The Bailey Bridge

I remembered watching a WWII movie in 1977 called "A Bridge Too Far"  I really liked the movie and the sound track was awesome.  I Still hum the soundtrack every once and a while.   I considered a very accurate telling of a battle told in a movie format.  It was neat seeing all these big name movie stars in the movie and I was living in Europe during the time this movie was filmed, I could relate to what I had seen on the screen.  To me this movie was underrated and next to the film "Midway" is one of my favorite WWII movies.

The film tells the story of the failure of Operation Market Garden during World War II. The operation was intended to allow the Allies to break through German lines and seize several bridges in the occupied Netherlands, including one at Arnhem, with the main objective of outflanking German defenses in order to end the war by Christmas of 1944.
The name for the film comes from an unconfirmed comment attributed to British Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, who told Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the operation's architect, before the operation: "I think we may be going a bridge too far", in reference to the intention of seizing the Arnhem bridgehead over the Rhine river.
The ensemble cast includes Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell and Liv Ullmann. The music was scored by John Addison, who had served in the British XXX Corps during Market Garden.

    Well the movie made mention of a "Bailey Bridge", and I never knew what it really was..Here is a clip of the bridge mentioned from the Actors "Elliot Gould" and "Michael Caine"

"Bailey Bridge mentioned"

Building the Bailey Bridge over the River Son

 This actually showed one being build.

Picture an Allied tank commander in Europe, during Autumn, 1944. Advancing for days, destroying the German resistance. Nothing has been able to stop the invasion; except a blown bridge. Luckily, somewhere back in the supply columns which keep the army going, is a Bailey Bridge.
Donald Bailey, the designer of the Bailey Bridge, was born in Rotherham, in 1901. He received his BA in Engineering from the University of Sheffield in 1923. After graduating, he helped design railway bridges in the 1930s, but by 1940 he was working for the War Department.
In Christchurch, Southern England he and a group of other engineers, comprised MEXE (Military Experimental Establishment). They were designing and testing new engineering equipment for the British Army.

The Army at the time was facing a dilemma. They knew they would be required to fight in Europe, with its various canals, rivers, streams, and lakes. Any one of these could stop an army advancing, and they needed a foolproof way to cross them.
Collapsible and portable bridges had been around for hundreds of years, in various forms. By 1940, however, British weapons were outstripping engineering equipment.
Their tanks weighed more than 40 tons, but the heaviest portable bridge could hold only 26 tons. The Allies would be bogged down and delayed as engineers worked to repair existing bridges or build more permanent ones.

A Bailey Bridge like this had to be contructed to cross rivers. This took precious time but was eventually able to allow XXX Corps to continue their advance.

Donald Bailey was being driven back to his headquarters building after a failed bridge test. The world seemed to be collapsing around England, and everything they tried seemed to fail. The War Department was desperate for a reliable bridge. Suddenly, Bailey had an idea. He began sketching it out on the back of an envelope.

Engineers slide a Bailey Bridge section into place, almost every part of the bridge construction was done by hand. The only time heavy equipment was used was to lift pieces into high places.

It was an amazingly simple design. Prefabricated panels each made up of internal trusses. These were joined by pegs, with large beams running across the bridge’s width. This gave them not only the rigidity needed to span a large area, but they could be assembled with simple tools: sledgehammers, rollers, and wrenches.

A destroyed Bailey Bridge and Sherman tank in Italy. While not indestructible, the bridges were easily replaced and cheap. They proved sturdy enough to stand up to almost any stress but quick and cheap enough to be disposable.

Equally important, they were straightforward and cheap to produce. Almost any industrial fabricator could make the panels and pieces necessary, and mass production was a definite possibility. The Bailey Bridge had been born.

An M10 tank destroyer crosses the Bailey Bridge.

