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").

On the flanks of the column, at its head, directing traffic at crossroads, worked the division's Military Police. They rode, like the division's officers, in brand-new, four-wheel-drive command cars which can do anything but climb a wall or carry their passengers in comfort. Their high bodies were the swirling centers of small and continuous tornadoes that whipped their riders' eyes, bit through heavy clothing. Officers and men wondered aloud why someone in the War Department had put a 1918 model body on a 1941 chassis.

By early afternoon the head of the column had pulled into Panama City, Fla. M.P.s pointed the way to a spreading, underbrushed, sandy plot picked for bivouac. The trucks rumbled in and men poured out of them, lined up in company areas, set up shelter tents. Within an hour the camp had sprung into life. Hungry soldiers sniffed the odors of chow, coming from gasoline stoves which the cooks had started far back on the road. By 5 o'clock, the early arrivals were eating, squatting in front of their tents with their mess kits. By dark the last outfit was in. The signal company had its generator going and the camp was alight.

Next day was Sunday and rest day, except for a platoon of infantrymen, two crews of artillerymen who went to the beach to demonstrate small-scale maneuvers for photographers. Florida's west-coast sand was tough going for the trucks but they pulled through it. Only a big 155 balked, and sank into the beach. Half a hundred infantry and artillerymen took up that problem (see cut, p. 23), worked it out, and hitched it back to its prime mover in a jiffy.

Sunday night the town was bare of soldiers; they had sense enough to turn in early, be ready for the march back home. At reveille (4:30) the camp was already astir. Tents disappeared as if a single big hand had picked them up. The columns began to move out under a cloud-dead sky before it was light.

Now, as the Reconnaissance Troop climbed back into its trucks again north of Abbeville, it was past noon. It had begun to rain. The troop's motorcyclists snorted off up the road, the combat cars slogged after them. Closed up, the main column began to pass--infantrymen clutching their rifles, gunners emptyhanded, with cannon rolling behind, engineers with their trailer-carried assortment of compressed-air outfits, bulldozers, other equipment for smoothing the path of the division's fighting men.

By dark the division was back in Benning, with roughly a 500-mile round trip, completed in three days, one of which had been given to rest. In the division areas the barracks windows were alight, the mess halls bustling. In the motor parks, men laughed and shouted at each other as soldiers do when they know they have done a good job. Among them circulated a few of the division's new set of 5,300 draftees, soon to be ready to join the outfit as tactical soldiers after a twelve-week training course. This time they had been left at home, but on the next long march they would go along. By midsummer, when the Fourth Division got its troop carriers and the rest of its equipment, with better than 16,000 officers and men and the fastest moving equipment, with the heaviest fire power, that a U.S. infantry division has ever carried into battle, the Fourth would be ready to march through Georgia or Armageddon itself.

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