The Miracle of Supply

(See Cover)

If the war ends soon, it will be because the Germans never dreamed that General Eisenhower could be such a madman. By last week he had landed well over 1,000,000 men on the Continent (others had landed in southern France, dropped by parachute in The Netherlands), but he still, apparently, had only one good usable port--some 500 miles behind his front--through which to supply his armies.

According to all the military textbooks, this was madness. But there was a methodical miracle in that madness. General Eisenhower's whole successful campaign hinged upon that calculated miracle.

The German failure to believe in that miracle cost them 160,000 seasoned men --men whom the Nazis desperately needed to hold the Siegfried Line but who were sacrificed to keep Eisenhower out of the ports of France and Belgium.*

In short, the Germans were badly cheated at the price they paid. And now they continued to pay for their miscalculation, for Eisenhower was two jumps ahead of their timetable. Since Lieut. General George S. Patton's swing through Normandy, they had never been ready for the next blow.

The miracle could be stated in simple, arithmetical terms: in the first 100 days after Dday, over 1,000,000 long tons of supplies (700,000 items) and 100,000 vehicles poured into France. What was more, these supplies closely followed the slashing, wheeling, speeding columns of Allied tanks and infantry via plane, truck, pipeline and railroad.

The North American Way. This miracle was in the American tradition, a tradition the Germans have never really understood. It was begotten of a people accustomed to great spaces, to transcontinental railways, to nationwide trucking chains, to endless roads and millions of automobiles, to mail-order houses, department stores and supermarkets; of a nation of builders and movers. It was also a miracle in the British tradition, begotten of a people who for generations have sailed all waters, great and small, and delivered their goods to every shore and harbor of the world.

It was a joint miracle, wrought by many hands. The planning and overseeing of it was in large part a Washington job, by Lieut. General Brehon B. Somervell's Army Service Forces and his chief planner, cool, efficient Major General Leroy Lutes. They were the wholesalers, getting the supplies from the producers, estimating how much could go to Europe (and how much to every other battlefield in the world), and delivering them on the far shore of the ocean in the quantities needed and at the time required.

But the miracle, which began so far back, showed most spectacularly on the transatlantic shore. British merchantmen and U.S. landing craft performed it in cross-Channel transportation. British ingenuity performed it by entirely new (and still secret) means of making open beaches almost as useful as ports. U.S. Navy specialists performed it in building up Cherbourg's shattered port to a capacity far greater than in peacetime. Army engineers performed it on the beaches and close behind the battle line. Loaders, repair men, railroad men, truck drivers, oil men, flyers stretched that far-flung performance farther & farther as the front advanced.

Faster than Ports. Last week, on D-plus-100, more than 100 freighters waited off the Normandy shore to be unloaded. With the aid of ducks the ships disgorged and turned away more quickly than if they had been in a modern port. LSTs, 50 and 60 at a time, beached themselves at high tide, were left stranded as the 19-ft. tide receded, opened their mouths and were unloaded before another tide floated them.

At Cherbourg, where the Germans, in their thorough way, had wrecked the breakwater, the 25,000 engineering troops had sunk a string of concrete barges. One of the worst storms the French coast has seen in years washed them ashore. With swift improvisation dozens of emptied Liberty ships were anchored bow to stern, and their sea cocks opened; the scuttled ships formed a new sea wall. A few days after the first ship docked at Cherbourg, the first train pulled out with supplies. By last week, 20 trains were leaving daily. Quays, warehouses and cranes had been installed, oil storage tanks repaired, thousands of square yards of concrete poured for open-air storage dumps.

Last week engines backed down the sidings to draw new rolling stock from ferries. Giant cranes lifted locomotives from other ships. Ducks loaded with supplies slid through the water and rolled up to the concrete storage squares. At night powerful searchlights lit the harbor for all-night shifts. (Capture of Le Havre ought soon to ease the strain on Cherbourg and the beaches; now ships will be able to proceed up the Seine itself to Rouen, 75 miles from Paris.)

How to Distribute Gasoline. From the ports and the beaches where these feats were performed, deliveries had to be made to a ravenous customer who demanded over a million gallons of gasoline a day--and who kept changing his address. By last week 700 miles of pipeline had been laid. From the end of the pipelines, tank trucks carry gas and oil 100 miles to distribution points, where fuel is transferred to five-gallon cans. Two-and-a-half-ton trucks take the cans to advance Army dumps.

But there are always special deliveries needed too; so gasoline also goes to the front in the bellies of the Troop Carrier Command's C-47s. Carrying fuel and other urgent supplies, the great ships sit down, one every 14 seconds, on narrow emergency landing strips sometimes only 50 miles behind the racing tanks. Soon railways will take over much of the burden.

But even with Cherbourg and the beaches, pipelines and planes, Lieut. General Omar N. Bradley 's armies would never have reached the Reich as swiftly had it not been for the Red Ball Express Highway. The R.B.E. is a one-way road which begins at Cherbourg and swings in a great loop, roughly south and east, to a point several hundred miles east of Paris.

It returns to Cherbourg again by a parallel route. On this express belt some 9,000 trucks roll day & night at 40 miles an hour -- at night with headlights ablaze, for speed is necessary and the German air force negligible. Every 30 or 40 miles, maintenance companies are stationed to make quick repairs.

Every few hundred yards, signs in English and French proclaim: "Red Ball convoys only. All others keep off."

