The

John F. Morrison

Lecture in

Military History

Military Leadership

and the

American Experience

by

Gerald F. Linderman

John F. Morrison Professor, 1988—89,

and

Professor of History, University of Michigan

4 October 1988

The

John F. Morrison

Lecture in

Military History

Military Leadership

and the

American Experience

by

Gerald F. Linderman

John F. Morrison Professor, 1988—89,

and

Professor of History, University of Michigan

4 October 1988

Combat Studies Institute

U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-6900

Gerald F. Linderman

Gerald F. Linderman, born in

Marshfield, Wisconsin, earned a B.A.

from Yale University in 1956 and

served in the Foreign Service of the

Department of State from 1956 to

1966, with tours in Africa and India.

He earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in

history from Northwestern University

in 1964 and 1971 respectively.

Joining the faculty of the Department

of History at the University of

Michigan in 1969, he became a full

professor in 1986 where he

continues in that position. Professor

Linderman is the author of The

Mirror of War: American Society

and the Spanish American War

(1974) and Embattled Courage: The

Experience of Combat in the

American Civil War (1987), a History

Book Club main selection.

Professor Linderman, the 1988-89

John F. Morrison Professor of

Military History at the U.S. Army

Command and General Staff

College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,

has received numerous teaching

awards at the University of Michigan.

The John F. Morrison

Professor of Military History

The Morrison professorship

honors Major General John F.

Morrison (1857-1932), whose

contributions at Fort Leavenworth

made it the center of tactical study

for the U.S. Army. An 1881

graduate of the United States

Military Academy at West Point,

Morrison had been a student in the

second class at the School of

Application for Infantry and Cavalry

in 1885 and had taught at

Leavenworth for one year just before

the Spanish-American War. His

broad understanding of troops and

tactics developed while serving on

the frontier in the 1880s and in Cuba

where he received a Silver Star for

gallantry in action against Spanish

forces at El Caney in 1898.

Following the Spanish-American

War, he served in the Philippines

from 1899 to 1904 and as military

attache with the Japanese during the

Russo-Japanese War. He attended

the Army War College and then

reported to Leavenworth in 1906.

During his six years at the School

of the Line and the Army Staff

College, Major Morrison served as

an assistant instructor in military art,

department chairman, assistant

commandant, and acting

Hi
commandant. Morrison was a

brilliant teacher and tactician. In

fact, years later, his students would

proudly declare: "I was a Morrison

man." General George C. Marshall,

one of Morrison's students at

Leavenworth, went so far as to

proclaim that "he taught me all I had

ever known of tactics."

Leaving Leavenworth in 1912,

Morrison held commands at

Vancouver Barracks, along the

Mexican border, in China, and at

training camps in the southern

United States. After an observation

visit to France in 1917, he became

director of training for the entire

Army. He retired in December 1921.

The John F. Morrison Professor of

Military History was established at

the U.S. Army Command and

General Staff College in 1974, and a

distinguished historian has been

selected every academic year to

hold this chair. Professor Gerald F.

Linderman is the fifteenth Morrison

Professor.

IV
Gerald F. Linderman, the John F.

Morrison Professor of Military

History, 1988-89, presented this talk

to Command and General Staff

Officer Course students on

4 October 1988.

Military Leadership and the

American Experience

Military leadership in this society in

wartime presents, and has always

presented, a problem of special

severity. At the root of the problem

is the relationship between the

individual American and that larger

society of Americans. Despite

complaints in every generation that

individualism is on the decline, by

any comparative measurementsimply setting this society against

others-we have not sought to

express ourselves through the social

group. Nor do we often accept that

the success of the group represents,

in some equivalent and satisfying

measure, the success of the

individual. Nor are we often willing

to subordinate to the group our own

interests and perceptions.

Let me try to draw a contrast.

Johannes Steinhoff was a World War

II fighter pilot, an ace, a Luftwaffe

major trying to combat Allied air

power over Sicily. In July 1943, he

received from Hermann Goring,

commander in chief of the Luftwaffe,

this teleprinter message addressed

to the German fighter aircraft forces

in Sicily:

Together with [our] fighter pilots in

France, Norway and Russia, I can only

regard you with contempt. I want an
immediate improvement in fighting

spirit. If this improvement is not

forthcoming, flying personnel from the

commander down must expect to be

remanded to the ranks and transferred

to the eastern front to serve on the

ground.

Such a transfer was to be not

exactly a promotion: these pilots

would have been thrown against the

Red Army as untrained infantry.

