Engineer Memoirs
relieved Sibley and pulled me in to
was still planning how best to do it.
completely evacuate France in the remaining six months left.
Q ..
What did this involve?
It involved moving thousands of troops and several hundred thousand tons of
A
equipment from France. I had to start practically from scratch because Sibley had
not made good plans to do the job within the allotted year. Moving the troops was
relatively easy. But moving the equipment was difficult. There were huge
stockpiles of equipment and supplies located all along the line of communications
which ran from Germany back across France NATO's strategy called for stopping
a Warsaw Pact attack on the Rhine, and the supplies were stockpiled not only to
assist the defense but to allow NATO forces to take the offensive.
The job had several large complications. First, we had to find space in Europe to
store the supplies and equipment. We wanted to put as much of the materiel as
possible along the new line of communications which paralleled the Rhine on its
west bank and went north to Rotterdam and Amsterdam. But there simply wasn't
enough room in western Germany to accommodate all the supplies and equipment.
As a result, we decided to move much of the ammunition to England, and most of
the food to Italy.
A second complication was that we discovered huge stockpiles of equipment in
France which were not on any records. These were items stored in France which
were part of our reparations from Germany and Japan. Most of this equipment
consisted of steel beams and columns. The concept was that these steel beams and
columns were to be used to rebuild bridges across the Rhine and elsewhere in
Europe after NATO had repulsed a Warsaw Pact attack.
A third complication was General
desire to move everything out of
France and leave nothing behind. Much of the equipment had deteriorated or was
otherwise cheaper to replace than to move. But O'Meara wanted nothing left be-
hind.
And finally, the job was complicated because the Pentagon was determined to
micro-manage the job. They had ordered USAREUR to submit key-punched cards
on which every item of equipment was listed, to include its description, volume,
weight, and condition. In addition, the location and future destination of the
equipment was to be listed. This job was only about 10 percent complete when I
took over.
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