Army's Garage

Two years ago Britain's Royal Army Ordnance Corps took over 600 acres of waste land, pockmarked with ramshackle buildings and rust-coated rail lines, in the interior of England, converted it into a mammoth garage and storehouse for His Majesty's mechanized troops at home and overseas. By last week this central depot was sufficiently developed for proud Ordnance officers to show it off to visiting newspapermen. The location of the depot, undoubtedly known to every general staff in Europe, correspondents were obliged to keep secret. They filed their dispatches from "somewhere in the Midlands."

Under huge sheds, one of them spread over eleven acres, some 1,600 army and civilian employes bustle about buying, inspecting, testing, maintaining and repairing the army's first-line transport and fighting vehicles. Two years ago the army had 4,000 motor vehicles; today it has some 22.500, with 6,500 of them stored in the Midlands depot. Two hundred close-mouthed drivers are on the roads day & night, shuttling new machines from the factories, storing them in sub-depots in Britain or driving overseas equipment to the docks. While most of the vehicles are modernized grey-green transport trucks, the garage also holds every type of unit needed by an army on wheels; Diesel-driven lorries to pull heavy guns: powerful breakdown wagons for the recovery and salvage of trucks, tanks and armored cars; three-ton workshops on wheels; special trailers for pontoons and box bridges and even a de luxe wagon which spreads out a green canvas into a commodious office for a field headquarters.

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