Hi 540th Engineers,

In WW II the Army deployed overseas maybe 300 tiny units (1 officer and 28 enlisted men) called Engineer Fire Fighting Platoons (EFFPs), the Army's overseas fire departments. The first ten, the 1201st through the 1210th were activated in August 1942 and the frst four (1201, 1202, 1204 & 1205) were deployed (to North Africa - Casablanca, Rabat and Oran) in early April 1943. In May came 1203, 1206, 1207 and 1208 - Algiers and possibly Bizerte and Tunis. Since Army historians do not create unit histories for units smaller than Battalion size these 300 Platoons are lost in the war's records.

Those of you who served in Sicily may have come across the 1206th and the 1208th. And those of you makng the Anzio beachead may have met the 1206th. We of the 1204th may have met some of you on the beaches of Southern France on 15 August 1944. Did any of your units build the railroad bridge (a Bailey triple/triple) over the Durance River at Myraguesse?

This story is let me ask "did you ever run across any of these EFFPs"? If you did how about contacting me at r11@maui.net to tell me about your meetings.

Thank you and Aloha,

Jim Davis, Member and Historian

1204th Army Engineer Fire Fighting Platoon

World War II

Jim; I as a member of the 34th Divn. Sorry to say, I never heard of a

Fire Fighting Unit where we were at. At Salerno or Anzio the only fire

we didn't see just heard, going overhead. Maybe if there is a way

thatyou could contact someone from the FAMOUS 100th Bn. , ( they

were from ALOHA land), they might be able to help. Rocky

Welcome aboard! I remember reading about army firefighting in this post not too long ago. I'm glad that folks such as yourself are keeping the memory of groups like this alive that otherwise would have succumbed to the black hole of time.

Welcome Mr. Davis! Glad to see you here. I'm in Fayetteville, West Virginia.

Brooke

Aloha Jim:

Glad to see you were finally able to post on the forum. Have enjoyed our email correspondence over the last few weeks. A warm welcome to you. It's great to have yet another WWII vet right here. What an honor.

Many hugs,

M

Jim:

Saw you had two intro posts in this section, so I combined them for ya!

Welcome aboard! I remember reading about army firefighting in this post not too long ago. I'm glad that folks such as yourself are keeping the memory of groups like this alive that otherwise would have succumbed to the black hole of time.

Captain Todd:

Thanks for posting that for Jim. Great reply. For the sake of newbies, I have pasted the link to the other post right here. Some people may miss the underlined link, especially newbies.

Jim: Here's the link you can click on to see the other post from the firefighter vet here on our site.

http://208.109.212.45/forum/index.php?show...amp;#entry19910

M's note 6-7-08: Jim and Leroy (from above link) already know each other...

Hi Rocky,

If not on Anzio's D-Day, the day after the 1206th EFFP now known as the 1206th Engineer Composite Platoon - Fire Administration/Fire Control went ashore. Reportedly on the first night or two on the beach the Platoon took a number of casualties including several deaths. The 1206th ended its war with participation in the North Appenines and Po Valley Campaigns.

To all of you who answered my first post, Mahalo (Hawaiian for thank you). The EFFPs are not the only units of WW II whose story the Army has not told. There are scores if not hundreds of small units that are not known. And the Army's Provisional units even the Army can't speak of. They are lost forever.

From Maui, Hawaii,

Aloha,

Jim

Thought I would add, Jim already knows Leroy (re the link to the other firefighter). They met a while back before I met either one of them.

Hi all,

My father, William Henry Mackey, Jr. (deceased) was a member of the 1222nd Engineer Fire Fighting Platoon originally based at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. I am trying to find any information related to this platoon, but between the lack of historians noting these small platoons as Jim noted and the personnel records fire in 1973 that destroyed many military records including my Father’s, I haven’t been able to find much.

I've also had some trouble just figuring out where they fit in the Order of Battle. I know my Dad was stationed in Wrangaton, Devon, England prior to D-DAY and then spent the rest of the war from D-Day +3 on, in France (mainly from all of the letters he received from friends he made there), but beyond that, have very little to go on.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. My wife and I are taking our first trip to France this fall and will be visiting Paris and Normandy. I am hoping to visit at least some of the places my Dad did 69 years ago.

Sincerely,

-Patrice Mackey

Hi Pat, welcome to the forum.

Records for the Firefighting Platoons are mostly non existant, especialy for those units that were in Northern France. Most often the platoons would be under command of the Engineer Section of one of the Service Force Base Sections. Sometimes a numbered platoon will be found in a troop list of a Base Section if the list is included in the availible records. In thousands of pages of a Base Section histories, there will just be a mention like '1 section sent to depot' or '1 platoon assigned to port area' with no mention of the unit number. So it`s very hard to even find where a unit was.

But there may be another way to find where your dad was. In your post you mention letters your dad recieved. Do you have any letters he sent or recieved when he was in France? If you do, look for APO numbers in the addresses or on envelopes. We might be able to find where that Army Post Office was located.

The attached page is the ENTIRE firefighting plan in the Engineer Plan for Operation Neptune, the Normandy Invasion. It shows you the typical mentions of the FF Platoons.

Neptune Fire Fighting Plan0001.pdf

6 sections, probably about 40 men for the whole invasion force.

Patrice:

Need to put you in touch with Jim Davis. When you are logged in, simply click on his username and you can send him a private message. Last I knew, he was offline for a few weeks, but give him a shout.

Larry,

Thanks for your message. I will see if I can find any letters with an APO. Most of the letters I have are from after he returned, sent from people he met in Devon in England and near Paris.

Larry,

I was able to find ONE letter sent to my Dad from my Grandmother while he was in Europe. It's from 12-27-1945 and the APO listed is 887. Not sure if that gives enough info, but I am off to search the internet to see what I can find.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

-Patrice