Word: battalion
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Leading his battalion of the 8th Marines into another beachhead landing-at Saipan last June - 6-ft, 200-lb. Lieut. Colonel Henry Pierson Crowe came about as near to getting killed as a man could, and still live. First a Jap bullet pierced his left lung, not far from his heart. Then he was almost killed by one of his own men who mistook him for a Jap. Just as the man was aiming, Jim Crowe raised his head feebly, identified himself by twirling his famed red mustache. Finally dragged back to a shell hole in the sand near...
...Government's offices flocked several hundred angry men, sobbing women, for another of EAM's interminable demonstrations. But something had been added to the hammer-&-sickle pennants and sloganizing banners. The crowd carried three improvised litters, containing three bodies-still warm. Leftists charged the nationalist-royalist X-Battalion had killed the three men. The opposition charged that EAM members had disinterred three newly buried bodies, was using them for propaganda...
Sentinels Silenced. Even then, the landings in force could not be made with the shattering surprise characteristic of other amphibious assaults in the Pacific. Surprise had to be sacrificed, because Leyte Gulf was guarded by three sentinel islands. On A-minus-three,* company combat teams from an Army Ranger battalion landed from light, fast assault craft on Homonhon, Dinagat and Suluan. Jap communications were hamstrung but not completely destroyed. Tokyo got some kind of word that something was afoot, but apparently could not make up its mind that this was it. Field Marshal Count Juichi Terauchi, once the butcher...
Eleven months later, after a row over a one-day pass which the ensign charged was unauthorized, Compton was sent back to the U.S. with his battalion, for leave and reassignment. But on his next detail at Camp Endicott, R.I., he found himself once more bossed by the same young officer, by now a lieutenant, junior grade. The lieutenant promptly began to ride him systematically, said Compton, gave him low marks in attitude and discipline, sent him on 15-mile hikes, imposed unnecessary discipline. When the next quarterly ratings were issued, Compton was found to be "unfit." He was discharged...
...surely coming, Hodges (then a colonel) was back in the U.S. and in the Infantry School job which George Marshall had held. Hodges bore down on one doctrine: the young men there were not to be thought of merely as lieutenants taking a prescribed course; they were to be battalion and regimental commanders in the coming war. The Infantry School course became one of the Army's finest...