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MCCHORD FIELD & ACTIVATION
The 843rd Engineer Aviation Battalion was activated at McChord Field, near Tacoma, Washington, on the 1st of September 1942. With a cadre furnished by the 833rd Engineer Aviation Battalion, which had just completed its training at McChord Field, the new battalion assembled its full strength of 775 enlisted men within one month’s time. Only about one half the normal complement of 31 officers were on hand at the start, the others arriving during the next two months. Colonel (then Major) James W. Park, a West Point graduate, was Battalion Commander, with Lt. Colonel (then Captain) George P. Munson, Jr., a Reserve Officer from Texas, as Executive Officer. With the exception of the Battalion C.O. and Executive Officer, all other officers were either recent OCS graduates from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, or OTS graduates from Camp Claiborne, La.
Men and officers were brought together from every state in the Union, -- with Colorado, Louisiana, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota and California providing the majority. In the busy days of training a man from Texas might find his partner was from Minnesota, or a man from California might be bunking beside a Pennsylvanian. Here, as in every other Army unit, the relative merits of the home states were often the cause of good-natured argument and kidding. These men were drawn from every walk of life, -- farmers, miners, truck drivers, machinists, clerks, students and a few construction workers, -- a typical cross section of American occupations. These were the men who were to become the 843rd.
In the eight months between activation and entrainment for the Port of Embarkation, 553 of the original 775 enlisted men either were discharged from the Army or transferred to other units. Half of this number was transferred out on physical grounds, either CDD or assigned to limited service units; the other half leaving the Army under Legislation permitting discharge of men over 37 years of age, or transferred for reclassification, as cadre for new units, or as candidates for OCS. Their places in the battalion were filled by men from replacement centers, usually with only basic military training.
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| Lt Seguin, Lewis, Jesser and Dower on training problem - McChord Field |
Insofar as climate was concerned, McChord Field and its surrounding areas proved an excellent training ground for conditions to be encountered overseas. The fog, rain, snow, chill wind, and the occasional extreme cold of fall and winter months at McChord Field were duplicated overseas, especially in England and France. Our early conditioning to inclement weather undoubtedly paid dividends in the later months when we lived and worked in varying extremes of weather conditions.
Colonel Park brought with him the West Point insistence on stern discipline and rigorous training. Our daily schedule started before dawn and continued until after dark, with hiking, calisthenics, map and compass problems, demolition work, training of truck drivers, mechanics and equipment operators. Two overnight bivouacs were made in the snow on Mount Rainier and 25-mile hikes made to return the following days. Fort Lewis and the 4th Division Prairie provided excellent training facilities for deployment training, rifle practice and battalion problems in attack and defense. Night problems and bivouacs always seemed to come with rain, snow or mud. When you had been called out at midnight to occupy defense positions around the north and east sides of the field, -- with a cold rain drizzling down your neck and the wet ground turning your feet into oversize ice cubes, -- a cup of coffee in the mess hall was a small but welcome compensation after the alert. Small rewards assumed a value that had no exact counterpart in civilian life.
From the beginning the mission which our battalion was to perform overseas was impressed on our minds, -- to build, maintain and defend airfields. Once a week the entire battalion assembled for orientation talks on the war and the part that we were to play. These were the grim days before El Alamein in Africa, and when the Japs were driving towards Australia and Alaska. At that time the chances were about even as to whether we would go to Europe, to Alaska or the South Pacific. On every hand there was a crying need for American air strength and we gradually realized that our part in building airfields would be an important one.
Our task could be accomplished only if the battalion acted as a single, smooth-running machine. The individual likes and dislikes of civilian life now must be subordinated to the discipline and teamwork of the Army. This welding process, -- of transforming nearly eight hundred rugged individualists into a single unit, -- was achieved against a background of natural difficulties. Bad weather brought cold and throat ailments, a minor epidemic of measles called for daily physical inspections, separate messing hours for each company in the battalion mess hall, and the erection of shelter halves around each bunk. The necessity of combining construction tasks with the daily routine of inspections, of regulation uniform, of military courtesy, was bound to bring about oversights and mistakes, -- by officers and men. Critiques were held, mistakes corrected, difficulties ironed out. As an example, NCO schools, held each evening in company orderly rooms, provided a method for reviewing and correcting daily errors and planning the next day’s program. For the officers it was “Completed Staff Work”, “Inspect, Inspect, Inspect”, “Know Your Men”, “Chain of Command”, “Advance Planning”, “The Training Attitude”. With constant emphasis on these points, it was not long until officers and men began to understand their responsibilities to the battalion.
Rain, mud, inoculations, issuing of equipment, inspections, formations, drill, calisthenics taken while stripped to the undershirt in freezing weather, firing on the range under adverse weather, -- these were a part of the new life in the Army. Many a man who had never handled a rifle in civilian life received his first test on the firing range at Fort Lewis. The first scores ran from almost zero to expert, yet eventually nearly every man qualified with the M-1 rifle. But to the end you could see the occasional “Maggie’s Drawers” from the target pits!