Goring's message was an unjust

and outrageous signal. He was

wrong. The problem was not

"fighting spirit." Pilots were dying

daily. The problem was that German

aircraft had been surpassed

technologically and that so many

experienced pilots had been killed

and could not be replaced.

Steinhoff was furious, filled with

anger and indignation. He protested

to his own general, who in turn said

to him:

Listen, you're not to take it seriously.

I did what I could. I've been urging

[Goring] to abandon the whole

business, but then he sent this signal to

the Air Corps. . . . And once again:

don't take the teleprint too seriously.

Do you promise me that?

Though still explosive, Steinhoff

hesitated and then answered, "Yes,

sir."

Immediately, however, he began

to think of the disparity between the
force of his emotion and the

meekness of his reaction:

1 felt almost ashamed of my attitude

when speaking to the general. It

seemed to me that I had been an

accessory to an act of treachery of

which our pilots were the victims. ... I

had thrown in the sponge, simply

answering "Yes, sir."

So why had he done it?

In this answer lay that trust in one's

superior-a whole attitude toward

life-which had been instilled into us,

into our fathers and into their fathers

before them. For us soldiers, it had

hitherto been the only right attitude,

indeed the only conceivable one. The

obedience practised for centuries by

the German soldier had always

presupposed an unshakeable trust that

the orders he received would be

sensible orders and that the high

command would search their hearts

very carefully before sacrificing whole

formations. And the many who were

sacrificed died in the certainty that this

was so.1

"An unshakeable trust that the

orders . . . received would be

sensible orders": what a small part

that precept has played in our

military experience. It is not the

American way. The United States

has never possessed an

unquestioning soldiery and has

never even approached the idea of

legions, those willing or compelled

to expend themselves in the name

of remote and ill-understood policy,

as were the formations of Rome or
of nineteenth-century Britain in

defense of the outposts of the

empire. The absence of such forces

has not previously constituted much

of a problem for us; it has, however,

become a problem-as yet

unsolved—in those situations of

limited war that have confronted us

since 1950. When decisive military

victory on the scale of World War I

or World War II is not attainable,

when wars are concluded by

tortuous negotiations over elusive

ends while combat continues,

American willingness to sacrifice

shrinks. As many of the men in

Korea asked themselves, if there is

to be no winner, why die for a tie?

The American refusal to pay much

deference to military leadership has

also meant that we have had no

experience of a military culture, no

military island within our own society

on which values other than those of

the society at large pertain. It is true

that four and one-half hours after

midnight on the first day of basic

training, new privates feel

themselves catapulted into a military

culture utterly different from their life

outside, but not many remain

intimidated. American civil society

so permeates military life, rendering

a military isolation so difficult that

military leaders have had to

understand that orders in war must

be framed not only for Americans as
soldiers but for those same

Americans as civilians temporarily in

military uniforms.

"An unshakeable trust that orders

, . . received would be sensible

orders": from the Army's earliest

days, foreign observers have noted

the absence of that confidence in

Americans. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm

von Steuben, George Washington's

inspector general, said of the

American soldiers he observed,

"One must first explain—and then

give the order."2 And implicit in that

formulation is the possibility that

one's explanation will prove

unconvincing and that one's order

will not be obeyed. Von Steuben

was not the last to discover that

giving orders in the American Army

was a lot less fun than in the

Prussian Army.

Let me offer you, as a brief study

of the difficulty of exercising military

leadership in this society, the

situation that confronted a company

commander in the American Civil

War. He had to understand, above

all, that leadership was not his to

exercise by virtue of the rank he

held. Several factors contributed to

his troubles.

In the Civil War, a captain did not

ordinarily know much more than his

men. Field Manual 22-100, Military

Leadership, tells us that, in order to
be a military leader, there are certain

things that one must be, that one

must do, and that one must know.3

In the Civil War, it was vital that an

officer be a person of the requisite

qualities and that he do certain

things to prove that he possessed

those qualities. But what was he to

know? The technical and

technological aspects of war are so

much more demanding today than

they were in 1861. A leader today

must know so much more than

citizens at large that his expertise

becomes an important source of

others' respect for him. But, in the

Civil War, few thought that

warmaking required specialized

knowledge; few thought that there

was anything to soldiering beyond

the firing of a rifled musket, an

experience with which many recruits

were already familiar. James A.

