Object Lesson

To the officers of the Second and Third Armies, resting from their far from sham labors in far-flung sham battle, the GHQ's Chief of Staff spoke pregnant words. Said Lieut. General Lesley James McNair: "There can be no excuse for another Guadalajara."

General McNair's reference to the rout of Italian troops by Russian airmen in Spain was pointed: In the first Battle of Louisiana, soldiers on the ground had been noticeably more inclined to stop and stare at attacking aircraft than to scatter and try to shoot them down.

To make Guadalajara more than just a foreign word, the Army Air Forces last week put on a terrifying show for 4,000 groundling officers (including more than 100 generals).

The stage was set at Shreveport's green-swarded Barksdale Field. Across the field and less than a mile from the spectators was a plot 2,000 feet long, 1,000 feet wide (eight big city blocks), spotted with 100 obsolete tanks, a few reconnaissance cars, patches of cardboard to represent troops. Rearing above the junk were two white pyramids, each the center of a 100-foot circle. These were the bull's-eyes for the high-altitude bombers.

Tiny and glittering at 15,000 feet, a dozen four-motored Boeing Flying Fortresses (B-178) thundered distantly overhead. Down whistled 240 100-pound bombs. The eight blocks burst into a flaming, dusty cloud. When the smoke cleared, one of the pyramids was gone.

A few 100-pounders had missed the target, but the next wave (three Douglas B-18s) slapped in their loads without a single miss. Black smoke belched up in geysers, junk tanks flipped on their sides, armored cars flumped limply on their bellies.

Down out of the west streaked a flight of 18 Bell Airacobras, at 50 feet off the ground let go a diving blast of gunfire. A column of 18 Navy dive-bombers, dropping from 8,000 feet, pulled up at 1,500, after letting go their 500-pounders. The giant bursts all seemed to hit the same spot.

Windup to this hair-raising blitz was an attack by eleven speedy A20 light bombers, especially designed for smearing a target of wide area. They whipped over at 4,500 feet, dribbled 176 100-pounders from their bays. Across the target spouted a deadly line of dirt, metal, smoke; the second pyramid took off and floated into fragments.

The show was over. Guadalajara was no longer quite such a foreign word.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.