In so far as events and dates occurring before the 9th day of June 1944 are concerned, accuracy and detail must necessarily be sacrificed in order to produce this history. On the date mentioned, all records, both historical and administrative, at that time in possession of the company were lost in a disaster which occurred in the English Channel, the details of which will be covered later in this same document. From such records as may be available and from questioning of men who were present with the organization during the period prior to the channel disaster a fairly accurate presentation of the facts has been obtained as set forth herein. All dates represented are correct and in instances where it has been impossible to determine the exact date, the date is not given.

 We commenced the regular and systematic contacting of organizations for which we were designated their source of maintenance. It was valuable experience and later, during the campaign, paid off in the form of close cooperation when we supplied service to those same units with which we had become acquainted in England. The most noteworthy accomplishment during this period was the equipping of the 103rd AAA Battalion with a special sight designed and perfected by Lt. Col. Pecca. Our service section worked night and day for an extended period during this operation manufacturing and assembling the sight to the satisfaction of all concerned. At this time the company was attached to the 6th Ordnance Battalion.

Chief personal concern of the men, it would seem, was the procuring of fresh eggs. We practically became egg worshipers after prolonged exposure to this powdered stuff the Army puts out. (Apologies to such kitchen personnel reading this as might pride themselves on their special recipe for treatment of the powdered variety.)

The impending invasion about this time became progressively a more and more important topic for a drop-of-the-hat discussion. In this company as everywhere, anxiety as to when and speculation as to where were in evidence.

About the middle of March we were joined by a detachment of ten (10) and a technical truck from the 175th Signal Repair Company which remained with us until after the war in Europe.

The first long move made by the organization was made on March 31, 1944 to a secret training area located Slapton Ley and Torcross, beach towns in Southern Devonshire. Coincident with this move and at about the same date was a transfer to the 177th Ordnance Battalion. We established ourselves in a large mansion on a country estate known as Widdecombe House, one mile from Torcross. The mansion was large enough to accommodate all but a small portion of the company and housed both and C.P. for the next month and a half until feverish preparation for the big show engaged in service and maintenance of secret equipment in the hands of troops in training.

About this time definite information was given us as to the part which we would play in the invasion in Europe, and accordingly we set about organizing the company into two parts, the first to be known as Detachment "A", and the second as Detachment "B".

Det. 'A' was to be composed of five officers and 100 enlisted men, plus the Signal Detachment was with us. The detachment was to land with V-Corps assault force taking with it all technical truck and supply parts and equipment including combat vehicle replacements sufficient to last until being joined by Det. 'B' several days later.

Organized on this basis, Det. 'A' left Widdecombe House the 16th of May for the marshaling area where final preparations were completed during the ensuing 15 days before loading aboard ship. Loading was accomplished June 1st from the southern tip of England and the vessel, a Landing Ship Tank, then proceeded to a quiet harbor where we awaited what was to come.

June 6th found us wallowing in the channel in company with a lot of other vessels of all descriptions stretching ahead and behind as far as you could see. News of the big event reached us and spread like fire but we had to wait for particulars regarding the progress of the beachhead. Arriving off of the shore of the Normandy coast the evening of the 6th we sweated and waited all that night, all day the seventh and about the midnight of the seventh commenced loading the equipment into landing barges. landing with the first barge load during the night. The need for other types of troops was evidently a little greater than for Ordnance at that stage so the remainder of the company waited all day June 8th before making the landing the night of the eight. Intense concentration of anti-aircraft rendered quite ineffective all attempts by the enemy to offer resistance. The shower of anti-aircraft tracers sent into the sky toward the enemy night raiding planes reminded the writer of salt and pepper. A remarkable spectacle, a most intense concentration--it was worth seeing and will be remembered a long time.

Those landing with the second barge soon located the first group to land and after completing de-waterproofing operations, the detachment proceeded to a location that had been selected as the site for our first shop. Omaha Beach was behind us.

Ordnance operations were commenced June 9th and we soon found that with the great quantity of wrecked and disabled equipment at our disposal, many repairs were effected by cannibalization, particularly on armored equipment since the beach was littered with it.

Ordnance service was dispensed freely to anyone and everyone looking for it. The service section was kept particularly busy producing parts which were not in the stock of emergency supplies which we had brought with us or which had since been used up.

