Supply Dock supporting the War Effort.

This paper is an extended excerpt from Mr. Schaefer's larger paper, "The San Francisco Port of Embarkation in World War II: Command and Control," presented at the June 1994 Conference of Army Historians. It includes considerable additional material not included in that paper, as delivered.

During its twentieth century overseas deployments, the United States relied on its major ports to sustain overseas battlefronts. In the Spanish-American War and World War I, the initial rush of supplies to the docksmomentarily overwhelmed the U.S. Army's logistic system. At the start of World War II, the post Pearl Harbor surge strained, but did not collapse, American ports. The San Francisco Port of Embarkation (SFPE) not only met the challenge, but emerged, revitalized. Did crisis management, however, also ensure the most efficient logistics system?

As historians have discovered, wartime surges follow a familiar pattern. As cargo innundates once sleepy terminals, deploying units pressure port commands to load and ship their gear immediately. Masses of supplies quickly strain rail facilities meant for a fraction of the volume. Shipments of rations, aircraft, vehicles, and ammunition flow in from all directions simultaneously. The War Department's (and, later, the Defense Department's) rush of ships and supplies to beleagured ports complicates matters enormously. Port commanders must master traffic control quickly or risk congestion and chaos.

During the Spanish-American War, for example, the Army's initially unsystematic cargo discharge at ports resulted in backed up shipping and idle military freight. As Erna Risch has pointed out, ship embarka tion for the 1898 Cuban expedition revealed the "surge" syndrome's worst aspects. The War Department "advised" the Army Quartermaster to dispatch supplies as soon as they reached the depots. Such an outflow quickly swamped the modest Port of Tampa, Florida, the Cuban Expedition's embarkation point. With limited rail input and scant storage facilities, Tampa could not handle the mass of undocumented freight. The Army needed a system to handle the surge. Captain James Bellinger established such an orderly approach, which included documenting cargo, procuring more wagons, and methodically unloading railcars as they arrived. He quickly ended the congestion.¹

James A. Huston has described World War I's even more overwhelming congestion. A few months before the U.S. entered the conflict, foreign munitions orders almost swamped U.S. ports. President Wilson's declaration of war merely accelerated the rush. The Army's supply bureaus sent uncoordinated masses of supplies to American terminals, with all cargo boasting high priority. As a result, 200 ships ended up waiting for stores at New York Harbor, while 44,320 railcars piled up rail depots as far inland as Pittsburgh. The War Department at last blocked, or embargoed, all freight from the ports until the terminals could move it. It also abolished the many competing supply bureaus. The newly appointed Director General of Railroads established a committee for government coordination which quickly systemized the inflow. These methods fore shadowed the reaction to the World War II surge.²

Indeed, as Huston has argued, many of the same factors that plagued Army port operations in the Spanish-American War and World War I came into play during the Second World War. Again, the War Department and supply depots overwhelmed the ports with undifferentiated cargo. As before, the Army built up an orderly system to meet the flood. Fortunately, American logistic officers drew on the past to avoid the chaos of previous deployments. A major U.S. port, the San Francisco Port of Embarkation's response to the initial World War II surge would prove decisive.

A case study of San Francisco's response to the initial World War II surge allows insight into issues that face the U.S. Army's logistics system today. What pressures does a Port of Embarkation face after the immediate outbreak of war? How did San Francisco be seen, the SFPE used dynamic leadership, close and immediate cooperation with civilian transportation authorities, and direct action (specifically, embargo) to halt the uncontrolled surge. The Port also created an orderly system for processing cargo. But, does successful surge strategy ensure effective battlefront resupply? In effect, is crisis management enough?

The Surge Begins

According to an Army chronicler, "the difficulties under which the Port operated in those early days seemed insurmountable." Historians Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton underline the gravity of the situation during the initial surge, as "the whole future of the ports came under review." As the military reinforced Hawaii and Australia, SFPE rail traffic increased to "several hundred times normal peacetime flow." The War Department also clogged the port by ordering seaborne ships to return for reloading.

To compound the confusion, Washington officials changed priorities frequently. SFPE traffic managers could not determine the consignee or destination of many poorly marked shipments. The Port lacked both the warehouse space and labor to accommodate the mammoth inflow. As Coakley and Leighton have argued, unit commanders regarded the POEs as "cornucopia[s] from which they could obtain whatever they needed." Such attitudes merely escalated the crisis. "These conditions soon produced a terrific overcrowding of the port," stated an SFPE analysis. "Decisive action was needed."³

General Gilbreath Takes Control

The SFPE's commander, Brig. Gen. Frederick Gilbreath, did not shrink from decisive action.⁴ A native of Dayton, Washington, the 53-year-old Gilbreath took over the Port only a month before Pearl Harbor. His varied background included much transportation and logistics experience. General Gilbreath spent four years at West Point before fighting in World War I. After the United States entered that conflict, he served as a disbursing officer in Britain and then as Army Transport Service (ATS) superintendent in St. Nazaire, France. Between the world wars he commanded Fort Bliss, Texas, and other posts along the U.S.-Mexicanborder. The strong-willed Gilbreath's organizing abilities won him respect throughout the Army. "He knew what he wanted and went after it regardless of obstacles that might be placed in the way," stated Port historians William Bolce and Capt. James W. Hamilton. Such determination served him well as he shaped the port operations, but eventually caused friction with the Chief of Transportation in Washington.⁵

Immediately afterPearl Harbor, General Gilbreath met with important Bay area civilian transportation officials. He consulted American-Hawaiian Lines' John Cushing, who suggested forming a committee with American President Lines and Matson Navigation Co. executives. Very receptive to this idea, Gilbreath also hired a civilian aide, Lewis Lapham of American-HawaiianLines. The Port commander found the committee's help "beyond calculation."⁶

Having secured the maritime community's support, General Gilbreath turned to the railroads. He first contacted John Sullivan, head of the Southern Pacific, who quickly brought in other rail companies. Civilian executives helped manage rolling stock by providing schedules, railhead capacity, and other information. Gilbreath's coordination with transportation executives did much to contain the SFPE's first major wartime surge.⁷

Even before Pearl Harbor, rumors of port conges tion at SanFrancisco rumbled into Washington. As the Army geared for possible war with Japan, the SFPE's workload increased, then exploded after 7 December 1941. On 2 January 1942, for example, General Gilbreath reported 2,987 loaded cars in the Bay Area, with 1,056 more expected the next day. "Such a condition cannot go on much longer without danger of clogging the rails to such an extent as to interfere with the offshore movement of troops," warned the Port Commander.⁸

To cope with this influx, Gilbreath directed the SFPE to unload and store shipments that could not be immediately lifted. Although the situation was not yet critical, he expected a crisis if unregulated cargo flow continued. Above all, the port commander needed more ships, for incoming freight could quickly fill the available storage facilities. If necessary, he could use additional piers for temporary storage. Gilbreath also urged the Army to establish holding points outside the port to take on overflow cargo. A few months later, the Office of the Chief of Transportation (OCT) established such stations at Tracy, Lathrop, and Pasco, California, and at Yermo, Washington. However, the general now confronted an endless parade of wheeled cargo.⁹

The Vehicles Pour In

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the SFPE faced an avalanche of vehicles for overseas shipment from several directions. Most task forces arrived by rail from field organizations. At the same time, new vehicles streamed in from various manufacturers. The War Department replacement pool at Stockton, California, also dispatched regular convoys.

Though railcars transported most trucks and tanks, such vehicles arrived on several different lines. Once the wheeled cargo rolled into port, longshoremen unloaded it at many separate San Francisco and Oakland yards. When these facilities filled up, the Port placed the overflow at any available space.

As convoys arrived from the field, the drivers parked their charges at various locations. Often, units would drive trucks, jeeps, and other conveyances directly to the piers, where they joined the general mass of cargo. This uncoordinated influx caused "confusion and loss of time in locating and centralizing specific task forces just prior to their embarkation for overseas destination."

Often, vehicles needed extensive repairs or other modifications. This situation also existed at the Port of New York, where up to 13 percent of rolling stock needed overhaul. In San Francisco, overworked me chanics could not service some battered vehicles in time for dispatch to the Pacific. During the first weeks after Pearl Harbor, no single maintenance center existed. As the massive 1942 surge continued, General Gilbreath took action. Clearly, he decided, all vehicles should go to a central dispatch point where trained technicians could inspect and prepare them for operations.

After some study, SFPE officials selected a site at 52nd and Green Streets in Oakland's Emeryville section. All rail traffic from the east and north converged at that point, then paused for twenty-four to thirty-six hours until the SFPE could ferry cars across San Francisco Bay. The Ordnance Division and other divisions drew up plans for a depot and repair facility at the Emeryville location, a concentration point with extensive rail yards. When technicians finished servicing and testing vehicles, they would place them in the depot's capacious outbound parking lot. For incoming traffic, Ordnance personnel also planned two smaller parking areas on either side of the inspection zone. However, as the SFPE mastered the motorized parade, it also faced an influx from the air.¹⁰

A Thousand Planes Arrive

In addition to mountains of rations, fleets of vehicles, and tons of ammunition, major aircraft shipments arrived in port, after Pearl Harbor. To dispatch these badly-needed planes to Hawaii and Australia, San Francisco adopted new loading methods. The SFPE at first lacked the detailed expertise to load out the fighters and bombers flowing into the port. Where it had once processed the occasional squadron of aircraft, the SFPE now dealt with swarms of planes "needed yesterday" by the U.S. Army Air Forces.

In early 1942, a shipment of fourteen SFPE-dispatched P-40 fighters arrived in Hawaii, somewhat the worse for wear. This effort underscored a need for improvement, which spurred SFPE action. Among other things, San Francsico personnel sprayed planes with antirust compounds and itemized extra aircraft parts. SFPE officers also supervised the aircraft during assembly, loading, and shipment.¹¹

During the first four months of war, from December 1941 to March 1942, a thousand fighters and bombers passed through the SFPE. "Experience gained...has shown a marked improvement in loading methods and more improvement is expected," reported General Gilbreath in mid-March. During these early days, port personnel developed many new techniques, mentioned above. Though at first almost overwhelmed, the SFPE's crew quickly adapted. The spirit of Captain Bellinger, the officer who rescued the Spanish-American War deployment, stayed within them. However, the SFPE needed to take major steps to relieve the overall congestion.¹²

The Embargo Breaks Port Congestion

During early January, the influx of troops and freight continued unabated. "The Supply services were being pressed to make shipments and gave little heed to conditions at the port," explains historian Chester Wardlow. On 12 January alone, for example, 3,208 loaded railcars chugged into the San Francisco Bay area.¹³

General Gilbreath needed to halt the inflow until the SFPE established traffic control. The specter of World War I congestion hung over him. As James Huston noted about that conflict, "It was futile to rush supplies to the ports faster than they could be loaded." Halfway through January Gilbreath asked Washington to embargo San Francisco. If the War Department approved, no supply services would ship cargo from factories or depots to Pacific terminals¹⁴ without the SFPE commander's permission. As for shipments already en route, General Gilbreath wanted to hold them at regulating stations until further notice. Such methods had helped clear congestion during World War I.¹⁵

The next day, 17 January 1942, the Army's Adjutant General took action. "Serious rail congestion now exists in the San Francisco Bay area," he informed all corps areas. Without a release from the Quartermaster General, no factory or depot should dispatch supplies to the SFPE. Accordingly, Brig. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, a War Department General Staff officer, officially diverted military supplies from San Francisco. Only cargo specifically earmarked forthe SFPE would reach the Port. A few- months later, General Somervell was assigned to head the Army Service Forces, which oversaw the Quartermaster and Transportation Corps.¹⁶

These directives effectively embargoed the SFPE. "...the port's rail terminals were jammed with boxcars and overflowing with piles of shipments; a 'breather'...was needed to catch up with the sudden flood of supplies," wrote Bolce and Hamilton. All available employees now cleared supplies from the docks. The SFPE First hauled nine hundred cars to interior locations. Stevedores then unloaded remaining cars and warehoused their contents "irrespective of contents, consignee or destination."¹⁷

Such bold actions relieved the backlog in two days. Port workers emptied all cars and cleared the railyards for regular traffic. After one week, General Gilbreath ended the embargo and permitted railcars to enter the Port. The SFPE also unloaded the rolling stock at holding points. Thanks to the embargo, the SFPE had survived its first major surge. However, the crisis revealed a need for expanded Port facilities, traffic control and Port reorganization.¹⁸

Expansion to Oakland

As relations with Japan worsened during 1940-41, Port commanders had extended San Francisco's facilities to outlying suburbs, particularly Oakland. In January 1941, Brig. Gen. Eugene Reybold, assistant chief of staff, called Fort Mason a "constricted area with no room for expansion." Its unfavorable tide conditions, and a single-track railroad, also precluded new facilities. Oakland, a large suburb across the Bay, looked more promising. That city's port area and Army base boasted ample land for warehouses, offices, and piers. Brig. Gen. John C.H. Lee, then SFPE commander, aggressively expedited the Oakland expansion efforts.¹⁹

General Lee²⁰ first appointed a Board of Officers to evaluate sites for projected SFPE offices and warehouses. Unsurprisingly, this group recommended leasing or building more facilities at Oakland, whose Army base and nearby property bulged with available space. UnderGeneral Lee's direction, the Army leased two warehouses and a cannery, with much more to come. The SFPE also constructed four additional berths in Oakland's outer harbor. By 15 November 1941, the Army held 431 acres of land and 1.5 million square feet of warehouse space at the suburb. His assignment at San Francisco completed, General Lee made way for General Gilbreath.²¹

The 1942 surge accelerated port expansion. General Gilbreath enhanced Lee's efforts by leasing more warehouses, piers, and office space. As the 1942 surge neared its peak in early January, he suggested a further major expansion into Oakland. This ambitious effort would add marine repair facilities, transit sheds, dock age for eight transports, and three general warehouses, totalling 702,000 square feet. Indeed, by February 1942, the SFPE had completed a headquarters building for several port divisions and soon erected seven additional warehouses. The Overseas Supply Division and technical services moved to Oakland in mid-1942. On 29 June 1942, the Office of the Chief of Transportation named the suburb an official SFPE branch. As the Port rapidly expanded facilities, it needed to revamp its vital rail system. To manage further surges, the SFPE moved in all directions at once.²²

