Harold R. Winton - Corps Commanders of the Bulge: Six American Generals and Victory in the Ardennes

corps commanders of the bulge

MODERN WAR STUDIES

Theodore A. Wilson

General Editor

Raymond Callahan

Jacob W. Kipp

Allan R. Millett

Carol Reardon

Dennis Showalter

David R. Stone

James H. Willbanks

Series Editors

corps commanders
of the bulge

Six American Generals and
Victory in the Ardennes

Harold R. Winton

Foreword by Dennis Showalter

University Press of Kansas

2007 by the University Press of Kansas

All rights reserved

Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045 ), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winton, Harold R., 1942

Corps commanders of the Bulge : six American generals and victory in the Ardennes / Harold R. Winton ; Foreword by Dennis Showalter.

p. cm. (Modern war studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn -: -- 7006 - 2384 - (pbk : alk. paper)

isbn : -- 7006 - 2894 - (ebook)

. Ardennes, Battle of the, 1944 1945 .. GeneralsUnited StatesHistoryth century.. LeadershipUnited StatesHistoryth century.. Command of troopsHistoryth century. I. Title.

D..AW 2007

.' 219348092273 dc

2006029067

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available. Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in the print publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z.- 1992 .

to walter ferrell winton, jr. who fought thereand won

Since we already require excellent intellectual qualities of those who are to be outstanding in the lower positions of command, and since these requirements increase with every level, it naturally follows that we have a completely different opinion than do people generally of the men who fill with distinction the second positions of an army.

Clausewitz

Contents

by Dennis Showalter

illustrations and maps

Photographs

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Maps

Foreword

This work addresses, systematically and in detail, a question that until this day has remained essentially unanswered. How, exactly how, did the truncated, marginalized U.S. Army of the interwar period produce so many capable division and corps commanders by the time of the D-Day campaign of 1944 1945 ?

It has been said, accurately, that he who has not fought the Germans does not know war. Discussions of the armys performance during its graduation exercises tend to concentrate at the top and the bottom. At policy and strategy levels, the focus is on Anglo-American friction and the competence of Dwight Eisenhower and his army commanders. At the sharp end, the issue of American fighting power vis--vis the German adversary inspires discussion of everything from tank design to infantry replacement policies.

Without competence in the middle parts of command, however, superior generalship and battlefield virtuosity alike are likely to be wasted. Given the nature of modern war and the scale of the fighting in Northwest Europe, effectiveness at division and corps levels was crucial to performance in all of the contending armies. Here, if anywhere, the Germans might have been expected to enjoy an advantage. To a history of large armies and a widely praised system of military education, they added five years of ruthless combat: surely time enough for cream to rise to the top. Even the British army, hardly a touchstone for military preparedness during the interwar years, had possessed a structure of higher commands and a spectrum of missions that allowed senior commanders to test their ideas and try their wings.

The United States Army did not neglect what it called the art of command. Its Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth was designed to train middle-grade officers for assignment at division and corps levels. Its curriculum and ethos, however, encouraged the development of staff officers rather than commanders: problem solvers rather than battle captains. The Army War College, created in 1903 , emphasized preparing its students for high command but focused largely on theory drawn from history, especially American experience in the Civil War and in World War I. Post- 1918 technological developments, and their accompanying pressure for devolved authority and individual initiative, were largely neglected.

The army, moreover, had for all practical purposes no operational command structure above the regiment. Divisions and corps were paper formations. Most of the regiments, grossly undermanned and geographically dispersed, were more notional than functional. Even the major overseas garrisons, Hawaii and the Philippines, were essentially administrative entities. The exponential expansion of the army that began in 1940 , and the accompanying purge of senior National Guard officers who at least had some practice handling a division, produced a network of two-star generals who essentially learned their craft on the job.

This was an unpromising matrix for final victory. Even if its best days were past by the summer of 1944 , Hitlers Wehrmacht was a formidable enemy that charged a bloody tuition for its lessons. But the men who led Eisenhowers divisions and corps across Europe performed wellso well that they are seldom included in the list of Americas military shortcomings compared to the Germans, the Soviets, and even the British. There were around a hundred of them. The photos that appear scattered throughout the volumes of the official history or concentrated in the illustrations of the books in the military history sections of contemporary bookstores look strangely alike under the steel helmets or the bills of dress caps. If their names may not be household words in the twenty-first century, they hold a respected place in that body of good ordinary generals on whose competence all armies depend no less than on the skill and wills of their ordinary soldiers.

These generals were a cohort in the most basic sense. They held the same rank: major general. The usual congressional concern for keeping budgets and egos down meant that, unlike most other armies, corps and division commanders were differentiated by appointment but not by rank. Yet paradoxically, those who held the higher post were the invisible men of the general officer corps.

The division was the armys building block. Generals are usually identified with the divisions they commanded: Terry Allen with the st and th; P. Wood with the th Armored; and so on. The army commanders are familiar for the most part because there were fewer of them. Corps were anonymous. Their identities were amorphous. They had no permanent structure; divisions and supporting units shifted from one to another, often with bewildering speed. Even their designation by roman numerals made it just that much more difficult to tell them apart amid the Is and the Xs.