S.O.S.

(See Cover)

The second U.S. miracle of World War II s now called for.

The first miracle was war production--and U.S. industry in six months has worked it. The second must be a greater miracle still: to the problem of dispersed supply in both hemispheres the U.S. must add the problem, of vast concentrated supply for a second front in Europe. The offensive-minded U.S. Army says it will be done. The job now ahead is not to walk on water, but to sprint.

The man who promised this miracle turned to Washington this week after a portentous visit to Britain. Arkansas-born Lieut. General Brehon Burke Somervell of the Corps of Engineers, boss of the Army's new Services of Supply, had made his estimate of the situation, had announced his decision. Now he sat down at his desk and went to work. The second front had become his No. 1 problem.

It took a lot of nerve, a lot of dead-aim calculation, a fine disregard of precedent to give the answers he had made to the questions which were posed him. In World War I the Allies, with a pool of about 20,000,000 tons of shipping, drew 60% of their supplies from France, Scandinavia and Spain. They threw their 100% largely at Germany on the Western Front. This time the Allies have only about 3,000,000 tons afloat. But the world is their battlefield. Vast stores of fuel oil, rubber and other riches once available are in the hands of the enemy. So are the resources and shipping of Scandinavia and, for practical purposes, of Spain. Moreover, the requirements in mechanized tools of war, model 1942, have shot up until supply is a fearsomely different art from the supply of 1917.

All these facts slim, faultlessly uniformed Somervell knew as he made his urbane, Southern-drawling way around Britain, wearing out officers and civilians by the smooth pace of his 17-hour days. No important military man in the British Isles can have doubted that of all the U.S. Army-Navy delegation sent to London three weeks ago, he was by far the most important. Britain already had the men for the second front, although she will be glad to get U.S. help.* She already had the will to help the Russians by diversion and, with luck, herself to strike a killing blow at Adolf Hitler. She already had her own and the U.S. navies, an air force that was growing mightily through her own and U.S. production.

The big hole was supply. Where was it all coming from--food, guns, tanks, ammunition, aircraft parts, the thousands of dinky items for the lack of which battles are lost?

Britain now had the answer. As far as U.S. Army men were concerned, she could bank on it. For years they had said "Watch Somervell," and the lean, easy Arkansan had always come through. He had come through so surprisingly that at 50 he was wearing the three silver stars of a lieutenant general. Still unruffled, still masking his occasional bursts of temper with lurid volleys of good-natured profanity, he bosses the biggest show in the U.S. armed forces. It is likely to become the biggest show in the whole U.S. war effort.

New Face. Somervell's Services of Supply did not exist three months ago. It is a product of Franklin Roosevelt's wholesale reorganization of the U.S. Army, which came out of the mill with a different and handsomer face than soldiers had ever seen before. The cumbersome General Staff was pared down; it took 50% of its personnel from the Air Forces. Below the General Staff the old complexity of arms, services and spare parts was bunched into only three agencies: Ground Forces, Air Forces and Services of Supply.

The fighting services--ground and air--are restricted to their simple functions, training and battle. All this suits their commanders, Lieut. Generals Lesley James McNair of the Ground Forces and Henry Harley Arnold of the Air Forces. The Services of Supply has the rest, from M.P.'s to ordnance, from housekeeping to transportation to the vast load of Lend-Lease. And that suits S.O.S.'s new boss too.

There were plenty of good men in the Army's top administrative jobs when General Somervell took hold, and he knew who most of them were. There were a few brief days of reshuffling, transfers, new appointments. Then Somervell called the first meeting of his staff.

The Old Man. It was the morning after the Big Snow and Washington was digging itself out of a blizzard. The staff was in early, cleared desks, sat down before the hour to wait for the first appearance of the new Old Man. He came in on the dot, slim, stern and businesslike. His staffers caught the gimlet look in his grey eyes, the rudimentary mustache masking a stubborn lip, the swatch of bright ribbons on his chest, the well-tailored uniform, the Corps of Engineers buttons* on the blouse.

