New Chapter

On the curving coast of North Carolina, where the New River bites through a sweeping scimitar of sand and spills into the Atlantic, a new chapter was started last week in the U.S.’s book of military tactics. It was a chapter on whose subject Germany had already written a terrifying five-foot shelf: cooperation under a single command of combat arms in battle.

The writing of the U.S. chapter was begun by Task Force 18, U.S. Navy. Task Force 18 is made up of the Army’s famed First Division, the First Division of the Marine Corps, a fleet of Navy transports. Its commander: grey-cropped, spectacled Major General Holland M. Smith, U.S.M.C.

Onslow Beach was whipped with rain and the breakers were capped with white when Task Force 18 began its exercises one night. On a high-topped dune “Howlin’ Mad” Smith stood with his staff, scanning the sea through night glasses. Through the scud a signal light blinked in code: “Execute.”

“Hell,” griped a Marine captain with a chin like a dornick, “he’s lit up like a new saloon.” The light blinked out. Three miles out, Marines of the Fifth Regiment, roused from their crowded bunks, were piling over the side into pitching beach boats, settling their combat packs, fixing bayonets as they squatted down. An hour after the light had blinked its message, the muted roar of 1,500-horsepower engines overtoned the growl of the waves. The boats were in the surf; men with their rifles held high piled into the water.

Around Howlin’ Mad to right & left, the landing party suddenly blossomed out of the dark, hunchbacked in packs, round-topped in steel helmets. Battalion officers rapped out orders for the landing party to switch its function, defend the beach. The receding rumble of boat engines told them that the Navy crews were going back for more men. Just ahead of General Smith one Navy coxswain, grounded on a bar, called for all the power his engines could give, wrenched the boat free. “God-damit,” shouted Howlin’ Mad, “he’s tearing the guts out of that boat.”

Along the beach the First Battalion set up its machine guns and mortars, disposed its riflemen. Just before dawn waves of beach boats began to rip through the surf. The First opened up with a chatter of blank-cartridge fire as two attacking battalions splashed through the shallows, made a dash for the cover of the dunes, dug in. It was around ten o’clock and everybody was sweating when Task Force 18 finally wound up its first landing party exercise.

Later in the week soldiers joined Marines in a landing party of 1,500, this time took along light artillery. Landing with tanks and scout cars will come later. Before Task Force 18 can call itself completely trained, it will have to work with aircraft from carriers. For storming a beach head is the toughest operation in the soldier’s book, and even cocky Marines know that against the modern, weapons of World War II it is no job to be run off without weeks and months of training.

The cheering thing about the North Carolina exercises: Army and Navy, having at last bent their stiff necks, were working together in the same training yoke.