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INTRODUCTION |
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A bright sun beat down on Camp Cooke, California that day, as if smiling its approval of the scene being enacted by the men of the Sixth Armored Division. It was September 20, 1943, and the usual calm, efficient atmosphere of the immense Reservation seemed to have been replaced by one of utter confusion. Trucks, loaded with equipment, rumbled up and down the Camp's paved highways, cargos were hastily dumped at Supply Room doors, while an assortment of gaudy furniture littered the area adjacent to each Company Day Room. Other trucks ground to a stop beside rows of barracks, and from them scrambled men shouldering heavy packs to trudge with a strange uncertainty toward their newly assigned quarters.
But these men were by no means recruits in the Army that was to annihilate the mighty Wehrmacht within a span of twenty months. Actually they were all muscle hardened soldiers who long before had mastered the basic fundamentals of warfare at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. And, during the long months that had intervened, they had undergone rigorous maneuvers in the hot musty forests of Louisiana, another gruelling five months of maneuvers on the vast barren wasteland of the Mojave Desert, and seven months more of strenuous training at Camp Cooke. Nor was this scene one of confusion. On the contrary, it was the skillful manipulation of men and equipment designed to add greater strength and mobility to an already tremendously powerful military organization. Here was the reorganization of the Sixth Armored Division. That September day marked the climax of long months of painstaking observation and studious analysis of the military successes of friend and foe alike, of mighty Armies already locked in the grim struggles that then raged across North Africa and in Russia. Into our ranks that day came men from the 69th Armored Regiment; versatile soldiers, wise in the ways of mechanized war. But the greater majority by far, were drawn from the Third Battalion, 50th Armored Infantry Regiment, an organization that came into being at Syracuse, New York in 1917 when an earlier generation of American fighting men rose to crush the Hun of that era, who even then sought to suppress the sacred American ideals for which our fathers fought and died. That great Regiment in turn traced its parentage to the ranks of the Twenty-Third United States Infantry, famed for its occupation and control of the vast unknown Alaska of 1867, after that land had been sold to America by the Russians. It is to those stalwart soldiers of the dim and distant past, that we of the Fiftieth owe our military heritage. And, it is to commemorate the memory of these brave men that our Coat of Arms is unfurled, to fly beside our country's Colors during every Battalion formation.
Last updated: November 11, 2007 |