MARK OF THE FIGHTING MAN

U.S. soldiers wear an emblem on the left shoulder: insignia denoting Air Forces, Service Forces, corps, Army commands, etc. But the men who wear division patches wear them with special pride. Any patch may mark a fighting man but the division patch marks a man who has been assigned to fighting as his basic job. On the following pages are a few of the many division patches which have become symbols of American courage on battlefields around the world. The outfits mentioned here were chosen simply as a typical cross section of the U.S. divisions in this war which have gone overseas, hating war, but doing their job.

The First. On Nov. 8, 1942, U.S. armed forces began the long, bloody drive that was to end in the heart of Germany. On that day the ist Infantry Division landed at French-held Oran. Behind the ist was a great record. In World War I the entire ist had won the green and red French fourragere which the outfit still wears proudly, looped over the left shoulder.

Under dashing Major General Terry Allen (now commander of the crack 104th Timberwolf Division), the ist took Oran and fought across Algeria. It ran into its first hard going in Tunisia, and learned there the lesson all fighting men learn: that the last touch of fighting polish is won only in battle against a stubborn foe.

In July the ist landed in Sicily. With the now much-decorated 3rd on its left and the 45th on its right, it smashed the Hermann Goring Division. All three became model outfits--professional, resourceful, cool. But so far as the ist was concerned, it was "The Division."

The 1st needed all its pride and skill for the next job: Dday, June 6, 1944. Under Major General Clarence Huebner, the ist landed in Normandy, and will never forget it. The blood of foot soldiers reddened the sands of "Omaha Beach"; more than 740 men of one battalion were awarded the Bronze Star. Later the division took part in the Saint-L6 breakthrough. It blasted a path east to Aachen, fought through snowstorms and blizzards. At Rundstedt's breakthrough in December, with the 991h and the hardened 9th and 2nd, it held the Germans at a critical salient shoulder, cleared Bonn, then plunged south to join the bridgehead cut out by the 9th Armored Division at Remagen.

Few of the ist's men who landed at Oran are left. Casualties have taken a heavy toll. Veterans have been pulled out to form cadres in other outfits. Said one doughfoot: "There have been three ist Divisions so far--one that fought in Africa and Sicily and two more since we landed in France."

The Forty-Fifth. Indians in the 45th Division staged a war dance at Camp Patrick Henry, Va. just before the outfit headed overseas. In July 1943, the 45th landed in Sicily. "The Thunderbirds," a National Guard outfit from Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico, had been well and lengthily trained. The 45th did all right in Sicily.

Fighting under Major General Troy Middleton, the 45th overran 1,000 square miles in three weeks. German prisoners complained: "Don't you Americans ever sleep?" In September, alongside the 36th (a National Guard division from Texas), the 45th landed at Salerno to begin one of the war's most grueling campaigns. Another National Guard division, the 34th (from Iowa and Minnesota), helped hold that beachhead.

The 45th slogged north through the Apennines for four months, with virtually no rest. Its infantrymen were the men Sergeant Bill Mauldin, himself a 45th Division soldier, drew in his cartoons--unshaven, unkempt, unbeatable. They were pulled out of the line only after they had cleared the approaches to Cassino, given a few days rest. Then they were sent into the smoky, battered beachhead at Anzio. A headquarters commandant grimly noted: "In the last months I have seen six battalion commanders come and go."

With the 3rd and the 36th, the Thunderbirds landed in southern France, cracked the brittle shell of German resistance and slogged north. The 45th spearheaded the VI Corps' drive toward the Belfort Gap. By mid-December of 1944, the 45th had been 18 months overseas, .and 365 of those days in combat.

They were not through. Under one of the youngest division commanders in the Army, 38-year-old Major General Robert T. Frederick, they drove on into Aschaffenburg, where they ran into some of the nastiest opposition yet--fanatical Nazi boys, girls and old men. They smashed on into the Nazi shrine of Nurnberg, crossed the Danube, and with the 42nd liberated the prisoners of Dachau. A week before V-E day, the weary 45th marched into Munich.

The Eighty-Second. In 1940, U.S. airborne divisions were only a fanatical idea. Two years later, the promising 82nd Infantry Division (Sergeant Alvin York's outfit in World War I) was turned into an airborne division, with Major General Matthew Bunker Ridgway in command. At the same time the 101st Airborne was newly activated under Major General William Carey Lee, the man who fathered the radical doctrine. The two outfits began intensive training.

