he Continental Army is often stereotyped as a ragtag group of irregulars. Thanks to the French, we are told, the army was sufficiently supplied, funded, and trained to defeat British professionals and win the war. Yet throughout the American Revolution, Patriots exhibited a singular ability to create their own capable military forces ex nihilo. And they ingeniously supplied and equipped local militias in addition to their eventual establishment of a Europeanized and professional army. That national legacy of military adaptation and innovation has characterized almost all subsequent American wars. Indeed, the spirited “army” that began the war at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775 bore little resemblance to the multifaceted and lethal military that defeated the British at Cowpens and at Yorktown in 1781 to end the war.
Such radical evolution has also been characteristic of the later American military, which has often been faulted for entering a war unprepared, naive, overconfident, and poorly led—but never remained so for long. Despite democracy’s innate unease with military culture and standing armies, within a year of America’s entering wars, the nation’s assets of individualism, fluidity between classes, openness to experimentation and innovation, meritocracy, affinity for technological change, economic dynamism, and love of liberty have consistently resulted in rapid adaptation and eventual success over much more experienced enemies.
The American Revolution established the tradition of a flexible military that quickly evolves from a disorganized and confused peacetime militia to deadly wartime soldiers. For example, at the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas, July 21, 1861), in the initial engagement of the Civil War, an imposing but disorganized and poorly led Union force of 35,000 raw recruits was routed and humiliated by a smaller but more spirited Confederate army. Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the few heroes that day on the losing Union side, and soon to be a general, left the flotsam and jetsam of Bull Run utterly depressed but still eager to bring about changes. He feared that the North’s armies were so disorganized, poorly equipped, and badly trained that they might never be able to invade and defeat the Confederacy, then about three-quarters the size of Europe.
Yet just over three years later in the autumn of 1864, General Sherman’s Army of the West had accomplished just that, after cutting a destructive swath through the heart of the Deep South from Georgia through the Carolinas before approaching Lee’s army in northern Virginia to help General Grant end the war.
The Macon Telegraph memorably described the terrifying approach of Sherman with his army throughout Georgia: “unsated still in his demoniac vengeance, he sweeps over the country like a simoon of destruction.” Later, on the grandstand overseeing the huge Union victory parade through Washington, D.C., in May 1865, the German ambassador remarked of Sherman’s army, as its war-torn veterans marched by: “An army like that could whip all Europe.”
When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, the American military was little more than a frontier constabulary of 120,000 irregulars. Two years later, after the armistice of November 1918, the new American Expeditionary Force had landed two million doughboys in France with only two hundred enlistees or so lost to enemy naval action. The U.S. economy went from essentially zero pre-war production of artillery shells to manufacturing over 50 million shells a year—the greatest per annum output of any belligerent in the entire war.
When war broke out again in Europe on September 1, 1939, the Depression-era U.S. Army was only some 170,000 soldiers strong—seventeenth in size of the world’s militaries, behind even tiny Portugal’s. By September 1945, the military had swelled to 12.2 million soldiers.
The U.S. wartime economy, battered by the Great Depression, was creating by late 1945 a greater gross domestic product than all of the other major belligerents put together. At war’s end, the American fleet, in both total tonnage and number of ships, was larger than the rest of the world’s major navies combined. Americans created the two most expensive, sophisticated, and deadly weapons systems of the war—the B-29 long-range heavy bomber and the Manhattan Project’s atomic bombs. And GIs, with little prior military training, in horrific battles on D-Day, at the Battle of the Bulge, and on Okinawa proved themselves among the most skilled and daring on either side.
The precedents of this extraordinary, near-frenzied American military resilience and recovery—which persisted, for most of the country’s history, without an institutionalized military culture—were established during the Revolutionary War. The first Americans quickly embraced military innovations, welcomed adaptation, and were humble enough to learn from more experienced European commanders.
They rarely saw unconventional forces as antithetical to traditional armies or as connoting lesser social status. Instead, they envisioned irregulars as complementary and ideally suited to the geography and local populations of Colonial America. The key was to draw on all manpower available without prior conventional restrictions. Washington, who believed victory would be achieved only when his orthodox infantry matched the caliber of the British army in set battles, nevertheless encouraged irregular and ad hoc militias, raiders, and guerrillas to work in tandem with his own Europeanized army.
General Nathanael Greene, perhaps second only to Washington in tactical and strategic insight, gained Washington’s confidence to form an irregular hit-and-run force of about a thousand infantry and eight hundred cavalry, to be supplemented by local militia. Greene himself avoided pitched battle with the better-equipped and larger British contingents in South Carolina. He wrote Washington, “I must make the most of a kind of partizan war.”
