Tunisian Scrap Drive

First hint of what happened to the spoils of battle in North Africa came in House hearings on the Military Appropriation Bill. Said Major General L.H. Campbell Jr., U.S. Chief of Ordnance: "They had a big parade over there of German trucks . . . pulling Germans guns . . . loaded with German ammunition. These will be returned to the Germans in the course of time--I mean the ammunition." The usable captured materiel was turned over to the French.

No hint was given of the total count of cannon, tanks and trucks. One guess at the loot taken from Arnim's armies: a thousand fieldpieces, two or three hundred tanks, six or seven hundred planes. No one would guess at the haul of small equipment: machine guns, mortars, and such oddments of fighting apparel as helmets and side arms.

Quick Booty. Ordnance maintenance companies had grabbed the choice pickings before the fighting was over--the trucks (their own and the enemy's), any new enemy weapons, for which Intelligence is always on the alert. Enemy vehicles were patched up, sometimes under fire, put to immediate use. Badly smashed cars and half-trucks were restored to useful life by "cannibalizing"--stealing a motor from one corpse, wheels from another, to make a single going machine from several wrecks.

After the guns ceased firing, combat troops turned out to help the Ordnancemen sort and pile the spoils. Usable equipment was repaired and cleaned up in the Ordnance depots, which can fix anything from a field gun to a cookstove. But not all captured materiel was usable. Much of it was just plain junk.

Slow Scrap. After the choice pieces were culled, the remaining litter of battle was trucked to dumps. Flame-twisted tank fragments, broken rifles, smashed helmets are worthless except as scrap for the steel furnaces of U.S. and Britain. Most of this junk of battle may stay where it is in the scrap piles of Tunisia: few home-bound ships can spare the extra days to load it.

Some of the refuse of victory will lie where it fell, awaiting discovery by some archeologist of the future searching the course of old battles.

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