Fighting Chance

It was June Week at West Point. Pretty girls were whisked down to Flirtation Walk, proud families and friends conducted through garden parties, receptions and trophy-filled museums. Then one morning last week, 475 white-belted, swallow-tailed graduates filed gravely to the rostrum, saluted Academy Superintendent Major General Frederick A. Irving, received their diplomas (B.S.) and commissions as 2nd lieutenants in the Regular Army.

They were the first class graduated since the Korean war began, but the new shavetails would not go directly to combat outfits, where so many of their schoolmates in 1948, '49 and '50 had gone. Korea had taught the Army a bitter and bloody lesson. The West Pointers had proved themselves fine officers in battle, but they had taken unusually heavy casualties.

Green to combat but trained to leadership, many in the '48, '49 and '50 classes had gone off to become section and platoon leaders, but they had had to learn the deadly lessons of combat under enemy fire. One outfit, Able Company, 7th Regiment, 3rd Division, went ashore at Wonsan last November with West Pointers leading three of its four platoons. By February, two had been killed and the lone survivor, All-America Quarterback Arnold Galiffa, had been taken out of front-line combat to become General Ridgway's aide. In another company, in the 2nd Division, one of its three West Point platoon leaders was killed, the other two wounded. Football Captain John Trent ('50) was killed three days after arriving in Korea; 1st Lieut. Samuel Coursen of the 1949 class was killed last October, rescuing a G.I. trapped in an enemy-held dugout, won a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry in action. By June Week, 267 West Pointers had become battle casualties in Korea. The last three classes had lost 41 men killed, 108 wounded, missing or captured --about one out of every six men assigned to an Army combat branch on graduation.

The Army, though it still insisted that its future generals learn their trade in combat, thought such heavy casualties were too high for the long pull ahead. "It is always the best men who get knocked off," said one officer bitterly. The 1951 class will get about six months' advanced U.S. combat training before the Army releases them for Korean duty, with a fighting chance of living through it.

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