Ernest Graves
Each company built one bridge a day. You had to build the bridge, take it down, and
get it stacked up because there was another company coming on behind that was going
to use the same site and bridging the next day. The first time through I don't remember
there being tremendous pressure because the bridges were short and not too difficult.
Q:
Just single Baileys.
A:
Yes. Single Baileys. After a day of orientation, we built two or three fixed Baileys on
successive days. Each one was a little more ambitious than the one before. The last
bridge we built was a floating Bailey.
The second time we went down there, we followed the same sequence, but all the
bridges were bigger. I had the whole company for the first bridge. We worked on that
beast about 22 hours. We arrived at the school in the afternoon. We took that group
out that night. We put one platoon to work that night digging in the footers for the
bridge. They worked most of the night. Then the rest of the company came on the job
about 6:00 and started putting up the bridge. It took most of the day. This was entirely
by hand. There were no cranes used at all. Every panel, transom, and stringer was
moved by people. If it was a double-tier bridge, the top members were hoisted shoulder
high. When we built a triple-tier bridge, we got the panels to the third by laying a false
deck. Everything was handled by hand. The only exception was the truck used to push
the bridge to launch it.
But I was up 24 hours straight getting that first bridge built, then dismantled. Danny
Geise, who was the second platoon leader, did the second one. It was a double-triple
Bailey, 160 feet long, class 40. The company did better on that. He organized the job
better than I had. He was a former engineer NCO who really knew how to get work
done.
And the men were more skilled. They knew what they were doing. Then we built rafts
and finally a double-single floating bridge out across the Thames River, which was a
good-sized river where it flowed past the school.
I remember this Bailey bridge training vividly. When we got up into Germany, we never
did any bridging like this. I have never seen a better school than this bridge school.
There were quite a few engineer battalions training in England at the time, and they all
went through this school.
Q:
It almost sounds as if you were training for the Rhine River crossing.
A:
That may have been what they had in mind. The commander of the engineer group
under which all this took place was [Thomas H.] Tom Lipscomb. Lipscomb became a
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