New G-4

"Watch Somervell" has been sound ad vice in the Army since 1918; it was being said all over again last week. Lanky, Arkansas-born Brigadier General Brehon Burke Somervell, grey and 49, had been made head of the supply section (G4) of the U.S. Army's General Staff.

Assigned to staff duty in World War I, young Engineer Somervell took a Cadillac on leave, went up to the front instead. There he won the Distinguished Service Cross* for gallantry in action. After the war he lived with routine for five years, then took up the kind of life that Engineer officers like most.

For the League of Nations he spent six months surveying the Rhine and Danube, returned to a series of civilian-clothes jobs on U.S. waterways. When he went back to Europe, he had another out-of-the-run job: an economic survey of Turkey, which he did in a year and seven fat volumes.

The Government began to get its real money's worth out of its investment in Engineer Somervell in 1936, when he was made WPAdministrator for New York City. On his Army pay ($6,813 a year including allowances) he ran the job for four years, did everything from banishing gnats from Flushing Meadows to laying sewers and building LaGuardia Field.

When the Army needed someone to bolster up the limping camp-building program, they gave the job to Somervell. By the time Congress took the whole business from the Quartermaster Corps (at the Army's insistence) and gave it to the Engineers, Somervell had it well under way. His reward: the General Staff.

* Not to be confused with the Distinguished Service Medal (for excellence in command and administration), which he also won.

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