Scales on War. Bob Scales
Indian tribes and the occasional face-off with the hated French, who occupied an empire beyond the northern and western colonial wildernesses. So our earliest citizens chose to defend their homes by assembling local militias from the citizenry. These pickup crews, like all militia, were terrible Soldiers, but they were usually better Soldiers than the Indians.
Perhaps we would never have become an independent nation had it not been for a badly behaving British Army that forcibly quartered its Soldiers in the homes of Boston’s prickly citizens. Hatred for a professional army increased yearly as the patriots’ propaganda amplified or made up stories about the horrors of lynching of citizens, burning of farms, and looting that accompanied the British Army from 1775 until the war ended at Yorktown in 1781.
The traditional distrust of a professional army extended itself to the colonial side during the Revolution. Washington’s Continentals (read “professionals”) won the war but suffered deadly neglect during the winters of 1777 and 1778, in places like Valley Forge and Morristown. Professionals saved the day and won the war at Yorktown (with massive help from French professionals). But over the centuries, history was rewritten by civilians who kept alive the myth of the minuteman who (like Cincinnatus) left his plowshare to take up his musket upon the approach of the British regulars. Minutemen were useful. Local armed citizens fought as bushwhackers and skirmishers, harassing the British lines of communications, and they occasionally reinforced Washington’s Continental regulars. The mythology of the militiaman, or the “citizen Soldier,” was larger than his contribution, and it would grow after the American Revolution.
The lingering animosity toward professional Soldiers, U.S. or British, was even written into the Constitution by our founding fathers, virtually all of whom served during the Revolution. Article 1, Section 8 of the document states that “the Congress shall have power to . . . raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.” The Navy is treated quite differently: Article 1, Section 8, clause 13 states simply that “the Congress shall have power to . . . provide and maintain a Navy.” The implications are clear. The founding fathers considered land forces temporary, to be raised principally in times of crisis with appropriations subject to termination every two years. Early congressmen, in contrast, considered the Navy to be the service that was to be “maintained.”
The myth of the minuteman grew during the American Civil War, a war fought by amateurs on both sides. The Confederate armies were formed from local community volunteers. Lincoln raised the Union army principally through a system of “volunteer” recruitment, in which leading civilian citizens, usually rich merchants, lawyers, or judges, would raise personal regiments and, after being elected to command by their Soldiers, lead them in battle. Within a few months, many of these untrained and undisciplined rabbles were dead—not of bullets but of disease caused mainly by amateur leaders who did not have a clue about sanitation or camp discipline. To be sure, most of the fighting generals on both sides were West Pointers. But the troops and junior officers they led suffered and died because they entered combat as raw civilians and were forced to learn to fight by fighting, the costliest way to professionalize an army. The price of amateurism was manifested mostly by wastage, something Lincoln called “the deadly arithmetic.” Poor tactical leadership and poor discipline in formations left most of those who remained with the colors dead on battlefields like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness.
By the end of the war, both armies had become professional through the deadly Darwinian process of wartime self-selection and luck. Amateurism, not the enemy, killed almost three-quarters of a million men, about one in five of those recruited—more dead than in all subsequent American wars combined. Sadly, in U.S. military history, folklore too often trumps truth. Amateurism has cost many more American lives than virtually any other phenomenon. A uniquely American form of amateurism continued to prevail after the Civil War, from the Spanish American War to Vietnam.
The world wars, Korea, and Vietnam were fought with ground forces remarkably similar in composition and competence. While the technical services (the Navy, Air Force, and noncombat ground Soldiers) were manned by skilled volunteers, the infantry—the branch tasked with fighting the enemy up close—came from the dregs of society. As a rule, infantrymen were smaller and less fit than Soldiers in other branches and services. They were drawn from the lowest mental categories, as determined by newly developed military versions of IQ tests.
Thanks to Hollywood, we have a positive view of the “Greatest Generation,” that of the World War II years. Unfortunately, during the opening campaigns amateurism continued to kill U.S. infantry needlessly. The battles of Kasserine Pass in North Africa and Buna in the Pacific were bloody disasters. Later, on the beaches of Normandy, the 90th Division suffered more than 100 percent casualties among enlisted Soldiers and 150 percent among officers in six weeks of combat. Gen. William DePuy, who served as a regimental commander in the 90th, later recalled that his division was the greatest killer on the battlefield. Tragically, it was the Germans who did the killing.
The crushing ineptitude of American close-combat units was eventually overcome by two factors. First, small batches of “elite” infantry stiffened the line. From the moment Airborne and Ranger Soldiers touched enemy soil they became killing machines. The Germans referred to our Airborne infantry as “Devils in Baggy Pants.” Fronts occupied by Airborne regiments were routinely four or five times larger than those held by conventional infantry regiments. The Rangers’ incredible, hand-over-hand climbing assault up the cliffs of Pont du Hoc on the Normandy beachhead is legend. Every tourist who stands at the top of this cliff asks out loud, “How did they do it?” The answer is that Ranger and Airborne units were carefully selected from out of the usual rabble. Officers and Soldiers alike were all volunteers. These units were robust. Unlike in traditional close-combat units, the Army assigned extra Soldiers to each Airborne small unit. As Soldiers died or were evacuated, their buddies—well trained and deeply bonded with their comrades in a way well known to all “band of brothers” units—joined their brothers in the fight without the need for additional training or familiarization.
The second factor that made the Greatest Generation great was lengthy immersion in the harsh crucible of war. As in the Civil War, most Soldiers who joined infantry small units failed to stay on the line very long. In World War II, thanks to the germ theory of disease and vehicular evacuation, more diseased and wounded Soldiers made it to field hospitals and survived. But Lincoln’s arithmetic persisted. Soldiers rotated though foxholes continually until a few survived to become superb close-combat killers. By the end of the war, our infantry had learned to fight, by fighting. Those units that faced surrendering Germans and Japanese in 1945 were superb. However, returning Soldiers made it clear to the American people that their experiences had been horrific, that many of their leaders had been unprepared to lead, that many of their weapons had been inferior, and that battles such as Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Huertgen Forest had been shameful slaughter pens.
Congress and the American people concluded from the stories of returning loved ones that their military had to find a less lethal way to fight its wars. Immediately after World War II, conventional wisdom inside the Pentagon was that nuclear weapons would make conventional ground warfare obsolete. As the Army and Marine Corps began their terrible slide toward combat ineffectiveness, the technical services began an aircraft-building program that would eventually consume almost 10 percent of the federal budget. Bombers were the answer for defending the American heartland. Even the expansion of the Red Army into Central Europe during the Cold War failed to convince true believers that nuclear deterrence alone was not enough, that the nation needed land forces to add depth and offer conventional strategic choices to our leaders.
Then the Army collapsed, for the first, but not the last, time after World War II. To be sure, all services, except for the strategic arm of the Air Force, suffered draconian reductions after this (like every) war. The Navy lost in its effort to build the first supercarrier. The Marines fought back efforts by senior Army leaders to fold Marine divisions into the Army and its air wings into the naval air arm. Yet, and in keeping with the Anglo-American tradition of neglecting regular Soldiers, Congress and the Truman administration effectively made its once proud and enormously competent Army into a constabulary force for occupying Germany and Japan.
As in virtually all wars in the American era, the Korean War