Exposing the Third Reich: Colonel Truman Smith in Hitler’s Germany

8. Army War College and Command

103 8 Army War college and command General McNair used to call those guys, the ones that had gone through the War College, the Ph.D.s of the Army. Anything that came up, there was some guy who just knew a hell of a lot about it. It was the one place where you could sit down and think. —General Thomas T. Handy, 1974 Smith’s gratifying years at Fort Benning with Marshall, Schell, and other first-rate professionals were focused on training and tactics. That assignment was followed by a year at the Army War College, where his focus was on national strategy, military strategy, and an expansion of his already considerable expertise regarding Germany , just as Hitler was coming to power and consolidating his grip on all aspects of life in Germany. Upon completion of the academic year in Washington, Smith returned to troop duty as a battalion commander in Hawaii, a place he had earlier visited and remembered fondly. The pattern of his assignments was consistent with the army’s practice of providing Regular Army officers a range of experiences from a “place where you could sit down and think” to a place where one’s boots got muddy in the field in the company of soldiers. Smith was pleased to be selected for the Army War College (AWC). He described the college as being the peak of the pyramid of army schools. It was a place where even casual social interaction was professional development, because one interacted with men who were still in the race to the top of the profession. Among military professionals there is a seamless segueing from professional to social to personal and back without differentiation. Kay and Truman saw life as an integrated whole, the center of which was unreserved faithfulness to duty. His classmates knew of his German expertise, 104 EXPOSING THE THIRD REICH that he was a decorated infantryman, that he was one of Marshall’s men, and that he was on the fast track. Successful completion of the Leavenworth course, indeed high standing in one’s class there, and an impressive record of performance over almost twenty years of service was necessary to qualify for General Staff duty and for appointment to the AWC. The officers selected to attend were regarded as prospective generals and key General Staff officers. That’s the way it was from the beginning, when John J. Pershing graduated with the first class in 1905, and that’s the way it continues to be into the twenty-first century. In the period between the world wars, class size at the AWC was generally eighty-five officers: seventy-nine army and six navy and marine corps. Reciprocally, usually six army officers attended the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. The army school was in Washington Barracks, later renamed Fort McNair, and a short trolley ride to War Department headquarters near the White House. The thinking and writing Truman Smith did there in his academic year solidified his already established reputation as the most knowledgeable officer in the U.S. Army regarding Germany. Smith later recalled that in sharp contrast to the Leavenworth Command and General Staff College Course, “there was no competition among the students at the [Army War] College.”1 Class work was performed in committees and subcommittees consisting of several students each, who would work together for several weeks on some aspect of a prospective war, such as, for example, manpower and industrialization, estimates and surveys of a potential enemy’s war capabilities and limitations, or American war plans. When the assigned task was completed after analysis and the preparation of a paper, findings and conclusions were presented orally to the class in a plenary session and subjected to criticism and discussion by students and faculty. Then, student committees were reconfigured to work a new problem with different classmates. In the course of the year, one worked closely with nearly all of the other students. During Smith’s time at the War College, this resulted in familiarity with just about all of those who would lead in World War II. About 75 percent of the War College graduates from 1933 to 1940 attained flag rank.2 Study, analysis, production of papers, and presentations by the student committees alternated with presentations by academics, diplomats, journalists, educators, elected officials, industrialists, Army War college and command 105 and senior leaders of the uniformed...