Word: platoon
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Sergeant Arnold A. Petry of Long Beach, N.Y. knows his Germans. He fights them armed with two automatic pistols and a Thompson submachine gun. When his platoon was surrounded in an apple orchard west of Tettingen, Germany, the sergeant growled to his men: "We won't surrender...
Friend or Foe? American tanks from the west clanked into Mongyu at 11:30. The first American, Brigadier General George W. Sliney, hiked in on foot with a platoon of Chinese troops from the Burma side. The cocky little foot soldiers who had mopped up the north Burma jungle saw a knot of blue-grey, raggle-taggle men at the junction and wanted to fire on them. Sliney threw himself in front of the Bren gun. They were Chinese from the other side of the block and they cheered and yelled as the American walked...
...what they're paying me for." The record of his tours of duty is as unglamorous as it is long; in World War I, though he got to France, he saw no action. In one thing he takes pride: he has commanded, in relentless progression, a squad, a platoon, a company, a regiment, a brigade, a division, a corps and an army. He dislikes the lofty impersonality forced on him by his present duty-"Hell, I'd rather have a regiment." Now, he says, "I don't do much except think a lot, scold a little...
Lieut. Will Rogers Jr., son of the late, great humorist, and Congressman from California until he quit politics to go to war, was forced to withdraw his platoon in the face of an enemy attack, but left his regards for the Nazis: on a four-foot sheet of wrapping paper, nailed to a tree in the middle of a road, he printed in big red letters a favorite Nazi slogan: "Beware! We will be back in two weeks with our new secret weapon...
When a division in action loses a pan or parts (a technical sergeant, a second lieutenant, a platoon, a whole company), the replacement is promptly supplied-how promptly was revealed by the entries in a captured German officer's diary. Having battered a U.S. division to pieces, the Germans laid plans for a knockout in the morning. But by morning the astounded Germans discovered that they were faced again with a U.S. division fighting at full strength...