Ryder on the project’s desirability, but most did not want the responsibility of having such a unit added to their train. In January 1944 the exchange unit was made available to British and French troops serving under General Clark’s command, and they similarly applauded it.59
While the exchanges became a fixture at rest areas, a miniature program was started in the army area on 14 December by the 62nd Quartermaster Battalion, Lt. Col. Lawrence C. Page, Jr., commanding. Eventually composed of two laundry companies and four sterilization and bath companies, the 62nd served more than 900,000 men in its first six months
of operation, from December 1943 to June 1944. Because field hospitals had the highest priority, Colonel Page deployed his laundry platoons so that they could simultaneously handle hospital linens and the clothes turned in to his eight bath and clothing exchanges. In the army area this required constant and careful reconnaissance—not without its difficulties. Page did not control selection of hospital sites, yet each of his bathing or laundry points required a water supply capable of serving 3,000 men per day.60
Pleased as he was that the fighting man welcomed these services and wanted them at hand, Sullivan preferred that exchanges should be located in rest areas where a water supply was accessible and to which men could repair. Not a minor consideration was the fact that the semi-mobile units, weighing ten tons or more, were restricted to surfaced roads and reasonably level terrain. The satisfactory shower and clothing exchange required a clear water supply of 20,000 gallons for every sixteen hours of operations, heavy tentage, additional space to store several thousand clothing sets, and portable lighting facilities. Sullivan contended, too, that each operating unit was noisy, had a telltale silhouette, and would be far removed from any replacement parts if machinery was damaged by enemy artillery.61
These unwieldy features led Colonel Page to recommend in November 1944 that a new and more compact company be organized, capable of rendering closer combat support. Although the fumigation and bath company—a small unit and one which broke down into self-contained platoons—had been recently introduced into Fifth Army, it still depended on an attached laundry platoon. By combining them Page felt that each bath platoon would be self-sufficient. It was to serve 225 men an hour. Because it would not be pulling heavy trailers and vans, the proposed bath and clothing exchange company could move more rapidly, and excessive travel by all parties would be eliminated. For his proposal, Colonel Page earned a medal. But the War Department rejected the suggestion on the ground that its applicability was limited. Meanwhile, General Sullivan felt that he could not advance the shower facilities to railheads, but he brought the clothing exchange system there. Truck drivers reaped the first benefits in February 1944. “A wet cold truck driver,” he maintained, “who can be given a hot bowl of soup and fresh clothing has less chance of a wreck and thereby contributes to the war effort.”62
Meanwhile the divisions improvised their own relief. In February 1944 the 34th Division established its own shower program in its rest area, with quartermasters operating the clothing exchange and engineers operating a 24-head shower. Within the next six months the 3rd and 88th Infantry Divisions started similar programs. On the day following its first combat mission in February 1945,
the 10th Mountain Division began a comparable service. The improvised divisional shower equipment was compact and easily moved. Unlike the semimobile sterilization and bath unit, which provided less shower space, this equipment could be brought to the troops and put into operation in twenty minutes. For one division’s experiment Sullivan sent 500 units of clothing. Another division was unable to institute a shower program immediately, but it experimented with the issue, two to three times weekly, of clean, dry socks, making deliveries through the ration railheads.
By the fall of 1944, the army quartermaster standardized his clothing exchange program for the forward units. Each exchange was equipped to maintain a daily turnover of 1,000 shirts, trousers, drawers, and undershirts, and 5,000 pairs of socks. Each corps was directed to regulate the use of these exchanges by the separate units. The organizations so designated brought their soiled garments to a laundry where they were provided with a receipt authorizing the exchange or initial issue of a like quantity of clean clothes.
One of the obvious results of the clothing exchange was to eliminate the “bundle” system of laundry and to reduce the difficulties of personalized service under combat conditions. Equally significant—as an economy measure—was that troops accepted stocks of used clothing they normally were reluctant to wear. In the interests of speedier handling the Fifth Army established a new sizing policy for items which had passed through the clothing-exchange, laundry, and salvage systems. Instead of issuing by the conventional tariff—which consisted of about thirty sizes for shirts and forty for trousers—clothing was assembled into three broad categories: small, medium, and large. Traditionally, this practice was repulsive to troops, but a survey of divisions elicited approval of three sizes. The soldier who had not bathed for several weeks, and whose clothing was offensive, was not likely to complain about the minor inconvenience of wearing garments not his own or loose fitting as long as they were well sterilized and freshly laundered.63
By contrast with Italian conditions, warfare in the south of France was extremely mobile, at least in the early stages, and it was impossible to provide comparable comforts for the combat troops. Seventh Army’s veteran divisions had outrun their service units as well as their supplies, and could not expect the services they had enjoyed in Italy the previous winter. Having left the mild Riviera zone for forested sub-alpine terrain, they needed extra clothing rather than an exchange, and such fuel as they could obtain was used for heating tents and billets rather than for baths. The 36th QM Company reported in early November that it was organizing a sock exchange for the 36th Division. Public baths were a feature of most French cities, and were used by the troops whenever possible, especially when they were rotated out of the line for a brief rest. CONAD provided as much assistance as possible. The 814th Sterilization Company, at Vesoul and later at Strasbourg, speeded up the clothing salvage operations already described, and the 865th and 7164th Fumigation
and Bath Companies, the latter an Italian service unit, were sent to Vaivre near Vesoul in November, and on to Lunéville in January.64
The contrasts between climate, terrain, and tactics in the successive combat areas of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and southern France emphasize the variable conditions and flexible procedures characteristic of the Mediterranean theater. This flexibility was also a favorable result of comparatively small-scale operations, in which one base section supported one army and was able to adjust rapidly to the special needs of that army. The succeeding chapters describe large-scale operations in which those elements of flexibility and rapid adjustment were notably lacking.