Engineer Memoirs
contractor, we sent a directive to this Japanese agency which then would arrange for
the contractor. The cost of this was all coming out as reparations. We weren't
budgeting for it.
We used troops to do some of the construction. They built a big prefabricated hospital
in Yokohama. We did a lot of work on some Japanese hospitals that had been taken
over.
I remember one of the projects was to build a psychiatric ward. The doctors told us the
kinds of things you had to have in a psychiatric ward, which we didn't know anything
about. All the radiators had to be enclosed in cages, because the patients would tear
them out. You had to have special windows and special doors and special everything
because a disturbed person could claw right through a wall if it wasn't built right. That
was one of the first projects I worked on. I had a drafting section under me.
Q:
So you were developing standard plans for different kinds of facilities?
A:
Developing plans for buildings, camps, and hospitals. People would come in with
requests. There seemed to be no restraint on that. They would come in for everything.
Some outfit got a neon sign, "Home of the Something Artillery." The minute that sign
lit up, we had 100 requests for neon signs. We had to decide what to do. Fortunately,
my bosses said "No, we are not going to--"
Q:
"We are not going to get in the neon business?"
A:
"We are not going to get into the neon sign business." But you know, it was every
conceivable type of construction. [Lieutenant] General [Clovis E.] Byers was the chief
of staff of the Eighth Army. He had a rule, which was a good rule, but not entirely
practical. Only he could sign disapprovals of requests from subordinate commanders.
The letters had to say "not favorably considered" instead of "disapproved." Until we
learned about this rule, we hadn't even bothered to answer the requests that we weren't
going to do anything about. We just stacked them. We only worked on the ones that
we were going to do something about.
My bosses, who included then Colonel--later [Major] General-- [Robert G.] Bob
MacDonnell, decided we were doing too much construction. To slow things down, they
started requiring the disapprovals to be handled first, and the letters of disapproval then
had to be sent up to General Byers. Those of us who had been stacking the disapprovals
aside and working on the approvals had to shove aside all the approvals and work on
the disapprovals, which meant we didn't put out any directives because all our time was
spent writing the disapprovals. I was in that job for 11 months and--
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