Generals of the Army

by James H. Willbanks

  In 1899 President William McKinley chose an unlikely reformer to be secretary of War—Elihu Root, a prominent corporate attorney whose physical frailty had limited his own military service to a few months in the New York State militia. By his own admission, Root knew nothing about the military or about national security. He reluctantly accepted the position only because McKinley convinced him that the country needed a lawyer to establish military governments in the newly acquired territories. Very quickly, however, both the president and the new secretary realized that administering these territories required reorganizing the archaic structure of the War Department. Over the next five years Root did just that, creating the first American General Staff to plan for the Army and overcoming the entrenched resistance of various civilian and military functionaries. He even began converting the traditional state militia into the modern National Guard, providing standardized organization, equipment, and training to the states.3

  Like any good attorney, Root researched his new assignment, reviewing decades of proposals to improve the Army. Eventually, he turned to Major William G. H. Carter (later a major general), a scholarly staff officer, to develop a plan for a hierarchy of schools that would train and educate officers throughout their careers. The result was General Order No. 155, dated November 27, 1901, which prescribed four stages of officer education after commissioning.4 First, each military post was to conduct part-time classes that would train junior officers in the basic requirements of peacetime administration and wartime tactics. Next, additional schools were added to the existing ones so that every officer would have a place to learn about his branch—Coast Artillery (Fort Monroe, Virginia), Engineers (Washington Barracks, which is now Fort McNair, D.C.), Cavalry and Field Artillery (Fort Riley, Kansas), and so on. The top level of Carter’s hierarchy was the Army War College, a combination of school and think tank in Washington, D.C., intended to help plan the Army’s mobilization for future conflicts.

  Yet the key to the new system lay in the third level of military education, between the branch schools and the War College. Based on Carter’s original design, this third step in education was established at Fort Leavenworth, although turmoil in the Philippines and elsewhere delayed the start of instruction until mid-1902. The existing School of Application became an expanded one-year course eventually relabeled the School of the Line, teaching Infantry and Cavalry officers and a handful of artillerymen, engineers, and other specialists. Although initially many students were lieutenants, as the education system developed, more men attended as captains. The first classes, like those of the 1880s, were composed of inadequately educated young officers, but gradually the quality of both candidates and instruction improved. The most successful graduates from this school then attended a second year of classes, the General Staff College. This was the army’s first attempt to produce the kinds of educated officers that increasingly dominated European armies, capable of planning and maneuvering larger military organizations when the country mobilized for war. Within a few years, the post also hosted schools in signal communications (1904) and field engineering (1910), creating an unequaled concentration of military students and innovation.

  A number of talented instructors taught at the Leavenworth schools during this period, most notably Major John F. Morrison, who tried to teach his students how to apply military principles in the confusion and uncertainty of battle. To do this, he adapted a French methodology involving planning for a tactical situation on a map. Many of his students, the generation of staff officers who held the Army together during World War I, proudly called themselves “Morrison men.”

  Yet the overall catalyst for change was undoubtedly General J. Franklin Bell, commandant from 1903 to 1906. After a meteoric rise in rank during the Philippine insurrection, Bell was the ideal man to organize and energize the new educational system. Well educated himself, in the Philippines he had witnessed the problems of inadequately trained and undereducated leaders attempting to deal with a wide variety of complex tactical and administrative challenges. Bell lobbied passionately to get better-qualified students as well as better instructors assigned to Leavenworth. Perhaps most significantly, he strove to change perceptions about the nature of military education. At a time when most colonels and generals had learned their profession solely by practical experience on the frontier, it was difficult to convince these officers of the need for and value of formal military schooling. The younger officers educated at Fort Leavenworth between 1904 and 1916 did not rise to the top of their profession until the 1930s. Still, Bell made major strides in changing expectations so that commanders sent their best, rather than their worst, officers to school. Beginning in 1908, the Staff College also ran a number of short “Get Rich Quick” courses to give higher commanders, as well as a few National Guardsmen and U.S. Marines, the basics of the new tactics and problem-solving procedures.5

  United States Infantry and Cavalry School, Class of 1907. First Lieutenant George C. Marshall is in the third row, fifth from left. (U.S. Army, courtesy of the Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas)

  This early instruction was far from perfect, especially with regard to the devastating increase in artillery destructiveness that produced a bloody stalemate during World War I. Nevertheless, the almost seven hundred graduates of the School of the Line and the Staff College proved critical to America’s performance in that conflict. They shared a common terminology and approach to problem solving that were essential to maneuvering and supplying huge numbers of soldiers and weapons effectively.

