Ernest Graves
worn out quickly, stripped, or broken. And dozer operators. And mechanics for
maintenance.
We did not have any Korean civilians with these skills. I was convinced that if we
started a program, we could hire these people. Then equipment operation and
maintenance would become as strong as these construction trades were already. In that
way the battalion would be extremely productive no matter what the vicissitudes were
of the Army replacement system. That happened during my tour.
Tom Lipscomb was the Eighth Army engineer. He was a guy that believed in getting
things done, and he supported us on these things.
Q:
So you had three different kinds of Korean labor, and you had three times as many
Koreans as you had soldiers.
A:
Yes. It was a big operation. There were over 1,200--at one point there were as many
as 1,400 people. But for most of the year, there were over 1,200 people in this
battalion. It was a big operation.
We did get a lot of extracurricular stuff. We traded--I will give you an example.
We were putting up many prefabricated buildings, and the kits for all these buildings
included plywood floors. However, most of the construction called for concrete floors.
So we had thousands of sheets of plywood. We would trade 80 sheets of plywood for
a new truck engine from the ordnance battalion up in Seoul that was rebuilding truck
engines. We would replace our own truck engines.
That was a third echelon maintenance job that was supposed to be evacuated to some
ordnance outfit to do. What we did to keep everybody happy was to put one of our
trucks in this ordnance company so that they could have it. They would keep it for--I
don't know how long.
In the meantime, while they had our truck, supposedly replacing the engine, we would
be changing ten engines in our own shops with engines that we had obtained from the
ordnance rebuild battalion in exchange for plywood.
The whole thing was done that way. We had a lot of things. We had a big tanker, which
we had borrowed from the Air Force on Kimpo Airfield. Every year when we had the
IG [Inspector General] inspection, the tanker had to be taken back over and parked at
Kimpo because it was an unauthorized piece of equipment. The day after the inspection,
they would go back and get it. We were absolutely dependent on this tanker for all our
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