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THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II
ON A CITIZEN SOLDIER.
By STRATTON HAMMON*
The very worst confrontation of things military upon a civilian newly commissioned happened to an architect friend of mine from Louisville named W. Earl Otis. For some unexplained reason, since he had no experience or connection with flying, he wanted into the Army Air Corps and somehow managed to get a commission as a captain. He was ordered to a small air base and, upon reporting for duty, was told that he was the ranking officer, therefore the commanding officer, and that he would have to take the review which began in just half an hour. He did not know what a review was!
My own advent into the army resulted in a clash between twenty-two years of intense civilian constructional experience and habits and one hundred and sixty-seven years of Corps of Engineers military constructional experience and habits. When America entered World War
II perhaps the most immediate problem was that our physical plant, necessary to train and prepare all the military services, was only a small fraction of what it needed to be. Forts, camps, airfields, hospitals, depots, and facilities of all kinds - even buildings to print army maps
- had to be erected at once. In the army, then including the Army Air Corps, this gigantic task fell to the U.S. Corps of Engineers.
The organizational setup of the Corps of Engineers was at that time exceptionally well suited to handling such a situation. The Corps was roughly divided into two parts. The first, commonly called "Going to Troops," was the regular army organization of companies, battalions, regiments, and corps composed of enlisted men and officers. The second, labeled the "U.S. Engineer Department," covered the entire country even in peacetime and was composed of a few career engineering officers and
thousands of extremely well-entrenched civilian bureaucrats. There were no enlisted men at all, not one.
The trouble was that the peacetime U.S. Engineer Department was principally concerned with lakes, dams, and inland water transportation and did not have the necessary military personnel. It was ill-equipped to handle the vast military construction projects. In order to fill this gap it called in many reserve officers and commissioned many new officers from the civilian construction industry. These citizen soldiers outnumbered the career West Pointers about ten to one.
The office of the Chief of Engineers was at the top of the pyramid, and under it were a number of divisional offices which usually embraced several states. Next were the district offices which encompassed about half a state; their boundaries, however, were determined mostly by geographical rather than state lines. Under them were the area offices, and the areas occasionally had a number of branch field offices. The Chief of Engineers was a general officer. The divisions and districts were commanded generally by a "chicken" colonel, and the areas by a major or a captain. All division and district engineers known to me were West Pointers, and all area engineers were reserve officers or, like me, had come in by being commissioned directly from civilian life.
An area engineer could wear several other military hats. He could also be the commanding officer and the contracting officer of the project he was building or he could possess any combination of these three titles. The area engineer could have half a dozen great constructional projects going at one time while being area engineer on all of them; but perhaps he might also be the commanding officer on several, or the contracting officer on some of them, or maybe only the area engineer on one or two. Each contracting officer had a monetary limit. My limit was one million dollars a day. If I needed to spend more, which I frequently did, I had to telephone my colonel whose limit was ten million dollars a day, equal to approximately a hundred million
by present standards. Between July 1942 and July 19433 my colonel, with about a half dozen area engineers, spent an amount equivalent to approximately a billion 1985 dollars. This was the complicated organization into which I was about to stick my head.
It came to my attention that the Louisville district engineer, Colonel (later General) Henry Hutchings was inquiring in local circles about construction men who might fit into his command. I was thirty-eight years old, had been an architect for
twenty-two years, and had operated my own firm for thirteen years starting in 1929. 1 went to see him at the Federal Building in Louisville, where his main office occupied an entire floor. Much later, when we had become friends, he told me that I had been accepted because my back was bowed out of shape by two decades of bending over a drawing board and because I wore a bow tie. He was clever enough to realize that men working on a drawing board seldom wore a four-in-hand tie because it hung down in their way. I explained that my hand was crippled, and he said that he would arrange a waiver. After taking a physical in early 1942, 1 received the usual letter from the adjutant general telling me that I had been appointed a captain in the Corps of Engineers and ordering me to report to the Louisville district.
From the Corps of Engineers' point of view, I was, perhaps, the greenest officer ever to report for duty. At least I felt that way. One of the first things that struck me was that everything -tables, chairs, boxes, whatever, was stamped "USED." Since they were obviously not new and were apparently used, it puzzled me why they had to be labeled in that manner. It was several days before I realized that this stood for "U.S. Engineer Department."
