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Upstarts
All our infantry was loaded onto quartermaster trucks because they couldn't be
expected to keep up on foot. They got on the road in approach march formation, with our
artillery batteries interspersed among them.
And then there was the use of radios. We had been carefully taught not to say
anything over the radio in the clear (not in code), that might be of value to the enemy.
Specifically, that included the designation of units, such as 90th Division, 915th Field
Artillery Battalion, etc., or the locations of friendly troops, even without unit designation.
Fire missions were sent in the clear, because it would take too much time to
encode and decode them, and besides, the enemy already knew where they were, and by
the time they got word where we were going to shoot, it would be too late to do much
about it.
.
I was with the command party, bouncing around in the back seat of Col Hughes
command car, listening to the crackle of the SCR 608 radio and trying to stay awake. It
was nightfall before we got started, and my mid-day nap had not completely caught me
up on sleep. We were driving blackout, with the driver straining to guide on the tiny red
cat-eye tail lights of the vehicle ahead.
It was well past midnight when we halted for no apparent reason, and Bob
Hughes and I dismounted and walked forward to see if we could find out what was going
on. (This was standard procedure, to make sure that a whole column was not stopping
because some driver had gone to sleep.) We stumbled through the dark along the
shoulder of the road, past a couple of dozen vehicles, until we got to a place where we
saw the tall shadowy figure of Col Bell talking to a Military Policeman (MP). We had
arrived at a fork in the road, and no one knew which branch to take.
The MP went to the radio in his jeep, and I heard him say, "The Commanding
Officer of the 359th Infantry is here at coordinates 753-658, and he wants to know which
road to take. "
This outrageous violation of radio security almost made me dive for a ditch,
expecting that artillery fire would be coming in any moment, but everyone else seemed
take it calmly. I was soon to find that as long as they were moving, armored units didn't
worry about some German intercept radios listening in. They knew it would be hours -
perhaps days - before the information would filter down to a combat unit which could
react to it, and by then our people would be miles away, and the situation completely
changed.
Col Bell got his answer and we drove on, down the right fork, I believe. Or maybe
the left. Anyhow, he got into contact with the commanding general of CCB, and got some
idea of what road to take to follow the armor.
I think it was at the time we were following the 4th Armored Division that we
made three rather long moves in one day, which kept us busy. On the second
displacement we ended up with the FDC in a deserted pig-sty, so we were glad to make
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