Pangborne, Berks, England — that’s what our orders read and at 1030 hours the same day we stopped in a tiny town about forty miles from London where a sian above the station read Pangborne ,. Our advance party waited for us on the platform and we unloaded and started for Coombes Park, a collection of Neissen Huts which was to be our home for the next sixt months. England was different… narrow streets.., left hand driving.., petrol instead of gasoline… pubs instead of taverns.., mild and bitters instead of good old American beer… and other things that we gradually found out. Well, we got around London, Reading, Oxford or anyplace else that we could find transportation to.
There we were, a pontoon outfit without equipment and so that became our first job. All our equipment seemed to be where we weren’t and so we drove countless miles over English roads picking up trailers and bridge supplies.
Besides that we found ourselves faced with learning how to construct the floating Bailey Bridge. Remember sweating out those 600 pound panels… night problems… remember the mud.., all that was England to us — work, more work, and then some more again. Rest? Hell, we never had time for it unless it was at the Thursday night dances that Lt. Boyer cooked up. All the gals from Pangborne showed up as well as the ATS from Reading and the Irish girls from Grizzly Green — and then after an evening of dancing we had more work the next day.
We learned too that England had been strictly rationed for a long time and we found ourselves rationed too.., one candy bar, seven packs of cigarettes, a pack of chewing gum, and a bar of Lifebuoy soap. Once in a while they had cookies but all the Zippos end Cokes that ”were going overseas” sure weren’t arriving where we were.
We were assigned to the 1105th Engineer Combat Group. commanded by Colonel Chester A. Moss, a former executive officer of our battalion. Under this group we built the first dual carriageway Bailey Bridge and later participated in the Standard Portable Military Bridge Demonstration held at Pangborne on the Thames River.
After getting ourselves up to standard we began training combat battalions methods of building our bridges. In six weeks 9 battalions were trained and made ready for the Invasion. Finally we began to work by ourselves again and one night built a bridge for speed, constructing a 206 foot bridge, 25 ton capacity, in 57 minutes flat, constructing from stockpile. One hundred and fifty six men from both A and B Companies were used. This was at Mapledurham, The next day we constructed a 215 foot bridge from trucks and used radio communication for the first time to bring the vehicles to the Pangborne bridge site: this bridge took one hour twenty minutes.
