EUROPEAN PHOTODOCUMENTARY

          Here's photographer Merle Merry, this time being photographed in front of his temporary barracks at Camp Hann near Death Valley, California.  While not particularly sturdy, the little building kept out whatever rain fell, but did little to defend against the blazing sun.  The anti-artillery men arose early for target practice, then by eleven were free to find a way to survive in the heat of the day.  The two stripes on Merle's arm indicate he is a Line Corporal serving with S2 and S3 units, that is Intelligence and Operations, and that he reported to Captains or Majors rather than Sergeants.

          This is an inside shot of the above barrack.  While he slept on a canvas cot for some time, Merle eventually was promoted to a spring cot.  Note the exact placement of the boots under the cots and the precise roll of the blankets on top of the cots.  The stove pipe vented an oil stove which heated the entire building during cold desert nights.

          The tent in the background is the 390^th Headquarters at Camp Irwin in California.  The sign Merle is leaning on shows the mascot of the 390^th, the Gollywampus Gremlin.  That character was designed by a former Disney artist.  The Gremlin is also displayed here in enlarged form for your viewing pleasure.  Camp Irwin was located on the Mojave Desert.

Having finished training, Merry was shipped to Germany where one of his duties was to show movies to the troops, the same general release films that were being seen in theaters stateside.  This picture shows Merle putting up a movie screen somewhere in a French forest.  He used a wrecker, the large piece of equipment on the right, to get himself up where he needed to be to put the screen in place.  He swung around on the wrecker's boom.  The size of the screen and wrecker are indicated when seen in comparison to Merry's six foot frame.  The roof over the screen was there to both darken the screen for better viewing and also to shield its light during screenings from the eyes of German flyers.  German airplanes would pass over the area at a regular time each night in an attempt to disturb their sleep.

Here is Merry sitting on a German pillbox at Verdon, one of many such structures built along the Siegfried Line during World War I.  The Siegfried Line was a heavily fortified defense built along the French border in Germany between 1933 and 1938 also called Westwall.   A pillbox was a German fortress, an enclosed gun emplacement built of concrete and steel designed to hug the ground to protect the soldiers inside until they were ready to fire on the enemy.  The top could be raised bya hydraulic system giving the gunners inside overhead continued protection while also opening up a line of fire.   Pillboxes were connected by tunnels and stocked with supplies allowing the Germans a firmly implanted line of defense during World War I.  They were not so effective in World War II when American troops planned offensive routes to go around them. This pillbox obviously had outlived its usefulness to the Germans.

          Merle mentioned in his story in Part Five that he was charged with collecting pieces of planes his anti-aircraft artillery unit shot down in order to document their hits during The Battle of The Bulge.  This unidentified G.I. displays a piece of one of the German planes downed by anti-aircraft artillery on their record-setting day.

This German Messerschmitt or ME 262 jet plane was one of many found parked off the edge of German highways, under trees.  They had been left where they were parked as the Germans retreated.  When the American infantry passed by they had lobbed hand grenades at them to be sure they remained immobilized.  German jet planes came out right at the end of the war.  Merle thinks had they come out earlier, and in large numbers, they might have made a difference in the result of the war.  They were able to pull away from American fighter planes easily, since they could go about one hundred miles an hour faster than any airplane the Allies had produced.  Only a relatively small number had been built in Germany before the war ended, but the concept was at once taken up by American engineers, introducing the United States to the jet age.

          This scene was a familiar sight to Merry who took this picture of trucks moving ever forward into Germany.  The sign on the last truck in the line speaks of being home by Christmas. 

Here is an action shot of Merry's Track, a truck-like vehicle that had  wheels on the front and a half-track on the rear.  The shot was taken on a German super autobahn (similar to our freeways built much later) near Bayreuth, Germany.  On the back of this picture, as well as many others in this photodocumentary, appears a stamp saying "Passed by Army Examiner."  All pictures had to be approved by Examiners before they could go out in the mail headed for home.

Merle's eyes saw this version of Nernberg (left) as the 390^th entered the town which had been bombed repeatedly by  Americans.  The same kind of military power was apparent in Munich (right) when Merry and the 390th arrived there in the fall of 1944. 

          Merry took this picture of these men in their jeep.  The signs on the bridge tell the story.  Finis meant the bridge had been completed by 3^rd Platoon of Company A, the 1303 Engineers.  "THANK GOD  THE LAST ONE" means that bridge was the very last one the unit had to build because the war was over.  The lower sign indicated two forty-ton vehicles or one seventy-ton vehicle could occupy that bridge at any given time.

          The bridges had been built, the war in Europe was finally over, and Merry awaited his turn among the hundreds of thousands of men who needed a ride home across the Atlantic.  While waiting, he was assigned to manage the Munich Theaters, a group of German theaters taken over for use by occupation forces. They used German projectors and hired German staff to run the theaters, including the lady by the jeep.  She served as Merry's assistant.  The German projectionist earned seventeen dollars per month.  The 3^rd Army Headquarters booked the films shown for Allied troops only.  Merry recalls seeing Germans who spotted advertising posters announcing a Sonja Henie film was playing.  The Germans knew who she was but also knew they weren't going to get to see the film at a Munich theater.  Note the designation on the jeep's bumper identifying it as one of General Patton's Third Division vehicles.

          When Merle Merry's turn to board a ship headed for home finally came, this sign was one of the last things he saw on his European tour.