Postwar Assessment (1920-1932)

Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry

US Army recruiting poster circa 1923

The estate of the late John Sayen has graciously given the Tactical Notebook permission to serialize his study of the organizational evolution of American infantry battalions. The author’s preface and the previous section of this book may be found via the following links:

Although the First World War had a profound impact on the United States Army, its most important effect was the degree to which the US Army embraced the tactical doctrines and military theory of the French Army. The reasons that the US Army should have embraced the French Army, and not the British, as its mentor, despite a language barrier, are not too hard to find. French influence had been strong within US military ever since the Marquis de Lafayette had first offered his services to George Washington. By 1780 the US Army was completely equipped with French-designed muskets. While the Army did not give up its British-style single-battalion regiments until 1898, General Winfield Scott had caused the Army to officially adopt French Napoleonic drill and doctrine in 1815. During the Civil War, soldiers on both sides wore French-style uniforms and many of their officers had learned their trade by studying the admittedly distorted descriptions of Napoleonic tactics rendered by French (actually, Swiss) General Antoine Jomini.^[1]

In addition, it appears that the senior leadership of the AEF was astute enough to realize that, for all its shortcomings, the French Army had been much more effective against the Germans than the British Army had, notwithstanding a great deal of British propaganda to the contrary that, in many cases still passes as “history” to this day. Finally, despite cultural and common language ties (and the best efforts of American Anglophiles) Britain and America had not been on especially friendly terms in 1917. In order to maintain their blockade of Germany, the British had boarded and sometimes seized American merchant ships and this had led to some ugly incidents.^[2] Also, there was strong anti-British sentiment within America’s sizable Irish population.

Despite General Pershing’s frequent assertions of AEF independence from its British and French allies, American doctrinal dependence on the French soon became almost total. Army manuals tended to be little more than direct translations of their French equivalents. French instructors were everywhere. Even before 1917, American officers who wanted to get ahead in their profession attended French Army schools. When George S. Patton was a young cavalry officer in 1911 and asked to become a tactical instructor at West Point, he was told that no cavalry officer who had not first attended the French Cavalry School at Saumur could ever receive such an assignment. Similar policies were undoubtedly in effect for the infantry, artillery, and engineers. After 1917 and up until 1939 American officers were sent in droves to attend French military schools so that they could learn the latest military techniques and keep up with doctrinal changes. Every large AEF staff had its French advisors. We have already seen in the last chapter how French influence drove the AEF’s combat organization.^[3]

French military education had its roots in the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment. This period stressed the importance of logical thought and reasoning and the use of scientific methods. The officers trained under these ideas, including Napoleon Bonaparte himself, would lead France to many victories in the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and thus enjoyed great prestige. According to Enlightenment thinking, the purely military arts of tactics and strategy too viable, complex, and ambiguous to really be taught. It was better instead to teach officers science and mathematics as these disciplines would give them useful skills and make them logical thinkers better able to recognize and master the practical lessons that their military experience would bring them. Thus, in Eighteenth Century France only artillery, engineer, and naval officers received formal training. The skills of the infantry and cavalry were considered far more intuitive and therefore best learned “on the job.”

In 1794, the new government of Revolutionary France consolidated its artillery and engineer schools under the École Polytechnique in Paris. In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte established a school for infantry and cavalry officers at Saint-Cyr. While Saint-Cyr still taught a lot of science and mathematics, it actually taught military art and history as well. It thus deviated from the “war as science” view taught at the École Polytechnique. World War I resolved the philosophical dissonance between these institutions in favor of the latter. Since St.-Cyr graduates mainly populated the infantry and cavalry, their life expectancies were dramatically shorter than those of their Polytechnique brethren who populated the artillery and engineers.

By 1917 the French Army was completely in the hands of technocrats who saw war as a kind of engineering project and sought to bring order and reason to the battlefield. They developed the “methodical battle” under which the enemy was systematically pulverized by masses of artillery. The infantry would merely occupy whatever was left. Though methodical battle methods were slow and cumbersome, the consensus among French and American officers was that by leveraging their national economies (to furnish, among other things, the vast amounts of ammunition required) they minimized risk and saved lives. They were also much easier to identify and explain (especially to amateurs) than the more sophisticated German approach.

The US Army taught methodical battle as “fire and movement.” One maneuver unit would fire while another moved and both received plentiful support from the artillery. Tactics were mainly linear and based heavily on Napoleonic ideas. They focused on securing one’s flanks (typically on impassible terrain or adjacent units), adhering to detailed map graphics, and having all operations subject to tight central control. Centralized control was especially important to ensure the proper coordination of all fire support. Army officers educated mainly in rote procedures would execute highly detailed plans and operations. Their focus would be inward on procedure rather than outward upon the enemy.

Well before 1917, the US Army was predisposed towards a methodical doctrine. Ironically, it saw the more decentralized German approach, because it relied more upon the professional skills of its officers than the weight of its ordnance, as elitist and harking back to the old European military aristocracies whose abuses had caused so many people to flee to America. However, despite their widespread suspicion of “professional” soldiers, Americans held engineers in high esteem. President Thomas Jefferson founded the US Army’s first formal school, the Military Academy at West Point in 1802 in imitation of the École Polytechnique. Jefferson had actually visited the school during his stay in France and he regarded it as an excellent model for the United States Army to follow.  (Among other things, the creation of a body of American engineers would free the young republic from the need to rely on the services of foreign experts.^[4]

Given the US Army’s near total ignorance of modern warfare in 1917, it is easy to see how it might have eagerly seized the first viable military doctrinal system held out to it. That of France was not merely available, it was also the natural choice. Thus, in American military thinking the French model of war as chaos that must be tamed overcame the opposing (German) view that war as chaos that must be exploited.