The new Boss's stern eyes swept the somewhat anxious group. "Which one of you sons of bitches," he demanded, "remarked that spring was here?"

In his swift rise, Somervell had not changed a bit. There was no use getting excited over a job, even if it was a big one. The staff sat down with him at the table and went to work.

The Job. For pure cussedness none of them had ever seen anything like the job they had to do. The Army was everywhere, from Fort Dix to Chungking, from Reykjavik to Port Darwin. Country boys in khaki, with the hayseed barely combed out of their hair, soldiered at Khorram Shar within hiking distance of the muddy confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Officers who had never been off the pavements set up camps on atolls in the Pacific or led men through the drifting fogs of the Aleutians to new homes that must be built. In the miasmas of Surinam and on the steamy flats of Africa, U.S. soldiers broiled at their work. Their lives and their combat effectiveness hung on the S.O.S. And the work of the S.O.S. hung on a myriad details, some so small that an office boy could handle them.

The stuff had to be bought and it had to be shipped. There had to be wool belly-bands for troops in the tropics, fur for Arctic troops, plenty of woolens for the British Isles. There had to be food for all in the style to which U.S. soldiers are accustomed --and lemon extract had to get to Anchorage and Eritrea on schedule, along with the lumber for barracks and gasoline for the mess stoves.

Stores of ammunition had to be built up wherever soldiers were going to fight, but it could not arrive ahead of the building of storage facilities nor behind the demand for its use. The fighting men in Northern Ireland needed mobile bakeries, shops to repair their worn-out shoes, gasoline for their tanks, parts to make up for wear & tear on equipment. The Air Forces (which supply their own peculiar equipment) also had to have guns, bombs and bullets, radios, helmets and goggles, tentage for ground crews who are being dropped off at obscure way stations on the air highways of war.

All this the S.O.S. promised and delivered. It bought, furnished and equipped chapels for chaplains. It furnished drugs for the Medical Corps, guns big & small for the artillery, beer and tooth paste for post exchanges at Anniston, Ala. and Alice Springs, Australia.

In the beginning of the emergency, civilian experts who were brought to Washington to teach the Army their big-business know-how grumped at soldiers' stodginess, at the Army's unwillingness to raise its sights. But the Army was fast pulling up its socks, a move which it began the day when George Marshall became Chief of Staff.

Today there are signs that the S.O.S. 's new chief is taking over more than a slice of the civilian talent that once worked for Donald Nelson's WPB and its confused predecessors. Somervell has raided WPB for industrial experts, put them into uniform with appropriate ranks up to brigadier general. On his staff he has railroad officials, shipping experts of the Maritime Commission and deep-sea ship operators. He has wangled engineers and factory operators, uniformed them and set them down alongside Army men to build new plants, supervise production, needle private industry for more.

For machinery is what the United Nations need most dearly. It is also what the U.S. can produce best and fastest. Says Brehon Somervell: "When Adolf Hitler put his army on wheels, he drove right down our alley."

The Engineer. Another character who has driven down the U.S. alley was Brehon Somervell himself. He started the trip when he got out of West Point in 1914, sixth in his class, berthed in the Engineers and ready for his two-month leave. He spent it in Paris, ran square into World War I and had his first experience with big money. Reporting to the U.S. Embassy for volunteer duty, he took charge of refugee funds, doled out $1,000,000 (his own salary: $180 a month) to get U.S. citizens out of the shooting.

He was mapping the Mexican border country two years later when Villa made his raid. Somervell went into Mexico with Pershing's punitive force, met Pershing a few days later when Black Jack pulled up alongside a broken-down truck and asked its idle crew where their officer was. "Here, sir," came a voice from under the truck, and Lieut. Somervell crawled out, greasy & grimed, wrench in hand, to salute his chief.

Somervell had set his own pattern. He had then, and has now, no use for thumb-suckers and mouth-breathers. He would rather do a job himself than have it done wrong. But he surrounds himself with able men, chosen with discrimination, seldom has to bother with small details once he has a job organized.

