Forces on the Ground

(See Cover)

From a pine-covered knoll near Hof (pop. 60,000) in central Germany, five G.I.s of Bravo Company. 2nd U.S. Armored Cavalry, last week stood watchful guard on a section of the Iron Curtain. Staff Sergeant William S. Nolen Jr.. 21. of Mt. Holly. N.C.. in charge of this pinpoint on 500 miles of West German frontier, had his .30-cal. machine guns dug in. his field telephone ready at hand. Beyond the barbed wire and strip of plowed land that marked the border lay the peaceful green hills of East Germany's Thuringia—and as close as 20 miles beyond that, as Sergeant Nolen knew, lay outposts of an elite, nuclear-armed Soviet army group of 20 to 25 divisions and more than 5.000 modern tanks. Nolen's key weapon was his telephone: 30 minutes after his warning, five crack U.S. divisions (3rd and 4th Armored, 3rd, 8th. 24th Infantry) would be on their way to prepared combat positions, backed up by nuclear-armed missiles and planes.

Sergeant Nolen squinted through his spotterscope at two Communist observation towers on the opposite side, talked to a TIME correspondent about the 19 East Germans who recently escaped into his sector. "Gives me the creeps, this place." muttered one of Nolen's men. "What a helluva life it must be on the other side."

"To Protect People." Thus last week was the close-in "engagement" of U.S. forces keeping the peace, as it had for a dozen years (while some pundits talked as though peace could come only by disengagement). Thus also was the rifle-toting U.S. Army, frequently the stepchild among the military headline-getters, spotlighted as it continued its patrol of the Communist land frontiers against the backdrop of the Berlin crisis.

In Washington one of the Army's most persuasive and respected generals took the occasion of Berlin to spell out for the Senate Armed Services Committee his modern version of an old Army land doctrine. "To protect people on this earth you need to hold the land with forces on the ground." said General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer. the Army's Vice Chief of Staff last fortnight. "The addition of nuclear or thermonuclear types of weapons does not in any way replace the requirements for good manpower." The Senators listened with close attention, later confirmed President Eisenhower's appointment of General Lemnitzer to the Army Chief of Staff's job, to succeed General Maxwell Taylor July 1.

"Who's He?" Heavy-set (5 ft. 11 in.. 190 Ibs.). "Lem" Lemnitzer. 59, son of a Pennsylvania shoemaker, has spent his 39 years since West Point getting jobs done and going away before anybody noticed he was there. Never the dramatic sort to pack pistols like Patton or a hand grenade like Ridgway, he was the workhorse officer who planned Allied landings in North Africa in 1942, negotiated the German surrender in Italy in 1945, organized Defense Department's NATO rearmament program (1948-50), commanded U.N. forces in the Far East (1955-57), was marked for the top job years ago. Yet his name was always widely met with a standard response: "Who's he?"