Engineer Memoirs
point to become acquainted. Personally, I had several contacts with them. They invited
my adjutant and me to
bridge on several occasions when we had a chance to be
away, and I believe I
dinner with them at least once.
There were: other activities, more general in nature, to welcome the men of the
battalion. Nearby, the Astor estate, Cliveden, sponsored some activities to which
battalion personnel were invited. The small communities nearby would often invite a
small group for some social function.
One thing I noticed was that the English were quite restricted in the availability cf many
items of food. The only
vegetables I remember were Brussels sprouts. I got very
tired
sprouts. Cakes were usually made from a very strong wheat flour and
with very little sugar available. Nevertheless, they shared what they had.
Moving ahead a little bit, but to give you some idea of the English food: I remember
very vividly that about four weeks
we landed in France our rations included the
first American white flour that had been issued. At the same time, some toilet paper
from the United States was issued. I really had a hard time deciding which was most
bread made from American white flour or toilet paper that didn't have
the wooden splinters that the British brown paper had! All this is to say that the British
shared what they had. They accepted the overloading of the island with troops and
equipment. It was very crowded, yet the relationships were good.
Q ..
One of
main things your battalion was engaged in while training in England was
mine clearing. Earlier you talked of your insistence on using live mines as part of that
training. After your unit got to France, landed in Normandy, how much use were you
able to make of that training? How heavily mined was the area? Did you feel that the
training turned out to be adequate?
A
The area into which we went, behind Omaha Beach, was very heavily mined. And the
mine problem was really our major problem for the first several weeks-together with
the problems of trying to move through the very heavy hedgerows of the Normandy
countryside.
There's no question in my mind but that the training in England, which accustomed the
troops to
with live mines, psychologically prepared them when they actually got
in combat, I have no way of proving this other than the fact that the men readily
accepted the assignments given, and we had relatively few casualties from mines that
could be blamed on mishandling. There were mine casualties. I was one of them,
actually, but this had nothing to do with attempting to remove mines. That mission was
handled very, very well.
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