Earl Hall
Era: World War II
Military Branch: Army
Mr. Hall served in World War II in the European Theater and the Pacific Theater.
He served in the U.S. Army. He received his training at Texas A&M University and at Officer’s Candidate School in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. He was assigned to Patton’s 3rd Army in the 1303rd Engineer General Service Regiment. He and his unit traveled throughout Europe during the war, building and rebuilding various types of bridges so that Allied troops could advance. They were also responsible for locating and exploding or digging up German mines. In addition, they sometimes did reconnaissance.
His rank was Captain.
Mr. Hall graduated from Beaumont High School in 1939.
Source: “Bridge Building Army Style,” by Al Zdon, Minnesota Legionnaire, October 2008 (reprinted with permission, see below)
Earl Hall was a young officer out of east Texas when he became a company commander in an Army bridge building regiment in World War II. The 1303rd built bridges across Europe and was primed for the invasion of Japan when the war ended.
The problem is that tanks can’t swim.
When George Patton’s Third Army came to a river blocking its path, the American blitzkrieg came to a thundering halt until the engineers could build a bridge. During World War II, hundreds of bridges, great and small, were built across ditches, streams, canals and raging rivers.
Earl Hall, who lives in Woodbury, Minnesota helped build a few dozen of those bridges as a company commander in the 1303rd Engineer General Service Regiment.
Hall’s bridge building career started with an interest in science as a schoolboy growing up in Beaumont, a city in southwest Texas not far from the Louisiana border.
“During the 30s and 40s, there was a widespread belief that engineering could change the world. People told me I was good at math, physics and science, and there was some idealism there,” Hall said in an interview.
He graduated from Beaumont High School in 1939 and went straight to college at Texas A&M.
“It was a poor boy’s college. It cost $50.00 tuition for the entire year. My mother was a widowed school teacher who had lost her job when the Depression started.”
Hall’s mother scraped by through teaching courses funded by the Works Progress Administration. “We were in pretty sad straits, but I had a pretty good paper route, and we put together a little money to go to school on.”
In the end, it cost about $600.00 for the college year, including books, housing meals and the rest.
At the time, Texas A&M was one of a handful of schools across the country that was totally made up of Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets. “Everybody on the campus wore a uniform. Every semester we had to take military science and tactics, and we all marched to the mess hall for lunch and dinner, and sat in an organized fashion for the meals.”
Hall was grateful that this early service to his country had a monetary benefit. The Army paid him 10 cents a day for his ROTC status.
The U.S. went to war when Hall was still a junior. The bombing at Pearl Harbor incensed Hall and his roommate so much that they marched down to the recruiting office in Bryan, Texas, and volunteered.
“The recruiting officer told us that we couldn’t volunteer. He said we’d been in the Army since we were freshmen, and that the Army would tell us when it was time for us to go.”
Texas A&M sped up its education process because of the war, and the students took their first semester of senior year during the summer. By January 1943, they were graduated.
The problem was that in order for an ROTC candidate to become an officer, he must have gone through the summer camp, and the accelerated track had wiped out that possibility. The Army solved the problem by shipping Hall off to Officer’s Candidate School in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, where engineering officers were trained.
Hall got his second lieutenant commission, and he was sent across country to Camp Ellis in Illinois to be part of the cadre as the 1303rd regiment was being formed. “It was a most unusual unit,” Hall said.
Hall’s own experience wasn’t bad either. In addition to his engineering degree, he had spent one summer building highways and other summers working as a roughneck in the Texas oilfields.
The cadre was formed in July of 1943, and grew to nearly full size at 1,700 men by March of 1944. The men trained by building bridges across the famous Spoon River in Illinois.
No one knew, of course, where they would be sent once they were ready, but some of the officers were taking a side course in Japanese, Hall said. Instead, the 1303rd was ordered to Massachusetts where they boarded a troop ship for England.
“We didn’t take our equipment with us. Our equipment met up with us in England.”
Their training continued, and Hall, who was the commander of Company B, did some special training with the British Commandos. Hall’s area of expertise was explosives, and a major job of the engineering units was to lay mine fields or to remove mine fields.
The unit also stayed busy in England by building airstrips and in laying concrete platforms for buildings called hard stands. “They said that every time we poured another hard stand, they had to run up another barrage balloon to keep the island from sinking.
“We poured a lot of concrete while we were there.”
D-Day came and went while the engineer regiment waited its chance. Hall took part in the landings personally, but will not talk about his activities, noting that it was top secret at the time. He rejoined his outfit in time for their own landing on Normandy Beach on July 28, 1944.
By August, the 1303rd had been assigned to Patton’s Third Army and were part of the full gallop across France toward the German border. The engineering regiment was in the 12th Corps and served as flank guard for the right side of the racing army.
Bridge builders are expected to be in the rear of the front lines, but the 1303rd spent the next nine months almost continuously in the combat zone.
Hall’s company became something of an independent unit. “We went across Europe as an individual unit, never together as a battalion or regiment. They just put us to work as engineers, and we rarely stayed anywhere for more than a few days.
