Service & Support Units

Ike talks to ammo handlers near Cherbourg 1944, from CMH

The 57th Ordnance Ammunition Company, during the pursuit across France, found itself engaging sixty-five of the enemy at Peronne when no other American units were in the area. It killed fifty and captured the other fifteen, its members receiving two Croix de Guerre, one Silver Star, and one Bronze Star for the exploit.

Another truck unit, the 666th, supplying the 101st and 82d Airborne Divisions over "Hell's Highway" to Eindhoven and Nijmegen, Holland, had trucks destroyed and drivers killed and injured by bombing. Carrying troops in support of the 82d Airborne Division in February 1945, it had several trucks shelled near Schmitt, Germany, with losses of infantrymen and drivers. Enemy shells and bombs were not this unit's main concern. It considered its greatest difficulties to be shell fragments, glass, bullets, and cartridge cases exposed in roadways when warmer weather brought thaws. In one 24-hour period the company had over a hundred punctures on its forty-odd vehicles. The 666th carried forward 2,800 tons and 17,350 soldiers for 188,587 vehicle miles over icy and snowbound roads between I January and 31 March 1945. For its "outstanding accomplishments" it received a formal commendation from III Corps. Ê

Medical ambulance companies were often as close to the enemy and as closely associated with forward units as the truck companies. The 588th Medical Ambulance Company, attached to the 66th Medical Group, worked in such close support of the 7th Armored Division as it spearheaded the XX ("Ghost") Corps drive across France that its ambulances were an integral part of the division so far as rations, gasoline convoys, communications, priorities in bridge crossings, and bivouac sites were concerned. Armored divisions and their medical companies moved so fast that the length of the ambulance haul to the rear was usually double that of ambulances working with infantry divisions. Ê

Early in the Battle of the Bulge, on 20 December 1944, the enemy attacked the 7th Armored Division's Trains near Samree, Belgium. The division quartermaster, with troops of his own section, Negro troops of the attached 3967th Troop Transport Company, and white troops of a platoon of antiaircraft guns from Battery D, 203d Antiaircraft .Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, threw up a defense and held the enemy off for about four hours while awaiting expected help from the 3d Armored Division located to the north. Medium tanks dispatched to relieve the quartermaster never arrived. The antiaircraft gunners lost their weapons to enemy fire, but not before they had knocked out two enemy tanks and run out of ammunition. The quartermaster and antiaircraft troops finally had to pull out. After the Battle of the Bulge was over and the 7th Armored Division had a lull sufficient for training programs, each unit of the trains, including the 3967th, was given a 57mm. gun and instruction in its use. Both Negro and white quartermaster units in the Bulge did what they could to hold off the enemy. ÊÊ

text from Chapter 19 of The Employment of Negro Troops by Ulysses Lee, The U. S. Army in World War II, 1966, CMH Pub 11-4Ê

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