Red Necks

The U.S. Army has grown 548% since 1936, but one branch of it, the Engineers--which last week stood a review on the shadeless, red-dusty parade ground of Fort Belvoir, Va., 15 miles south of Washington on the bank of the Potomac--has grown 1,160%.

Best-educated and most versatile branch of the Army is the Corps of Engineers. Officered by scholastic top-rankers from West Point and by graduates of such crack schools as M.I.T., Purdue and Caltech, the Engineers like to brag that they can do anything. In peacetime they build dams and -levees for power and flood control, think nothing of odd jobs like filling top-flight posts in WPA, the Civil Aeronautics Administration. In wartime they do a thousand jobs behind the lines, pave the way for infantry and tanks up front, often use shooting irons as well as shovels. Rednecked fighting men as well as skilled technicians, the Engineers are highly respected by other men in uniform.

The 8,000 men who last week strode smartly past Belvoir's commandant, wiry, fox-faced Colonel Roscoe C. Crawford, were more Engineers than anyone had seen together since World War I. Only two weeks before, Belvoir's garrison had been 3,000. Within a month it will be 10,000, and more will shortly be training at the Corps's second replacement training center at Fort Leonard Wood, near Rolla, Mo. By July 1, when the Army has hit a strength of 1,418,000, there will be 91,000 Engineers.

Marching in Belvoir's review was many an oldtimer. They were the ones who knew, and who dinned that knowledge into the recruits, that Surveyor George Washington was father of the Corps of Engineers, that Sylvanus Thayer and Lee and Goethals and MacArthur were members of the Corps. A few could recall the day in November 1918 when the famed Second Division lined up with its Engineer regiment in the honor position on the right of the line. The division cheered mightily when the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre was pinned on the Engineers' colors. That honor was for a day at Soissons when the red necks drove six miles into enemy territory, captured 2,700 prisoners.

At Belvoir, as at other training stations, Engineer recruits get their primary soldiering in big doses, soon pass on to specialized training. Some will join combat regiments and battalions, will go into battle with infantry and artillery, lugging in motor trains a fantastic assortment of bulldozers, water-purification outfits, pneumatic drills, earth-borers. Some will join ponton (Engineer for pontoon) companies, will learn to sweat hip-deep in rivers, laying bridges for the infantry. Others will go to topographical (mapmaking) outfits, to railroad-operating companies, to general service regiments, to camouflage battalions, dump-truck companies, water-supply battalions, shop companies, depot companies.

Before and after Belvoir's review, the center's recruits worked hard at their trades. On pine-rimmed Gunston Cove, a ponton outfit in dungarees and hip boots got its first look at its equipment, blinked when its officer-instructor said: "If you aren't handy with it, one day you may get shot." Farther down the shore, a purification outfit ran off drinking water, checked its chlorinated product in test tubes. Off in the woods camoufleurs practiced hiding barracks buildings under false roofs, pine boughs, strips of brown flannel. Elsewhere on Belvoir's rolling, wooded 10,000 acres, Engineers practiced bridging ditches for infantry. Marching along the roads with rifles slung, they passed experimental pillboxes, saw evidences of other Engineers' work. The pillboxes were scarred, blackened and upended, by grenades, flamethrower and demolition explosives. Like other landmarks at Belvoir, the pillboxes tell the marching men that an Engineer never knows what he'll have to do next.

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