SCIENTIFIC PACKING HELPS INVASION

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 228, 23 June 1944, Page 4

SCIENTIFIC PACKING HELPS INVASION

Valuable Space Saved BRITISH CIVILIANS WORK IN SPARE TIME (British Official Wireless.) (Received June 22, 7.30 p.m.) . RUGBY, June 21.

One of the most remarkable stories behind the Allied advance on the Normandy front is the achievement of British men and women who made possible the rapid unloading and maintaining of supplies by scientific packing. Knowing that the success of the whole operation hinged largely ou the amount of equipment each ship would be able to discharge on the landing beaches, British logistics experts analysed ever}’ type of wood, because a packing ease may weigh 201 b. when the wood has a moisture content of 80 per cent., but only 131 b. when well-seasoned wood, with only 15 per cent, of moisture content, is used.

The experiments led to a decision to use special boxes weighing a maximum of 1001 b. for .small stores which had to be carried by hand in the first landing rush. All the boxes were waterproofed, numbered and identically packed. To assist identification in the dark, the letters and figures were raised like braille. Spare Time Effort. With British manpower fully mobilized, the problem of manufacturing and packing the eartons was largely solved by the voluntary spare-time effort of British civilians*working in their own homes. Forty thousand British workers gave an average of 22 hours a week of their spare time to helping the invasion.

Once the troops were established on the beaches, supplies were landed in larger containers called beach-packs. In hundreds of depots throughout Britain, men and women worked 14 hours a day seven days a w’eek. At one ordnance depot, girls of the Auxiliary Territorial Service prepared beach-packs containing vehicle spares. Among them were two girls from Chile and one from Argentine, who crossed the Atlantic to enlist, also a typical British girl, Private Poter, who has a brother in the British Army in Italy, another brother in a British destroyer and whose husband is with the R.A.F. in India. When the troops have penetrated inland, heavy third ’category stores are landed in crates, each division requiring 179,101 crates, including 50,308 cases of ammunitoin. At this stage, time -for reassembly on land permits the packing of heavy equipment in parts, thus saving shipping space. Scientific packing of a two-pounder anti-tank gun saves 61 per cent, storage, a six-pounder anti-tank gun 58 per cent., a 25-pounder field gun 40 per cent, and small arms and searchlight equipment each 50 per cent. The average saving is 50 per cent., which means that British methods have in effect packed a double punch into the landing operations.