EPIC TASK

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20109, 1 December 1939, Page 12

EPIC TASK

TRANSPORTING B.E.F. 25,000 VEHICLES MOVED SMOOTH OCCUPATION WESTERN FRONT, Oct. 19. Behoid the bald statement that two army corps of the British Expeditionary Force are in position along (he French frontier is the story of the biggest movement of motorised troops ever attempted and carried out by any army. The German armies which marched into Austria and the Sudetenland moved from their own territory past frontier posts into adjoining States, but every one of the 25,000 vehicles which the British Expeditionary Force brought with it bad to be loaded into a transport and carried across the Channel, and then unloaded in a strange, although allied, country. For every motor vehicle which the B.E.F. in 1914 brought to France there are 30 in this force. Tiie movement was accomplished practically without a hitch. Only 25 of the vehicles had to be evacuated to the base for repairs, and there was only one real casualty, namely, when an ammunition wagon loaded with small arms and artillery ammunition caught fire. “It was our first bit of active service,’’ said one officer. “It gave a lively half-hour. Everybody took cover, and the wagon finished up in two pieces on opposite sides of the road, but nobody was hurt.” Since a military vehicle can travel only about 120 to 150 miles on the petrol that it can carry, about 15,000 tons of petrol had to be transported from England and laid down at points along the line of the B.E.F.’s advance. All of the petrol was carried in rectangular four-gallon tins, seldom seen in Europe, and French villagers, seizing them delightedly, are putting them to a variety of uses. This windfall has already presented them with several hundred thousands of empty tins. Only a small number of trains were used in transporting one entire corps; all the remainder went by road in convoys, which streamed across France for many days.

In advance of this invasion came about 350 military policemen, mostly in groups of 16, with a cooker, enabling them to settle down comfortably anywhere. They brought stencils, paint, and blank traffic notice plates.

“They Did The Job”

Most of these men were members of the Corps of Military Police, but some were Guardsmen and reservists, and some Automobile Association men, who had had a few weeks of military training.

These little groups sprinkled across France had only two days in which to prepare to direct the invasion of 25,000 vehicles driven by men who had not previously seen France; who could not speak the language of the country, and who had to find their way along roads which run circuitously through the narrow streets of towns and villages. They also had to travel at a fixed rate and in a fixed density, but they did the job. In each of the towns a French traffic policeman stood beside a red-capped B.E.F. policeman for a day or two, and then faded away, leaving his former duty to the Briton. It was a tacit and unofficial understanding such as enabled the whole of the “occupation” to be so smoothly effected. In front of each wave of British motorised troops were posted petrol depots and repair shops, while behind the convoys came formations of travelling workshops and recovery vehicles. There were also petrol companies carrying enough petrol to enable every army vehicle to travel a certain number of miles after its own tanks were empty.

An urgent question, and one which is more than merely of local interest, is whether the roads in this part of France can stand up to such traffic. Already the country is becoming very wet. Internal traffic on the roads throughout the deep area that the B.E.F. has occupied has been multiplied many times in the last few weeks.

If Germany is thinking of trying to thrust a mechanised army into France, she will need to begin soon, because she will meet with tremendously increased obstacles if she tries to get through later. Tank-traps are filling with water, and flat fields already harvested are becoming softer every day. The country near the British lines is becoming progressively more and more tank proof. For our own purposes, battalions of expert roadmakers are arriving to reinforce the pioneer battalions already here, and one-way traffic routes are being marked out to save roads from traffic, which runs over the edges of the paved roadways. Meanwhile, each battalion —and a battalion front is narrow —has many vehicles. Each division must receive daily many tons of food, which is brought up by divisional transport. In the army reserve is a powerful tank force, which naturally was brought here on the railways, but which can no longer travel by train. The state of the roads in Western Europe has become one of the problems that are being studied in those rooms of Allied headquarters along the Western Front, where big maps on walls are speckled with coloured lines, indicating the position of each division of the German army from the Russian frontier westward to the increasing concentrations opposite the Franco-Belgian frontiers. The condition of the roads may be one of the deciding factors in Herr Hitler’s policy.