The Rail Traffic Control System

The Port took three steps to improve rail traffic control. First, the SFPE added two switch engines (one for Fort Mason and one for Oakland), whose added power moved trains more rapidly from one track to another. Second, the Port expanded rail yards and built additional trackage in the Oakland area. Third, the SFPE established an elaborate control system. As mentioned, General Gilbreath set up a rail traffic control office (RTCO) to direct movements of SFPE bound freight.²³

Civilian rail company representatives kept the RTCO up to date on movement schedules and priorities. The RTCO in tum communicated with Army manned "regulating sections" located at nationwide strategic rail terminals. With these methods, Fort Mason orchestrated railway cargo movements. "This system controlled and eventually eliminated the causes which had produced the freight congestion in January, 1942," stated an official report. However, the SFPE now needed to free its wharves and depots for export cargo.²³

Civilian rail company representatives kept the RTCO up to date on movement schedules and priorities. The RTCO in tum communicated with Army manned "regulating sections" located at nationwide strategic rail terminals. With these methods, Fort Mason orchestrated railway cargo movements. "This system controlled and eventually eliminated the causes which had produced the freight congestion in January, 1942," stated an official report. However, the SFPE now needed to free its wharves and depots for export cargo.²⁴

Closing Down the General Depot

Before Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco General Depot stored supplies for the neighboring military commands. Modest military import and export traffic enabled the Port to retain long-term stockpiles without reducing its own export storage capabilities. However, the Depot hampered operations after Pearl Harbor. As General Gilbreath quickly discovered, the storage facility attracted domestic supply shipments like flies to jam. Such shipments devoured space needed for export materiel. Port personnel found themselves storing equipment for the Western Defense Command (WDC) in the depot while supplies needed for Hawaii and Australia remained in boxcars.²⁵

General Gilbreath took immediate action. Due to excessive rail congestion, he wrote, the SFPE should accept only overseas supplies. The WDC should use its own storage facilities outside the Port for domestic shipments. Well aware of San Francisco's difficulties, the WDC's commander removed his stocks from the Depot. Back in Washington, General Somervell accepted Gilbreath's judgment. On the last day of January 1942, he ordered general depot activities at San Francisco and Oakland closed down. Such an action, Somervell stated, could assure the SFPE enough storage space to plan for future surges. No longer would domestic supplies pile up in space needed for overseas shipments.²⁶

Lessons of the First Surge

Thanks to General Gilbreath's firm direction and his staffs inventive improvisations, the SFPE survived its first test. As Chester Wardlow has observed, lack of central control over supply movements caused congestion at most American ports. At Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, forexample, unchecked Lend-lease shipents clogged the piers in early 1942. Using methods similar to General Gilbreath's, the Port agency head embargoed further freight movements and moved rail cars to various reconsignment points until stevedores cleared the docks.²⁷ The nationwide 1942 surge underscored the pressing need for military traffic management. No military planners wished to repeat the experience of World War I, when rail congestion overwhelmed the ports. To avoid such congestion, all port commanders established a control system. In turn, the War Department and Quartermaster Corps Transportation Branch (later the OCT) provided overall control.²⁸

The SFPE effectively managed the 1942 crisis. However, as will be seen, efficient traffic management at domestic ports often merely pushed congestion into the theater ports. As U.S. terminals continued to pour out supplies without carefully worked out priorities, logistic difficulties ensued.

Aftermath of the 1942 Surge

After the 1942 surge, the San Francisco Port of Embarkation continued expansion of its facilities and reorganization. The Port established a large troop staging area at Camp Stoneman, leased additional piers at San Francisco, and added more warehouses, offices, and piers to the Oakland Branch. The War Department created the Army Service Forces, which in tum directed the Office of the Chief of Transportation (no longer would the Quartermaster Corps direct port operations). Once outranked by General Gilbreath, Maj. Gen. Charles P. Gross became the former's superior officer. The two enjoyed a usually cordial, but increasingly volatile relationship as the Pacific War escalated.

As the dust cleared from the 1942 surge, then Colonel Gross²⁹ acknowledged General Gilbreath's achievement: "I realize you were being urged to greater and greater speed in January when the vessels in questions were being loaded." As he admitted, the Port could not make up stowage plans fast enough to match the uncontrolled shipments. However, he stressed the "extreme necessity" of quick ship handling in port so that scarce available tonnage could "handle as large a quantity of freight as possible."³⁰

General Gilbreath had already suggested a structured cargo layout on piers to prevent congestion. Gross accepted this idea, but urged the port commander to follow a specific movement control plan. In later years, General Gross consistently emphasized advance planning for crisis management. To his frustration, General Gilbreath and his successors did not always follow his suggestions.³¹

As usual, Gross closed his missive cordially: "We are...appreciative of the very fine work being carried out by the port." His letter revealed his particular management style, which contrasted with General Gilbreath's blunter, more emphatic manner. Gross's genial words did not entirely hide the firmness that lay beneath them. He made it clear what he wanted done and the means to do it. Under the steady pressure of Pacific war operations, OCT and SFPE priorities and perceptions eventually diverged and caused severe strains between the two commands.³²

Conclusion

The San Francisco Port of Embarkation mastered the seemingly overwhelming Pearl Harbor surge with forceful and often ingenious action. In doing so, the SFPE proved the U.S. Army had learned the lessons of World War I in avoiding congestion. General Gilbreath's leadership proved a decisive factor. Cool in the face of crisis, he took the right measures at the right time, including embargo. That particular measure halted congestion in its tracks. However, the port commander did not simply block cargo from the port, but cleared the backed-up freight as quickly as possible. He also used the time to divert excess cargo to holding and reconsignment points. Thus, Gilbreath allowed new inflow of cargo into the Port within a week.

The SFPE commander developed new systems for rail traffic and vehicle processing and quickly established teamwork with civilian transportation executives. This last initiative showed that officials in Washington, D.C., had learned lessons from World War I, when the executive branch at first tried to run the railroads itself. When this effort caused greater congestion than before, Washington returned the rails to civilian control, with some government oversight. After Pearl Harbor, General Gilbreath immediately teamed with commercial transport companies instead of taking over their assets. This move allowed an orderly transition from peace to war. Significantly, he moved the large general depots out of the SFPE. His terminal would not use valuable storage space for cargo not destined for overseas. The Port also took definite steps to expand into outlying areas, specifically Oakland. Lastly, the OCT acted presciently in accepting Gilbreath's recommendations. Teamwork, in port and out, helped the SFPE overcome the crushing 1942 surge. However, as the Port faced surges during the rest of the war, this teamwork declined. Though General Gilbreath thoroughly developed the Port's infrastructure and staff organization, he allowed its individual divisions to operate autonomously, often without regard to other organizations. This practice reduced the Port's efficiency as the war escalated. Though effective in surges, crisis management did not always work in sustainment, a more difficult and grueling phase.

The Army's recent deployments in Desert Shield and elsewhere reveal many of the same problems faced by the SFPE in World War II. During Desert Shield, for example, surges almost overwhelmed several terminals, including Wilmington, NC. Though no port commander resorted to embargo³³, all needed to improvise and stem the uncontrolled cargo traffic. Often starting with very little, they needed to build infrastructure and systems in a hurry. Like the SFPE, they regulated rail inflow, set up orderly documentation procedures, and shifted cargo to the assigned storage areas. When some terminals filled up, they transferred shipments to other ports. Reaction time to surges decreased with each conflict. After the initial burst of cargo, the ports of embarkation sustained a more regular system. However, freight flooded the American rear areas in Saudi Arabia. As in World War II, oversupply proved the rule. The Army could control the surges at ports, but sometimes not in the theaters. The military's overall "push" system, which thrust vast amounts of supplies at a battlefront, made for ultimately inefficient logistics.

Mason R. Schaefer has been a historian with the Army's Military Traffic Management Command in Falls Church, Virginia, since October 1990. He holds a masters degree in American history from American University, where he currently is working on a Ph.D. in history.

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Notes

¹ Erna Risch, The Quartermaster Corps, (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1966), pp. 539-42.

² James A. Huston, The Sinews of War, (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1966) pp. 342-45.

³ "Historical Record, San Francisco Port of Embarkation, 1941-2," RG 336, Suitland (MD)Federal Records Center (Hereafter SFRC); Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940-43 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1955), p. 342.

⁴ As the war escalated during 1942, Colonel Gilbreath soon became a major general. General Gross, Chief of Transportation during World War II, was also a colonel until mid-1942.

⁵ William Bolce and James W. Hamilton, Gateway to Victory: The Wartime Story of the San Francisco Port of Embarkation, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1946), pp. 197-98.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 5-6.

⁷ Ibid., p. 6

⁸ Wardlow to Superintendent, Army Transport Service, SFPE, 12 Nov 41; Gilbreath to ACofS, G-4, Washington, D.C., 4 Jan 42, RG 336, SFRC.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ San Francisco Port of Embarkation Rpt, 25 Nov 42, sub: "Improvements of Methods," RG 336, SFRC; Coakley and Leighton, Global Logistics, p. 342.

¹¹ Memo for the Record, General Gilbreath, 14 Mar 42.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Chester Wardlow, The Transportation Corps: Movements, Training and Supply (Washington, D.C.:Office of the Chief of Military History, 1954), p. 269.

¹⁴ In early January 1942, San Francisco controlled all Pacific ports, including Seattle, WA, Los Angeles, CA, and Portland,OR. Seattle became an official Port of Embarkation on 17 January 1942, while Los Angeles remained an SFPE subport until September 1943.

¹⁵ Gilbreath to Supply Service Commanders, 16 January 1942, RG 336, SFRC; Huston, p. 348.

¹⁶ Adams to CGs of all Corps Areas, 17 Jan 42; Somervell to AGI, 18 Jan 42, RG 336, SFRC. Large quantities of supplies for Western Defense Command (WDC) installations had also arrived at the SFPE for storage and/or shipment. These were now to be sent directly to those installations and not the port.

¹⁷ SFPE Rpt as of 25 Nov 42, RG 336, SFRC.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Reybold to Chief of Staff,7 January 1941, RG 336, SFRC.

²⁰ He took command of the SFPE on 18 October 1940.

²¹ SFPE Rpt as of 25 Nov 42; Col F.W. Hoorn to Chester Wardlow, 17 Feb 44; "Special Reports on Administrative Developments," OCT Control Division, 3 Nov 42, RG 336, SFRC.

²² Gilbreath to AG, 9 Jan 42; Bolce and Hamilton, Gateway to Victory, p. 17; "Special Report, November 3, 1942", RG 336, SFRC. Each warehouse stretched three city blocks in length.

²³ Oliver to Gilbreath, 26 Jan 1942; SFPE Rpt as of 25 Nov 42, RG 336, SFRC.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Report of the Chief of Transportation, Army 16 Service Forces, World War II," 30 Nov 45 (Washington, D.C.: War Department), p. 31.

²⁶ Gilbreath to Record, 3 Feb 42; Somervell to Commander, SFPE, 31 January 1942. RG 336, SFRC.

²⁷ Report of the Chief of Transportation, Army Service Forces, World War II," 30 Nov 45, p. 31. Other congested ports included New Orleans and New York.

²⁸ Huston, The Sinews of War, pp. 342-43.

²⁹ He became transportation chief and major general in July 1942. Up to that time, he headed the Quartermaster Corps' Transportation Branch.

³⁰ Gross to Gilbreath, 9 Mar 42. RG 336, SFRC.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid.

³³ According to some observers, port commanders at Wilmington, NC, and Bremerhaven, Germany, "embargoed" their ports when congestion became excessive. However, they actually diverted excess cargo to other ports or found extra storage space.

A Forgotten American Military Strategist The Vision and Enigma of Homer Lea

By Richard F. Riccardelli

Amry History, No. 36 (Winter 1996)

Warfare, either ancient or modem, has never been nor will ever be mechanical. There is no such possibility as the combat of instruments. It is the soldier that brings about victory or defeat. The knowledge of commanders and the involuntary comprehension and obedience to order is what determines the issue of battles. Homer Lea, Valor of Ignorance, p. 43.

On the morning of 12 December 1941, five days after their attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces began their invasion of the Philippines. The exact invasions sites, as well as the Japanese strategic plan, were outlined by Homer Lea in his book Valor of Ignorance (1909). He predicted the Filipino capital, Manila, would fall in three weeks or less; the Japanese Army took it in twenty-six days.

Who was Homer Lea and what were his theories? Why has he been forgotten? If he were alive today, how would he illustrate a strategic vision and identify flashpoints of strategic interest to the United States?

Homer Lea, standing just over five feet tall and weighing about one hundred pounds, was both a colorful and a pitiful character. He was a lieutenant general in the Chinese Imperial Army. Before World War I, he also became an adviser to Lord Roberts, chief of the British General Staff, as well as Kaiser Wilhelm and Generalmajor Hans von Seeckt. The king of Italy personally annotated a copy of Valor of Ignorance for his chief of staff. A copy of Lea's book was seen on VladimirLenin'sdesk in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916. Lenin stated that "this book will someday be studied by thousands of people." Lea's book was on the curriculums of the German, Russian, and Japanese military academies.

His supporters in tne united states included Elihu Root, former Secretary of War, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; former Army Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee; Maj. Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, and Maj. Gen. J.P. Story. While his admirers saw Lea as a visionary who ultimately would predict the nature and areas of conflict in the twentieth century, his enemies described him as antiSemitic, with a fascistic insistence on racial purity.

Who Was Homer Lea?

The grandson of a Civil War, Confederate physician (Dr. Pleasant John Graves Lea), Lea was born 17 November 1876 in Denver, Colorado. Because of a physical defect called scoliosis, which causes a hunchback condition, as well as weak eyesight aggravated by smallpox, Lea's ambitions for military service and a complete academic education never were realized.