The first Ordnance ashore equipped for repair of combat vehicles, we had more than enough work to match the best efforts of a superman. The men worked hard accomplishing an unbelievably great volume of work. It was common to have crews working far into the night or all night wherever blackout conditions would permit.

The morning of June 10th the area was visited by the Army Ordnance Officer who informed us that the entire Detachment 'B' had been lost at sea and that we should proceed accordingly and requisition replacements on that basis, both men and equipment.

It became evident the following morning that the information reaching us with regard to the channel disaster was in error. Detachment 'B' had been split further into two parts and loaded onto two vessels, only one of which had been torpedoed. Part of the detachment had landed the evening of the 10th and rejoined Detachment 'A' June 11th amid considerable rejoicing.

At this point I digress to record the activities of Detachment 'B' from the time of the departure of Detachment 'A' for the marshaling area. On June 6th, having spent the intervening 20 days in stocking a greater supply of parts and preparing the number of combat vehicle replacements for the landing by making mechanical repairs and accomplishing the necessary waterproofing, the detachment departed for the marshaling area and on the morning of the 8th loaded aboard two vessels (Landing Ship Tanks) for the crossing.

Disaster struck at 0300 hours 9 June when one of the vessels was struck by a torpedo believed to have been launched by a German 'E' Boat. Two officers and eleven enlisted men were rescued by a British destroyer and returned to England. Twenty-seven (27) enlisted men perished at sea. (Appendix # 1)

Two days after being joined by those of Detachment 'B' who made the landing, the company moved the shop to a location which was to be home until after the big breakthrough at St. Lo some weeks later. It was a rather muddy, musty place identified on the map by a patch of green and designated as "Foret de Cerrisy". In Cerrisy Forrest we received personnel replacements which restored us to T/O strength. We were still short the equipment lost in the channel sinking.

From the time of the landing until moving to Cerrisy Forrest only one man had been wounded as a result of enemy action.. T/5 John MacDonald was wounded in the neck by a sniper while returning from a contact party. He was hospitalized.

Life in the Forrest was quite routine and no great amount of repair work was required for a number of weeks while troops continued to pour ashore and the army was built up in preparation for the subsequent breakthrough at St. Lo late in July. Interest was supplied by such incidents as our salvage disposal export, bespectacled T/5 Aaron 'Moe' Landres, who happened to be without his specks at the time gravely seeking road directions from one of the many stone statues around the Normandy countryside.

The Normandy hedgerows were giving the Tankers as well as the doughfeet a lot of trouble and it was about this time that some ingenious man, driven by necessity devised a gadget which after having been demonstrated, was promptly dubbed a 'hedge row cutter' and ordered to be mass produced by every Ordnance company which had a welding outfit that could be spared for the job. During this period, our welders worked all night producing and installing the device on as many tanks as could be equipped with it before the St. Lo breakthrough. It was not a sensation but was reasonably successful and undoubtedly helped in solving the hedgerow problem.

On July 5th, 2nd Lt. W.C. Youens, one of the officers who had survived the channel disaster, and 95 enlisted men assigned to the 526th Ord. Co. landed in Normandy and joined. Considerable confusion concerning the details of the sinking existed both on the continent and in England with result that replacement of personnel losses were duplicated from both ends. Lt. Youens brought another officer to replace the second officer rescued from the channel since it was impossible to locate him after landing in England. He also brought with him complete equipment as original included in that with which Detachment 'B' had embarked since it was believed in England that both ships had been torpedoed.

Then followed several days of transferring men and disposing of excess equipment to restore the organization to its T/O strength once more. The replacement who landed with Lt. Youens was retained on the rolls as an overage and placed on DS to another company of the same battalion.

On July 27th Capt. F.F. Poppenburg was transferred and 1st Lt. W.E. Anderson assumed command.

In an operation at the long and fast drive across France, service units such as ours become strangled with a gruesome collection of wrecks and road losses that never quite permit it to catch up with the war until the war slows down some what. From Normandy to Luxemburg it was a long trail of muddy fox holes with rain, long move, traffic jam, hornets (thousands of them, remember them?), long move, try and get some gas, move again. It was not uncommon to have mechanics 200 miles behind engaged in cleaning up work that the company had been forced to leave. We wrestled with tons and tons of track of all types and descriptions, trying to keep the combat outfits moving on rubber. We performed inspections on as many units as the manpower situation would permit, installing engines, transmissions, final drives, making smaller repairs, and always that track in ten-block strips, tons of it.

