They did what they could with what they had available, and they did well, as everyone learned before it was over, despite a general and appalling paucity of bare necessities.
While on extended training exercises the Army of the United States of America made do with “field expedients” to simulate the weapons and equipment they lacked— mockups of stovepipe and plyboard to give an unconvincing illusion of the missing heavy mortars and artillery pieces, rickety trucks standing in for the still-unsupplied half-tracks and tanks—the modern and fully equipped Wehrmacht was on the march in Europe and the Imperial Japanese Army moved deeper and deeper into China and strengthened the fortifications of Pacific islands with strange names.
But at long last, the sands of time trickled so low as to leave nothing in which the stubborn American ostrich could longer hide its head. Poland fell to German and Russian arms, then Russia attacked Finland. In the early spring of 1940 Germany conquered tiny Denmark and invaded Norway. Next to feel the might of the war machine of the Third Reich were Holland and Belgium, and even as French and British troops tried to hold the shaky line in Flanders, the panzers and the Wehrmacht infantry were racing through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes to strike deep into France, rolling up her scattered bands of ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-led troops.
And as the French and British armies, which had suffered many of the same injustices from their respective countrymen and governments as had the American army, were taken, utterly routed and thoroughly defeated, off the beach at Dunkirk by a makeshift fleet of civilian boats, leaving behind them the bulk of their weapons and equipment as well as any thought that this new war would be a static conflict as had been the last one, the sluggish American Congress began to face the fact that a large army, a modern army, a strong army might well be needed … soon.
The training regiment as well as the understrength combat-ready (which was a very unfunny joke) units scattered about the forty-eight states and its possessions overseas began to see a slow trickle of long-overdue equipment, weapons and supplies. New buildings began to be thrown up on existing open posts and on reopened ones as well as newly purchased or condemned-to-government-use land.
And then, on the 16th of September, 1940, the first peacetime Selective Service Act was signed into law, and long before anyone was ready for it, the onrushing floods of drafted men were virtually inundating every training facility.
VI
Almost overnight, the training regiment became a training division. With the overall size more than quadrupled while the available numbers of cadre remained almost static, new and exalted ranks fell like so much confetti. The captain of Milo’s company became a light colonel and took James Lewis along with him to be his captain-adjutant in his new battalion command. The company exec should then have advanced to company commander save for the fact that he had already been bumped up to major and was serving on the staff of the division. Two of their three second lieutenants were also bumped up and shipped out, leaving only the newest officer, Second Lieutenant Muse, to become a first lieutenant and take over the company. As Lewis had long planned, this frantic shuffling left Jethro Stiles in the position of first sergeant and Milo, bumped to tech sergeant, as field first.
By the time they had managed to get the first class of draftees through their mill and off to advanced basic training, there were none of the original cadre contingent remaining at a rank lower than sergeant, and the resultant situation was so critical as to lead to the virtual shanghaiing of trainees showing even the bare minimum of needed talents or of prior military experience to fill empty cadre slots in the company Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E). Nor were they alone in this practice; from division down it was the same story. The general preference was for enlistees, but they would take draftees, too, figuring—rightly, as it turned out—that all of the men would be around for however long the war lasted.
The world continued to turn, and the new training division and many another like it continued to painfully remold their quotas of soft civilian levies into reasonable facsimiles of soldiers. Class after class after class of them passed through the hands of Lieutenant Muse, First Sergeant Stiles and Sergeant Moray on the initial steps along a path that would lead, for some, to death or dismemberment.
Elsewhere on that same world, II Duce, Benito Mussolini, launched the Italian army on an offensive against the small, weak army of Greece, moving out of already occupied Albania. The Greek forces of General Alexander Papagos not only stopped the numerically superior, vastly better-supplied and -armed Italian army, they launched two ferocious counterattacks that drove the invaders in full rout back over the Albanian border. Papagos then took the offensive, his troops pouring into occupied Albania in full pursuit of the demoralized Italians. Reinforcements of men and materiel poured in from Italy, of course, but even with these, the best that Italian General Visconti-Prasca could do was to hold a little over half of Albania, the rest being occupied by the Greeks. It is most probable that that unhappy man thought quite often of the hoary folk proverb involving the best treatment of sleeping dogs.
Completely lacking any air force, the Greeks had been aided in this regard by elements of the British forces engaged against the Italians in North Africa. Had the British not constructed airbases and supply points on the Greek mainland and on Crete, chances are good that Mussolini’s Teutonic allies would have allowed Visconti-Prasca and his stymied, stalemated army to twist slowly in the wind of the Albanian mountains until hell froze over solidly. But the German high command, just then preparing to invade their sometime ally, Russia, and not at all savoring the thought of Greek-based British planes menacing a flank of their Russia-bound army, elected to drag the well-singed Italian chestnuts from out of the Greek fire.
When once the Nazi propagandists had thoroughly cowed the leaders of Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, forced them in their terror to sign degrading treaties and sent in German troops to occupy and prepare for an invasion of Greece, Britain sent General Henry Wilson with upward of sixty thousand British troops from North Africa (where they, too, had recently inflicted a humiliating defeat on Italian arms in the deserts).
But Wilson’s sixty thousand and the remainder of Papagos’ hundred and fifty thousand proved just no match for the Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe units thrown against them in their hastily erected position. The German invasion had commenced on April 6, and by April 29 the shattered remnants of the Greek army had surrendered and the only British still remaining in Greece were either captives or corpses.
The conquest of Crete took only about ten days and was a purely Luftwaffe victory, even the ground troops being of the Luftwaffe Fallschirmjager or airborne troops. The lightning-fast victories of German arms made it abundantly clear to a closely watching world that only large, strong, well-trained and, above all else, well-supplied and well-armed forces could represent any sort of a match for the triumphant forces now scouring Europe and the Balkans with fire and steel.
The United States of America was not as yet formally a warring nation, but only fools could doubt that she soon must be such. This became more than abundantly clear when the U.S. Navy destroyer Kearny, while helping to protect a Canadian merchant convoy in the waters off Iceland, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on October 17, 1941. A brand-spanking-new vessel replete with all modern appurtenances, DD Kearny survived the torpedoing and limped back to port safely. But not so with the elderly four-stacker DD Reuben James, two weeks later. The James was torpedoed without warning, the deadly “fish” struck her main magazine and the explosion ripped her completely in two. The bow section sank immediately and the stern section stayed afloat only long enough to explode into millions of pieces; all of the ship’s officers went down with her, and a bare forty-five of her men were saved.