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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."