On War Planning: The 29th U.S. Infantry Division as a Case Study in Manning and Training an Army during the Second World War
Date
2014-01-07
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The original intention of this dissertation was to conduct a transnational comparison of a Canadian and an American division during the combat phases of the Second World War as a case study for the raising of mass civilian armies. For a time I even considered adding a British division into the mix. However, clearer heads prevailed after a very short meeting with Dr. David Bercuson. Early research for this dissertation indicated the untold story of military history remains the manning and training policies utilized by warring nations. Historians have generally studied combat results and generated inferences about these important subjects without actually conducting the research necessary to fully appreciate and understand their significance. My dissertation eventually evolved into a comparison of these subjects within an American and a Canadian combat division as a result.
I began with the 29th U.S. Division because, as a Canadian, I knew much less about the U.S. Army in WWII and wished to finish the more difficult of the two divisions first. 400 pages later I realized a comparison would prove impossible due to time and space constraints. Concentrating solely on the 29th Division as a result, I sought to deconstruct the notion that training, manning, and administering procedures always progress in an upward trajectory and that inherent flaws are inevitably discovered and rectified prior to combat.
Moreover, I have always been struck by how little we know about the individual soldiers who fought the great campaigns that capture our imagination so vividly. Soldiers have largely been viewed from a collective standpoint within military history circles. Even John Keegan’s seminal Face of Battle views infantry warfare collectively. Divisions and armies do not fail or succeed on the battlefield; individuals who compose those units fail or succeed. The influence of the individual soldier’s social background on his training and combat experiences remains virtually ignored within military history circles. Military history and social history are usually viewed disparately, even within academic history departments. Social history conferences seldom contain substantial military components and the social side of military history is too often shunned at military conferences in favour of leadership, grand strategy, operational narratives, and weaponry.
Great military leaders admittedly bear a heavy responsibility when planning and administering battles. However, the best laid plans of staff and command officers are useless without a willingness by common soldiers to vacate the comparative safety of a hole in the earth and move towards metal being hurled at them at supersonic speeds. In other words the individual private, section leader and platoon officer determine whether a great leader’s plan succeeds or fails. The social backgrounds of a representative statistical sample of the 29th Division was therefore generated to afford the regular soldier an individual identity and to provide a better understanding of the relationship between individuals and battle outcomes. Going forward, such a shift of focus from the collective to the individual together with greater study of training, manning, and administering policies will provide a fuller understanding of how individuals affect battle outcomes and, more broadly, warfare in general.
This work does not add to the accumulation of study on leadership, strategy, weaponry, combat performance, and battle outcome. It instead focuses on organizational, replacement, and manning policies and the training carried out within the 29th Division prior to the unit’s initial engagement in combat to provide a better understanding of the U.S. Army’s combat results. Armies that prevail in combat owe their success to more than leadership élan and the weaponry they employ on the battlefield. I often placed heavy emphasis on the small details, though it was never intended as space-filling minutia. A central theme of this dissertation was to illustrate that careful attention to small organizational and policy details during training were fundamental precursors to a unit’s battlefield successes.
My long-term goal going forward is to carry out similar studies for the 3rd Canadian and 3rd British Divisions to complete the transnational comparative work I originally set out to accomplish. Division studies countenance multinational comparisons that hold the potential of reducing ad hominen explanations of battle outcomes. American, British, and Canadian divisions were relatively similar in size and organization during World War II and can thus be examined to discern similarities and differences, regardless of the size of each nation’s army.
Human nature dictates the killing and dying of battle has been and remains the most psychologically captivating fragment of military history despite, in a vast majority of cases, combat comprising only a fraction of a soldier’s total military service. The time spent organizing and training soldiers to kill and die has been virtually ignored by historians. More nuanced study of the army’s training and organization remains necessary because it represents a sine qua non to a broader and more complete understanding of the U.S. Army’s combat performance during World War II. This dissertation examines the 29th Division’s preparatory phase as a case study to better understand the combat successes and reverses experienced by the United States Army during the Second World War.
Description
Keywords
History--Military
Citation
Benneweis, D. R. (2014). On War Planning: The 29th U.S. Infantry Division as a Case Study in Manning and Training an Army during the Second World War (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27201