Search Results

This chapter moves the story from the New Deal to the U.S. Army. As the state's main wartime hub for psychological research, the Army Research Branch, headed by University of Chicago sociologist Samuel A. Stouffer, presented evidence to military commanders that better-educated soldiers were more efficient, exhibited higher morale, and were less likely to desert or suffer a psychoneurotic breakdown than their educationally deprived peers. Military and educational policymakers were galvanized by this finding and joined forces to create the Army Information and Education Division—the education clearinghouse for the common soldier. With the steady support of General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the army, who believed wholeheartedly in the transformative power of education, millions of G.I.s made use of the educational services provided to them.

The campaign to sell voluntary repatriation was not the administration's only PR success in 1952. As the war persisted, officers and officials at all levels made big improvements in their publicity efforts. Many learned from earlier mistakes. In the Far East, senior officers also established more effective bureaucratic structures and brought in more personnel to help deal with reporters. On the ground in Korea, the changing nature of the war also eased the military's task. As the fighting bogged down in stalemate, it became less newsworthy. For the first time, the military also had enormous control over what reporters saw. And at the same time, they were now in a position to alleviate the two practical problems that had soured military‐media relations in 1950: appalling billets and antiquated communications. In Washington, meanwhile, officials undertook numerous information campaigns that helped sustain a measure of support for the war.

This chapter examines how the support of influential Americans, including President Roosevelt and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, combined with the pioneering work of combat historian S. L. A. Marshall to produce richly detailed histories that contributed to the U.S. Army's unprecedented drive to document the services wartime history—a practice that the Army had not followed either during or after other major conflicts. The chapter demonstrates that in addition to its use in official histories, others put oral history to use to serve the war effort. Samuel Stouffer and the U.S. Army's Research Branch often used oral histories to improve survey questions that went out to hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The Research Branch's work proved invaluable in many instances, and perhaps nowhere was it more worthwhile than in reshaping treatments for battle fatigue. The extensive use of oral histories during the war led to its widespread acceptance by the U.S. Army after 1945, and because of the active campaigning of wartime practitioners such as historian Forest Pogue, the wider community of academic historians, who often disparaged the value of oral history after the war, came increasingly to embrace the practice during the 1960s and the 1970s.

When America went to war again, Berlin responded by turning his revue-writing impulse again to patriotic ends. Invited to revise Yip Yip Yaphank for a new era, Berlin created This Is the Army (1942) and succeeded by avoiding direct expressions of patriotism and focusing instead on the ordinary complaints and wishes of the common soldier. More than that, Berlin’s songs had a way of reflecting the common preoccupations that soldiers and citizens shared, and thus it could be argued, his work helped to normalize the war experience in an unstable period of American history. This Is the Army takes center stage in Berlin’s work for several reasons: its tour of the U.S. and war zones, its performances for more than a million civilian and soldier spectators, and its status as “the best thing I’ve ever been connected with,” as Berlin called it.

This chapter concerns the mechanization of cavalry in the U.S. Army after World War I. It discusses the early mechanization experiments, the mechanization of horse cavalry units for service, and the merger of the cavalry and armor divisions in 1950. The chapter also explores the history of the development of mechanized forces in the whole of the U.S. Army, from the advent of tanks in battle in the 1914–1918 war to the end of Desert Storm in 1991.

This chapter focuses on Frank Parker, a U.S. Army cavalry officer who first conceptualized combined arms mechanized force. Parker began to understand the idea of the operational depth of mechanized warfare supported by tactical aviation as a solution to trench warfare during World War I. He became a visionary after witnessing the introduction of the airplane and tank in warfare. The chapter provides background on Parker's education and career.

Three weeks before DePuy assumed command of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and four months before the Yom Kippur War started, DePuy asserted to several infantry trainers that the previous army had been ill-trained compared to the present army. He asserted that they needed to produce units that were five times as good as those of the enemy forces. Since the Red Army and the U.S. Army could be perceived as relatively equal, training served as the fundamental determinant of their performance. Preparing for the war thus entailed producing “infantry squads and platoons to do the mission of the Army.” Since the Yom Kippur War's resulting lethality proved to be an indicator of how the first battle had to be won, the Yom Kippur War served as leverage to obtain revitalizing resources for the Army.

This chapter examines the establishment of the United States-Mexico border, not just as a cartographic construction, but as a joint production of cooperative policing. As U.S.-Mexico relations deepened and became more complex in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the borderland transformed into a space of bilateral, if sometimes grudging, consent. By focusing on U.S.-Mexico military campaigns against Apaches and U.S. attempts to quell Mexican political dissidents on American soil, an image emerges of a fledgling bilateral policing apparatus, one in which the police power of both countries is pooled, borrowed, and amplified.

