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318 12 Conclusions ATaleofGeorgeandHenry Serving in the Great War had given the two men a shared experience that had helped to grease the wheels of their working relationship . Henry, the elder of the two, had risen to the rank of colonel and had commanded an artillery regiment during the war. George had been promoted to the rank of temporary colonel and had served as a corps chief of staff. Both men looked upon their military service during World War I as one of the great formative events of their lives. Although the two worked extremely well together, there was one subject that nearly ended their professional relationship. In March 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was confronted with a number of problems. Henry knew well that the United States was likely to be drawn into a war with Germany or Japan and that the nation was little better prepared for this eventuality than it had been in 1917. A few months before, Congress had approved the nation ’s first peacetime draft, and the some of the draftees were already in training. However, this growing force still needed officers. While ROTC units across the nation provided a pool of reserve officers with a better military education than had been given those who had attended land-grant colleges prior to World War I, there were still not enough men to lead the growing ranks of the army. To solve this problem Stimson proposed that the army reestablish the ninety-day Officer Training Camps used in the Great War. This proposal was abhorrent to the army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall. George was adamant that any future army raised for the approaching war be provided with competent junior leaders more realistically and thoroughly trained than the generation of 1917. For the first and only time in their long and fruitful relationship , George informed Henry that if the secretary went forward with his plan on resurrecting the OTC model, he would resign as chief of staff.1 This rare confrontation between Stimson and Marshall was an indication of how deeply some of the army’s officers believed that the training and performance of the Great War’s junior officers had been flawed. Marshall and other Regular Army AEF veterans under- 319 Conclusions stood the price that the American soldier paid for serving under illprepared small-unit leaders. The AEF’s half-trained junior officers and NCOs usually fought bravely but seldom fought skillfully. At the “tip of the spear,” these infantry leaders lacked the critical experience and the tactical and technical skills to take advantage of the slim opportunities available to the attacker on the margins of the attritional World War I battlefield. This was a major failing, because changes in the nature of combat brought about by improved weapons and the expanded breadth of the battlefield now required a decentralization of command and control that placed much greater responsibility upon small-unit leaders. As the war progressed, it was increasingly the junior leaders at the tip of the spear, and not the generals, that ultimately decided whether the senior commander’s grand plans were properly executed. In the case of the AEF, this spear point was made of a brittle and untempered metal. The failure of the leadership spear point was not a result of the poor human material that comprised the blade. In the majority of cases, the AEF’s junior officers and NCOs were patriotic, adequately educated, dedicated to the cause, and brave to a fault. They were eager to learn and were well aware of the limitations of their training and experience. These leaders did the best they could under the conditions they faced, but far too often they sacrificed themselves and their soldiers in clumsy, ill-supported, frontal mass attacks. Their maladroit tactics generally showed an awkward inability to match formations, maneuver, and firepower to the terrain and the enemy they encountered . Furthermore, American officers and NCOs also tended to display a fatal lack of initiative that ceded hard-won and short-lived tactical gains to a more skillful and agile enemy. Some of these problems were the result of the inherent realities of the Great War’s battlefields that all the major combatants had to contend with during the conflict. Advances in communications and command and control had not kept pace with the changes in weaponry. Without reliable and responsive communications, it was exceedingly difficult for the attacker to gain the reliable and responsive artillery fire...

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