Army & Navy - Lessons of the Cumberland

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What the Generals Said. At each critique, the tired, dirty men of Lieut. General Ben Lear's Second Army waited to hear whether the generals thought they were ready for combat (TIME, Oct. 19). Last week the generals said yes, with qualifications:

Said small, keen Lieut. General Lesley

J. ("Whitey") McNair, ground forces chief who came down from Washington to see part of the finale in a jeep: "Yes, I have seen combat-worthy units on these maneuvers. Not all of them are combat worthy, of course."

After last year's Louisiana maneuvers he criticized leadership and discipline (TIME, Sept. 29, 1941). This year he gave a pat on the back. Lear's forces have lost many officers to new units in formation (U.S. division increase in one year: 27 to 72). But leadership, said McNair, is excellent among the higher officers. As for discipline: "Last year, the maneuvers stopped when men gathered around a pop vendor. They filled themselves full of pop, then they couldn't march or fight. I haven't seen any of that this year."

The men were harder than last year, but "what they need is whatever it takes to keep them going when they are cold, wet, tired and hungry." He recommended marching five miles an hour (which requires some running) with full pack. One outfit showed General McNair results; on a problem lasting three nights and four days without letup, hungry, cold and tired, the unit marched 35 miles with full pack in one day.

Last week General Lear urged his commanders to "kill the academic and unimaginative outlook ... so to train their subordinates that they are physically and emotionally prepared for the realities of war. . . . We will not find any Japanese in the southwestern Pacific who will permit us to go along with our eyes closed, our guns unloaded and our weapons buried beneath a mass of bedding rolls." He illustrated :

^ He found a captain and a soldier in a jeep taking breakfast to an outpost of four soldiers five miles away. "I think," said the General, "he should have been inspecting his command and had that task accomplished by one of the cooks. . . ."

> In Hartsville one morning General Lear found a sergeant and twelve men, unaware of an enemy battalion near by. The sergeant was lost and was doing nothing about it. "I emphatically told him to go and look for a fight."

> In a tent at the command post, the general found the whole staff having an animated conversation while the radio, unheeded, gave essential information.

>But the standout virtue of troops throughout the maneuvers was the initiative of small, isolated units (see cut, p. 68). One OCS graduate with only eight men captured 18 vehicles and a tank in one morning. Another small unit raided the Blues through an entire problem, was never captured.

All hands praised the men for "doing their damndest," for their serious attention to camouflage, their slit trenches. There was praise for the improvement in supply, for the way the generals profited from mistakes, for the way the men kept themselves and their machines off the roads. Lay observers, remembering Bataan, thought the first burst of real fire would cure lots of minor troubles.