When I had come to that headquarters before, trying to join up, everyone was friendly, courteous, and helpful, even the colonel. Now, no one paid me the slightest heed, especially the colonel who, I quickly learned, was a supreme being to be talked about in hushed terms. I had no office or even a desk and chair
that I could call my own and seemed destined to wander forever around the halls. Not even the lieutenants wanted to have anything to do with me.
It turned out later that the colonel had a plan for me, but he did not deign to acquaint me with the fact. Instead he acted as if I did not exist. So I spent my time bothering the civilian heads of sections in an effort to learn how the organization worked. I read reams of manuals, contracts, etc., and journeyed out to local military construction projects to talk to the area engineers about their problems. Early in July Major Joe Gill, a West Pointer who afterward became a general in the Air Corps, informed me that the next day I was to report to Lawrenceburg, Illinois, a hundred miles to the northwest, where a great army airfield, with several satellite fields, was being constructed. My title was to be the executive assistant of the district engineer, and my job was to help the area engineer expedite the construction which was behind schedule.
What an area engineer really was, especially what the lines and extent of his authority were, was still a mystery to me. How much power did he possess to rectify his position if he did fall behind schedule? I had never heard of a contracting officer. The colonel, in his wisdom, realized all this and was sending me on this mission so I could catch up on my learning. I soaked up army knowledge like a sponge and that was all to the good because there was precious little time for me to learn. My education
here also embraced the constructional peculiarities of an airfield, a type of engineering knowledge foreign to me up until that time.
On July 29, 1942, when there had barely been time to become acquainted with the area engineer and his two lieutenants, I was ordered back to the district office. Here I was told by Major Gill that the colonel had appointed me area engineer, commanding officer, and contracting officer of an army airfield, with all customary facilities, to be built seventy miles to the north of Louisville in Columbus, Indiana. I was handed a one sheet, two
paragraph letter of authority which stated that I had only five months to get a group of farmers off their land and have military planes flying in. This project not only included four mile long concrete runways but even the design of the airfield and the construction of housing, shops, schools, gasoline storage, fire department, water system, sewage system, electrical system, etc. The purpose was to train Army Air Corps flyers to work with ground personnel troops to be quartered at Camp Atterbury, then under construction ten miles away.
A panel truck was provided, and this was stocked with several typewriters, a file or two, and mounds of army forms. Included was a heavy manual which informed me how to act as an area engineer. All alone I crossed the Ohio River, drove north, and wondered how on earth any human being could possibly accomplish the task that was assigned me. Incongruously a wisp of a newly-learned engineer song kept popping into my head: "The engineers, they have no fears, they live in caves and ditches." I wondered if they had any caves in Columbus, Indiana, for I had no place else to stay that night!
As I drove along, I remembered that my good friend, Major William Strudwick Arrasmith, former Louisville architect, was the area engineer building Camp Atterbury; I stopped and gave him a call, knowing that he had a staff of a hundred or so civilian employees. I asked that he let me have an office manager and a dozen secretaries. He just laughed at my plight because the same thing had happened to him when he started Camp Atterbury. He did consent to have one secretary and a jeep sitting in front of the courthouse when I rolled into Columbus.
When I arrived an hour later, there she was waiting for me, and we conferred in my panel truck, conjecturing how to put together an army airport in five months. Having been included in this situation once before, she suggested we appeal to the local chamber of commerce, and off we went. That body was flabbergasted. They had heard nothing of my project which promised to disrupt the little town, but they managed at once
to procure us an office by taking over the Sunday school of a Lutheran church. They began to round up all typists and anyone else whom they thought would fit in. We got the telephone company to install a lot of telephones. The first calls were back to my colonel's office; I began badgering the various department heads for personnel and got the promise of an office manager, several persons to start our financial section, and a dozen civil engineers and inspectors.
Next we contacted several firms of architects in nearby Indianapolis and called the Columbus Chapter of the American Legion, asking if they could put together a group of Legionnaires to form a guard for the proposed airfield. We obtained a court order allowing us to survey a two square mile tract even before the farmers realized that they would have to move off the land some of their ancestors had obtained by service in the Revolutionary War. Indeed, one of the first local groups to come to my office was a Daughters of the American Revolution delegation to obtain my promise that the remains of the Revolutionary War veterans would be carefully re-interred in a cemetery of its choosing.
In about ten days Colonel Hutchings sent me an assistant area engineer. This was Lieutenant Austin Griffith who had come straight from the Kentucky Highway Department. He knew his roads, and an airport runway is simply a good road built one hundred and fifty feet wide. We had to fight not only for personnel and four million dollars worth of heavy earth-moving and concrete-paving equipment, but also for every bit of material needed. My first estimates told me that in order to meet our schedule, we would have to move in ten carloads of cement and fifty-five carloads of aggregates (sand and gravel) every day.
