Word: 110th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tough Touch. But tough and touchy as Ben Lear is, no soldier of the 110th was prepared for the tough touch that awaited them when they pulled in at Camp Robinson toward sundown. The General's order: that the 110th return at once to Memphis and stand by. They were to get mass punishment, the innocent with the guilty...
Along busy Central Avenue, on the outskirts of Memphis, Tenn., rolled 80 trucks of the 110th Quartermaster Regiment, making slow progress through Sunday traffic. In the cabs and on the hard seats behind sat 350 soldiers, ties discarded, collars open under a blistering sun. After the manner of the U.S. soldier, Model 1941, or the Roman soldier, B.C. 100, they were also making merry by waving at girls, shouting boisterous pleasantries at civilians. They had a right to be cheerful, they had just finished more than a month's hard work in the Second Army maneuvers in central Tennessee...
...caddy, jumped a three-foot fence, stalked to the convoy. A command car in the column jerked to a stop, and its officers piled out to face an Awful Fact. The golfer was Lieut. General Ben Lear, commander of the Second Army, director of the maneuvers from which the 110th had just emerged...
...Lear was a first sergeant before he was an officer, and what he had to tell the 110th's officers sizzled with first sergeant's wrath. When all the burning words had been said, Ben Lear told the convoy to move on, that it would hear from him after it got back to its home station at Camp Joseph T. Robinson, 145 miles away...
...110th, like the rest of the soldiers, know Ben Lear (in uniform). They know him as a ranker who lives commendably close to his troops, a rugged soldier despite his 62 years, a great believer in spit-and-polish. They know and generally approve his dislike of sloppy soldiers, his decisive action (TIME, June 23) to clear his Second Army of incompetent officers so that its outfits can grow into first-class fighting units. They know him, too, as a commander too much preoccupied with small details...