Small Yankees

New Englanders, who naturally believe that their scions are bigger if not better men than their fathers, got a shock last week. According to an Army stature chart, bona fide Yanks are the smallest men in today's Army, said Major George D. Williams of the Surgeon General's office. The average New England height has been pulled down by the many short-statured descendants of French-Canadian and Polish settlers.

Biggest men in the Army are Midwestern offspring of Scandinavians. Average height, which rises from East to West, slumps again in the Southwest, where Mexican forbears have left their stamp.

Plans for 1942

From Camp Blanding, Fla. to Fort Lewis, Wash, the U.S. Army plugged at battle training. The emphasis was on operations of the battalion Majors, younger and slimmer than the Army had seen since World War I, led their outfits far into the field to march and dig in combat exercises. The Army, after the biggest field maneuver ever, in 1941, was preparing for field exercises in 1942.

This year the U.S. will have no grand-scale maneuvers, which so heavily burden the transportation system.

Emphasis instead will be on training the hard nubbins of military strength that Army & Navy call task forces. Satisfied that the Army can operate in large bodies, can supply itself without snarling its communication lines, Lieut. General Lesley McNair, Commander of the Ground Forces, had decided to concentrate on combat refinements.

"Whitey" McNair's plan will be detailed by an officer of whom the U.S. may hear a lot more before the war is over: young (46) Major General Mark Clark, a tall, well-knit infantry soldier who is the Ground Force Chief of Staff. Mark Clark is as dead serious about training soldiers as he was when an officer asked him what his chief interest had been at West Point. His answer: "Graduating and getting a commission."

The job of training men to fight he reduced to training them to kill without getting killed. The 18 National Guard and nine regular divisions (minus those already out of the country), having shown that they can operate on a big scale, now learn how to operate in small units with more fighting virtuosity.

Nothing bigger than a corps (two or more divisions) wall work in a single exercise, and they will work for perfection of coordination in the squad, for perfect teamwork between battalions and regiments. Unlike the 1941 exercises, this year's "little maneuvers" will have plenty of airplanes, plenty of tanks. Soldiers and officers will learn how to work up behind dive-bombers, how to cooperate with reconnaissance aviation, how to move in swiftly behind tanks. and how to plow ahead to take objectives that tanks cannot take.

No outfit will be ultraspecialized. Mark Clark's theory is that a U.S. fighting man should be able to do any kind of fighting. Many an outfit still in trucks or on its feet will be trained as air infantry. Others will be trained for desert warfare, but they may have to fight in Alaska, and saturnine Mark Clark will certainly not let them forget it.

The Army expects the maneuvers to be crack, postgraduate exhibitions. The troops will have only a sprinkling of new men among them; the 32 new divisions to be activated this year will not get in on the show. The new boys will be learning fundamentals; their work will be close to the camps. The maneuver fields will belong to the veterans, who 18 months ago were civilians.

Lear on Hardening

The Second Army's rough, tough, plain-spoken Lieut. General Ben Lear, no West Pointer, has given the back of his horny hand to an old Army tradition: breathing exercises. Said he in a letter on physical condition to his command: "There is no particular reason for breathing exercises."

But the General had other precepts on troop hardening. They read like a come-on for a course by mail on becoming a heman:

> "It is possible, by heavy exercise, to increase the cross section of a muscle by 55 to 90%." .

> "Individuals can get quicker results . . . by making the work heavy and continuous."

>"Much more heart development is secured by running a mile in five minutes than by running it in seven or walking it in 15."

> "If you want to condition men to march long distances with full equipment, march [them] long distances with full equipment."

>"An all-around physical conditioning program should include marches of increasing lengths with increasing loads, a great deal of running, calisthenic exercises, combative activities, obstacle-course running, swimming, competitive athletics."

> "Soldiers who are physically fit as well as proficient in their military training will meet the enemy confident in their individual superiority and it is with such men that victories are won."

Red Light for Red Lights

In the unminced words of Surgeon General Thomas Parran, Mrs. Ida B. Wise Smith, peppery W.C.T.U. president, and Federal Security Administrator Paul V. McNutt, the U.S. citizen has been told again & again that the Army lost 7,492,000 man days in World War I owing to venereal disease. Only disease that cost more days was influenza. Venereally, World War II looks like World War I to some people.

Except in the Air Corps (which has done nothing because it considers attempts to control prostitution a waste of time), Army procedure to date has been: A military commander with a rising venereal-case sick list first asks civil authorities to clean up nearby red-light districts. If they do not act, he asks the corps area commander for help; the corps area commander asks FSA to investigate.

At some point in this procedure a quick cleanup usually occurs. Reno's famous "stockade" was closed within five days when the Army requested it.

But some towns have neither police nor jail space to run in the girls, who turn up in droves on Army pay day. Other towns are fattening on revenue attracted by honky-tonks while their officials talk blandly of cooperation but do nothing. Last week signs were that the Army will soon put its foot down. FSA has reported bad spots to the War Department, which may turn them over to the FBI to get rid of the prostitutes.

One bad spot is Pensacola, Fla. At first city fathers dug up an old Florida law. put quarantine placards on the doors of 15 houses, threatened $1,000 fines or imprisonment if anyone went in or out. But this setback was temporary, prostitution is again nourishing and the town is near the top of the War Department's black list.

A town which has tried and tried without success is small, neat Alexandria, La., held responsible by FSA for infecting Camns Beauregard, Livingston, Polk and Claiborne. When Alexandria obediently c'csed its four bordellos and filled its jail with prostitutes (90% of them were infected), 150 were still out on bail, mostly newcomers who had arrived with the Army.

Mayor George W. Bowden asked Governor Sam Jones for help. When State police drove the women from the streets, they took refuge in the Camp Claiborne woods, where they carried on until State and military police hunted them down like game. Shouting and shooting high, MPs bushwhacked the glades, drove the frightened girls to the road. There State police made the arrests.

The G-men probably will not enter the fray until June or later because the FBI, busy with spy hunts, has no G-men to spare. But the job they will do on the first community will be thorough. In an area that may extend as far as 200 miles from an Army camp they will round up pimps, politicians, prostitutes, madams, crooked cops, white slavers, conniving cab drivers, real-estate owners, other aiders and abetters. Those convicted can be fined $1,000 and jailed for a year.

Old Army & Navy officers were neither enthusiastic nor sanguine about the cleanup campaign. They had higher hopes for the new five-day gonorrhea cure.

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