Garfield entered the war as a

lieutenant colonel, a nice place to

start out in the Army, especially

since he possessed no military

knowledge-none. But he did not

for a moment doubt his fitness for

high command. "Pluck," he said,

simple readiness to fight, was

infinitely more important than

"military science."4

For another reason, too, rank

counted for little. Men entered

military service determined not to be

"bossed." The Southern soldier,
said one Confederate enlisted man,

was "an individual who could not

become the indefinite portion of a

mass, but [he] fought for himself, on

his own account." A Confederate

officer observed that the rank and

file "failed utterly to understand . . .

why, as soldiers . . . they were not

each and all entitled to be treated as

free men." At the top, Robert E. Lee

complained that "our people are so

little^ liable to control that it is difficult

to get them to follow any course not

in accordance with their own

inclination." And it was no better on

the Union side, where William T.

Sherman grumbled that "each

private thinks for himself. .. . I

doubt if our democratic form of

government admits of that

organization and discipline without

which an army is a mob."5

Now, what could a Civil War

company officer do in such a

situation? One would expect him to

issue the essential orders and see

that they were executed and

discipline enforced. Ah, that he

could not do, because his was not a

twentieth-century America, not an

urban and industrial America, but a

society of farmsteads and small

towns. Nor was his a twentiethcentury American Army. Units were

not national composites, drawing, as

they do today, men from all parts of

the country. Most companies were
made up of residents of the same

town, at most the same county, a

situation that gave enlisted men a

powerful leverage. In most cases,

the captain had been elected by

those in his company. Those in the

ranks were his boyhood friends, and

he expected to return to that small

town to live in their midst and among

their families once the war was over.

A lieutenant colonel in the 3d

Ohio, John Beatty, decided that he

had to discipline the men who were

straying from camp at their whim.

The court-martial charges he

pressed, however, brought down on

him, in his words, "not only the

hatred and the curses of the soldiers

... but ... the ill-will of their fathers,

who for years were my neighbors

and friends." And his attempt to

establish discipline simply

aggravated insubordination. Some

of the men drifted away for days,

and those who remained refused to

drill. When Beatty ordered one of

the worst, a drunken and rebellious

soldier, to be buckled to a tree, the

whole regiment protested: "The

bitter hatred that the men

entertained for me had now

culminated." Beatty faced them

down; he drew his sword and told

them that he would die before he

would let them free the man; finally,

they dispersed. But it was not over.

At last, the colonel of the regiment

8
intervened, but only to plot with the

men against Beatty; 225 soldiers

signed a petition demanding

Beatty's removal. Again, John

Beatty persevered, but you can

imagine how poisoned were his

relations with friends around him

and friends at home.6

Now, the Civil War did not, of

course, come to a halt because the

problems of command were so

painful. It was fought not because

armies were held together by

external discipline but because

officers and men shared a

dedication to the same set of

values-values that all were anxious

to express in combat. The most

important of them was courage—an

assertive, aggressive, fearless

courage. So, while Civil War camp

discipline remained abominable and

march discipline abysmal, discipline

was best where it was most

necessary-in battle—and here

courage was the key. Men would

respond to orders in and around

battle when their own courage was

at issue and when orders were given

by officers of whose courage the

men were convinced. It is this

courage that, in the early years, held

Civil War armies together. It was

not ideology, not any notion of

cause, not organization, not training,

not the coercion of a courts-martial

system that provided Civil War
armies the minimal cohesiveness

essential to fight their battles; it was

courage, invoked by officers who

understood their society and their

men.

The way a Civil War officer

ordinarily won that essential

reputation as a brave man was by

demonstrating courage, notably, by

calmly and coolly exposing himself

to enemy fire. This was how John

Beatty finally ended his tribulations

with the 3d Ohio. In the Battle of

Perryville, he ordered his men to the

ground while he remained standing

amid "shot, shell and cannister . . .

thick as hail," a gesture that won

over the regiment. "Now they are,"

he said, "without exception, my fast

friends."7

As the Civil War officer built a

reputation for bravery, he built

credits that he could then use to

challenge and to draw out his men's

courage. He might employ gestures

of reassurance, such as by casually

lighting a pipe and strolling about as

the enemy's bullets flew past, or he

might shame his men with his own

courage. A cavalry officer trying to

stem the Union retreat at

Chickamauga deliberately walked up

to a rail pile far in advance of his

men, standing erect and exposed to

enemy musketry until his soldiers,

previously "driven back by hot fire"

of the Confederates but now

10
embarrassed by their timidity, rallied

to him. He repeated the gesture

several times until, in midafternoon,

he was fatally wounded.8 Orders

from such men were heeded.