His family moved to California, where Lea excelled in Latin, French, history, and mathematics, and where he learned Chinese from the family cook. After attending Occidental College and Stanford University (1897-1899), he left school because of poor health. Yet, he earned a reputation as a brilliant student of the military campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, and numerous American Civil War generals. His fellow students enjoyed Lea's ability to confound "his professors with his intimate knowledge of the campaigns of Napoleon and Hannibal." But Dr. David Starr, a renowned pacifist and then president of Stanford, recalled Lea as "a vulgar, loud-mouthed, excessively warlike youth."

After leaving Stanford, he joined a secret Chinese movement that was a branch of the White Louts Society, a source of Chinese revolutionaries over hundreds of years. The goal of the society was the overthrow of the Empress Dowager and the Manchu court of China. Accounts of Lea's participation and role in the revolution in China are fragmentary and in some cases, contradictory. What can be said about Lea's role is that in the summer of 1899, he left for China with at least $60,000 to participate in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, and that he was commissioned a lieutenant general in the Chinese Imperial Army.

He met Dr. Sun Y at-sen, the future president of the Chinese Republic and leader of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), either in Japan or Hong Kong. Sun selected him as his military adviser and, later, as his chief of staff. Perhaps it was Sun's western medical education and his political ideas, borrowed from western democracies, that drew him to select Homer Lea as a trusted confidant.

In May 1900, when then Maj. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee led a multinational expedition to end the uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion, which was aimed at driving the "foreign devils" out of China, Chaffee met Lea in Beijing and was supportive of his plans to democratize China.

After Lea's return to California, he continued fund-raising efforts for the Chinese reform movement. In 1904 he established the Western Military Academy, using former U.S. Army personnel as trainers. The Academy was expanded to cover twenty cities nation wide, to include Chicago, New York, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, and a number of cities in California. A contingent of fifty Academy members marched in the 1905 Tournament of Roses parade.

While secretly sending Academy graduates to China in anticipation of the uprising against the Manchu regime, Lea encountered trouble at home. Legal problems emerged in California, Minnesota, and New York, because of accusations that he was illegally training soldiers on American soil for use in a foreign war. He was investigated by the U.S. Secret Service, but the various charges could not be proven, and both the charges and the investigation were dropped.

On one particular trip to the eastern part of the United States, Homer Lea sought financial and political assistance from several sources, including the Military Academy at West Point, New York; the Colt arms manufacturing company in Hartford, Connecticut; and even the White House in Washington. However, these efforts by the Chinese reform movement to secure support from politicians and manufacturers in the east met with failure.

According to his sister, Ermal Lea Ureen, in a letter to the Saturday Evening Post in May 1942, Lea had an interview with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House to seek support for his Chinese revolutionary cause. The fruits of his travels are unknown, but apparently he was unsuccessful in raising any substantial sums of money or measurable political support from national figures.

Lea's first book, published in 1908, was a novel, The Vermillion Pencil. The plot concerned the destruction of Chinese society by Christian missionaries. This theme echoed a principle of the Chinese reform movement: to seek a China without foreign influence within its borders. Concurrent with this novel, he wrote a play, "The Crimson Spider," which remained unproduced.

His second book, The Valor of Ignorance, published in 1909, would become more popular in the United States during World War II, although it was written in spring 1907 at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War. Dedicated to Elihu Root, it was a strategic-military thesis, which sold 18,000 copies in the United States before going out of print in 1922. In that year, Japan began to build up those Pacific islands which had been acquired from Germany after World War I.

In Japan itself, The Valor of Ignorance was published under the title, The War Between Japan and America, and was reprinted at least twenty-four times, selling over 84,000 copies in the first three months after publication.

The Valor of Ignorance was studied by General Douglas MacArthur, and was quoted by Col. (later Maj. Gen.) Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence officer during World War II and Korea, as the roadmap for Japanese hegemony in Asia and the Pacific. In an interview in 1942 for an article, "Ever Hear of Homer Lea?" Colonel Willoughby further observes that

Homer Lea was neither a mystic nor a prophet. He was a scientist. He studied the science of war, the fundamental laws of which are as immutable as those of any other science.... He also sought to analyze the causes of war and to diagnose the symptoms of an approaching conflict. And having proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that great causes for war existed between the United States and Japan...he proceeded to set forth the tactical course that war would take.

Shortly after Valor was published, Lea sent a copy to General Chaffee for his critique. Chaffee, along with the former chief of artillery, General Story, immediately came to see Lea. Chaffee noted that he had not been able to sleep since reading the book.

Pacifist groups denounced Valor as fascist and totalitarian. At the same time, Literary Digest called it a daring and startling book for every American to ponder.

In Europe, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, British Chief of the General Staff, said he could not rest until he had finished the book. While in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a personal invitation to Lea to attend German military maneuvers, which Lea sequently did, attired in the dress uniform of a general in the Chinese reform movement army. Lea observed the maneuvers and met with senior German Army officials.

By 1911, Lea, along with Sun Yat-Sen, had gone to Europe to meet with political and military leaders in Great Britain and Germany, to raise funds for the Chinese reform movement, to see German doctors for eyesight problems, and to seek European support (or, at least, nonintervention) in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. Whether at meetings in London or war games in Germany, Lea would appear in his full dress Chinese general's uniform.

In October 1911, the child emperor of the Manchu dynasty, Pui Li (as portrayed in the movie The Last Emperor), was unseated in a surprise uprising. Sun and Lea returned to China. During this turbulent year, Lea found time to publish The Day of the Saxon. This book emphasizes Anglo-Saxon superiority and the perceived threat posed by Slavic powers. Lea warned the Germans against an attack on Russia. He saw that such a future war would lead to the defeat of Germany. The book sold 7,000 copies in English and went out of print the same year that Adolph Hitler came to power. In December 1911, Lea started his third book on geopolitics and military strategy, "The Swarming of the Slavs," but it was never finished, and today there are no copies extant.

In 1911, Sun Yat-sen was elected president of the Chinese Republic and presided briefly before stepping aside as various warlords maneuvered for position. In 1917, Sun established himself as the leader of the Kuomintang in southern China.

While in China, Lea suffered a stroke and returned to California, where he fell into a coma and died 1 November 1912, two weeks before his thirty-sixth birthday.

On 10 April 1969, the ashes of Homer Lea and his wife, Ethel, were brought to Taipei, Taiwan. They were interred on 20 April during a ceremony attended by the premier and vice premier of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and the president of the Taiwanese legislature, Yuan Sun Fo, Dr. Sun Yat-sen's only son. The government of the United States gave no official recognition to this event. Given President Richard Nixon's historic trip to mainland China only three years later, perhaps this official indifference is not surprising.

Homer Lea's Strategic Vision

Success in military operations depends primarily upon the excess of rapidity that one army has over another in reaching a theatre [sic] of war and moving therein. As the theatre of war increases in distance from the main bases of the combatants and extends in area, armies become more dependent upon the rapidity and capacity of means of transportation. As an army is limited or retarded in gaining strategic positions in a theatre of war, its worth is decreased accordingly. Homer Lea, Valor of Ignorance.

Homer Lea is an enigmatic figure, lost in the shadows cast by the geopolitical and military strategists of his time, including Frederich Ratzel (1844-1894) and Rudolf Kjellen (1864-1922), who created the term geopolitik. Meanwhile, Sir HalfordMackinder (1861-1947), a British geographer and theorist of the Eurasian heartland, received considerable notoriety for his work in 1904, The Scope and Methods of Geography and the Geographical Pivot of History.

Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) transposed some of Lea's thoughts into German geopolitical thinking af fecting Hitler's National Socialist movement. In 1909, Haushofer traveled to the Far East for service study with the Imperial Japanese Army. He learned Japanese, increased his knowledge of the region, and taught at the Japanese staff college. Perhaps Haushofer's two years of service study drew him to Homer Lea's works; perhaps these affected Haushofer's theories on Autarky, the ideal of national economic self-containment; Lebensraum, the right of a nation to expand to provide room for its population; or Panregions, the claims/manifest destiny of a nation to conquer and annex territory.

During this same period in the United States, Alfred T. Mahan (1840-1914) rose to international prominence through his work on naval strategy, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (1898). Mahan, like Lea, drew on historical analogies to support his principle points. There are strong similarities between Mahan's six elements of seapower and Lea's treatise, which cites landpower as the ultimate source of victory. While some writers believe Lea's theories contradict Mahan's principles, in reality they complement Mahan.

Homer Lea believed that war was inevitable. Wars result from territorial aggression and economic expansion, caused by population growth and the needs of survival, including geographic access to transportation and resources. He describes this inevitable expansion as follows:

The loot of town and tavern has given way to the universal thievery of natural resources that modem civilization has made necessary for the progression of man and the supremacy of his political institutions. In those old days it was the orderless strife of individuals; now it is the predetermined struggle of nations. In those times when the world was opulent and the greed of man was the small greed of his single self, mankind marauded rather than warred. Now it is the struggle of nations in the last looting of Nature; increasing each year in intensity, not alone by the added increment of population, but by the development of material science and the growing hungers of insatiable civilization....Homer Lea. The Day of the Saxon.

In an ominous warning in Saxon, he noted that "the wealth and population of the United States excites no fear in Japan, nor does the vastness of the British Empire cast any foreboding shadow across those routes of march over which Germanic armies exact, in due time, to make their way."

Lea viewed states located between great powers as the battlegrounds of future wars. "Whenever a physically inferior state is placed between two greater powers so that it is included within their sphere of political and military progression, its independence is never more than tentative and its political survival brief." In this category he cited Poland, the Philippines, the Balkans, Persia [Iran], Afghanistan, and Korea.

When considering economic power, Lea notes that "instead of adding power to a nation, it simply in creases the responsibility of its rulers and necessitates a greater diligence for defense...."

Like Mackinder, he saw Great Britain, Germany, and Russia as major players in the future—but he also included China and Japan. Lea foresaw Japan as the "industrially controlling factor in Asia." He foretold of German and Russian expansion into Poland; and he saw Persia's ultimate goal as control of the Persian Gulf. He prophesied the end of the British Empire "east of Suez" with the loss of India.

While he regarded Russia and Japan as geopolitically natural allies, he observed friction between China and Russia. As Lea noted, "The expansion of China is antagonistic to Russia more than to any other nation."

Concerning war, Lea warned that

in the future, it can be considered as an established principle that nations will more and more make war without previous notification, since modern facilities increase their ability to take their opponents by surprise and to strike the first blow as nearly as possible to their main base.

Lea recognized the profound impact that logistics and transportation had on power projection and as the fulcrum for national military power. In his historical analogies, Lea highlighted the grave impact this had in the Spanish-American War and on the war in Europe. In particular, he focused on the relation between the transportation difficulties and power projection problems the United States faced in transporting troops to the Philippines during the war with Spain.

Because of technology, Lea foresaw that future wars would erupt quickly and extend over great distances with far more destructive results than in the past. Along with the revolution that technology has on warfare, Lea focused on the critical impact internal political and economic changes have on the strategic policies of nations.

Lea believed that economic interdependence between nations would not reduce conflict, but rather, precipitate it. He noted that

opulence, instead of being a foundation of national strength, is liable to be the most potent factor in its destruction.... National opulence is a source of danger instead of power, for. ..trade, ducats, and mortgages are regarded as far greater assets and sources of power than armies and navies.

There are parallels between Lea and Mahan in this philosophy, with Mahan citing a like rationale for the fall of the Roman Empire.

During World War II, much of the Japanese Army was in China and Southeast Asia. Perhaps the Japanese should have dedicated more of their army to the Pacific campaign, for according to Lea, "should Japan, to extend her sovereignty on the Asian continent, neglect to first gain control of the Pacific, then the duration of her national greatness will draw to an end."

Lea Forgotten and his Vision of the Future

The amalgamation of small states into great political entities is the reason for the diminution in number and frequency of wars, a lessening of international conflict that has nothing to do with the so-called increasing morality of man. Homer Lea, Valor of Ignorance, p. 92.

Homer Lea observed that "in the past it was the individual who was the predominant factor, today, nation; tomorrow, races." His detractors identified Lea with authoritarian figures who used ethnic and cultural differences to project their power. Some of his undemocratic philosophies, no doubt, are one reason for his obscurity today. Yet, he lived in an era when the Chinese Exclusion Act had a profound impact on his Asian activities. He recognized that the United States focused on a Europe-first strategy.

Lea had other shortcomings as well. In two articles in Harpers Weekly in August 1910, he dismissed the importance and influence that the airplane would have on future war. According to Lea, perhaps its only significance would be in the field of reconnaissance. He also was against using the "citizen soldier" to fight in any national conflict less than total war. The roots of Lea's aversion to the use of the reserves are unclear, but he notes of the "civilian volunteer" soldier:

The soul of the soldier can only be developed by discipline, by honor and martial deeds. It cannot be constructed to order or dressed up with false shoulders in twenty-four days by uniforming [sic] a civilian volunteer or by commissioning and spurring him with purchased valor....

Homer Lea also criticized those who advocated disarmament. He saw armament of a democratic society as relieving the great mass of society from the responsibility of being on a perpetual war footing. Regarding totalitarian societies like Germany and Japan, he wrote in 1909:

Should Germany on the one hand and Japan on the other continue to adhere rigorously to these laws [of national existence], resisting the deteriorating influence of industrialism, feminism, and political quackery, they will, in due time, by the erosive action of these elements on other nations, divide the world between them.

Lea's short life, Pacific focus, lack of academic credentials and his emphasis on a strong defensive posture, were out of step with his contemporary strategists. Still, Lea emerges as a remarkable geopolitical and military strategic thinker, with uncanny insight into future flashpoints. Homer Lea is overlooked by historians and academicians today, yet his analytical approach to warfare and subsequent forecasts on conflict in the twentieth century were astonishingly accurate.

