Motorization at Fort Eustis
Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry
The estate of the late John Sayen has graciously given The Tactical Notebook permission to serialize his study of the organizational evolution of American infantry battalions. You can find other posts in this (very long) series by means of the guides located at the end of this article:
In the 1920s, motor vehicle technology advanced to the point where the cross-country mobility of cars and trucks had greatly improved. In response to this development, in 1929, the War Department authorized an experiment in which the 34th Infantry Regiment, then located at Fort Eustis, Virginia, replaced all of its animal transport with motor vehicles of various kinds.
For the sake of this experiment, the 34th Infantry received:
twenty-three cross-country cars
nine cross-country cars with light cargo bodies
nineteen 1.5-ton 4x4 trucks
fifteen 4x2 3/4-ton trucks
fourteen 6x4 3/4-ton trucks
five 3.5-ton Holt tractors (each pulling two 3/4-ton trailers)
one 750-gallon fuel truck
eight motorcycles with sidecars
five trailer-mounted field kitchens
Of these vehicles, only the field kitchens, motorcycles and fuel truck were of types that had been formally adopted by the Army. The rest were procured directly from the civilian market. (In some cases, the commercial-pattern vehicles were purchased “off the shelf.” In others, the manufacturers modified stock vehicles prior to handing them over to the Army.)
Source: “Notes from the Chief of Infantry: Motorized Infantry Regiment” Infantry Journal (April 1929) pages 413-414
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