The 82nd saw its first action in Sicily. The beginning was tragic. Recognition signals failed and antiaircraft gunners, both enemy and friendly, shot down more than a score of the 82nd's transport planes. All but one battalion landed in the wrong spot; skeptics wanted to write finis to the whole idea. But the 82nd persisted. It showed what it could do when it moved 250 miles in eight hours to join the attack on Salerno. When U.S. troops marched into Naples three weeks later, the cocky 82nd led the way.

Then the 82nd went to England, to prepare for the biggest test of all. With the 101st and the British 6th, its men spearheaded the invasion of France. Casualties were heavy. Many a rifleman of the 82nd died in the ditches and orchards of Normandy. But the outfit secured its area, broke through, crossed the Douve and led the drive which sealed off Cherbourg, later taken by the 79th ("Lorraine"), the 4th ("Ivy") and the gth--all infantry divisions.

For a month the 82nd fought as infantry before it was pulled back to England to rest. In September it made another drop, this time in the Nijmegen sector in Holland. In December, near Stavelot, the 82nd fought on the northern side of the Ardennes bulge, while the loist staged its epic stand to the south, at Bastogne. The 82nd finished the European war fighting with the British Second Army at Wittenburg.

Matt Ridgway could be proud of

his swaggering soldiers' job. The new horizons for airborne operations were in the Pacific, where the nth was already in the line, fighting in the Philippines.

The Armored Divisions. All armored division men wear the same gaudy, triangular patch; only the division number varies. The yellow in the patch stands for the cavalrymen, the scarlet for the artillerymen, the blue for the infantrymen; men of these three branches were originally thrown together to make up the first U.S. Armored Force, in July 1940.

The 1st Armored landed at Oran, rumbled through to Tunisia. At Sidi bou Zid it was thrown back on its wheels. It recovered and under Major General Ernest ("Hardboiled") Harmon drove through Macknassy and opened the way into Bizerte. Later the ist fought at Cassino. It Janded at Anzio, aided the breakout, fought a savage engagement in the area of Cisterna and Campo Leone. First to cross the Tiber, it marched into Rome with the fresh man 88th, the 88th and the redhot ist Special Service Force. After that their style was cramped in the battering, constricted Italian campaign.

The 2nd, with rehearsals in Africa and Sicily, landed in Normandy last year and roared into the ruptured German lines at Saint-L6. The closing phase of the war was an armored force field day. All of them -- the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th, the 6th, the 7th, the 8th, the 9th, the 10th, the 11th, the 12th, the 13th, the 14th, the 16th, and the 20th -- dashed off the edges of operational maps, slashed into Germany's heart. As uppity as all armored units (they speak pityingly of "the poor goddam in fantry"), they had never forgotten that uppity, onetime armored division commander, George S. Patton, who said (with embellishments) : "You can't move a string of spaghetti by pushing it from the hind end.

" The Thirty-Seventh. Ohio is proud of its Buckeye National Guard Division, which fought in the last war at the Meuse-Argonne and Ypres-Lys. The 37th was federalized in 1940. Its commander was and still is Major General Robert S. Beightler, a civilian soldier, civil engineer and director of Ohio's State Highway Department.

The 37th trained in the heat of the deep South and practiced jungle combat in the Fiji Islands. In the summer of 1943 it landed on New Georgia for its baptism of fire. There the 43rd Division had been fighting a grisly campaign to seize Munda airfield. Men lived in foxholes where infiltrating Japanese sometimes found them and fought them with knives and bare hands.

It was mid-August before the 37th and the 43rd (New England National Guard) could report the airfield secured.

Three months later the 37th went ashore on Bougainville for more of the same, at the beachhead established by the 3rd Marine Division at Empress Augusta Bay. There, with the Americal Division (the only U.S. division without a number), the 37th successfully held an area of dank jungle against a desperate enemy.