Today, there is a renaissance in geopolitical analysis in works published by Zbigniew Brezinski, Henry Kissinger, and others. With the breakup of the former Soviet Union, cultural, ethnic, and regional power clashes have increased in number and intensity. One recent article notes that the source of conflicts today are neither ideological nor economic, but rather, cultural, thus corresponding to Homer Lea's observations. Robert Kaplan's book, Balkan Ghosts, and his recent article on "The Coming Anarchy," cite the historical genesis for ethnic conflict. Kaplan cites how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are all contributory to conflict.

Homer Lea's theories of using convergence and intersection of lines emanating from centers of power to forecast future wars show extraordinary applicability to warfare and campaigns in the twentieth century. Lea's principles and mathematical paradigms at the strategic level of conflict show a striking similarity to military strategist Antoine Jomini 's standardized military methods in his treatise, the Summary of the Art of War, at the operational level of warfare. Indeed, Jomini has great impact on Mahan's view of seapower and on Lea's view of landpower.

In a recent (1993) book, War and Anti-War in the Twenty-FirstCentury, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler assert that the geopolitical assumptions of the turn of the century, as characterized by Halford Mackinder, are obsolete, with the role of space dominating the future battlefield. For his part, Lea noted that "modern means of transportation and communication, while shrinking in a practical sense the size of the world, have to a corresponding degree increased the area [and possibilities] of modem and future warfare." That area is one where technology is only a tool—a means toward victory; the geopolitical and military reasons for war are much the same as during the turn of the century. Ethnic warfare, overpopulation, and nation state aspirations of regional hegemony are sources of conflict as we enter the twenty-first century and step back to the future.

Col. Richard F. Riccardelli is Director of Plans, Programs, andBudget, U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Prior to that assignment, he was G-2 for the 82d Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A graduate of the U.S. Army War College and the Army Command and General Staff College, Colonel Riccardelli holds B.A. from Seton Hall University and a M.S. degree from Ohio University.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Interested readers should begin with Homer Lea's own books, of course: The Valor of Ignorance, and The Day of the Saxon, both published by Harper and Brothers (1942). In addition, the Charles Boothe, Joshua B. Powers, David Starr Jordan, Bertram Wolfe, Stanley Hombech, and Howard P. Jones collections at the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California, contain valuable material on Lea. See also the following books: Key Ray Chong, Americans and Chinese Reform and Revolution, 1898-1922: The Role of Private Citizens in Diplomacy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); Richard O'Connor, Pacific Destiny (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1969); Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1993); and Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York, NY : Little, Brown and Company, 1993). A number of articles in periodicals also shed light on Lea, particularly Clare Boothe "Ever Hear of Homer Lea?," The Saturday Evening Post ( 14 Mar 42); Valeriu Marcu, "American Prophet of Total War," The American Mercury (April 42); "General Homer Lea," The Literary Digest (16 Nov 12); Raymond Hardie, "Homer," Stanford (June 90); Thomas Fleming, "Homer Lea and the Decline of the West," American Heritage (May/June 88); John Clark Kimball, "Homer Lea—Interloper on History," U.S. Ν aval Institute Proceedings 98 (April 72); Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?," Foreign Affairs (Summer 93); and "The Coming Anarchy,"Atlantic Monthly

United States Army Services Of Supply

Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell

Commanding General of the Services of Supply

Proceeding of the Academy of Political Science, Vol. No. 2 Transporation in Wartime and the United Nations (Jan., 1943)

THE science of war breaks down into three simple divisions-strategy, tactics and logistics. Today I shall discuss one of these three. I shall attempt to show the part logistics has played and will play in the present war

But first, let us get our nomenclature straight.

Strategy is the long-term science or art of war, plan whole campaigns, envisioning the over-all situation, how armies and navies will or will not be employed—tha is strategy.

Tactics is the science of handling units in the field of action. It is the close-up military science; it concerns the placing and utilization of troops, airplanes or naval vessels, as the case may be, the movements in the arena of combat, the grouping of specific task forces.

Any tyro in the military art knows these two. But what about the third great division ? What is the science of logistics and how does it fit into the pattern of successful combat? Where do strategy and logistics meet, where overlap?

Stated briefly, logistics is the science of transportation and supply in war. It is the art of getting the right number of the right men to the right place with the right equipment at the right time.

When we hear " too little and too late " we know that someone's logistics plan has broken down. When we hear "our troops are advancing" we know not only that strategy and tactics are succeeding but that logistics is doing its part. In Africa we are witnessing the result of a logistics breakdown. Allied planes, blasting Rommel's supply line from Europe, prevented munitions and fuel from reaching the Axis armies. The headlines are shouting the results.

Good logistics alone cannot win a war. Bad logistics alone can lose.

The history of logistics is not quite as old as the history of war. Battles between early barbarian tribes were fought on the spur of the moment. Men met and fought and ran away.

The name of the first tribal chieftain to employ even a crude supply plan is hidden in the mists of antiquity. Tactics and strategy were born on that night many thousands of years ago, when some chieftain sat at the campfire with his follow and planned the next day's battle and gave some thought to the day after that. Logistics was born the day some barbarian leader ordered his tribe to bring up food and forage and extra weapons for tomorrow's fight.

History has little to say of the masters of logistics. The man on horseback, not the leader of the pack train, stirs the imagination. Logistics is troublesome work. It is all labor and no glory. It involves more sweat than blood.

There are ten military students who can tell you how Blenheim was won for every student who knows what admininistrative preparations made the march on Blenheim possible. It is certain, though, that no leader has been successful without careful handling of his logistics.

Primitive warriors, no doubt inspired by chivalry, left much of the work to their women. In the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates 8,ooo years ago women followed the troops and did the chores. They carried burdens, grew small patches of grain, gathered fuel, scraped and tanned skins, stored the food, fashioned spears, kept camp fires alight.

We find today's parallel in our munitions factories where forty per cent of the workers in many industries are women. Tomorrow the number will be greater. Before we win I venture to predict, half of the work behind the lines will be women's work.

In spite of its importance, logistics has remained a stepchild of the military art. There is no glory in it. Thousands of volumes have been written on tactics and strategy—many of them, I admit, compiled by soda-fountain strategists—but I find that few writers have ever taken the trouble to put studies of logistics between cloth covers. Not that this science was completely ignored, even by the ancients. It was Socrates who, describing the art of generalship, wrote: " The general must know how to get his men and their rations and every other kind of stores needed for war. He must have imagination to originate plans, practical sense and energy to carry them through. He must be observant, untiring, shrewd; kindly and cruel; lavish and miserly; generous and stingy; rash and conservative. He should also, as a matter of course, know his tactics."

You will see that wise old Socrates placed logistics first and added tactics almost as an afterthought. Notice, too, what he says of the commander's dual personality, his kindliness and cruelty, his quality of lavishness and miserliness, the necessity of being both a robber and a watchman.

This is as true today as it was several thousand years ago. Our critics, when they charge us with robbing some nonessential civilian industry of raw materials in order to make sure that the soldiers have enough, are paying us a compliment. When they say that we are miserly with the civil needs of the nation and lavish with military needs, they are merely stating that we know the military art—the art that wins battles in the end.

One of the greatest masters of this art was Moses. When he led his people out of captivity he succeeded because he employed logistics on a grand scale. Feeding his people in the wilderness was a triumph in the commissary department, clothing them was a job for quartermasters, hauling their camp gear fell to his transportation division, his signal corps kept up communications—and I wish our engineers today could employ whatever scheme he used to cross the Red Sea!

His father-in-law, Jethro, counseled Moses wisely when he said: " Thou wilt surely wear away ... this thing is too heavy for thee. Thou art not able to perform it alone." Moses heeded him. He named able lieutenants, gave them authority and ordered them to use initiative and decision. He made over-all plans and his subordinates carried them out. Moses was a great general.

Cyrus and Alexander are remembered for the Macedonian phalanx. But it was not the phalanx that made them great. This tactical formation originated with neither of them. They merely added more men and weapons to an old idea. What they did originate was a system of transport and supply. They won their battles.

Caesar's conquest of Gaul was a logistics triumph. He built up the Roman fleet; he reconstructed the ports; his engineers laid out the longest lasting military highway system in history; he provided fresh water for troop concentration points; built up a plan of communications. Caesar was a master of logistics.

Compare these successful logisticians with the greatest military success and failure of modern history, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Moscow fiasco was not the fault of tactics or strategy. Napoleon failed because he did not organize an adequate service of supply. He failed to delegate authority. He chose to be his own tactician, his own strategist and his own quartermaster. He was writing letters about the badly made saddles, the price of shirts and the quality of bread at a time when he should have been devoting all his energy to problems of the high command.

As Napoleon's forces moved toward Moscow, the advance guard had the rich granaries of Poland and Russia to draw upon. There were magnificent herds of cattle in Galicia. Many pack horses and vehicles were available. But Napoleon's commissary troops dissipated these priceless supplies. There was no decentralized authority, no plan. More food was trodden under foot than eaten. " A little order ", the Crown Prince of Bavaria wrote home during the campaign, "would have saved the day "—a little order and a co6rdinated plan for shelter and for getting and distributing supplies.

Napoleon's shortcomings did not fall on barren ground in Germany. In I868, before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Von Moltke drew up a comprehensive plan. Under it, Bismarck handled strategy and political background, Von Moltke organized and trained the army. Von Roon was responsible for mobilization and supplies.

Germany carried out that plan. Just forty-five days after the declaration of war, Napoleon III surrendered at Sedan.

In our own Civil War both sides neglected to make comprehensive plans for supply and transportation. In the later years of that war, we find General Sherman appealing to Washington for a chief quartermaster. " Draw me a program," he wrote to General Allen, "whereby orders may issue from the War Department enabling you to act as my chief with power to ... direct the course and accumulation of supplies, the distribution of...transportation, and all details purely pertaining to your department. I must have some quartermaster whose sphere is co6rdinate with my own."

Stanton refused Sherman's request, and in another letter, directed to Meigs in May I864, Sherman wrote: " I think Secretary Stanton has made a mistake. ... By providing means of transportation at the very time and in the manner demanded by events which cannot always be foreseen, a quartermaster can assist in achieving success."

Sherman did well without the top-side logistics officer, but it must be remembered that his Army totaled only 100, 000 and he himself had to perform duties which should have been left to a subordinate.

In World War I the United States made much progress in logistics as a necessary science in warfare. The scale of operations, the distance from our home bases, and our allies taught us much.

These lessons were not forgotten and were embodied in the course of instruction in our Service Schools. Practice, however, was sadly lacking, owing to the size of the Army and the restricted, not to say miniature, scale on which maneuvers were conducted. The amount of the appropriations available, which was the basic cause of this condition, also forced an organization on the War Department which was not in step with largescale streamlined operations.

Just three years ago, the United States again turned its attention toward the state of its armed forces. It answered some of the pleas of the War Department. Important steps were taken to provide the Army with modern military equipment. It is unfortunate they could not have been on a grander scale.

On this point let me quote General Wavell to the effect that the soldier is apt to disregard or underrate the statesman's difficulties. Wavell says: " The politician has to persuade and confute; he must keep an open and flexible mind, accustomed to criticism and argument; the mind of the soldier, who commands and obeys without question, is apt to be fixed, drilled and attached to definite rules."

This, together with our traditional military policy, probably explains in part at least why our statesmen and our soldiers were so slow to see eye to eye, early enough to prepare adequately.

But as the European battles increased, as one nation after another fell, it became more evident that Germany had reached a new peak in the science of logistics. No army could advance and consolidate so much territory in so short a time without split-second, timetable supply and transport. Our concern increased with each Nazi success. Service and civilian boards and committees wrestled with production problems. We found ourselves the arsenal of democracy. We were on our way to an all-out program.

On December 7, I941, almost overnight, we became a fullfledged combatant. It was then possible to call upon our entire productive resources, our men, our materials, our machines, to provide the implements and their transportation for the struggle.

In January 1942, the President created the War Production Board which immediately absorbed the Office of Production Management and the Supply, Priorities and Allocation Board. He conferred upon the chairman broad powers to direct the nation's production and procurement effort.

In March, the Army was redivided into three branches, Ground Forces, Air Forces and the Services of Supply. Grand strategy remained the function of the high command; Ground Forces and Air Forces, the fighting arms, took over training. Logistics rested with the Services of Supply and the field forces.

The three are of equal importance. Should any one of them collapse, the other two automatically will fail.

Immediately after reorganizing the Army, the War Department made an agreement with the chairman of W. P. B. defining the respective fields of the two agencies. Under this arrangement, the War Department was charged with determining its military requirements, including new plant facilities, transportation and communications, and translating them into terms of demands for raw materials, tools and labor. It was further charged with the negotiation, placement and administration of contracts for procurement of its supplies. Its duty was to determine specifications, plans and research with an eye on conservation of critical materials.

The framework was ready. It was almost entirely the job of S. O. S.—the Services of Supply—to complete the building. That we started to do. That we still are doing.

Just what is S. O. S. ? It handles logistics and administration. Its purpose was to take these loads as far as possible off the mind of the Chief of Staff. It is the biggess in history, the most widespread, geographically. It employs more people, owns more land, spends more money, handles more merchandise than any other organization the world has ever known. Still you do not begin to get the picture. For in addition to these functions, there are attached to S.O.S. all the administrative duties not actually a part of Ground Forces or Air Forces.

From the moment an American soldier holds up his hand to be sworn in until he is discharged at the end of the war, S. O. S. takes care of him. It feeds him, clothes him, houses him, transports him, schools him in many or all of his duties. It looks after his morals and his manners. It tries to keep him happy in 2,000 army motion picture theatres where he sees films fresh from Hollywood at an admission price of twelve and a half cents—and thus it becomes the greatest showman in the world. It feeds some fifteen million meals a day, bakes more bread than any other hundred bakeries in the world, launders more clothes than all the other laundries, mends more shoes than all the other cobblers, patches more tires than all the other repair shops, provides more beds than all the hotels.

