Engineer Memoirs
major general. He was the engineer of Eighth Army in Korea. He was a district
engineer. He was the division engineer of the North Atlantic Division. He was the
deputy commander of Combat Developments Command when it was at Fort Belvoir.
Q:
Maybe that's where I know the name.
A:
You might have run into him. He was a colonel when he commanded the group in
England. He was a West Pointer out of the class of 1934.
That's my most vivid recollection of this time in England. My battalion commander,
Major [Elliott H.] DeJarnette, was relieved because things weren't going very well. He
was replaced by a lieutenant colonel named [Eugene L.] Jones who had commanded
another engineer battalion and had been wounded. When he had come out of the
hospital, he took over from DeJarnette. Jones tried to improve things, but that was a
motley rabble.
Q:
Really?
A:
I was very young, and I didn't know how to deal with a lot of these things. In
retrospect, I didn't handle my part of it very well, and my superiors didn't either. I will
give you an example of the kind of thing that happened.
During the infantry training, we were going to have a night security exercise. We had
our staff meeting where all the officers assembled and the S3 [operations and training
officer] went over what we were to do. We were to march to a wooded area nearby
where we were supposed to dig slit trenches to lie in and establish local security. To
show you how brash I was, I had been with this outfit at the time several weeks. I got
up in the middle of the staff meeting and I said, "Are we going to carry through on this?
Or are we going to dig for a half an hour and decide that the ground is too hard and
quit?" Well, that wasn't a very polite remark. But the S3 said we were going to do it.
There was no question. So, we went up to the woods. It was colder than hell frozen
over--this was January in England--and we started trying to dig.
The ground wasn't frozen, but it was extremely rocky. People dug for about 30
minutes, but they weren't getting anywhere. The trenches were about 2-inches deep.
They were trying to dig these slit trenches with entrenching tools, which all the soldiers
had at that time, and they weren't getting anywhere.
About that time music started playing. The Red Cross doughnut truck had showed up,
and the girls were playing music and passing out coffee and doughnuts. The company
commanders immediately decided that everybody should go for doughnuts, and that
was the end of the exercise.
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