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Title (Dublin Core)
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Army Trained in Trucks "Preventive Maintenance"
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Article Title and/or Image Caption (Dublin Core)
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Title: The General Drives a Truck
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extracted text (Extract Text)
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THE Army is motor minded. At all its
sence motor schools it is preaching |
a new military gospel. It is called “Pre- |
ventive Maintenance,” and its tenets em- |
body an entirely new attitude toward the
motor transport which plays such a vital |
part in modern warfare. |
At the Holabird Quartermaster Motor |
Base near Baltimore the visitor, if he is |
fortunate enough to get in, is apt to see a |
sergeant or perhaps a lieutenant showing a
dignified two-star general the latest wrinkle |
in testing a truck's efficiency. And on the |
roads near the base the civilian motorist,
pulling over to let an Army convoy pass,
frequently finds to his surprise that the |
trucks, from quarter-tonners to six-tonners, |
are being driven by generals, colonels, and |
majors. These high-ranking chauffeurs are
pupils, taking the Army's “Preventive
Maintenance Course for General and Field
Officers.” They are acquiring technical
knowledge which in the old days
was considered unnecessary for
military higher-ups. More im-
portant, they are being in-
doctrinated in right methods of
using and caring for motor
transport, with emphasis on how
to prevent trouble rather than
on how to make repairs. From
Holabird they will go into the
field to spread the doctrine and impose the
new standards throughout the Army.
Preventive Maintenance stems from the
realization that the internal-combustion en-
gine has revolutionized ground warfare (in
addition to making possible war in the air).
The weapons and men in this war are trans-
ported by trucks; tanks and planes are
serviced by them. A modern army com-
mander must realize that the wheeled ve-
hicle is a fundamental weapon of war in
its own right.
Or, to state the matter in its simplest
terms, the Army had to teach itself that a
good truck, just as truly as a good cavalry
horse, will give better service if it is gentled
along and pampered a bit with care and at-
tention.
Now, Americans always have taken it for
granted that this country made the most and
best automobiles, and grew the most and
best drivers. But it may be that the nationalpastime of driving carefully-built passenger
cars over carefully built superhighways
made us a shade too complacent over the
“foolproof” reliability of our machines. An
Army truck, hauling the loads it has to haul,
getting over the terrain it must get over,
can't be made that way. Designer and
builder can give it a lot, but the foolproof-
ing has to be built, not into the driver's seat,
but into the seat of the driver's pants.
That's where Preventive Maintenance
comes in. The basic idea is to get the best
equipment and the best men to handle it,
and train them to get the best out of it. As
a formal program at Holabird, however,
they break the plan down into five phases:
1. The selection, by physical and psycho-
logical tests, of men best fitted for the tasks
of heavy driving.
2. Thorough driver training, with safety,
efficiency, and economy of operation as the
major goals.
3. A carefully worked out program of
daily care, inspection, and servicing of equip-
ment.
4. Systematic organization of technical
repair services from the front-line zone back
/ to the base.
5. Creation of a widespread engineering
and testing setup to work with the factories
in designing and producing needed equip-
ment, and to press for the twin goals of
simplification and standardization of that |
equipment. |
This kind of motor-minded planning got a
tremendous boost last year when the Army
held its greatest peacetime maneuvers, and |
a lot of officers and men learned—the hard
way—that a truck that won't run is no more
a military asset than a gun that won't shoot. |
Worse than that, it may keep out of action
a gun that would shoot if it had the chance.
The rock-bottom fact about war today is
that the vehicles, whatever they may be, |
have got to get through. The course of bat-
tle moves with relentless speed, and a case |
of motor failure can be every bit as valuable |
to the enemy as a direct bomb hit.
Col. H. J. Lawes, Commandant of the
Q.M. Motor Transport School at Holabird,
summed it up this way: |
“You aren't likely to hear any general
crying ‘My kingdom for a horse!’ in this
war—but you might hear one muttering. ‘A |
fuel-pump bowl! My stars for an eight-cent
fuel-pump bowl!"
Some such vital gadget is the modern
equivalent of the famous horseshoe nail, for
want of which the shoe, horse, rider, mes-
sage, and battle were lost. And that item
is an excellent example of how the Holabird |
program works. The fuel-
pump bowl is built to trap sed- nb |
iment in the gasoline supply;
the old type was of glass, perfectly service-
able, but capable of being broken by a freak
hit from a bouncing pebble. Now a metal
bowl is replacing it. The new type is un-
breakable, and of course it's opaque, too,
so it must be opened up, inspected, and
cleaned at regular intervals. That is the
essence of Preventive Maintenance—get a
safer, sturdier part; standardize it; set up
a fixed procedure for taking care of it.