The 60,000 military police keep order among soldiers in troop concentration points-and they are part of the S. 0. S. Army courts that try the soldier when he misbehaves are under the direction of a section of the S. O. S. The Chaplains who minister to the soldiers' spiritual needs are part of the S. O. S. The army exchanges, the camp and post stores that sell cigarettes, chewing gum, toothbrushes, candy bars and beer—a billion dollars' worth this year, by the way—are part of S. O. S.

The Services of Supply builds the Army's roads and camps and hospitals. In the past two years the S. O. S. has undertaken nine billion dollars' worth of purely military construction, and already has completed three fourths of what it undertook. If all the concrete runways we have built on army airfields were spread out side by side they would pave our smallest state of Rhode Island from border to border. If all the army land we have bought for camps and fields and target ranges and other installations were lumped, it would cover more than half of England. That is a lot of real estate.

The S. O. S. operates the army telephone and telegraph lines and the biggest radio network in the world. It nurse the sick soldier and binds the wounds of the soldier who is hurt. It keeps the Army's accounts, pays.the soldiers and civilian employees, carries part of its mail, clothes every individual soldier, designs his weapons, oversees their manufacture, takes them to him where he needs to use them.

That's the job of the S. O. S.

But there is even more.

We have not overlooked the fact that education must play a tremendous part. We must have research and training. Today's research program in the Army totals in dollar expenditures a figure approaching if not surpassing the entire procurement of peacetime years. Facilities of American universities have been offered and accepted. Our critical materials are limited. We must have substitutes. We must use steel in place of brass, plastics in place of steel. This is a war of cialists and technicians. Constantly, the Army must increase its fund of technical information. We must train, and we are training. We have reached the pedagogical pinnacle as the nation's greatest training and educational institution.

It is not a one-man task. It is divided into some thirty divisions, arms and services. Each of these is headed by an expert, a man trained through the years for his particular job. Many of these officers are from civil life, picked out of key positions in industries. Others, particularly in the administrative services, have had long army experience.

Under these key men the various branches of S. O. S. again are subdivided, and each subdivision is headed by a man who knows what he is doing. Authority is spread thus down the line. Only on matters of broad policy is it necessary for any department head to ask advice of his superior. We have good men, and are getting more, the best in the world, in all positions of trust, and we trust them. They are doing a magnificent job.

They are doing that job under immense difficulties. Urgency prods them every minute, day and night. We started many years after Germany and Japan. We must make up for lost time.

Pure logistics would indicate that the machinery for producing all these services should be set up in peacetime so that when war comes we could turn a switch, step up the current and meet the demands. Industry should be geared not alone to production of peacetime goods but to the maximum demand of wartime. The tools and machines must be ready for the conflict.

Yes, we did have a great industrial machine but it took time and patience, men and dollars, before the thin trickle of needed war production became the great stream that is now pouring out in ever increasing proportions. Even today it is not yet the surging torrent that we must have if our logistics are not to burden too greatly the tactics and strategy of the United Nations in all corners of the world.

Between five and twelve tons of equipment must be landed with every soldier sent overseas. Another ten must be shipped to him each month in food, clothing and ammunition. Men and machines and ships must dig out the raw materials, process them in the factories, carry them to the seaboard and finally ship them through the narrow, dangerous waters that are the oceans of the modern world.

No matter how difficult the task, S. O. S. must come through. There are nights when tens of thousands of soldiers must be shifted great distances across the continent. On these same nights heavy freight trains, laden with raw materials, must rush toward industrial plants while others, loaded with finished tanks and guns and planes, must hurry to ports of embarkation. All the while the machinery of training of new troops must continue without slowdown or interruption just as the fighting continues on the front lines. Supplies must reach the battle regularly and generously.

There can be no blackout, no letup for an instant in the great factory we call Services of Supply. It is a twenty-four-hour job, seven days a week.

Yes, logistics is a science. But we who practice it have another name for it. It is the biggest headache in the world. But praise the Lord, we are going to pass the ammunition and have it there to pass.

Focus on the Field

Office of the Command Historian Military Traffic Management Command

Don E. McLeod, Command Historian

Army History, No. 17 (Winter 1990/1991)

The Military Traffic Management Command (MTMC) is celebrating its silver anniversary this year as the Department of Defense's (DOD) single traffic manager. A function assigned after World War II to a variety of agencies by the Secretary of Defense, DOD traffic management was finally given in 1965 solely to the Military Traffic Management and Terminal Service Command, the forerunner of MTMC. Over the years MTMC transporters have executed their single manager responsibilities, in part, by reviewing past transportation performance for guidance in making future operations more efficient, safer, and cheaper. For twenty-five years the MTMC history function has complemented this effort by maintaining an inherited document collection from predecessor commands, collecting additional records, and preparing an exhaustive annual historical review.

The Military Traffic Management Command represents a unique command relationship within the Department of Defense organizational structure. Under the provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, it is a conponent of the U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), one of eleven unified and specified commands reporting to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on strategic mobility issues. At the same time, MTMC is a jointly staffed, industrially funded, major Army command. It is through MTMC that the secretary discharges his responsibilities as the DOD single manager for traffic management, common-user ocean terminals, transportation engineering, and intermodal containers. MTMC executes its peace and wartime missions with a melding of operational and management activities, meeting military transportation requirements while emphasizing service and economy. The Military Traffic Management Command recognizes that projecting a forceful and rapid response to any hostile threat is the core of the nation's defense posture.

Operation DESERT SHIELD challenged the command's capacity to perform in an emergency environment Ninety-five percent of the deployed unit material was transported by ship, a gargantuan task illustrating MTMC's unique ability to orchestrate the movement of massive amounts of material in a short period of time. Thirty days into the operation, nearly 24,000 measurement tons of ammunition and 900,000 measurement tons of materiel, including 44,000 pieces of equipment, were moved to seventeen ports by approximately 2,950 rail cars and 4,200 tracks, and loaded onto 59 ships for shipment to Saudi Arabia.

DESERT SHIELD also challenged the MTMC history program, a single-person office that continues to be responsible for the normal range of major Army command history program services, such as conducting oral interviews, producing studies, leading staff rides, providing information and responding to staff requests, introducing automation, supervising subor dinate command history efforts, and handling the "ash and trash" of office administration. As with most small Army offices, a concentration of effort is called for if the MTMC historian is to win the hearts and minds of the command's upper-level managers. The office's focus is on oral history, studies and monographs, staff rides, and the annual historical review. Exploring the ways in which automation can make the program more efficient is an ongoing priority.

Through the exit interview process the historian establishes a dialogue with command managers and learns the command business. This forum also porvides insights, test judgements, and can give visibility and legitimacy to a somewhat misunderstood function. For the staff, the corpus of interviews offers a unique medium for the exchange of ideas, opinions, and analyses, as well as a review of where hte command has come—and a chance for speculation as to where it is going.

Interviews also offer the MTMC historian insights for monograph and study topics. They focus the historian's study efforts more precisely on what historical analysis MTMC decision makers require as they deal with present and future command issues and challenges. Study projects also bridge the gap between oral history and the documents collection program by directing records collection efforts more precusekt.

Staff rides provide the historian with an additional bridge to management. They offer the commandor and his staff new perspectives, provide enrichment, and take advantage of the Army chief of staffs leadership initiative. Unfortunately, this effort often becomes a bill payer for other more pressing command histoy functions.

Although the annual historical review (AHR) is less exciting than interviews, studies, and staff rides, it is the workhorse of the MTMC history office. As with most Army history offices, the AHR is not an end in itself, but serves as a reference for most information requests, represents the starting point for many studies and monographs, and is used as the guide to many major command history office document collections. In sum, the AHR is a prerequisite for much of the serious historical work produced by the MTMC history office. One goal of that office is to spend less time with the AHR so that more time can be spent on more professional functions having a higher priority.

The history office is experimenting with d-Base III plus, exploring several possibilities for gathering, organizing, manipulating, and indexing information to reduce the time spent in AHR production. The historian indexes, using events and dates derived from the command's weekly summaries of significant events and from reading files. Other index categories include directorates, key words (such as functional areas), prioritized events (assigning values from one to five), key documents, and action officers. Benefits include the capability to prioritize events for a highlight chapter, create an index based on key words (for instance in the caseo fMTMC: strikes, exercises, quality control, cost savings, etc.), and establish a chronology. In the long run, this application may prove too costly in terms of time, but the realities of the new budget compel the command historian to explore this and other labor saving programs and measures.

The Military Traffic Management Command history office, like many others, reaches out to other related history programs to exchange information, test ideas, and seek assistance. These efforts involve considerable contract with USTRANSCOM, the Department of Transportation, and the MTMC subordinate command historians, as well as with the many other historians facing the similar challenge of delivering quality historical services to their commands. The fruit of these cooperative efforts has appeared during operations such as JUST CAUSE and DESERT SHIELD.

As a small history effort, the MTMC history office also relies upon the talented historians and specialists at the Center of Military History, who are ever ready to drop what they are doing to help out the single historian offices. This support covers the gamut from the Center's response to the MTMC historian's numerous requests for information, to reviewing a critcal job description, to the more general opportunity for professional development offered by the Center's semnars and this year's Army Historians' Conference.

The requirements for assistance never really end. If the MTMC historian's office had a "wish list" from the Center, it would include publication of the longawaited Army regulation on history (AR 870-5), and establishment of a standard staffing pattern for Army history offices. MTMC would also like to see the Center's Field and International Division continue to evaluate the AHRs and, for good measure, would add to that a review of Army history records collection categories—which differ in every individual history office.

Each Army field historian—but especially those in the smaller offices—works with the same variables to develop a plan that is right for his or her command. As the Army's Table of Distribution and Allowances organizations face almost certain fiiture reductions, the MTMC history office would like to do more than just survive. Coordinating with kindred government history offices and with the Center of Military History in this new, post-Cold War era, the MTMC historian is refining and integrating the historical function to assist Military Traffic Management Command managers with their future decision-making responsibilities.

Organizational Changes in the U.S. Army Materiel Command, 1962-1992

Robert G. Darius

Army History, No. 23 (Summer 1992)

Since its activation in August 1962, the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) has seen major organizational changes. A major Army command, AMC combined most of the logistics functions of the seven technical services into a single organization as a result of the Hoelscher Report, a Department of the Army study that recommended the creation of a "materiel development and logistics command."

The new command, which abolished the 185-years old system of individual supply (Technical Services), came into being under the direction of General Frank S. Besson, Jr., who implemented the Department of the Army recommendation. AMC was organized initially into five commodity major subordinate commands (MSCs): Electronics Command, Missile Command, Munitions Command, Mobility Command, and Weapons Command; and two functional MSCs: Supply and MaintenanceCommand, and Test andEvaluation Command. In addition, thirty-six project manager offices were established to manage the development of major/visible weapons and equipment.

In July 1966 the Supply and Maintenance Command, an MSC responsible for stock control, storage, distribution, transportation, repair parts management, and emergency planning was absorbed by HQ, AMC. This action led to the creation of major directorates in the headquarters dealing with supply, maintenance and transportation, international logistics, management systems, data automation, and operational readiness.

The absorption of the Supply and Maintenance Command into HQ, AMC, affected the field programs as well. Depots and installations that had reported to the Supply and Maintenance Command now reported to HQ, AMC; procurement detachments were created in New York, Oakland, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and Chicago; new PMs were established at the MSC level; ammunition plants were reactivated to meet growing needs in Vietnam; and some installations (Erie Proving Ground and Dickson Gun Plant) were closed.

In 1969 General Ferdinand J. Chesarek, AMC's second commander, initiated a major realignment of Headquarters, AMC. Partly driven by a Department of the Army manpower survey calling for space reductions, this reorganization and realignment led to adding a third deputy commanding general and elevating the chief scientist to deputy level, cutting back the number of PMs, increasing the MSCs' roles in monitoring PM activities, decreasing the commanding general's span of control, and providing greater latitude to MSC commanders and to deputies in their specific areas.

Manpower cuts resulted from the drawdown in Vietnam and from general cutbacks in Federal employment. In 1970 AMC lost about 6,400 civilian authorizations, followed by a loss of over 15,300 in 1971 and over 7,700 in 1972. In 1973 AMC lost another 5,456 authorized spaces. The military side also experienced cuts. Reductions were handled through attrition and one-for-five replacement hiring.

In 1973 as part of the Total Optimum Army Materiel Command, the Department of the Army ' s Baseline Development and Utilization Planning Project, and the Army reorganization of 1973, AMC—with Department of the Army approval—pulled together Electronics Command elements at Fort Monmouth; consolidated the Munitions Command and Weapons Command into the Armament Command; and revamped a new MSC (the Mobility Command) as the Troop Support Command. Other mergers and consolidations took place as well.

General Henry A. Miley, Jr., became commander on 1 November 1970 and was heavily involved in the ongoing AMC reorganization, thinking that these changes would keep AMC "ahead of the power curve" during expected Army-wide reorganizations, consolidations, and closures. The Army Materiel Acquisition Review Committee (AMARC), a Department of the Army-level, industry-heavy committee, was set up to study the sequential acquisition steps of requirements and concepts. The secretary of the Army chartered the committee to recommend improvements in the Army materiel acquisition process, while praising consolidations and cutbacks in AMC. AMARC called for extensive personnel cutsin asystem it considered over managed and, most notably, called for evolving separate research and development centers.

On 12 February 1975 General John R. Deane, Jr., took over the command and, having approved the concept of separate development centers, began implementing AMARC's recommendations. AMC was designated the U.S. Army Materiel Development and Readiness Command (D ARCOM) on 23 January 1976.

DARCOM soon went from six commodity commands to eleven, six of which were primarily development commands. The eleven were increased to thirteen in January 1979, when the electronics and communications functions were split three ways. The International Logistics Command was organized and its missions were transferred in 1975 to the newly created Security Assistance Center. General Deane called for a study on how to shape the headquarters best to relate to the changes made elsewhere in AMC.