  The Test of World War

  In 1916 the Fort Leavenworth schools closed down when the garrison units, instructors, and students went south to participate in the punitive expedition pursuing Pancho Villa into Mexico. No sooner had the U.S. Army finished this frustrating mission than it had to conduct an unprecedented projection of power, mobilizing the country to participate in World War I. From a 1916 strength of 108,000 men, by 1918 the Army had grown to almost 2.4 million, of whom more than a million were overseas.6 To further complicate this expansion, the new Army had to learn the deadly lessons of modern warfare, in which huge armies struggled using unprecedented weapons such as tanks, aircraft, and poison gas. Our British and French allies were frankly skeptical about the ability of Americans to do this, arguing that President Wilson should simply turn over this huge supply of half-trained troops to be used as replacements for their own, more experienced units.

  The American expeditionary commander, General John J. Pershing, resisted these arguments, determined that his army would operate as a separate American force with its own tactics and organization. The graduates of Leavenworth were the key men who helped Pershing create this army from nothing.7

  During the war, eight of the twelve officers who served as Pershing’s chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or head of primary staff sections were Leavenworth graduates; seven had attended both the School of the Line and the Staff College. Graduates also provided a disproportionate number of staff officers and commanders in the American Expeditionary Forces’ corps, divisions, brigades, and regiments. Some of the historical studies at the prewar schools had focused on the Franco-German battles of 1870, which by sheer coincidence occurred in the same region of France that the Army fought over in 1918. Thus, the trained staff officers were already familiar with the terrain of the Meuse-Argonne region. Eventually, Pershing directed that, as each army unit arrived in France, its “Leavenworth men” would be detached from that unit and redistributed to satisfy the most urgent needs.

  When the supply of such peacetime graduates proved inadequate for the ballooning American forces, in November 1917, Pershing established a shorter, three-month version of the Staff College in Langres, France. To save time, students were trained to work in only one particular staff section—personnel, intelligence, operations, or logistics—rather than all possible staff positions. At first, the French and British provided the instructors for the Langres course, but by the end of the war the
faculty was almost completely American, primarily peacetime graduates of the Fort Leavenworth schools. At Pershing’s insistence, the doctrine and concepts taught at Langres were also echoes of those at the prewar schools. The Langres course graduated a total of five hundred students in 1918. This course also institutionalized the heavy French influence on American staff organization and doctrine between the world wars.

  Leavenworth between the Wars

  Elihu Root’s school system for officers had clearly proven its worth. Most professional army officers came out of World War I convinced that they needed to do a better job of preparing for a possible future conflict on the same scale, and that peacetime education was the key to such preparation. As the size and budget of the U.S. Army dwindled during the 1920s and 1930s, maintaining large, combat-ready units proved increasingly impractical. Leaders had few opportunities to actually maneuver troops, and thus the only way to prepare for the future was to invest in the intellectual development of the officer corps. Attending branch courses and especially the Leavenworth schools became a key component of a successful career.

  Small wonder, then, that reestablishing the officer education system was a high priority in 1919. For the first four years of peace (1919–23), the restored schools followed the pre-1916 model, albeit with a wealth of new information derived from the recent war. Thus, the yearlong School of the Line taught officers how to operate a division of up to 28,000 men, but only selected graduates of this course attended the General Staff School itself, which focused on corps and higher-level organizations. Ninety-nine officers began the School of the Line in 1919, but only forty-nine attended the second year.

  From 1923 to 1928 this structure was condensed into a single-year course known as the Command and General Staff School. This change allowed Leavenworth to teach as many as 250 students per year, accommodating the large number of officers who had entered the service before and during World War I. In 1928 the War Department resumed a two-year program of study, but virtually all students attended both years of the course. Beginning in 1935, however, the looming prospect of a new world war prompted the Army to revert to a one-year course in order to generate more staff officers in anticipation of mobilization.8

  In addition to the regular courses of one and two years’ duration, a Special Command and General Staff Course, three months in length, provided the rudiments of the Leavenworth doctrine and methodology to as many as fifty National Guard and Reserve officers each spring. A separate organization conducted a three-year correspondence version of the course for other officers who could not attend in person. Although this latter program did not produce fully qualified staff officers, it did familiarize reservists and other officers with the terminology and procedures found in the resident courses.

  The faculty adjusted the curriculum frequently to accommodate changes in doctrine and technology, especially during the first few years, when prewar texts proved to be largely outdated. The school’s basic approach to warfare, however, remained unchanged throughout the interwar period.9 The classes and doctrinal publications incorporated various lessons learned during the recent world war, but instructors frequently marked down students who applied the slow, grinding, attritional concepts of the trenches. Instead, the Leavenworth school in all its different incarnations consistently emphasized mobile, maneuver warfare in open country.