If, however, an officer had not yet

had a chance to prove himself or if

his courage in combat remained

unclear, he would continue to be

tested by the men. They could not,

of course, force him to thrust himself

forward in battle, but they had other

ways. They could purposely and

flagrantly violate a regulation and

then watch for his reaction. If he

punished justly, he would win

respect; if justly and cleverly, he

would win even more. If, however,

he punished harshly, he would be

counted a martinet, would be

despised, and would open himself to

his men's retaliation. He would go

unsaluted; would be mocked in

company theater performances;

would be targeted for derisive,

sardonic cheers on the march; or

would be manhandled in company

snowball fights. And if matters were

not repaired, he would be hung in

effigy or treated to his own funeral:

[We] built a coffin of cracker boxes.

We made a dummy of straw and old

clothes, laid the corpse carefully in.

We paraded around the camp, and

after a suitable funeral, we buried it

with military honors. Our new would

be lieutenant departed the next day,

never to return.9

11
At the extreme, he would be

threatened directly with what in

Vietnam was fragging.

Now, I do not mean to suggest

that, in the Civil War, all the cards

rested in the hands of the enlisted

men. Soldiers were just as intent on

demonstrating their own courage as

they were determined to compel

officers to prove their courage.

Thus, the possibility that a soldier

might be branded a coward in the

columns of his hometown

newspaper was a powerful deterrent.

Also intimidating were the Army's

public degradations of cowardly or

refractory soldiers - the head

shaved, the buttons cut, the coat

turned, and the miscreant drummed

out of camp as the band played

"The Rogue's March." There were

physical punishments too, and some

of them—tying men up by their

thumbs or binding them to the racks

of battery wagons - were

excruciating. And there were military

executions. Soldiers, however,

seldom reacted to such episodes as

their officers intended-with the

resolve to be better soldiers-but

with anger and revulsion. Often

repulsed by what they had seen,

they simply walked away into

desertion. Or their resistance

increased. Sentries aimed high

when prisoners ran to escape. Men

selected for firing squads loaded

12
blanks, aimed poorly, or simply

failed to pull the trigger. For one

Confederate execution, twenty-four

soldiers had to be marshaled to

shoot a single man.10 Thus, all

official responses to indiscipline had

to be used sparingly and with the

greatest care.

Now let me attempt to bring these

observations down to our own day.

Following the Civil War, the Army

became a small frontier constabulary

whose job it was to discipline the

Indians of the Plains. In the

process, it became a professional

force —lean, sinewy, imbued with a

highly professional discipline. That,

however, counted for little in the

Spanish-American War, when the

Regulars were once gain inundated

by civilian volunteers, in numbers ten

times their own. Officer-enlisted

man relationships were again much

as they had been at the outset of

the Civil War.

The novelist Sherwood Anderson

was one of those volunteers in 1898,

one of those hometown-company

National Guardsmen. He was

amused that officers and men had

been told that they should not mess

together:

Ed and Dug [company officers,

again elected] are all right. They have

to live off by themselves and act as

though they were something special,

kind of grand and wise and gaudy. It's

13
kind of a bluff, I guess, that has to be

kept up.12

Sherwood Anderson could not

separate the company commander

from the janitor he had known back

in Ohio, or the first lieutenant from

the celery raiser at home, or the

second lieutenant from the knife

sharpener.13 And they did not

control him:

An officer might conceivably "get

away" with some sort of injustice for

the moment—but a year from now,

when we are all at home again [?] . . .

Did the fool want to take the chance of

four or five [of us] huskies giving him a

beating some night in the alleyway?14

So, while such companies were

on active duty in 1898, fistfights

between officers and men were

frequent. Marching columns often

broke ranks for sight-seeing. Orders

requiring that water be boiled and

orders forbidding the men to sleep

in huts previously occupied by

yellow-fever victims - orders

delivered by hometown friends—

were ignored. In 1898, for every

soldier who was killed on the

battlefield, fifteen died of disease.

But the Spanish-American War

was the last of the hometown wars,

and the power of command was

strengthened dramatically by the

experience of World Wars I and II.

