Franklin F. Snyder
We were billeted in a real nice, I don't know whether they called it a chateau or not,
but it was a real nice mansion that the Germans had been using. It was in the town
about a mile or so from the office. The headquarters were out at the edge of town,
and it was walking distance back and forth from the residence to where our offices
were.
So we had, I think in my paper there I describe how many people we had, but it was
Mittendorf who was in charge. I think he has died. Al Cochran and Bill Lyles are
also dead. Mittendorf was the head civilian in the Atlanta Division office after the
war. I don't know whether this has anything to do with the story, but when, a few
years back, the commanding general died and I think Mittendorf later on married his
wife there in Atlanta.
He was in charge of the unit. We had several G.I.s and, Don Cameron was there.
He had the contact with the Weather Service. In other words, he got all of the
weather information that they could collect for us. All this is told in the articles
about how we operated. Hathaway had gone around. He had visited all of the
engineers of the various armies and arranged for collecting gauge readings and for
putting in some additional gauges or replacing ones that had been destroyed.
At that time we had one bank of the Rhine and, I think, once or twice some of the
G.I.s were killed reading the gauges. But the reason we were at Chantilly was the
communication system. In other words, the data that we could get would come in,
and then the forecast would get back out to the armies in an efficient manner. I
never went into that. I'm not sure just how it all operated, but it apparently operated
pretty good because of the planning and communicatins facilities there.
The upper river gauges were in Switzerland on one side, and Germany on the other.
The Swiss couldn't give us that information, but somebody, the intelligence people
arranged with somebody to get us the Swiss gauge readings.
Q ..
So you did have the-Swiss readings?
A ..
Yes. Then quite a bit of the time, the Germans were broadcasting river data in the
clear. They apparently felt it was of more value to them for navigation and maybe
they didn't know we were interested in it. Every so often someone picked up for
us the river readings broadcast by the Germans for some of the gauges on the
tributaries in the German held area. They were very helpful.
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