Ernest Graves
I was blessed by having assigned to the unit a couple of warrant officers that were
outstanding in engineer maintenance. They came after I had arrived, but they could do
all kinds of things.
We were very lucky to be right next to the engineer depot. Only instead of doing it the
way it had been done, which was to drop over there and make deals with the depot
commander, we submitted some requisitions, which had been an unheard of thing up
until that point. And I got on to the staff. They were very proud of the fact that they
could slip over there at the last minute and get things when they needed them. Conboy
was bragging to me about this one day, and I said, "Look, that's all very well. But you
wouldn't have this problem if you would make better plans." So we overhauled that.
But the battalion did do a lot of work.
Q:
What kind of work?
A:
Two main things. Asphalt paving and building shelters for the Honest John missiles.
The 4th Missile Command, as I mentioned, had just deployed there. Their headquarters
was at Chunchon, but there were storage sites for Honest John missiles all over the
place. Of course, these were nuclear capable. I had nothing to do with the nuclear
aspects of them.
The battalion built storage buildings for the storage of all the parts, and the storage
buildings had to be heated because the solid fuel rocket motors of the Honest John
missile could not stand to be frozen. Of course, that got improved later on, but at that
stage, the propellant could not stand extreme cold.
The whole matter of building these heated shelters was a real trial because the buildings
themselves were highly inflammable. The heating units were modified Nelson
heaters--you know, the kind of thing that was just an open gas flame with a blower on
it. We had some real trials with this thing.
It was all we were capable of at the time. The missiles were coming, and they had to get
them in out of the cold.
But the asphalt paving was more a source of pride. We had several asphalt plants, not
very large ones, and A Company was sent up north into the area of the 7th Division to
pave roads. We moved the company up there in the winter to prepare for paving when
the weather warmed up.
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