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The Battle of the Forward Switchboard
On the day I went out to be a forward observer with the Engineer company - the
place on Hill 122 where I found the artichokes that Joe B. Davis refused to share - Jake
asked me to keep an eye out for a likely position for the forward switchboard. I found
what I thought was a good one, on the edge of the hilltop, only a couple of hundred yards
from my own location with the engineers. I called back to Jake and described it in
glowing terms, pointing out that practically all our infantry units were now on the hill, so
the lines from switchboard to FOs and LnOs would all be short: lateral more than
forward.
Jake was so pleased with my solution that he renamed the switchboard in my
honor. When you called, Davis the operator would answer "Moore Switch" instead of
"Upstart Forward." I was justifiably proud.
That night the Germans must have expended most of their artillery ammunition
firing on our elements on Hill 122. I was safe underground, in the covered slit trench the
engineers had dug for me, but Moore Switch was not as well dug in. Davis the operator
was not wounded, fortunately, but there were several near misses, and several of the lines
going into the switchboard were cut by the fire. Early next morning Moore Switch was
moved to a safer position at the foot of the hill. And re-named. The operator again
answered, "Upstart Forward."
All during the Normandy campaign, most of the flow of information and fire
missions came over the telephone, and both the Upstart and the Upstart Forward
switchboard operators were working at top speed, routing the calls, checking to see that
the call had gone through, and occasionally monitoring to make sure a line was still in
use. (Sometimes a caller would just put down his phone and forget to ring off.) Operators
weren't supposed to listen to the conversations, but they necessarily heard snatches of
them and absorbed more by osmosis, so that sometimes Browne* and Amos Davis knew
as much about the situation as I, who was paid to know.
But after the breakthrough, when the glamour war started, there wasn't time to lay
all those lines to the FOs and LnO's, and we had to rely on radio during our dash across
France. We still had the main switchboard and the lines to the firing battery positions and
our own CP locations, but traffic on them was pretty slow.
One mid-morning, after I had just signed off from talking on the radio to a LnO,
Capt. Richter, my telephone rang, and I heard the plaintive voice of Browne*, the Upstart
operator. "Sir," he said, "could you tell me what's going on?"
At the end of the last chapter, designated The Glamour War, we were in a
recently-bombed chateau, surrounded by mad Frenchmen in tanks. We did not linger
there, but moved north again, and after two days of desperately heavy fighting, ended up
behind a line of low hills occupied by our infantry. From those hills, our observers looked
down on a wide, flat valley with open green fields punctuated here and there by patches
of woods. The little village of Chambois lay in the valley, a few miles away.
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