In my ignorance I innocently called the cement company that I had been buying from for twenty years and instructed them to send me ten carloads of cement daily. They nearly fainted, telling me that their entire output would not begin to equal that amount. They did agree to try to put together a cartel of cement
suppliers all over the mid-west in an effort to accommodate me. Their last question was, "What siding do we move this cement onto?" This raised another problem. We had no siding, and when I called the Pennsylvania Railroad to ask that they put in one for us, they were scornful, telling me that they had no rails and that in any case there were scores of other new military installations ahead of us. So we sent out one of our "expeditors" to locate rails, and he found them in an abandoned coal mine in Sullivan County, Indiana. The word leaked out, however, and before we could get the equipment together to bring in the rails, they were gone. This made me angry, and, as a commanding officer having the highest telephone priority (all telephone calls were completed only on a priority basis and each installation had
a priority number), I forthwith called Donald M. Nelson, head of the War Production Board. He was most tolerant and said, "Captain, tell me exactly where you are." Two days later the Pennsylvania Railroad was beginning to build a railroad spur into my airfield.
This episode had a sequel. I reported to my colonel's headquarters each Saturday to bring him up on the week's developments. When I next walked through his doorway, he was yelling at the top of his voice, "If you take him out of that job, you can take me out of this one!" As I passed his secretary, I asked, "What's that about?" She replied, "You." All the colonel said to me was, "Don't call Donald Nelson again." Nelson did not complain; it was the Chief of Engineers office. In my civilian ignorance I had not gone through channels, which would have taken months; by reason of my military orders I did not have months to spare.
These problems kept sweeping over us in waves as the office filled out and construction began. By that time the weather was turning cold and winter was setting in. This complicated the concrete-pouring process. Normally constructors just quit pouring concrete in freezing weather, but we could not. My schedule called for me to put down an average of one mile of concrete twenty-five feet wide each day through the middle of winter. I did not know that no one had ever achieved such a record before. Later, when I knew my colonel better, I asked, "Why did you assign the area engineers who had been architects to engineering projects and the engineers from civilian life to architectural jobs?" He answered, "You all knew how to build, but, by assigning you projects outside your disciplines, you did not know the jobs I gave you were impossible, so you did them."
One day while walking through the district office I happened to cut through the estimating section which was staffed with about forty estimators. One of them, working on my airport, called out, "Captain, what is your airport going to cost?" I gave him a figure off the top of my head which evoked a round of
laughter as I had intended. Later, when the contractors' bids came in, my facetious estimate was just short of perfect while that of the estimating section was over a million dollars off. Thereafter, I enjoyed an undeserved reputation as a whiz with constructional figures.
Union organizers began to give me trouble, stopping work here and there on the field while making speeches to the workmen. My guards would throw several out one gate, but more would enter another gate two miles away (the field had an area of four square miles) posing as ordinary workmen. Finally we appealed to the draft board at Indianapolis, asking why these young healthy males were allowed to evade military service. (One of them was a professional wrestler.) The organizers began to disappear, and when it began to sink in what was happening, my troubles in that direction ceased.
As construction hit its peak, my big headache became quality control. My inspectors just would not inspect. They all wanted to be "good ole boys" loved by everyone. It seemed repugnant to them to tell anyone that he was doing something wrong. However, the Corps of Engineers civilian bureaucrats were on my back, and they were fanatical about obtaining not merely good concrete but perfect concrete. I have seen a district supervisor rub his cheek on one of my concrete walls to feel its texture. A honeycomb was absolutely unthinkable to the old line Corps civil servant engineers. The trouble was my inspectors were concrete contractors scrounged from private industry during the emergency. They did not know that the kind of concrete demanded by the district could actually be produced, and until being commissioned into the Corps, neither did I
Nevertheless, it was my responsibility to put down 352,000 square yards of perfect concrete in the dead of winter, and I meant to do it. This was equal to a strip twenty-five feet wide and twenty-four miles long, and there were only twenty-four days in which to accomplish it. It was, of course, necessary to pour concrete twenty-four hours each day seven days a week.
Because of the cold, our concrete finishers were always working about a mile behind the paving machines. Every one of these finishers were paid more money than the commanding officer, area engineer, and contracting officer.
