Smartly the 83rd Division band blared the serenade that welcomes recruits to Indiana’s Camp Atterbury, This Is the Army, Mr. Jones. About 250 civilians piled off the Sunday-night train from Detroit. They were no ordinary recruits, some were beyond military age, some had fought in World War I; all were members of C.I.O.’s United Automobile Workers. They had come from Midwestern armament plants to Atterbury’s wooded hills to train a few days with U.S. soldiers.
Shrewd Walter P. Reuther, U.A.W. vice president and one of organized labor’s best brains, had sold the War Department the idea: if workers could fraternize with soldiers on soldiers’ terms, there might be greater effort on the assembly lines. In Atterbury, Reuther led his 250 shop stewards and committeemen to waiting combat carriers. In the Sard’s mess halls the newcomers dined heartily; marched to barracks. Lights went out at 9:30 p.m.
At 5:30 next morning began two aching days. The first was a 16-hour shift, the second a dawn-to-midnight spell. No one talked of time-and-a-half for overtime, though the union was paying the men for time lost in the shops. Under the grinning guidance of the troopers, the earnest 250, helmeted and in fatigue uniforms, carried on with aging muscles and unpracticed bodies. Older unionists dropped out now & then for a breather; younger ones plowed on through the stiff routine.
On the rifle range they burrowed into the cold Hoosier earth, tried out the Army’s Garand. They passed the ammunition for 105-mm. howitzers. They dug slit trenches, staggered across swaying bridges of wire and planks (the less nimble tumbled six feet down into muddy water), paddled assault boats over mined, smoke-screened Driftwood River, grappled hand-to-neck while instructors barked: “Be ruthless—kill, maim, gouge his eyes, stick your fingers up his nostrils, give him a knee in the kidneys!”
The hardier unionists ventured on the “blitz course”—the mean, trying 1,000-yard obstacle trail where Rangers are toughened: through barbed wire, up cliffs, over barricades, crawling on their stomachs while tracer bullets streaked above and bombs burst around. For a final treat the Division staged a mock battle, and the weary visitors watched guns and tanks they had helped make swing into action.
Back in civvies, the U.A.W. stumbled into a 4 a.m. return train to Detroit. The 83rd rank-&-file passed judgment: “Good guys.” Said Walter Reuther: “We’re going home tired in body but determined to give the boys in our fighting army the fighting equipment they need. The boys in the services have plenty of guts. We’re determined to back them with plenty of sweat.”
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