In the battlefield these bridges proved indispensable. Field Marshal Montgomery said they were necessary to the speed of the Allied advance during the war. In Italy and Sicily, over 55 miles of bridges were built, spanning everything from stream beds, to the 1,126 ft. Bridge over the Sangro River. The longest, which spanned the Chindwin River in Burma, was 1,154 ft.
After D-day, in France, the low countries, and Germany, Bailey Bridges were consistently used to replace many of the bridges destroyed by the retreating Germans. Famously, the Son bridge was replaced with one during Operation Market Garden, in September 1944; eventually allowing Allied armor to press forward and help seize Nijmegen.

A Bailey section in a memorial in Christchurch. The local Stanpit Marshes saw the development of much of the engineering equipment of WW2.

Today Bailey style bridges are a fixture of almost any modern military. The materials have been upgraded, but the basic design, prefabricated, interlocking sections which can be put together a myriad of ways, has not changed.
Their use has expanded to the civilian life, where they are often used for disaster relief and are permanent fixtures in some areas. Bailey might not be the best-known hero from World War 2, but his contribution to the war effort was immense, and his memory, and legacy, can not be forgotten.

Well there is symmetry...

 Many years ago, when I got the "Precious" a.k.a my 1999 F150, 

Yep, that is her, well I sold her to a friend of mine who wanted a super reliable truck for his son, and normally I wouldn't have, but he is my "brother from another mother" and he knew I had taken really good care of the truck. So I made him a fair offer and he was good with with it.

I had clean up the truck and had her ready for her new owner, 

There she is leaving.  I was a bit bummed, best truck I ever had. 

       Well to the beginning of my blogpost,  i and my son flew here...back to the Carolinas to get my new F150.

Yep, to Charlotte,  North Carolina to pick up my new truck from this place..

Yep, Capital Ford. I had found a slightly used F150 at a good price and bought it.

Well she is RED, but an extended cab, I prefer extended cabs over super cabs.  She is a 2021 F150 XLT with the sport and chrome package.  I bought her outright., no note. So we drove home and on the way home we stopped at a little restaurant in Augusta called"Wifesavers" 

Yep, same place as all those ago,  well the Mac and Cheese is favored by the wife, so we loaded up and continued driving. 

Drove a lot different than "the Precious " more comfortable and a lot more bells and whistles,  lemme tell you.

   Yes, I did this off my kinda smart phone.....at work......again.........*sigh*

Watching a WWII movie and it triggered a memory,(No I ain't that old)

  I was watching a movie last night(Sunday) called a "Bridge Too Far" one of my favorite movies along with "Midway", I liked the 1976 version and Yes I even liked the 2019 version, but I digress and they were talking about a "Bailey Bridge" and I remembered doing a blogpost so I rustled around and found it.  I also added the soundtrack because I until recently did "Monday Music" and yes I will bring back.

  I considered a very accurate telling of a battle told in a movie format.  It was neat seeing all these big name movie stars in the movie and I was living in Europe during the time this movie was filmed, I could relate to what I had seen on the screen.  To me this movie was underrated and next to the film "Midway" is one of my favorite WWII movies.

The film tells the story of the failure of Operation Market Garden during World War II. The operation was intended to allow the Allies to break through German lines and seize several bridges in the occupied Netherlands, including one at Arnhem, with the main objective of outflanking German defenses in order to end the war by Christmas of 1944.
The name for the film comes from an unconfirmed comment attributed to British Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, who told Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the operation's architect, before the operation: "I think we may be going a bridge too far", in reference to the intention of seizing the Arnhem bridgehead over the Rhine river.
The ensemble cast includes Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell and Liv Ullmann. The music was scored by John Addison, who had served in the British XXX Corps during Market Garden.

 

Building the Bailey Bridge over the River Son

 This actually showed one being build.

