Young Man in a Hurry

During the Louisiana maneuvers of September 1941, which saw the dawn of the present U.S. Army, Lieut. General Lesley J. McNair was talking to a friend about some necessary weeding out of generals gone to seed. The Army, he said confidently, could find the necessary younger officers to replace the spent militarists.

"Take this young fellow here," he said, nodding at Major Alfred Maximilian Gruenther. "He is capable of a much higher command."

Probably not even General McNair dreamed that the thin, slight officer with the booming voice would swing into higher commands so swiftly. Made a lieutenant colonel during the maneuvers, he was taken up by Colonel Dwight David Eisenhower, who made him Deputy Chief of Staff of the Third Army. Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Al Gruenther became a colonel; last year he got his brigadier general's star, went to England with Eisenhower.

Last week, when his chief reached a full general's rank, Gruenther became the youngest major general in the U.S. Army. He will be 44 next month.

Artillerist Gruenther first came to public attention eleven years ago, when the public was more interested in bridge games than in soldiers. Lieut. Gruenther used to drive the 35 miles daily from West Point to Manhattan to referee bloodthirsty bridge games between Ely Culbertson and Sidney Lenz. Early in the morning, at the end of the matches, before the reporters could write their 2,000 daily words, he tumbled on to a mattress in the back of his car and fell sound asleep while Mrs. Gruenther drove back to the Military Academy. By 8 o'clock he was teaching chemistry to cadets.

A man in a hurry, Al Gruenther entered West Point in 1917, graduated eleven days before the Armistice with the "joker" class which then had to go back to school after it had been commissioned'. Always an exciting fellow, he was the cause of his editor-father's failure to get out the Platte Center, Neb. newspaper the week he was born in 1899.

Confirmed as lieutenant general for war's duration last week was 62-year-old German-born Walter Krueger, who had held that rank on a temporary basis as the tacti cally smart commander of the U.S. Third Army. Meaning of his rank-for-the-duration: he had been assigned to an unspecified command in a war theater.

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