Books: People Going Crazy

PERSIAN GULF COMMAND—Joel Sayre —Random House ($2).

“The way I seen Persia,” said a dreamy G.I. to Correspondent Joel Sayre as their ship entered the Persian Gulf, ”was a swell big marble layout in the moonlight with a built-in pool. Birds was singing, but not too loud, and everything smelt wonderful. Some guys with turbans was taking it easy on cushions. They had whiskers and they was having a smoke out of them jars with the hose on them and they was smothered in wonderful-looking broads . . . wearing them long peekaboo pants. Sitting on the floor was a three-piece orchestra playing Midway music. Standing out front was the best-looking broad of them all doing bumps and boy, was she built! . . . Yes, sir, that was Persia.”

Land of Romance. As the transport drew near the land, G.I.s swarmed to the rail, eyes misty with Technicolor anticipation. “The sun shone with an idiot brightness, but it was raining”—and out of the miasma loomed “dejected palm trees, a few worn mud buildings, aged water buffaloes . . . and a cluster of sickly natives, including several girls with rings in their noses who would never get a screen test.” The G.I.s, stared in speechless horror— until “a colored soldier won immortality … by throwing back his head and crying, in a long, high wail, ‘Iran! Land of romance!'”

Once ashore in that “queer, drear, roasting land,” the 30,000 G.I.s of the P.G.C. (which meant Persian Gulf Command in Washington, and People Going Crazy in Iran) pulled off one of the great jobs of the war, the Lend-Lease supplying of the Red Army. They were “a weird, shambling, offbeat outfit” of white and Negro road builders, stevedores, engineers, mechanics and medics. In all their months of labor, from the winter of 1942 to the winter of 1944, they never saw an enemy plane or tank, never ducked an angry bullet. But their struggle to do an essential job under harrowing conditions is one of the epics of the war, and Joel Sayre’s witty, comprehensive account (which first appeared in the New Yorker) is one of the most readable of war correspondents’ books.

Corporal Slick’s Ride. The battle of Stalingrad was under way when the first men of the P.G.C. landed. Droves of supply-packed Liberty ships soon followed. But from the port of Bandar Shahpur there was no transport to Russia except a single-track railroad, running across desert as bare as the Sahara and through 47 miles of tunnels in mountains almost as high as the Rockies.

Undaunted, Fireman Corporal Harry Slick loaded 21 freight cars with 1,000 tons of supplies, including high-octane gasoline and explosives, and set off northward. Coming down a mountain, the throttle broke and the brakes refused to grab. Corporal Slick was doing 90 m.p.h. when he reached the flat again—somehow still on the tracks—and his supply train roared through eight stations before it finally stopped. The reward which he got from a grateful Red Army commander was the coveted Order of the Red Star; it entitled him to free rail-transport anywhere in the Soviet Union.

Sling-Shots & Flit-Guns. Desperately, the P.G.C. examined the main highway to the north. It turned out to be an ancient caravan route which showed no signs of having been repaired since King Darius officially declared it open, some years before he lost the Battle of Marathon.

The road was also in constant use by two million nomadic savages, who were dead-shots with the kind of sling that David used against Goliath, and who spent their spare time stripping the copper wire off the line of telegraph poles. The nomads explained that they knew all about war: their ancestors had fought a dandy one against the Sumerians in 3000 B.C., and their ruling Khan unfailingly subscribed to the airmail edition of TIME.

The men of the P.G.C. set their teeth and went ahead. Within a few months they had lined up 50,000 Iranian workers —as well as 2,000 small boys who raced enthusiastically through mosquito-ravaged villages spraying angry oldsters and babies with flit-guns.

Revelation & Elongation. It all added up to one of the knottiest labor problems in history. Shifts had to be arranged according to the workers’ respective religions, or else pious fanatics would toss aside their tools and start tearing out heretics’ hair. Production once dropped to zero for a whole month while workers celebrated “the first revelation of the Koran to Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel.”

P.G.C. medics had revelations of their own. They found that the healthier the worker was, the more attention he demanded; one boy of twelve, who was in charge of an electric crane, succeeded in getting no less than three injections for typhus (he really liked it). Another eye-opener came when a worker’s head was crushed between two crates of machinery, and he was back on the job in two days. “His head was noticeably elongated, but he claimed he felt better than he ever had before. . . .”

Perspiration Handicap. Malaria, dysentery, smallpox, typhus and sandfly fever were everpresent. But no disease was as terrible to the P.G.C. as the fierce Iranian heat. Normal summer temperature was around 140 degrees (in the sun).

“In the early days (there was) a Perspiration Handicap once a week. Each entry would roll up a sleeve, crook an elbow, and . . . see how fast he could fill an empty C-ration can. Eight minutes, 41 2/5 seconds was the record, achieved by a fat but fading major. . . . Finally, the contest had to be discontinued. ‘The boys are just plumb sweat out,'” said one of the officers.

P.G.C. Delivers the Goods. Somehow or other, the P.G.C.’s eccentric American-Iranian production unit built two huge General Motors assembly plants in the heart of the desert, and even got so that it could put a truck together in five minutes flat. P.G.C. engineers carried on from there. Every day bulldozers roared out into the desert, every day the new asphalt highway stretched a few miles farther.

Boxed truck parts were swung ashore at the Gulf, assembled into trucks on the spot and filled with supplies. Frequently the supply trucks were across the border into Russia before the Liberty ship which brought them had weighed anchor. Truck drivers worked 20-hour shifts, often on a diet of Spam and bread & jam. A hundred Diesel locomotives hauled tanks, planes, jeeps, command cars, fire engines and ammunition over the tottering railway.

“There is no longer any secrecy,” says Author Sayre, “about the fact that (the P.G.C.) delivered, across Iran, four and a half million long tons of everything a fighting people needs, from arms and food and clothing and medicines to the equipment for an entire Ford plant. The world was amazed by the Red Army’s mobility two summers ago .. . . contributing mightily to that mobility were 143,000 American vehicles assembled and delivered by the P.G.C.”

Today, concludes Author Sayre, “if you see a fellow wearing a green shoulder patch with a red scimitar and a white star in it, you had better buy him a drink. He did well by all of us.”