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Of Telephones, Wire, and Upstarts
One day of the first week we were in combat, Lt Col Costain, the commanding
officer, got into his command car and started to leave the CP. The off rear tire of the
command car picked up the wire from the fire direction center to A Battery and took off,
taking the wire with it, jerking the field telephone out of the hands of PFC Smith*, who
was talking over it at the time. The telephone bounced over the meadow in the wake of
the command car as the screaming Smith* galloped in hot pursuit, his helmet falling
forward over his eyes.
Track-laying vehicles, tanks and such, were even worse, since they covered more
ground surface, and their radio antennas were so tall that they could snag wire up to
twelve feet overhead. I remember the first knocked-out German tank I ever saw. It was a
Panther, slightly smaller than its more famous cousin, the Tiger, but it looked like a
battleship to me. I was exclaiming in awe, when I noticed its right track. A good halfmile
of red-orange German field telephone wire was wrapped around it. I knew then that we
could win the war: there were military problems that the Super Race had not eliminated
either.
There was a worse hazard to telephone wire than traffic, though. Enemy artillery
fire, which sends out sprays of sharp steel fragments, will mangle both wire and human
beings. When artillerymen can't think of anything else to shoot at, they shoot at road
intersections. And that's where the most wire is. And that's probably where they will be
shooting again - about the time the wire crew is out trying to splice the line back together.
Any time, day or night, that a switchboard operator became aware that a
telephone line was not operating" he would ring the emergency line [like 911] to the Wire
Chief, and he would send a crew out to troubleshoot it. The system they used to locate the
break was to bracket it: They would go out about half-way and hook a telephone onto the
line with test clips, ring it, and see which end of the line answered. Then they would
know that the break was somewhere between where they were and the other end. The
worst thing that could happen was not to get an answer from either end. Then you knew
that there were at least two breaks in the wire, and if it was a fairly short line, it might
save time just to lay the whole thing again instead of fixing it.
We weren't supposed to use lights at night - might give away our position to
"Bed-check Charlie," as we called the night-flying German aircraft. But it’s difficult even
in daylight to sort out your wire line from a dozen or so other lines along the same road,
and finding the two cut ends of the same line and splicing them together would be nearly
impossible by using only feel, so wire crews were allowed to use carefully shielded
flashlights to do their work in the dark. And each man carried on his belt a lineman's kit,
a leather holster holding a folding knife and a pair of electrician's pliers. This and two
kinds of tape allowed him to make waterproof splices in the wire.
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