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Upstarts
Then someone yelled "March Order," and while I was looking around to
see what that meant, they started to close the trails of a howitzer on my
legs, and when I jumped to get out of the way, I was almost run down by a
truck wheeling in to hook up. So I guess there are three things that get
action out of an artilleryman.
Moving the Infantry
Infantry, by definition, fights on foot. Traditionally, they are also expected to
move to the location of the fighting on foot. They are often called on to do that,
especially if the distances are short. But 25 miles is about as far as a doughboy' in full
pack can be expected to march in a day, and after such a day, he really needs another day
or two to rest before he is in good shape to fight.
During the "Glamour War" period, I remember the end of one long day's march -
the third day of a march of 62 miles - when the infantrymen were so exhausted that they
were clinging to anything with wheels - trucks, tanks, farm carts. I saw at least one
hanging like a three-toed sloth to the tube of a towed Tank Destroyer gun. I hear stories
about Roman legionaries making longer forced marches under even heavier packs, but I
question their fighting abilities when they got there. I suspect that their enemies were so
astonished at their sudden arrival that they gave up.
Recognizing infantry mobility as a problem, the War Department experimented
with various solutions. As one of their experiments, the 90th Infantry Division was
redesignated the 90th Motorized Division some time in late 1942 or early 1943, while we
were still at Camp Barkeley, and issued enough vehicles (large 2 1/2 ton 6x6 GMC trucks
with long wheel base) to permit every infantryman to ride to work during field exercises.
The rest of us already had transportation.
I don't remember just how many vehicles this amounted to, but I do know that our
column took up more than a hundred miles of road space - more when some trucks
straggled, as they were bound to do. It was even worse when they tried to travel with 100
yards between vehicles, as our combat troops in North Africa recommended to keep from
presenting a profitable target for dive bombing and strafing. A hundred yards is the
length of a football field without the end zones, and there just wasn't enough road space
for that in the Camp Barkeley maneuver area. Eventually the Division came up with a
policy that all convoy driving would be with a "speedometer multiplier" of three. That
meant that a driver was expected to multiply the number of miles per hour by three, then
stay behind the vehicle ahead exactly that number of yards. Since most drivers were
neither mathematicians nor infallible judges of distance, this worked only tolerably well,
but was better than nothing.
The crucial problem, however, turned out not to be how to fit them on the roads,
but what to do with them after they had left the roads and unloaded the infantry. Where
did you park the brutes? If you scattered them over the landscape either under cover of
trees or dispersed a hundred yards apart (on account of enemy aircraft, remember?) they
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