The 75th Troop Carrier Squadron amassed a reputable combat record during the war, with campaign credit for Normandy (which included a Distinguished Unit Citation for the entire 435th Troop Carrier Group), Rome-Arno, Northern France, Southern France, and Germany.  For many of these airmen, days were spent ferrying troops and supplies and on the uncommon occasion, dropping paratroopers through flak-riddled skies at night or towing gliders into enemy infested drop zones.

But not all of those men assigned to the squadron were aircrew.  It took a significant set of specialist types to keep the squadrons running and organized and for those like Virgel Brinker, a spectacled soldier who electroplated galvanized kitchenware in civilian life, that meant seated at a typewriter completing morning reports or striking orders in duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate.


<h1>CARRIERS & GLIDERS</h1>

For his first weeks in England, the Squadron trained constantly with paratroops of the 101st Airborne Division and British 6th Airborne, which required considerable adaptation by both sides given their differences – from jumping out of the side down with lack of reserve chutes to lining interior fuselages with felt to accommodate for the British hobnail boots.

As spring approached, the squadrons and groups of IX Troop Carrier Command became increasingly restricted in activities and soon the combat crews were secluded in a barbed wire enclosure as everyone speculated about the imminent invasion.  At 1800 hours on June 3rd, all members of the squadron not confined to this site painted the invasion aircraft and gliders with black and white stripes (for naval recognition) around the fuselage and wings.  This was done in less than three hours and quickly covered with camouflage netting.

Overlord was postponed from the 4th to the 6th on account of weather, and on that date the squadron departed carrying the 501st Parachute Infantry and supplies and, later that evening, the 320th Glider Field Artillery.  The next morning – after these two considerable missions over hostile coast – the crews found their planes to be perforated by many more bullet holes than had been seen the previous night and in many cases, engines that were thought to be operational had been shot up.

In the middle of July, the Group moved from England to Gibraltar and immediately set out touring the town and swimming in the brilliant Mediterranean.  Passengers not on combat crew, like Brinker, were without bunks on arrival to the Rock and so sightseeing remained the main attraction until they were better settled.  Their stay was brief (and of course it was the combat crews who saw any action at all) and within a month, Virgel was back in England again.

In the closing days of the war and after, when so many troops were rotated home on account of accumulation of points, soldiers transferred to Air Force units and airmen found themselves posted to infantry roles – anything to effectively get men home and fill the gaps they left.  Brinker transferred from his troop carrier squadron to L Company, 424th Infantry Regiment on May 7th.  The war in Europe ended the next day and soon the ‘company was not at all like it was when it went overseas.’  Having been tasked with guarding 14,000 prisoners in Lanvenlonsheim, they received an influx of five hundred troops to ease the balance.

After a short period of training in screening and containing the German prisoners, the regiment went to work building the enclosure and dealing with their inmates, which grew progressively more difficult as even more arrived.  Soon they were watching over 100,000 men, many of whom ‘were displaced persons in the German army and about a thousand German female “camp followers.”’  Even in the days after victory there were still casualties as many prisoners who tried to escape were shot.

Eventually, the encampment consisted of twenty-three cages with a lighting system surrounding the perimeter of six miles.  The troops suspected it was the largest enclosure in Germany at the time.  

Unlike many soldiers whose final months overseas were marked by inactivity and anticlimax, Brinker’s last period in Europe was demanding and continuous. Guard shifts rotated around the clock and accountability – which he was overly familiar with on paper – extended to physical control of a massive and unstable population.

Brinker remained with L Company until July 1945 before moving on through replacement depots as the Army processed men for redeployment or discharge. He was one documenting the processing, however, and his European service formally ended in October.  


<h1>BRIDGES & DEMOLITION</h1>
 
When the Army returned to war in 1950, years of postwar service had Virgel in senior technical and supervisory roles.  When he entered the Korean theater, he did so as a seasoned Sergeant First Class and assistant communications officer with Headquarters and Service Company, 8th Engineer Combat Battalion.  He had been with the Battalion since November 1949 (his second Japan posting in the late 1940s) and deployed with the 1st Cavalry Division to Korea in the summer of 1950 as part of the initial response to the North Korean invasion. They landed at Pohang-dong and moved inland almost immediately, traveling along dirt roads through Taegu, Waegwan, Kumchon, and on to Hwanggan, where they established bivouac.

The pace was fast and the situation unstable. After only two weeks in country, following the withdrawal of the 24th Infantry Division from Taejon, the battalion was forced to pull back from its first contact with the enemy near Yongdong. The battalion forward command post was established in a lightly wooded schoolyard near an abandoned village, separated by a dried rice paddy. The command group occupied the schoolhouse, illuminated at night by a portable generator.