When the U.S. entered World War I, Captain Somervell went to France with an engineer outfit, built munitions depots, helped set up a railroad, sneaked off briefly in a general's car (with proper permission) to win his D.S.C. in combat. He was a lieutenant colonel at 26 when the war ended. After service in the Army of Occupation he went back to the Engineers' routine.

But not for long. In 1926 he went to Europe again, to survey the navigation facilities of the Rhine and the Danube. He came home to work on rivers and harbors for a while and go to Army finishing schools. He went back in 1933 to do an economic survey of Turkey for Kamal Atatuerk, stomping much of the country afoot. Dictating eight hours a day for three months, he reduced his findings to a tidy seven volumes. As a result he knows as much about the Army's transportation and supply problems in the Near East as any man.

For Brehon Somervell the New Deal provided new opportunities, as it did for many an engineer. As executive officer of the old National Emergency Council, he directed construction of the early stages of the Florida Ship Canal and, offhand, rebuilt hurricane-flattened Gainesville, Ga. He learned to think in terms of big projects, to get the loyalty of workers not too anxious to work, to pile into a job that looked too big, and reduce it to simplicity. His West Point training and Army experience kept him from going off the deep end of social experimentation with his civilian associates, but his efficiency made him many a potent New Deal friend.

Among them was Harry Hopkins. He tapped Somervell for the biggest relief job in the country, the New York City WPA, which had worn out two administrators, including old Hugh Johnson. At that time the red-bordered Workers' Alliance was shouting "Get rid of Ridder" (Johnson successor) and Somervell went in wryly offering a new battle cry: "Sink Somervell."

He was not sunk. For three and a half years he ran the show, spent $10,000,000 a month (his salary as lieutenant colonel: $6,900 a year). There were rows with the Communist Party and with private industry, which saw the engineer beating them out of fat jobs. There was a sit-down strike (which he beat by locking the privies). But in the end even the Workers' Alliance admitted that the job had been a great show of efficiency ("but so was the building of the Pyramids") and Somervell had left plenty of monuments. The biggest: LaGuardia Field.

When the emergency came, Somervell went back to Washington, soon walked into one of the worst messes of his career. The Quartermaster Corps (which is now in S.O.S.) had bungled its camp-building job and Somervell was called in. He straightened it out, so deftly that some Congressmen still think there was something fishy. By the time they had reached that conclusion, Somervell was gone, first to the supply job on the General Staff, then to S.O.S.

There Brehon Somervell works as he expects his subordinates to work: good, long and hard. He does no entertaining at his quarters in Fort Myer, has done none since his wife died five months ago. His three daughters run the household, hear their father turned out at 6 a.m. daily, watch him march out on foot for the office. After he has gone two miles his chauffeur picks him up, runs him in to the Munitions Building, where he is at his desk demanding action by 8:30 a.m.

The procurement of supplies for the second front has long since begun, and there is no end to the planning for Europe and for all the other spots where U.S. soldiers will fight. But Brehon Somervell has plenty of ways of getting action, and not all of them lie in his office, or in the thousands of S.O.S. headquarters in the field. He also knows where to go when he needs big things, when other agencies block the path of the S.O.S. Brehon Somervell has two potent friends in Washington. One of them is Harry Hopkins. The other is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Future's Portent. Where Somervell's career will end, no man can yet say. But able George Marshall, chafing in Washington, may give the answer. If he should become the Pershing of the second front, with field command of the A.E.F. in Britain, Somervell would be a top-flight candidate for his job as Chief of Staff.

When the war is over, U.S. military equipment will be scattered on highways, airdromes and goat paths around the world where Brehon Somervell sent it. If it arrived too late, if it was short by so much as a supply of critical bolts, nuts or solenoids for an airman's machine guns, the war will have been lost. If it got there on time and in the fullness of its complexity, the war will have been won.

* This week the British radio warned French listeners to evacuate coastal areas, since their presence there might hinder impending action of "friendly troops."

* Proud privilege of the Engineers (to which Somervell is no longer detailed) is its exclusive brass buttons, dating from 1812, with a turret instead of an eagle.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.