Horsin' around
Don Coldsmith, Syndicated Columnist
Monday, July 21, 2008
I was in the pasture feeding cattle not long ago when a red pickup turned in off the road. The driver didn’t get out, just sat and waited until I finished what I was doing. I drove the tractor out and shut the gate and then he approached and spoke to me.
I didn’t know him, but after he verified who I was, he reached in his pocket and pulled out an embroidered circular patch of orange cloth. “Ever see anything like that?” he asked.
I certainly had. It was the insignia I’d worn in World War II, a tank in the jaws of a black panther — Tank Destroyers. We talked a little while. He’d been in the 601st Tank Destroyers in Europe, while mine was the 637th, in the Pacific. Neither of us knew how many Tank Destroyer Battalions there were, but he thought his was the first. It probably was, with the 601 designation.
I’ve heard from a lot of World War II veterans since I wrote the “Fifty Years Ago” columns. It’s still happening, as it did with my Tank Destroyer neighbor. One of the interesting letters I received was about mules. This man had been a tanker in Italy and had been interested in my columns about the mule pack artillery. He’d seen pack mules used extensively there.
He had questions about the mules he’d seen hauling supplies in Italy. He didn’t mention gun mules carrying mountain howitzers. His impression, especially in the muddy winter of 1944-45 was that “they were manned mostly by Italian military personnel, who had become our allies.”
He wasn’t sure what the animals should be called, he said. “We called them mules, but they were smaller than our domestic mules. They resembled a burro but were considerably larger.”
I’ve heard similar stories from other men who fought in Italy. My guess is that the ones he saw were mostly Italian mules, used by Italian troops and strictly for packing supplies.
We did have pack artillery units in Italy. Our 10th Mountain Division had mountain howitzers like the ones on which I trained. The gun was broken down into nine parts, packed on six mules. The wheels and breech mechanism were packed on one mule, the barrel or “tube” on another, and so on. Each Phillips pack saddle had special fittings to clamp onto that particular piece of equipment, except for the “cargadore” platoon, which did carry supplies for the gun battery. Mules and men were highly specialized. Some of the men I trained with were killed in the Po Valley in that Italian campaign.
The impression that the animals my reader described were “smaller” than a domestic mule but “considerably larger” than a burro is probably right, whether they were American or Italian. At that time, a lot of farming in the United States was done with horses and mules. A mule, of course, is a hybrid animal. Its mother is a horse and its father, a donkey. We were used to seeing big, heavy draft mules, out of Clydesdale, Belgian or Percheron draft mares. A pack mule should be somewhat smaller.
Our gun mules were especially selected for the part of the howitzer they’d carry. The mule packing the “tube,” for instance, had a load that was high and heavy. His center of gravity was high and the balance poor. This had to be a stocky animal with legs set wide apart. The wheel and breech mule, by contrast, had a wide load — a wheel hub sticking out on each side, but a low center of gravity. It could be a tall, rangy animal. These mules were also highly trained to run to position on command. I rather doubt that even in a combat situation they’d be used to pack supplies. There would be no way to transport the howitzer if even one of those specialist mules became a casualty.
That, of course, was one of the major disadvantages of the pack artillery.
See you down the road.
wanderer (anonymous) says...
Interesting stuff, Don. I remember reading once about the large number of mule packers used in World War II. The author commented that the Army would have gladly used more, but it couldn't find enough -- and four years of war (for the U.S.) wasn't enough time to train them. Makes you think.
July 23, 2008 at 12:24 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )