No More Phony Maneuvers

One night last week, sergeants' whistles shrilled in Fort Dix. By midnight, trucks and guns were rumbling past the flat Jersey fields; by noon the 44th Division (New York and New Jersey National Guard) was well south of Washington.

Ten-day furloughs had just been summarily postponed. The 44th had got the rush act for a warlike job. It was disposed in the famed cockpit of the Civil War, in Virginia, where Lee, Jackson and Grant had sparred and pounced. The 44th's job: to take Fredericksburg, defended by a regular outfit whose size the 44th did not know.

By week's end the job had been well done. Major General Clifford R. Powell learned by reconnaissance that he had less than a division in front of him, won by turning the enemy's right flank while hammering heftily on the left.

On Sunday, the 44th rested, prowled the Virginia towns, roamed through Fredericksburg's National Military Cemetery, where 15,000 Civil War soldiers (12,000 marked "unknown") lie under prim headstones. But there was no day of rest for the officer responsible for the maneuver: Major General Lesley James McNair, Chief of Staff of the Army's General Headquarters. He headed back to Washington, got busy again in his office, overlooking the campus-like lawn of the Army War College on the Potomac.

Wiry "Whitey" McNair had a lot of other work to do. As head of the Staff that will direct the field armies of the U.S. if war comes, he already had an army to work with. The Second Army was already at maneuvers in central Tennessee. Before the summer was over, every tactical outfit in the Army would have had at least a month of field fighting, made just as realistic as Whitey McNair and his staff knew how to make it.

General McNair became Chief of the G.H.Q. Staff last August, promptly dropped out of public sight. At the War College, where he ran upstairs two at a time, worked 18 hours a day, his job and the job of the Staff was to direct the work of whipping the Army into fighting shape, to plan field exercises, to keep eyes peeled for new training methods, stupid officers, backward outfits. By October, Artilleryman McNair, recent head of the Army's Command and General Staff School, had his staff clicking, had the field forces of the U.S. molded into four field armies, nine tactical corps, Armored Force, Coast Artillery districts, etc.

Through the winter and early spring, General McNair made himself scarce around GHQuarters, batted around the country in Army planes looking over all kinds of outfits. No doctrinaire and no hell-roarer, West Pointer McNair still found plenty of fault, learned plenty about 1941-model U.S. officers and soldiers. By spring he had 21 officers on his staff, each a specialist in his branch, and G.H.Q. inspectors began to drop in on Army posts from Boston to San Diego, to see how things were going.

Meanwhile the staff worked hard at laying out the biggest maneuvers the U.S. Army had ever had. They found that their new boss was an uncompromising stickler for realism. He wanted no more of the old style of maneuver, in which the U.S.'s undermanned, underarmed Army had to pretend that one man with a flag was a tank. He also insisted on "free" maneuver--i.e., battle exercises in which commanders get a job to do, perform it the way they want.

McNair's Manual. "An armistice or rest period during a maneuver--for example, at night--lessens realism and training value," says McNair's manual for maneuver umpires. Similarly he washed out such practices as crossing bridges marked demolished by the enemy forces. In other days, troops waited a proper period (used in real action to bridge a stream), then marched across. From now on they must get around demolished bridges the best way they can--but not across the original bridge. Prohibited too was the old practice of marking open fields and woods as held by forces of one side or the other. "A particular tract," says the manual, "may be used either actually or not at all; it may not be used by assumption or constructively."

For judging fighting effectiveness, McNair's manual left little to umpires' whims. For 1941's maneuvers every officer will know what it means when an attack plane slips up on his outfit while it is marching in column. It means 10% casualty, and it should teach him to keep his eyes open and his men dispersed. Officers know that for every minute an infantry outfit lies in the fire of an enemy battery it loses 1%, that every time a tank gets within 100 yards of infantry soldiers they lose 3%. These and all other foreseeable battle contingencies are laid out, to give a sound rule for judgment of performance. McNair's manual may well be the steppingstone to higher rank for many a bright officer, a millstone round the necks of the dullards.

This week, on George Marshall's recommendation, Lesley McNair was nominated a lieutenant general. Army men marked down General McNair as an officer to keep an eye on at this summer's maneuvers. He has already gone places and may go a lot further.

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