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Troop Trains
(April 19, 2010) |
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My first remembered contact with trains was at Knott's Berry Farm when my
father, the Navy Master Chief, was stationed in California. They had a real
working steam engine and cars. When I was nine we were stationed in Scotland. We
would take a ferry across the river Clyde and then board a train for the forty
mile ride to Glasgow.
But I grew up in the days of jet airplane travel and never road a train in the
US, to get anywhere. That is until I was hired by Amtrak to be one of the first
white Pullman porters. We were called sleeping car attendants, but a Pullman
porter was what I really was. I got my passengers on board, made up their rooms;
saw to their needs (to include shining a lot of shoes) and then de-training them
at their destination. I worked out of the Chicago crew base and got to ride on
about | |
Van E. Harl |
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seventy five percent of the rail passenger lines in the country from 1974 to
1976. I still say I went to college on the Amtrak scholarship. It was my two
years of working the rails that paid for my education. |
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After leaving Amtrak I had never been back on a train until the 10th of December
2005. The small Oklahoma train line of Farmrail which hauls freight in southwest
Oklahoma ran a special Christmas passenger train and lots of old memories were
awakened. The Colonel was with me (my wife) and we got to talking about troop
trains and how the military used them in time of war.
The US military used trains for the first time (on a limited basis) during the
Mexican-American war of 1846. The Civil War (1861-1865) saw the heavy dependence
of rail transportation by the North and South. That war was the first true
mechanized war. The ability to move large groups of men and war fighting
material (logistics) over hundreds of miles in just a few days was what kept the
South in the fight for so long. Fast projections of men and supplies into the
forward edge of the battle area by trains was also what allowed the Union to
push the fight deep into the Confederacy and end the war.
When the US entered WW I the first thing they did was send Army units of Light
Rail Operations, to build connecting rail lines in France using French trains
and track. This allowed for the rapid movement of US troops into battle. The
Doughboys got to know and experience the famous 40 & 8 French box cars. Each of
the twenty nine foot by nine foot cars had a brass plate on it that advised the
Americans they were in a box car that could haul 40 men and 8 horses. These cars
were first build in 1872 and American service men road in these cars in both
world wars. I called a veteran friend who traveled across France into Germany
riding in a 40 & 8. As his train moved east, riding in a box car with no
bathroom, they would pass westbound trains with regular passenger cars full of
German POWs. Of course the German rail cars had bathrooms. The Allies had to
maintain certain standards for handling German prisoner, but these rules did not
always apply to their own troops.
Over 40 million men and women served in WWII and almost every one of them rode a
Troop Train during that war. In the latter part of the war on any given day over
one million servicemen were riding a Troop Train. The US was averaging 2500
Troop Trains a month.
We continued to use trains during the Korean War. Large numbers of military
units on the eastern half of the US rode trains to the West coast to ship out to
Japan and onto Korea.
The last major troop train to be used was in 1965 when 15,000 men and their
equipment from the 1st Infantry Division rode the rails from Ft. Riley, Kansas,
to Oakland, California, on their way to Vietnam. During WWII railway bridges and
tunnels were guarded to prevent sabotage from disrupting the critical flow of
troops and supplies. When the 1st Infantry Division deployed to Vietnam many of
the same bridges were guarded against war protesters trying to stop the Army
from sending solders to another foreign battle area. Times had changed since the
Pearl Harbor generation rode the rails to war. Train high. | |
By
Van E. Harl
Copyright
2005 About Author:
Major Van E. Harl, USAF Ret., was a career police officer in the U.S. Air
Force. He was the Deputy Chief of police at two Air Force Bases and the
Commander of Law Enforcement Operations at another. Major Harl is a graduate of
the U.S. Army Infantry School, the Air Force Squadron Officer School and the Air
Command and Staff College. After retiring from the Air Force he was a state
police officer in Nevada.
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