Rehearsal

Last week, in the dairy country of northern New York, in the forests of Washington, along streams and through swamps in Louisiana and Wisconsin, the U. S. Army worked like terriers. In the biggest peacetime maneuvers in history, 300,000 regular, National Guard and reserve troops hiked, fought, slept in the open, while Army umpires with white bands around their campaign hats marked down their scores. Sweaty infantrymen slogged along country roads. Artillery rumbled through peaceful villages, tired gunners asleep in the trucks. Rednecked horse cavalrymen galloped down ravines, and forded creeks behind cased guidons. Cursing engineers built pontoon bridges across rivers while machine guns chattered and infantrymen in trucks shouted for more speed.

Ill-equipped, scantily trained, the U. S. Army had put itself on a stage where its public could see it in all its deficiencies. What the public saw was the inevitable result of 20 years of peacetime apathy toward national defense. What profession al Army officers saw was a job well done, considering the tools and men on hand to date.

Biggest of the maneuvers and typical of the rest was the Battle of Northern New York, where 85,000 troops fought a three-day action while 15,000 more backed them up on the supply lines and in the air. Strategically it was also the most significant. In that area, east of the St. Lawrence River town of Ogdensburg (captured by the British in 1813), Army troops would be gathered for flank assault if the U. S. should be invaded from Canada.

Black & Blue. From New England had come Major General James Albert Woodruff's Black Army. Spearheaded was the regular Army's famed First Division, screened by the Army's historic Third Cavalry. Outnumbered almost 2-to-1 by the defending Blue Army of National Guardsmen, it was ready to attack from the banks of the Grass River (flowing north into the St. Lawrence) when the maneuver began.

Commanding the Blue Army was one of the service's most noted advocates of defense by attack: hawk-nosed Lieut. General Hugh Aloysius Drum. By mid-morning of the first day, his divisions had made contact with the Blacks. All night there was rifle fire from outposts along the Grass. Next dawn, Hugh Drum started the ball rolling. His first target was the flower of the Black Army: the motorized, mobile, battle-scarred Fighting First. Stationed on the Black Army's north flank, the First failed to watch the bank of the St. Lawrence, off to their right. There Hugh Drum started a flanking march by Maryland and Virginia infantry units, a company of Pennsylvania tanks. When the First came to, its supply train had been captured by the Maryland 5th Infantry, and Virginians from the Shenandoah Valley were blazing away at its rear. Said a Black artilleryman, hopelessly cut off: "We had one gun firing north, another south, and the third one shooting straight up."

But Hugh Drum still had something up his sleeve. First day of the maneuvers he had whipped up a German-style motorized attack by putting the Irish 165th Infantry (of New York City) into trucks, backing them up with motorized cavalry, artillery, engineers. While the Blacks tried to fight their way out of the encirclement of their north flank, the motorized column, after riding all night, slammed them from the rear on the other flank. The Black Army's 26th National Guard division, squeezed front and rear, decided to retire, moved ten miles east to the next river (the Raquette) while the umpires recessed the battle.

When the recess was over, the Blue Army went after the invader like a winning boxer out of his corner. Through the chilly night (the temperature got down to 41DEG) engineers hurried pontoon bridges across the Raquette. Before dawn, while the bridges were still abuilding, infantrymen paddled across in assault boats, and rifle fire bit the dark. Again Hugh Drum's fast-moving motorized column, riding a motley assortment of green, red and white trucks, turned up on the Blacks' south flank. By noon the Blues' artillery had crossed the Raquette behind the infantry. With pleased but dead-pan faces at the power of tactics which threatened to about-face the invaders and back them against the St. Lawrence, umpires called the war off.

Drain Pipes, Pie Plates. Next night, in the stadium of St. Lawrence University at Canton, N. Y., officers of both armies sat down to hear Hugh Drum. Most glaring deficiency of the maneuvers the First Army commander passed over in one sentence. The point was too well known, even to the watching farmers, to be labored : the U. S. Army was grotesquely short of combat equipment. In both Black and Blue armies there were only four tanks. Like the Germans seven years ago, company commanders whitewashed the sign "TANK" on the sides of trucks, and the umpires counted them as tanks.

And there were no modern anti-tank guns. Soldiers made them from drain pipes, old wheels, set them up on fields and roads and solemnly served them while umpires stretched their imaginations. There were few .50-calibre anti-aircraft guns. The shortage was made up by lettering ".50-calibre" on a pie plate, pasting it on the side of a Springfield rifle. Except for the regular outfits, no regiments had more than a token equipment of the Army's new Garand semi-automatic rifle. Except for the regulars, no outfit was completely motor-equipped. Hundreds of trucks and sedans were rented by the day from civilians to fill out the National Guard's complement of rolling stock.

The Army has some 400 tanks, but the organization of the new Armored Corps kept most of them busy at Ft. Benning and Ft. Knox, far from the maneuvers. The same was true of planes: the Air Corps needed most of its planes for its training program. For reconnaissance, Blue and Black Army commanders had observation planes, but almost no attack planes, which could have played hob with troop movements, especially river crossings. The handful of pursuit and bombardment pilots detailed to the maneuvers spent most of their time dogfighting, testing a telephone warning system for tracing the course of invading enemy aircraft by plotting locations where civilian volunteers reported bombers overhead.

Beyond these obvious lacks, Hugh Drum found others to point at. One of them was a shortage of troops. He turned it into a plug for conscription. Said he: "We are wasting time and ignoring basic lessons of history by months of discussing the volunteer versus the conscription system." Other faults he blamed on lack of training. He found smaller units (com panies, battalions, etc.) weak on the basic mechanics of fighting -- patrolling, reconnaissance, communications. He found waste of man power. "Too many com manders," said he, "expected all officers and all men to be at work or in the fight all the time." He found poor teamwork between ground and air troops, between ground branches themselves.

Good Beginning. U. S. civilians found Hugh Drum's criticism more stimulating than disheartening, saw no reason to doubt that the Army already has the start for a first-class fighting force. Working till they were wobbly, sleeping on the ground in cold and rain, the First Army's sickness rate was about half the rate for regulars in garrison. Its morale was tops; after long hikes, fights through underbrush, soldiers were not too tired to shave, brush their teeth, skylark. The supply system, running in food and ammunition for an army bigger than the population of Schenectady, N. Y., had worked without a major hitch. Staff work was better than it had ever been before, traffic ran without road clogs. Soldiers behaved better. Except for two besotted regulars who went on window-breaking and larceny rampages (and got jail terms from a court martial), the deportment record was near-perfect.

This week, back at their home stations, National Guardsmen waited for the President's call for a year's active service, had the prospect of longer and bigger maneuvers to brush up basic combat lessons, develop the kind of teamwork the Germans have. Regulars hoped Congress would soon pass a conscription bill. For--besides men and equipment--what the Army needs is practice, practice, more practice. No Army man forgets that it took the Germans seven years.

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