Nevertheless, French doctrine did not triumph in the US Army without overcoming a good deal of opposition. Some officers argued that doctrine that relied on the superior military skills that a carefully selected and trained officer corps could provide might make sense for a nation that was likely to be fighting its future wars overseas, where time and distance would necessarily limit the material it could bring with it. Also, an adoption of the German emphasis on short but decisive wars could facilitate an American victory while the American public’s support for the war was still high. These arguments were sufficiently persuasive that they eventually caused the 1941 edition of the US Army’s Field Service Regulations (FM 100-5), which replaced the much more heavily French-influenced 1923 edition to incorporate large sections from the 1936 edition of its German counterpart, Truppenführung (or “Command of Troops”).^[5]

However, this success had already been rendered meaningless by the Army’s 1929 publication of the Manual for Commanders of Large Units. This was a “straight up” translation of the French manual of the same name recently published in France. The US Army never promulgated it as “official” doctrine, but at a time when the Army could rarely engage in field exercises at even the regimental level, the clear, systematic, and concise instructions that the Manual supplied for the operations of divisions and corps were eagerly consumed. Thus, the Manual became more than an official doctrine. It was what everybody read. It brought French-style doctrine to all levels of command.^[6]

Also in 1929 year George C. Marshall took over the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning and began to emphasize a French-style doctrine. The Army’s Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth Kansas had already been doing this for some time. Many American officers would probably deny that the United States was ever a slavish imitator of France in matters military and would instead argue that America has evolved its own “way of war” to which no doubt the French have made some contributions but so have many others including the Germans.

It is true that the doctrine that Marshall taught and has to a great extent continued to guide the Army today does differ from French post–1918 doctrine in a number of respects. For one thing, it puts great emphasis on offensive operations, something the French became reluctant to do after the catastrophic losses they had suffered in 1914-18. Even so, Marshall believed that effective command and control “presupposes that the leader knows the leader knows the location of all elements of his command at all times and can communicate with any element at any time.” He also emphasized that to know and apply the proper “rules and procedures” could overcome the “friction” of combat. These were core principles of French doctrine and stood in sharp contrast to the much more decentralized German approach wherein the leader allowed his subordinates to carry out his orders in their own way. Leadership was by exception and assumed that the commander had enough trust in his subordinates to make close supervision unnecessary.

Marshall was convinced that such an approach could never work for the hastily trained and organized American units that would most likely fight the next war. A professionally trained cadre of leaders could still enable an otherwise amateur army to fight well under a decentralized command system, as the Finnish Army would demonstrate in the “Winter War” of 1939-40 but to Marshall, and many other Americans, such a cadre smacked of “elitism.” Marshall believed that an American army needed a clearly defined, concise “paint by the numbers” system that could be memorized and applied without much need for holistic thinking. With such a system, it could win a war of attrition victory would be on the side of the “big battalions” and “big industry.” ^[7]

Editor’s Note: The format of the many appendices to this work fit poorly with Substack. For that reason, I have placed them on a PDF file that can be found at Military Learning Library, a website that I maintain.

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^[1] In 1874, General William T. Sherman complained to his old comrade Stephen A. Hurlbut about how completely the United States Army had, throughout their own careers, been shaped by the “principles and practices” of its counterpart in France. Quoted in Perry D. Jamieson, Crossing the Deadly Ground, United States Army Tactics, 1865-1899 (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press 1994) p. 3.

^[2]  For Winfield Scott’s impact on US Army doctrine see John S. D. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny, the Life and Times of Winfield Scott (New York, The Free Press, 1997) pp. 100-101; and Winfield Scott, The Memoirs of Lt-General Winfield Scott, LL.D Vol. 1 (New York, Sheldon and Co. 1864) pp. 118-121. For some good material on the military incapacity of the British Army see John Mosier, The Myth of the Great War op cit, especially his account of the Battle of the Somme in Chapter 12. For more on this subject see Denis Winter, Haig’s Command op cit and Tim Travers, The Killing Ground (London, Unwin Hyman Ltd. 1987). For some material on Irish anti-British sentiment in America see Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins, The Man Who Made Ireland (Boulder Colorado, 1992).

^[3]  The 1923 edition of the US Army Field Service Regulations, which was the equivalent of today’s doctrinal manual, FM 100-5 was closely based on French field manuals published during 1917-19. When General George C. Marshall too command of the US Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, he published the Manual for Commanders of Large Units (USAIS Fort Benning, Georgia 1929). It was a straight translation of the French Army manual of the same name. Though always a “tentative” and never an “official” doctrinal publication most officers followed it very closely.  For an example of a prewar US Army manuals, see War Department Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry in the Army of the United States (Washington DC, Document No. 574, USGPO 1917). See also Carlo D’Este, Patton, A Genius for War (New York, Harper Collins 1996) p. 126.

^[4]  For a discussion of pre-1794 formal French military education see Major Ernest Picard and Lieutenant Louis Jouan, L’Artillerie Française au XVIIIème Siècle (Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1906) pp. 1-44. For a description of St.-Cyr and the École Polytechnique in 1876 see Upton, The Armies of Europe and Asia op cit. pp. 240-247.

^[5]  The author is much indebted to Major Don Vandergriff, USA, for allowing him to use pre-publication material from his book Path to Victory, America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs (Novato CA, Presidio Press 2002). See also Martin Van Creveld, Fighting Power, (Westport Connecticut, Greenwood Press 1982) pp. 28-34 and Robert Allen Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster, The Development of French Army Doctrine 1919-1939 (Hamden Connecticut, Archon Books 1985) pp. 2-9.

^[6]  Ibid and see also US Army, Manual for Commanders of Large Units (Washington DC 1929).

^[7]  Ibid.