Yoo-Hoo!

Along busy Central Avenue, on the outskirts of Memphis, Tenn., rolled 80 trucks of the 110th Quartermaster Regiment, making slow progress through Sunday traffic. In the cabs and on the hard seats behind sat 350 soldiers, ties discarded, collars open under a blistering sun. After the manner of the U.S. soldier, Model 1941, or the Roman soldier, B.C. 100, they were also making merry by waving at girls, shouting boisterous pleasantries at civilians. They had a right to be cheerful, they had just finished more than a month's hard work in the Second Army maneuvers in central Tennessee, and done a good, cheerful job of it.

Past the first tee of the Memphis Country Club the convoy moved at a snail's pace. Along the walk bordering the course strolled a group of girls in shorts. From the trucks came a drumfire of soldiers' shouts--"Yoo-Hoo-o-o"--"Hi, baby"--a fanfare of whistling.

"'Tis He!" On the first tee, hard by the street, a leathery-faced golfer was getting ready to tee off. "Fore," shouted a soldier. The golfer turned and glared at the trucks. Thereupon the soldiers let him have it: "Hey, buddy, do you need a caddy?" The man on the tee handed his driver to a caddy, jumped a three-foot fence, stalked to the convoy. A command car in the column jerked to a stop, and its officers piled out to face an Awful Fact. The golfer was Lieut. General Ben Lear, commander of the Second Army, director of the maneuvers from which the 110th had just emerged.

Ben Lear was a first sergeant before he was an officer, and what he had to tell the 110th's officers sizzled with first sergeant's wrath. When all the burning words had been said, Ben Lear told the convoy to move on, that it would hear from him after it got back to its home station at Camp Joseph T. Robinson, 145 miles away.

The men of the 110th, like the rest of the soldiers, know Ben Lear (in uniform). They know him as a ranker who lives commendably close to his troops, a rugged soldier despite his 62 years, a great believer in spit-and-polish. They know and generally approve his dislike of sloppy soldiers, his decisive action (TIME, June 23) to clear his Second Army of incompetent officers so that its outfits can grow into first-class fighting units. They know him, too, as a commander too much preoccupied with small details.

Tough Touch. But tough and touchy as Ben Lear is, no soldier of the 110th was prepared for the tough touch that awaited them when they pulled in at Camp Robinson toward sundown. The General's order: that the 110th return at once to Memphis and stand by. They were to get mass punishment, the innocent with the guilty.

Toward midnight the trucks were loaded again and the convoy was off. To rest tired drivers, it stopped three hours on the way, resumed the journey by dawn. Before noon the 110th had pitched tents on Memphis airport, was waiting for the lightning to strike. It struck soon. To the airport came Ben Lear in person, read the riot act again--"disgrace to the Army . . . loose conduct and rowdyism . . . breach of discipline." Then he announced sentence. After a night's rest, the 110th would head home. And on the way every man in the outfit must march 15 miles.

To the Second Army's hard-bitten infantry outfits this would have been a breeze. To the truck drivers, clerks, typists, mechanics of the 110th it was no such thing. But the General had spoken.

Next day, the hottest day in two years (97DEG), the trucks rumbled off, crossed the river, stopped beyond in the Arkansas flats, let all but the drivers out. Five miles ahead the drivers stopped, got out, started to march. Through the morning and afternoon, the trucks were leapfrogged, until everybody had had his dose. One man. just out of the hospital at Camp Forrest, Tenn., soon fell out, was trucked into Camp Robinson. During the day about twelve others fell out, were picked up. The stragglers and heat-stricken took emergency treatment from a dentist and a sanitary officer who were also being disciplined. The rest ate plenty of salt against the heat, filled their canteens silently at wayside towns, while the citizenry eyed them with sympathy.

But the 110th's Battalion took the whole business as soldiers should. When civilians were not around, they laughed and kidded, sang snatches of songs, tried to improvise on an old theme--"General Lear he missed his putt, Parley Voo--. . ." And when they finally got back home they grinned at the gibes of other soldiers. They did not seem to feel that they had disgraced the Army.

Goat v. Rowdies. Neither did some Congressmen, who roundly trounced Ben Lear, off & on the floor. Texas' Paul J. Kilday sent a hot wire to the General, demanding an explanation. Ben Lear replied: "I am responsible for the training of all elements of this Army. . . . Rowdyism can not be tolerated. . . . Circumstances called for immediate action." Arkansas's William F. Norrell demanded a Congressional investigation ("He apparently is engaged all the time in playing golf"). Illinois's Everett M. Dirksen said he did not know "whether public funds are to be expended so that grouchy, golfing old generals will develop a lot of sourpuss soldiers." Missouri's isolationist Senator Bennett Champ Clark called Ben Lear "a superannuated old goat, who ought to retire."

The controversy spread like a heat wave. The Arkansas Department of the Army Mothers' Club demanded Ben Lear's removal. The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel printed a letter from an Army mother ("Maybe General Lear got his rule books mixed and read the one for Russia") and the paper invited its readers to say more about the Memphis Incident. Cantankerous Westbrbok Pegler defended Ben Lear on the probability that "the obstreperous haberdashers and grocers" of the Quartermaster outfit had used lewd language to Memphis' shorts-clad girls--an unfair, and also incorrect assumption.

The hubbub became so regrettably loud that the Army had to act. From Washington it announced that Ben Lear had been ordered to make an explanation. Until it arrived, the Army would say nothing. Under the circumstances there was not much to say. Ben Lear might well have been oversevere: his sentence had the stigma of capricious anger, wounded vanity. But his objective--better discipline--was good. Many an officer thought it better to forget the whole business than make a nationwide song & dance about it.

But the nation thought differently. It was the first time U.S. citizens had had a chance to make a song & dance out of anything connected with World War II, and they made the most of it. They saw nothing wrong with yoo-hooing, and proceeded to tell the Army so, with many a yoo-hoo.

But in the Army a general is always right. The basis of all discipline is: orders are orders. In the view of professional officer,. Ben Lear was not dishing out punishment as a champion of U.S. womanhood, nor because a soldier threw him off his golf game. He saw a breach of discipline, and smacked it good & proper. That he smacked it harder than was good & proper was--in a professional's view--beside the point.

Meanwhile the hooraw had proved embarrassing not only to Ben Lear but to the 110th and the Army. Last week in Olympia, Wash., soldiers from Fort Lewis tossed out mash notes to girls ("Please write to this lonely soldier," etc.) tagged with the postscript: "Don't tell Lieut. General Ben Lear." From 70 noncoms of the 250th Coast Artillery went a challenge to the 110th to a 15-mile marching race. Wrote the 250th: "If we don't finish first without having to write our Congressmen, we'll let you yoo-hoo at us." At a bathing-beauty revue at the El Paso (Tex.) Country Club, brimstony Major General Innis Palmer Swift, commander of Fort Bliss (and one of the judges) watched the girls prance by, and owlishly hooted "Yoo-Hoo." And out of the Memphis Incident came World War II's first nickname for a U.S. outfit: the 110th's marchers became "The Yoo-Hoo Battalion."

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