Thirteen months later, the 37th landed with MacArthur in Lingayen Gulf to begin the race south for Manila. In three days it covered 50 miles. On its flank raced the spectacular ist Cavalry, rolling on wheels. Beightler swore: "We've fought our way a hundred miles and we won't let those feather merchants beat us in." Through a mid-morning mist the 37th saw Manila at last. The ist Cavalry, plunging ahead to liberate Santo Tomas, did beat them in, but it was the 37th which paddled across the Pasig River to seize the old walled Intramuros, where the vindictive Japs trapped in Manila fought to the end. Then the 37th turned north again to join the 33rd in the capture of Baguio.

First Cavalry. The history of the U.S. frontier is written into the record of the ist Cavalry. Its 8th Regiment was organized in 1866; part of its 7th died with Custer at Little Big Horn. For years, stationed at the century-old post of Fort Bliss, most of the ist Cavalry patrolled the Rio Grande. But the time the old noncoms remember most bitterly was the more recent one when they lost their horses.

As a mechanized outfit the ist Cavalry Division left Fort Bliss in 1943, bound for the Pacific. Its commander was burly Major General Innis Palmer ("Bull") Swift, a veteran spit-&-polish horse soldier ("It doesn't take a damn bit of practice to live like a hog") who made a crack record in combat.

The 1st Cavalry jumped into the war on the Admiralty Islands north of New Guinea. They swept the Japs off Momote Airfield on Los Negros and beat off fanatical counterattacks.

In October 1944, along with the 24th and other divisions, the ist Cavalry went ashore on Leyte. Their new commander, Major General Verne D. Mudge, in the best tradition of Bull Swift, alerted his men against surprise Jap paratroop attacks with the stern words: "The best goddam way for a Jap to commit suicide is to land near a cavalry unit or otherwise horse around with a cavalry unit." The outfit seized Tacloban, later fought next to the veteran 32nd ("Red Arrow") in the bloody, muddy Ormoc pincers operation.

A few months later the ist was ferried onto an enemy shore again--this time on Lingayen Gulf, where three years before the Japs had landed. The 1st's spectacular dash to Manila was only its first job on Luzon. It is still there, routing out Japs.

First Marine. Marines identify themselves less with divisions than with their whole, proud, hardboiled Corps, which has fought in almost every campaign since Commodore Esek Hopkins' expedition to New Providence in the Bahamas, in March 1776. Before this war the Corps was not arranged in divisions. Nevertheless, the history of the Corps in World War II will largely be the story of its divisions, beginning with the ist. This was the outfit chosen to make the first big U.S. attack in World War II--the gambling, amphibious assault on Guadalcanal in August 1942. Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, later Marine Commandant, was the C.O.

The story is well known--how they fought through the torn coconut plantations, crossed the Tenaru River, fought the battle of Lunga Ridge; how they grabbed the airfield and hung on, almost out of supplies, ravaged by malaria, while the Japs poured in reinforcements. That tropical battleground became the focus of a nation's anxiety. If the ist had failed, the damage to U.S. plans and morale would have been incalculable. But the ist hung on. buried its hundreds of dead and counted the enemy dead in the thousands.

Then the 1st was withdrawn for rest and reorganization. It went back into battle in New Britain. But its bloodiest job was still to come. In the early fall of 1944, under the late Major General William H. Rupertus, its men waded ashore from landing craft on Peleliu in the Palau Islands. On Bloody Nose Ridge in caves which were the "incarnate evil of this war," the Japs made their last stand. In stifling heat at least one regiment of the ist took as high as 60% casualties. The 81st Infantry Division ("Wildcat") moved in to relieve them. In three weeks 1,038 of the ist had been killed or were missing, 4,650 wounded. But in less than four weeks of fighting 11,083 Japs lay dead on Peleliu and U.S. forces controlled the sea lanes to the Philippines.

Few veterans of Guadalcanal are still with the ist. Their casualties have equalled almost an entire division. Last week the ist was taking more casualties on Okinawa, 3,350 miles from Henderson Field, only 960 miles from Tokyo. It still had the same twofold mission--take the objective, kill the Japs.

That was the mission of all Marines--the 2nd at Tarawa, the 3rd, 4th, 5th at Iwo Jima. The new 6th Marine Division was also fighting on Okinawa (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS), and the Marines had gallant Army company. Until recently when the 6th Marine Division joined them, all the heaviest fighting in the south had been done by the seasoned 7th, 27th and 77th Divisions, veterans of the Pacific campaign, and the 96th Division, blooded last year on Leyte.

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