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91 5 A One-Man Band Camp McCain was built in a rural area of Mississippi near the town of Grenada and about a hundred miles from Memphis, Tennessee, over winding , two-lane roads. In the summer the heat and humidity were intense, but Camp McCain had large wooded areas in which to train the men of the 87th Infantry Division. Special Services came to the North Mississippi base and built heavily used Service Clubs, bowling alleys, exchanges, and beer halls and instituted a full schedule of athletic events. In August, however, the camp and the men of the Golden Acorn Division had a major event. For almost a week the beautiful Hollywood actress Carole Landis visited the camp and threw herself into a hectic round of entertainment, from singing to giving boxing championship awards. Landis had been working through the Special Services and USO to entertain the troops. She first went to England and North Africa, then to the Pacific, where she contracted a debilitating disease, and then to visit troops training in the United States. One morning she showed up at a company mess hall and helped two shocked GIs peel potatoes. According to the division command, morale for the 87th Division had never been higher.1 The Special Services officers worked to provide all they could for the men, and they formed a large group of local girls, called the “military maids,” to attend dances and hold birthday parties for the troops at that isolated post. The 1943 Valentine’s Day dance, organized by the Special Services and the town of Grenada, filled the large wooden Service Club, as the commanding general, his staff, and many local matrons, as chaperones, watched over the event. Music was provided by a GI band organized and equipped by Special Services.2 With many troops being trained in remote areas, the Special Services was 92 American Girls, Beer, and Glenn Miller challenged, and every effort was made to provide those important moraleenhancing activities. It was one thing to have a Hollywood star visit an army camp or open a PX beer hall; it was another to have a coherent program to extend Special Services offerings to units in training or engaged in combat overseas. Army units at the theater, army, or corps level were used to having units attached to them for operations in the process of building a force for combat, but this was quite different from having a Special Services officer attached to a commander ’s staff. To have Special Services personnel simply on site did not answer a commander’s question as to exactly what they had and what their capabilities were. There was a need to have identifiable Special Services units that would become a part of the commander’s assets. In 1942 Osborn’s Special Services Division began a process of building the first Special Services unit at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, with the purpose of deploying the unit to Britain as quickly as possible. The basic mission of the unit was as follows: “The Special Services [unit] is an independent, self-sustaining, semi-mobile organization , trained and equipped to provide recreational and informational services to troops serving in a theater of operations. It is able to provide forward echelons with services and facilities otherwise available only in base operations .”3 With a mission clearly defined and with plans to ship them to England by September 1942, there was a need to make the unit comprehensible to overseas commanders. Consequently, by the end of 1942 the unit became a company, which did not change any of the activities or the tables of organization and equipment. Commanders and staffs would be happier now, having an identifiable army formation. By the end of the war in 1945, the Special Services Division had forty companies, with the vast majority serving overseas. By the very nature of the companies, they had to have a close working relationship with the Army Exchange System, the USO, and the Red Cross. With the army in need of combat troops as the war progressed, the Special Services companies had to prove their worth. By the end of the war, there were more than four thousand soldiers involved in the Special Services companies. The soldiers assigned to the companies first completed basic combat training , giving them proficiency with the rifle and with the skills a combat soldier needed to function on the battlefield. Once that was done, the soldier was assigned to the company...

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