"Well, men, the 137th is no more." These were the words spoken by our commander, Col. Powell, after he had called us all together on the drill field on the afternoon of 16 November 1944 at Camp Haan, California. With this news of the 137th also came the breaking up of other antiaircraft units at Haan. As Captain Ronayne put it later, the army had overexpanded its specialized organizations. American production and skill in the midst of a great world war had gained air superiority in all theaters, and because of this alone our unit was to be broken up.

I can well remember my feelings at that time, and from the expressions on the faces around me my thoughts were in harmony with everyone's. Where do we go from here? Were we to be sent out as individuals or transferred as a unit to some other branch of the service? Will it be the Infantry, Field Artillery, Combat Engineers, or MP's?

Remember the rumors that followed? They were a dime a dozen, and every time we turned around a bigger and better one turned up. The Happy-dale Supply Room and Range Section Country Club Manufactured them in mass production style day and night. How the Army loves rumors!

The 137th was activated at Camp Edwards in June 1943, but really did not get under way until September. In the following pages we shall try to recall a few of the many experiences, the mock battles, the trials and errors that we "enjoyed" during our tour from coast to coast as a AA unit in training.

WD AGO form 1 is the morning report. A morning report is made up daily by every battery and company in the army, and this report is the basic record of every unit, eventually winding up in the permanent files of the Adjutant General in Washington. "A" Battery's morning reports start with 10 June 1943 and show a continuous record of all the changes which have affected men in the battery: men transferred in and out, men promoted and reduced, men from duty to furlough and from furlough to duty, and, rarely, men from duty to AWOL, followed almost invariably by "AWOL to apprehended and conf."

Being an official record, the morning report, like other official records, omits may events and slides over others with a formal remark. Our field problems, for example, were all covered by remarks like "left Westhampton Beach NY by mtr convoy. Arr Easthampton bivouac area 0050," followed by some similar wisecrack on our return to camp. The bloody weeks of the Reign of Terror, early in MTP, were graphically described in the morning reports as "usual organizational duties, Cp Edwards, Mass." With all its faults, however, the morning report is still helpful in jogging the memory. Let's jog back to activation day when the mimeograph in battalion headquarters first started to roll.

Battery "A" started with a battery commander, Captain Kendall, two other officers, Lts Carbarry and Riehemann, and a cadre of twenty men fresh from the swamps of Camp Davis. None of the original officers are here now: Captain Kendall left the battery on 7 December 1943 and Lt Riehemann got the jump on the rest of us by going to the Infantry in February. Of the enlisted cadre five still remain: the first sergeant, Cpl Saalfeld, and Sgts (then Pfc's)Dec, Rasmussen, and Waldron. Some of the others moved out, like S Sgt Moore, first in a long chain of supply sergeants. Others went out with promotions, like M Sgt Burtnett. Two others went down and out, like ex-Sgt Duke.

The cadre-training period, described elsewhere in the chronicle, lasted until the battery was swelled to T/O strength by the arrival of fillers. They came in three big batches, the first one bringing eight men to the battery about 30 July. Then came two more shipments near the end of August. Men have come and gone since that time (270 to be exact), but of the men assigned to Battery "A" at the beginning of September 1943, 72 were still present for duty this November.

Among our losses during over a year of training were some men who will not be forgotten. Morris Watkins was one; he came in as a machine gun sergeant and later took over the mess hall before a kidney trouble, developed on the rainy sands of Wellfleet, put him out of action. Peter Cassino was another; he was discharged for the severe burns suffered when the tent burned down during the Great December Field Problems. Aaron Drucker and Anthony Zimmardi were two more losses from the gun crews. "Yo-Yo" Verano, born too soon on the Rock of Gibraltar, held out almost to the end. And no account of the battery's characters would be complete without mention of "Leave-it-to-Mortie" Brown, who terrorized the height finder crews and supply room with equal ease during his stormy career.

The morning report records all the details of the Officer Replacement Pool which we seemed to be operating for the first year of activation. After Captain Kendall left, the battery was under Lt Luke W. Corbett, formerly battalion adjutant. Then came Captain William Phillips, the man who "interviewed" Sgt Waldron for fifteen minutes during which neither of them spoke a word. The longest tenure in office, however, belongs to the present incumbent, Captain Ronayne, who took over on 21 March 1944 and has had the situation well in hand ever since.

To fill the three other T/O positions for officers, the battery has been cursed with enough first and second lieutenants to win a dozen wars with the fountain pens Williams always sings about. There have been twenty-nine in all, of whom the most notorious, aside from the present crew, have been Lts Foster, Collins, Dobschulz, Jordan, Riehemann, Winter and "This-is-it-men" Moore.

Field problems and firings are two subjects covered very briefly in the morning reports, as we saw from a remark quoted earlier. But the dates of these excursions may be of interest:

18 October-2 November 1943: First Wellfleet firing (also the battery's first bivouac).

19 November 1943: First field problem (the one-night stand).

29 November-5 December 1943: Second firing at Wellfleet.

9-22 December (with a short break before the 18th): The Great December Field Problems, after which our gun pits were left strewn all over the Cape.

27 February-5 March 1944: Wellfleet Firing.

24-27 March: AGF Field Problem 1 (The Albany-Buffany Line).

31 March-1 April: Last Wellfleet firing (AGF test).

24-25 April: The Ten-Mile Hike & Bivouac (Wet).

25-27 May: First Suffolk Field Problem.

5-8 June: Second Suffolk field problem (the paratroops routed).

4 July: Topsail firing for the AAF

21-22 July: First North Carolina field problem (AFG No. 2).

7-8 August: Second North Carolina field problem.

17-18 October: Last bivouac (administrative, á la Abercrombie & Fitch).

Also included are those long changes of station, mostly made by horse-drawn trains:

15 May 1944: From Camp Edwards, Mass., to Suffolk Army Air Field, West-hampton Beach, LI, NY (on the Sunrise Highway), by motor convoy.

16-18 June: To Camp Davis, NC, by rail. The 100 days of changes begin.

26 September-1 October: To Camp Haan, California, by rail. (The last of the AA camps the battalion will police).

The morning reports leave off at this point. They will continue to go in daily, reporting officers and men leaving, until at some future date there will be only one man left. The final entry will probably read:

Drieslein RW 36 008 565 1st Sgt

Fr dy to AWOL