ARMY: Battle of Shreveport

Last Sunday dawned wonderfully exciting for the 100,000-odd inhabitants of Shreveport, La. For four days the powerful (220,000-man) Blue Army of Lieut. General Walter Krueger, unofficial winner of the preceding week’s Battle of Louisiana, had been pushing north to take the city. On Sunday the second phase of the maneuvers was to end. And so far as Shreveporters (patriotically wearing red brassards on their arms) could see, their own smaller (117,000) Red Army was putting up a stout and resourceful defense.

Indeed it was. When the battle ended Sunday afternoon Lieut. General Ben Lear’s Red defenses were still intact, and Shreveport’s bells pealed in victory. Under the assumptions that go with any maneuver, he was to be relieved by a fresh (but theoretical) force on Oct. 6. Whether he could have hung on until then was a question that Reds answered one way, Blues another,

The Hairy Engineers. Thus the big question—”Who won?”—was one that not even the uniformed newsmen traveling with the armies could answer. But on one fact all were agreed. The Battle of Shreveport was a battle of engineers. In a country crisscrossed by water courses and sticky with swamps, the engineers had a field day.

During the five-day battle, Ben Lear’s engineers, ably supported by horsemen of Major General John Millikin’s Second Cavalry Division, lingered far behind the main body as it retired to the north. They threw down tank barricades, planted thousands of mines that erupted smoke (and theoretical destruction) when tank or scout car disturbed them.

They also blew up 2,000 bridges in the path of the advancing Blues. The blowing up was theoretical but accurate: umpires with formulas in their pockets inspected every foot of fuse, every block of TNT, allowed no bridge to be closed off to the Blues unless enough simulated TNT was planted, in just the right spots, to tear it down.

On the Blue side, the red-necks became front-line troops—in a tradition that was old at Cerro Gordo. Sweating, plastered with swamp mud, drenched with rain, they built bridges alongside spans that umpires’ flags had marked blown up. They picked up tank mines, destroyed barricades, bridged rivers and bayous with pontons or spanned them with felled trees. When they had finished, Louisiana had more usable bridges than it had ever had before. All along the Blue front, fighting troops advanced to the scream of the engineers’ power saws and the grunt of their powerful bulldozers.

As they have in many a battle before, the soldiers with mud behind their ears got a wholehearted vote of thanks. Most impressed by their virtuosity were British observers, who knew what crack German Pionierkorps men can do. The British said they had never seen anything like it. Tearing down or building up—the engineers were cracker jacks at either.

Pattern. For this last battle of the maneuvers, Ben Lear gave up the crack Second Armored Division to the Blues, started with a force smaller than he had had in the preceding week. With his reserves based on Shreveport, he flung his advance elements far to the south. He employed all combat bodies, including his Red air force, in widespread reconnaissance, a function in which neither side had shown up too well the week before.

Up from the south plowed Walter Krueger’s troops, between the Red River on the east, the Sabine (boundary of Louisiana and Texas) on the west. Behind the spearhead of infantry, headed by engineers, the Blues’ Second Armored Division, most experienced of U.S. Panzer units, chafed in bivouac.

For two days the Blues slowly advanced, the Reds slowly retired. Then the Second got its orders. Its commander, squeak-voiced Major General George S. Patton Jr., who hides much military culture behind the Army’s best smoke screen of profanity, was ready to deliver a telling blow.

Panzers. North from bivouac, with terse combat orders in the pockets of their coveralls, headed the Second. Its tanks moved in column, parallel to the Sabine River. Its wheeled equipment (mechanized infantry, artillery, etc.) took a more westerly route.

The tanks soon ran into the work of Lear’s engineers. Trying to force a crossing of the Sabine River near Carthage (45 miles south of Shreveport), they found that the red-necks had blown up everything usable. But Colonel William H. Morris, commander of the 66th Armored Regiment, learned of a ford downstream. He led his regiment down a dirt road toward the river, and ran into a slambang battle that for two hours threw the 66th back on their caterpillars.

This time it was Panzer trouble. Captain Hugh B. Ellis of the Red troops, a scholarly officer whose spectacles were now flaked with mud, was in his way with a small holding force. Tank guns barked. Soldiers shouted as they piled off truck and tank and into the fray. Colonel Morris laid down a smoke screen, called for help from his accompanying artillery.

It was two hours before he could get the umpires’ decision. Then he made a bitter discovery: in the past 20 hours the river had risen eight feet and the ford was not passable. Captain Ellis & troops were finally wiped out. The Blues bawled for the engineers. By the time they had this and other crossings bridged with pontons, the war was over.

Meanwhile Georgie Patton at the head of the fast-stepping wheeled column had driven close to 400 miles through Texas. He swung sharp east and flung himself on the defenses at the back door of Shreveport. His 41st Armored Infantry made a pass at the Reds’ airdrome, reportedly were repulsed. They also established a temporary hold on Shreveport’s vital waterworks.

But when the war ended, Patton had little more than a nuisance grip. South of the town, the Blues’ main body was still 25 miles away. The Blues’ armored troops were just getting ready to cross the Sabine. And Ben Lear still had in reserve a powerful slug: the Sixth Infantry Division, and the bulk of his armored troops.

So ended the biggest peacetime battle exercises ever held in U.S. history. They had lasted six weeks, had shown that U.S. soldiers are tough babies. They had shown that the Army has an efficient supply system, that it knows how to move and feed large bodies of troops.

Anticipating the considered critique to be made this week, high officers told newsmen that cooperation of air force with ground troops had improved over the previous week. Less of an improvement was the attitude of ground troops to air attacks. They still paid too little attention, took too little care about cover. Perhaps it would take a real battle attack to show the men on the ground what they were up against.

On the whole, the troops had well earned their reward — 1 5-day furloughs —the most liberal wholesale vacations the Army has ever given.