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 Apprentice to Journeyman By any objective standard, we were untrained. —Bill DePuy, Oral History, 1979 On 25 June 1941, Second Lieutenant William E. DePuy reported to the 20th Infantry at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.1 His training was rudimentary, and he knew it. He and his fellow cadets learned some American military history and tradition; the organization of the U.S. Army; how to wear the uniform; how to march troops about in groups; a bit about the characteristics and capabilities of weapons ; how to read a map and navigate, with perhaps a little field work in land navigation; and whatever gems and tricks of the trade were passed on to cadets by the Regular Army soldiers of the ROTC detachment. Training was notional and devoid of what it meant in application. Bill DePuy was no greener than the typical product of the commissioning process. In fact, his experience as a National Guard enlisted soldier, combined with his training as a cadet and his positive attitude, probably gave him a leg up on his peers. Nevertheless, when years later he was asked his opinion of the training he’d gotten before reporting for his initial assignment, he said, “It was assumed that we were trained in ROTC, and relative to everybody else in the World War II Army, I guess we were. But, by any objective standard, we were untrained.”2 Along with most new lieutenants, DePuy became a platoon leader. After three months he became headquarters company commander for another three months. Those were the positions he held as the 20th Infantry marched five hundred miles to Louisiana for maneuvers in the fall of 1941. And then they marched the five hundred miles back. His retrospective evaluation of the Army he joined is a balance sheet of good and bad marks. “I’d say that I learned more about just plain soldiering from six months in the 20th Infantry than I learned 1 General William e. DePuy in the rest of my service.” Not given to hyperbole, DePuy was reporting the difference between saying and doing as they applied to soldiering. When laymen think about soldiers, they probably picture uniforms, marching, banners, and martial music; but infantry soldiering—in the doing—is mostly hard physical work. He later spoke well of his regimental commander and later corps commander, Lieutenant General Frank W. “Shrimp” Milburn. He credits the battalion commanders of his own early experience with being “tough and hazing kinds of men.” They demanded much of their troops, but “they made you do things that are good, like taking care of the men and demanding that ‘nobody drops out,’ and so nobody did. The soldiers were sufficiently terrified so that nobody dropped out of that 1,000-mile march unless he went to the hospital .” The plainsman took to soldiering. He brought a penetrating critical faculty to his calling. On the liabilities side of the ledger was an anachronism guaranteed to produce American cadavers. As DePuy recalled, “Tactics consisted of getting on line and advancing in rushes—it was called extended-order drill.” Such tactics were recognized as a bad idea as far back as the American Civil War. Napoleonic massing of assault troops gave way to increased dispersion as defenders burrowed in holes in the ground and fired weapons ever deadlier in rapidity and accuracy. That practice continued in the Balkan wars in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which was a preview of the Great War in demonstrating the temporary ascendancy of defense. Audacity, offensive élan, and the spirit of the bayonet made for big butcher bills in an industrial war characterized by the vastly increased firepower of infantry and artillery weapons. Massed troops in the open made it an even worse idea in 1914–1918. It was an idea verging on criminal folly, exercised as it was in Bill DePuy’s training in 1942 and 1943 and in close combat in 1944. Upon his return from the Louisiana Maneuvers, which had exercised large bodies of troops for modern war for the first time in twenty years, DePuy was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he attended a thirteen-week communications course that began in January 1942, the month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It is indicative of the time that only one of the thirty-three officers in the course with DePuy was a Regular.3 In 1942, the strength of the U.S...

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