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Fellow Spearheaders and wives, I would like for you to join
me tonight in a trip down memory lane to the beginnings of the
3rd Armored Division and before.
Any following Ernie DeSoto and his magnificent talks on the
division history given at Hot Springs and before that at Louisville
has considerable nerve, but I would like to add a few footnotes,
anecdotes and personal observations.
Along with some 600 or so reserve officers, I reported for
active duty at Fort Benning to the 2nd Armored Division on February
10, 1941, arriving on a Central of Georgia train better known
as the Yellow Dog and in a car half-freight and half-passenger,
the passenger side having a coal stove for heat. It was not an
auspicious arrival. There were no bands.
General Richardson (we were in the same company), Colonels
Bill Lovelady, Wesley Sweat, Andy Barr, Jim Alexander, and many
more were in this group at the Officer's Training Center, better
known as Billo's Military Academy, where we received training
to become armored officers. This included learning to drive or
operate all the vehicles from motorcycles to tanks.
There was a song at the time which went: "They put me
on the garbage truck to learn to double clutch when they tried
to make a tanker out of me."
It was not quite as safe as it sounds. An officer in the company
next to mine was killed when overturning an armored scout car,
the predecessor to the half track, and the edge crushed him.
Our training conditions or accommodation were not deluxe.
We were in pyramidal tents with Sible wood-burning stoves. There
was a Lister bag on the company street, a latrine (dug and limed)
at the end, but we had running water for cold showers and shaving.
Also all the wood you could cut for your stove.
The wooden mess hall had not been completed, in that the roof
lacked tarpaper, and when it rained one wore his hat and raincoat
while eating.
We also had training on all weapons except tank gunnery. One
day I was on the firing line, a towel around my neck (I had fallen
in the creek during a bridge building exercise and my right shoulder
had packed up so that I could not raise my hand above my head)
when a tall major showed up and asked me if I would like to go
to division headquarters after training. This was my first encounter
with John Smith and I said yes.
George Patton would occasionally address us. Remember pink
slacks? He held ours were too wide, we were not going to look
like sailors, so off to the post tailor we went to have them
slimmed. He also got some subdued snickers for congratulating
us for polishing the back sides of our brass belt buckles.
After reporting to headquarters of 2nd Armored, I found that
I was destined for the 3rd Armored. Headquarters was in an old
brick mess hall and, with Lt. Jack Hutchinson and Sgt. Lloyd
Evans of des Allemands, Louisiana, I had an "office"
in an abandoned store room where the windows were boarded up.
We had a single unshaded drop light, one portable typewriter,
a couple of chairs and an orange crate for a table.
There one day, writing a story for the Columbus paper about
a coming parade, I used the phrase "hell on wheels."
Apparently General Patton liked it. It has appeared on the 2nd
Armored shoulder patch for some time.
George Patton had a mock attack which took place on the drill
field on special occasions, all before a grandstand. First, 75mm's
would sound a few rounds to set the mood. In the distance light
tanks would form, pointed to the grandstand, then head for it,
sirens screaming. Smoke would be laid and infantry in World War
I helmets, leggins and gas masks would advance, with fixed bayonets.
At the climax George Patton would land his own plane before the
grandstand, dismount, wearing his Green Hornet self-designed
uniform and gold plated tankers helmet, stride to the microphone
and tell everyone what was happening. It was quite a sight.
If you will excuse a personal occurrence, during all this
time I had not been paid. Neither had I received any mail from
home. It turned out that I appeared on two sets of orders, one
for an armored regiment - to which my mail had gone - the other
to Hq. Meanwhile Helen [Dugan's wife] had had an operation and
sent me a telegram - which went to the regiment. I was not paid
until a few days before leaving for Camp Beauregard on April
14, and I had chits out all over the place.
How many came to the 3rd Armored in the cadre? Raise hands.
Camp Beauregard, a National Guard camp near Alexandria, Louisiana,
was not the Waldorf Astoria, but there were times later when
it looked good. Many of our troops were out at the dust bowl
at Esler Field, a landing strip under construction. It was said
of it, that one could stand with feet ankle deep in mud and dust
in the face.