Deliveryman de Luxe. The fabulous delivery service which operates between the ports of England and France and the armies at the front is the Services of Supply of the European Theater of Operations. Its head is Lieut. General John Clifford Hodges Lee, Eisenhower's supply chief.

Socially, he is a man who cannot be missed. A man of exceptionally friendly and attractive personality, he rarely comes into a room without attracting attention. Militarily he is a martinet, a spit-& -polish soldier with the driving energy which is apt to characterize good officers. Administratively, he is Hollywood's dream of a big executive: he keeps two secretaries and three aides run ragged; while his satellites revolve around him, he ticks off his schedule with the inexorability of a clock.

All these are integral parts of John Lee's character. Born 57 years ago in Junction City, Kans., the son of an Iowa insurance agent, he was named after his mother, who bore the unusual name of John Clifford Hodges II (her family, vexed that she was not a boy, named her after her father, a captain in the Confederate Army). He graduated from West Point with George Patton and Lieut. General Jacob L. Devers in the class of 1909. As an Army engineer Lee served in the Philippines, built dams on the Ohio River, was aide to Major General Leonard Wood.

In World War I he saw action with the Kansas 8gth Division with his friend General Somervell, won a D.S.M. and Silver Star in combat duty. When World War II came he was a colonel, was shortly made a temporary brigadier general, given command of the 2nd Infantry Division at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Old Friend Somervell and Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, whom Lee had known on the West Coast, picked him to be Eisenhower's supply man.

Soldier & Gentleman. General Lee is passionately, deeply devoted to propriety. He is one of the most formal high U.S. officers in Europe. When an officer enters his office, General Lee expects the halt, the clicked heels and the salute--held until he returns it. Then he wants the officer to report in the third person: "Colonel Smith of X Regiment reporting to the Commanding General." This formal procedure accomplished correctly, he usually thaws cordially. At staff meetings his aide calls for attention when the General approaches. The staff rise, stand like ramrods until Lee walks to his seat.

This same sense of propriety caused him to issue an order that no cigars were to be held for officers until combat soldiers got enough. He has been known to halt his official car after it had just missed striking a woman and apologize for frightening her.

In war as in peace he rises at 5:30 or 6 a.m., a habit which he admired in General Wood.

In private life he is equally devoted to the things which he thinks become a gentleman and an aristocrat. An Episcopalian, he goes to church almost every day and sometimes twice or thrice on Sunday, often taking his entire staff of 40. (He also keeps a Bible on his desk, another in his brief case.) He likes to drive a car at a hell-for-leather clip and sometimes does the same with a jeep, although in his present post he has several chauffeurs, including Henry Chambers, a Negro staff sergeant who has been with him for 18 years.

Now a widower (his son, Captain John C. H. Lee Jr., is with the engineers in France), he continues to entertain well. At his London apartment he had a bar for his guests; he himself generally drank only tomato juice. Now his headquarters are in the Majestic Hotel in Paris.

He likes important people and they usually respond. In England he cultivated the British, had tea occasionally with the nobility. His old friends in the Army extend from General Somervell to General MacArthur. This gregariousness has done his career no harm, but he is just as loyal a friend to many people who are not important.

Big Executive. As an administrator, General Lee is at his most terrific. His chief of staff, Brigadier General Royal B. Lord, takes care of many details, but Lee keeps up with current facts by a small, brown leather loose-leaf notebook--which a major on his staff is in turn assigned to keep up to date.

On an equally high plane is the rest of General Lee's executive background. His public-relations officer, Colonel "Jock" Lawrence, used to be Samuel Goldwyn's pressagent. In England General Lee travels in a large black limousine with red leather cushions. Before the invasion he often went on inspection trips in a private train --actually assigned to General Eisenhower, who had little use for it--which had two cars for automobiles, two for staff, dining and conference rooms and various utility cars.

This panoply of efficiency is no more invariably efficient than its parallels in civilian life. There was one occasion last spring when his Washington superiors, after a checkup, temporarily stepped in to help. With invasion only a few weeks away, General Lee's organization had not yet ordered 214 items (adding up to some 300,000 units) for the invasion. That assist from Washington may have helped smooth the invasion, and General Lee's record.

A good clue to the estimate of General Lee held by those in a position to judge best may be offered by two facts: 1) he is still, in permanent rank, only a colonel, although some officers whom he outnumbered in peacetime now wear permanent stars; 2) in spite of any shortcomings in performance, he was kept on in his huge job, the success of which was vital to the success of the Allied campaign in France.

For if General Lee is sometimes a little too impressive to be wholly convincing, his performance is altogether too vigorous to be underrated. There are few generals in the Army who can match him for energy. He regularly zips through a 16-hour day on a minutely fixed timetable.

His job is to keep supplies moving across hundreds of miles and to see that the commanders at the front get what they need. In one not unusual day last week he covered 800 miles by air and about 100 by land, checked up on his supply lines from Brest to close behind the front, conferred at various hours with General Eisenhower, Bradley and half a dozen other commanders, and reached his quarters precisely at 7:50--as scheduled.

A man eternally on the go is necessary to keep supplies eternally on the go.

* The estimated numbers (some now prisoners) whom the Nazis left behind: Cherbourg 35,000; Saint-Malu 4,000; Brest 35,000; Lorient 10,000; Saint-Nazaire 10,000; Le Havre 9,000; Boulogne 7,000; Calais 10,000; Dunkirk 10,000; Mouth of the Scheldt 30,000.

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