Picture an Allied tank commander in Europe, during Autumn, 1944. Advancing for days, destroying the German resistance. Nothing has been able to stop the invasion; except a blown bridge. Luckily, somewhere back in the supply columns which keep the army going, is a Bailey Bridge.
Donald Bailey, the designer of the Bailey Bridge, was born in Rotherham, in 1901. He received his BA in Engineering from the University of Sheffield in 1923. After graduating, he helped design railway bridges in the 1930s, but by 1940 he was working for the War Department.
In Christchurch, Southern England he and a group of other engineers, comprised MEXE (Military Experimental Establishment). They were designing and testing new engineering equipment for the British Army.

The Army at the time was facing a dilemma. They knew they would be required to fight in Europe, with its various canals, rivers, streams, and lakes. Any one of these could stop an army advancing, and they needed a foolproof way to cross them.
Collapsible and portable bridges had been around for hundreds of years, in various forms. By 1940, however, British weapons were outstripping engineering equipment.
Their tanks weighed more than 40 tons, but the heaviest portable bridge could hold only 26 tons. The Allies would be bogged down and delayed as engineers worked to repair existing bridges or build more permanent ones.

A Bailey Bridge like this had to be contructed to cross rivers. This took precious time but was eventually able to allow XXX Corps to continue their advance.

Donald Bailey was being driven back to his headquarters building after a failed bridge test. The world seemed to be collapsing around England, and everything they tried seemed to fail. The War Department was desperate for a reliable bridge. Suddenly, Bailey had an idea. He began sketching it out on the back of an envelope.

Engineers slide a Bailey Bridge section into place, almost every part of the bridge construction was done by hand. The only time heavy equipment was used was to lift pieces into high places.

It was an amazingly simple design. Prefabricated panels each made up of internal trusses. These were joined by pegs, with large beams running across the bridge’s width. This gave them not only the rigidity needed to span a large area, but they could be assembled with simple tools: sledgehammers, rollers, and wrenches.

A destroyed Bailey Bridge and Sherman tank in Italy. While not indestructible, the bridges were easily replaced and cheap. They proved sturdy enough to stand up to almost any stress but quick and cheap enough to be disposable.

Equally important, they were straightforward and cheap to produce. Almost any industrial fabricator could make the panels and pieces necessary, and mass production was a definite possibility. The Bailey Bridge had been born.

An M10 tank destroyer crosses the Bailey Bridge.

In the battlefield these bridges proved indispensable. Field Marshal Montgomery said they were necessary to the speed of the Allied advance during the war. In Italy and Sicily, over 55 miles of bridges were built, spanning everything from stream beds, to the 1,126 ft. Bridge over the Sangro River. The longest, which spanned the Chindwin River in Burma, was 1,154 ft.
After D-day, in France, the low countries, and Germany, Bailey Bridges were consistently used to replace many of the bridges destroyed by the retreating Germans. Famously, the Son bridge was replaced with one during Operation Market Garden, in September 1944; eventually allowing Allied armor to press forward and help seize Nijmegen.

A Bailey section in a memorial in Christchurch. The local Stanpit Marshes saw the development of much of the engineering equipment of WW2.

Today Bailey style bridges are a fixture of almost any modern military. The materials have been upgraded, but the basic design, prefabricated, interlocking sections which can be put together a myriad of ways, has not changed.
Their use has expanded to the civilian life, where they are often used for disaster relief and are permanent fixtures in some areas. Bailey might not be the best-known hero from World War 2, but his contribution to the war effort was immense, and his memory, and legacy, can not be forgotten.

Goings on at Casa De Garabaldi

 A Few things going on at Casa De Garabaldi.....

One thing that I did was buy a car cover for "My Precious", since I am not driving her as much since I am driving the Focus a lot more, I have had problems with Dead Battery, and I went to Harbor Freight looking for a "Trickle" charger and found one...

    Started the Install process,

   I like Zip Ties, Keeps things neat.

      This shows the actual plug, it matches the plug I use for my Motorcycle trickle charger.

Completed the install, Now to dig out the actual charger....

Plugged it in...

         This I did several weeks ago.