  The instruction sought to equip student officers, as future commanders and staff officers, to adjust quickly to changing situations to gain and maintain the initiative, developing simple solutions to maneuver whether they were attacking or defending. To do this, the first portion of the course focused on combining the different combat arms—Infantry, Coast and Field Artillery, and Cavalry—as well as the principles of tactics, decision making, supply, and staff operations. Historical examples from the Civil War to World War I emphasized that frontal attacks were usually costly and often ineffective, whereas a maneuver to bypass or outflank the enemy often brought more success and less bloodshed. This emphasis on flanks represented the assumption that the World War I stalemate, where no flanks existed, was unlikely to recur. As the course progressed, the faculty introduced more complicated forms of maneuver, such as the difficult task of crossing a river defended by the enemy.

  The educational methodology was equally practical. Mornings began with short lectures and discussions, and tactical problems consumed the remainder of the day. The school taught a systematic, logical procedure for evaluating and then solving such problems. Some of these exercises were completed in the classroom, using maps; others were conducted as field trips to envision operations on the terrain near the fort; and still others were actually field exercises to maneuver real units (within the constraints of the shrunken peacetime army). In most instances the student had to produce oral or written orders to execute his plan. Leavenworth students also went on staff rides, studying the actual terrain and leadership decisions of Civil War and other historical operations, or using that same terrain as the basis for fictional problems of modern tactics. As the course progressed, larger units and more complicated tactical problems, often drawn from recent history, were introduced that taxed the students’ abilities. For example, after examining the failure of the German offensive in northern France in September 1914, students had to produce an evaluation and an operations order to support the decisions of the First German Army commander in that battle.

  The brigade (6,000 to 8,000 men) and the division were the most common units studied in particular situations. During the first year of the two-year courses, student results were graded against a fixed standard, a rubric often referred to as the “Leavenworth solution.” Critics at the time and since have argued that this approach stifled student creativity and encouraged stereotyped, predictable tactics in the field. Still, this grading at least permitted an objective means of comparing the performance of different students. In addition, using a fixed set of criteria also helped ensure that graduates would approach real-world problems from the same perspective, which facilitated cooperation between wartime units. At least some of the tactical problems used in the second half of the course did not have such fixed rubrics for evaluating student achievement, demanding more innovative solutions.

  Both at the time and in retrospect, some observers also criticized the limitations of this very practical, tactically oriented curriculum. Leavenworth students learned little about strategy or mobilization, subjects taught only to the relatively few men sent to the Army War College. Advocates of airpower and mechanized warfare complained, with some justification, that these aspects of warfare received less emphasis than conventional Infantry-Artillery operations. To some extent, the neglect of aviation was inevitable, because the Army permitted the Air Corps Tactical School to emphasize the concept of independent, strategic bombardment with air units commanded by aviators, which reduced the number of air units available to support ground operations.10 Still, in the course of the 1930s the school did incorporate increasingly sophisticated problems involving observation, ground attack, and pursuit fighters as well as entire mechanized divisions, at a time when the U.S. Army had few aircraft and even fewer tanks. Moreover, despite the addition of the words “Command and” to the title of the school, relatively little instruction was devoted to the problems of leadership or command; the assumption was that, by making students both technically proficient and self-confident, the intellectual content of the course would equip them to serve effectively as commanders and staff officers in positions far above their ranks at that time.

  This instruction was by no means easy on those who attended Leavenworth. First, the increased number of student officers, and especially married officers, strained the physical facilities of the post during the early 1920s. Even after additional buildings were adapted for instruction and housing for married couples, the varied experience of these students made standardized instruction difficult. Some had commanded large units in combat during 1918, while others had remained in the states to train the expanding
army; some had completed the School of the Line, whereas others had attended only the abbreviated Langres course or in some instances had no formal military education since commissioning. As the world war receded in time and the peacetime military school system took hold, the student body became more homogeneous. Regardless of when the student attended the Command and General Staff School, he faced a demanding course of instruction that often required many hours of evening and weekend study to prepare for exercises and examinations. Competition was fierce because graduates were ranked strictly according to their class averages, rankings that were often important factors in determining the students’ future assignments and promotions. Among other things, class standing determined the students’ subsequent standing on the list of officers eligible for positions in higher-level staffs. Despite the attractive scenery and lack of troop responsibilities, attending Leavenworth was rarely an easy assignment. Still, the majority of students considered the school a positive experience; for many of them, attendance at Fort Leavenworth proved to be the single most important developmental experience of their careers. Others grumbled about what they perceived as the rigidity and artificiality of the school environment, but they all benefited from learning standardized concepts, formats, and procedures.