Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith

9. “Expunge the Bunk, Complications and Ponderosities”

163  9  “Expunge the Bunk, Complications and Ponderosities” External historical determinants dictated that the army and navy traveled on different paths toward modernization and professionalization. The army faced an incubus from which the navy was immune. The U.S. Navy could never threaten the constitutional balance and possessed, at least from the late 1880s, a fleet-in-being. The skeleton army was always held suspect, divorced physically and psychologically from a rapidly changing and mostly unreceptive civil society whose members it would lead in time of war. The navy’s trajectory was mostly dialectical; the army’s, cyclical. The story goes something like this: The outbreak of war finds the army woefully unprepared; the hasty mobilization that follows the declaration of war becomes a mismanaged shamble, and the first encounter with the enemy ends in defeat. American wealth and material resources prevail, giving renewed vigor to the “minuteman mythology” that citizen-soldiers always prevail over paid hireling regulars. In the immediate postwar period, popular disgruntlement compels congressional intervention. Budgets are slashed and taxes rise, paying off the war debt. Senior officers grudgingly accept reform but wage a tough bureaucratic rear guard, blunting its worst effects. Popular interest fades, as does that of the politicians. The army recedes into comfortable isolation, reverting to the routines, lifestyles, branch loyalties and antagonisms, and values of the prewar army. In peacetime, the War Department represents little more than a weak confederation of hostile tribes; the senior leadership engages in the traditional bureaucratic 164  BEETLE wrangling for preference and institutional control and bitterly defends the status quo.1 The Root reforms and the 1920 NDA furthered the movement toward creating a corporate military structure, but the officer corps retained its old organic sense of itself as a community. Organizational structures changed, but the undergirding conservative assumptions and attitudes continued intact. As long as the army remained detached from external interference and internally divided, parochial interests precluded the evolution of armywide viewpoints. Such an institution simply could not innovate, much less reinvent itself. The army schools exactly mirrored this dynamic. Sherman opened the Leavenworth school to educate the rapidly aging post–Civil War hump of officers. It was derisively called the “kindergarten” because commanders, reflecting age-old line versus staff antagonisms and deeply suspicious of “book” soldiers, sent their “idiot lieutenants” off to Kansas. By the 1890s, Leavenworth evolved into a genuine school or, actually, two schools—one for the line and one for the staff. The Spanish-American War renewed the process. The school closed for the duration, and when it reopened, its mission reverted to educating the new hump of officers. The regulars referred to the new intake of officers as “the Crime of ’98.” In the years before American entry into World War I, the Leavenworth schools threw off their remedial content and again reintroduced the borrowed German applicatory curriculum. Then the war forced the closure of the schools. March created or reformed the branch schools and ordered Leavenworth reopened, with a restored two-year sequence of courses and a modernized curriculum that sought to incorporate the organizational, tactical, and logistical lessons of the world war. He argued that reduced numbers and funding demanded a progressive system of army schools dedicated to educating—not training—forward-looking and mentally flexible officers so that in the next national emergency the army would not founder, as it had in the past. He wanted a rigorous, meritocratic system that ensured only the best rose through the branch schools, Leavenworth , and the War College to higher commands and the War Department General Staff. The victory of the Old Guard killed March’s vision. The structures survived, but the mission changed. The old pattern once again repeated itself. One important change survived. Whereas the old army had never valued education, the war proved the worth of Leavenworth and the War College, especially the former.2 “During the World War,” Pershing told the War College’s graduating class of 1924, “the graduates of “Expunge the Bunk, Complications and Ponderosities” 165 Leavenworth and the War College held the most responsible positions in our armies . . . had it not been for the able and loyal assistance of the officers trained at these schools, the tremendous problems of combat, supply, and transportation could not have been solved.”3 The army’s attitude toward education may not have undergone much change, but the message was clear: no officer would rise in the...