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.

Capture and casualty

Meanwhile, an important battle had been fought at Mons, where the VII Corps ran into the elements of 20 German divisions that British troops had flushed from the Normandy beachhead and the Pas de Calais. The VII Corps took 30,000 prisoners and killed 2,000 Germans—part of the last reserves of the German 7^th and 15^th Armies. This left the roads through Belgium virtually unblocked all the way to the German border and enabled the American 1^st Army to take Aachen within six weeks.

Jack catches a train for Paris and a much
needed furlough in Verviers, Belgium.

Jack made a capture during this time as well and probably saved the lives of the German prisoners in the process. “Townspeople nearby had told us there were some German soldiers hiding in the hills and woods outside of town, so we went looking for them,” Jack says. “The guys I was with were looking in a stone house, shooting the doors off rooms with their machine guns. I figured no one in their right mind would be in there, so I started back down the hill.

“In a grove of trees, I knelt down and looked up and saw a bunch of Germans hiding up there. We just stared at each other until one, a very tall, thin soldier said, ‘Ah, comrade!’ I replied, ‘Comrade!’ and he came down out of the trees, followed by the others. They were all young, some of them probably no more than 15 or 16 years old. They hadn’t been eating well and had boils on their faces.

I called to my buddies, ‘Hey, they’re down here,’ and one of the guys in my group came down and started cursing at them and acting like he was going to shoot them. ‘For God’s sake, calm down,' I said. 'They could’ve shot me if they wanted to and they didn’t. They’re just kids.’ When they realized we weren’t going to shoot them, a couple more came out of the bushes. One of them gave me his watch out of gratitude, I think, for saving his life. I also got to keep one of their pistols and sold it and the watch later to a soldier on one of the other gun crews.”

Jack on leave in Verviers, 
Belgium, at the Chicago Bar.

On the way to Germany, the unit experienced its first casualty since the invasion. 

The 474^th engaged the Luftwaffe in three raids and engaged four planes, downing one of them, during this time. Battery A moved to Theux and a few days later joined the rest of the outfit as they convoyed to Eupen. It was near Theux that A Battery’s John P. Cairo was shot in the stomach. As they carried him away he said, “Don’t worry fellows, I’ll be back later.” But a few hours later, word was received that he died in a field hospital.³²

Jack knew John well, and although it doesn’t say so in The Maverick Outfit, John was killed in a gun accident by another member of his gun crew. “The other soldier was adjusting the headspace in a 50-caliber gun,” Jack explains. “If you get it too tight, it will fire automatically, and that’s what happened. John had just eaten breakfast and was going out to check on how the other guys in his crew were doing. The gun barrel was depressed, which it shouldn’t have been, when it fired and it blew John's stomach and its contents out his back.

“John and I were good friends,” Jack continues. “When he was on our gun crew, he and I usually dug our foxhole together. We would have lots of friendly discussions and only a few loud ones. He was raised near Altoona, PA.

John was buried in a temporary cemetery at Fosses-la-Ville, Belgium, as were 2,198 other American soldiers from September 1944 through May 1945. His temporary interment there became, decades later, the basis of a long-distance friendship. Follow the link to read more about Fosses on a supplemental page to this blog, "Belgium Connection."

Cpl. John P. Cairo

“About nine or 10 years after I got home, I went to look up John's family," Jack said. "His only remaining relative was a stepsister. Needless to say, she was very happy I came to visit her, and we both cried. No one else from the unit had ever written to or visited the family. But she knew how John had been killed through a friend of hers who had worked in the Pentagon. I promised to send her some pictures of John and me, taken in the states, and I did," which explains why there were no pictures of John in Jack's photo collection. The photo of John shown here was found on his Fosse #1 virtual cemetery profile.

Jack adds that John and he discusssed prior to the invasion about whether they would go home again or not. “I always felt I would,” Jack says, “but John didn’t think he’d make it.”

Around the time of John's death, Jack and some members of his unit became friendly with an Army mess unit made up of African-American soldiers, who were interested in the guns Jack's group used. He and some of the other guys would go down later to eat and sit and talk with the cooks as they ate. “One member of our gun crew asked me to bring him back some chow, that where he came from they didn’t eat meals with blacks,” Jack recalls. “He was from Pennsylvania, same as me, so I called him on it and told him to get his own food or go hungry. The sergeant brought him back something anyway.”