At Paris we caught up with the war briefly and settled down for a few days in a suburb called Billiers le Bacle, moving our shop into an area formerly occupied by a Luftwaffe repair outfit. The grounds were strewn with a miscellaneous collection of sabotaged airplanes and countless spare parts, some of them new. Here most of the men had a chance to go out through Paris on a brief sight seeing tour. Our stay was cut too short thought and we had to commence to move and pick up the wrecks again while the army pushed toward Belgium and the Siegfried Line.

About the time our combat forces struck the German border, we came to rest in a patch of pine trees in Luxemburg. It was September 20th. This place was the realization of all that an Ordnance man wants to forget. We had rain, cold, mold, and mud-we had mud that was classic. In order to move equipment through the area, it was necessary to use a grouser equipped tank as a prime mover. News Week magazine featured picture taken in our area while we had about two feet of mud. It was represented as "Tanks moving up toward the front along the Luxemburg border".

On October 5th we moved the company into a railroad station near Weywertz, Belgium in Kreis Malmedy, remaining there until December 15. Like everyone else at the time, we had time on our hands. We procured a projector and had regular movies, when the projector operated properly. The men sang-the company had a quartet that practiced regularly and performed before movies. Everyone griped about the chow at that time and quite understandably so for all we could procure at the ration dump was "C" ration stew or "C" ration hash, take your choice. Did you ever try this sort of thing for three weeks?

Early in the winter a campaign got under way which commenced with an assault on a key village known as Schmidt, located twenty miles SW of Aachen. Terrific losses were sustained by the supporting armor, both tanks and tank destroyers, and the better part of our efforts for several weeks were focused on this campaign. We were operating at great distance from the units which we were supporting and it was necessary to send out parties of repair to remain with the units for several days at a time.

On October 6th T/3 Charles Specklemire was awarded the Bronze Star Medal per par 3 GO # 62, Hq. FUSA dated 26 September 1944 for meritorious service in connection with military operations against the enemy from 9 June 1944 to 5 July 1944 in England and in France. T/3 Specklemire was one of the survivors of the English Channel disaster.

On November 29th while still at Weywertz, a German flying bomb struck in the center of the area demolishing a great part of the railroad station and causing a number of casualties. One man, T/5 Frank W. Polcyn was killed instantly. Two men, S/Sgt Elmer A. Wolfgram and T/4 Earl R. Brister died of wounds received. Fifteen men were hospitalized, seriously wounded and two slightly wounded. Twenty-seven were treated for slight wounds, not hospitalized. (Appendix # 2)

While at Weywertz several more men received Bronze Star Medals in connection with military operations against the enemy during the period immediately following the Normandy assault. These men were: Capt.. W.E. Anderson (1st Lt. during period covered by citation) and Capt. F.F. Poppenburg (former commanding officer) per par III GO # 69, Hq. FUSA, dated 16 October 1944; T/3 Harry J. Field, T/3 George Ponzar, T/# Casimer I. Zaremba. T/4 Harold Backs, per par III GO # 77, Hq. FUSA. A total of five enlisted men and two officers have received the Bronze Star Medal award for service performed while assigned to this company.

On December 15th, shortly before the start of the German winter offensive, the company moved to Eupen, about fifteen miles north of Weywertz. We had not yet finished moving our supplies from the old location at Weywertz when the German forces over ran that section of Belgium and it became impossible to finish the job of moving until some weeks later when we again had control of the area. The area in question lay for several weeks between American and German lines.

The rest of the winter was spent in Verviers, a fair sized Belgium city apparently out of reach of the battle but not out of reach of their artillery and flying bombs for we had hardly set down our duffel bags here when another flying bomb struck within 100 yards of the C.P., demolishing it and causing considerable damage in the shop area. As a result of this incident thirteen (13) men were treated for wounds, one of them hospitalized. Most casualties were caused by flying glass. (Appendix # 3)

On January 1st, T/4 Nowostawski and T/5 Routt shot down two German planes in the vicinity of St. Tround, Belgium, using caliber 50 anti-aircraft mounts.

About the time of arrival in Verviers, the city was subjected to fire from what was believed to be German V-2 bombs. None of them fell in the immediate area, however on the day after the move to Verviers, one bomb was dropped in the area which had been vacated in Eupen and which was still occupied by a number of parts and supply men and automotive mechanics who had been left behind to clean up unfinished work.

