The following biographical sketch of Lieutenant Colonel
Rayle was compiled by his son Bruce from family memories and other material
he inherited from his father.
Lieutenant Colonel Roy E. Rayle was born in Rayle Georgia and grew up
in Eastover, South Carolina. He graduated
from Georgia Tech in 1938 with a BS, Mechanical
Engineering. He also completed the Army ROTC program at Georgia
Tech and with the onset of World War II was ordered to active duty
about year before Pearl Harbor.
During World War II
he served in Africa and Europe in Aviation Ordnance for the
Ninth Army
Air Force (the tactical outfit, i.e., with small planes like P-47s,
not the big bombers). About the most dangerous thing he admitted
to doing was removing a fuse from a dud 500 pound bomb in some French
field with a hacksaw (against standing orders) so that he could find
out why so many bombs were duds. He eventually found that
exposure to rain during fuse manufacture was the culprit.
After the war at Eglin Field, Florida, he investigated more bomb
problems. He decided to stay with the Army when the Army Air
Force was made into an independent branch of service, the USAF.
Then he got a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering at MIT (1949),
and after that he had a tour of duty at the Pentagon doing development
for artillery shells (including the
280-mm atomic),
tank shells, and 106-mm recoilless rifle ammunition.
About 1952 he went to Ft. Leavenworth War School in Kansas to prepare
for Korea. Despite volunteering for Korean duty, he was assigned
to Springfield Armory (1953) where he developed the
M14 Rifle and
the M79 Grenade Launcher ("The
Bloop Tube"), which were both accepted or approved by the Army
in 1957. At about that time he was assigned to MAAG, Taiwan.
He and family arrived by plane April, 1957, and moved into temporary
housing (a house) on a crumbling hillside high above a rushing
stone-filled mountain river, at the end of Lane 4, Tien Mu, which is a
northern suburb of Taipei in the direction of the Grass Mountain
volcano. We stayed maybe six weeks (waiting on a house to
become available) and then moved to Hsinchu about June 1957 where we
stayed until we moved stateside about April 1959.
His duty in Taiwan was as a liaison officer, and he worked
mostly in Chungli with his counterpart in the Chinese
National Army, a Colonel Li. Part of his work likely included Chinese Army logistics as well as Chinese Army motor pool and weapons maintenance
issues.
After the tour of duty in Taiwan my father worked at the Pentagon on
various Ordnance development projects, including the
TOW missile
and M50 Ontos
(Greek for "The Thing"). Ontos was a tracked assault vehicle
with six recoilless rifles used in Korea and Vietnam by the Marine
Corps.
In 1963 he retired from the US Army (at 20 years of service) and went
on to develop more weapons as an engineering director for defense
contractors. After that he taught engineering courses and
consulted until a few year before his death in March 1997 at age 80
(Alzheimer's Disease).