Problems of reconnaissance, attack, and defense of airfields were staged on the 4th Division Prairie. Use of smoke pots, firecrackers, small demolition charges, flares, attention to cover and concealment, extensive use of maps, time factors in the movement of troops, -- these gave a sense of reality to the problems. Elements of the training program found a place in these problems, -- the scouting and patrolling, combat first aid, compass reading, and defense against air and chemical attack. A notable feature was the critique held after each problem was called to a close.
In an infiltration course at Fort Lewis we advanced under live fire, crawling on our bellies from prepared trenches towards three 30-caliber machine guns which fired a scant foot or two over our heads as we crawled through or under barbed-wire entanglements, in and out of holes and ditches, and tried to avoid small charges of explosives placed here and there about us, simulating land mines in actual battle conditions. Afterwards we put out fires made by the tracer bullets in the wooded hill beyond the immediate area of the course. In another course we advanced with the M-1 rifle, one of us at a time, over a series of fixed obstacles (barbed-wire, deep pits, log emplacements) and fired point-blank at head and torso silhouettes of “enemy” soldiers that would pop up in the woods beside us, usually at the most disadvantageous time for firing, just as we were crossing a difficult obstacle.
Then there were the night problems, many of them consisting of surprise truck movements to bivouac under black-out conditions. The night alerts rouse memories, -- how it felt to be awakened suddenly by the sharp blast of a whistle some time after midnight, how you got out of the bunk in a hurry, threw on your clothes and gear and ran out to formation half asleep. Then there was the chilling cold of the woods at night, and if you were lucky and didn’t catch guard duty, maybe you could catch a few winks, providing you could arrange the blankets and shelter half so you didn’t get soaked. And in the gray of the dawn came the trip back to camp, everybody too tired to even talk.
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| The Chaplain and a group of men - Mt Rainier |
In November and again in March overnight hikes were made to Mount Rainier. The battalion was divided into two serials, -- two companies going up one day and the other two the following day. Trucks transported the men approximately 50 miles from McChord Field to the snow-covered campsite, well up the slope of the mountain. All afternoon was free time for hikes up the mountain, skiing, snowfights, or a beer party in the tavern. We pitched our puptents and slept on four feet of snow, with the fourteen thousand foot mountain towering above us in the cold moonlight. Then came reveille and mess before dawn; camp was struck and we were on our way as dawn broke. The hike was 2 ½ miles in 50 minutes, then 10 minutes rest by the roadside. The last few miles seemed endless, until we finally came to the trucks and piled in, stiff and sore, for the remaining miles to camp. “Blister Inspection” was standard procedure after a hike, and the medics always found some customers.
In the immediate battalion camp area there were two day rooms, shared by the four companies and medical detachment. These day rooms provided ping pong, billiards, checkers or chess and were good places for writing letters. Near the area occupied by the 843rd were a library, a beer tavern, post theater, and a Post Exchange in which the meals at the battalion mess could be supplemented with a steak dinner and all the ice cream sodas and sundaes a man could hold. In later days in England, France and Germany, where ice cream was just a memory, most of us were to recall the old PX that helped so much to boost morale at McChord.
We made arrangements with the County Highway Department for “on-the-job” training of our motor grader operators and mechanics, and each day our men were taken out on the county roads and to the maintenance and repair shops. The battalion built a timber road bridge under the direction of Captain Alden, completed the rough grading of some 4000 feet of taxiway at McChord Field, camouflaged radar installations on the Olympic peninsula, and carried out numerous minor engineer construction projects at Fort Lewis and McChord Field.
On December 10th the battalion received warning orders for overseas movement. Plans were made at once to terminate the training, to secure the remaining needed equipment and to mark and crate all material for shipment. On January 16th advance copies of movement orders were received for shipment of equipment, less that to accompany troops, to arrive at the Boston Port of Embarkation by the 2nd of February. Cars could not be secured until January 23rd, and then the train was loaded one, cold night in snow and ice. Lt. McCluggage and 21 enlisted men went with this train as a security detachment, to rejoin us later.
We expected orders to move the battalion at any time and we were all anxious to be on our way. But the days dragged into weeks and the weeks into months, without the orders. This anti-climax found a return to training again, -- this time in infantry style, since our engineer equipment was on its way. The battalion moved to a tent camp in a wooded area near the original barracks at McChord Field.
While some of the married men of the battalion whose wives had come to live in Tacoma had received overnight passes for the past several months, most of us had been restricted to passes of not more than four hours. Now, however, five-day furloughs for enlisted men and three-day leaves for officers were started, and men and officers quickly took advantage of the opportunity to spend time in San Francisco, Portland, Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. The men whose homes were located within reasonable distance managed to make a brief trip home, but the majority were unable to get home before departure overseas.
A short time after the move to the tent area the battalion received replacements for a hundred 38-year men who were being discharged. These men were immediately put through an intensive course of training similar to that which all other men of the battalion had experienced. An Air Force classification team spent a few days interviewing all men of the battalion. As a result of these interviews many men were reclassified and transfers made.