Washington was impressed, and quickly responded, “[I] approve of your plan for forming a flying army.” Greene’s “flying army,” soon working in tandem with Brigadier General Francis Marion (the “Swamp Fox”), saw a greater number of battles and engagements in South Carolina than took place in any other theater of the war. Indeed, one in five American war deaths occurred in South Carolina, a state that the much-larger British forces could never completely subdue.
In the Northern theater, Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys of Vermont similarly wore down British forces. They proved central in capturing Fort Ticonderoga at the critical junction of Lake Champlain and Lake George, during a now-famous late-night attack on May 10, 1775. The capture of the fort allowed General Washington to send Henry Knox to the stronghold to transfer its critical arsenal of cannon to Boston, where the captured artillery proved decisive in forcing the British to evacuate the city in 1776.
Traditional American generals such as Benedict Arnold, Horatio Gates, and Charles Lee all argued for the value of the militias and “special forces.” They sought to integrate these autonomous bands of infantry and cavalry that brought their own food, owned their horses, and served without regular pay into their own regular armies. The revolutionary impetus to use these assets was partly ingrained, given the successful prior use of militias and rangers in the earlier French and Indian War (1754–63), and partly tactical, drawing on colonials with specialized knowledge of terrain, local populations, and enemy intentions.
Later, John Adams famously noted that the keystones of the revolutionary America that had provided the new nation its stability and security were small towns, religious congregations, schools—and militias.
This early tradition of encouraging raiders to work in concert with regular forces also became a hallmark of later American militaries. In the Civil War—one of the rare major conflicts fought on American soil—both sides relied on guerrilla forces. Perhaps the most famous were, on the Union side, the use of sometimes brutal units such as Richard R. Blazer’s “Blazer’s Scouts” and Samuel C. Means’s “Loudoun Rangers” and the activities, on the Confederate side, of Elijah V. White’s “White’s Comanches” and “McNeill’s Rangers” commanded by John Hanson McNeill. In Virginia, General John Singleton Mosby (the “Gray Ghost”) and Turner Ashby for years tied down thousands of Union troops.
The mounted “Partisan Brigades” of “the devil” Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan (sometimes called “the South’s Francis Marion”) worked throughout Tennessee and Virginia in conjunction with the Army of Tennessee throughout 1862 and 1863. Sherman felt that Forrest had caused more havoc to Union infantry operations than any other Confederate force.
In response, the Union’s devastating 1864 raids by Philip Sheridan’s mounted troops into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and Sherman’s self-supporting infantry with its notorious “bummers” in Georgia and the Carolinas, detached from all logistical bases, were themselves unorthodox. In the spirit of the Revolutionary War’s flying columns, they were mixtures of raiding and traditional marching, designed to war on Confederate infrastructure and property, to free slaves, and to force civilians to withhold support from Southern troops.
The use of insurgents, guerrillas, and special forces continued from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea of an “irregular war” involving all imaginable sorts of forces, both unorthodox and conventional, sometimes behind enemy lines, targeting infrastructure and manufacturing as well as armed forces, was a direct legacy of the revolution. From the long-range penetration efforts against the Japanese in Burma by Merrill’s Marauders to the efforts of Green Berets to organize Hmong resistance during the Vietnam War, such special forces had their American origins in the Revolutionary War.
Just as importantly, the outmanned and outgunned American forces in the revolution were especially open to ad hoc technological innovation, keen on scientific breakthroughs, and reliant on novel military protocols—in ways unexpected by the wealthier and better established British military. While the extent of the colonials’ use of the somewhat clumsy and difficult-to-load Pennsylvania Long Rifle has been exaggerated, the novel, rifled muskets nonetheless tripled the traditional hundred-yard range of the British “Brown Bess” smooth-bore musket. Soon American snipers learned to pick off British officers at the then-unheard-of distance of over three hundred yards. Such targeting of British commanders played a key role at the monumental American victory in 1777 at Saratoga, New York, a turning point that many historians cite as the catalyst that finally convinced the French to intervene on behalf of what they now saw might be the winning side.
Perhaps the most effective use of early rifles was by “Morgan’s Riflemen,” a militia led by Daniel Morgan. At the small but critical Battle of Cowpens (1781) in South Carolina, Morgan brilliantly combined a diverse force of regular troops, militia, and his rifled sharpshooters virtually to destroy the infamous “British Legion,” led by the feared and often reckless Banastre Tarleton. The crack British troops were led into a veritable American ambush of feigned retreats, multilayer defenses, sharpshooting snipers, and double envelopment.
