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Show U. S. 'Scouts and Raiders' Q i Make Warfare History Wtfh Specialists in Guerilla Tactics Practice pf q ; Bloodless Raids in Preparation for ri;' Big Battle to Come. J.-a By BAUKIIAGE News Analyst and Commentator. WNTJ Service, Union Trust Building Washington, D. C. 'Halt who's there?" This sentence, barked out In one startled exhalation, stopped the stealthy form which had suddenly materialized out of the shadow of a plane. His dark wet suit stuck to his lithe form. His hands went up as the sentry's bayonet stopped just short of his midriff. There was no moon. The two figures, hardly visible to each other In the black, froze for a second as the sentry's nervous trigger-finger grew a little more steady. He called the guard. There was the crescendo scufT-scuff-scuff of hurrying feet and a moment later, the sentry was patrolling patrol-ling the airdrome again very much on the alert. . . . "For the. fifth time, I ask you where you came from," the angry colonel demanded. For the fifth time came the same answer from the prisoner in the wet jungle suit "Private, first class, James O'Fallon, Serial No. 3030496." "Take him away," said the colonel finally, "he can stay in the guardhouse for the duration." The guards hustled No. 3030496 off to the hoosegow where he stumbled over an assortment of "AWOLS" and other bleary-eyed offenders. He saw three other men lying peacefully peace-fully on the floor arrayed like him. But no sign of recognition on their blackened faces. Bloodless Raid Private first class O'Fallon and his four comrades (although the colonel didn't know it at the time) were the only men captured out of a raiding party of 40. The rest had slipped catlike over the whole air-base, air-base, chalked their initials on planes, sketched the location of the radio room, noted the position of the antiaircraft guns, estimated the size of the garrison, checked each rock and sandbar in the shallows through which they had crawled before be-fore they reached the beach. Of course, this was only a practice prac-tice raid like dozens of others, the preparation for which I have witnessed. wit-nessed. But real bullets had twice that night whistled out over shadows shad-ows and set the big grey Snauzers yipping and the flashlight stabbing Into the black sky above the base. Tha unwritten story of these specialists spe-cialists will all come out some day. The Japs did this kind of thing at the beginning of the war and we thought it incredible. The British did it later with their brilliant "commandos!" "com-mandos!" The old name for it is guerilla warfare . . . fighting behind the, lines, or In the more official language lan-guage of an article by Douglas Smith in that trenchant military publication, the Cavalry Journal, "a phase in trained armed warfare that concentrates on destruction (the raiders destroy, the scouts merely get information) of enemy personnel person-nel and equipment in the enemy's own territory." Back in the French and Indian wars, the ancestors of Douglas Smith began learning these tricks; Captain Smith, an American citizen and later of the French foreign legion, has put on paper some of the principles he has adduced from his own experiences in World War II. Excellent Results "The usual method of attacking an airdrome," says Captain Smith in recounting one of his experiences with the guerillas composed of British Brit-ish and French in Libya, "was for the men to leave their cars (the rubber boat of the desert) and go on foot up to the airdrome at night. When possible, they passed the sentries sen-tries without detection and put their bombs on the airplanes (chalk marks when you just rehearse) then left the airdrome and got sufficiently suffi-ciently far away before the bombs went off. "Of course," says Captain Smith laconically, as the descendant of a good Indian fighter would, "this was not always possible and many times, sentries had to be killed in hand-to-hand fighting by a sudden attack with a knife. . . " Although the Germans Ger-mans made every effort to protect their planes against such attacks, approximately 300 enemy planes were destroyed by this guerilla unit in a single 12-month span. Captain Smith, writing in the early days of the war, says, "in case of the invasion of Europe," the benefits derived from guerillas would be "of the greatest assistance to an army opening a bridgehead." Well, not only the land guerillas but also the men who come up out of the sea by night are of "greatest assistance" whether you call them by the romantic name of "commandos" "com-mandos" or the more prosaic American designation of "scouts and raiders." The French have their land gueriUas who are already playing play-ing a vital part in the battle of Germany. Ger-many. The part our scouts and raiders raid-ers have in the same epic event will some day be sung in appropriate appropri-ate measures. But let's get back to our personal history. The day after the bloodless "raid" which I described to you, a captain from the raided airbase was visiting at "raider" headquarters. Said the captain, after his third coca cola: "About your raiders running run-ning hog wild over our joint last night. We caught them all four of them. They walked right into the sentry's arms and darn near got drilled." The raider officer who lived his part and looked it he was still unshaven, un-shaven, got up and picked up a rifle, shining like a schoolboy's morning face, that was. standing in the corner. The Colonel Errs "Take this back to your colonel," he said, "and have him check its number. He knows it stands in the rack right outside his door and if you have an inspection worth a nickel, it's been missing about nine hours." The captain cocked an eye. "Yep," said the raider, "I plucked it from the bush and would have had the name plate off the skipper's door too if I hadn't heard a step in the hall. Want to see a sketch of your layout?" He tossed a sodden notebook on the table. Yes, it was just "play." But the young officer who had been pushing the pigskin around for one of our storied gridirons only two years ago had played at more serious games in Africa before he came back to be an instructor he had landed on more than one enemy beach, wiggled wig-gled past sentries, human and canine, can-ine, just as he had when he worked his way up to the commandant's door, stole the rifle, inched his way I back to a clump of bushes, dug out J his deflated rubber raft, blew it up j and paddled back to safety. Duck soup for him. He'd done it ! aU before in earnest once when there had been a quick hash of a i knife and some blood and a sentry's sen-try's last groan, stifled by a hand that had to wipe some enemy blood from it. And for that, he wears a little ribbon on his dress tunic whicb you can't buy, by the yard. Women and the War What is going to happen to the millions mil-lions of women who are now filling jobs in war industries when (1) those industries are discontinued or converted to peace-time operations, (2) millions of men come home from the war looking for jobs? A group of women who meet in Washington frequently, have been hard at work for months on plans to deal with such an emergency. They are the women's advisory committee commit-tee of the War Manpower commission, commis-sion, headed by Miss Margaret A. Hickey, and they have just made some specific recommendations to War Manpower Chief McNutt. The women's committee says that: Employers should give their women wom-en workers notice of cessation of work as far ahead as possible; Women to be laid off first should be those on the split-shift, including mothers of children for whom part-time part-time working arrangements have been made; Women who wish to resign from their jobs voluntarily should be asked to do so as soon as possible; Women who have to be dismissed because of the curtailment of work should Be given consideration as to skill, seniority and dismissal pay, based on length of service; Plans should be made for advising advis-ing women who are dismissed about such things as transferring to other jobs, retraining for other jobs and their social security rights. What action the manpower commission com-mission will take along these lines remains to be seen. But at least the women have spoken up. |