Late in the winter, February 12, 1945, we again moved to the area which we had previously occupied in Eupen. The stay here was short and concerned mostly with preparing the combat units for the drive across Germany which commenced the first part of March.

On the 7th of March we moved to Hofen, in Germany near Monchau, the pivot of Runstedt's winter offensive. We were approximately six miles from Weywertz to which town we had moved on October 5, 1944, five months earlier. From Hofen we jumped off on the long succession of moves that took us across Germany to the war's end. We again started the familiar business of picking up wrecks and leaving the repair crews down the length of the Ahr Riber to where it empties into the Rhine a short distance above Remagen, famed as the initial bridgehead across the Rhine. For a few days the shop was set up in Altenahr, on the Ahr Riber from which we completed a refitting operation commenced before leaving Belgium, and performed another as further preparation for the drive across Germany.

We now had with us a detachment of two officers and approximately thirty enlisted men of a Belgium Fusilier Battalion, detached as a security guard while in Germany. It was still necessary to post our own sentries at points such as the main entrance to the shop area but the main responsibility of security guard was handled by the Belgium security detachment.

March 27th the company crossed the Rhine River at the V-Corps bridge located a few miles above the Ramagen Bridge.

We made moves during the rest of the sweep across Germany of as great a distance as was consistent with vehicle operating range, the problem of keeping in contact with the supply depot, the necessity of leaving crews behind to finish work in each area and to move remaining supplies. We were still struggling with the truck loads of track mentioned preciously in the narrative as an item ranking with fuel in keeping armored equipment rolling over long distances.

We moved as rapidly as possible, performing as much maintenance as possible, a large part of which consisted of collecting the tanks lost by the moving armored units and by ourselves. The long road marches such as were being made provided more engine, power train, and suspension system maintenance than we could cope with and after four or five hundred miles the shop remained almost hopelessly full until the end of the war which found us in Weiden near the Czechoslovakian border, having swung south into the Third Army after the Russian-American linkup east of Leipzig.

Our transfer to the Third Army became effective May 6th, one day before the official end of the war in Europe. At Weiden the signal detachment which had been with us for more than a year left to return to their own organization. On May 12th the company moved into Holysov, Czechoslovakia, having postponed the move several days since the end of the war.

At Holysov the Belgium Fusiliers which had accompanied us through Germany departed for Belgium.

We took a vacation and worked a working man's hours for a change. To assume that there would be any appreciable decrease in the amount of repair work finding it's way into the shop after the war had ended was a mistake. It was several weeks before things slowed to where we could loaf a little, however night work was discontinued and the men had a rest that had been a year coming. We opened a movie theater. We organized a dance band and installed it in a club fostered by the company. We swam. We read. We laid in the sun and acquired a tan. We made acquaintances among the local residents and found them pleasant people to know.

Redeployment began to have its effect on the company and some strange new business about points began to fill conversation. Men counted their Purple Hearts in terms of five instead of one; they began to worry about battle stars and when it was all settled-found that the organization had earned five of them. As sidelight on the battle star question-those who had made the Normandy landing with Detachment "A" were entitled to wear the Bronze Arrowhead along with the battle stars on their theater service ribbon.

Redeployment took more men than it gave so it was considerably understrength that we made the move from Czechoslovakia to Nurnburg, Germany on July 21st, 1945.

Settled in Nurnburg, we found we had tanks again, thousands of them. With this move we broke up our association with the 177th Ordnance Battalion to which we had been attached since the first part of April 1944 and were now attached to the 317th Ordnance Battalion, the mission of which was the operation of the Third Army combat vehicle redeployment pool. Our chief concern now was storage and preservation of combat vehicles turned in by redeployment units.

Following on the heels of a host of rumors came an order dated Sept. 9th ordering the company to the Assembly Area Command, Camp Baltimore, 25 miles SE of Rheims, France on the first leg of the long trip back to the United States where it will be disbanded.

The work that the 526th Ordnance Tank Maintenance Company was organized to do was done and at this writing it seems fitting to draw the history to a close. The redeployment shuffling of personnel has resulted in such a complete turnover that we now have only three officers and fifty three men left of those who entered the war with the company during the first weeks of Normandy.

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