Free Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II by Belton Y. Cooper Page A

all nine of our L5 Cub forward observer aircraft, which belonged to the field artillery battalions. Each battalion was equipped with three of these planes, which located enemy positions and directed artillery fire. The design of the plane was such that the pilots flew too low and too far forward, where they were subject to small-arms fire.
    With the promise of new planes, the artillery observers asked for additional protection. One of the most feared wounds by men was injury to the genital area. We fabricated two small bucket seats for each plane from quarter-inch armor plate cut out of German half-tracks. Each seat was contoured to protect the lower back, buttocks, genitals, groin, and upper part of the legs. The seats, which weighed about eighty pounds, were welcomed by the pilots and forward observers and raised the overall morale. The pilots eventually learned to fly a thousand feet up and a thousand feet back behind friendly lines. If they could maintain this distance safely, they could still observe enemy targets and be reasonably free from flak.
    The Gas Attack
    During this period, a potentially disastrous event took place that had a dramatic effect on the tactical situation at the time. I have never seen it mentioned in any article or book except the history of the 3d Armored Division.
    Early in the evening of July 21, while it was still daylight, I arrived at our battalion headquarters bivouac area to see the sentry wearing his gas mask and whirling his ratchet claxton, the signal for a gas attack. My driver and I had our gas masks in the Jeep, and we put them on immediately. The men in the bivouac area were putting down their tools and scrambling to find gas masks, which were stored in a trailer next to the ordnance shop headquarters. They’d been put there for reissue after we’d stripped them off tanks or other vehicles that had been shot up and abandoned.
    The men grabbed the gas masks from the trailer until there was only one left. Two men entered the trailer simultaneously, one from each end. On one end was Lieutenant Reed, a strapping six feet four inches and weighing 250 pounds. (We used to call him Big Reed, from the cartoon “Terry and the Pirates.”) On the other end was Major Arrington, about five feet eleven inches and weighing about 160 pounds. They both looked covetously at the mask. Nobody knew exactly what went through their respective minds, but Lieutenant Reed wound up with the mask and the major walked away empty-handed.
    Fortunately, the gas attack was a false alarm. It turned out that the Germans had fired a white phosphorus smoke shell into the rear of the battalion area and one of the sentries mistook the smoke for gas and gave the alarm. Other sentries took up the alarm, which quickly spread throughout the entire area. By the time it was dark, things had settled down, but there was an air of nervousness, and everyone kept his gas mask close at hand for the night.
    The ordnance companies were equipped with three decontamination trucks in the event of a mustard gas attack. The trucks contained large wooden tanks filled with water and several drums of chloride of lime powder. The procedure was to mix the powder in the water and spray it on any contaminated vehicle. The chloride of lime would release a free chlorine radical, which would neutralize the additional chlorine in the mustard gas and make it harmless. As the result of this false alarm, the drivers of the decontamination trucks checked their equipment carefully that evening, and one driver opened a drum to make sure that it held plenty of chloride of lime.
    The crew of the decontamination truck went to sleep in their foxhole, right next to the truck. Later in the evening, a heavy mist began to settle over the bivouac area, and some of the moisture apparently got into one of the drums that had been opened, and a small amount of chlorine was released. Because chlorine gas is heavier than air, it spilled over the side of the drum, down