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.
