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Chapter 6
The Battle of the Forward Switchboard
In my essay "Of Telephones, Wire, and Upstarts," I mentioned switchboards only
in passing, so here I must expand a bit. I am sure you have seen telephone switchboards,
with jacks and plugs and tiny lights that light up when someone is calling in. The field
boards that we used in WW II were primitive: Instead of lights, they had little hinged
doors called "drops," one for each incoming line. When the person on the end of the line
rang, the drop would fall open. There was also a crank, which the operator twisted to ring
the phone at the far end of a line.
Sound complicated? It is, unless you can see the actual switchboard. Just believe
me when I say that the operator can connect any line tied into his board to any other line,
provided both lines are intact. He can generally tell by the way the crank turns when he
rings whether the line is broken, grounded, or OK. If it is not OK, he has to tell the
impatient caller why he isn't getting an answer, then call the wire chief, so he can send
out a trouble-shooting team.
Sometimes an operator has to take considerable heat, when the calls are coming in
thick and fast. To make it harder, certain calls identified as Flash, Priority, or Fire
Mission have to go through at once, even if it means breaking into an ongoing
conversation. I don't think we ever got a Flash or a Priority call: they had to do with an
enemy breakthrough that might endanger our position. But we did get lots of Fire
Missions.
And there were emergencies not covered by the book. On a field exercise at Camp
Barkeley, a rattlesnake suddenly reared up under the switchboard and rattled the operator
- figuratively as well as literally. He was engaged in connecting Major Costain, the Bn
CO, with Lt Col Daly, the Div Arty S-3. Neither of those gentlemen was patient when
frustrated, and T/4 Browne*, the switchboard operator, had to make a quick decision as
to whether he was more afraid of a snake than of two field grade officers. He gave
priority to the snake, and abandoned his post. The two irate officers had to wait until Pvt
Custer, the battalion rattlesnake hunter, came and dispatched the reptile.
Pvt Custer, nicknamed "General" in honor of his namesake of Little Big Horn
fame, was a short, muscular soldier of no particular distinction except that he had the four
stars of a full general tattooed on each shoulder just in case of an unexpected promotion.
and that he loved to hunt snakes. He would kill three or four of them every time we went
on a three-day field exercise.
And there was a time, on the Normandy beachhead, when the luckless Browne*
had his switchboard positioned at the corner of a field, in a hollow dug into the hedgerow
embankment. An incoming shell burst almost on top of the hedgerow above him and the
concussion knocked him flat. When he recovered his breath and senses, he looked to see
a mess of loose ends of wire cut or jarred out of the board. He crawled over and closed all
the drops. Only one of them fell when he tested. He still had an intact line to Upstart
Charley, the C Battery switchboard.
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