Here my quarters were considerably improved over the Harmony
Church area of Benning. I had an individual tent, stretched over
a wooden framework with a screen door and concrete floor. This
was fine until it rained, when there was three inches of water
on the floor. I put my footlocker up on bricks and in the morning
stood on it to dress.
Here I got a selectee, a Dartmouth graduate named Ed Inglis,
to help me in writing and with Sgt. Lloyd Evans, an old timer
in the army to help us to get supplies and so forth. We started
putting out public relation releases about the "Bayou Blitz."
Here I found that the way to make one's mark in the army is to
get people - such as Inglis - who are smarter than you and an
old timer such as Lloyd Evans to smooth things out. Our objective
was to make the men of the division feel that they were part
of fine organization, to which they belonged. We concentrated
on hometown papers and publicizing the officers so the men would
know who they were.
At Polk I got John Hess, another Dartmouth man, to do a radio
program broadcast over WWL at New Orleans. Both he and Inglis
went to OCS. Hess originated the WWL radio program in early 1942.
At Beauregard one of our men was brought up on rape charges
and I heard indirectly from General Gillem that he would prefer
if our name not appear in the paper. With help I saw the DA and
our name never showed, but I later heard that a corps headquarters
at Beauregard was unhappy because of the inference that it was
one of theirs.
One day I went in to Alexandria to see the city editor of
the paper there.
"Do you know the difference between you and the other
PRO'S here?," he asked. At that time the 82nd Division,
not then airborne, and a National Guard division were at Livingston
and Claiborne.
"No," I said.
"Let us say a soldier was bitten by a snake," the
city editor said. "One of the PRO'S would deny it, saying
there were no snakes in the area. The other wouldn't know anything
about it. YOU would give the whole story about it, adding that
the snake had a gold ring around its neck, and - by golly - it
WOULD have a gold ring around it's neck!"
I have another story about a finance officer. When Elmer Gude
joined us, I never missed another payday. One day a National
Guard officer from a division nearby came over to Gude for advice.
On leaving he commented, "You read by note and I play by
ear."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Remember Camp Polk? They were still hammering and painting
when we moved in there in June of 1941, it having been built
for us. Then came the selectees, thousands of them, with General
Gillem meeting most trains as they came in. In addition to being
a time of training, this was a time of change. Personnel, orders,
army regulations, tables of organization, unit designation, uniform
regulations - all were in a period of change and flux. But we
were learning.
Do you remember the arrival of the first General Grant medium
tanks, halftracks, the twinning of companies for the formation
of the 7th Armored Division, yellow jaundice, and Leesville on
Saturday night? Then there was Colonel (later General) Leroy
Watson's golf course & moving tank range, hikes, and the
rifle and artillery ranges.
During this time up at division, Johnny Hess and I were pounding
out publicity about the division. We came up with a one-page
form to be filled out by company clerks on every selectee who
arrived, which went to his home town paper. One of the enlisted
men came up with the idea of folding and stapling this, doing
away with an envelope. What we were trying to do was infuse a
feeling of belonging and unit pride and we literally put out
thousands of press releases.
John Smith spent some time in Washington facilitating the
construction of the Lee Hills privately financed officers quarters,
substituting tile pipe for iron, which was proscribed, and other
substitutes.
On Saturday, December 6, 1941 there was a dance at the officers
club and Helen came down from Shreveport and stayed at the guest
house. Sunday morning we went to the movie and when we came out
I ran into Col. John L. Pierce, G-4, an A&M man, who said,
"Dugan, have you heard? The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. And
we won't have to let the selectees go."
After this, things really got serious.
Shortly thereafter the 703rd TD Bn was activated and rumors
that the jails were cleared for personnel are absolutely untrue!
Then II Armored Corps was formed, with General Gillem in command,
replaced by Walton H. Walker, and John Smith became Chief of
Staff, and combat commands replaced brigades.
Somewhere along here we sent a party to North Africa to observe
the British and how they conducted desert warfare. We had a talk
from a military attaché who had been in Romania when the
Germans invaded (and took over all trucks and immediately painted
them black). At division we had a couple of exercises which made
one think. One was to do with supplying an army in Africa with
one rail line and another was how to stop a retreat!
