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.

Warm welcome in Belgium

Jack's infamous "Micheline" photos, front and back. 

As the 474^th crossed the French border into Belgium and moved farther into the over-run country, it received an enthusiastic welcome from the Belgian people, who lined the roads cheering. The crowds were so dense at some points it was next to impossible to move the half-tracks through. One Belgian man was even standing on a sidewalk with a fancy decanter and a liquor glass, dispensing free drinks to the troops.

The down side of this was that there wasn’t much privacy for the GIs. In fact, meals weren’t very enjoyable because hungry-looking kids would gather around as soon as one of the men got the 10-in-1 burner going and started to cook chow.

On Sunday, families came out in groups to look at the tracks and the guns and talk to the “American Soldat.” One such family—an elderly father and mother, a young daughter and her boyfriend, who were arm in arm—drew attention. The boyfriend used many American expressions and finally admitted to being a downed Canadian flyer. This family was one of the units in the underground that hid such people and ferried them back to freedom.

Another apparent civilian came up to a half-track and asked for some rations. The fellows gave him some K-rations, but he asked for a box of 10-in-1s instead. It turned out he was a downed American flyer, but he had no plans to return to his outfit. He liked it in Liege.

Jack and A Battery were stationed in Liege beginning Sept. 9, and eventually the rest of the battalion and battalion headquarters moved there as well. Jack remembers the warmth of the Belgian people, the open arms they welcomed the Americans with and their documented disdain for Hitler and the Nazis who had overrun their country.

Liege had lots of pretty women, too, and…

 On Sunday a group went to mass in the cathedral in Liege…It was an incongruous lot that filed into the large church, as they parked their M-1s against the pillars and knelt down. As they left the church they were mobbed by the other worshippers in the vestibule of the church and finally a prelate, who Dave Pearlman, of Boston, still claims was the Cardinal of Liege, came out and distributed medals. Pearlman, who is Jewish, and Harry Anderson of Roanoke, VA, were asked why they went to mass. “To meet the girls,” they replied, “all the girls are Catholic.³¹

Apparently, meeting girls wasn’t too difficult in Liege. If you were the least bit shy, they came and met you. Jack has two photos in his collection of Micheline Sottiaux, a young woman from Liege. One photo of her with a friend has her address written on the back, while the other of her alone says, “I love you.” Jack says he hardly knew her, that she was passing out similar pictures to other GIs as well and that the love she proclaimed was for the American liberators.

He does, however, admit to trying to go see her at her home when he returned to Liege a few months later. “Her house had been buzz-bombed,” he recalls. “Her mother answered the door and wasn’t very friendly. She showed me a picture of Micheline with her fiancé and sent me on my way.”

Jack’s wife, Wilma, whom he met and married after the war, never did like it that he kept those two photos and never was sure whether to believe his story. But it was probably true, because the unit was only stationed in Liege about a week or two and by Sept. 20 had moved into Germany—hardly enough time to begin much of a relationship, especially with a guy who just a few months earlier was making money in England laundering other guys’ trousers so THEY could chase women.

Jack’s gun crew also saw tanks doing battle in Belgium, from the top of one side of a deep valley. “We had to keep out of sight, of course. A farmer who lived close by cooked steaks and fried potatoes for all seven of us. I think he gave us some wine also.”