Battle of Rancocas

ARMY & NAVY

A hostile army, 300,000 strong, landed on the New Jersey coast near Barnegat and took the field against the U. S. Army. The invaders pushed forward to Rancocas Creek where they encountered a defensive force of 200,000. A fierce engagement on a 40-mile front ensued. The U. S. centre was badly broken. Mt. Holly and Camp Dix fell. Trenton was bombed to bits. Philadelphia and New York lay open to attack. Then with supreme courage and vigor the U. S. forces rallied and in a fine display of open warfare threw themselves savagely upon the enemy, driving him back and back. All losses were recovered. A "lemon squeezer" movement was being applied to the invaders when an armistice ended the "war," leaving 43,750 dead and wounded on the battlefield.

Such was the great battle of Rancocas Creek, staged last week as a theoretical military problem. The Red "invaders" were non-existent except for a handful of officers to outline their positions. The Blue "defenders" were composed of 6,000 flesh-and-blood officers and men drawn from the regular Army, the National Guards of New York and New Jersey, the organized Reserve, all under the command of Major General Hanson Edward Ely, commander of the Second Corps Area. Except for the activities of the staff officers of 32 commands, of telegraph, telephone and typewriter operators, of motorcycle messengers, chauffeurs and carrier pigeons, all the fighting was done on large maps with little red and blue flags moved craftily about.

The cost of the four-day battle to the U. S. was $18,000, most of which went to farmers for the use of their fields, barns, outhouses. Some of the husbandmen unintentionally contributed to war-time realism when they tripped over military telegraph wires strung through their hayfields, fetched axes and hacked apart the communication lines of the defending force.

General Charles Pelot Summerall, Chief of Staff, paid the "war" a fleeting visit, inspected the field of action. Said he: "This war game constitutes the biggest and best tactical campaign ever waged on American soil by the U. S. Army." Just what it all meant strategically he left to the War College to study and say.

Reserve officers and National Guardsmen were aquiver with excitement. On the night before the big Red drive, few if any of them got any sleep. Brig.-General Cornelius Vanderbilt, commanding the 154th Brigade of the New York Guard, waited bravely for the attack at the Wrightstown-Lakewood crossroads. When along toward dawn it did not occur, he rolled up in his blanket and took a 60-minute catnap on the roadside.

A Red propaganda sheet called the Daily Ananias was rained down upon the Blue Forces. To break enemy morale, it stated: "Blues Poison More Wells," "Prisoners Surrender to Reds Voluntarily," "Blues Fear Red Bayonets," "Mutinous Blue Soldiers Hang Colonel."

After four days of savage combat, General Ely led his general officers into a cinema house at Bordentown, explained what had been done, told them their performance "smacked of military genius." He added that the U. S. should have a trained emergency army of 200,000 in the Second Corps Area for instant military service, bemoaned the fact that the U. S. has no such force now.

Like all such maneuvers, the Battle of Rancocas Creek, observers agreed, will be detailed to Congress next winter as an argument to show the need for increased appropriations for national defense.