Army & Navy – Boys Into Men

TRAINING

Georgie Patton would hardly recognize his Desert Training Center today. Where the first 8,000 men of his Armored Force sweated 15 months ago, rehearsing for Tunisia, today nearly 200,000 troops of all kinds, save only WACs and paratroops, are being finally hardened for the fighting in Europe and Asia. The huge oval area in southern California and western Arizona has expanded until it is now larger than England. It is the biggest Army training area in the U. S.

To skeptics who point out that few, if any, deserts remain on the world’s fighting maps, the Army has a clinching answer: for hardening troops physically, for steeling them emotionally for battle and for putting them through maneuvers on the grand scale, the D.T.C. has no equal. This is the Army’s postgraduate course.

This week 106,000 men were learning how tough the D.T.C. at its toughest can be. Two infantry divisions, one of armor, an air-support command of 3,000 men and 23,000 service troops were winding up the most grueling maneuvers ever held in the U.S. Said an exhausted tankman: “We were in Louisiana before we were here. I thought that was rugged, but it was a picnic.”

120° in the Shade. D.T.C. is the Army’s only training theater of operations. Like a battle area, it is organized into two zones: an inner combat zone, itself a fifth larger than Switzerland; an outer communications zone for supply troops. It spreads out over a barren, treeless land of salt lakes, crazily ripped by jagged, granite mountains. Dryness keeps the heat barely endurable: Last week it was 120° in rare patches of shade.

From Los Angeles’ suburbs to east of Phoenix, from the Mexican border to Boulder City, Nev., stretches this waste of land that only the Army could want. Where a year ago there were only parched hamlets hundreds of miles apart, now there are seven major camps, dozens of other establishments, nine airdromes, 42 landing strips, five major hospitals. Across the desert swirl 25,000 general-purpose vehicles (jeeps, etc.) and 2,500 tactical vehicles (tanks, etc.).

Three Gallons a Day. Despite the heat the soldiers’ health is good: less than 2% are non-effectives—half of what the Army considers satisfactory. It takes a man six days to be conditioned for living in this furnace breath; but with salt tablets and fruit juices, prostrations are but one in 2,000. On maneuvers each man gets three gallons of water daily, for drinking, washing and cooking.

The hardening is mental, too. “The troops get away from home influences, away from wives and mothers,” says the D.T.C.’s boss, Major General Charles H. White. “Out here they are miles from ordinary comforts. Boys become men in a pretty short time in a place like this.” There is no place to go on leave save Los Angeles, hundreds of miles away.

Six Miles an Hour. Under battle conditions, long convoys of blacked-out trucks nightly set out from each camp for supply dumps 30 and more miles away. They shun paved roads and blindly poke their painful way across country. Speeds are four to six miles an hour. For days on end, service troops spend less than four of every 24 hours in bed. They try to catnap in trucks grinding across the choppy desert; it is like sleeping in a concrete mixer.

And there is room aplenty for all kinds of live artillery practice. Gas (tear) is a maneuver hazard. Live bombs crunch. Every soldier learns to crawl under live machinegun fire 40 inches off the ground.

How many of the 2,000,000 U.S. soldiers already overseas are desert-seared, the Army will not say. But D.T.C.’s wartime future is assured. For troops come out confident of handling what lies overseas. Says one veteran: “After this, wherever they go, they’ll be happy.”