As a result of the Study to Align AMC's Functions (STAAF), the headquarters staff was cut from 2,138 to around 1,400. Some spaces were deleted and others were transferred to the field. The STAAF group explained the organizational changes being made and the trade-offs that would be required in the way DARCOM was to do business, including possible risks. When the command later decided that it had gone too far in shedding resources with expertise to function effectively in monitoring both development and support activities, the STAAF analysis was available to carry out "AMARC Revisited."

The Supply and Maintenance Command merger and changes brought about by STAAF gave more direct responsibility over the wholesale supply system to HQ, DARCOM. In keeping with AMARC's philosophy of decentralization, and to bring a centralized form of command and control closer to the depots, DARCOM established the U.S. Army Depot System Command (DESCOM) on 1 September 1976.

AMARC's emphasis on development paid dividends with the some 400 weapons and other items of equipment brought through the early development stages in the 1970s—a whole new generation of more capable Army equipment. The command did not work for long under the new organizational structure before the split between readiness and development commands began to chafe.

AMARC Revisited, initiated by General John Guthrie, began an effort to rejoin the severed commodity commands and to increase the authorized strength of the command. HQ, DARCOM's fiscal year 1978 baseline study calculated that DARCOM needed a total of 137,157 personnel and that it was short 21,631 authorized spaces in materiel readiness positions, and 330 at the headquarters. As a result of the study, resources available to DARCOM began to increase. From 1979 to 1984 AMARC Revisited resulted in the reconciliation of the commodity commands and the elimination of the many problems created by AMARC.

In August 1979 a study group recommended a productivity improvement concept named the Resource Self-Help Affordability Planning Effort (RESHAPE), which sought to meet command baseline manpower requirements through, for example, greater use of overtime, overhire, streamlining, personnel incentives, reduced layering, merger of duplicative organizations, and more widespread automation. Personnel authorizations were increased for both DESCOM and HQ, DARCOM. The intent at headquarters was to reestablish a technical expertise that had been effectively removed under STAAF. This deficiency was rectified with headquarters growth and a matrix management initiated by General Donald R. Keith, keyed toward newly introduced weapons systems staff managers.

Under General Richard H. Thompson, the command continued to shed the AMARC legacy, adopting a more military structure with directorates redesignated deputy chiefs of staff and a name change from DARCOM back to the U.S. Army Materiel Command. DARCOM-Europe, established in 1982 under General Keith to centralize command and control and reduce costs in both Europe and the United States, became AMC-Europe.

The U.S. Army Laboratory Command (LABCOM) was established on 1 October 1985 under General Thompson to bring together AMC's research laboratories that generated new technologies and advanced concepts to carry the Army into the future, by the merger of some HQ, AMC, staff with personnel from the former Electronic Research and Development Command, based at Adelphi, Maryland.

In April 1986 AMC-Far East was established in Korea to provide centralized management and control of all AMC elements there and to provide more effective liaison and support to Eighth Army. In 1987, following the recommendations of the Packard Commission, most of the project managers under AMC were transferred to the newly created Department of the Army undersecretary, the Army Acquisition Executive (AAE). The AAE had Program Executive Officers (PEOs) reporting directly to him, each given authority over project managers in a particular field of equipment development, with HQ, AMC, and its MSCs providing programmatic advice and assistance to the PEOs. This evolution, implemented by General Louis C. Wagner, Jr., had an impact on all AMC elements involved in materiel development and acquisition.

In September 1989 General William G. T. Tuttle, Jr., inherited a command that was adjusting to major functional changes and declining resources, while maintaining the capacity to support the Army in both peace and war. Declining resources became an ever more prominent reality for AMC, largely as a result of changes in the international environment. AMC had to alter the way it worked to become more efficient. General Tuttle continued the emphasis on total quality management, which began under General Wagner, as a key component of any AMC activity.

General Tuttle initiated adetailed functional analysis of AMC to determine what it did, how it did it, what the best way to do it was, and what functions could be curtailed or eliminated. Like his predecessor, he dealt extensively with value-added total quality management, and a variety of Army and Department of Defense studies designed to improve the efficiency of the Army. Defense Management Review and the various Base Realignment and Closure acts had significant impact on AMC during the stewardship of Generals Wagner and Tuttle. These studies merged with AMC ' s own internal actions to effect a major restructuring and downsizing of the command.

Between 1987 and 1991 these actions resulted in a command-wide reduction in force (RIF), followed in the headquarters by a 30 percent reduction in authorized staff. The headquarters reduction was accomplished by attrition and personnel reassignments, rather than by RIF. Changes in the overall MSC structure included the planned consolidation of all AMC industrial activities—depots, ammunition plants, and arsenals—in a new Industrial Operations Command at Rock Island Arsenal. Also planned was the merger of AMCCOM and MICOM into a Missiles, Armaments and Chemical Command at Redstone Arsenal. In addition, Troop Support Command and Aviation Systems Command were to merge in place in St. Louis and form the Aviation/Troop Support Command. The Army Research Laboratory would replace the current Laboratory Command.

AMC proved that its stress on realignment and downsizing did not prevent it from performing its primary mission—support of the troops in the field—as demonstrated by the command's support for Operation Just Cause and Operation DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM.

General Jimmy D. Ross returned to AMC and assumed command on 31 January 1992. General Ross initiated his "AMC Challenges" in line with Army Chief of Staff General Gordon R. Sullivan' s "Enabling Strategies" for maintaining the edge, reshaping the force, providing resources, and strengthening the force. General Ross' focus includes the following emphases; sustain the force; provide superior technology and engineering; leverage industry and academia; retain a motivated, competent, quality, well-trained work force; continue to ensure that AMC is recognized as an integral part of the total force; downsize AMC consistent with the Army's requirements; exploit essential core capabilities supporting the Army's warflghting capabilities; provide "best value" products and service; strengthen AMC ,s strategic mobilizationcapability forpower projection; and operate in peace as in war.

Dr. Robert G. Darius is command historian, HQ USAMC Historical Office in Alexandria, Virginia.

Railway Transportation Required for a Pioneer Battalion, U. S. Army

by Capt. W. H. Rose, Corps of Engineers

Professional Memoirs, Corps of Engineers, Untited States Army, and Engineer Department at Large, Vol. 3, No. 12, (October-Decemeber, 1911)

The following is a statement of the transportation required for movement by rail into the field of a pioneer battalion of Engineer troops, based on the organization and general equipment prescribed in the Field Service Regulations of 1910 and on the detailed equipment and allowances prescribed in General Order No. 95, War Department, 1908. In case of conflict, the Field Service Regulations are assumed to govern as being of more recent date.

I. Tabular statement of personnel , animals , and vehicles pertaining to Pioneer Battalion of Engineers

	Officers	Enlisted Men	Riding Animals	Draft Animals	Pack Animals	Tool and Map Wagons, (Loaded)	Field Wagons	Ambulances
3 Companies	12	492	90+	60	18	9	6	-------
Headquarters	3	9	9*	8	-------	1	1	-------
Sanitary	3	9	9	-------	-------	-------	-------	1++
Total	18	510	108	68	18	10	7	1

*Includes 1 lead horse for Major. Field Service Regulations, pages 40 and 43.
+Includes 6 riding mules.
++No ambulance prescribed in Field Service Regulations.

II. Tabular statement of personal baggage , rations , forage and horse equipment pertaining to Pioneer Battalion of Engineers in the field.

	Barrack Bags	Trunk Lockers	Cots	Blanket Rolls	Rations per Day	Saddle Animal Equipment	Draft Harness 4-mule sets	Pack Equipment	Lbs. Hay per Day	Lbs. Oats per Day
Officers	18	18	18	-------	18	-------	-------	-------	-------	-------
Enlisted Men	-------	-------	----	510	510	-------	-------	-------	-------	-------
Horses (102)	-------	-------	----	-------	-------	102	6	-------	1428	1224
Mules (92)	-------	-------	----	-------	-------	-------	-------	-------	1288	828
Total	18	18	18	510	528	102	17	18	2716	2052

III. Tabular statement of tentage, etc., except shelter tents pertaining to Pioneer Battalion of Engineers in the field

	Common Tents	Wall Tents	Hospital Tents	Tent Stoves	Stove Pipe Joints	Stove Pipe Elbows
3 Companies	3	-------	-------	-------	-------	-------
Headquarters	1	-------	-------	-------	-------	-------
Co. Officers	-------	9	-------	9	14	4
Hdqr's Officer	-------	2	-------	2	14	4
Sanitary Officers	-------	2	-------	2	14	4
Total	5	13	2	15	105	30

In Addition to the above equipage as tabulated, there will be two field ranges with cooking utensils for each company, such annunition as might be taken with the troops on the train, and a few miscellaneous articles listed in General Orders No. 95, War Department, 1908, which no special provisions need be made.

Thne Field Service Regulations, page 141, prescribe that in the field Engineer troops needing ammunition will draw it from the nearest ammunition wagon, so it is probable that in a movement into the field Engineer troops would only take with them one or two bandoliers per man, and no special provision need to be made for this so far as transportation is concerned.

An inspection of Table I and of the prescribed allowances of transportation for officers and enlisted men will show that for the personnel there will be required at least:

1 standard sleeper for 18 officers,
11 tourist sleepers for 510 enlisted men.

The tourist sleeper being assumed to contain sixteen sections and three men per section being allowed. A rough computation of the total number of cars of all kinds for the battalion shows that it will be necessary to divide the train into two sections, and therefore the requirements will be

2 standard sleepers,,
12 tourist sleepers.

In case the standard sleepers can not be provided for the officers, a portion of one of the tourist sleepers in each section of the train will be curtained off for their accommodation, as prescribed in A. R., 1908, paragraph 1136.

Transportation must be provided for a total of 194 animals. The ordinary and palace stock cars carry 16 to 20 animals each, and the improved stock cars 20 to 24. On the assumption of 18 animals per car, 11 stock cars would be the minimum requirement.

Two kitchen cars, in the form of baggage cars equipped for cooking, should be provided ; one for each section of the train.

The wagons and ambulance, if one be taken, will be carried on flat cars. It will be assumed that the tool wagons are loaded and that they will not be dismantled, but that the tongues will be removed. Each tool wagon, field wagon, and ambulance will require a floor space about 11 1/2 feet long by 5 1/2 feet wide. Flat cars range in length from 34 to 40 feet and are about 8 1/2 feet wide. If the tongues only are removed three wagons can be loaded on each car. All seven field wagons can be loaded on one car if disassembled. As they would generally be needed immediately upon detraining, they had best be loaded in the same manner as the tool wagons. On this assumption, six flat cars will be needed for the wagons. If the field wagons are disassembled, five would suffice.

For the forage, box cars will be used. Each day's supply of hay (2,716 pounds) will occupy 225 cubic feet as baled, and each day's supply of oats (2,052 pounds) will occupy 75 cubic feet, a total of 300 cubic feet. Box cars vary widely in size, but the ordinary box car, with a rated capacity of 60,000 pounds, has a gross cubical content of approximately 2,200 cubic feet. Assuming the forage to be loaded to within 2 feet of the bottom of the rafters, and that a small space for handling is left opposite one door, the net loading space is about 1,500 cubic feet. One car would then carry five days' forage for the animals of the entire battalion, and one car for each of the two sections into which the train is divided will be sufficient for any movement that may be made in this country. For shorter journeys a portion of the forage car may be used for other purposes.

For transportation of property, including horse equipment, draft harness, pack equipment, tentage, etc., one box car per section will be sufficient.

For baggage, including barrack bags, trunk lockers and cots of officers and arms and blanket rolls of enlisted men and such rations as are not carried in the kitchen cars, one baggage car persection will be required.

The following are, then, the total requirements:

• 2 standard sleepers
• 4 box cars (forage and property)
• 12 tourist sleepers
• 2 baggage cars (baggage and rations)
• 11 stock cars
• 2 kitchen cars
• 6 flat cars (wagons)

The troops and cars may be divided equally between the two sections, but this will necessitate the splitting of one company.

A better make-up for the two sections, keeping the companies intact may be effected by assigning one company with four tourist sleepers to the first section and two companies with eight tourist sleepers to the second section, equalizing the sections by assigning to the first five of the six flat cars. This will separate the two companies in the second section from some of their wagons and animals en route, but as the first section will arrive at the point of detrainment first, the companies in the second section will find there wagons and animals waiting for them upon their arrival. The make-up of the two sections from head to rear should be as follows:

In the Field Service Regulations the kitchen car is placed ahead of all the tourist sleepers. In the above make-up, the kitchen car for the second section is placed between the fourth and fifth tourist sleepers. This will enable each of the two company kitchens to be placed in the end of the kitchen car adjacent to the four tourist sleepers which the company occupies, so that rations can be issued from both ends of the car multaneously. Only those rations which will be needed en route should be placed in the kitchen cars, and a passageway should be kept clear for the passage of officers, train employees, etc. While the kitchen car has been located according to the Field Service Regulations in the first section, it is believed that even in this case the size of an Engineer company would make it advisable to place the kitchen car between the second and third tourist sleepers in order to facilitate the issue of rations.

For the transportation of the pioneer battalion into permanent camp there must be considered in addition to the impediments listed above certain additional articles of clothing and equipage which must be taken. These additional articles come from the increased allowances for permanent camps, as given in General Orders No. 95, War Department, 1908, and the princpal items are listed below. The numbers do not correspond exactly to those given in General Orders No. 95, for the reason that a different organization of the Engineer battalion was contemplated in that order. However, it is believed that in the changes which have been made the intent of the order has been complied with, and that the numbers given represent the allowances that would be made for the present organization.

Surplus Clothing and Blankets . ( Will probably be packed in squad lockers.)

Miscellaneous tools, stationery, etc.

For these extra supplies two box cars and one flat car should be supplied. One box car should be attached to each of the two train sections as before listed, and the flat car to the second section, making twenty-one cars in* each section.

---

*Will probably be shipped by Quartemaster 's Department direct to camp. See General Orders No. 95, 1908, pages 25 and 26.

