West Point ’41: The Class That Went to War and Shaped America

3 | At the Post

16 3 At the Post Jim Forsyth was returning from visiting his family at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in the summer of 1939, ready to begin his third year at West Point as a “cow.” Following the first two years as plebes and then yearlings, and after a sixty-day furlough, cadets were said to be cows returning home from far afield. En route to New York, Forsyth’s train pulled into Elgin, Illinois , west of Chicago. As he sat reading, the train whistle blew, indicating his onward journey. Passengers shuffled through the car with suitcases, searching for spare seats on the crowded train. A young lady sat down beside Forsyth, and the pretty sight broke his concentration. She was a girl of medium height with fair skin and gilded-brown hair cascading over her shoulders. Forsyth guessed her to be about twenty. They began small talk. She told him her name was Ruth Noffs, and her father was a railroad stationmaster in Elgin. She was headed to Maryland to visit relations. Soon, the two were playing cards. Between the heat of the summer and the heat of young adulthood, as the hours passed into the better part of a day, small talk led to amorous talk. By the time the train reached the east coast, James Forsyth had a new girlfriend. Diamond Jim was smitten. He and Ruth began corresponding, and she became his “OAO,” the term for “one and only” girlfriend. The initial bliss of amore, however, did not last long. In September 1939, Hitler’s Wehrmacht—the Third Reich armed forces—invaded Poland, marking the onset of the war in Europe. For many, the mood at the academy sobered considerably, but Ed Rowny was devastated. Not only did his parents hail from Poland, but he recalled the fright of those terrifying goose steps at the Berlin Olympics. Those boots were now marching across his ancestral homeland. Upon the invasion news, Peer de Silva and Tom Cleary hoisted a homemade swastika atop a small flagpole as a prank. For days prior there had been talk among friends about how to outprank one another; Walter WoolKazel -Wilcox - West Point.indb 16 3/19/2014 5:40:09 PM at the post ★ 17 wine especially egged some cadets on. But this stunt went a little too far. The resulting front-page picture and story in The New York Times created an uproar. Rather than face dismissal, de Silva and Cleary were required to respond to every irate letter that poured into the paper—and there were hundreds—with each of the classmates’ responses vetted by the academy’s English department; out of mischief would come some learning. In anticipation of a war, lectors including Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and George Marshall began reengineering their talks in tactics to real-time strategies. Many cadets were awestruck to have such men in their midst. When General Omar Bradley stopped George Johnson in training, he nearly froze in astonishment. I can’t believe he’s even asking me a question. Jack Norton struck up a unique relationship with a tactical instructor, Captain Jim Gavin, who was impressed with Germany’s pioneering airborne operations. Like another “tac,” Lieutenant Jake Waters—the sonin -law of General Patton—Gavin was always seeking ways to improve on the three mainstays of warfare: march, shoot, and communicate. The marching aspect included strategies for tanks, trucks, amphibious units, and other methods of moving forces; shooting involved finessing weapons and firing techniques including those on tanks; and communications on the front lines were enhanced by new twists to radios, signaling, encryption , and so forth. Gavin and Norton bantered about whether parachutes could enhance the march element. The Soviets jumped out of airplanes into snow banks without the benefit of parachutes. Imagine the possibilities, the two conjectured , if U.S. parachute units could bypass man-made or geographic barriers to combat the German blitzkrieg. The pair deliberated various concepts. During an amphibious landing, parachute units could land behind enemy forces defending a beachhead. They could be inserted at the tail end of a blitzkrieg to destroy refueling tankers or attack supply depots supporting front-line units. Maybe they could bypass mountain obstacles and land on the rooftop of a defended building near the enemy’s command headquarters . The opportunities to tactically employ parachute units seemed countless. While shifting into this war mindset, cadets nonetheless never gave up hopeofdefeatinganadversaryclosertohome—theNavy.The’41ersrooted themselves silly at the revered annual ritual, the Army-Navy game held...