World War One: The Officer Corps Develops Command and Control

In April 1917, the United States formally declared war. The first American troops arrived in Europe in June 1917, and their initial participation in combat at the front was in October 1917.

It was not until May 1918, however, that U.S. soldiers played a major role in World War One.

Compared to Austria, Serbia, Germany, France, and other nations, the United States had a relatively brief experience in the war; fighting ceased on November 11, 1918.

The American officers had, however, one thing in common with their counterparts in the armies of the other countries: nobody had even seen a war like this before, and nobody was sure how to fight it.

Many of these officers were experienced, but their experience was irrelevant. They’d been involved in combat in the Philippines and in Cuba as part of the Spanish-American War, and they’d fought Pancho Villa’s Mexican revolutionaries.

The trench warfare in Europe was a different situation. As historian Timothy Nenninger writes,

In World War I, the United States Army entered combat on the Western Front with an ill-defined idea of how to command troops on the battlefield. Although most senior leaders in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) had commanded in combat in Cuba, the Philippines, or Mexico, none had experience with large unit, high intensity combat as conducted in France.

Several factors made the ground war in Europe different. First, the size: millions of soldiers, millions of guns, billions of bullets.

The second factor which distinguished World War I from previous conflicts was mechanization. Although machine guns had been used in previous fights, only during WW1 did they become numerous and common. Tanks entered battle for the first time. Other new weapons included airplanes and poison gas.

Advanced and sophisticated levels of industrialization produced weapons capable of killing on a large scale.

A third factor was that the American officers weren’t accustomed to being part of a multinational coalition. Coordination with French and British officers was a new experience.

There are probably other factors which distinguish WW1 from previous conflicts. American officers studied quickly to gain insights into this situation, as Timothy Nenninger notes:

The lack of first-hand experience was mitigated in part by service school education, General Staff analysis and doctrine, and professional writing in service-sponsored journals and books on military art that provided some insight into modem war. But until the summer of 1918 all of the principal elements of the AEF's command process - organizational, doctrinal, technical, and personal - were untested.

Under the command of General John Pershing, the decision was made to keep the AEF together as a unit within the larger multinational coalition. Previously, the alternative route - embedding small groups of Americans inside French and British units, mainly as replacements to “fill the holes” - had been considered.

This decision shaped the American experience of WW1, and in fact created a distinctly American experience of WW1, being different than the French or British experiences.

How and how well the process worked depended on the knowledge, skill, and preparation of commanders and staff officers, and on their interaction. Although the AEF drew on the experience of other armies, how they applied that experience resulted in a distinctly American process of command.

For the U.S. military, WW1 constituted a challenge to develop new forms of command and control. American officers learned to operate in a large, mechanized, multinational context.

General John Pershing: Civil Rights Hero

General Pershing became most famous for leading the United States Army in World War One. But many years earlier, he took courageous steps to acknowledge the contributions of African-Americans in the nation’s military.

Having graduated from West Point in 1886, one of his earliest assignments was, according to historian Kevin Hymel,

with both the 6th and 10th Cavalry Regiments. The 10th was one of two black cavalry regiments commanded by white officers. Pershing was called “Black Jack” in reference to his service with the10th, and the nickname stuck long after he left it.

Pershing was proud of his service with the “Buffalo Soldiers,” the nickname given to the African-American cavalrymen. In 1898, when the Spanish-American war began, Pershing insisted on rejoining the Buffalo Soldiers as they went into action in Cuba.

In his own words, Pershing described what he saw as a wonderful unity among the soldiers:

Each officer or soldier next in rank took charge of the line or group immediately in his front or rear and halting to fire at each good opportunity, taking reasonable advantage of cover, the entire command moved forward as coolly as though the buzzing of bullets was the humming of bees. White regiments, black regiments, regulars and Rough Riders, representing the young manhood of the North and the South, fought shoulder to shoulder, unmindful of race or color, unmindful of whether commanded by ex-Confederate or not, and mindful of only their common duty as Americans.

Years later, when Pershing was commanding in Europe during WW1, his loyalty to Black soldiers would lead him to assignment them to meaningful combat roles. Pershing answered to President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had reintroduced segregation into the civilian branches of the government.

As Commander-in-Chief, Wilson was not pleased to see African-American troops taking on significant military tasks. In assigning Black troops to the same types of duties as any other troops, Pershing showed that he was willing to risk Wilson’s displeasure.

