Marching Through Georgia

As the new U.S. Army gets out of blueprints and into being, so the news of it will change, is changing, from news of plans and beginnings, to news of a new thing in existence. Herewith TIME prints an account of 72 hours in the life of a motorized division.

North of Abbeville, where the blacktop road bites into the red clay of eastern Alabama like a suture in raw flesh, the Fourth Division's Reconnaissance Troop halted. They climbed stiffly down from armored scout cars spaced a precise 25 yards apart, pushed goggles back from windburned, dusty faces, dug in reefer pockets for cigarets. Motorcyclists propped their machines on stands, squinted appraisingly at engines. The long-legged, flat-backed Troop Commander brushed oil-stains from his face with a reddened hand and walked back along the column, to see how things were.

Since daybreak the Reconnaissance Troop had been pushing north at a steady 30 m.p.h. Two hours behind them the rest of the division—infantry, artillery, engineers and miscellaneous outfits—were pounding along at the standard speed. Here was a chance for a two-hour rest. The division commander, Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall, had ordered the troop to wait for the division north of Abbeville, go on into Fort Benning, Ga., in tight column.

The troop ate lunch—thick sandwiches packed in paper bags by the cook for the midday halt. A few bought canned stuff from the general store at the roadside, walked back to the cars with the shoulder-hitching, spraddle-legged walk that is proper affectation for cavalrymen even when they are motorized. The General's O.D. sedan whirled around the bend and pulled up alongside the store porch. General Fredendall, a short, lean-flanked infantryman, stopped to chat with newsmen. "A good looking outfit," remarked one of the newsmen. The General's reddened cheeks wrinkled in a grin. "Good enough," said he.

The Fourth was a new outfit, put together last summer after having been inactive since World War I, the first of the regular Army's nine streamlined divisions to be fully motorized. This march, and everything the Fourth would do hereafter, was trail-blazing for the Army in a new tactical field in which infantrymen ride to battle and get out to walk only when it is time to fight.

The march had begun two days before. Few minutes after midnight the Reconnaissance Troop had pulled out of the pine-shadowed reservation at Benning, was far south when the rest of the outfit turned out of bed at 3 a.m. and got ready to move. By dawn the whole outfit was rumbling south toward Florida on parallel roads. In approach-to-battle formation, trucks rumbled 100 yards apart; machine gunners stood with their eyes on the skies getting the habit of watching for planes; soldiers of the three infantry regiments rode in trucks (soon to be replaced by 603 troop carriers with caterpillar treads). Each infantry outfit was followed by a battalion of artillery with 75-mm. guns (soon to be replaced by the new 105-mm. howitzers). Farther back came the division's big guns, a battalion of bigmouthed, ugly 155s. Like the other artillerymen, its gun crews rode on big trucks (soldiers call them "prime movers").