Word: buckners
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...youngster grew up in a rugged, outdoor life, its setting the lovely, wooded country of rolling hills known in Kentucky as the "Pennyr'y'l." "I went barefooted," Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. has written, ''hunted, trapped, fished, swam, canoed, raised chickens, fought roosters, rode five miles daily for the mail, trained dogs, did odd farm jobs, learned not to eat green persimmons and occasionally walked eight miles to Munfordville to broaden my horizon by seeing the train come in, learning the fine points of horse trading or listening to learned legal and political discussion on County...
Test to Come. Brother officers, in moments of highly confidential shoptalk, have been known to accuse Buckner of possessing too much surface brilliance- a damning indictment in the Army. Much of that criticism may well have stemmed from subconscious envy of Buckner's first-rate vocabulary, which shines with added luster against the background of a traditionally inarticulate profession. His standing with the Army's top leaders is attested by the fact that they have entrusted an army to his command at this stage of the war, when there is no lack of good generals with recent battle...
...Buckner was a colonel in 1940, serving as chief of staff to the 6th Division, when he got his orders to Alaska. There was an immediate promotion to brigadier general in the assignment, and a task no good officer could have faced with overconfidence. Commanding a force that was never to go above 14,000 men until after Pearl Harbor, he had to fortify and guard a sparsely populated region one-fifth the size of the U.S., with a coastline nearly twice as long...
Close, But . . . The war which struck the U.S. at Pearl Harbor late in 1941 lapped perilously close to Buckner's domain in the following six months. In early June 1942, when the Japanese seized Kiska and Attu, enemy carrier-based planes attacked Dutch Harbor and troop transports bore down on the base. They turned away when land-based aircraft from Buckner's hastily constructed airfields struck at them...
Postwar Plans. In San Francisco, waiting out the war and trying to keep track of her family, is Mrs. Simon Bolivar Buckner,* who was born Adele Blanc, in New Orleans, but moved to Kentucky "when she was a quadruped." Her elder son, Simon Bolivar III, is a captain in the Signal Corps in France, her younger son, William Claiborne, a plebe at West Point. The daughter, Mary, is studying at the University of California...