Edward L. Rowny
Finding places to relocate the stockpile of food was relatively easy. The boxed
rations, powdered milk and eggs, and other f od we moved to Camp Darby on the
o
west coast of Italy. Some of the remaining stocks of food we planned to put along
the lines of communication [LOC] in western Germany.
Relocating ammunition was an enormously large and complex problem. Not only
is ammo bulky and heavy, but it must be stored in carefully calculated small
stockpiles, separated from one another for safety purposes. Sibley's tentative plans
were to relocate this ammo along the LOC in Germany. But there was not room
for more than 10 percent of it. My plan was to prevail upon the United Kingdom
to allow us to store the ammo on abandoned airfields in England, which had
become inoperable after World War II. Although the Ministry of Defense of the
United Kingdom cooperated fully, the task was difficult because people in England
living near the abandoned airfields did not want to accept new hazards to their
safety. The deadline for getting out of France was February 15, 1967. Yet it was
not until December 26, 1966, before we received the final okay from the United
Kingdom.
Moving the reparations materiel was also a complicated job. We decided to sell
as much as we could for scrap, move some back to the United States, and move
the remainder into the highly overcrowded bases in western Germany.
Getting our plans approved in the Pentagon was a sticky problem, but we were able
to solve it in an unorthodox way. Not having enough officers to draw up the plans,
I struck a deal with the deputy chief of staff for personnel [DCSPER] of the U.S.
Army. He had a number of young lawyers on his rolls for which he had no jobs.
These were young lieutenants who had received grants from the Army to complete
their legal training and were now required to pay back for their training by
performing obligated tours of duty. I was assigned 30 of the brightest of these
lawyers for a six-month obligated tour in Heidelberg. They did a splendid job of
drawing up our FRELOC plans in a hurry. But one of them had a good idea. We
invited people from the Pentagon to Heidelberg to look over our shoulders and give
us day-to-day approval as we progressed.
We also convinced them that listing all the equipment on punch cards was a
hopelessly long, and in fact, unnecessary task. We simply estimated the amounts
of supplies and equipment in gross terms and went about moving it. One of the
young lawyers assigned to me even convinced representatives of the General
Accounting Office [GAO] to come to Heidelberg to witness how we planned and
executed FRELOC. This paid enormous dividends. Instead of the usual critical
report which all such jobs get from GAO, we managed to receive a commendation.
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