The Coming of Age: The Role of the Helicopter in the Vietnam War

by Herbert P. Lepore

Army history, No. 29 (Winter 1994)

Setting the Stage

For many Americans, the Vietnam War was the most divisive war ever fought in our nation's history. Most Americans old enough to remember it—or even to have fought in it—can reflect on how it tore at the very core of the nation's political, sociological, educational, and moral fiber. Through the medium of television, Americans had a front-row seat to the suffering, death, and destruction emanating from that war.

During their almost ceaseless television exposure to the Vietnam War, Americans had etched in their memory the image of a military machine not heretofore seen very often on the evening news in America's homes. That machine was the military helicopter.

True, American troops had used the helicopter earlier in the Korean War, but its use was limited primarily to medical evacuations, transportation, and logistical support. Television coverage of the Korean conflict was miniscule compared to that given the Vietnam War, so popular awareness of the helicopter was limited. All of the American service arms had helicopters during the Korean War, but probably it was the Army that made the most significant use of the relatively new helicopter. In early 1951 the Army dispatched three medical detachments to Korea, each with four H-13 medical evacuation helicopters, which were used to evacuate over221,000 American wounded to mobile Army surgical hospitals, otherwise known as MASH units. The Korean War was unique in that the extensive use of the helicopter for aerial medical evacu ation of seriously wounded fighting men added a new dimension to the art of war—ironically, one of saving lives.

The Marine Corps used the helicopter in the Korean War with the establishment of helicopter transport squadrons, which provided tactical transportation, reconnaissance, and logistical and medical support. The Marine Corps had been the only armed service to begin experimenting with the tactical use of helicopters after World War II. In fact, the concept of "vertical envelopment" dated back to 1947, but was more extensively developed only after the Korean War.

As the conflict in Korea slowly wound down in 1953, the U .S. Army sent to Korea the first two of what would become known as helicopter transportation companies, the 6th and the 13th Helicopter Companies, which had H-19 helicopters. These were used to carry United Nations negotiators to Panmunjom, Korea, to negotiate an armistice with the North Koreans and the Communist Chinese forces on 27 July 1953. The same two companies were also used in the repatriation of United Nations prisoners of war.

Of course, the Korean conflict was not the first war in which the helicopter was used in a combat environment. During World War II, in April 1944, the Army Air Forces had used a Sikorsky R-6 helicopter to evacuate wounded personnel in Burma.¹

After the end of the Korean War in 1953, adapt ability of the helicopter to military doctrine underwent serious discussion and evaluation. The Army and the marines tested and used helicopters as troop transports during the 1950s and early 1960s. Korea had provided a suitable paradigm about the efficiency of the helicopter for transporting troops and supplies over difficult, insurmountable terrain. Tactical doctrine, therefore, was irrevocably changed, because soldiers and equipment now could be moved with celerity to an objective, no matter what the terrain. During the Korean War a number of U.S. Army combat officers envisioned the possibility of using armed helicopters. If these machines could move men and materiel regardless of terrain, they reasoned, could they not also provide close air support to ground troops—an innovation that would change military doctrine in future wars. However, it was not until several years after Korea that the Army at Fort Rucker, Alabama, surreptitiously placed guns and rockets on helicopters and test-fired them to assess the helicopter as an aerial weapons platform. The reason for the secrecy lay in the fact that other Army combat arms, such as the Infantry, Artillery, and Armor, believed that the use of ordnance and arma ments doctrinally was restricted to them and, therefore, should not be given to an interloper such as an organic Army aviation element. The Army was also involved with the Air Force in an ongoing dispute about close air support to ground units. That function ostensibly was delegated to the Air Force as a result of the Key West Agreement of 1947. By the late 1950s, however, the Army was allowed to field the pentomic division's Aerial Combat Reconnaissance Platoon, which utilized armed helicopters. Yet by the end of the 1950s, acceptance of the armed helicopter was still limited in most military circles, and it would not be until the 1960s that the existence and use of armed helicopters were finally accepted within the Department of Defense. Compared to those of the Korean War period, the helicopters of the late 1950s and early 1960s were larger, more powerful, and, of course, armed.²

Changes in the Wind: Preparation of the Helicopter for War

The inauguration of John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1961 brought about profound changes that affected Army aviation—particularly regarding the use of the helicopter. The political and military doctrine of "massive retaliation" promulgated during the 1950s no longer was an acceptable option. One reason for the diminishing influence of the massive retaliation strategy was the onset of "brush-fire wars." These were small wars fought with conventional weapons in the so-called Third World or nonaligned regions and involved the use of guerrilla or paramilitary forces. At the time of John F. Kennedy's inauguration such a war already was taking place in Southeast Asia involving North Vietnam (aligned with the Soviet Union) and South Vietnam (an ally of the United States).³

In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union became caught up in a mutual frenzy of supplying arms, advisers, and equipment to buttress their respective allies in Asia. In 1961 the U.S. Army sent its first armed helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft to support SouthVietnamese troops. By 1963 the United States had 21,000 military advisers (the equivalent of a reinforced division) in South Vietnam. They were being supported by one of the most significant fixed-wing aircraft in the Army's inventory in South Vietnam, the twin-engine CV-2 Caribou transport. It served the Army well, with a short-field landing and takeoff capability that made it highly suitable for Vietnam. In April 1966, however, the Army relinquished it to the U.S. Air Force as part of a memorandum of agreement by which the Air Force, in tum, no longer claimed any suzerainty over tactical helicopters in South Vietnam.⁴

The military and political activity taking place in South Vietnam during 1960-62 evinced the need for the Army to examine its helicopter requirements and tactics—particularly in regard to South Vietnam. Lt. Gen. Gordon B. Rogers chaired a board in 1960 which had as its primary mission the upgrading of Army aviation elements, such as tactical, surveillance, and observation aircraft, particularly helicopters. The concept behind the upgrading was the need to meet tactical contingencies such as conventional wars, brush-fire wars, or what would later be referred to as low- or mid intensity conflicts. Akin to the upgrading was the board's recommendation that the soon-to-be-ubiquitous UH-1 (Huey) helicopter become the primary helicopter in the Army's active aircraft inventory. The Rogers Board also recommended the procurement of the CH-47 (Chinook) twin-engine cargo helicopter. Both of these aircraft were to acquit themselves well in the ensuing Vietnam War.⁵

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1962 ordered a study on the tactical mobility of the Army ground forces, particularly in regard to airmobility, i.e., the use of helicopters to transport troops to a given area and to provide close air support. Ironically, the Army for all intents and purposes already was utilizing airmobile operations at the time. In 1962 Mr. McNamara ordered Lt. Gen. Hamilton H. Howze, the Army's first director of aviation, to establish and chair a board to implement this study. The Howze Board, as it came to be known, convened at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1962. It performed numerous tests and studies and posited the thesis that Army aircraft, particularly helicopters, could provide airmobile assets necessary to enhance ground forces' combat efffectiveness. The concept of airmobility entailed the use of helicopter borne troops to be inserted anywhere on a battlefield to engage the enemy quickly and effectively. Airmobility was tailored for the subsequent Vietnam War and used with effect. The Howze Board also recommended the fielding of a cavalry combat brigade to fight brush-fire wars. The Department of Defense, however, deferred action on this full recommendation, although it did create and test an air assault division, which included an organic helicopter battalion.

The 11th Air Assault Division was established at Fort Benning, Georgia, to test all facets of airmobility. The division passed its airmobility tests by the end of 1964 and on 1 July 1965 assumed operational status as a tactical division, renamed the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). The "1st Air Cav," as it became known, had its own organic aircraft and could provide its own tactical and logistical support.

The division's activation came none too soon. Because of political and military perturbations in South Vietnam in the spring of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to deploy tactical units. The 3d Marine Division was the first such unit, deploying in April. In July 1965 the 1st Cavalry Division received its orders. It deployed in August 1965 and arrived in South Vietnam in September. It became the Army's first division-size unit to engage the enemy and to spend over 2,000 days in South Vietnam, thus making the 1st Air Cav the longest-serving Army unit "in country" during the war. It received numerous citations and awards for combat.⁶

The Call to Combat: Army Aviation at War in Vietnam

South Vietnam was a milieu conducive to the use of the helicopter in both tactical and nontactical situations. The country lacked an extended road and highway system, and the roads that did exist often came under attack by the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army (NVA), thus precluding or restricting their use. In addition, the varied topography of South Vietnam, which included an extensive canopy of jungle, mountainous terrain, swamps, and an expansive delta, was ideally suited to the use of helicopters for lift and support purposes. Throughout the period of active American participation in the Vietnam War (1961-73), the Army and Marine Corps divisions in country had organic helicopter units, as did a number of Army brigades that served in South Vietnam. American combat units normally were not in country very long before they were in the field engaging the enemy. Three things favored American ground forces: tactical mobility, firepower, and logistical support. All three were achieved with the helicopter.⁷

The use of helicopters in the Vietnam conflict was to change forever the American doctrine of tactical warfare. Helicopters proved to be multidimensional. They performed tactical airmobile missions, including the insertion and extraction of ground forces; rescued downed aviators (alone with Air Force fixed-wine aircraft); provided close air support with the UH-1 and AH-1 (Cobra) helicopter gunships; performed aerial reconnaissance; and undertook medical evacuation missions, known as "dust off' missions. Approximately 390,000 wounded American fighting men's lives were saved by medical evacuation helicopter crews during the Vietnam War. This was more than ten times the number of American lives saved by helicopters in Korea. There are at least three reasons for this seemingly disparate statistic: helicopters in the Vietnam War were able to carry more litter cases than the small H-13 helicopters used during the Korean War; there were more field hospitals; and the Vietnam War simply was a longer war. On the other hand, medical evacuation was more difficult during the Vietnam War because medevac helicopters often had to land in or near hotly contested landing zones. In Korea, most medical evacuations took place in terrain that was more accessible, out of range of enemy fire, or to the rear of a fixed defensive position such as a bunker or foxhole.

Helicopters provided the majority of the logistical support missions in the field and to fire bases and isolated outposts throughout the length and breadth of South Vietnam. Unique to this war was the fact that light and medium artillery could be lifted and moved as needed by helicopter from one fire base to another with reasonable alacrity. This capability saved American lives and was instrumental in thwarting enemy attacks.

The helicopter was not without its detractors, however. It seemed to some that unit commanders often used the helicopter as an aerial command, control, and communications platform from which they surveyed the battlefield below and used radio communications to guide subordinate unit commanders on the ground. Many tacticians believed the commander's place was on the ground with his troops. Another criticism directed against airmobility was that it reduced the ability or desire of ground units to move on the ground against the enemy, fix him, and destroy him. It appeared that it was easier in the mind-set of infantry commanders to insert troops quickly, engage and defeat the enemy, and extract the American troops—only to have to repeat the same tactical process eventually. Some commanders posited the complaint that the extensive use of the helicopter in Vietnam, coupled with the noise of the aircraft, merely served as a timely warning to enemy on the ground that American troops were coming into a specific area, thereby giving the enemy time either to stand and fight or disengage and withdraw to fight somewhere else at his option. The helicopter was also assailed as being too lightly armed to withstand ground fire. This complaint begged the question of whether ground security was capable of defending disputed landing zones. Throughout the American participation in the Vietnam War, this problem was not always resolved, even when areas were softened up by close air support or supporting fire from fire-based artillery units. The NVA and the Viet Cong often tenaciously attempted to close with the helicopter-inserted infantry so as to preclude the effective use of close air support.

There is merit to these criticisms, or to what might be considered by some as cavils, but the following should be noted: the terrain, along with the tactical and political dicta of the war, precluded the use of large numbers of American troops to occupy a position on the ground for an extended period of time. The enclave or fortress mentality, which had beset the French and had contributed to their defeat in the earlier Franco Viet Minh War, was not a desirable option, though used somewhat by the marines at Khe Sanh in early 1968 before the Marine withdrawal in April (more on this subject later).

Since the terrain and dearth of roads favored the defender, not the attacker, movement on the ground—even with armored and artillery support—was often hazardous and time consuming. The argument cer tainly can be made that tactical unit commanders should be on the ground with their troops; still, the tactical fluidity of the situation often necessitated having a unit commander airborne where he could make the proper decisions based on his aerial observations of what was happening below. It was true that the helicopter was lightly armored, noisy, and could at times compromise tactical situations by these short comings. Yet, it must be remembered, this was an unconventional war in many ways and, as mentioned earlier, favored not the attacker, but the defender. The use of the helicopter by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in the attack mode markedly reduced this advantage for the enemy.⁸

With the implementation of the helicopter as an instrument of war, it became imperative that the Army have a means whereby it could maintain tactical and administrative control of all its divisional and nondivisional helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in Vietnam. It did this through the creation and use of the 1st Aviation Brigade, which served in Vietnam from May 1966 to March 1973, after which it was sent to Fort Rucker, Alabama, as a training brigade. In 1988 it became a combat aviation regiment. While in Vietnam , the brigade had under its suzerainty nondivisional aviation assets numbering at times as many as 4,000 rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft and 24,000 troops. During the war the 1 st Aviation Brigade and its sunnort units became involved in four significant tactical operations that warrant examination.⁹

The first noteworthy tactical situation in which the brigade and its units became involved was the Tet offensive of January-March 1968. In this operation the brigade responded to the precarious tactical situation wrought by the NVA's and Viet Cong's sudden incursions into major cities throughout South Vietnam. The 1st Aviation Brigade established an airborne command and control operation, while simultaneously beginning successful counterinsurgency operations that eventually drove the enemy out of the urban areas and restored the tactical status quo. This illustrated well that unit Commanders did not have to be on the ground to begin offensive or countervailing action against the enemy. Doctrinally, the ground commander was to become more flexible than he had in previous wars. He there fore had a better grasp of what was happening on the ground and could move his troops quickly to where he needed them. This was effectively done to stem the Tet offensive.