The Priorities of the Soviet Espionage Network in the United States

Communist spies in North America had more than one function. They gathered intelligence, but other tasks often had higher priority.

Beyond stealing classified documents from the government and from the military, and beyond sending such secrets to Moscow, Soviet operatives were tasked with influencing U.S. policy. To this end, they established themselves in both governmental and non-governmental institutions.

This can be seen, e.g., in the intelligence provided by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers joined the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) in the mid 1920s, from which he was recruited into Soviet espionage agencies around 1932. By 1938, he had grown disillusioned with the international communist conspiracy.

He disengaged from the USSR’s intelligence agencies and began offering information to the United States government. He was able to explain that Soviet operatives were often more interested in shaping U.S. policy than in stealing U.S. secrets.

As historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein explain, “Cold War scholars generally are aware of the influence issue.” Yet, in the popular imagination, Soviet spies are generally conceived of as “stealing secrets.”

One Soviet agent, named Alger Hiss, is perhaps best known to the public as the man who stole classified State Department Documents and passed them on to other operatives, including Chambers. But while Hiss’s reputation depicts him as an intelligence-gatherer, he actually did much greater damage as a policymaker.

It is less well known that Hiss, while on the payroll of Soviet intelligence agencies, was a key advisor to President Roosevelt in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Hiss’s influence was responsible for the death of thousands as he enabled Soviet imperialistic expansionism to run amok in eastern Europe.

There is, then, a disconnect between what professional historians know, and what general public’s perception is. Scholars are aware

of the Cold War role played by Chambers, who knew a lot about spying and was involved in it on a professional basis. Yet Chambers repeatedly stressed that spying as such was not the major issue. Rather, he said, with the likes of Hiss in federal office, policy influence was by far the leading problem.

While the Soviet effort to steal classified U.S. documents was a grave danger during the Cold War, an equal and possibly greater threat was posed by communists inside the U.S. who nudged policy decisions in directions which favored Stalin.

Insider Information: Soviet Access Inside the U.S. Government

Although the Cold War is usually defined as starting in the mid-1940s, Soviet espionage efforts inside the United States started decades earlier. By the 1930s, there was an established intelligence network operating undercover in North America.

Famous spies like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, Harry Hopkins, and Philip Keeney funneled classified government documents to Soviet intelligence agencies. Some of these operatives were deliberate; others were unwitting dupes, who never quite understood what they were doing.

These “moles,” operating from their posts inside various governmental and social institutions, were ultimately complicit for thousand and tens of thousands of deaths as the USSR unfolded its imperialistic expansionism in eastern Europe, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Equipped with insider knowledge of the U.S. government’s policy-making apparatus, the Soviets could form their own policy in anticipation of American responses to it. As historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write,

Guided by such inside information, the Soviets could plan their own strategies with assurance — like a card player who could read the hand of an opponent. Knowing what the United States or other Western nations would do with respect to Germany, Poland, Spain, Japan, or China, the commissars could make their moves with foreknowledge of the responses they would get from other powers. Thus the two facets of the Soviet project interacted — the spying handmaiden to the policy interest. And, of course, if knowing what the policies of the United States and other non-Communist nations would be was useful to the Kremlin, then being able to influence or guide those policies in some manner would have been still more so.

Several concrete examples show this principle in action: At the Yalta Conference, Stalin knew that Roosevelt’s foreign policy was shaped largely by Alger Hiss, who was a Soviet agent. Stalin knew in advance Roosevelt’s concerns, and to which extent Roosevelt was willing to cede American interests to Stalin’s pressure tactics.

Similarly, Stalin knew that his operatives had undermined from within the will of the U.S. government to resist Mao’s vicious attack on Chinese liberty. Stalin could support Mao and know that the Americans would offer only slight verbal resistance and no material opposition. Millions of Chinese paid with their lives.

James Madison: The Virtues of Constitutionalism

After winning the election of 1808, James Madison became the fourth president of the United States in 1809. Arguably, however, his most significant contribution to history happened twenty years earlier.

Madison’s impact on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, and the Constitution which it produced, is so extensive that he earned the nickname “Father of the Constitution.”

Constitutionalism is central to intuitive notions of fairness, justice, and equality. Constitutionalism is essentially a codification of the rule of law: constitutionalism is the demand that a plan of government be written, published, and carried out.

As historian Larry Arnn writes:

Ours, wrote Madison, is the first nation to adopt purely representative forms. This means that all sovereignty or authority to rule is located in the governed or in the people.

