The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-08-06

Armies at Beau
 regard in September, 3O2,O0O of the
 Second and Third Armies in the
 Carolinas in November.
 Maneuvers so far have been piddlin' little things of divisions or
 corps, 8 mere 15,000 to 100000 men Now the full armies swing into &C.,
 tion in the biggest war games the
 country has seen since the War Be-
 tween the States, as there was noth-
 ing like these during the World
 War. There wasn't time.
 While every effort will be made to
 make these maneuvers as real as
 possible, including the use of smoke
 bombs for mines and sound effects
 achieved by playing phonograph
 records of dive bombers over loud
 speaker system, there will still be a
 lot of yelling about these aspects.
 For in spite of the best efforts of
 the MTP experts-the mobilization
 training program staffs-these ma-
 neuvers will be far from blitzkrieg.
 THE REAL THING,
 BUT
 Participation of aircraft will be limited. There will be few if any parachute troops. All the ground forces will have honest-to-John rifles and full quotas of machine guns, and they will fire blank cartridges as long as the supply holds out, as the munitions plants are too busy making real things to bother making more blanks.
 In the line of field artillery, there will be 75's, but practically no sos, no 105,s, 1858 or any of the bigger guns. There will be almost 100 per cent equipment in the way of smaller mortars, but very few of the larger sizes. Anti-tank guns and anti-aircraft guns will be missing.
 As for panzer divisions, the Army will use what it has, but they won't be completely equipped. The light tanks will be out in force, but heavy tanks won't be up to quota by any manner of means, and neith- CT will the heavier trucks nor mo- torcycles.
 Army headquarters doesn't want to get very specific about numbers on hand or shortages in these vari- ouS categories. The shortages par ticularly come under the heading of military secrets. But wherever there are shortages, they are going to be apparent through the use of guns, stovepipes for mortars, on wheels for anti-tank guns, and so on.
 There will probably be consider able squaWk about all these dummy weapons, in spite of the fact that the Army has been doing its best for months to explain that the Ger mans trained with cardboard tanks before Hitler and that these short ages are inevitable when you jump an army from 5000 to 100000 practically overnight.
 DRUM WOULD
 BEAT OUT FACTS
 Army has always been undecided. in the past, whether to blush in shame and try to hide its shortages, or whether to come out boldly and admit its equipment left consider able to be desired. General Drum. in command of the up-to-then big gest maneuvers in the New York state area during the last few years, has been one of the officers sup porting the idea that the country should be fully informed about how lousy its Army material really was. in the hope that it would stir LID people and particularly congress- men to demand more money for de- tense. It didn't work, but it was a good idea.
 Army public relations branch has been doing its best this spring and summer, to let the country know what to expect in the way of short age of arms in these fall maneuyers. There will be dummy weapons in almost every unit, and umpires with white flags meaning stop, blue flags meaning advance, red flags mean ng retreat, and orange flags mean n you're wiped out, will be all over he landscapes.
 What it will all prove is simply hat the Army isn't ready for war. Certain task forces, perhaps yes. But the Army as a whole hasn't the equipment and its men, good as hey may be, simply haven't had all the training it takes to make an Army that will stack up against the professional and fire-baptized lighters of Europe and Asia. And ihe more everyone realizes those shortcomings, the better of we'll be.
 Cpu,s~@v~k TA