ARMY: Test For the Fourth

A long caterpillar of cloud last week wound over the drought-baked hills of Fort Benning, Ga. Within its dusty, choking interior moved a new kind of U.S. fighting team, facing its first test.

The Fourth Division, transformed from a motorized outfit into a division part armored, part motorized, was being tested as model for the infantry division of 1942. It was the U.S. Army’s experiment to find the best type of unit to do the all-important job of following armored spearheads. The test showed that an outfit like the Fourth, plowing along in support of a drive by an armored division, can go in when the armored division is stopped and hold what has been won.

The first division in the Army to be fully motorized (i.e., put on wheels), the Fourth puffed out its expanded chest still more when it took on its new form last month. Said sunburnt men (40% draftees), squinting across the road at the cantonment of the crack Second Armored Division: “Now we’ll show those high & mighty bastards something.”

The new Fourth is buttressed by 79 tanks. Its reconnaissance troop is expanded to a battalion (with 14 tanks). It has an anti-tank battalion, will soon get an anti-aircraft battalion, and a third regiment of infantry. Its weapon strength has been multiplied beyond the fondest dreams of any gun crank. It has 3,997 machine guns (including 1,460 Tommy-guns). It has 284 cannon, ranging from blunt-snouted 155s and 105s for the artillery to slim 75s for anti-tank work. And it rides in an assortment of 2,900-odd vehicles.

The test was a problem in logistics (troop movement), worked out by Major General George S. Patton, corps commander for the exercise. One afternoon the Fourth bivouacked in the Georgia hills, routing out buzzing coveys of quail to hide their machines under bush and scrub growth. Somewhere north of them the Second went into action against a mythical foe. At dawn the Second was moving north and the Fourth was in support.

By the terms of the problem, the Second was finally stopped by the enemy. Then the Fourth’s test began. Its commander, Brigadier General Fred Clute Wallace, was told to move up, relieve the Second. Hitch was that the country roads were little better than cow paths, that the Second would clutter them aplenty moving to the rear. There were to be no traffic jams for airplanes to bomb.

The Fourth’s artillery had moved up first to support the Panzer outfit. Then the Fourth’s infantrymen scrambled out from bush and thicket, wheeled out their half-track (part caterpillar) troop carriers and headed for the front. For 25 to 30 miles they slogged along at 25 m.p.h.

Then they ducked off into woods and fields, in an unholy fog of dust. As they passed tankers going to the rear, censor-able words were exchanged. Up front the Fourth’s riflemen and machine-gunners scrambled down, moved forward, got into position.

That was all; the exercise ended there.

But General Wallace was pleased, and said so. In the complicated, sweaty job of passing through the armored division, the Rolling Fourth had worked with smooth, unhurried speed. There had been no traffic jams to speak of; the Fourth had filtered through like sand through a sieve. The division commander’s verdict —and the Army’s—”Smartly done.”