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Show With Ernie Pyleat the Front: Mechanical Wizards Do Army's Toughest Job Keep Machines Going Is Job of Ordnance 12-16-Hour Day Under Fire By Ernie Pylc SOMEWHERE IN NORMANDY I moved over to an ordnance ord-nance evacuation company. These men handle the gigantic trucks, the long,' low trailers trail-ers and the heavy wreckers that go out to haul back crippled tanks and wrecked anti-tank guns from the battlefield. The ordnance branch's policy on these wrecking companies Is that if they don't have a casualty now and then, or collect a lew shrapnel marks on their nT;-CT? vehicles, then t,l they're not doing 1 1 l their job effi-& effi-& II ciently. If , tfuj Tanks must be s ili retrieved just as ?w J'M ble after they have been shot y j I up. In the first - &&J piace We don't Ernie Pyle want the Ger-mans Ger-mans to get them; secondly, we want to get them repaired and back in action for ourselves our-selves right away. The job of an ordnance evacuation company is often frightening, although al-though this company's casualties have been amazingly low. In fact they've had only four and it's still a mystery what happened to them. The four left one day in a jeep, just on a normal trip. They didn't come back. No trace could be found. Three weeks later two of them came in just discharged from a hospital. On the same day a letter came from the third from a hospital in England. Eng-land. Nothing yet has been heard from the fourth. And the strange part is that neither the two who returned nor the one who wrote from England Eng-land can remember a thing about it. They were just riding along in their jeep and the next thing they woke up in a hospital. All thfee were wounded, but how they don't know. Friends suppose sup-pose it was a shell hit. At any rate, a sergeant in charge of one section of the mammoth movers, mov-ers, known as M-19s, took me around to see some of his crewmen. They all go by the name of "The Diesel Boys." Their vehicle is simply a gigantic truck with a long, skeletonized trailer trail-er behind. Like all our army over here they were strung out around the hedgerows hedge-rows of the field under camouflage nets, with the middle grassy fields completely empty. My friend was Sgt. Milton Rad-cliff Rad-cliff of Newark, Ohio. He used to be a furnace operator there. He and all the other former employees still get a letter every two weeks from the company, assuring them their jobs will be there when they return. And Radclifr, for one, is going to take his when he gets back. Sgt. Vann Jones of Birmingham, Ala., crawled out of his tent and sat Indian fashion on the ground with us. On the other side of our pasture lay the silver remains of a transport plane that had come to a mangled despair on the morning of D-day. It was a peaceful and sunny evening, quite in contrast to most of our days, and we sat on the grass and watched the sun go down in the east, which we all agreed was a hell of a place for the sun to be going down. Either we were turned around or France is a funny country. The other boys told me later that Sergeant Jones used to be the company cook, but he wanted to see more action so he transferred to the big wreckers and is now in command of one. His driver is a smiling, tall young fellow, with clipped hair, named Dallas Hudgens from Stonewall, Ga. He was feeling stuffed as a pig, for he'd just got a big ham sent him from home and had been having at it with a vengeance. There are long lulls when the retriever re-triever boys don't have anything to do besides work on their vehicles. They hate these periods and get restless. rest-less. Some of them spend their time fixing up their tents homelike, even though they may have to move the next day. One driver even had a feather bed he had picked up from a French family. The average soldier can't carry a feather bed around with him, but the driver of an M-19 could carry 10,000 feather beds and never know the difference. The boys are all pretty proud of their company. They said they did such good work in the early days of s the invasion that they were about to be put up for Presidential citation. cita-tion. But one day they got in a bomb crater and started shooting captured German guns at the opposite bank just for fun, which is against the rules, so the proposal was torn up. They just laugh about it which is about all a fellow can do. Corp. Grover Anderson of Annis-ton, Annis-ton, Ala., is one of the drivers. He swears by his colossal machine but cusses it, too. You see the French roads are narrow for heavy two-way military traffic and an M-19 is big and awkward and slow. "You get so damn mad at it,'' Anderson says, "because convoys pile up behind you and can't get around and you know everybody's hating you and that makes you madder. mad-der. They're aggravating, but if you let me leave the trailer off I can pull anything out of anywhere with it." Anderson has grown a red goatee which he is not going to shave off till the war is won. He used to be a taxi driver; that's another reason he finds an M-19 so "aggravating." "Because it hasn't got a meter on it?" I asked. "Or maybe because you don't have any female passengers," an- 1 other driver said. To which Brother Anderson had a wholly satisfactory GI reply. He said, "(remainder of column voluntarily censored) ." It was just beginning dusk J when the order came. A soldier came running up the pasture and said there was a call for our ordnance evacuation company to pull out some crippled tanks. We had been sitting on the grass and we jumped up and ran down the slope. Waiting at the gate stood an M-19 truck and behind it a big wrecker with a crane. The day had been warm but dusk was bringing a chill, as always. al-ways. One of the soldiers loaned me his mackinaw. Soldiers stood atop their big machine ma-chine with a stance of impatience, like firemen waiting to start. We pulled out , through the hedgerow gate onto the main macadam highway. high-way. It was about 10 miles to the frontlines. "We should make it before full darkness," one of the officers said. We went through shattered Caren-tan Caren-tan and on beyond for miles. Then we turned off at an angle in the road. "This is Purple Heart corner," the officer said. Beyond there the roadside soldiers thinned out. Traffic ceased altogether. altogeth-er. With an increasing tempo, the big guns crashed around us. Hedges began to make weird shadows. shad-ows. You peered closely at sentries in every open hedgegate just out of nervous alertness. The smell of death washed past us in waves as we drove on. There is nothing worse in war than the foul odor of death. There is no last vestige of dignity in it. We turned up a gravel lane, and drove sowly. The dusk was deepening. deepen-ing. A gray stone farmhouse sat dimly off the road. A little yard and driveway semicircled in front of it. Against the front of the house stood i five German soldiers, facing in- ' ward, their hands above their 1 heads. An American doughboy stood in the driveway with a tommygun pointed at them. We drove on for about 50 yards and stopped. The drivers shut off their diesel motors. One officer went Into an orchard or-chard to try to find where the tanks were. In wartime nobody ever knows where anything is. The rest of us waited along the road beside an old stone barn. Three jeeps were parked beside it. The dusk was deeper now. Out of the orchards around us roared and thundered our own artillery. An officer lit a cigaret. A sergeant with a rifle slung on his shoulder walked up and said, "You better put that out, sir. There's snipers all around and they'll shoot at a cigaret." The officer crushed the cigaret in his fingers, not waiting to drop it to the ground, and said, "Thanks." "It's for your own good," the sergeant ser-geant said, apologetically. |