[Granville-Hough] 1 Dec 2009 - Logistics and Paper Work at Thule

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:26:44 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Logistics and Paper Work at Thule - 1 Dec 2009

    When I got to Thule, Greenland, I had never been a Logistics
Officer, so I had lots to learn.  However, the list of things I had to
do routinely had been going along for several years so that all I had to
do was to keep up with them.  I soon found this only took part of my day
so I looked about to see what else might be done.  I discovered the the
Army had a World War II account still open at Reykjavik, Iceland, that
no one knew about.  (This was in 1962, some 17 years after the war
ended.)  I did some research and found the Army Regulations on closing
defunct and obsolete accounts, and suggested we close the account.  No
one objected, so I got it done.  I then looked around and found an open
account in Newfoundland, I believe at Gander, so I got it closed as
well.  These were paper transactions that no one really cared about, but
I felt I had made a real tangible contribution to ending World War II.
(Recently, I learned that that British, Canadian, and American
volunteers had operated the Royal Ferry Command and had moved 10,000
planes to England.  They used Gander as a regular stop and Reykjavik as
an emergency base.  This was before the U. S. entered the war, but I
cannot say the accounts I closed were related to those operations.)
    As I looked around at my domain of responsibility, I found one was
conserving electricity.  As I noted, all our normal electricity came
from the power ship which had been towed up from Florida.  We had an
Ordnance support unit which kept all the spare parts for our Nike
Hercules missiles, motor vehicles, control radars, generators, etc in
warehouses.  We had to keep those warehouses at a stable temperature of
about 40 to 50 degrees so that the metallic parts would not be
constantly contracting and expanding.  So it was an expenditure of
electricity to keep the warehouses warm.  In looking at the warehouses
and looking at the contents of each, I discovered one or two was filled
with Nike Ajax parts, and we had no Nike Ajax missiles.  How did this
come about?
    Well, it came about this way.  When the concept was developed for
Thule as a BMEWS site, the only operational Air Defense missile system
we had was the Nike Ajax.
Remember, when things came by ship, there are only six weeks for getting
into the Thule port.  In shipping bulk items to Thule you had think two
years ahead, one to accumulate the materials at the U. S. port,  and one
to get your ships in the convoy following the Coast Guard icebreakers,
then unloading at Thule, then get in the convoy breaking your way out.
The Nike Ajax parts got unloaded and into the warehouses.  By that time
the Nike Hercules had become operational with nuclear warheads, so the
Army made the decision to install it rather than the Nike Ajax.  So when
I looked around, we had the Nike Hercules warehouses in constant use,
and the Nike Ajax warehouses where no one was allowed because the parts
could cause trouble if used in the Nike Hercules.
    Now I had worked in Nike Ajax research and analysis and knew about
scarcity of certain parts.  I believed it would be a great boon to the
Nike Ajax batteries in the Continental U. S. if they had this store of
spare parts.  I suggested through channels that they be removed to the
Boston/Providence and New York defenses.  My simple request caused quite
a stir.  Everyone, I suppose, had forgotten ever sending Nike Ajax parts
to Thule.  However, this was the period when the original Nike Ajax was
a vacuum tube system, but was constantly being updated with
transistors.  Engineers and technical people thought it would be a very
difficult problem to go through the circuitry and determine which of the
parts we had in Thule would still work.  So the answer came back: "No,
we do not want those parts.  Empty the warehouses and destroy the
items."  Then we considered our options.  We wanted to get the parts far
enough away they could not be retrieved and used.
    The commander of the Ordnance unit suggested we take the parts out
onto the frozen ocean and dump them.  Then when the spring thaws came,
the parts would neatly slide down into the deep water.  So we loaded
twelve dump trucks with Nike Ajax parts, went out about a half mile off
shore in the darkness, and dumped them.  The next spring they were
gone.  We saved the electricity which had heated the warehouses.
    But my disposal of these parts gave the New York headquarters an
idea they could dispose of anything in Thule that was an embarrassment
to the Army.  They asked if we could take on five empty vans for storage
use.  These vans were from some procurement mix-up and had no usefulness
at all in the states.  I made the assumption they would be sent by ship
and would arrive after I was long gone from Thule.  So I said yes, we
could use them as storage for certain kinds of items that could stand
freezing, one for each battery and one for headquarters.  But they
fooled me in New York.  They wanted to get rid of the items so badly
they shipped them by air, and I had to sign for them before I left.
    Well, those are some of the things I recall.  With love to all, Grampa.