Out of the Hole

The War Department last December confessed to some sad bungles in Army construction (TIME, Dec. 23). A further confession was added last week, but also a showing that Army performance had improved since the Corps of Engineers' able Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell moved in on the Quartermaster Corps.

General Somervell had admitted to a House committee that the Army had underguessed the cost of its new cantonments, airfields, etc., by at least $339,000,000. Revised cost: $984,300,000. Some of the reasons for this bad guessing did the Army no credit. By the Army's own, oft-repeated account, its chief excuse for being, in the placid decades after World War I, was to plan its expansion into a full-strength force. Such planning presumably would include provision for rapid, efficient construction of cantonments to house the expanded Army. Witness Somervell said that no such plans existed when expansion began last year. He added: "I want to say, as an engineer, that if proper and complete plans had been provided, we would have saved $100,000,000."

Armchair constructors had fancifully assumed that all the camps would be built on good terrain, that weather would be fine, that roads, railways, water supplies and electric power would be ample, that the costs of labor and materials would stay put. As any lay contractor worth his cement could have foretold, practically none of these assumptions held good. Plans were suddenly, sometimes erratically, changed. Congress delayed initial appropriations, so that jobs which might have been done last fall had to be done in wintertime. Unions put the bite on workers for stiff initiation fees, held up some camps until demands were met.

Despite such mistakes and handicaps, General Somervell this week was able to report a change for the better. On Jan. 3 (just after he took over), of 236 Army projects scheduled, 19% had not been started, 44% were behind schedule, only 26% were on schedule, 8% were ahead of schedule, and 3% were completed. By Feb. 21, his chart read: 5% not started, 23% behind schedule, 54% on schedule, 10% ahead of schedule, 8% completed. Some of this improvement was paper legerdemain: original, over-optimistic schedules had been revised, deadlines for completing some camps had been advanced to more realistic dates. But the Army undoubtedly had learned a lot on the job, by last week was pulling itself out of the hole.

Utopia Undone. Commanding officer at Fort Bragg, N. C. is Major General Jacob Loucks Devers. Until last September his post was the peaceful habitat of some 5,000 field artillerymen. Aside from more or less perfunctory summer maneuvers, nothing much ever happened at Fort Bragg to disturb the routine of life in the hand some brick barracks, the pleasant officers' quarters, the not-so-pleasant, ramshackle quarters for noncoms. Some of the men at Fort Bragg had been there since World War I, hoped to die there. Older officers thought highly of Bragg as a quiet place to pass their latter years.

Last September, this military Utopia ended with a bang. Fort Bragg was to be turned into a training centre for 67,000 men: the job had to be completed in six and a half months. Army quartermasters, civilian contractors, 30,000 Tarheel work men moved in to construct 2,562 new buildings, 93 miles of paved roads, 75 miles of water mains, 60 miles of sewer lines, an 8,000,000-gallon (per day) water system, 60 miles of electric power lines, other huge essentials. The cantonment would be North Carolina's third largest city. By last week, 1,900 of the buildings had been finished (many with green lumber, which was bound to warp); 35,000 troops were quartered, and General Devers was sure that the whole thing would be completed before his deadline.

Attendant griefs, bungles, triumphs at Fort Bragg helped to explain why the Army had to up its cost estimates a third. Green surveyors in the pine woods at Bragg sometimes made ridiculous mistakes, staked out building sites where none was supposed to be. Many a Tarheel carpenter had to be taught his trade on the job (but General Devers was lucky: of all his laborers, only the plumbers had a union shop). Uncanny disasters twice hit the already insufficient water supply. On two different days, a million gallons unaccountably vanished from the reservoirs. General Devers twice had to forbid bathing, limit the use of toilets, conserve what water was left until the mysterious leakage stopped.

The roads originally laid out for the camp were too narrow (16 feet); a fine system of 44-foot trunk roads is now abuilding. Traffic on the State highways between Fort Bragg and Fayetteville got into fatal snarls. Until General Devers put his military police on the job, deaths on the highway averaged one every four days. Temporary hospital quarters in the brick barracks were sloppy makeshifts. Four locomotives, shunted on to nearby sidings, last week provided steam heat for an uncompleted hospital.

But farmers did learn how to be carpenters. General Devers cut corners, even cut sacred Army tape (example: many a building was nearly completed before paper authority to start it had arrived). Where a steel water tank had been planned, with no steel at hand, a 132-foot concrete monster stood last week. When the lumber supply threatened to run short, Army buyers combed the Carolinas and part of Georgia, cornered the regional market (at premium prices), and kept well ahead of the carpenters. A two-story frame bar racks, from concrete foundation to the last shingle, was run up in ten days. Some where on Bragg's busy landscape a new building was finished every 32 minutes of the working day (eight hours).

Though the troops that poured in were sometimes ahead of schedule, all had quarters ready when they arrived. One outfit gave General Devers a rare laugh. The 112th Field Artillery (National Guard) arrived from New Jersey with twelve pianos, 36 polo ponies, its due complement of men and officers. Only items left behind were the regiment's guns. They arrived several days late.

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