The Long Grey Line

Out of the barracks sally-ports, sudden as buckshot, burst cluster after cluster of one of the best-disciplined groups of young men in the world. Uniformed in grey and white, studded with shiny brass and topped with towering, plumed "tarbuckets," they fell in quickly, wheeled sharply, flowed in one trim mass onto the broad green Plain that tops the granite-cliff shores of the Hudson at West Point.

Flanking the Plain, under the shade of the great elms, stood excited parents and friends. Among them, more subdued but more deeply moved, stood an older part of the Long Grey Line of West Point graduates. At a booming command, some 4,800 white-gloved hands snapped 2,400 rifles to "present arms." Front & center, to the strains of Alma Mater, marched the 853 members of the class of 1945, the largest in West Point history. Then the Corps, company by company, wheeled and passed in review, rank on rigid rank saluting with eyes right, and being saluted in turn by doffed hats, until the last line vanished back through the sallyports.

In West Point's traditional June Week, no event means more than the simple, spectacular Graduation Parade that thus took place one afternoon this week. To relatives and sweethearts it was the grand climax to the grinding life they had been hearing about for months or years. To plebes it meant the end of their sorest year and the balm of recognition by upperclassmen. To the graduating class it marked a poignant end and a challenging beginning. And to the Long Grey Line, some of them stooped in mufti, it symbolized the yearly renewal of a strong, 143-year-old tradition to which they had devoted the best part of their lives.

In Washington, on the very same day, an event took place which made the display at West Point more broadly significant than ever. In the first of a series of hearings, the House's special Postwar Military Policy Committee officially opened the great debate on universal military training. Favored by 69.6% of the U.S. people (according to this month's FORTUNE poll), is the Army's proposal to require all able-bodied young men to serve one year in training under arms--with West Point graduates as the chief teachers. If defeated, this program will probably be replaced by a vast expansion of the standing army and the reserve officer training program. Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain: West Point, the backbone of the U.S. Army, henceforth will have a greater influence on peacetime U.S. living and learning than ever before.

Esteemed through six major wars and scores of minor ones, in peacetime the Army influence has always been suspect. Yet the sight of West Point on parade is always heart-quickening.. One good and typical reason could be found in the young stalwart who led the parade this week. Chosen by the Tactical Officers last June to command the Corps of Cadets during his final year, First Cadet Captain Robert Evans ("Woody") Woods was not necessarily the brainiest (he was 605th at graduation), the most personable, nor the most popular member of his class. He was chosen because he best combined the qualities that West Point stands for.

Measles & Music. The story of how he got that way begins almost 25 years ago in the small, glassmaking town of Corning, N.Y., where Woody was born & bred. Until he was six, he had a normal American childhood--measles and whooping cough included. Then his mother died, and his father, who spent most of his time at the glass works, hired a kindly widowed housekeeper to look after Woody and his two older sisters.

Among other things, music kept the Woods family close. To his sisters' cello and piano and his father's crisp baritone, Woody soon added a competent violin, heard at many a social and musicale. All four of them sang in the choir of the Episcopal church, where the boy became an acolyte. By preference Woody spent his afternoons hunting and fishing, his evenings playing with the Italian and Polish kids in the neighborhood. Once he took his father's best rifle without asking and banged it up disgracefully, and once he threw a snowball into an automobile that belonged to the vice president of the glass works.

Music brought Woody his first uniform, as trumpeter in the school band. Music also got him into the only big fight of his life to date. Member of a dance band for seven years, he was challenged during an intermission one night by a bully who insisted on fooling with the instruments. Brawny from hours of sand-lot football, Woody invited the challenger out, led him to a quiet spot behind the Episcopal church, flattened him. The bully later became a boxing champion at Cornell--and one of Woody's best friends.

Love at First Sight. Finishing high school with a good B average, a name as a musician, and a bigger name as an athlete (track and football), Woody turned down a bid from a conservatory of music to accept an "academic-athletic" scholarship at Bucknell. Until then, except for normal hero-worship, the military inspiration in his life was limited to: 1) his father's record as a corporal in the Corning home guards during World War I; and 2) a small army of tin soldiers given him by his Uncle John (who had once had the idea of manufacturing tin soldiers for a livelihood).

But one Saturday Bucknell's freshman football team, starring Halfback Robert Woods, went up to play West Point's plebes. The massive solidity of the granite buildings, the lavish green setting, the breath-taking view of the Hudson River, and above all the precision of movement everywhere, made the visitors' eyes pop.

For Woody it was love at first sight.

The boy decided that the Army was the life for him. But the Army almost turned out to be the Navy. His Congressman's allotment of West Point appointments was gone, but there was one left for Annapolis. Woody got it, made the football team and ran the 220-yd. dash in track. But he had no ambition whatever to become a sailor. That lack of incentive, plus his sports, spelled his finish at the Naval Academy. At the end of his second year he flunked a final exam in mathematics, and was promptly dismissed.

