Rah, Rah, U.S.A.

This week the U.S. Army launched its first football offensive. In Los Angeles, where Army officials have limited sport crowds to 5,000 since Pearl Harbor, 55,000 football fans were permitted to gather in the Memorial Coliseum to watch an All-Army team tackle the Washington Redskins, the first of eight games with big-league professional outfits. The goal: $1,000,000 for Army Relief.

The All-Army squad, culled from the 1,500 recent varsity players now in khaki, is split into two task forces: Eastern and Western. The Western group is coached by Major Wallace Wade, whose Alabama and Duke teams have been picked for the Rose Bowl five times. The Eastern group, under Colonel Bob Neyland--another football mastermind whose bone-crushing Tennessee teams won 30 straight games in 1938-39-40--will start its four-game series against the New York Giants Sept. 12.*

Coaches Wade and Neyland finally managed to get 130 onetime players assigned to football detail. Standouts among the Eastern squad are Corporal Norman Standlee (fullback terror of Stanford's famed T formation and more recently the bugaboo of the big bad Chicago Bears), Lieut. Harold Van Every (one of Minnesota's slickest broken-field runners and later star of the monstrous Green Bay Packers) and Corporal George Cafego (tailback on Tennessee's recent wonder team). The Western Lineup boasts Lieut. John Kimbrough (Texas Aggies' 220-lb. fullback who got $9,000 for six pro games last year) and three others of the high-scoring 1940 Aggies: Quarterback Marion Pugh, Halfbacks Jimmy Thomason and Bill Conatser.

With this star-studded backfield and a 220-lb. line, the All-Army Westerners set out this week to break up the deadly passing of Redskin Sammy Baugh. They started off like Commandos: on the second scrimmage of the game, Kimbrough ran off tackle 58 yards for a touchdown. But the powerful Redskins had too much ammunition for a bunch of soldiers with only three weeks' practice. They blasted them from the air (23 completed passes), mowed them down on the ground, kicked two perfect field goals--one from the 24-yd. line, another from the 27. Score: Redskins, 26; All-Army, 7.

*Other All-Army games will be played in Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit, Syracuse, Boston, Jersey City.

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