Because the Constitution is written, it is more objective. The text is fixed, and while some questions of interpretation are possible, it does not change over time.

Because it is public, it creates a sense of access and equality. Any citizen can learn what the system of government is and how it works. Citizens can use this knowledge to act politically to further their own interests or values.

Non-citizens can also access the Constitution and, using their knowledge of it, decide whether they want to attempt to become citizens. Larry Arnn continues:

But at the same time, the people do not occupy the offices of government — as they did, for instance, in Athenian democracy. America’s pure or simple “republicanism,” as Madison called it, makes possible the separation of powers both between the governed and their government and also inside the parts of the government.

The vision of American Constitutionalism is a republic with freely-elected representatives. The individuals in government represent the voters. Elected official act on behalf of the citizens.

The government should not rule the citizens: the citizens should rule the government.

The original intent of the Constitution was not to create a class of permanent career politicians. Those elected to Congress were to meet occasionally to transact whatever business was necessary, but should spend most of their time living in their communities and working at their own trades.

As Larry Arnn notes, the Constitution can be seen as an extensive list of ways to limit the power of government:

The sovereign people delegate their authority to government, separately to separate places. This separation is both horizontal, among the branches of the federal government, and vertical, between the states and the federal government.

By dividing power among the three branches of government, and then dividing it again between national and local governments, the Constitution seeks to preserve individual political liberty by ensuring that there is no large mass of power in any one office.

Another way to limit the power of government is to ensure that elected officials are representatives of the people, not rulers over them. Elected officials should serve occasionally, for short terms, and only for specified purposes.

The people themselves are outside the government, and they may intervene only at election time. Between elections, they watch, judge, and argue — in other words, they think before they act.

James Madison was a passionate abolitionist, and by the time he died in 1836, the end of slavery in the United States had become a historical inevitability.

Madison also understood that educated voters were good for the nation, and worked therefore with Thomas Jefferson to found the University of Virginia.

The rotation of officials in and out of government ensures that no one individual can lodge himself permanently in a position of power. Limiting the power of the government, in order to protect individual political liberty, includes limiting even the power which the voters might indirectly exert over each other.

Voters, at their own discretion, replace elected officials. Individuals in government offices should be replaced if the voters think that by such replacement, the will of the voters can be more accurately represented.

Over time, but only over time, they may replace the whole lot. This system limits both their power and the power of those in government.

Madison’s cabinet changed significantly during his presidency. At that time, there were only five cabinet offices: Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Treasury, and Attorney General.

During Madison’s tenure in office, there was a complete turnover in cabinet office. By the end of his presidency, none of the original five were left.

Required Military Service: Damaging Freedom in Order to Preserve It?

A variety of words are used to name the process of requiring men to enlist in the armed forces of a country: draft, impressment, conscription. These words may have slight differences in meaning, which also vary over the decades and centuries, but they essentially all refer to ignoring the will of the individual and requiring him to bear arms for the nation.

The terms ‘impressment’ and ‘conscription’ can also, at times, refer to the forced requisitioning of material objects and supplies as well as manpower.

This practice is never popular, but nowhere meets with more resistance than in the United States. Because the USA is explicitly founded on the notion of individual political liberty, conscription is especially ironic, inasmuch as it violates the individual’s freedom in the name of protecting the individual’s freedom.

The most recent example of such impressment happened during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, but the practice dates back to times even before the nation’s founding. There were examples of the ‘draft’ during colonial times in the 1600s.

Studying particular instances of the impressment of supplies in North Carolina during the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1781, historian John Maass notes that it was so unpopular that it even fostered sentiments in support of the enemy.

In this way, the draft was truly counterproductive.

Likewise, John Maass writes, the conscription of men began to nudge some residents of the area to support, in thoughts if not in deeds, the adversary:

For similar reasons, conscription also raised the ire of men forced to perform compulsory military service through the process of a draft. In all theaters of the war, Revolutionary authorities relied heavily upon conscription, a practice several American provinces used as far back as the seventeenth century. Despite historical precedents, involuntary military service was certainly an imposition upon many male Carolinians (and their families), and often met stiff resistance. Just as men and women directed their ire toward governing officials and their agents over impressment, so too did the draft cause similar disaffection and hostility among men compelled to serve in the ranks. Opposition to conscription and impressment created significant difficulties for Britain’s former American colonies in building allegiance to the new Revolutionary governments, and in defending themselves from British and Tory enemies.

