ARMY: Wind, Sand and Steel

These no longer unusual scenes took place last week in the California desert:

Dust hung low on the shimmering horizon. It parted like a curtain, and out of it raced columns of jeeps, radio cars, light and medium tanks, self-propelled 75-mm. guns and towed 105-mm. howitzers, anti-aircraft trucks, supply cars, ambulances and caterpillar tank-retrievers.

Beyond the purple morning shadows on the mountains the sun already beat so hard on the flinty sand and the gaping arroyos that newsmen and soldiers fresh from Fort Knox already felt blind and seared. But the men in the machines were veterans; they had met the sun and were equal to it.

The steel army rolled vast, powder-white and terrible to a railroad crossing with lancelike antennae uplifted and colored guidons fluttering in the sun. From rocks before them orange flags appeared: umpires’ signals that they were under artillery fire. The steel army returned the fire, then wheeled from the exposed position and thundered off in its own dust.

Inside the thickly armored walls of a light tank, with the traps buttoned up and only tiny periscope slits for ventilation, the temperature reaches fantastic heights —some tankers swear to 180°. Through the slits swirls desert dust, caking on the sweating faces of the four crew members into a brown paste. Beads of sweat trickle down from under their leather helmets and goggles, curl around their noses and cheekbones. Even dust masks, that they wear to filter out the dust, do not save them from coughs and rasping “tank throat.”

The smell of hot oil, hot rubber, leather and sweat pervades each steel machine. To this in action is added the bitter odor of powder smoke. And when a tank stops for a moment, fumes from the noisy, thrashing engine drift forward to add to the bouquet.

Clanking over the rolling plain at 25 to 30 miles an hour, the tank has the motion of a small sailboat in choppy water. Every sudden encounter with a ditch or an arroyo knocks the crew against the steel walls, making them momentarily glad of their thick, hot helmets, which otherwise are instruments of torture in a desert that is on the average 10° hotter than Egypt.

Sometimes the metal machines themselves get so hot they catch fire—apparently from gasoline fumes when the gas boils in the gas tanks. By late afternoon water carried in a tin can is almost too hot for hand washing.

Bivouac. At dusk the columns draw close to the shelter of a mountainside and scraggly clumps of paloverde and green-silver, dusty-needled tamarisk trees. Every vehicle halts a good distance from every other: there are no clusters of machines to make targets for surprise air attacks.

Leaping from their tanks, the crews take no time to wash the desert paste from raw faces. They seize shovels, quickly dig slit trenches just deep enough to lie in full length below the desert floor. Beside each trench goes a bedding roll. Then the tankers turn to washing. They use their water cautiously. One gallon a day has to suffice each man for drinking, cooking, cleaning his mess gear, washing himself.

A tin of fruit juice with the supper ration provides more moisture. The canned-meat ration is so hot from the desert that no fire is necessary. For coffee the tankers sometimes fill a tin can three-quarters with sand, pour in a little gasoline, sink it in the ground to the rim and throw in a match. The gas flames steadily, just long enough to boil the coffee.

Air Support. The only weapon of the armored columns that does not live with the formations in the desert is the air support. But an air officer stays with every unit commander to tell him what jobs can be done from the air, the best plan of an attack and the number of planes needed. Once this is decided, the armored commander can talk directly by radio and in plain English with the nearest emergency airfield, which should not be more than ten flying minutes away.

The tank commander also asks air support for urgent supplies. He lays out panels on the ground to show where materiel should be dropped. Even before the cases hit the ground the tankers know each load by the color of the parachutes (e.g., red for ammunition).

Last week the Blue Army commander called for air aid as his columns rolled into the pass to Needles, Calif. Here they had been stopped short by opposing artillery. Then the bombers came from the rear, diving at gun emplacements, strafing bombed-out troops. Behind them came the transports ready to drop paratroops.

The Object. Despite their grueling effort, the tank men cared curiously little whether they held the pass when the sun slanted down and washed the plain in yellow and gold. For them the real object of their maneuvers was to get an early crack at Rommel’s tankers. From the first day they arrived at the railroad siding near the Desert Training Center (and half of many companies keeled over from heat prostration) to the day last week at the pass, to Needles, these men had grown tough and disciplined. They had fought over an area bigger than Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and they had learned the art of desert warfare.

Their commander, tough, spidery Major General Alvan Gillem, knows that half that art is teamwork. Says he: “There isn’t a tank man alive who could operate a tank by himself, and there isn’t a tank crew that could keep a tank operating without the help of the last little man with the last little monkey wrench. They all know that.”

Before his quarters at Camp Young, General Gillem has a private shower. But his lips are as cracked as those of his tankers, his face is as raw and weathered from the sand-laden wind, his uniform is a pair of overalls. Like his men, Gillem is maneuvering with one thought in mind.