Word: 1st
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Infantry, The Infantry. . . . When Allen took over the 1st, the division had no superior in the Army, and in the opinion of its men it had no equal. Its boast, when Allen was ready to take it to Britain early last year, was that all but six of its 13,000-odd men were volunteers. They were already calling themselves "the first team." They drilled, maneuvered, played under their shoulder patch (the figure 1 in red) with a special swagger, and they roared out the infantry's song with a special gusto...
...Oran, where the 1st landed and met some of the hardest fighting of the early campaign in North Africa, Allen demonstrated the quality which had sometimes been confused with casual impetuosity. The French held a strong position at St. Cloud, a suburb of Oran. Rather than lose men in frontal assault, Allen, on a spur-of-the-moment decision, sent two units around the town, into Oran. As his men told it later, it sounded obvious and easy, but they knew it was the act of a resourceful and flexible commander...
...spot, these early operations were not the easy matters which the censored accounts then made them seem to be. Men were killed. Men were wounded. Most of the officers in the 1st and other divisions got their first combat test. At that time, not one division in the new U.S. Army (excepting the lost men of Bataan) had been thoroughly schooled in battle for more battle. But, everything considered, the divisions engaged in Sicily did well, and the 1st division did very well...
First important step in this drive was the capture of Barrafranca, a town of stone houses at the end of a narrow valley, guarded on either side by three rugged hills and many smaller ones. The veteran 1st Division's 26th Infantry Regiment was assigned to take these hills, thus opening the way into the town. With the regiment's 2nd Battalion, one of three in the action, was TIME Correspondent Jack Belden. His report, which arrived last week, is of a battle as it looks to the soldier in battle, with all its desperation, irrelevance and confusion...
...three major generals commanding infantry divisions, the best known is Terry de la Mesa Allen, leader of the 1st, only division in the Seventh Army that fought the Germans and Italians before Sicily. Lucian K. Truscott Jr. of the 3rd Infantry is a hell-roaring cavalryman, tall, lean, wiry. He developed U.S. Ranger tactics in England, accompanied a unit of Canadian Commandos on the bloody Dieppe Raid...