Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
We put together a good team, but unfortunately it was advertised as "The Truth Squad."
Now, if you tell somebody that we're sending this team back to bring you the truth, it raises
certain hackles on the part of those who are to receive that message. So, we walked back into
a veritable lion's den of growling folks ready for, "What is this truth you're bringing us?"
Now, the nice thing about it was that General Blanchard did call General Shy Meyer, who
was then the DCSOPS, and asked that he sponsor us, so we at least had somebody to be a
long-range protector.
In any event, we came back, after putting together a rather long briefing of, I don't know, 70
to 80 Vu-Graphs, and briefed. At the staff level, the majors and lieutenant colonels from all
over the Army Staff just had question after question. We dealt with all kinds of their
questions, and then we briefed up the line, the next level. Finally, we had our major briefing
to a dozen Army Staff generals, co-chaired by Lieutenant General Meyer, the DCSOPS, and
Lieutenant General William R. Johansen, the DCSLOG at the time. They co-chaired the
meeting. It was a two-and-a-half-hour briefing. That is, I was on my feet at the end of the
table briefing for two and a half hours. There were a lot of questions and answers and
challenges and dialogue. This briefing was a major point, I think, in which we moved to a
place where everybody understood where everybody else was. We portrayed the difficulty of
doing all the things required and the fact we had to have decisions. Somebody needed to be
figuring out where they were going to get all the trucks, tanks, and Bradleys to put in the
warehouses we were going to build.
We now had the basic mark on the wall for how we would proceed. Henceforth, after that
day, the Department of the Army and Headquarters, USAREUR, had a plan that called for so
many warehouses, so many theater reserves, so many ammunition storage sites, the number
of places we intended to put those warehouses, and that sort of thing. This was the mark that
any other change could be measured against. We now, at least, had something on paper we
could dialogue against. That was a major point in time.
A second most interesting trip back to Washington came a couple of months later. Brigadier
General Drake Wilson was commander of EUD at the time. He came down, sat with me, and
said, "I think we've got a big problem in constructing the first site in MoenchenGladbach
using the baggies, the humidity-controlled cover for individual tank storage." His point was
twofold: First, instead of having one big, cleared area where you construct a warehouse, you
had to have a bigger area to put all the individual baggies. Second, each one of them had to
have a prepared platform, which meant there was a lot more construction required, and
therefore it was going to be a lot more costly. Yes, the individual bag may not be too much,
but for the construction to have a pad, an entrance, and then the wiring to get electricity to
each of the dehumidifiers was going to be more. Additionally, we were in wooded areas, so
we were going to have to take out a lot more trees, and EUD was getting adverse reactions
from the Germans.
Drake felt we really had a problem, and he ran out some numbers that showed EUD felt they
could build controlled-humidity warehouses for about the same price. With that, General
Groves, the Chief of Staff, dispatched General Heiberg and me back to brief the Army Staff
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