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VMI Archives. MS 0532. VMI at War Project Collection /trlf,el},ofle.J) ),~L!IoAI J(,.r.r~: ld/;,;~ P~rs 4NZ.IO Marshall Burwell Hardy, Jr. Kentucky is a state famous for its handsome gentlemen, lovely ladies, and mint juleps. "Marsh "falls in the first category, thrills the second, and is an expert on the third. Marshall has always been eligible for those coveted academic stars, and is one of those rare individuals who is capable ofgetting the most out of a thing, and he has always found plenty of time to share his knowledge with his less fortunate Brother Rats. Marshall's rea/love is his military duties. The result ofthis love and of his ability can be readily seen in his military record, collection which he finished off by being a first lieutenant in F Company. He plans to enter the Army and that organization will gain a true man while V.M.l. loses one of its best. -1940BOMB Project By the subject. .. War at One of my mother's favorite maxims was this little jingle: "The fear of HellVMI is a hangman's whip, to hold the wretch in order; When you feel your Honor grip, 0532.let that be your border!" Needless to say, that philosophyMS fitted perfectly with VMI. Moreover, lam a third-generation peacetime lawyer and "red-leg" citizen-soldier. 1 My grandfather, William Jarvis Hardy, Jr. '865, served the entire four years of the Civil War in the Richmond Howitzers of the Army of Northern Virginia; and my father volunteered the day after World War I was declared, serving nineteen months, mostly in the 138th Field Artillery, KyNG-the same regiment in which I first had active duty. Neither of them ever donned a uniform again when peace came, practicing law the rest of their lives; but I had trained fromArchives. my freshman year in high school, and stayed on as a Reservist for another twenty-two years-in all, thirty-four and a quarter years in service. Of that time, I was in uniform fourteen years, one month,VMI or rather, I was in seven different uniforms.2 My Army retirement pay is now a substantial financial aid. In my grandfather's and father's times, peace meant peace; in my time, it meant Cold War. My greatest achievement was winning the hand of Miss Whitney Treat Knowles. We reared six children, including two sets of boy-and-girl twins, througp~hewfui·asma of the 1960s. My greatest failure is that none of our three sons became either ci ti zen-soldi e~r I w ~ ow ever, on their own (with some he! p from family) all six-our three charming daughters an ee sta wart sons-got themselves well educated and into other worthwhile careers. (By virtue of our eldest daughter's marriage to a French citizen and oldest son's marriage to a British subject, five of our six [so far] grandchildren have dual citizenship.) Both my wife's family and mine are members of the church in which we met and were married, Calvary 174 M. B. Hardy, Jr. Episcopal in Louisville, Kentucky. We've served it in many capacities. [My efforts forthe church, along with other professional and personal activities, are summarized in my current Curriculum Vitae.) So much for me and my family; what about all the people I've encountered along the way? To paraphrase Kipling, "I've fought with many men acrost the seas, An' some of 'em was brave, an' some was not. "3 I've also contended with a lot of lawyers since 1948, and some of them was good and some was not. (I wonder how the enemy, or opponents in court, perceived me?) It was always a surprise to get beaten by the underrated, or when the overrated caved in. 4 My first big battle was with the U.S. Army. When we graduated, Great Britain was expecting invasion and France was falling; young officers were suddenly so important that the chaplain of the Senate, then considered the best preacher in the U.S., Reverend Peter Marshall, preached our Baccalaureate sermon; and the chief of staff, General George Catlett Marshall '0 1, made the commencement address. (I only claim kin to the General.) Most of us gave up our dreams of civilian careers; mine was to build railroads in South America, at $600 a month,*h" his, to some degree, why I had studied civil engin ring and Spanish atcollection VMI. (Stateside pay for civil e ineering grads was $90 to $125 a month.) So, I a ied for active duty. Because of a childhood eye injur, , a umed down. I made a nuisance of mysel , nd pulled every string imaginable. As part Of this effor y dad wrote to his second cousin, then-Lieut nt General Douglas MacArthur. I got a as an engineering clerk with the construction division ofE.I. DuPont de Nemours & Company, at $125 per month; three months later, I was chief expediter in the Projectsoutheastern United States for the construction of the Charlestown, Indiana, powder plant -at $216 a month-largely because VMI taught me good engineering lettering and how to read constructif~lans.War ,., J Then the Army finally acted. I was ordered to the~onth~ldat 1st Armored Division at Fort Knox, Kentuc~l)>r a year's active duty-at $125 a month, agam. Moreover, I soon fell to that scourge ofnewly­ forme~ies: measles. The 1st Armored Division was Regular Army, andVMI I was a 2nd Looie with the sole Military Occupational Specialty of "equitation instructor." Naturally, despite being a country boy who couldn't even ride a bike, I became battalion motorcycle officer, after being assigned to the 27th Field Artillery Battalion (Armored). The battalion's senior officers all became0532. generals: Maraist, Williams, deShazo, Cortand more. Some senior enlisted men held Reserve commissions, and the sergeant major, a World War I Distinguished Service Cross holder, was suddenly "Major NapierMS," the post adjutant. On the "Grand Maneuvers of 1941, "5 I rode a Harley-Davidson 65 about 1,500 miles, and the twenty-five cyclists I had trained (using equitation techniques) survived, with only one minor injury. I still see or hear from some of them. My first lesson in field soldiering concerned city boys. After supplying the cadre for the 4th Armored Division, the 1st Armored Division had become about twenty percent recruits, mostly America's first peacetime draftees.Archives. Our officer vacancies wer filled with 1941 ROTC grads. The third day of the motor­ march to Louisiana, our battalion surgeon co men ted that we were having an epidemic of constipation; we hadn't VMItaught the city boys how to dig "c holes" to relieve themselves whetytway from toilets! During those three-month maneuve , learned some other things: (l),.l(eep a reserve ...That lesson became clear to me while pinned down i cotton patch; my "cyclists," with our M-1928 Tommy guns, had charged an infantry platoon and got high scores from the umpires7ntil another platoon moved through some woods to attack our flank and we had no reserve to call on; (2)~·rain for stamina ... As Colonel "Teddy Bear" Heflin '16 had trained us in wrestling my Rat year; and (3~ the middle of the night, don't stumble around a command post. I stepped on Brigadier General Orlando Ward in his sleeping bag; he was a real gentleman about it, though. ~ For all of this, we got our first campaign ribbon, the American Defense, appropriately colored yello , since the rest of the world was desperately fighting. 175 M. B. Hardy, Jr. We had hardly gotten back to Fort Knox when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor-eleven days before my year's active duty was up. I had asked my ring figure date, Kitty Hill from Richmond, to Louisville for Christmas, but she hadn't yet accepted, and, oh, well. All of the West Point class of 1941 who had joined us for the last half of the maneuvers were transferred out; the division was reorganized, losing a tank regiment and most of our motorcycles, but gaining an artillery battalion; and we were alerted for overseas movement. I went to the new field artillery outfit, the 91st Armored Field Artillery Battalion. Our weapons were new, too: lOSs self-propelled, "on the half-shell" (T- 19 half-tracks). My job would be combat trains commander and battalion ammunitions officer. The commanding officer was Charles P. Summerall, Jr. , son of the former chief of staff, and our new division commander was the gentlemanly Orlando Ward. Assembling all the officers, he said: "I consider it a signal honor to assume command of this splendid division upon the eve of its greatest adventure." He also told us that he didn't know whether we would go to "Siberia, Liberia or Iberia." In the event, we went to none ofthe above. After staging at Fort Dix, New Jersey, we sailed in May 1942 into a North Atlantic scourged by submarine "wolf packs." A week earlier, celebratingcollection my promotion to first li eutenant, I had ~?e the mistake of visiting Atlantic City with my parents and 16-year-old sister, and we saw the four-f~de tarred strip nning north and south out of sight at highwater level on the beach­ from the oil of torpedoed Ameri n ships! We sailed aboard the transpo Thomas H. Barry, ex-Oriente, a New York-to-Havana cruise ship. With bunks seven tiers high in her ba age hold, she was rated at 3,500 troops;Project but, as an experiment, she_ was double-loaded with 7 ,000.
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