Delivered for D-Day

One clue that invasion might be near was in the office of Lieut. General Brehon Somervell, chief of the Army Service Forces. His orders had been to procure and ship more than 100,000 items needed for the Army's pre-invasion stockpile, from shoelaces to tanks. By last week all but 79 of the items were stockpiled where they belonged. The rest were on the way and the mad supply rush was easing up.

Boxcars, Bazookas. The end of last year lank, dandified General Somervell returned to Washington from Cairo, a grim man with a bad cold and a hell of a job ahead.

In 1943 alone, his A.S.F. had already procured and shipped to all parts of the world $23,200,000,000 worth of equipment & supplies--about everything in God's world: 21,000 boxcars, 91,000 bazookas, 1,270,000 microphones. 9,000,000 gas masks, 17,000,000 neckties, 21,000,000 rifle grenades, 36,000,000 pairs of goggles, 52,000,000 lb. of soap, 98,000,000 lb. of chemical-warfare defensive agents, 13,500,000,000 rounds of .30-and .50-caliber ammunition, 109,200.000 rolls of gauze bandage, 617,000,000 tablets of sulfadiazine, 20,000 75-mm. tank guns.

The Cairo conference, setting the date for the invasion of Europe, had made Somervell's already vast job suddenly prodigious. He called his staff together and said brusquely: "This is it." They went to work against time and the inevitable last-minute extra orders from commanders at the front.

As time grew shorter, procurement got harder. Typical was a hurry-up order for 7,000 big truck tractor and semitrailer vehicles. A.S.F. men grabbed 800 from Army units in the U.S., picked up 200 here & there, cut back production of six other kinds of motor vehicles in U.S. plants to give the trucks priority. They got them built and shipped them off.

The invasion army suddenly wanted 30,000 rounds of a special type of ammunition. The factory making that kind of shell was out of production; officials said it would take two months just to start it going again. A.S.F. said it would have to be sooner. All the shells were ready in one month.

One of the last-minute orders from London was for 2,000 medical kits. A.S.F. men located a cache of them already loaded on a freight train in Kansas City. A.S.F. ordered: take the stuff off the freight, truck it across the city and put it on a fast passenger train. Sixty hours after the rush request, the 2,000 kits were on the eastern seaboard, ready to be shipped.

By the end of last week 32 of the 79 items had been crossed off A.S.F.'s worksheets. Although 34 new orders had come in, the initial invasion supply job was virtually finished.

"To the Very End." Whimsical, sometimes irascible Bill Somervell, pride of the highly professional Corps of Engineers, has been criticized for many things. He was lambasted for his snap decision in the Canol oilfield project, and for sticking to it in spite of his critics. (Operation of the $24,000,000 refinery, built with U.S. money in Canada's Northwest, began a fortnight ago--TIME, Oct. 4.) Hard-boiled and quick-tempered when the heat is on, West Pointer Somervell has long riled more ceremonious men by his disregard of red tape, his ruthless firing of officers he deems incompetent, his burning impatience with opposition or delay. His annoyed enemies call him a man on horseback.

But Somervell and his fast-moving staff have accomplished what is probably the greatest feat of logistics in world military history. The fighting end of the Army has long since decided that Somervell, who won his D.S.C. in front-line action in World War I, is a mighty handy man to have on the Army's toughest, most complicated, most thankless task.

Somervell has done many an extracurricular job: he built LaGuardia Field, made New York City's muddled WPA run like clockwork, started the ill-starred trans-Florida Canal. He has a misquotation from Lincoln hanging on the wall of his reception room in the Pentagon Building. It is his standing answer to critics:

"If I have to read, much less answer, all the criticisms made of me and all the attacks leveled against me, this office would have to be closed for all other business. I do the best I know how, the very best I can. I mean to keep on doing this down to the very end."

But he has a shorter way of saying it: "They can all go to hell."

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