Life among the Brits

The front end of a half-track looks like a truck or Jeep, but the 
back uses tank tracks instead of wheels. The roller mechanism 
on the front cleared mines.And, in the case of the 474th's half-
tracks, the rear end was fitted with anti-aircraft weaponry. 

The 474^th disembarked near Glasgow, spent the next leg of its journey on board trains and bunked temporarily in the town of Wallingford, England. On Feb. 23, 1944, it convoyed across the south part of England to Bridgwater, situated near where the Parrot River empties into an inlet of the Bristol Channel. Many of the soldiers were billeted in private homes, with a few in stores and shops.

“I was part of a group of maybe 25 from A Battery who were billeted in a one-room schoolhouse that opened onto an enclosed courtyard,” Jack says. “We were at one end of the town, while the rest of the battery was located at the other end. Our motor pool was also located with the rest of A Battery, and this required us to do a lot of walking. However, we had a great advantage since we were not subject to close scrutiny from those in charge.”

Jack in the gun turret of his
half-track, the Any Gum Chum?

That lack of scrutiny paid off for “Jack the Budding Entrepreneur.” While he says he enjoyed the firing range, designated hikes and seeing the countryside, “it became quite boring doing the repetitive drills on the guns and listening to boring talks on aircraft identification from very boring non-coms.” To make life more interesting—and lucrative, since he sent home all of his pay he was allowed to—he set up a cleaning business, mainly for trousers, since it took too long for the army’s laundry to come back.

“Since we had a lot of guys who considered themselves to be God’s gift to women, I found a way to pocket some extra money. Of course, the other guys would cover for me when I had a lot of pants to clean. (By the way, no underwear would I clean.) I used GI soap. The courtyard had a long wash trough, and the lady nearby had four flat irons I could heat on our fireplace. For her help, we kept her in sugar, candy, soap, etc.”

Jack also took time off during his stay in England to have his tonsils removed. “This was performed under a local anesthetic at an Army hospital maybe 25 miles away,” he recalls. “I held the pan while the doctor cut them out. Then, after two days I was given a choice of doing KP at the hospital or going back to my outfit. I chose the latter.”

According to The Maverick Outfit, life at Bridgwater helped mold the outfit into a family of sorts. Since a training schedule didn’t exist, after breakfast the men went to their respective motor pools and worked on the new half-tracks that had been delivered to England.

James Black and Frank Basil, both members
of Jack's gun crew, load 37mm canon rounds.

The wide use of aircraft in World War II led to related developments in anti-aircraft weapons. The half-tracks used by the 474^th were one of those developments and were hybrid vehicles on which machine guns were mounted, transported and fired. The half-tracks were similar to pickup trucks or Jeeps in front, with a traditional pair of tires, Then, in back, instead of tires they sported tank tracking to allow them to move on a variety of terrain.⁹

Guns mounted on the half-track Jack was assigned to included two 50-caliber machine guns, one mounted on each side of a central 37-millimeter machine gun. The 50-calibers weighed 54 to 100 pounds, could hit low-flying aircraft and could fire 400 to 500 rounds per minute. It used ball and tracer armor-piercing ammunition. In comparison, the 37mm weighed 210 pounds, had an effective ceiling of 10,500 feet and fired 120 rounds per minute. It used larger, high-explosive ammunition with shell-destroying tracers.

Jack’s half-track gun crew included a sergeant and a driver in the cab and five guys in the turret:

• One operated the sites (which Jack says no one used).
• One fed the right 50-caliber machine gun.
• One fed the 37-mm and the left 50-caliber machine guns
• One sat on the left and traversed the gun turret.
• One—in this case, Jack—sat on the right, controlled gun elevations, fired the two 50-caliber guns simultaneously with one foot and fired the 37mm gun with the other foot.

A full side-view of a WWII half-track in action, camouflaged for winter.

For the 474^th and other similar units, the half-track vehicles would become their homes after the invasion, so much pre-invasion time was spent customizing them. Maneuvers gave the men a chance to try out the vehicles and determine what needed to be done. One improvement included welding racks onto the backs of the tracks to carry the gun crew’s barracks bags. But the Army had even more in mind:

One morning a truck came to the motor pool, and boxes were distributed to the crews. Inside each box were small pots and pans, a frying pan and a small two-burner gasoline stove. All of the utensils had collapsible handles and could be easily packed. These kitchen utensils were part of a new ration, called 10-in-1. Accompanying them was another box which had in it food for 10 meals, hence the name 10-in-1. The idea of these rations was to relieve the kitchen crew of supplying meals in the field as they had done in Tennessee. Each crew cooked its own and sometimes, in Europe, they would supplement the diet with the help of a cow or a deer who happened to come a bit too close to a hungry crew. The rations included such convenient items as powdered milk and eggs, cans of meat for the main course, little boxes of cereal which simply needed the addition of water to be made edible (the box served as a bowl) and, of course, coffee. On the day that the rations arrived, the men cooked their own lunch, on their own stoves at their respective tracks.¹⁰

Though this photo was taken after  D-Day
(notice swastikas indicating Jerry planes
shot down), it shows the half-track's "name"
of Any Gum Chum? The soldier pictured is
gun crew member Buck Haviland.

Jack adds that some 10-in-1 rations included a large can of English stew. “You only tried once to eat it,” he said. “It was a good trading item with the natives, if they were really hungry!”

Also during this time many of the gun crews began naming their half-tracks and painting the names on the sides. Jack’s gun crew dubbed their home away from home Any Gum Chum? after the phrase the American GIs heard so often from English children near where they were stationed.