The “fiddlestick” is another Holabird in-
novation. It's really a swagger stick for
motor-minded officers, a handsome article
of haberdashery—Ilong, slender, cased in
pigskin and very similar to any other swank
riding crop or officer's swagger stick. On
close inspection, however, it turns out to be
a precision tire gauge with a double head
and long barrel so it can be used to measure
the pressure of the inner tire on heavy,
double-wheeled trucks.
The gauge serves a double purpose. It is |
a constant reminder to the officer himself of
the importance of such a basic thing as tire-
pressure inspection, and it is mightily im-
pressive to the men under his command as |
a lesson in high standards of vehicle mainte- |
nance.
More complex Holabird mechanical de-
velopments include a special oil-bath air
cleaner, which has greatly improved motor |
performance under bad dust and sand condi-
tions; a portable high-speed battery charg-
er; a portable compressed-air unit; and
beautifully compact ignition, battery, and
circuit testers. |
Of all the vital and vulnerable spots on a
modern car, perhaps the battery is the most
important. And military service is particu-
larly tough, with its repeated stops and
starts, and its relatively short road runs
which give the generator little chance to re- |
build the charge. Reports from the Russian
front indicate that one of the prime causes |
of the German reverses last winter was |
breakdown of motor transport, and that
battery failure was very common. Tests |
have shown that a run-down battery may |
freeze at 20 degrees above zero while a
similar battery, fully charged, can with- |
stand cold as great as 85 degrees below zero.
In any case, it is regarded as routine now |
that when any sizable U.S. troop unit is |
about to go into action, all its motorized |
equipment must be battery-tested, both for |
charge and probable remaining life, and un-
satisfactory batteries must either be |
charged or replaced by new ones. Portable
testing and charging units have been de- |
veloped for field use, and the pride of the |
collection is the little hot-shot 100-ampere
charger which can roll along the line, slap-
ping the charge into each weak-sister bat-
tery in five minutes or less. A thermostatic
control prevents overcharging.
Equally ingenious is the portable air
pump, a small gas engine and air compres-
sor, set in a tubular steel frame and made
to be trundled along the truck line, wheel-
barrow fashion. You can look it over for
the air tank, but you won't find any; the
tubular frame itself serves as the air reser-
voir.
The ignition and circuit testers illustrate
the campaign for simplified and standard-
ized equipment. Ultimately the Army plans
to have completely standard repair outfits,
so that any trained soldier, working with
any repair group, will know N
that the low-voltage circuit
tester, for example, is to be found in the
lower left drawer of Cabinet X in Truck 3.
The tester will be standard throughout the
Army, and the inside of the case lid will
carry basic instructions and a wiring dia-
gram, permanently etched in metal. |
Months ago, when the whole Preventive
Maintenance program was in the early
stage of development, officers in charge of |
the plan ran a quiet survey of their own,
asking a number of field officers, “What do
you need to make your motorized equipment |
work better?” Almost invariably the an-
swer came back, “More spare parts!” It
was plausible, but not entirely practical. |
One typical Army car, the 21%-ton truck,
has exactly 2,997 parts, of which about 1,900 |
are necessary for the operation of the ve-
hicle. The Army has some 80 makes and
models of cars, and among them they have |
around 2,400,000 parts—quite a bundle for |
any repair crew. |
The motor-vehicle officers tackled the
problem from a different angle, suggesting |
a joint inspection of the cars in question.
More often than not the search turned up
dirty air cleaners, clogged oil filters, low oil
level, batteries run dry, tires too soft or too
hard, wheels out of alignment, or a score of
other evidences of sloppy maintenance and
lightweight inspection which went a long
way toward accounting for that voracious
appetite for spare parts.
The real drive for indoctrination of offi-
cers and men in Preventive Maintenance
theory dates from that time. It was pushed
vigorously by Army Motors, a sprightly
publication at the Holabird Base, and was
taken up by other Army papers, among
them the Infantry Journal.
Driver selection and training, in particu-
lar, has been stressed from the beginning.
It is a surprising fact that a very large ma-
jority of the young men coming into the
Army have never driven a car, and many of
those assigned to motor transport work
must be taught the fundamentals of driving
before they can tackle the advanced course.
