48 Million Tons To Eisenhower: The Role Of The SOS In The Defeat Of Germany [Illustrated Edition]

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Text originally published in 1945 under the same title.

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48 MILLION TONS TO EISENHOWER:

THE ROLE OF THE SOS IN THE DEFEAT OF GERMANY

BY

LIEUTENANT COLONEL RANDOLPH LEIGH

Historical Section, ETO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

CHARTS 4

FOREWORD 6

CHAPTER 1—HURRY UP AND WEIGHT 7

SOS Troops On D-Day 8

The Main Hindrances To A Speedy Victory 12

CHAPTER 2—TIME AND TIDE ON D-DAY 15

CHAPTER 3—THE STORM 21

CHAPTER 4—BRAINS AND GUTS 26

CHAPTER 5—3,065,505 MEN ON A SHOESTRING 30

CHAPTER 6—UP FROM THE RIVIERA 43

CHAPTER 7—LINKING UP 48

CHAPTER 8—COMMUNICATION OF IDEAS 57

CHAPTER 9—BUTTER, OIL AND SHOES 64

CHAPTER 10—FIRE POWER AND MOBILITY 69

CHAPTER 11—GAS INSURANCE 79

CHAPTER 12—MEDICAL CARE 84

CHAPTER 13—MORALE 95

CHAPTER 14—REINFORCEMENTS 102

CHAPTER 15—POL 113

CHAPTER 16—THE UK IN RETROSPECT 117

CHAPTER 17—COLUMBUS, WE ARE HERE! 124

HEADQUARTERS, COMMUNICATIONS ZONE, ETOUSA 132

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 134

CHARTS

1—U. S. Army Tonnage, World War I and World War II

2—Comparison of Artillery Ammunition, 1918 and 1944

3—Truck Routes in ETO

4—Rail Nets in ETO

5—Number of Prisoners Handled

6—Comparison of Army Rations

7—Losses in Motor Vehicles, 1918 and 1944

8—Tonnage of Motor Vehicles in ETO

9—Bomb Tonnages, World War l and World War II

10—Medical Care in Two Wars

11—Deaths from Disease, 1917-19, and 1942-45

12—Losses Through Venereal Disease, 1918 and 1944

13—Doughboy and GI Mail

14—Officers and Enlisted Men in ETO

15—Battle Casualties, World War 1 and World War II

16—Combat Casualties, World War I and World War II

17—Decorations in ETO

18—POL in ETO

19—Oil Products from America, World War I and World War II

20—Lend-Lease Compared with National Wealth

FOREWORD

This book is not intended as a definitive history of this phase of the American effort in Europe, but to record the highlights of that great project.

Obviously no one person could gather and evaluate all the material for a book on the Services of Supply of the United States Army in the European Theater of Operations. Actually more than one hundred persons, ranging from a private first class to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, contributed variously. Ten general officers, for instance, read proof and criticized chapters dealing with their particular branches.

The material as a whole, however, was gathered through the Historical Section of ETO and by the historians of the staff sections. The idea of the book originated with Colonel William A. Ganoe, the original Theater Historian. Certain individuals rendered outstanding assistance. Among these were:

The Theater Historian, Colonel S. L. A. Marshall, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Taylor, for tactical aspects; Lieutenant Colonel W. R. Churchill, Lieutenant Colonel S. V. Larkey, Major C. R. de Arman, Major M. S. Hayden, Major W. F. Knowland, Captain R. J. Greenwald, Captain R. C. Healey, Captain L. deL. Landes, Captain V. L. Posvar, Lieutenant H. E. French, Lieutenant Maurice Goodenough, Lieutenant H. M. Hull, Lieutenant C. R. Jones, Lieutenant P. R. Ledbetter, Lieutenant R. E. Stockton, Lieutenant Hugh Williamson, Lieutenant Morton Yarmon, Warrant Officer J. F. Bierstein, Warrant Officer M. M. Cahn, Technician Third Grade H. G. Elliott, Technician Third Grade L. W. Furda, Technician Fourth Grade J. F. Rudick, and Technician Fourth Grade R. M. Viets for the supply build-up details; and Captain G. S. Ierardi, Lieutenant P. G. Schuyler, Technical Sergeant H.. Diaz, Staff Sergeant C. W. Young, Technician Third Grade S, E. Hughes, Technician Third Grade R. J. Koke, Sergeant P. de Anna, Technician Fourth Grade Carl Hubeny and Tatiana Benard for the illustrations.

