Jarman's Junglemen

On Gatun Lake, in the Panama Canal Zone, floats a little fleet of motorboats. They are blue-grey, stubby, old--so old, some of them, that they are kept lake-worthy mainly by the heroic ingenuity of their soldier crews. The soldiers who run the boats call them the third-ocean fleet. They are the supply boats of one of the finest, least-known outfits in the U.S. Army: the Panama Coast Artillery Command.

Each day, from docks along the lakeside, the stubby boats chutter off with men and supplies for the listening posts, anti-aircraft gun batteries, searchlight positions which stud the green, hot hills around the lake.

The number and exact location of these guardian outposts, scattered along the Panama Canal, are close-held Army secrets. But any foreign sailor, gliding through the Canal on a freighter, can see occasional clusters of tents or barracks in the hills, can even see the snouts of guns against the sky. Any Japanese or German strategist, studying maps of the Canal, knows that the guns are there to guard some of the most valuable military targets in the world: the locks in the Canal itself, and great earthen Gatun Dam (105 ft. above sea level and 400 ft. thick at the water level), where a break would empty the lake, dry up and close the Canal.

Wherever the guns, searchlights and watch posts are, there are soldiers burned hard and brown by the tropic sun, toughened by war with the jungle. For, when the Coast Artillery anti-aircraftmen in the Canal Zone were ordered into the hills last year, they had no place except jungle to go.

They had to learn to use machetes, cut their trails through matted tree and vine. They packed tents, food, guns, building materials, ammunition into the steaming wastes by boat, truck, muleback, and shanks' mare. They slashed down forests, cut away hilltops and hillsides to make sites for their guns and quarters. They built their barracks, from foundation to rooftop.

Army engineers eventually cut roads to the main positions; signalmen laid telephone cables. Otherwise, the artillerymen did it all themselves.

Boss of this stupendous job was Major General Sanderford Jarman, a hulking heap of energy and ambition who fired railway guns at the Germans in World War I, afterward had much to do with developing the intricate directors which guide the fire of modern anti-aircraft guns.

General Jarman has a reputation for being one of a rare Army breed: a first-rate Army politician who is also a first-rate soldier. His main job perforce is at his desk in headquarters at Quarry Heights (Balboa), but he gets out often into the field, in rainy season can wade and ride the muddy trails with the toughest of his men (see cut).

"Sandy" Jarman has under him some of the toughest specimens in the U.S. Army. Toughest of the tough is Colonel Homer R. Oldfield, commander of a brigade of shore and anti-aircraft gunners on the Atlantic side of the Canal.

Mahogany-hued, leather-hided Colonel Oldfield is, among other valuable things, one of the most skillful "robbers" in the Army. By that word of praise Army men mean that he can find more ways to get needed materials for his outfit than a regiment of M.P.s and quartermasters could possibly guard.

Example: when Colonel Oldfield's men were short of lumber for their barracks, he sent them by night to strip the hulk of an old ship, forlorn on the shore of Gatun Lake.

Men in the Canal Zone jungle are supposed to get two three-day leaves each month. Many of the men prefer to stay on at their remote stations; sometimes, for two months at a stretch, do not visit the dives of Panama City and Cristobal. Those who go more often are called "Blue Moon Kings" (for the sickly blue drinks which are commonly served to the unqueenly hostesses).

In the jungle, supply boats, trucks or pack mules call once a day, unless something happens--each station keeps a 30-day supply of canned food on hand. Once every week or two, traveling crews bring in 16-millimeter movies (on show recently: the seven-year-old Count of Monte Cristo). There is beer in the station canteens. And there is always work--back-breaking work, digging gun pits, opening new trails, building--and gun drill.

For the young lieutenants who command the larger positions, there is invaluable training in field command. For the squads of three and five men in the smaller outposts (O.P.s), there is only such company as they can find in themselves, their telephone, the jungle, the tropic night.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.