The practice of conscription is a perpetual thorn in the side of military leaders. Soldiers who did not voluntarily enlist are perhaps more likely to desert or cause other disciplinary problems.

Yet, over the centuries, some form of the draft has repeatedly shown itself to be necessary.

In the impressment of material supplies, there is a need to watch the ethics of the conscripting officers and men, because there is a temptation to take more than one needs. A thoughtfully-organized impressment of supplies can minimize the damage to goodwill among the populace.

Likewise, the humane treatment of draftees can reduce personnel problems among the soldiers.

Desmond Doss: Medal of Honor

Movies which present historical events may be entertaining, but we must examine them carefully. Such films often change details in order to make a more enjoyable plot.

The film Hacksaw Ridge tells the story of PFC Desmond Doss, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery in saving the lives of American soldiers while risking his own life. While the film does change some details of Doss’s early life and childhood, it is largely accurate in its depiction of his military activity. As journalist Robert Cherry writes,

The film, directed by Mel Gibson, centers on the life of Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist. His work in a Virginia defense plant exempted him from the draft during the Second World War. His patriotism, however, compelled Doss to join the Army, despite religious beliefs that would not allow him to carry a weapon. Doss explained, “Can’t stay here while all others in my community go and fight for me.” When asked by an enlistment officer why he wanted to join up, despite his unwillingness to fight, Doss answered, “While everyone else is taking lives, I will be saving them.”

Doss enlisted in his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, and eventually earned the rank of Private First Class. He was assigned to the Medical Detachment, 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division.

The events in which he would earn the Medal of Honor would take place between 29 April and 21 May, 1945. But before that, he faced many obstacles.

At every step, Doss faced administrative and social obstacles to becoming a combat medic. His commanding officer told his platoon, “Private Doss does not believe in violence, so don’t look to him to save you on the battlefield.” The hostilities he experienced intensified when one of the enlistees led a group of men to physically assault Doss, claiming, “I don’t think this is a case of religion, I think this is cowardice.” Doss, however, eventually gains enough respect from his comrades that he is able to finish his training and is sent to the battlefields of Okinawa.

The fighting on the Island of Okinawa happened near the end of the war. The Japanese were mounting their last major defensive efforts.

Doss’s unit attacked and fought its way up what the military records call “a jagged escarpment.” When they found themselves at the summit, a massive barrage of Japanese “artillery, mortar, and machinegun fire crashed into them.”

The records go on to say that many soldiers were wounded, and those not wounded quickly retreated. Robert Cherry details Doss’s bravery:

When his platoon is brutally counterattacked, forcing a retreat from Hacksaw Ridge, Doss decides to stay behind to help evacuate the wounded. Over the coming days, he single-handedly rescues 75 soldiers, including his commander. Each time he saves a man, Doss prays, “Dear Lord, help me save one more.” For his actions, Desmond Doss was awarded the Medal of Honor.

The military documents note that, at one point, Doss crawled 200 yards forward from the line under heavy fire to bring back a wounded comrade.

At another point, he crawled so far forward that the was eight yards from the enemy line; he repeated this until he’d retrieved four wounded soldiers.

The actions of Desmond Doss attract attention, and a major Hollywood movie, seventy years after the fact, because of his selflessness, courage, and dedication to principles. As Robert Cherry notes, “this movie highlights the three core values that underpin the behavior of many” ordinary Americans: “patriotism, religion, and individual perseverance.”

These are uniting values: people of all races, religions, cultures, and languages embrace principles like these: “In the movie, we see how religious beliefs promote efforts to help others,” writes Cherry:

The vast majority of deeply religious individuals are focused on how to conduct their own lives in the service of family and community.

PFC Doss, as the military citation states, “unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist” wounded men. Desmond Doss had both principles and a selfless dedication to fulfilling those principles.

Some people doubted Doss; some even mocked him. But he simply worked to live out his beliefs as best he could.

The film also highlights individual perseverance: how the hero did not succumb to defeatism when confronted by obstacles; how he relied on his own initiative rather than becoming a victim by waiting passively for outside intervention.

There have been many brave women and men over the years who have dedicated themselves to doing the right thing. They don’t all agree on what, exactly, the right thing is. But they understand that it’s related to self-sacrifice, to defending innocent people from evil attacks, and to facing opposition bravely.

The Congressional Medal of Honor (CMOH) has been awarded over the years to women and men who distinguish themselves conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of their lives above and beyond the call of duty.