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Show With Ernie Pyle at the Front Ordnance Keeps Army in Trim by Repairing Parts LST Personnel From All Parts of Country Prove They Can Take It By Ernie Pyle IN NORMANDY. One of the things the layman doesn't hear much about is the ordnance department. In fact it is one of the branches that even the average soldier is little aware of except in a vague way. And yet the war couldn't keep going without it. For ordnance repairs all the vehicles of an army and furnishes all the ammunition for its guns. 1 Today there are more vehicles in the American sector of our beachhead beach-head than in the average-sized American city. And our big guns on an average heavy day are shooting up more than $10,000,000 worth of ammunition. ammu-nition. So you see ordnance has a man-sized job. Ordnance personnel per-sonnel is usually about 6 or 7 per cent of the total Ernie Pyle men f an army. That means we have many thousands of ordnance-men ordnance-men in Normandy. Their insigne is a flame coming out of a retort nicknamed in the army "The Flaming Flam-ing Onion." Ordnance operates the ammunition ammuni-tion dumps we have scattered about the beachhead. But much bigger than its ammunition mission is ordnance's ord-nance's job of repair. Ordnance has 275,000 items in its catalog of parts, and the mere catalog itself covers a 20-foot shelf. In a central headquarters here on the beachhead a modern filing system sys-tem housed in big tents keeps records rec-ords on the number and condUion of 500 major items in actual use on the beachhead, from tanks to pistols. pis-tols. . We have scores of separate ordnance companies at work on the beachhead each of them a complete firm within itself, able to repair anything the army uses. Ordnance can lift a 30-ton tank as easily as it can a bicycle. It can repair a blown-up jeep or the intricate breech of a mammoth mam-moth gun. Some of its highly specialized repair re-pair companies are made up largely of men who were craftsmen in the same line in civil life. In these companies you will find the average age is much above the army average. aver-age. You will find craftsmen in their late 40s, you'll find men with their own established businesses who were making $30,000 to $40,000 a year back home and who are now wearing sergeant's stripes. You'll find great soberness and sincerity, plus the normal satisfaction that comes from making things whole again instead of destroying them. You will find an IQ far above the average for the army. It has to be that way or the work would not get done. You'll find mechanical work being done under a tree that would be housed in a $50,000 shop back in America. You'll find men working 16 hours a day, then sleeping on the ground, who because of their age don't even have to be here at all. Ordnance is one of the undramatic branches of the army. They are the mechanics and the craftsmen, the fixers and the suppliers. But their j')b is vital. Ordinarily they are not ill a great deal of danger. There are times on newly won and congested congest-ed beachheads when their casualty ra?e is high, but once the war settle" set-tle" down and there is room for . increment and dispersal it is not necessary or desirable for them to do -eir basic work within gun ra.'.ge. Our ordnance branch in Normandy has had casualties. It has two small branches which will continue to have casualties its bomb-disposal squads and its retriever companies that go up to pull out crippled tanks under fire. But outside of those two sections, if your son or husband is in ordnance ord-nance in France you can feel fairly easy about his returning to you. I don't say that to belittle ordnance in any way but to ease your worries wor-ries if you have someone in this branch of the service overseas. Ordnance is set up in a vast structure of organization the same as any other army command. com-mand. The farther back you go the bigger become the outfits and the more elaborately equipped and more capable of doing heavy, long-term work. Every infantry or armored division di-vision has an ordnance company with It all the time. This company com-pany does quick repair jobs. What it hasn't time or facilities for doing it hands on back to the next echelon in the rear. The division ordnance companies hit the beach on D-Day. The next echelon back began coming on D-Day D-Day plus four. The great heavy outfits arrived somewhat later. Today the wreckage of seven weeks of war is all in hand, and In one great depot after another it is being worked out repaired or rebuilt re-built or sent back for salvage until everything possible is made available avail-able again to our men who do the fighting. In later columns I'll take you along to some of these repair companies that do the vital work. The cook on LST No. 392, on which I came to France, was a beefy, good-natured fellow named Edward Strucker of Barberton, Ohio, which is near Akron. Cooking on these transport ships is a terrible job, for you suddenly have to turn out twice as much food as normally. But Eddie is not the worrying type, and he takes it all in his stride. Eddie has a brother named Charles in the army engineers, and in the past year has been lucky enough to run into him four times once in Africa, once in Sicily, and twice in Italy. One of those small-world experiences experi-ences happened to me, tocy while on that ship. We lay at anchor in a certain harbor a couple of days before be-fore sailing for France. On the second sec-ond day Iwas in the washroom shaving shav-ing when a sailor came in and said there was a Commander Greene who wanted to see me in the captain's cabin. The only Greene I could think of who might be a commander in the navy was Lieut. Terry Greene, whom I had known in my Greenwich Village days. You J didn't know I ever had any ! Greenwich Village days? Well, don't get excited, because they weren't very lurid anyhow. At any rate I went to the captain's cap-tain's cabin, and sure enough it ' was the same Terry Greene all right. By some strange coincidence coinci-dence we had both got 17 years older in the meantime. Greene held a very important position po-sition in the convoy. He was tickled to death with his assignment, for he had been in the States almost the whole war and was about to go nuts for some action. I haven't seen him on this side of the Channel to discuss it, but I'm afraid our trip over wasn't as exciting ex-citing as he would have liked. But you can't please everybody, and it was just tame enough to suit me fine. . One of the gun crew is Seaman John Lepperd of Hershey, Pa. He is about the oldest man in the crew. He is 34, and has three daughters 17, 15 and 13 and yet he got drafted last November and here he is sailing sail-ing across the English channel and helping shoot down German planes. It still seems a little odd to him. It is quite a contrast to the building game, which he had been in. Also on this ship I ran into one of my home - towners from Albuquerque, Albu-querque, Electrician's Mate Harold Lampton. His home actually is in Farmington, N. M., but he worked for the telephone company at Albuquerque, Albu-querque, installing new phones. Now he is the electrician for this ship. He has been in the navy for two years and overseas for more than a year. .He is a tall, dark, quiet fellow fel-low who knows a great deal more about the Southwest than I do. He said he has driven past our house many times, and we had long nostalgic nos-talgic talks about the desert and Indian jewelry and sunsets. We are both tired of being where we are ajid we wish we were back on the Rio Grande. Among the soldiers I talked to on the LST were Corp. Loyce Gilbert of Spring Hill, La.. Pfc. Oscar Davis of Troy, N. C, and Pvt. Floyd Woodville of Baltimore. |
