North of Tennessee's meandering Duck River, where rolling meadows and woods break sharply into commanding hills, 55,000 U.S. fighting men last week worked at war. A few weeks before, frank General George Marshall had said that the U.S. Army was still in the high-school stage. In Lieut. General Ben Lear's Second Army, three divisions were far enough along in their courses to be sent to the Tennessee laboratory to show what they had learned, and study further in the hard school of field maneuver.
Last week, after ten days of set exercises in the 600-mile-square area south of Nashville, they met in mimic battle—the Fifth (Regular) and 27th (New York National Guard) Divisions on one side, the 30th Division (Tennessee, Georgia, North and South Carolina) and the 153rd Infantry Regiment (Arkansas) on the other.
A warm-up for six months of maneuvers that will put up to 472,000 troops into battle at one time (during September in Louisiana), the Second Army's first fight was no more than a quiz; the final examinations will come later. Army officers were only incidentally interested in the fact that the numerically weaker Red Army (30th Division) backed up before the Blues. They were vitally interested in what signs the Second Army's troops showed of acquiring the sheen and polish of first-class fighting men.
Gibes & Gusto. Making allowances for inevitable shortages of equipment and for the fact that the maneuver season was just beginning, they saw a realistic, competent job of battle craft.
Dusty trucks, with drivers' rifles in holsters alongside the steering wheels, rumbled along rocky roads and through field and wood without traffic tie-ups. Supply functioned without a major hitch. Motorcycle dispatch riders, powdered with dust that turned their blue denim white, clattered into well-hidden command posts with battle messages that got prompt handling. In forward areas, tireless doughboys, in superb physical condition, moved forward, retired, swung down the roadsides with a minimum of stragglers.
In one 24-hour period during the week, infantry soldiers of the 2yth slogged over 25 miles of road, wood and field without showing exhaustion, were still able to gibe at less active outfits as they pulled into bivouac.
The Second Army's men made camp in afternoon showers, and by night without lights—in creek valleys, on hills, in woods. They slept on the ground, ate good food from spotless mess kits, with gusto. Every creek was a bathtub where bronzed soldiers bathed, a washtub where they laundered clothes and hung them on tree limbs to dry. In bivouac and on long halts, barbers broke out clippers and shears, went to work on soldiers' close-cropped polls. If condition, cleanliness and a kind of jeering morale were the only measures of good outfits, the Second Army needed nothing more.