Another aspect of Army hatred is that it seems to emanate only from Capitol Hill. An amazing transformation occurs when a politician or administration official (and even some in the media) visits Soldiers in a combat zone. Around reelection time, all politicians will tell anyone who is interested how many trips they have made to the war zone. “What did you think of the troops you saw there?” is my usual question. “They’re incredible!” is the inevitable answer. “What discipline! What patriotism, what a great bunch of guys!” Occasionally I will remind them of their forgotten green-room rants: “Please square with me how such great guys, many with half a dozen years or more in the combat zone, suddenly get so stupid when they come to Washington?” No answer. Yet for some reason, as soon as these great Soldiers go from combat to Washington they become the Jed Clampetts of the Beltway cocktail circuit.
Why? It is complicated. But let’s start with popular perceptions of armies, perceptions that have sprung from historical events that begin with the very foundation of our country. Englishmen came to our shores in the seventeenth century to escape the depredations of Oliver Cromwell and his professional army, raging across England during its protracted civil war. Remember, pre-industrial armies were simply masses of dirty off-scourings of society, scum who Soldiered in predatory machines that needed to move to sustain themselves. While on the march armies took horses and crops and dragooned favorite sons into the ranks. It is this sixteenth-century precedent of a feckless, regicidal band of ravaging Soldiers and officers that today leaves the United Kingdom with a Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and a Royal Air Force but no Royal Army.
The English Civil War experience and the “Glorious Revolution” that followed gave our colonial ancestors an abiding distrust of standing, professional armies. Unfortunately, the colonies were dangerous places, threatened by as yet unbroken Indian tribes and the occasional face-off with the hated French, who occupied an empire beyond the northern and western colonial wildernesses. So our earliest citizens chose to defend their homes by assembling local militias from the citizenry. These pickup crews, like all militia, were terrible Soldiers, but they were usually better Soldiers than the Indians.
Perhaps we would never have become an independent nation had it not been for a badly behaving British Army that forcibly quartered its Soldiers in the homes of Boston’s prickly citizens. Hatred for a professional army increased yearly as the patriots’ propaganda amplified or made up stories about the horrors of lynching of citizens, burning of farms, and looting that accompanied the British Army from 1775 until the war ended at Yorktown in 1781.
The traditional distrust of a professional army extended itself to the colonial side during the Revolution. Washington’s Continentals (read “professionals”) won the war but suffered deadly neglect during the winters of 1777 and 1778, in places like Valley Forge and Morristown. Professionals saved the day and won the war at Yorktown (with massive help from French professionals). But over the centuries, history was rewritten by civilians who kept alive the myth of the minuteman who (like Cincinnatus) left his plowshare to take up his musket upon the approach of the British regulars. Minutemen were useful. Local armed citizens fought as bushwhackers and skirmishers, harassing the British lines of communications, and they occasionally reinforced Washington’s Continental regulars. The mythology of the militiaman, or the “citizen Soldier,” was larger than his contribution, and it would grow after the American Revolution.
The lingering animosity toward professional Soldiers, U.S. or British, was even written into the Constitution by our founding fathers, virtually all of whom served during the Revolution. Article 1, Section 8 of the document states that “the Congress shall have power to . . . raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.” The Navy is treated quite differently: Article 1, Section 8, clause 13 states simply that “the Congress shall have power to . . . provide and maintain a Navy.” The implications are clear. The founding fathers considered land forces temporary, to be raised principally in times of crisis with appropriations subject to termination every two years. Early congressmen, in contrast, considered the Navy to be the service that was to be “maintained.”
The myth of the minuteman grew during the American Civil War, a war fought by amateurs on both sides. The Confederate armies were formed from local community volunteers. Lincoln raised the Union army principally through a system of “volunteer” recruitment, in which leading civilian citizens, usually rich merchants, lawyers, or judges, would raise personal regiments and, after being elected to command by their Soldiers, lead them in battle. Within a few months, many of these untrained and undisciplined rabbles were dead—not of bullets but of disease caused mainly by amateur leaders who did not have a clue about sanitation or camp discipline. To be sure, most of the fighting generals on both sides were West Pointers. But the troops and junior officers they led suffered and died because they entered combat as raw civilians and were forced to learn to fight by fighting, the costliest way to professionalize an army. The price of amateurism was manifested mostly by wastage, something Lincoln called “the deadly arithmetic.” Poor tactical leadership and poor discipline in formations left most of those who remained with the colors dead on battlefields like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness.
By the end of the war, both armies had become professional through the deadly Darwinian process of wartime self-selection and luck. Amateurism, not the enemy, killed almost three-quarters of a million men, about one in five of those recruited—more dead than in all subsequent American wars combined. Sadly, in U.S. military history, folklore too often trumps truth. Amateurism has cost many more American lives than virtually any other phenomenon. A uniquely American form of amateurism continued to prevail after the Civil War, from the Spanish American War to Vietnam.
The world wars, Korea, and Vietnam were fought with ground forces remarkably similar in composition and competence. While the technical services (the Navy, Air Force, and noncombat ground Soldiers) were manned by skilled volunteers, the infantry—the branch tasked with fighting the enemy up close—came from the dregs of society. As a rule, infantrymen were smaller and less fit than Soldiers in other branches and services. They were drawn from the lowest mental categories, as determined by newly developed military versions of IQ tests.
Thanks to Hollywood, we have a positive view of the “Greatest Generation,” that of the World War II years. Unfortunately, during the opening campaigns amateurism continued to kill U.S. infantry needlessly. The battles of Kasserine Pass in North Africa and Buna in the Pacific were bloody disasters. Later, on the beaches of Normandy, the 90th Division suffered more than 100 percent casualties among enlisted Soldiers and 150 percent among officers in six weeks of combat. Gen. William DePuy, who served as a regimental commander in the 90th, later recalled that his division was the greatest killer on the battlefield. Tragically, it was the Germans who did the killing.
The crushing ineptitude of American close-combat units was eventually overcome by two factors. First, small batches of “elite” infantry stiffened the line. From the moment Airborne and Ranger Soldiers touched enemy soil they became killing machines. The Germans referred to our Airborne infantry as “Devils in Baggy Pants.” Fronts occupied by Airborne regiments were routinely four or five times larger than those held by conventional infantry regiments. The Rangers’ incredible, hand-over-hand climbing assault up the cliffs of Pont du Hoc on the Normandy beachhead is legend. Every tourist who stands at the top of this cliff asks out loud, “How did they do it?” The answer is that Ranger and Airborne units were carefully selected from out of the usual rabble. Officers and Soldiers alike were all volunteers. These units were robust. Unlike in traditional close-combat units, the Army assigned extra Soldiers to each Airborne small unit. As Soldiers died or were evacuated, their buddies—well trained and deeply bonded with their comrades in a way well known to all “band of brothers” units—joined their brothers in the fight without the need for additional training or familiarization.
The second factor that made the Greatest Generation great was lengthy immersion in the harsh crucible of war. As in the Civil War, most Soldiers who joined infantry small units failed to stay on the
