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The
40th - Their Own Story
Pt 3 of 6
The
big St. Lo push began. Twelfth Army group needed communications
to control the fast unfolding operation and withdrew the battalion
from the 1st Army to help lay the lines. Those were the days
of fast and frequent moves. There was two whole weeks at Argentre,
an unusually long period in those days.
And the work pushed as fast. Before the enemy finally began
to outdistance his pursuers, there were rough times. Jerry
though they might pinch off the advance or stall it at the
narrow bottle-neck of Avranches. He tried continual
bombing and strafing. And just at that time, the 40th was
putting in an open wire line from south of Avranches to St.
James. Thirteen spans of wire were bombed out on the 8th of
August.
That was just the kick-off for the race, however. The work
went on at Laval, Chartres, Coupern. There were fifty and
sixty mile stretches of spiral four. Then open wire for twenty
four miles out of Versailles. (Gay Paree is in that area,
as some will remember)Next was a seventeen mile job of two
arm open wire from Verdun towards Metz.
Then the work turned north. It went from Verdun to Aubange,
into the city of Luxembourg, from Aubange to Bastogne. (Bastogne
was a nice looking city at that time.)
Twenty seven miles of two arm, twenty open wire came next.
It started at Liege- and ended on Hitler's sacred soil! The
line ended in the outskirts of much battered Aachen, strands
of copper pointing towards Berlin. The 40th had been the first
to string wire onto German soil.
And it hadn't been easy. Robot bombs threatened and knocked
out part of the line. A K-4 was almost completely destroyed
by a land mine. But the German fortress was more directly
threatened.
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