"The poorer the infantry, the more...
artillery it needs; the American infantry needs all it can get."
That is what a French general said in WWI. I read it long ago and could never really understand why he said that. After reading this book, The School of Hard Knocks, Combat Leadership in the American Expeditionary Force (http://www.amazon.com/School-Hard-Kn...expeditionary+), I understand.
The book is about how American small unit leaders, Lts and NCOs were trained and how they performed in battle. They were very poorly trained and consequently performed poorly, the poor performance resulting in sluggish performance inordinately high casualties for the results gained.
The Army was faced with an almost impossible task, going from around 7,000 regular and Nat Guard officers to almost 200,000 in no time at all. So only so much could be done. But the book recounts how very much of what was done was a complete waste, large blocks of time spent on close order drill, bayonet fighting and wig wag flag signaling. The Army de-emphasized training available from Allied officers in order to further an 'American' way of fighting to a certain extent.
It was surprising to me that the NCO corps basically wasn''t. The training was almost non-existent and the results showed.
The many many faults were never really corrected. Divisions fed into the line in late 1918 were as bad as the first divisions to go in and those first divisions never got much better as far as small unit fighting went. Divisions and brigades got better at things like coordinating artillery and supports but the sharp end stayed dull.
It was very interesting how Army personnel policies were hugely important in getting in the way. Wholesale drafts from units that had worked together for a while destroyed cohesion. Filling school quotas with small unit leaders pulled directly out of battles was something they insisted on doing. The book seems to describe an AEF that was approaching a crisis with straggling possibly approaching 10% as the war ended.
Another interesting point the author made was that small unit leader training and accession practices in Vietnam resembled to some extent those of WWI.
The book was a little slow in the first few chapters, neccasarily (sic) so in order to detail the initial training but it all comes together in the last chapters describing how it all played out in France.