In this chapter, George H. Monahan discusses the success of the German U-boat offensive in the Western Atlantic after the U.S. entry into World War II, which led the War Department leadership to believe that the U.S. Navy was not employing adequate antisubmarine tactics. In the application of airpower to combat the submarine threat, the War Department and Army leadership believed that aggressive "hunter-killer" tactics would prove more effective than the Navy's preferred defensive tactic of conducting aerial patrols in the vicinity of convoys. Navy leaders, meanwhile, contended that its defensive tactics were the best method of protecting shipping. A bitter interservice conflict ensued as the War Department sought to initiate an Army Air Forces antisubmarine offensive over the Bay of Biscay. Claiming jurisdiction over all air operations at sea, the Navy leadership firmly opposed the War Department's initiative and insisted that Army Air Forces antisubmarine units operate according to the Navy's defensive doctrine. Secretary of War Henry Stimson's frustration over Admiral Ernest King's refusal to accede to the War Department antisubmarine initiative led the former to support a post-war reorganization of the military command apparatus, thereby ensuring Navy subordination to civilian leadership under an overarching Secretary of Defense.

The period between 1969 and 1973 marked a very bad time for the U.S. Army's history as Vietnam appeared to have the upper hand in the war against the United States. While the U.S. Army was busily engaged in Asian light infantry combat, the armored and mechanized forces of the Red Army as well as the mobile fire support in Europe had already been modernized. As such, the U.S. Army had to improve training procedures, a rethought of doctrine, and modernized weapon systems so that they would properly be able to address the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Some of the effects of this war involve the end to conscription as well as how volunteers were needed to be recruited in the army.

Long before Ulysses S. Grant made his move to the James River, the North Carolina seaport of Wilmington on the Cape Fear River had become the principal port of entry for ships carrying essential supplies to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. By the summer of 1864, as Grant fought his way through the wilderness, and Butler moved up the James River to Bermuda Hundred, the survival of Lee's army depended heavily on the flow of European arms, equipment, and provisions being imported into the Confederacy by way of Wilmington. Union military authorities did not initiate a serious campaign against this key city until late 1864. By then, however, Wilmington was the most heavily defended city on the Atlantic seaboard, with the exception of Charleston. Nevertheless, with important lessons learned in previous combined operations, the U.S. Army and Navy made plans to capture Wilmington with a large-scale combined operation.

This chapter examines the struggle of the U.S. Army cavalry to find new mounts and a tactical doctrine. It discusses criticisms of the mechanized cavalry, including its vulnerability to antitank weapons and its inability to function as soon as the fuel is exhausted, unlike horses. The chapter also explains the underlying principles of the tentative Tactical Employment of the Mechanized Division and The Tactical Employment of Cavalry, which highlighted principles and methods applicable to both horse and mechanized cavalry.

This chapter examines the unpreparedness of the U.S. Army for World War II because of the line branch chiefs' compartmentalized organizations and their refusal to adopt military mechanization strategies. The regular army and National Guard divisions were unable to reach full strength during the interwar period, or have the opportunity to engage in large-scale maneuvers to test cavalry doctrine, until 1940.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of the book, which is about the history of the mechanization of the U.S. Army horse cavalry during the first half of the twentieth century. The book examines the changes in the cavalry doctrine during this period, the untold story of the first mechanized cavalry theorist Frank Parker, and the Army Organization Act which merged the cavalry with the armor branch. It also highlights of the role of Fort Knox in Kentucky, where new ideas had germinated at times and been discussed with German staff officers who visited the base in the 1930s.

This chapter examines the U.S. Army occupation of the Philippines from 1898-1918. The long-term military presence in the Philippines represented perceived opportunities and dangers for white American men in the minds of some observers, highlighting the debates about U.S. imperialism in the period. The chapter analyzes the system of regulated prostitution the U.S. Army created and maintained as a means of controlling potential venereal infections among soldiers until public scandal forced an end to the program. The chapter also examines the effects that race and race relations had—both white and black soldiers were deployed to the Philippines—on sexual relations and how these were policed by the army.

This chapter examines U.S. Army deployments to France during the First World War and the occupations of France and Germany in the aftermath of the war. At the outset of American involvement in World War I, army and War Department officials were especially concerned with how they might cope with an anticipated venereal epidemic, and how to deal with expected problems from romantic fraternization between American soldiers and the European women they would encounter while deployed. This chapter also examines uses the experiences of the American Expeditionary Forces to illuminate differing conceptions of masculinity and sexual propriety for the officer corps and enlisted men.

This chapter examines the validity of using intelligence tests to measure the quality of behavior of human beings. It cites the findings of Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 study on the U.S. Army which concluded that the average mental age of Americans in the U.S. Army was only about fourteen. This conclusion was criticized by Walter Lippmann who argued that the tests were inadequate measures of the quality of human beings. This controversy aroused public and professional interest in intelligence testing.