Lacking the industrial base or scientific infrastructure of Britain, the Americans proved in many ways more innovative. General Washington was alarmed that his army suffered inordinate losses from smallpox epidemics over the first two years of the conflict. Nearly two decades before Edward Jenner’s use of safe and effective mass cowpox inoculations to prevent smallpox, Washington gambled by ordering thousands of soldiers of the Continental Army to be innoculated during the winter of 1777.
The Americans employed an early but dangerous method known as “variolation,” one that collected the pus from the lesions of infected smallpox patients and inserted the live effluvia into the skin of the healthy. The risky practice worked. Not only might the resulting immunity have saved the American army, but it also provided advantages over mostly unvaccinated British adversaries. After Washington’s vaccination program, fewer than 2 percent of American soldiers were lost to subsequent smallpox epidemics.
Some entrepreneurial efforts to find new weapons and protocols were encouraged even when they proved far ahead of their time and impractical. Tradition has it that the world’s first military submarine, “The Turtle,” was designed and built in 1775 by the Yale graduate David Bushnell. In conjunction with the Continental command, Bushnell had been experimenting with ways to attach mines to harbored British warships, and the effort soon led him to explore submarine delivery systems.The result was the Turtle—a one-man, egglike capsule, built of oak with reinforced iron bands. The idea was to submerge the hand-powered ovoid shell, steer it near to docked British ships, attach a fused mine, and then paddle away before the bomb went off. Allegedly the first use of a submersible craft in actual combat, the Turtle failed in its three attempts to place an explosive device near hms Eagle, docked in New York Harbor.
Finally, the Continental Army proved eager to incorporate military knowledge, tactics, and experience from more experienced European militaries. Seeking to hone a European-type army, Washington welcomed in 1777 the help of the expatriate veteran Prussian officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. He had served as the aide-de-camp to Frederick the Great and was intimate with the modern Prussian army, then the most innovative and disciplined force in Europe. Von Steuben not only brought Prussian order and drill to the American army, but he also schooled it in the use of sequential fire by rank, the famous Prussian “oblique order” of rapidly marching diagonally across the battlefield to concentrate the mass of the army on a fixed spot on the flank of the enemy, and the tradition of positioning the supreme commander near the front so he could lead by example.
Von Steuben’s training manual Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States (1779) was widely read by Washington’s officers, who adopted its disciplined training regimen and fire control—and it even served as a blueprint for U.S. Army handbooks up to the modern era.
In July of 1781, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, arrived in America with four thousand French troops—soon to be joined by the French fleet. But unlike some prior French commanders with far greater experience than Washington, the fifty-six-year-old Rochambeau, a veteran of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, collaborated with him as an equal. He correctly advised that the ultimate American objective was not recapturing New York but destroying the British army at Yorktown.
The better-known Marquis de Lafayette, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, joined Washington’s staff, fought in a number of early battles, was wounded, spent the hard winter with the troops at Valley Forge, and returned to France to help raise money, arms, and French soldiers for Washington. He returned to fight in the last battle of the war, the victory at Yorktown. Lafayette, like Rochambeau, got along well with Washington and the Americans, and like von Steuben he labored to make the American military comparable in numbers and skill to the British. Indeed, the later American institutionalization of separate infantry, cavalry, and artillery corps, the idea of a formal general staff, and the practice of breaking military divisions into regiments and battalions can be traced to French and Prussian advisors.
From the beginning of the U.S. military, foreigners found it easy to work with affable Americans, who were mostly devoid of class pretensions, titles, and hierarchies—a tradition that endures today. It is no surprise that the Americans in both World War I and II were seen as the most congenial of their allies, eager to learn from their more-experienced partners.
Indeed, this initial willingness to adopt, modify, and improve foreign military practices under allied consultation and instruction was enshrined in all later American armies. In the American Civil War, both sides had been schooled in Napoleonic practice and doctrines, which, albeit outdated, still formed the basis for the early training of the Union Army.
When the American Expeditionary Force arrived in France in 1917, after initial discord with the British and French over the preservation of American autonomy, it soon learned from its allies’ prior bitter experience that the machine gun and artillery, not well-trained American marksmen, were the key to victory in the trenches. The British also wisely informed the late-arriving Americans in 1942 that unescorted daylight bombing missions over Europe were recipes for disaster. The application of the British Merlin engine to the sluggish American P-51 fighter, and of the seventeen-pounder gun to the under-armed Sherman tank, made both weapons among the best in the war.
At the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the formal American army was trained to European standards. But it was also energized by indigenous minutemen, snipers, and special forces—all of which have parallels today. Contemporary American military mastery of machines and gadgetry also is a Revolutionary War inheritance. The French and European advisors certainly aided the Americans as part of their own self-interested efforts to weaken Britian. But they also did so in admiration of American idealism, openness, familiarity—and willingness to learn, consult, and collaborate.
No comments :
Post a Comment