THEN & NOW


WHAT A GEM


The U.S. Army ground effects machine, or GEM, was a hovercraft powered by two aircraft engines driving ducted fans and was capable of traveling over land or water—even if it may have been a little hard to steer. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army Transportation Museum, Fort Eustis, Virginia)


helicopter. Tat technology had been kick- ing around nearly as long as the airplane, if you don’t count Leonardo da Vinci’s conceptual drawings.


LUMBERING BEAST But the Army, then as now, had more irons in the fire than just the ground- effects machine. Two pages later, we learn that the Army was also looking into using a nuclear reactor to power its Over- land Train.


To the contemporary eye, the Overland Train might seem as wacky as the Air Car. Te magazine’s accompanying image, of what appears to be a truck pulling trailer after trailer after trailer, seems almost patently absurd. But that image offers no sense of the scale of the machine. Tat may have been because the Overland Train was probably well-known to readers. Indeed,


it was something of a midcentury engi- neering marvel that had even appeared in LIFE Magazine.


R.G. LeTourneau Inc., a Texas maker of heavy machinery, created the Tournatrain to haul timber from remote wilderness areas where there were no roads and no infrastructure. Te Army wanted to do the exact opposite—haul tons of gear into wilderness where there was essentially nothing. Tis was in service to the DEW line. DEW was an acronym for distant early warning. If the Soviets launched a nuclear attack against the United States, the shortest distance for their bombers to travel would be over the North Pole.


If the United States wanted an early warning of such an attack and the abil- ity to strike back with its own bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, it


needed to move many hundreds of tons of gear and infrastructure to the inside the Arctic Circle. Creating the DEW line meant that the government needed to have sensors where there had never been any.


Back at the beginning of 1961, it wasn’t yet three years since the U.S. had launched its first artificial satellite, much less a GPS network. So the country needed boots on the ground along with radar stations in remote locations to monitor for potential nuclear surprise attacks. Te DEW line was also intended to warn of invasion by sea and land.


Tat meant that the Army needed a means to haul all of that materiel to places with no roads or infrastructure and nothing but wilderness. When the U.S. Army Transportation Research and Develop- ment Command (TRADCOM) got a


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