The Seventeenth Largest Army
The old Regular Army, part fairy tale and part dirty joke, was generally either ignored or disdained. But its people went about their work with a dogged humdrum gallantry—and when the storm broke, they helped save the world.
December 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 8
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EmailThen came the entrance of more than eight million men into what had been an army of a little more than one hundred thousand, with USO shows and stage-door canteens and little old ladies inviting servicemen to their houses for nice home-cooked meals on Sundays, and men buying them drinks while Red Cross people at the train depots offered free packs of cigarettes, “tailor-made,” not like the rolled ones the Regulars always used to smoke; and all the equipment was redesigned, the helmets, packs, web gear, barracks bag, shelter halves, everything; and in 1942 Yank , the GI weekly, run by and for the ex-civilians, defined the words Old Army as a group of persons who spoke in sentences inevitably beginning with “By God, it wasn’t like this in the ——”
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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