The second important operation involving Army aviation units was the April 1968 orchestration of the relief effort by the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) to lift the North Vietnamese Army siege of the embattled Marine base at Khe Sanh. Dubbed PEGASUS, the operation successfully combined airmobile operations and a sustained road march by 1st Cavalry "sky troop ers" and Marine units to lift the siege.

The third significant operation utilizing Army helicopters in South Vietnam was the U.S. and South Vietnamese Armies' incursion into neighboring Cambodia in Mary 1970 to ferret out and destroy NVA units and their supply depots. Although a presidential order allowed troops to advance only thirty kilometers into Cambodia, the deployment succeeded in uncovering a number of large North Vietnamese ammunition and food caches. These finds subsequently were transferred back to South Vietnam, where they we destroyed or—in the case of the food—given villagers.

The fourth and final important large-scale operation involving massed Army helicopters in South Vietnam was Lam Son 719 (January-April 1971). It was a combined land and airmobile, mid-intensity-level operation. The mission was the coordinated insertion of South Vietnamese troops by air and armored units into Laos to drive NVA regulars out of areas contiguous to the South Vietnamese border. American lift helicopters ferried South Vietnamese troops into Laos and helicopter gunships provided close air support, destroying a number of North Vietnamese P-76 tanks. The Army, however, suffered the loss of approximately 100 helicopters, most shot down by Soviet built 37-mm. antiaircraft guns. Because it was monsoon season in Southeast Asia, some helicopters were lost to the pervasive inclement weather. During Lam SON 719, Army helicopter pilots were often forced to fly in what could be described as at best marginal conditions. Helicopters in Vietnam did not have tactical radar on board, so pilots had a difficult time flying during inclement weather. The fact that more helicopters were not lost during this operation was due in large measure to the pilots' flying skills and bravery. Lam Son 719 itself incurred a great deal of controversy both UH-1B Bell (Huey) picking up 1st Air Cavalry reconnaissance troops north of Bong Son Plains, South Vietnam, June 1967. within and without military circles as to its efficacy and results. The operation, however, served as a "lessons learned" study for the Army, in that it brought out the need henceforth to have more heavily armed helicopters in such operations, as well as attendant and better close air coordination with the Air Force and integration of supporting fire.¹⁰

UH-1B Bell (Huey) picking up 1st Air Cavalry reconnaissance troops north of Bong Son Plains, South Vietnam, June 1967.

During the Vietnam War, the Army had a number of helicopters in its inventory that played important roles. The UH-1 Huey was a multifaceted aircraft serving as a troop carrier, gunship, medevac helicopter, and cargo carrier. The CH-47 Chinook and the CH 54 riying Crane (larhe) were pnmanly supply, lilt, and transport helicopters. The Army also had two observation helicopter models that acquitted themselves well in South Vietnam: the OH-6 Cayuse (Loach) and the OH-58 Kiowa. However, the most formidable helicopter to serve in Vietnam was the AH 1 Cobra gunship, which first arrived in country in 1967. The Cobra carried 7.62-mm. machine guns, pylon mounted 2.75-inch rocket launchers, a 40-mm. M75 grenade launcher, and an Ml34 minigun. It wreaked much havoc upon enemy units, equipment, and personnel during its time of service in Vietnam and is still used by the Army.

Reflections

The Vietnam War was in many ways a most imperfect war, fought by fallible men using flawed tactics; yet it was a war where battles were often brief and bloody, where tactical and logistical support often decided issues of success or failure, and where dying or living was minutes or seconds away. It was a war in which the tactical helicopter came of age and added a new dimension to warfare, that of airmobility. Though an imperfect and seemingly ungainly aircraft, the ubiquitous helicopter touched the everyday lives of the young men who fought in the harsh climate and terrain of South Vietnam. It took them into battle, provided close air support, supplied and resupplied them, and evacuated the wounded and the dead. In turn, 2,700 helicopter pilots and crewmen died during the conflict supporting their comrades on the ground. Seven helicopter pilots and crewmen received the Medal of Honor, two of them posthumously.

The Vietnam War has been over almost two decades. Its veterans, once boys and young men, are now middle aged, and most have gone on with their lives. Yet it is unlikely that any of these veterans have foreotten their imaees of the helicooter in Vietnam. To many, it was the first aircraft they saw when they landed in country and the last one they saw as they were leaving for home. Time and distance have blurred many memories about the Vietnam War, but one memorial to service in that conflict stands—the helicopter that served the Army well.

CH-54 Sky Crane (Tarhe) lifting a 105-mm. howitzer at a fire base in Vietnam.

Since the Vietnam Warthe helicopter has changed, as have helicopter tactics. The gunships such as the venerable AH-1 Cobra and the newer AH-64 Apache are more heavily armed and now provide firepower and standoff capability heretofore not envisioned. Both of these aircraft more than proved their mettle in the recent Gulf War. Other helicopters with better lift and supply capabilities, such as the UH-60 Black Hawk, have been integrated into all facets of helicopter doctrine. Airmobility tactics, helicopter lift capability, aerial surveillance, and aeromedical evacuation techniques all have been refined to meet the contemporaneous needs of the U.S. Army. The visionaries of the 1950s and 1960s who dared to promulgate the thesis that armed helicopters had a place in military battlefield doctrine have long been vindicated, and though many of these men are no longer with us, their vision will always be remembered. Because of them the military helicopter has come of age to make the U.S. Army a more effective and responsive fighting force.

Dr. Herbert P. Lepore is command historian, U.S. Army Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command, Rock Island, Illinois.

Notes

¹ Frederick A. Bergerson, The Army Gets an Air Force (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 63, 71,99-100; Interv, author with Lt Gen (Ret.) R. R. Williams, 8 May 84 (hereafter Williams interview); Richard T. Weinert, A History of Army Aviation 1950-1962 Phase I, 1950-54 (Fort Monroe, Va.: U.S. Army TRADOC Historical Office, 1971), pp. 17, 70, 90-91; Capt. John G. Westover, Combat Support in Korea (Washington, D.C.: Combat Forces Press, 1955), pp. 6, 21, 23, 111-12; Special Text, Helicopters in Korea, 1 July 1951-31 August 1953, Apr 55 (hereafter Helicopter Special Text-Korea); Korean War Monographs, Lt Col Walter J. Borden (Nov 55), Capt Wesley D. Chitty, Jr. (Nov 55), Capt Thomas A. Beasley (Nov 55), in special collections at the Aviation Center Special Collections, Technical Library, Fort Rucker, Ala.; Maj. W. H. Thornton, USA, MSC, "The 24thMedical Battalion in Korea" Military Surgeon 106 (July 1951):11-20; Lt. Col. Spurgeon H. Neel, Jr., USA, MC, "Medical Considerations in Heli copter Evacuation," U.S. Armed Forces Medical Journal 5, no. 2:220-27; Peter Dorland and James Nanney, Dust Off: Army Aeromedical Evacuation in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1982), pp. 10-20 (hereafter Dust Off); Lynn Montross, Cavalry of the Sky: The Story of U.S. Marine Combat Helicopters (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), pp. 55-67, 133-42, 180-86; Thesis, Capt Frederick M. Clingman, USAF, "Analysis of Aeromedical Evacuation in the Korean War and the Vietnam War," inDTIC, ADA 214-994-2, p. 15 (here after Clingman thesis).

² Col. Jay D. Vanderpool, "We Armed the Helicopter," U.S. Army Aviation Digest 17 (June 1971):4; Charles O. Grimminger, "The Armed Helicopter Story, Part I: The Origins of U.S. Army Aviation," U.S. Army Aviation Digest 17 (July 1971): 15; J. Pouget, "The Armed Helicopter," MilitaryReview (March 1964):81 96; William Vance, "How the Army Got Its Shooting Helicopters," National Guardsman (May 1963):3-4; Charles O. Grimminger, "The Armed Helicopter Story, Part II: ' Vanderpool's Fools"'U.S. Army Aviation Digest 17 (August 1971): 15-16. Ltrsfrom the Brig. Gen. Carl I. Hutton Papers in the Special Collections, Aviation Technical Library, Fort Rucker, Ala.: Col Jay D. Vanderpool to Brig Gen Carl I. Hutton, 5 Dec 58; Brig Gen Carl I. Hutton to Col Jay D. Vanderpool, 13 Dec 1958; Brig Gen Carl I. Hutton to Maj Gen Hamilton H. Howze, 9 Aug 56; Maj Gen Hamilton H. Howze to Col KennethK.Blacker, 1 Aug 75. Maj.Gen.Hamilton H. Howze, "The Future Direction of Army Aviation,'"Army 7, no. 5 (December 1956):51-54; Maj. Gen. Hamilton H. Howze, "Future of Army Aviation," United States Army Aviation Digest3, no. 6 (June 1957):4-6; Special study, Leonard Weston and Clifford Stephens, The Development, Adaptation, and Production of Armament for Army Helicopters, Part I, U.S. Army Weapons Command, 11 Nov 76, pp. 1, 4-6, 17, 22, 24, 44; Lt. Col. Eugene W. Rawlins, USMC, Marines and Helicopters, 1946-1962 (Washington, D.C.: History and Museum Div., HQ, USMC, 1976), pp. 59-71, 72-81; Weinert, A History of Army Aviation 1950-1962 Phase II, 1955-1962, pp. 88-94.

³ Carl Berger, ed., The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1977), pp. 11-14, 20, 26-27; Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1983), pp. 310-12,349-56; Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965-1973 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988),pp.5,10-17,49,61; Peter Braestrup, ed., Vietnam As History: Ten Years After the Paris Peace Accords (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1984), pp. 6-11, 14-15; Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 997-99; Edgar O'Ballance, The Wars in Vietnam, 1954-1973 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1975), pp. 42, 44, 60; Lt. Gen. John J. Toison, Airmobility, 1961-1971 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1974), pp. 26, 29-32; George M. Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, rev. ed. (New York: The Dial Press, 1967), pp. 137, 154-57; Weinert, A History of Army Aviation 1950-1962 Phase II, 1955-1962, pp. 38-41.

⁴ Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, pp. 291-92; Clarke, Advice and Support: The Final Years, pp. 13-14; Toison, Airmobility, pp. 8-10, 26-36, 104 08; Shelby Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam 1965-1973 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1985), pp. 18-24; Williams interview; General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984), pp. 11-12, 14, 16, 19; Shelby Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle (New York: Galahad Books, 1986), pp. 59-64.

⁵ Weinert, A History of Army Aviation 1950-1962 Phase II, 1955-1962, pp. 31-32, 48-49, 437; Tolson Airmobility, pp. 8-11, 19; Williams interview; Bergerson, The Army Gets an Air Force, p. 108; Richard K. Tierney, "Forty Years of Army Aviation" (condensed from The Army Aviation Story, Northport, Ala.: Colonial Press, 1963), pp. 49-52; Brig Gen Carl I. Hutton, Air Mobility, n.d. (believed to be an information paper prepared for the Army Aviation Hall of Fame).

⁶ Final Rpt, U.S. Army Tactical Mobility Requirements Board, 20 Aug 62; Toison, Airmobility, pp. 51 57; Weinert, A History of Army Aviation 1950-1962 Phase II, 1955-1962, pp. 30-39; Palmer, The 25-Year War, pp. 27-29; Bergerson, The Army Gets an Air Force, pp. 111-14; Interv, author with Gen (Ret.) Hamilton H. Howze, 23 Apr 86.

⁷ Stanton, The Rise and Fall of the American Army, pp. 81-96; Palmer, The 25-Year War, pp. 58, 62; Toison, Airmobility, pp. 52-62; Bergerson, The Army Gets an Air Force, pp. 114-19; W. E. Butterworth, Flying Army (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday & Co., 1971), pp. 96-100; Williams interview.

⁸ Dust Off, pp. 96, 116-23; Intev, author with CW4 Michael J. Novosel, 11 Jan 84; Williams interview; Maj. Gen. Spurgeon Neel, Medical Support of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1965-1970 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1973), pp. 49-68, 73-78,101-107; Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, pp. 47-49, 109; Toison, Airmobility, p. 62; "Air Force, Army Agree on Role Mission," Aviation Week and Space Technology 27 (April 1966):26-27; Dust Off, pp. 21-66; Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army, pp. 50-51,269,364; Palmer, The 25-Year War, pp. 62, 160, 168-69; Interv author with Lt Gen Harry W. O. Kinnard, 16 Sep 86; Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 56-57,59; Qingman thesis; After Action Rpt, U.S. Army CGSC, 19090.2, Critique of Counterinsurgency Airmobile Operations, 5 Jul 65, U.S. Army, Vietnam, p. 58.

⁹ Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle, p. 109; Stanton,The Rise and Fall of an American Army, pp. 87-91; Palmer, The 25-Year War, pp. 62, 158-60; Toison, Airmobility, pp. 89,103-04\ A Distant Challenge: The U.S. Infantryman in Vietnam, 1967-1970 (Birmingham, Ala.: Birmingham Publishing Co., 1971) (a compilation of articles and observations on Vietnam), pp. 133-40, 327-41; Rpt, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), Report on the War in Vietnam: Commander in Chief Pacific (As of June 1968), pp. 99, 247, 276,297; After Action Rpt, 173d Airborne Brigade (Separate), 5 Jun 65, U.S. Army CGSC, N-l 8745113-A.

¹⁰ Bernard C. Nalty, Air Power and the Fightfor KheSanh (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1973), pp. 96-102; Palmer, The 25-Year War, pp. 109 14; O'Ballance, The Wars in Vietnam, pp. 119-30; Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army, pp. 77,80,111,114,144-45,157,181,231,241,256,259; Toison, Airmobility, pp. 144,154-59; Kahin and Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, pp. 172-77; After Action Rpt, Operation Hue, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), Feb 68; After Action Rpt, LAM SON 719, Jan 72; Jacob Van Staavem, "Interdiction in the LaotianPanhandle," in The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia, 1961 1973: An Illustrated Account, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1984), pp. 114-17; MFR, 101 st Airborne Division (Airmobile), 20 Mar 71, sub: Airmobile Operations in Support of LamSON 719, U.S. Army CGSC; Clingman thesis, p. 59.