Word: troop
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Across the land last week, for six warm days & nights, a troop train rumbled. It was an old train, with no fancy name. To the engineers and switchmen, it was No. 7452-C. The men on board dubbed it the "Home Again Special," and wrote the new name in chalk on the sides of the old Pullman cars. In another war there might have been brass bands at every stop. But in this pageantry-less, slogan-less war, the train just rumbled on toward New York, through the big towns and the whistle-stops...
These men on the troop train, already famed in communiqués and the war's best-sellers,* were heading home for a 30-day furlough after 27 months of battle...
Until that happened, the Germans seemed to be making some belated efforts to evacuate southward; Red pilots reported bombing southbound troop trains. But the railroads were lost now. At Jelgava, the Russians were only 25 miles from the sea. The Germans were thus caught in two pockets-one between Riga and the Gulf of Finland, the other between Riga and East Prussia...
George Marshall, Chief of Staff, knew just the man for the vital job of directing troop training. "Whitey" McNair, who had dreamed of leading troops afield once again before he retired, became a schoolmaster. He broke sharply with easygoing tradition, trained troops under live fire at home, pounded endlessly at the basics of combat training-physical conditioning, tight discipline, painstaking reconnaissance, good shooting...
...dawn when Barrow and I joined the troop movement; the cruelty of the heat and cloudless skies was already unbear able. The whole Sixty-Second Army was on foot. As far as you could see, strung over the horizon through rice paddies, in single file along the ruined rail bed, crawling through ditches on the devastated highway, were single files of Chinese troops...