    Then we had a cold front hit, I knew it was coming, I heard Old NFO and others in the Texas area complaining about it.  And it got cold in a hurry.  So I turned on the fireplace...

       And the Dog immediately moved in.........

I had to work in the meantime....

  It was Cold........and WET.......

   Did I say Wet?..........And COLD

And I had to Work Christmas Eve and Day....

When the weather warmed up a bit, I pulled the cover off of "My Precious" so I could check the charge and saw this

    Battery was at full charge, I moved the trickle charger and cranked up the truck and let her idle for 20 minutes while I was doing some yard work and cleaning up some yard debris.  Got done and covered the truck back up.  

   

      I was trying to repair the battery jump box that I have, My son had manage to get one of the clamps broken while it was in his charge....Get it.....Charge....I will be here all week, try the veal and tip the wait staff.   Well any way I was going to try to repair the clamp...

   Well I had folded a piece of metal at work and I was going to try to see if I could use it to "Brace" the clamp over the break...

   Well it work initially.......But I then used a dremel to trim some excess metal and destroyed the structural rigidity that was necessary to make it work.....crap.    So Plan B

Yeah......Amazon.....I had gone to Harbor Freight and to several Auto Parts stores looking for clamps large enough and there were none available....Now I could have bought a Jumper Cable and destroyed it and took the clamp...but wanton destruction ain't my thing....so I went to Amazon.

    Finished it......Finally    Kept the box with the "Negative" clamp in case I need it.

     Meanwhile I had bought a oil filter for my daily driver...Remember this one..?

   Yep my Focus....Well I went to buy an oil filter for the Focus, I am having a shop I use for all my major work, they know me and all my cars since they opened do the oil change, too cold to crawl under the car right now, if the weather was warmer, different story.

but I like to use "Ford" filters. not the generic cheap filters that the shops tend to use...hey it is a quirk....my car, my quirk, so there :P but I digress

Well I go to buy a filter...

 Yeah, one of those.....I bought one of those 6 months ago and paid $7 bucks for the filter, well I bought a filter last night and it cost me dang near $10 bucks.....Jeez   "Lets Go Brandon"

  And speaking of "Brandon" we Rock banging Mechanics do have an opinion...

Saw this on the door going into the breakroom several weeks ago.....as of my last day working a couple of days ago, it is still there and there are other ways to make our opinions known...

 This was a temporary install to facilitate maintenance and we of course made sure that it was labeled appropriately so there was no doubt.

 Got rid of my Cub Cadet today, the only good thing about that mower is the motor,  I got tired getting nickel-ed and dimed by it.  I have to decide in the spring to either fork over 2 grand for another riding mower and deal with the associated maintenance cost like fuel, blades, oil, ete,ete or have a lawn service cut my grass, I have to weigh the pro's and cons, basically do a cost analysis.  In the past I thought it was strange to have someone do something that I am perfectly capable of doing, but after dealing with this lawnmower the past year, I can understand why people pay someone else.

     We went to the range today, the spousal unit had bought me gift certificates to the local range and today was "ladies Night"

                                                  laid out the .45

   Both Plastic Fantastics, Er Macks Favorite Guns  the Glocks, the Model 17 and 19

                    And the S&W .22 Pistol for the Spousal Unit :), She is shooting with me today

                                                                           The Target

   The Distance, I use this because of the unofficial Tueller Drill which I and many others have blogged before.

  The Spousal Unit firing the Smith .22 pistol, she fired that for a bit 

      This is her shooting my Glock 17 with the Holographic Sights, She liked the sights on the Glock better, easier to use, but the .22 was less recoil and less"Boom" for her. She hasn't gone shooting with me since before the birth of our son, so I was very happy to have her along.  I am hoping that she will join me more often.

   And yes this was me on New Years Day lol, I had to work both New Days Eve and New Years Day.

    What can I say...Aviation is 24/7/365.   But it pays pretty well, LOL