What Are You Currently Reading? 2012

[ganulv]

Checked out The Gun by C.J. Chivers from the library last week. Apart from the fact that I thought the book could have used a bit of editing as the topics did not seem always to stay on topic, I much enjoyed it. My knowledge of firearms is very basic, however, so I was not a very informed reader. Any informed readers of the book on the forum who would care to share their own opinions?

[carl]

Ganulv:

I am probably far less informed than I like to think I am but my opinion of the book is exactly the same as yours. Very good but it needed a tougher editor. It was as if the author and the editor knew little about firearms history before the project was started and found the whole of the subject so interesting they couldn't bear to leave anything out.

[carl]

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.

[Fuchs]

Sadly, actual small unit combat training was a quite novel idea in WW1.
The fragmentation of infantry combat into platoon or squad actions caused by the need to exploit micro terrain features (or the need for night actions) for survivability was not adequately foreseen. Pre-1914 literature is concerned with battalion-level tactics mostly.
They did actually understand the problems caused by firepower and some authors did understand the necessary individual movement techniques, but they simply did not understand that command and tactics would break down into parallel small unit actions.

Ironically, the otherwise relatively conservative cavalry was often leading in small unit tactics (especially raiding and scouting) because it was anticipated that cavalry in action would often be about small units.


Few select units, typically meant to spearhead offensives, received much small unit combat training in form of simulated assaults on dummy trenches and the like.
Leaders of line units on battalion level and below had to improvise training based on what they've seen happening in combat (which required to survive the same yourself in the first place).
NCOs were in many armies the ones who shouted commands so the officers would not need to do so and might even be absent from the most routine exercises.

[carl]

Fuchs:

The author stated the problem the US Army had in a very expressive, pithy way. He said the US Army was a 1914 army fighting against and beside 1918 armies. Those other armies had had time to learn all those lessons and had a greater depth of pre-war small unit leaders to draw from so there would be some left alive to learn and pass on the lessons. According to the book, the US Army didn't. There was a lot covered in the book and it gives a whole lot to think about. If the war had gone on, it seems we wouldn't have done much better and may have done much much worse. The straggling (soldiers going back from the line) problem was getting very bad.

The most surprising thing to me was there was no NCO corp as we would know it.

[Bill Moore]

Carl,

The criticism of the mass and ineffective training may be accurate, but that is what happens when you don't have a standing "professional" army. Instead of overwhelming the enemy with strategy and tactical skill we overwhelmed them with industrial might (at least initially).

I realize you're summarizing the book, but if the author is claiming the European armies were better I would like to hear why he/she felt that way? The French, Italians, and British performed terribly, and while the German Army reformed prior to WWII I haven't seen much in my readings that the other nations have.

Most of my reading has been focused on Pacific region and the Europeans during WWII performed extremely poorly there. Maybe the reality is that most peacetime armies, unless they're deliberately (not in response to a crisis) prepping for an invasion of another nation, are poorly trained?

[carl]

Bill:

The author says that for all the mortal floundering around the US Army did, the strategic effect of its effort was decisive. That effect just cost much more in blood than it could have because of avoidable failures in training and leadership.

The US Army was absolutely less effective than the French, British and German armies...of 1918 and the author does in so many words say that. Those armies were not at all in 1918 what they were in 1914. They had made huge strides in effectiveness, titanic strides. In fact one British officer when he first saw the US Army upon its arrival in France said something along the lines of 'This is Kitchener's army all over again.' The British had come a long long way from Kitchener's army. None of those armies in 1918 could be compared to what they had been 4 years earlier. One example that I recall reading about. In 1918 if you were in a British defensive position and you wanted aerial photos of a German position opposite, you would have them in hand, your own personal hand, in 24 hours. Those 1918 armies were pretty sophisticated in many ways.

If a peacetime army is poorly trained, I think it is a matter of choice. They don't have to be that way. The Germans were fair enough in 1939.