Smoke Screen Begins To Form on the Moselle River

Smoke Screen Begins To Form on the Moselle River 

Within an hour Colonel Cottingham and Lt. Frank W. Young, of the 84th Company, moved four generators down to the side of an abandoned railroad embankment (Position 2 on the map). Smoke pots helped conceal the generators as they began to build up a screen, 

The engineers rated the value of smoke at Arnaville less highly than did the participating chemical officers. After the war. Colonel Walker expressed the view that enemy fire on the crossing site was limited more by a shortage of ammunition than by American smoke. Undoubtedly the enemy did suffer from a limited supply of ammunition and could not make lavish use of shells for missions of harassment and interdiction. But his interest in lucrative targets of opportunity, as evidenced by this experience on 10 and ii September, was enough to convince the 5 th Division that a smoke screen should be maintained. 

The operation at Arnaville demonstrated for the first time in the European theater that smoke generators could give effective support to an opposed river crossing. The experience also served notice that certain improvements were desirable. 

Even before the operation began it was evident that a smoke company had enough organic vehicles for transporting fog oil and supplies from company dumps to forward positions, but too few 2 2-ton trucks to haul oil from the army supply point. The 5 th Division solved the problem of fetching oil from the army supply by augmenting the five company trucks with additional vehicles. This matter of limited organic transportation and its effect on resupply remained a constant 

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