User Reviews

"The Linesman" is one of my favourite episodes of "Combat!" thanks to it combining two of my favourite actors: Vic Morrow and Jack Lord ("Hawaii 5-O").

This Edward Lakso story has the squad going out on a mission to lay a phone line as HQ feel sure that the Germans are monitoring Allied radio communications. Lord plays Sergeant McKlosky who was a linesman in civilian life and he carries a bitterness and lack of faith in others after an accident in a Wyoming blizzard where his colleague left him, near freezing to death with a broken leg.

Things get off to a bad start when a sniper takes out McKlosky's assistant and this is even before the start of the mission. He blames Sergeant Saunders and the squad for allowing the sniper to get anywhere near and draws a telling off from Lieutenant Hanley. Regardless, McKlosky now feels he is surrounded by an inept squad. These feelings are ramped up when squad stumblebum, Private Littlejohn drops a vital reel of telephone wire from a bridge into the fast flowing river below. McKlosky assumes the mission is nixed as they no longer have enough cable to reach their destination. Saunders thinks otherwise and offers a short cut.

They find themselves still short of wire and Saunders suggests a village where they can salvage some wire, assuming that one length of wire is just like any other, here, McKlosky show his expertise and puts Saunders straight. Saunders and the squad put McKlosky straight when they have a fire fight with a German platoon who arrive in the village and having completed the mission, they get out safely in a German truck. The episode ends with the two sergeants having a mutual respect for each other's abilities.

The lack of perpetual gunfire appears to annoy some, but the acting makes up for the lack of squibs going off. Morrow and Lord were stars in long running tv series for a very good reason: acting ability. Both could do heroes and villains and make them believable. Acting was an art, it seems to have been lost, long ago.

10/10.

We begin seeing a sergeant Barney McKlosky, (played by Jack Lord of Hawaii-Five-O fame) who becomes most upset with Sgt. Saunders for "letting" one of his men get shot by a sniper as they prepare for a mission. McKlosky is more upset when he Saunders and three of his men are the ones to escort him to lay phone lines from a command base to a new outpost. He seems to not understand that anywhere near or behind enemy lines, there can be a sniper who moves in and shoots someone, even though the area had been thoroughly checked out just a short time earlier.

McKlosky's negative attitude is the crux of this episode. The whole march along they are laying down phone wires, rapidly hiding them in the grass and brush in a way that seemed not too realistic to me. They weren't slowly covering everything up, just knocking a few weeds over the wires are they moved along.

At one point they are crossing a bridge and they are at the end of one spool of wire, so they call up Littlejohn to provide the new spool. As can be expected, whenever the likeable big guy has any sort of valuable equipment to handle, he botches it (a weak point of the series in my opinion) and the spool drops into the river and is lost. McKlosky chews out Littlejohn as though he is an idiot.

This means they don't have enough wire to get the line to reach their destination. Saunders pauses a moment to think and almost immediately McKlosky is almost yelling at Saunders as though the only thing to do is turn back. But Sarge has studied the map and believes a shortcut-through area more heavily patrolled by Germans-will let them reach the destination and complete the mission.

Well, that doesn't work out either, so Plan C is to go to a deserted French village and abscond with wire that is available there. As always, as soon as our guys move into a deserted village, one or more German trucks/cars arrive as the Krauts are setting up an observation post.

Of course they are able to complete the mission, and McKlosky learns that he does need to trust in others and get over the bad experience he had before the war that one of his men told Saunders about.

I think they fell too much into a formula to make this a standout episode. It felt much like a few earlier episodes-particularly with another sergeant vying with Saunders, another sergeant with some past demons causing him to be most disagreeable, hostile to everyone around him. I had a bit of a problem with the basic event that caused their misery-the dropping of one spool of wire into the river. It seems that while they had an ample supply of wire available, they calculated just how much to take and didn't allow for anything that might cause them to need more. Given that it was supposed to take hours to lay down a few miles of phone line, through woods, up and down hills and across a bridge and all, I cannot help but ask, "Why not just bring along an extra spool or two of wire more than you think you will need?" I know, I know-that would have made for a 12-minute episode. I also thought Lord's character was too quick to show that much anger at Saunders & Co.