Word: infantryman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bradley of Moberly, Mo., the Army's Chief of Staff, slipped on his steel-rimmed glasses in the Senate Caucus room last week and took a soldier's look at the North Atlantic Treaty. The diplomats and statesmen had argued out the legal niceties of the pact. Infantryman Bradley skipped the fine print and drove to the main point. In his mild, high-pitched voice, Bradley told the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee: "Our frontiers of collective defense lie in common with theirs [the other treaty nations'] in the heart of Europe...
...success has been the well-tempered amateur squinting down a rifle barrel. "Don't fire till you can see the whites of their eyes" was plain common sense to colonials facing the parade-ground tactics of the 18th Century Brit ish army; later, as any World War II infantryman who sweated out the world's most thorough rifle instruction in training camp knows, the common sense of the 17703 became doctrine. Pratt leaves it to his publishers, in a jacket blurb, to add that "the national tradition that included Daniel Boone and the Mountain Man . . . would naturally produce...
Readers who know that it takes ships, planes, artillery and service troops to get the infantryman within range of a live target, may feel that Pratt has cheered the role of the foot soldier to the point of oversimplification. Actually he takes nothing away from the other arms; his peep-sight view merely assumes that their work had already been done. None of these sketches is exhaustive, but every one is readable, informal history that few armchair tacticians would wish to miss and few professional soldiers could fail to learn from. What will keep Eleven Generals and many a plain...
Essential Sequel. But there was no doubt about the State Department's real feelings in the matter. To express them to the nation, Acheson had already called on Chief of Staff Omar Bradley. Speaking before the Jewish War Veterans in Manhattan, Infantryman Bradley made the point with soldierly precision: "Although the North Atlantic pact is an agreement on policy for our common defense, it is evident that policy without power is like law without enforcement ... A military assistance program is obviously an essential sequel to the pact...
...wanted his audience (a group of New England manufacturers) to realize, however, that there was no "easy and popular way to armed security." Air power was the primary attack weapon, but in the long run, said Infantryman Bradley, "a war between nations is reduced to one man defending his land while another tries to invade it. Whatever the devastation of his cities and the disorder in his existence, man will not be conquered until you fight him for his life...