One day while at Polk, a newspaperman from the Chicago Tribune
by the name of Jack Thompson arrived. Now Col. McCormick, owner
of the Tribune, didn't like President Roosevelt and he thought
Camp Polk a bad place for an army camp (so did a lot of other
people), so he gave Jack Thompson a special mission. Jack inquired
as to how many soldiers were suffering from snakebite, and I
told him I didn't know of any. He seemed to think I was holding
out on him, so I made arrangements for him to visit the post
hospital, and when he returned he said that he had not found
any. This is why Col. McCormick sent him to Louisiana. Later
the Tribune carried a small article, with illustrations, on the
deadly coral snake and it being indigenous to Louisiana. They
could have gotten it out of the encyclopedia!
Do you remember the Mojave desert and our arrival there late
in the spring of 1942? The thriving communities of Rice and Freda?
Water bags, canned sardines, ginger snaps, lemon balls, rusk,
and canned turkey? And the pervasive heat? So do I.
There was one company commander, who will remain unnamed,
who, on arrival, formed his company and addressed something like
this:
"Now men, we have arrived on the Mojave Desert, one of
the hottest places on the earth. The training will be rigorous
and demanding. Here we will separate the men from the boys."
And at this pronouncement he dropped in a dead faint!
John Smith had luxurious accommodations, a wooden floor on
his tent. He used an orange crate for a bedside table and kept
missing small metal objects, such as insignia, etc. One day he
found a pack rat trying to get away with his wrist watch and
it went under the floor, where all the missing objects were found.
Pack rats were not the only life on the desert. One morning,
walking down to breakfast, I passed a bush from which came a
pulse quickening rattle. I didn't take time to think, just jumped
about ten feet away. It was a sidewinder. I went back to the
tent and got my .22 target pistol, shot the snake in the head
and carried it to breakfast on a stick., whereupon General Walker
stopped eating. He didn't say anything, but later in the day
the Daily Bulletin carried a line which stated: "Henceforth
officers will not discharge firearms within the confines of the
camp."
A number of officers' wives, mine included, followed us to
the desert. At that time Palm Springs was deserted in the summer,
and the wives prevailed on the locals to open homes and apartments
for them. Helen arrived by train with two small children and
a trunk in the baggage car. The train station was 10 miles or
so from town and if the trunk were not near the baggage car door
it was not taken off. It was some time before her trunk arrived,
meanwhile she had limited clothing for the children. However,
she did get an apartment some distance from the town and stores,
requiring twice a day walks along the side of the Indian reservation
to provide food and milk for the children. The Indians were forbidden
liquor, but got it, and in driving down the road would force
Helen and the children into the ditch. Later she got a house
in town around the corner from the grocery, and it was here that
she experienced the earthquake. The children learned to swim
in the pool at the Desert Inn.
Remember taking a shower with your coveralls on? And how you
would come out with your teeth chattering in 100-degree-plus
weather because of evaporation?
Now our purpose on the desert was maneuvers, under Patton's
Desert training Center, and when the principal one came we were
fully extended. To tell the truth, we had difficulties. One was
because of a civilian map - Chamber of Commerce, really - which
had one scale north and south and another east and west. This
played havoc with thrust line coordinates. Another was communications.
Andy Barr had gone to the hospital in Palm Springs for an operation,
and I, a mere captain, got low priority on radio messages. When
the critique came after the maneuvers, let me tell you that Dugan's
light did not shine. Let me put it this way, until you have been
chewed out by a lieutenant general before an audience of hundreds
of officers, you have not been chewed out. No matter that he
did not mention my name, I knew who he was talking about. Later
I mentioned this to General Gillem, our corps commander and a
friend, and he said not to take it too seriously.
With the coming of fall in 1942, the women in the supermarket
in Palm Springs were discussing the secret orders for us to move
to the East Coast. This was confirmed when John Smith called
me in one evening and handed me a bulky package - it was a shortage
report - to be flown to Phoenix, Arizona and from there air-mailed
to Washington. We used General Gillem's plane and pilot, taking
off from a dusty airstrip. The landing field at Phoenix had a
cover of about ten feet of mist and we made a bumpy landing.
