and now on to CONUS!
European Veterans Return Home
When Task Force 34 arrived in Norfolk, Virginia on November 25, 2000, the 50,000 American troops aboard faced an America that they did not recognize - one without cars, heat, electricity, invaded from north and south, struck by over five hundred nuclear weapons, with two governments and an insidious organization corrupting its shocked and desperate population. Contrary to what they had been told prior to embarking in Bremerhaven, all of the physically fit troops were to be retained in military service, with the mission of restoring order and rebuilding the U.S.
During the voyage across the Atlantic (which saw the reinforcement of Task Force 34 by the remnants of the
Enterprise and
Eisenhower battle groups from Northern Ireland and Portsmouth, England, respectively), the troops of U.S. Army Europe were reorganized into coherent units. Like the restructuring of Army and Marine Corps units in CENTCOM, small groups of soldiers were kept together as units of the appropriate size (fire teams, squads or platoons) and integrated into larger organizations. It was decided to keep the organizational structure of the three pre-war active-duty Army corps that fought in Europe (III Corps, V Corps and VII Corps) intact, and reconstruct the corps into units under the banner of pre-war active-duty units that fought in Europe. Each Corps was organized at a strength of 15,000 men, organized into three 4,000-man brigades (each of which took the identity of a pre-war division) and a 3,000-man Corps headquarters and ancillary units. III Corps, which returned to Norfolk, was composed of the 1st Cavalry Brigade, 2nd Armored Brigade and 4th Infantry Brigade. V Corps, returned to Mobile, Alabama, was composed of the 1st Infantry Brigade, 3rd Armored Brigade and 6th Infantry Brigade. VII Corps, returned to the south Texas coast, was composed of the 1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Brigade and 10th Mountain Infantry Brigade. (The identities of the 5th and 8th Infantry Divisions were not used, as CINCEUR considered those units still to be in action in Europe and as a tribute to those American soldiers still fighting behind Warsaw Pact lines in Poland and the USSR.) Each corps also had an assigned civil affairs brigade and a Naval Construction (SeeBee) regiment to perform recovery and reconstruction tasks.
While units were nominally armored or infantry, in practice they were light infantry. All heavy weapons, equipment and vehicles had been left in Germany. Each brigade in III Corps and V Corps was organized into two light infantry, one combat engineer, one military police and one support battalion. The light infantry battalions received the few 120mm mortars and most of the other heavy weapons that were available. The combat engineer battalions were equipped with civilian construction equipment and support equipment - compressors, dump trucks and the like, given the dearth of combat-capable heavy equipment. The MP battalions were the main motorized combat force, using a variety of light wheeled vehicles (the odd HMMWV, requisitioned civilian pickup trucks converted to mount machineguns) and armored cars (mostly former bank armored cars but also including a hodgepodge of former police vehicles, Department of Energy armored cars and vehicles in the ports that were awaiting embarkation for the war zones). The support battalion provided transportation (using school buses, delivery trucks and horse-drawn wagons), repair services for the brigade's equipment, warehousing, communications, procurement and medical support to other units of the brigade.
The civil affairs brigades were tasked to restore civilian government administration and law and order to the areas under Milgov control. The civil affairs brigade commanders served as the corps commanders' reconstruction coordinators, and were unique in the Milgov military structure since they were civilians, appointed by the JCS to manage the transition from martial law to a less severe national emergency (and eventually to normal peacetime) status. The commanders, commonly referred to as "Reconstruction Tsars", were usually senior pre-war civil servants, from agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, or Departments of Energy, Transportation, Labor or Housing and Urban Development. As the reconstruction effort expanded, a Reconstruction Tsar for each state was appointed by Milgov to coordinate Milgov's efforts in support of the restored state and local governments. The first step in the civil affairs brigades' efforts were to locate pre-TDM government employees, whether local, state or federal, and get them working in some aspect of the reconstruction effort related to their pre-TDM occupation. For example, Social Security benefits administrators established and maintained a registration system for refugees and administered ration allocations, while law enforcement officers and postal workers were placed to work in their local areas. Each Civil Affairs Brigade had two MP companies assigned - one to provide security for Milgov facilities and one engaged solely in providing training to re-formed local law enforcement agencies or expanding the remnants of pre-war agencies.
Each corps had a Naval Construction (SeeBee) Regiment assigned to it to perform reconstruction tasks - the 8th Regiment to III Corps, the 7th Regiment to V Corps and the 25th Regiment to VII Corps. These regiments were unique in that their organizations were brought back at their full wartime strength by incorporation of surplus naval personnel, refugees fit for military duty with prior construction experience, and new recruits fresh from naval initial training at the small recruit induction center at Cape May, New Jersey. The SeeBee regiments also absorbed construction engineer personnel from other branches of service, and civilians were often drafted (although not at gunpoint) to provide labor for reconstruction tasks. A novel two-year draft was also instituted in the SeeBee regiments, where a draftee would serve most of his or her term working in a single area (often a single project) and, upon discharge, remain in the area or at the facility as the permanent, civilian operations or maintenance staff. Heavy equipment in CONUS was obtained from state and local governments (highway, parks and public works departments) and requisitioned from civilian construction companies, and the regiments received priority allocations of fuel. The SeeBee regiments' efforts were directed at restoration of services and facilities of strategic, national importance - each combat brigade's combat engineer battalion was tasked to provide the engineer support needed to sustain that unit - so the SeeBees worked on projects such as restoring housing for refugees near agricultural or industrial areas (moving refugees out of "temporary" camps that had become all too permanent), restoring port facilities to allow waterborne trade between Milgov controlled areas and receive ships arriving from CENTCOM, refurbishing water treatment facilities and bringing oil refineries, power plants and steel mills back online. During the years of the reconstruction effort, the SeeBees of the 21st Century proved just as heroic, capable and hard-working as their grandfathers in the Second World War.