In order to frighten my inspectors into being more demanding, I would appear at different work sections all over the field at any time, night or day. One morning at 4:00 a.m. I drove my jeep fairly close to one of the operating concrete pavers and was not heard because of the racket the machine made. I walked silently out of the dark up behind my inspector who was gazing down into one of the worst batches of concrete yet seen on my field. It was covered with water which was a prime Corps
"no-no." Touching the inspector on the shoulder I asked, "How are things going?" He answered, "Just fine." It was said that they could hear me yell a half mile away.
When mechanical equipment is pushed to these extremes, it is difficult to keep it running. We had five tremendous concrete pavers, which rode on steel tracks placed twenty-five feet apart and mechanically put down the concrete paving. By desperate efforts we kept two of these operating, on the average, while three were being repaired.
Administrative problems were continuous. On one visit to the district headquarters a department head said to me, "Captain, you are running a most unusual construction project." When I asked why, he said, "Not one change order has reached my desk from your airport." Since I had signed scores of change orders, I hurried back to my field and called my office manager. "How many change orders have I signed?" was my first question. He answered, "seventy-three." "What did you do with them?" was my next question. He took me over into his office and opened a drawer in his desk and said, "Put them in there." He had not processed them up through our own architect-engineer staff, through the concerned contractors, nor into our area and the district financial section as was required!
My title as commanding officer was valid only until the Army Air Corps sent in their commanding officer to take charge, but this did not happen while I was at the field. As the end of 1942 approached, a number of military aircraft, assigned to the field, appeared, and we were able to allow them to land on one runway and provide the personnel with housing facilities. We had accomplished our mission, the rest was cleanup.
The vast Camp Atterbury ten miles north of my field was being simultaneously completed by Major Arrasmith. Since he also lived in Columbus we had spent many of our evenings together trading shop talk. Occasionally we were invited to partake of rationed steaks at the Seymour Country Club by Captain Case, who was the area engineer of another air corps training field with five satellite landing fields twenty miles south of Columbus. The gigantic powder plant across the river from Louisville was also beginning to produce even while it was under construction.
Upon receiving my orders to report to my next post, the personnel on the field arranged a farewell dinner at which they presented me with a large framed declaration. It read:
Whereas it has been determined that in view of the fact that a group of sundry Masterbuilders under the masterful direction of a Contracting Officer is engaged in defense construction and that said construction is nearing completion with astonishing rapidity and that the group of Masterbuilders is and will be dissipated and that ere long it will be Gone With The Wind and that the Contracting Officer will be promoted and assigned to ever greater responsibilities elsewhere, it is desirable and fitting, and in the best interests of goodwill, good fellowship and considerations of Auld Lang Syne that we should meet here tonight in Building No. 109, Type FO-1, without cost to the Government, to break bread together, to let down all barriers of rank, caste and distinction, and to congratulate ourselves heartily that the damned job has gone as well as it has.
The expression "Masterbuilders" was prophetic. I was indeed soon promoted to major and was assigned to greater responsibilities. These included the finishing of three more army airfields, a general hospital, a quartermaster depot, a medical depot, and the construction of a modification center for the alteration of Army Air Corps bombers. In six more months, about the middle of 1943, even these were nearing completion, and this
meant that the Louisville District of the U.S. Engineering Department had just about erected all the emergency military constructions assigned to it. Most of the officers, West Pointers, reservists, and those who came out of civilian life, were being "ordered to troops" in batches; I went along with the others. My colonel was the first to go.
It was ironic that then, and only then, the reservists and ex-civilians were first ordered to
fly to Engineer School of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to learn how to become proper officers. Never again in the army did I have the power of a commanding officer, area engineer, and contracting officer, and never again was I able to accomplish so much for the army. When we entered that Engineer School, we learned many of the fine points of being an army officer, but we lost much of our spontaneous initiative. I would no longer have dared to call Donald Nelson to obtain a railroad spur!
EPILOGUE
The air support command base at Columbus was closed after World War II but was reopened in 1949 for the training of reserves. On October 11, 1954, the Air Force renamed the base after Lieutenant John E. Bakalar who was killed in action over France on September 1, 1944. By 1965 it was the home base of the 434th Troop Carrier Wing which trained about 2,000 reservists from Indiana and Kentucky.
The Defense Department closed the base in October 1967 when it had 40 active military personnel and about 356 full-time civilian employees, about half of which went on active duty as reservists on weekends. Since that time the field has belonged to and has been operated by Bartholomew County, Indiana.
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