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National Geographic : 1941 Jul
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Around the Clock with Your Soldier Boy Staff I'hotographer .. Baylor Roberts Coffee Tasters Curl Their Lips Over Sample Drinks in a Q.M. Depot Growls, long and loud, come from officers and men if camp coffee is weak and pale. To get good beans, well roasted, is the Quartermaster's job; to keep it strong is the company cook's duty. In this San Antonio army coffee laboratory samples are made from different berries. Tasters couldn't possibly swallow one cup after another; hence the colossal cuspidors close at hand! projects amounts to nearly 4,000,000 acres, or an area bigger than the total land and water extent of Rhode Island and Connecticut. Think what a headache Army lawyers on the Judge Advocate General's staff must get. seeking options, purchase contracts, and sound titles for so many different tracts of land! This Judge Advocate General, incidentally, has an interesting job, and a small army of lawyers works for him. He told me that about fifty years ago fully half of all officers and men in the Army were being court-martialed every year; now such trials are rare. Enlisted men are no longer prosecuted for filching a chocolate bar from the post exchange, swiping a buddy's tobacco, or punching his nose. Now company commanders settle most such family quarrels. Minus Ordnance, We Couldn't Even Start to Fight No fancy pants or flashy parades for the boy who lands in the Ordnance Department. Yet he's the man behind the man behind the gun. His job is to supply guns and am munition. He handles the bullet for your .22 rifle, or a one-ton shell for a monster coast defense gun. To do its work, the ordnance branch needs the help of armorers, instrument repairmen, welders, electricians, machinists, chemists, tool makers, munitions workers, gunsmiths, and artillery experts. Soldiers may be trained at ordnance train ing centers, or in the ordnance schools at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and Raritan Arsenal, Raritan, New Jersey. Imagine all a rookie must learn! "Ord nance" handles every tool of war, from pistol to siege gun-some 2,500 separate items of more than 250,000 different parts! Besides guns and ammunition, this branch also deals in tanks, armored and scout cars, bombs, range finders, fire-control devices, and pyrotechnics for signaling. Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads hold the same salt and spice you find in American Army camp life.
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