Mine was the happier task of organizing the work and writing the book.

RANDOLPH LEIGH

Lieutenant Colonel, CMP

Historical Section, ETOUSA.

Paris

June 1945

CHAPTER 1—HURRY UP AND WEIGHT

There was this about the essential nature of World War II in Europe which equalized the strain upon the troops of supply and of combat and in the end gave them equal share in the great victory: It was the swiftest-moving war in all the ages and at the same time it was the most ponderous war in the sheer weight of matériel required for the fighting.

Never before had armies struck by land and air with such sustained speed. Never before had the striking power and velocity of combat forces been so completely regulated by the ability of supply forces to cope with unprecedented burdens. There were no tables of experience for what had to be done. The masters of logistics from past wars would have deemed the task impossible. Finally, the fight was won because the men who braved the fire were supported by other men who dared to move mountains.

In many ways the conflict resembled that pattern of ideal war which military theorists have long envisaged, perhaps while little knowing the stress and shock or the hopes and disappointments of the real thing. Under the hypnotism of a cult of Force on the one side, or under the conviction of a doctrine of Democracy on the other—many times from sheer youthful exuberance—men drove one another to new heights of unexampled and prodigious effort. The normal military progress of a half-century was compacted into the span of a few months. Yet in the rear areas as in the forefront of battle, it was characteristic of this warfare that while men planned carefully, they did not act cautiously. The boldness of Allied thinking, rather than any material advantage, was the margin of victory.

For the men running the machines of high velocity warfare, time and space seemed barely to exist. They flew over seas and continents. They drove their modern juggernauts over hundreds of miles of hostile territory. American genius and industry had equipped them with durable yet nicely precisioned weapons. With the aid of other near-human instruments hardly less sensitive than the brains and hands that made them, they charted their way swiftly and unerringly deep into unknown country and demolished in a few seconds' time strongholds that in another age would have been counted a day's journey distant and would have resisted thousands of ill-equipped men for months—or forever.

Next in time of action, though second to none in dash and glory, came the foot soldiers of the front. In comparison with the men of armies before them, they were the fleetest and strongest combatants who had ever gone into battle. They were strong primarily because they were swift, and they were swift because of their motor vehicles, their weapons and their smooth-functioning, technically perfected organization.

And after the forward fighters of ground and air came the soldiers of the Services of Supply. These were the armed men who represented American industry transported to Europe to fight it out with German industry under most unfavorable conditions. Often within the combat area the men of the SOS performed with courage and ingenuity the multitudinous tasks put upon them. Heavy tasks, generally prosaic and often miserable.

Members of the port battalions—men on the docks unloading ships-railway men—truck drivers....

Men piling ammunition in dumps scattered through lonely forests-men moving masses of supplies in and out of bleak warehouses—men building camps and staging areas in muddy fields....

Men covered with grease and grime as they work upon locomotives in gloomy roundhouses—men building highways by hand and by bulldozer—men rebuilding railroads destroyed by bombs, shells, and demolitions explosives....

Men driving DUKWs, lighters, bargers, Rhinos—men going without sleep on all sorts of transportation runs, including the famous Red Ball....

Chemical mortar experts—wiremen, switchboard operators, line-builders, radio relayers—combat photographers—pharmacists....

Men in repair shops and maintenance depots—men handling clothes and tenting....

Skilled physicians and surgeons and nurses, tending the wounded.

Thousands of men doing their duty wherever they happened to be, in defiance both of danger and exhaustion.

