World War II

The 23d Engineers in World War II

The following is excerpted from "Spearhead in the West" with minor editorial changes

The 23d Armored Engineer Battalion reactivated on 15 April 1941 at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana with the 3d Armored Division.  Cadres were made up of 28 officers and 729 enlisted men from the 17th Engineer Battalion of the 2d Armored Division.  Major Fremont S. Tandy was the first commanding officer.

The 23d trained at Camp Beauregard and Camp Polk, Louisiana; at the Desert Training Center, California; Camp Pickett, Virginia; and Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, before sailing for Europe early in September 1943.  Upon arrival in the United Kingdom, the battalion was stationed at Fonthill Bishop, Wiltshire, England, and took part in extensive maneuvers over Salisbury Plain, and along the coast.

Lt. Colonel Lawrence G. Foster led the 23d Armored Engineer Battalion through all five campaigns in the west.  He and  his troops went ashore on Omaha Beach on 23 June 1944.  The hedgerows of Normandy presented an immediate problem.  Some method had to be devised to get tanks through or over these formidable embankments.  After blasting passages with TNT at bloody Villiers Fossard and Haut Vents, Foster's men invented a double blade hedge cutter which was attached to the division's Sherman tanks by maintenance crews.  These proved to be successful.

 The battalion's first big combat bridging operation was carried out near Corbeil, France when 540 feet of treadway were thrown across the Seine River.  After the Seine, the engineers bridged the Marne, Aisne, and a number of other streams which paved the division's march into Belgium.  At Mons, they exchanged shovels for machineguns and declared a Roman holiday by mowing down disorganized enemy columns trying to break out of encirclement.  Two bridges at Namur, one across the Meuse, and one spanning the Sambre Canal, were built under hazardous circumstances.

Working under vicious mortar, artillery, and sniper fire, men of the 23d mastered the dragon's teeth of the Siegfried  Line, lifted thousands of mines, destroyed pillboxes, and cleared road blocks.  During the Ardennes fighting [Battle of the Bulge], units of the battalion aided in the successful defense of Lierneux, Cherain, and Sterpigny.  The normally hazardous work of lifting mines was made more difficult by severe cold and snow which prevailed during the period.

 Back in the Rheinland, then engineers constructed four bridges across the Erft River and Canal under observed enemy artillery, mortar, and small arms fire.  In the final great offensive, the bridge company also aided an engineer group in the bridging of the Rhein near Bonn.  The battalion's last operation, the bridging of Mulde River, was abandoned by army order.  The 23d came of out the line with reason to feel that its combat record added much to the proud history of the original "Road Builders of the AEF."

23rd Engineers Soldiers who Gave Their Lives in World War II