TREAT EM ROUGH!
Col. Ira C. Welborn, Tank Corps director in the United States. Welborn, an infantry officer, earned the Medal of Honor during the Spanish-American War.
TREAT EM ROUGH!
The Birth of American Armor, 191720
DALE E. WILSON
Foreword by
Maj. Gen. G. S. Patton, USA (Ret.)
Philadelphia & Oxford
Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2018 by
CASEMATE PUBLISHERS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA
and
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Copyright 1990 Dale E. Wilson
This edition first published in 2018.
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-667-3
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-668-0 (ePub)
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
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Foreword
About one year ago, when Dale Wilson asked me to review his manuscript, I sensed its excellence, and predicted that it would eventually be published as a full-scale historical volume. Happily, I was correct! In this respect, I am especially delighted that the selected publisher is my old friend and West Point 1946 classmate, Bob Kane. No other publishing house known to me can match the quality of Presidio Press as a producer of military history books.
An army son, I was born in December 1923. Living in Washington with my parents from 1929 until 1934, I was virtually raised on first-hand stories of tank operations from the 19141918 War.
I can still recall vividly the parade of narrators who came to call on my father, their former commander. Some of these visitors were Sereno Brett, Sasse, Joe Viner, Elgin Braine, Arthur Snyder, Harry Semmes, and many more great personalities whose names escape my memory. As a young and impressionable sub-teenager, I was permitted to sit in a corner after dinner and listen to conversations involving training at Bourg and Langres, the initial engagement at St. Mihiel, and finally, the Argonne Forest, where, near the village of Cheppy, my father was seriously wounded and carried from the field by an Italian-American soldier, named Joe Angelo.
The echoes of those war time reminiscences remain clear in my memory: What an S.O.B. you were, George, but we loved you! Do you remember the time when ? I couldnt get the damn thing started. I called the repair folks and they couldnt either! Hell, we didnt eat for three days. And so forth, into the late evening hours. My mother, Beatrice, literally would have to order me to bed, reluctant as I was to leave that fascinating company.
Theirs was the story of the birth of the tank in the United States Army. It is a wonderful tale, and thanks to Dale Wilson, it now has been pulled together and recorded for all time.
The auspicious birth of the tank notwithstanding, its near death soon followed, and is skillfully laid out for us in Wilsons vitally important epilogue. From 1920 to the early 1930s, the tank and its associated operational concepts (which later evolved into armor) were steadily shoved aside by the traditionalists. Accordingly, many of those who had pioneered this vastly important research effort either left the army or became terribly discouraged and returned to their former branch of service. Our national military and political leaders could not yet see the potential demonstrated by this noisy and cumbersome combat vehicle, and literally allowed it to die on the vine.
In time, of course, the picture changed. When the Nazi threat become more evident, even to the most casual observer, the combined arms team which was later to become known as armor was conceived and born at Fort Knox, Kentucky. However, the men described here, whose early efforts contributed significantly to victory in Europe in 1945, for the most part received little recognition following that victory.
Now, after nearly 70 years, Captain Wilson has given us the opportunity to recognize and salute those pioneer tankers who made armor history, by Treating em Rough. They indeed broke trail for those who followed on.
G. S. Patton
Maj. Gen., USA (Ret.)
Preface
As a career Army officer, I have long been fascinated with the study of military history. After receiving my commission in the Armys Armor Branch in 1979, I became particularly interested in the study of tanks and mechanized warfareespecially the development of mechanized theory and doctrine.
Abundant literature is available on the conduct of armored operations in the Second World War, the Korean conflict, Vietnam, and the Arab-Israeli wars. Historians have also devoted considerable attention to the postWorld War I development of mechanized theory, with special emphasis on the work of Englands Basil Liddell-Hart and Maj. Gen. John F. C. Fuller and of German Gen. Heinz Guderian. The creation of tanks in 1914 and their employment by the British in the First World War have also been explored in depth.
Unfortunately, historians have virtually ignored the American experience with tanks in World War I. The most notable work on the subject was done by Martin Blumenson in the first volume of his collection of The Patton Papers . But Blumensons work, excellent though it is, goes little farther than the experiences of George S. Patton, Jr., with the American Expeditionary Forces Tank Corps in France. Similarly, Dwight D. Eisenhowers biographers have provided glimpses of the activities of the Tank Corps in the United States insofar as they involved Eisenhower, who commanded the first stateside tank training center at Camp Colt, near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1918. Studies of American operations in France contain little (usually erroneous) or no information about the employment of tanks.
This dearth of information about Americas first experience with the tank started me on a path that culminated in this work. I must confess that it was a fascinating journey. Along the way I became acquainted with a number of men whose names have long since faded into obscurity: men like Majs. Sereno E. Brett and Ralph I. Sasse, Lt. Col. Joseph W. Viner, Cols. Henry E. Mitchell and Daniel D. Pullen, Capt. Elgin Braine, Brig. Gen. Samuel D. Rockenbach, and a host of others who shared a vision of what the tank could accomplish and worked to make that vision a reality on the battlefield.
