January 2011

The World of Tomorrow Iron Men

By Larry Zim, Mel Lerner, and Herbert Rolfes; Harper & Row; 240 pages .

By Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller, and Seymour Chwast; Abrams; 80 pages .

By Larry Zim, Mel Lerner, and Herbert Rolfes; Harper & Row; 240 pages .

By Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller, and Seymour Chwast; Abrams; 80 pages .

Videotape produced and directed by Tom Johnson and Lance Bird; 83 minutes .

By Stuart Leuthner; Doubleday; 324 pages .

Now that a Super Bowl game attracts as much attention as a presidential election, it is easy to forget that not so long ago professional football was a little-noticed backwater of the American sports landscape. Before the advent of media stars like Broadway Joe Namath, players such as Jim Ringo, Ed Sprinkle, and Toy Ledbetter toiled in relative anonymity for low pay in often half-empty stadiums. Stuart Leuthner has interviewed two dozen men who helped the pro game grow into the spectacle it is today—heroic quarterbacks, mean linebackers, scrubs, front-office figures, and even a member of the Washington Redskins’ band.

American servicemen certainly were not trigger-happy in World War II. We were, after all, products of the Depression era and raised to the dictum “waste not, want not.” Moreover, most Americans, even today, feel kin in spirit if not in fact to the pioneers who settled the continent and who felt they might not have food on the table tomorrow if they were prodigal with ammunition today. In addition, our Army trained us in marksmanship and gave medals for proficiency on the rifle range. If we saw the enemy, we shot at him. He did well to keep his head down. To simply spew bullets in the direction of a barn or a hillside because the enemy might be lurking there was against our instincts and our training.

Some explanation is needed for the fact that so few of my generation saw fit to challenge Marshall’s assertions.

As military riflemen, the men of all the Company K’s, however valorous, were poorly trained. Judged by ideal standards of the Old Army—that of the thirties—they were not trained at all. What they needed was extendedorder drill and musketry. What they got was “sneaking and snooping” and a little individual marksmanship—just enough to shake whatever self-confidence they had acquired at Coney Island shooting galleries.

What angers me, as an Old Army NCO and a World War II armored-infantry officer, is Marshall’s unexamined assumption that individuals naturally have choices as to when and if to fire. Excepting sentinels, scouts, and such, this violates centuries of military doctrine. A rifleman is, in principle, part of a shooting machine controlled by officers and noncommissioned officers. A rifleman ordinarily does his duty when he obeys orders. In the absence of orders he is usually right in doing nothing. In the fog of battle voluntary firing could (and often did) kill his own comrades.

In the ancient seafaring town of Portsmouth, England, overlooking the English Channel, stands the D-Day Museum. This June it will be at the center of ceremonies commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the day when Allied troops—many of them embarked from this port—breached Hitler’s Fortress Europe. The museum is full of telling exhibits, but most impressive by far is the Overlord Embroidery, which tells the story of the Normandy landing in glowing fabric.

As one of the highlights of the year 1913 (“The Time Machine,” November 1988), you listed the upset victory of the Notre Dame football team over Army, due mainly to the exploits of the passing combination of Knute Rockne to Gus Dorais. Your report, however, seemed to support the old myth that the forward pass as we know it today is dated from this game, that it was the famed Rockne-Dorais duo that brought the forward-pass play kicking and screaming, so to speak, into the twentieth century.

This widely held misconception apparently got its start because of Notre Dame’s unexpected and stunning win over a highly favored Army team, a victory that the shocked football powers of the East could accept only on the basis of what was to them a new and thitherto unused tactic on the playing field. But this conclusion does an injustice to a little-known football team from the Midwest and its innovative coach.