Combat Engineers WWII and the Atomic Bomb: Mel Brooks Was a Combat Engineer in World War II
Feature Photo: The Corps of Engineers organizational structure was used to hide the development of the atomic bomb in World War II
Since the late 19th century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has organized itself into geographic divisions and districts to carry out its work. It is a flexible structure, with Corps districts and divisions created, reorganized, and eliminated as responsibilities and needs change. The Corps created a unique district in the midst of World War II to help camouflage the most secret of efforts – the building of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan District, established on 18 June 1942, was meant to appear to outsiders as simply another Corps of Engineers district, created in the midst of a war in which the Corps, and the entire country, had been mobilized to defeat Japan, Germany, and Italy. One would have assumed that the Manhattan District handled Corps work in the New York City region. In reality, the Manhattan District had no geographical boundaries, and Corps planners knew from the beginning that the work of producing the atomic bomb would take place elsewhere.
Mel Brooks Was a Combat Engineer in World War II
Soon after graduating from high school in 1944, 17-year-old Melvin Kaminsky enlisted in the U.S. Army. Raised in poverty by his widowed mother in tough Brooklyn neighborhoods, the future Mel Brooks was now to experience the stern realities of war—unlikely preparation for a life in comedy.
Ranking high in intelligence testing, Private Kaminsky was placed in the elite Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) and sent to Virginia Military Institute to be taught skills such as military engineering, as well as horsemanship and saber-wielding. When the combat arms complained that ASTP deprived them of the brightest enlisted men, the Army terminated the program after young Kaminsky had received twelve weeks of training. He then went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for regular basic training. Shipped to Europe in late 1944, his first duties were as a forward artillery observer. Next he was assigned to the 1104th Engineer Combat Group in time to participate in the Battle of the Bulge (although he would later state that he was not at the center of the most heated action).
The 1104th had been activated in March 1943 and landed in Normandy on 11 June 1944. It advanced with the Allied forces through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and entered Germany. The unit constructed the first bridge over the Roer River and built similar structures over the Rhine and Weser rivers and the Lippe and Aur-Oker canals. It also destroyed pillboxes and cleared roads. By the end of the war in Europe the 1104th was conducting a reconnaissance of the Harz Mountains.
The group, like other Engineer combat units, was frequently in advance of the front lines. It was often under artillery, mortar, and sniper fire. Five times it fought as infantry and suffered several casualties. Melvin Kaminsky’s main responsibility was the harrowing business of deactivating enemy land mines. He also endured—and not always passively—the anti-Semitism of some of his fellow soldiers. The teenager/soldier did not see the Nazi death camps but he recalled large numbers of refugees: “They were starving. It was horrible.”
“War isn’t hell,” he observed. “War is loud. Much too noisy. All those shells and bombs going off all around you. Never mind death. A man could lose his hearing.” Asked by his son if during the war he thought about “what it would take to rebuild postwar Europe ,” he replied “You thought about how you were going to stay warm that night, how you were going to get from one hedgerow to another without some German sniper taking you out. You didn’t worry about tomorrow.”
Discharged as a corporal, he soon found work as a comedy writer in the infant medium of television and adopted the name Mel Brooks. His career expanded into acting, directing, and producing. His achievements include classic films such as Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and The Producers – in which he skewered his old foes Hitler and the Nazis.
“I was a Combat Engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering.” Mel Brooks
WATCH Blazing Saddles trailer, One of Mel Brooks’ movies which he stated would probably not be produced today because of the political correctness craze according to an Independent.UK report.
Sources: James Robert Parish, It’s Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (2007); U.S. News and World Report website (August 12, 2001); Max Brooks, Saving Mel Brooks.
Combat and Military Construction
Shortly before the United States entered World War II, Congress and the War Department approved the transfer of military construction responsibilities from an overtaxed Quartermaster Corps to the Corps of Engineers. The shift was implemented piecemeal. After the Destroyers for Bases Agreement of September 1940, the chief of staff, General George Marshall, assigned the Corps the job of constructing air bases in the string of British Atlantic territories from Newfoundland to British Guiana, thereby initiating a program of overseas base construction by the Corps of Engineers that long remained one of its most important functions.
In November 1940, Marshall ordered the transfer to the Corps of Engineers of all air base construction in the United States, excluding the Canal Zone. Finally, in December 1941, Congress transferred to the Corps the responsibility for real estate acquisition, construction, and maintenance for Army facilities, including training camps, government-owned munitions plants, air bases, depots, and hospitals.
Domestic base construction peaked in 1942, as the nation geared for war. U.S. military construction expenditures in July of that year alone exceeded those spent during the entire period of 1920 1938. By the end of 1942, the Army could house 4.37 million soldiers and provide hospital beds for 180,000 more. It had built 149 munitions and aircraft manufacturing plants and constructed depots with 205 million square feet of storage space. Domestic military construction has remained an important function of the Corps of Engineers since 1942, but never again did it reach the level of that year.
During World War II, Army engineers placed floating and later fixed bridges across the rivers of Italy, France, and Germany, supporting hotly contested crossings of the Rapido, Roer, and Rhine rivers. Engineer troops prepared and developed beaches for assault landings, both in Europe and the Pacific. On the beaches of Normandy, engineer troops, operating under heavy enemy fire, cleared lanes for landing craft by destroying the mine-bearing steel structures that the Germans had implanted in the intertidal zone and bulldozed roads up the narrow draws through the cliffs lining the beaches. During the Battle of the Bulge, quick engineer actions destroyed critical bridges in the path of advancing German forces, slowing and diverting them while Allied forces regrouped. The engineers also opened road connections traversing the long wilderness reaches between the southern Canadian road net and interior Alaska and between British-ruled Assam Province in India and Yunnan Province in southwestern China.
Outstanding Army engineer support continued in the Korean War. Army engineers destroyed bridges over the Naktong River and built fortifications that helped American and South Korean forces hold the Pusan perimeter in the southeastern corner of the peninsula while General Douglas MacArthur prepared his assault landing at Inchon near Seoul. When Chinese forces entered the war and forced the Americans to retreat, the engineers built lateral roads behind new defensive lines that permitted the rapid movement of forces and equipment to areas subject to heaviest attack. This helped American commanders stabilize the front.
In Vietnam the engineers helped provide access to enemy strongholds in support of concerted U.S. search and destroy missions. To assist in these efforts and to reduce enemy attacks on military convoys, the engineers introduced the Rome plow, a military tractor equipped with a protective cab and a special tree-cutting blade. Engineer troops also constructed 900 miles of modern, paved highways connecting the major population centers of the Republic of Vietnam and monitored the construction by private American contractors of an additional 550 miles of Vietnamese highways.