CAMP ATTERBURY

There are not many who went through the winter of 1942 - 43 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, who are likely to forget it. Rain seemed to fall constantly. The standard uniform was helmet liners, raincoats, and galoshes. Target practice was held in mud that was ankle-deep. Practice marches were restricted to hard roads -- it would be too hard on the galoshes to wear them on a march. The sick rate averaged about three hundred a day. Why Atterbury was selected for a training camp when Texas was over-supplied with dry ground is another of those General Staff mysteries. The reason couldn't have been local, because the draftees came from all over the country. At least, the recruits learned that it was more important to keep their rifles dry than it was to keep themselves dry.

One of the most necessary requirements for the infantry is to harden them physically, so that they can stand the arduous life of the combat infantryman. Two of the instruments of torture put out by the high command were the obstacle course and the physical fitness tests. The obstacle course would have been fun for a ten-year-old boy, but it was pure torture for a soft forty-year-old man. One patriotic forty-year-old, who was subject to heart attacks, insisted on trying it day after day and had to be carried in each time on a stretcher.

The physical fitness tests seemed too demanding for civilians, but when the tests were being discussed during an officer's meeting and an officer objected to thirty pushups, Lieutenant Dan Gust got down on the floor and did one hundred and thirty pushups. That ended the argument.

By the time the next summer came, those who hadn't broken under the punishment were so inured to physical discomfort that they took whatever was dished out without a word, except to answer some complainer, "Aw, you can't take it."

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