SOS Troops On D-Day

The Services of Supply troops who supported the landing in Normandy numbered 527,631. They were distributed on D-day as follows:

OPERATING PERSONNEL, ASSIGNED AND ATTACHED

Men of the Advance Section, Communications Zone—896

Men of the Base Sections—7,236

Quartermasters—59,834

Men of the Medical Corps—65,407

Engineers—79,330

Men of the Ordnance—45,646

Men of the Signal Corps—16,578

Men of the Chemical Warfare Service—6,954

Men of the Transportation Corps—68,850

Military Police—12,468

Reinforcements—11,489

Miscellaneous—59,809

Total—434,497

NON-OPERATING PERSONNEL

Reinforcements for SOS units—76,359

Hospital patients—14,402

Prisoners (American soldiers serving court-martial sentences or awaiting trial)—2,373

Total—93,134

Grand Total—527,631

On D-day the operating troops of the Services of Supply totalled 434, 497—31 per cent of the whole Army of the European Theater of Operations. On 7 June 1944 that Army contained 1,549,080 troops, including those in the United Kingdom as well as France.

Every army, every corps, and every division includes service troops. And those troops were, to a large extent, organized and trained by the Services of Supply in Europe. And many of them served under SOS commanders until they were assigned under a ground force leader.

The extent to which the service troops are meshed in with (and often interchangeable with) the combat forces is shown by the fact that on 31 August, 1944, out of the total of 800,000 men in the armies by then in Northern France, 344,759 were service troops, as follows:

Chemical Warfare—9,749

Engineers—130,207

Ordnance—47,953

Quartermaster—59,011

Signal—36,470

Medical—44,019

Military Police—6,906

Miscellaneous—10,444

Many points of similarity and of difference stand out when the Services of Supply of World War I are compared with those of World War II. On Armistice Day in 1918, the SOS of World War I had about the same strength as that for our main invasion force of 1944. General Pershing's SOS was 570,140 strong, and there were 527,631 SOS troops in the European Theater of Operations in June 1944.

Pershing's whole army at its peak contained roughly 2,000,000 men. And that was almost exactly the strength of the U. S. Army in the European Theater by the late autumn of 1944, if we count only the troops coming in through Normandy.

The force (Force Dragoon) which landed in Southern France on 15 August, 1944, and made its brilliant march up the Rhône Valley and into Germany was not nearly as large as the Normandy invasion force (Neptune), and its action was at the outset less dramatic though its final accomplishments were tremendous. In technique and equipment Dragoon operation was of a piece with Neptune, but its Service of Supply was proportionately smaller.

The SOS of Dragoon was absorbed by that of Overlord on 20 November, 1944. (The Allied Normandy operation as a whole was called Overlord. Neptune was the name for the movement to the beaches and the assault upon them.) At the time of the merger, the strength of the SOS of the Northern force was about that of the SOS of 1918—over 500,000.

The merger of the Northern and Southern forces resulted in a ratio of SOS to combat troops in December 1944 which approximated the ratio in the AEF of December 1918—a ratio of 1 to 2. By 30 April, 1945, the strength of SOS in Europe was 979,637 men—about one-third of the total force of 2,821,382. This included, of course, the patients in hospitals.

In comparing the two wars the outstanding fact about the supplies used is that nearly six times as much materiel per man was needed in the Second World War as in the First. Up to 11 November, 1918, the tonnage for World War I was 8,348,342 long tons. (See chart 1.)

Up to 31 May, 1945 the tonnage for World War II was 47,641,882.

To put it another way, World War II was vastly a more mechanical war and consequently a heavier one. Nor was that all. The volume of materials to be transported and turned into combat results was bulkier though at the same time generally more delicate. The average ton of matériel for Pershing took up only 63 cubic feet of space.

CHART 1

The average Eisenhower ton required 99 cubic feet.

That meant fifty-seven percent more space in ships, in warehouses, on docks, on trains and in trucks for every ton, on the average, of the whole 46,000,000 tons. It also meant more trouble on roads, for often the huge machines of modern war in their big crates made it necessary to reduce two-way roads to one-way use, and they even forced costly detours because of the bottlenecks they created at sharp turns in winding roads.

There were other complicating factors tied up with this greater bulkiness combined with greater weight. Many of the most valuable mechanisms of war were so large and so heavy that they could not be lifted by the cranes available in Britain. In some instances