Coming back after dark, they placed cars with headlights on at
either end of the landing strip. It was not a trip I wanted to
make often.
You will recall that our train trip to the East Coast and
Camp Picket entailed using rail lines through Chicago, St. Louis
and New Orleans, giving an idea of the equipment we had.
About here I would like to mention the favorite sayings of
some officers:
General Hickey's was a classic: "We are all creatures
of habit. He wanted us to have the right habits."
Roland P. Shugg, a maintenance and vehicle expert, would say:
"I don't think he is so damn smart!" This usually applied
to the designers or providers of vehicles or tanks.
The battalion commander of one of our attached tank units,
when we were in a frenzy of change, would, in a resigned tone,
say: "It is only temporary!"
John Meade, on the mimeograph, without which - it seemed -
we could not move: "Even when hurled in anger, it is a poor
weapon!"
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Back to our move to the East Coast - it was, of course, for
us to embark for North Africa. Unfortunately for the army and
fortunately for us, there were not enough ships, and we settled
in at Camp Pickett, Virginia, seeing pine trees and red clay
again and enduring rain.
Helen again campfollowed and we got an apartment at Farmville
in the home of a maiden lady who had a house on the back of the
property housing her Negro maid and the maid's child, about the
same age as our two. Of course, they played together. Our two
had in kindergarten at Palm Springs acquired a hard California
accent, but in no time there was superimposed upon it a Virginia
Negro accent! Later a Pennsylvania Dutch tone appeared.
When it became clear that we were not to move overseas anytime
soon and because of the lack of sufficient ranges at Pickett,
came the move to our favorite place, Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.
As I recall, I came home from camp one day and said, "If
you want to go with me, be packed by noon tomorrow."
While at Pickett, Sgt. Lloyd Evans had gotten leave to return
to Louisiana and had driven our 60 hp Ford back, so we had wheels.
Indiantown Gap was a delight, but housing hard to find. We
finally got a small apartment on the third floor over a tavern
at Cornwall, while many officers found places to stay at Mount
Gretna, Hershey, Palmyra and other small towns nearby. Rationing
was in force.
We were lucky in getting to maneuver in snow and ice while
at Indiantown, for it served us well later in the Bulge. In better
weather we had exercises in the alleys above the Gap. Here I
served as an umpire, riding in a light tank and a little apprehensive
because of my bedroll and air mattress strapped on the back,
as live ammunition was being used. It was here one sunny day
I approached "Chubby" Doan, stretched out belly down
on a hillock surveying the movement of tanks. A snake was about
to crawl up the leg of his coveralls and when I called his attention
to it he merely shook his leg lazily and the snake scurried off.
It was at Indiantown that I made Major. Also general staff.
Back to housing, we had water trouble at Cornwall - there
was an open outhouse up the hill from the well at our place -
so with the coming of spring we moved to a camphouse on a hill
near a covered bridge close to Jonestown, where Helen learned
to build a fire with hard coal and get up at night to empty the
pan under the icebox. Meanwhile both children had their tonsils
out at the same time in Harrisburg.
But on the bright side we had a couple of trips to New York,
the opera and a little diversion.
While at Indiantown, we were on standby with loaded halftracks
when a coal miners strike was settled. General Watson got married,
and our men had a wonderful time in Reading, Penn., and other
places, particularly on Saturday night, dancing to the "Beer
Barrel Polka."
Remember "Take it out of the A bag and put it in the
B bag!"? This was all part of our training preparatory to
going overseas along with the 25-mile hikes, going through the
gas chamber, fighting through the simulated village, qualifying
on the various ranges. (I fired expert with the Tommy gun).
Remember the latter part of August of 1943? We departed Indiantown
Gap for Camp Kilmer, indoctrination, and a few days later entraining
for Staten Island, there to board vessels such as the converted
Gripsholm, the Capetown Castle, John Erickson and Shawnee.
We were on our way overseas!
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