Engineer Memoirs
Q:
You mentioned a personnel shortage, and the deactivation of one company.
A:
That is an interesting point. The battalion had the following approximate numbers of
people: 300 U.S., 350 KATUSAs [Korean augmentation to the U.S. Army], 500 to 600
KSCs [Korean Service Corps], which was a civilian work force.
Q:
I've never heard of the KSC.
A:
Actually, we had two battalions at one time of these KSCs, the Korean Service Corps.
Then it was cut back to one. And we had, when I left, about 200 Korean civilians. One
of the secrets of the 44th's success was that they had always had these Korean civilians.
They weren't part of the U.S. civil service, but they were part of a parallel effort, a
local-national effort. The 44th had 20 or 30 carpenters of this type, and they also had
a support center composed of blacksmiths and machinists and that type of people.
They had scrounged up all of these machine tools. This support group could make
almost anything. I mentioned that Conboy was so proud of what they could do. One of
the things he described to me was the hinges that they had made for the doors for the
shelters for the Honest John rockets.
I said that was great, but had we requisitioned any hinges for next year? They hadn't.
And that was when we had the falling out. I said, "Fine, we can make these hinges."
Q:
But why should we?
A:
Why should we. We've got other things for these guys to do. When I first took
command, the group commander was Larry Lawrence, who was somewhat of a timid,
bureaucratic colonel. He said that we should look over our Korean civilian complement
because they were planning to reduce personnel. In response to this, I came in with a
memo proposing to triple the number of Korean civilians. I said, "We've got all these
people over here. The object is to get work done. These people are highly skilled."
With a short tour here in Korea--the tour was 16 months at the time--and a lot of
relatively inexperienced draftees coming to the battalion, the only way we maintained
our proficiency was to have these Korean civilians. The KATUSAs were good for
guard duty and truck driving. We got very few skills from them. Occasionally we got
somebody, but they were draftees--the KATUSAs. They were Korean draftees.
We had only 300 Americans. The KSCs were labor. We didn't get skills in that. That
was shoveling and carrying and so forth. These Korean civilians represented the most
skilled people we had. We had the carpenters. We didn't need more of those. We had
the machinists. But where we needed more skilled people was in equipment operating,
crane operators, in particular, because cranes are very delicate machines, in spite of
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