Woody went straight to West Point's football coach, Lieut. Colonel Earl Blaik, and found a sympathetic ear. After boning, he passed his qualifying exams with 100 in math. Colonel Blaik found a Georgia Congressman who was willing to swap Woody's Congressman a current vacancy for one the following year. By this time it was the eve of Woody's 22nd birthday, when he would become too old for West Point entry. There was still no official notice of his appointment. Gambling on the chance that it had been sent direct to West Point, Woody and his father begged & borrowed gasoline from neighbors, set off on the 240-mile trip at 5:30 that evening.

The road was foggy most of the way. In Newburgh, eleven miles north of West Point, they were stopped about 11:30 for speeding. Explaining, they got an escort instead of a ticket. After a final pause at the West Point gate, they rushed to the quarters of the waiting Adjutant. There on the doorstep Woody identified himself, raised his right hand, took the oath as a cadet of the United States Military Academy -- just eight minutes before the dead line.

The House That Thayer Built. Few West Pointers have made so dramatic an entrance or so notable an exit as First Captain Robert Woods. But most of what happened to Woody in the three-year interim was what happens to every cadet. He was rolled, ground, grooved and calibered into shape by the same basic regimen that West Point has followed for more than a century. This process for molding military youth was set up by one of the neglected great men of U.S. education, a graduate of West Point as well as of Dartmouth. His name was Sylvanus Thayer.

When Brevet Major Thayer was named Superintendent of West Point in 1817, the 15 -year-old Academy was rotten with nepotism, sycophancy, bad teaching, worse discipline. When Thayer arrived, all the faculty was under arrest, and shambling, dictatorial Captain Alden ("Old Pewter") Partridge was holding the post singlehanded.

First, Thayer got rid of Partridge -- no easy job. Soon after, he succeeded in dismissing the son of a major general for returning late from vacation. Thus began the impartial, ironclad discipline that was to shape West Point's growth.

Under Thayer, West Point became the first and model U.S. engineering school.

Thayer also inaugurated: 1) high stand ards of admission; 2) the breaking up of classes into small sections so that instructors could speed the bright cadets and worry along with the dullards; 3) daily recitations and grades for all cadets; 4) a Spartan life; 5) hikes by the Corps to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, to in spire public confidence; 6) a cadet officer hierarchy, based solely on merit; 7) a strong community of spirit, based on absolute honesty. By the time Thayer resigned in 1833, West Point had earned international renown.

"Hell on the Hudson." West Point rules and traditions struck Plebe Robert Woods like a tidal wave on the morning after his mad dash to get there. Reporting to the cadet adjutant, he got this greeting: "Wipe that smile off, Mr. Dumbjohn, or whatever your name is! Brace up! Suck up your guts! More! Get rid of that gabardine coat! Get those shoulders back! Pull your chin in! Further! Further! Where 're you from? The Navy? What part of the Navy? Oh, Annapolis, eh? . . ." The next few minutes of scorn were enough to wither an asbestos monkey.

Woody swiftly learned that an order from a superior carried "the impact of a rifle shot" -- and that everyone is superior to a plebe except "the Superintendent's dog, the Commandant's cat, the waiters in the Mess Hall, the Hell Cats (buglers), and all the Admirals in the whole -- Navy." For the rest of the morning and all afternoon, indignity was piled on indignity. Between affronts, Woody lugged bed clothes, changed white shirt for grey, shut tled to & from the cadet store with supplies, learned about demeanor and demerits, drew a rifle, drilled, ran, crept, crawled, fell in but never out. When he finally stretched out in Beast Barracks that night, he understood exactly what they had meant at Annapolis when they spoke of "Hell on the Hudson." How Many Days, O Catiline? In Beast Barracks, plebes are confined for two weeks; they are then supposed to be sufficiently polished to be fit company for the rest of the Corps. In their first six weeks they receive highly concentrated basic training. At nearby Pine Camp, where cadets go for summer training, Woody and his classmates served as buck privates in the annual Corps maneuvers, learned their lessons from some of the 2,000-odd veteran officers and noncoms of West Point's permanent detail.

September brought new woes. Plebe Woods lived mostly in a braced position, turned all his corners sharply, rose ten minutes earlier (at 5:50) than upperclassmen and studied each evening until 10:30, sat on the front half of his chair at mess, called out the minutes before assembly, walked sentry duty, ran mes sages, carried mail. And always he stood ready to reel off the prescribed answers to upperclassmen's badgering questions.

