Franklin F. Snyder
Q ..
Kept him warm though, right?
A.
I don't remember Cameron being there, but he must have been in the same building
with me. The other people were all fairly high-ranking Air Force officers. They
were a nice bunch of people there, and they had a deal. The military was not
supposed to take anything out of the French economy, so they had a deal where they
supplied the baker with American flour and. we got our French bread every day.
Boy, that was good. I love French bread. Once in awhile, they'd be flying into
London or somewhere. They'd bring some eggs back from London. But that was
an experience there.
The heating system, no one could understand why we couldn't get any heat at night.
It was a complicated system. The hot water storage was up in the attic and the
heated water would go up there, I guess, and then get distributed and a lot of times
people couldn't get a hot bath. Cochran sent a mechanical engineer out from Paris
and on Christmas Eve, Cochran and I explored the heating system. We finally
figured out something so that we could at least get some hot water for a bath. But
that was a side light.
One event that happened, there are seven dams on the Upper Rhine where half of
each one was controlled by the Swiss and half by Germany. There was always talk
about the Germans blowing up some of those dams. One day, just before we issued
our forecast, we got a message that the Germans had blown up one or two of the
dams, so we quick figured out some new forecasts. Another message came in
saying that the Germans had planned on doing it, but the Swiss had talked them out
of it or something. They had not blown the dams up.
Q ..
Well, that was the real fear, wasn't it? It wasn`t so much of the rain as the Germans
would blow the dams on the upper Rhine and that would flood the downstream area.
A ..
Yes. Actually, it would not have extended far because they're relatively small
dams. It would have been disastrous for some distance, but it would never have
been carried too far. If they had synchronized and blown-up two or three of them,
timed them all and everything, they could have sent a pretty good wave downstream.
I don't remember how we estimated what would happen downstream. Anyhow, it
didn't happen.
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