A model course in advanced driving tech-
niques developed at Holabird includes con-
voy and cross-country driving and operation
of motor vehicles under blackout conditions.
Selection of the likeliest candidates for
this training is a special problem in itself.
Studies have been undertaken to obtain a
series of carefully graded physical and
psychological examinations which could re-
flect a prospective Army driver's fitness for
the job. These tests were prepared by the
outstanding personnel technicians in this
field. The results of this group study are
being co-ordinated and applied by Dr. Leon
Brody, formerly of New York University's
safety center.
Eyesight, of course, is a very important
factor for any driver. But in addition to the
normal tests for sharpness of vision, it has
been found advisable to run
special tests to weed out men TE
who see well straight ahead
but suffer from “tunnel vision"—inability
to see out of the side of the eye. “Night
blindness,” another eye defect, is known to
be associated with Vitamin A deficiency;
men who have trouble in blackout driving
are fed vitamin concentrate, and the weak-
ness sometimes clears up in as little as 48
hours.
Blood pressure has been found to have
considerable influence on a driver's
physical reactions. Records gathered
in the New York area showed that
of accident “repeaters” who were
given physical examinations, 48 per-
cent had low blood pressure. The
Army now sets an allowable range of 105
to 145 for men between 18 and 35 years old.
Laboratory equipment for driver examin-
ation may include a distance-orientation de-
vice, in which the man is required to bring
two pointers into line equally distant from
his sighting point, and a reaction-time indi-
cator, in which he must shift his foot from
a simulated accelerator pedal to the cor-
responding brake pedal when a light signal
flashes. Failure to react is rated an error;
a study of several thousand “good” drivers
disclosed six tenths of a second to be the
average reaction time on this test. -
Finally, a man’s mental attitudes are im-
portant. In general it appears unwise to
select either a man of very high or very low
mentality. The slow thinker won't meet
new situations or problems with enough
speed and judgment, while the intellectual
is apt to day-
dream about personal affairs or world prob-
lems, letting his attention wander.
These principles for the selection of driv-
ers are among the subjects studied in the
two-weeks officers’ course at Holabird, but
by far the greatest part of the time is spent
on the physical maintenance of vehicles and
equipment, and 54 hours of work is put in
on first-echelon maintenance alone. The
echelons, in this usage, are the four divisions
into which Army motor care and repairs are
organized. They range from first echelon,
the maintenance and minor adjustments the
driver can provide for his own car, back to
fourth echelon, the complete repair and
overhaul service available at a fully
equipped base shop.
In many ways, first echelon is the most
important, because it is the most truly “pre-
ventive” maintenance. The procedure for
drivers is worked out in full detail, with
schedules of required examinations and
check-ups before, during, and after opera-
tion of the vehicle, as well as more elaborate
adjustments and checks at weekly and
monthly intervals. Just to give an idea, the
“Before Operation” routine starts with an
examination of the car in general for leaks
of any kind, and ends with the completion
of the engines warm-up period. In between
coe 14 other check-ups—inside, outside,
and under the car. The “After Operation”
schedule includes 45 checks “to be sure ve-
hicle is ready to operate again at a mo-
‘ment’s notice.”
Apparently some drivers always will cut
a corner here or there to save themselves a
little trouble—and some of them even man-
age to survive the practice. But that isn't
going to be too easy for Army drivers, and
it seems reasonably certain that several
hundred thousands of Americans eventually
will return to private life with the solid les
sons of Preventive Maintenance thoroughly
drilled into them. And that should have a
noticeable effect on the automotive customs
and habits of the nation.
The postwar period may even bring the
country a standard, unified set of driving
arm signals, based on the Army signals il-
lustrated on Page 53.
“Clear signals are essential to safety,” an
Army slogan points out. “Make your sig-
nals clear and definite . . . . no driver is a
mind reader. Give them in ample time . . . .
and make them last long enough.”
‘That sounds like good sense and personal
“preventive maintenance” for peacetime as
well as for war.
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Language (Dublin Core)
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eng
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Date Issued (Dublin Core)
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1942-08
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pages (Bibliographic Ontology)
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46-53, 202
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Rights (Dublin Core)
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Public Domain (Google Digitized)
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Archived by (Dublin Core)
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Roberto Meneghetti
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Marco Bortolami (editor)
Popular Science Monthly, v. 141, n. 2, 1942