Sample question: "How many days [until June], 0 Catiline?" The answer (to be delivered in a military manner): "[The exact number of] days and a butt, O noble Catiline, and may the great God in Heaven speed them more quickly by the great Corporal Jupiter, and may the coming days be more joyous, but not for me, sir! May your classes be no soirees, and your sorrows negligible, and on your leave may there be some beautiful femmes, some canoes, lots of skags [cigarets], full moons, and plenty of Coca-Cola; hot darn--but not for me, sir!" Woody seldom flubbed the answers, behaved so well otherwise that he was never "awarded the privilege" of walking the Area on Saturday afternoon.

For Mind, Body, Soul. Except for such first-year indignities, Woody's routine was largely the same throughout the three years of his war-speeded course. Over West

Point's 16,000-odd acres, in & out of the old crenelated buildings that house the very newest equipment, he attended a prescribed roster of classes, drilled with the weapons of all branches of service, generally followed the routine set for all cadets (except Air Forces candidates, who spend much of their final year earning their wings at nearby Stewart Field).

In autumn, Woody more than satisfied the athletics requirement by playing varsity football (thus becoming the only man ever to play for both Annapolis and West Point). In winter he went out for indoor track and in spring for outdoor track and baseball, meanwhile learning to box, fence, wrestle. On Saturdays he regularly at tended the hops. At one of them, two years ago, he met pretty, blond Geraldine Harrington of East Orange, N.J., whom, in honored West Point tradition, he was to marry this week, the day after graduation. On Sundays he attended Episcopal services in the Academy's beautiful Gothic chapel. (Separate services are held for Catholics, Jews, Christian Scientists.) Two years of this grueling testing and training marked him as a man who was able to command, willing to obey, eager to serve, quick to learn, honest, strong, able -- in sum, a good soldier. For these reasons he was chosen First Captain.

The Liberal Arts of Soldiering. Judging by the result, the academic training that Woody received is, within its military limits, one of the most successful in the world. One reason is West Point's relent less system of selection: although entering students are carefully chosen, 25% of them are normally weeded out during the first year. Another is the serious and specific unity of purpose among both teachers and students. Biggest reason is that the teaching hits what it aims at.

Well aware of modern war's complexity, West Point does not attempt to turn out a finished soldier. Specialization is left to Army branch schools, civilian graduate schools, and the service graduate schools, including the General Staff School at Leavenworth and the Army War College in Washington. West Point is the liberal arts college of U.S. soldiering.

Mathematics and engineering form the bulk (55%) of the normal curriculum.

But 29% of classroom hours are spent on English, languages, history, economics, international relations. Most of the critics of West Point's "narrowness" are old-timers who do not know how much its teaching has been liberalized in recent years. Most departments keep well up on civilian programs in teaching, make many innovations of their own. The out standing example is the department of economics, government and history, headed by brilliant Colonel Herman Beukema (pronounced Bew'-kuma). In the touchy field of international relations, he encourages both instructors and students to speak their opinions freely. His textbooks are kept so thoroughly updated that the new est (covering events up to January 1, 1945) are still unbound.

In 1942, West Point's present Superintendent, Major General Francis H. Wilby, invited criticism of the shortened curriculum from a board of consultants including Presidents Ernest M. Hopkins of Dart mouth and Karl T. Compton of M.I.T.

Reported the board: "[We were] greatly impressed by the thoroughness of the instruction, the alertness of the students, and the excellence in balance between the discussion allowed the students . . . and the more formal aspect of recitation and instruction. . . . There is no justification for the popular conception that West Point instruction is rigid, stereotyped, and regimented."

What Is Character? Yet classroom proficiency comes second at West Point. First is the intangible called character. If you ask West Point graduates to define it, they will usually mention the Academy's motto: Duty, Honor, Country. Pressed further, they may describe it as the pilot light that touches off the spirit of a citizen army, or the force that inspires in that army at war an overwhelming sense of obligation to win.

West Point character is perhaps best understood through the manner in which it is produced. The hazing of plebes, bright answers and all, is designed to reduce all newcomers to a common denominator of brotherhood and then raise them up with a healthy respect for their superiors. Citizens who share the ancient U.S. fear of a large standing army, with its threat of military dictatorship, may take comfort in the knowledge that nowhere is the civilian authority of Congress so studiously--even breathlessly--respected as at West Point.

It is too early to assay the quality of U.S. military leadership in World War II, as history will assay it. But the U.S. is winning this war, as it has won all others in its history, and 640 out of 1,497 of the Army's present general officers are West Pointers.* First Captain (now 2nd Lieut.) Robert Woods will take his place in battle with the Long Grey Lines as soon as he has finished a course in the Infantry School at Fort Benning. Whether he will follow in the brilliant footsteps of such First Captains as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing and Douglas MacArthur, only time can tell. Whether he does or not, he is clearly a good man to have on our side.

*Chief among the notable non-West Pointers: General of the Army George Marshall, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute.

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