Heroes on wheels maintain lifeline to battle grounds

By John Christie, Warweek staff writer

A FORWARD SUPPLY POINT, France — The guy who makes the touchdown gets all the cheers. The blocking back gets plenty of lumps, bumps and bruises.

The touchdown maker rates every hooray that is aimed at him. But the blocker should get a pat on the back once in a while.

So right here and this minute we're asking the greatest blocking back in the record of the universe to take a bend. We mean the men of the Service of Supply — and that's a bouquet we just flipped your way.

The guy draped around the steering wheel of the truck — the guy bending his hump over a shovel — is the last guy in the world to claim he is a hero. But bet me ... there isn't a grain of gold brick in him.

The SOS record doesn't only speak for itself — it yells louder than a Reception Center PFC.

The SOS job in this theater is a miracle of team work, sweat and good old American savvy.

It would take every line of type in this newspaper and every other newspaper being published in the U.K. and on the Continent to record the roster of all the jobs — big and small — that the SOS guys have pulled off. But put them all together and it adds up to the biggest job ever in the history of warfare. It's the supply guy who feeds, clothes and services the men and machines in the fastest, the biggest and the most lethal advance in the annals of combat.

Right off the bat the SOS guys crossed up the Heinies when they went to work on Cherbourg. The Nazis blew up almost everything they couldn't carry and our own guys lathered huge portions of the big port to rubble and dust as they evicted the dug-in enemy. The SOS guys moved in and pitched their Sunday throw and had the port working smoothly in record time. It's their boast that in a short while Cherbourg, the risen city, will be handling four times as much cargo as it did during peacetime.

Our SOS heavy men used a lot of the material the enemy had abandoned. They scooped out the explosives from large concrete sea mines and transformed them into sturdy facings for burned out quays. They took the poles from camouflage nets over rocket platforms and. made pilings out of them. Captured German trucks and steam shovels were repainted and back in action FOR OUR SIDE in less than three hours after they were nailed.

That's only the beginning of the job that the SOS muscle-men did. Railroads, their tracks snarled and bent, were repaired and manned and roads, pocked by blockblusters, were fixed up in record time. And over the ties and over the roads roared the trucks of the SOS in the general direction of Berlin. And that flow of supplies goes on around the clock, twenty four hours a day, no pay for overtime.

Nothing stops them and it looks as though nothing can. Once again it was the American soldier using his noodle as well as his biceps. In the same way that the American doughboy figures out ways to use his steel helmet and how to increase the fire power of his weapon by little tricks of his own, the engineers and the SOS guys were bearing down on the job and doing it with old American teamwork and efficiency. They outflanked the rules but their way is now the right way no matter how they did it. Because they pay off on the results. And the results make it the most successful campaign ever since little David teed off on that big balooka Goliath.

The ever-thirsty monsters of advancing armored columns demanded gas — and more gas. And without gas coursing through their steel veins — tanks are just outsized paper weights.

Old Joe SOS — now young black Joe as his face blackens up like Al Jolson during business hours with the sweat and dirt of battle — followed the charging course of the tanks with oil pipe lines. They needed bulk gas supply as near to the front as possible.

"You should have seen those jaspers come up," a tank staff sergeant told this reporter. "I'm up there close to all the fireworks when I see a lot of Joes moping around a field and I give them what's going on. They tell me they're SOS loogans. And what are they doing? They're surveying the field so they can build an extension on their gas pipe line. I tell them I'm for that nine ways from Tuesday.

"I'm for what they're doing because my battle buggy can't operate without gas. But I tell them why the hell don't they wait for the infantry to take the field? All I got was a 'Yes, yes, but we're busy.' "

Listen to what an infantry buck sergeant has to say about the ingenuity of the SOS man.

"You gotta be an inventor to make a rating with that outfit," the GI said. "Do you know what those guys thought tip? They figured out hedgerow cutters for tanks. Look like a toothed plow. Anyway, our tanks were being hung up in the 'rows and a lot of time was wasted and they made soft targets and a lot of guys got nailed. So the SOS lads heard about it and a second looey and two enlisted men sat down and came up with this thing. And what are they making 'em out of? They're making them out of angle-iron obstacles ... the things the Heinies we're going to ruin our D-Day party with."

Maybe the guys who dreamed up the hedgerow cutter won't wind up with any iron clanking on their chests or any imbedded in their skins. But this one idea alone will permit a lot of tankers to go home in one piece ... and, incidentally, make certain that a lot of Nazis will wind up with a permanent unbreakable lease on six feet of French soil!

So on they go, day after day — doing odds and ends and all the odds and ends blending into the one big picture of a mighty force behind the fighting force, and behind the lines for the SOS usually means within pistol shot of the enemy.

Besides moving supplies forward and thinking up inventions to stop the enemy, one of the real big jobs is the handling of the wounded and the prisoners of war. Wounded who can be patched up within ten days are being cared for in hospitals not far from the front. Others are being evacuated by the SOS to the United Kingdom. Roughly 50 per cent of 70,000 casualties, including 7,000 P of W casualties, were taken out of France and brought to the U.K. during the first two months after D-Day. On one air strip alone an average of 220 planes are landing daily and 280 were counted in one day. That is 118 more than the record boasted of by executives of La Guardia Field, one of the biggest airports in the world.

The SOS think-tanks are awash with ideas. Ingenuity coupled with the fire power of the combat troops has the Heinie on the ropes. Perhaps one of the finest examples of thinking in the pinch was the conversion of tank transporters into ammo haulers, each capable of toting 31 tons of the stuff. That equals 12 ordinary truck loads. And what did our SOS Einsteins use to convert these babies from tank transporters to ammo haulers? The 64-dollar answer is: From gadgets made from captured German scrap iron. Take the head of the class, Horace.

Tune in while a second lieutenant briefs his drivers before they push into the roaring night:

"Don't return sniper fire. Just duck your noggin and keep pushing that truck. We must keep moving. That's your job. Keep moving. The Joes don't need any help tracking down snipers. That's their job and they're the best in the world at it! Don't do anything but drive, drive, drive! They don't need fire power or marksmen. They need rations and it's your job to get rations to them no matter what happens.

"We're going 85 miles ... and that should be done 15 miles an hour. That means six hours driving if we're lucky. Then ... if they unload us right away ... we should be back at the motor base by noon tomorrow."

Off they went, weaving between the bomb craters, strafed and rocked by artillery fire, moving through the day and the night.

"We made it," the looey said when I saw him a day later.

WE MADE IT!

That's the slogan of the SOS.

WE MADE IT!

And for once the blocking back is being hailed by the touch down maker.

The blocker has become the running back's hero!