Word: 36th
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Ralph Bellamy soberly reading Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat (Victor, 4 sides), and Orson Welles smacking and grumbling solemn words from Pericles to Lincoln (No Man Is an Island; Decca, 10 sides). Less noisy: A Walk in the Sun (Disc, 6 sides), a chronicle ballad of the famed Texas 36th Division, sung by Composer Earl Robinson. Strictly for their fans is the patter of Jimmy Durante (Decca, 8 sides) and Bob Hope (Capitol, 8 sides...
...winter of 1943-44, after a bloody mauling at Salerno, the men of the 36th Division went back into the line. A few weeks later, at the Rapido River, the Fifth Army's Lieut. General Mark Clark committed them to one of the bloodiest engagements of the Italian campaign...
...river banks. German mines were thickly sown along its shores. Major General Fred Walker, the division's commander, thought (and told General Clark) that an attempt to cross the river at that point would be suicide. Nevertheless lean, nerveless Mark Clark ordered the attack and drove the 36th at the river for three days. In those three days the 36th lost more than 2,000 men-taken prisoner, wounded or killed...
...months later Walker was sent back to the U.S. in a training command. The 36th, with replacements, fought on, landed in southern France, fought its way into Germany. But old 36th Division men still hate no man in the world as much as they hate lanky, stubborn Mark Clark...
Last week, as the 36th Division, built on a skeleton of Texas National Guardsmen, held a reunion in Brownwood, Tex., the men who still remembered the frightful days at the Rapido did what they always promised they would do. They demanded that Congress investigate the "colossal blunder [and] take the necessary steps to correct a military system that will permit an inefficient and inexperienced officer, such as General Mark W. Clark ... to destroy the young manhood of this country." Said one company commander: "I had 184 men . . . 48 hours later I had 17. If that's not mass murder...