Just before dawn on July 31st, a squad-sized guerrilla force shot their way into the perimeter between the village and the schoolhouse. Pushing aside the improvised blackout curtains, the attackers fired automatic weapons into the lit interior. Within moments, five headquarters personnel – including the battalion executive officer, Major Lonnie B. Flowers – were killed or mortally wounded and several others were injured.

The battalion continued operating under constant pressure as United Nations forces attempted to stabilize the front along the Naktong River.  Three bridges were demolished at Waegwan to slow the enemy advance – almost immediately after, the engineers improvised river crossings using straw rice bags filled with sand to support foot traffic and vehicles.

Brinker was reassigned to C Company near the end of August. The company was frequently attached to the 8th Cavalry Regiment and employed as infantry when circumstances demanded it. Days were spent as engineers clearing obstacles, preparing routes, constructing positions and nights were often spent in defensive fighting.

In early September, after securing the first and second hills in a series of engagements north of Taegu, C Company attempted to dig in on a third position composed almost entirely of rock. After dark, white phosphorus, machine-gun fire, and artillery swept the area. An attached forward observer eventually determined that the incoming fire was friendly, but not before eighteen casualties were sustained, including a newly assigned platoon leader and a medic whose legs were blown off.

The battalion’s work continued as preparations were made to break out from the Pusan Perimeter. Brinker’s company cleared minefields along the Naktong and contributed to the construction of an underwater bridge for the 24th Division. As United Nations forces advanced north, the engineers swept mines ahead of armored units along the Seoul-Kaesong road, crossed the Imjin River, and entered Pyongyang, where they cleared street barricades apparently intended for the defense of the capital.

As the Company dug in with the battalions of the 8th Cavalry near Unsan, the weather turned sharply colder.  On the night of November 1st, Chinese forces launched a coordinated attack under a bright moon. Fighting lasted from early evening until midnight as United Nations units were routed from the town.  The engineers retreated alongside infantry through the streets, shooting into buildings and windows as Chinese mortar fire followed them.  The retreat continued southward in disorganized groups by platoon, squad, or individual basis.  The able-bodied ripped doors off Korean houses to carry the wounded.  

Captain Siegel, anticipating the severity of the situation, had already moved the company’s vehicles, limiting losses to a single bulldozer and one two-and-a-half-ton truck.  The battalion regrouped near Sukchon in the first week of November. There, C Company immediately set to work constructing a divisional airstrip and opened a gravel pit, completing the work in a matter of days before moving south again to road projects near the Chongchon River. 

Cold-weather clothing – pile jackets and caps – did not arrive until mid-November.  In December, the major withdrawal resumed. The engineers returned to direct support of the 8th Cavalry Regiment, rejoining battalion control only for major projects such as a timber trestle bridge over the Han River. The bridge was completed with demolition charges already in place. By month’s end, the battalion prepared the two timber trestle bridges and the railroad bridge over the Pukhan for demolition, followed by the two Holly Bridges over the Han.

Those bridges were blown in January. Artillery attempted to break the ice on the Han River to deny crossing to Chinese forces, but the frozen surface was thick enough to resist shelling. Seoul fell for the second time in six months. Roads clogged with civilians and ox carts as the retreat continued south through snow-covered terrain and frozen rice paddies.  

By that time the snow had accumulated to six inches.  The battalion moved south, blasting through ‘rock-bound defiles and water-logged rice paddies.’  Brinker returned to Headquarters and Service Company, where he would remain as Eighth Army eventually resumed the offensive. 

He served through the summer and monsoon season as negotiations began and stalled, and after Brinker was promoted to Master Sergeant in August, the fighting resumed.  The culmination of an administrative career that had steadily moved from clerical to technical authority under combat conditions came in November when he was appointed a Warrant Officer. He remained in Korea through the following year, serving as the war settled into its prolonged, grinding stalemate.

He was later promoted to Chief Warrant Officer after returning to the United States and in that same year, attended Ordnance School at Aberdeen Proving Ground, followed by advanced training in ammunition supply and handling.  At Sandia Base, under the Defense Atomic Support Agency, he later qualified as an Army Nuclear Weapons Assembly Technician.  Across two decades of service, Brinker was repeatedly positioned near the Army’s defining moments of the mid-twentieth century. He was witness to the greatest invasion to the European continent, on the ground in Korea during the crisis of 1950, and later within the institutional machinery that marked the Army’s entry into the nuclear age.