The unit cleared mine fields, built a prisoner of war camp, and did extensive road work. “But more than anything else, we built bridges. We crossed all the major rivers in Europe, and got pretty good at it.”
There were three general types of bridges the engineers would build. One was called a Bailey bridge, which was mainly a gigantic erector set. The main pieces were six by 10 foot panels with crossed steel braces. Each panel weighed 600 lbs.
“We figured it took six men to lift one and put it in place. If a man couldn’t carry 100lbs., he didn’t belong in an engineering unit.”
The bridge was constructed by building a section at one end and then pushing it out on rollers over the river until it reached a pier. “You always had to have enough built behind to support what you were pushing out.”
The second type of span was a pontoon bridge. Pontoons were floated down the river and captured and put in place with treads above them.
“First you’d build an abutment on either side of the river. You’d attach the floats one at a time. They were clumsy, clumsy things.”
The bridge was kept from floating downstream by dropping anchors upstream and lashing the bridge down with wire fixed to the anchors.
A third type was the wooden trestle bridge, built with thick trestles topped with steel I-beams.
Whatever the type of bridge, it had to support the 70 tons of load needed to get a tank to the other side.
The bridges were often built on the rubble of prior bridges the Germans had destroyed in their retreat. The engineers would construct wooden cribs to hold the rock and rubble, and then let that support the new bridge.
Heavy equipment was at a premium, and the 1303rd made do with one small crane, big enough to lift I-beams, and a small bulldozer. All wood was sawed by hand. “There weren’t any Skill Saws in those days.”
In general, a bridge could be erected in two or three days. “That’s if you’re working very hard, and you know what you’re doing.”
The type of bridge they built depended on the water to be crossed and the speed at which it was needed. A pontoon bridge was the quickest, but also one of the hardest to build in fast moving water. The tankers also disliked pontoon bridges intensely because of their instability.
With no weight on a pontoon bridge, the carrying surface was five feet above the water. When a tank rode out on the bridge, the surface was only a foot above the water. “It bounces up and down, and they were known to dump tanks in the river. They were tricky to build and tricky to drive across. You never sent two tanks in a row over a pontoon bridge.
“The pontoon bridge was not your ideal bridge.”
Hall noted that his company never actually brought the materials for the bridge to the site. Special Bailey or pontoon companies had the job of driving the bridge parts to the site where the 1303rd would put it together.
If I-beams were needed, they would have to be found locally. “You know we didn’t ship I-beams overseas to make bridges. We didn’t ask, we didn’t pay, we just took it. Sometimes the French would get a little disturbed when we took them, but all we could tell them was that we were fighting a war.”
But bridge building wasn’t the only thing the engineers did. Because the 1303rd was on the flank of the army, its members often did reconnaissance in small vehicles, searching for German units that had been bypassed by the lightning advance.
“If you drove into a French town and all the people came out with flowers and flags and wine, you knew the Germans were nowhere around. But if the town was all shuttered up and nobody was in sight, you knew the Germans were close at hand.”
Once an enemy position was encountered, the engineers would call in 8th Air Force support, and the P-47s would attack the German units.
On at least two occasions, including the fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, the engineers were deployed as infantry troops. “We did our duty, but we weren’t very good at being infantry.
“At the Bulge, they sent us up and we were assigned a sector at the corner of the Bulge, to keep the Germans from expanding. We dug into our foxholes and waited. The Allied cause was very fortunate the Germans didn’t choose to attack us. It’s one thing to be deployed, and another to perform well in action.”
The Bulge occurred during the time when Patton’s army was slogging through an area near the German frontier, meeting heavy resistance. “We were about 50 miles east of Nancy, and then we were on the road north the next day.”
Hall said Patton’s logistical skills were never more evident than getting his army up to the battle. “We had orders for which roads to follow, and when we’d go over a crossing, a unit coming the other way would follow right behind us. It was beautiful logistics, but that was Uncle George.”
Hall did have one close encounter of the first kind with the American general. “Patton had a habit of coming up to the front in a jeep, with the flags flying and his entourage in tow. He really didn’t belong in a combat area.”
Hall was overseeing the construction of a bridge when he noticed the presence of another officer next to him. “Patton immediately told me where he wanted that bridge done, and he said, ‘If you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody that can.’
“Here I was, a 22-year-old talking to the General of the Army, but somehow it didn’t bother me a bit. I don’t know why, I simply told him how long it was going to take for each phase of the project. It was a lot more hours than he wanted.
“But you know what, nobody could take our place, and nobody could do it better. The general just walked away without saying a word.”
When Patton went back to his headquarters after a trip to the front lines, he would often fly back in a spotter aircraft, Hall said. In that way, none of the soldiers would ever see the general heading backwards from the front.
Hall said a lot has been written about Patton since the war. “But we respected him and we loved him. He took care of us and that meant equipment, supplies, and recognition too. And I’ve read about that special discipline he enforced, but at that time I didn’t notice anything special about it.”
One part of the Patton operation that Hall always remembered was when a leading element of the army would capture a German rest camp and liberate a quantity of liquor. “He always shared it with the troops. We would get our ration every so often. I think sometimes we built those bridges when some of the guys were half drunk.”
When the Bulge was halted, the Third Army’s advance to the heart of Germany continued. “It was a moving event, and we just tagged along.”
When there were no bridges to build, there were often minefields to clear. “It was nerve wracking business, but you had to do it.”
The mines could be detected by swinging a mine detector in front of an engineer. “Once a mine was detected, you could blow it up or dig it out. If you dug it out, you’d use your bayonet to scrape the dirt away from the mine.
“But the Germans didn’t want us to remove their mine fields. The main mines were Teller mines that had about 12lbs of TNT in them. But they would also plant smaller anti-personnel mines that would go off with just a footstep. Sometimes they would attach the anti-personnel mines to bigger mines. You’d have to search with your bayonet to see if the mine was booby-trapped.
“We didn’t have enough training at it, and most of the training was on the job experience. We lost a few men out there. When one guy was blown up, another guy had to take his place. Wars are like that.”
Getting supplies could be difficult when the pressure was on to build a bridge because the armor was waiting to press on. “You were suppose to fill out a requisition and it would go upstream to corps headquarters, and then you waited until they brought it to you. That was a little slow.
“What you really did was find out where a heavy equipment depot was and go steal one. Nobody got terribly upset with us.”
Hall said he had the ideal motor sergeant. “He knew his stuff about rebuilding vehicles and fixing them. It turns out he ran a car ring in Detroit that stole cars in America, redid them, and shipped them over to Canada. He was perfect as a motor sergeant for our company. He knew how to get parts.”
The bridges were generally built without enemy resistance, but on occasion there would be a mortar attack. Once, a German .88 opened fire on a project. And sometimes an airplane would strafe the engineers.
“One time, out of nowhere, a plane came over and strafed us. It was going like hell. I jumped up in the Jeep where we had a wing-mounted 50 caliber and waited for him to come back. When he did, he came too fast for me to even swing the gun around.
“It turned out it was a Junkers two-engine jet. It’s a good thing they didn’t have too many of those.”
Hall’s most dangerous incident, though, came without any enemy fire. “We were going to build a bridge across the Moselle, and we had to take an assault boat across to the other side to look at the ground over there.
“Assault boats have flat bottoms and are powered by paddles. The current was taking us downstream pretty quickly and we couldn’t control the boat. There was a sunken island with trees sticking out of it, and when the boat went off and left us, I was holding onto a tree for dear life. I had more clothing on than I would have liked for being in a river, and I just wasn’t a good enough swimmer to reach the shore.
“Private McDaniels saw us. He had grown up in Tennessee and he knew how to navigate fast rivers in small boats. I don’t know how he got out there, but if he hadn’t I would have drowned. Nobody told him to come out and rescue us. He just did it. We took care of each other.”
The 1303rd finished its war in Europe at Passau, Germany, in the spring of 1945. For two weeks, Hall, now a captain, was the military governor of Passau.
Not much later, though, the 1303rd mounted up and headed for Marseilles, where the men were loaded on Navy troop ships that quickly took them across the ocean, through the Panama Canal, and on to the Philippines.
While in the Philippines, Hall learned that there was a difference between the European war and the Pacific war in terms of what you could get away with. “Some other company saw us with a piece of equipment that had once belonged to them. Before I knew it, I was up for general court marshal. Fortunate for me, our C.O. went and explained that’s how we’d done that in France. They let me go and told me not to do it again. I could have been in Leavenworth.”
The regiment set up camp near Clark Airfield and got ready for its next duty, the invasion of Kyushu, Japan. When the atomic bombs ended the war, the regiment was sent as an occupation force in Japan, and it slowly began to go home.
Hall had enough points to go home early, but he was considered essential personnel by the Army, and kept on to guide the unit through being disbanded.
He arrived home in Beaumont, Texas, on Christmas Eve, 1945.
For several years, Hall worked for General Electric as a jet engine specialist. He still has patents with the company for mechanisms he invented. His love affair with engineering, however, was waning.
“I began to see that engineering couldn’t save the world.”
In mid-career, Hall quit his job and went to the Boston Theological Seminary. One of his classmates was Martin Luther King, who became a lifelong friend.
General Electric helped out with Hall’s new endeavor by keeping him on as a part-time specialist.
In the end, Hall became deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and participated in such activities as the March to Selma. In the following years, as an ordained Methodist minister, he served churches and communities across the country.
Control Data, a Minnesota company, hired him at one point, and that was his passport to the state. Once in Minnesota, he became the director of Business Management at St. Thomas University, a position he held for eight years before retiring. He still serves on committees at the university.
Hall wrote a book on integrated project management with fellow scholar Juliane Johnson, and the book is still considered a standard in the field.
“I know a lot about project management, and it all started with building bridges.”
He and his wife, Carol, have three sons and live in Woodbury, Minnesota, where Hall has been using his master gardening skills.
At the present time, Hall is working on a book called Finding the Footprints of God, a perspective on spirituality from the mind of a scientist. He’s been working on the project for four years, and he said the book will be done in another year.
And you know it will.
“I consider it a tremendous privilege to have done the things I’ve done, to have known the people I’ve known and to have gone the places I’ve gone—and to have that little gal, my wife, with me all the way.”