Here, several developments came

into play. Today's America is no

14
longer fragmented, but integrated; it

is a centralized society and

becoming more so. Washington

exerts a direct and powerful role in

our daily lives, far beyond that which

nineteenth-century Americans could

have imagined. The Army, itself a

much more powerful bureaucratic

organization than it was 100 years

ago, draws additional strength from

its role as an arm of Washington. In

the nineteenth century, for example,

soldiers did not worry about

dishonorable discharges. The small

town, while still autonomous, did not

care what Washington thought of

one of its citizens. Today, within a

far less personal mode of life,

dishonorable discharges hurt

opportunities in education, careers,

and housing. They can affect one

through life, and soldiers know it.

The power of command has also

been strengthened directly by those

technological aspects of war that

now require a specialized

knowledge, thus enhancing the

influence of those who possess

expertise. The basic unit of war is

no longer only a man and his rifle,

and we no longer maintain, as did

Theodore Roosevelt, that to find the

best military commanders one need

only to look for the best citizens.

And, finally, command meets less

resistance because war itself has

become a phenomenon immensely

15
more potent and overwhelming than

it was in 1861-65, and thus men

entering the Army are far less

confident that they can control their

fates on the basis of their own

individualized behavior.

Still, although the power of

command has been made stronger

by changes within our society and

by changes in war itself, the job of

command remains painfully exacting.

We have always had a diverse

society, but its wildly heterogeneous

and assertively multiethnic quality

today requires of the Army officer

complex cross-cultural understanding of a high order. And that is

made more important by the

disappearance, in the wake of

Vietnam and Watergate, of a set of

standards, generally described as

white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and

male, which, despite their severe

deficiencies, at least identified a

mainstream of American values that

could be invoked by officers as a

measure of common expectations.

We appear, moreover, to be entering

a period in which low-intensity

conflict threatens us more than does

general war. Low-intensity conflict

will bring with it a severe

maldistribution of sacrifice. A few

will be called to do the difficult work.

Deciding which few will, I fear, create

problems of equity reminiscent of

16
Vietnam. We still have no legions,

nor shall we ever.

The problems of military

leadership today may not leave

officers standing practically on their

own as was their fate in 1861, but

difficulties persist. Field Manual

22-100 says that the leader "has to

focus his attention on accomplishing

the mission while looking out for the

well-being of his soldiers."15 Put in

this easy way, that is a dream, for it

neglects the central fact that there is

almost always a tension, and often

an opposition, between the

accomplishment of the mission and

the well-being of the men. And

there is no escape. The tension

cannot be resolved by simply

moving in one direction or the other.

A body dedicated to its own

well-being may be a college

fraternity or a businessmen's club,

but it is not an army. Conversely, a

high command pursuing singlemindedly the accomplishment of

mission, while relying largely on

formal discipline to set its

relationship with the rank and file,

will find itself, within the American

social and historical context, without

an army.

So, true leadership will continue to

rest in accepting that tension; in

understanding human beings, their

special experience in American

history and the nature of the society

17
to which that experience brings us

today; and in operating an Army

within the space that opens to

perceptive people who understand

such things and are able to keep in

some rough and always difficult

balance the requirements of the

mission and the peculiarities of the

American citizen-soldier.

18
Notes

1. Johannes Steinhoff, Messer-schmitts Over

Sicily (Baltimore, MD: The Nautical and

Aviation Publishing Company of America,

1987), 189, 192-93.

2. Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes

Marching Home (Boston, MA: Houghton

Mifflin, 1944), 9.

3. Field Manual 22-100, Military Leadership

(Washington, DC: Department of the

Army, 1983), 1.

4. Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (Kent,

OH: Kent State University Press, 1978),

87.

5. Jacob R. Perkins, Trails, Rails and War:

The Life of General G. M. Dodge

(Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Co.,

1929), 82; Carlton McCarthy, Detailed

Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of

Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 (Richmond,

VA: J. W. Randolph & English, 1888), 8;

Hilary A. Herbert, "Grandfather's Talks

About His Life Under Two Flags,"

Southern Historical Collection, University

of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill, 112;

Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War

(New York: The Century Co., 1928), 15;

William T. Sherman, Home Letters of

General Sherman (New York: C.

Scribner's Sons, 1909), 209, 211.

6. John Beatty, Memoirs of a Volunteer,

1861-1863 (New York: W. W. Norton &

Co., 1946), 71-82.

7. Ibid., 139-40.

8. Jacob D. Cox, Military Reminiscences of

the Civil War (New York: C. Scribner's

Sons, 1900), vol. 2, 31.

19
9. Enos B. Vail, Reminiscences of a Boy in

the Civil War (Brooklyn, NY: Printed by

author, 1915), 113.

10. Charles T. Quintard, Doctor Quintard,

Chaplain C.S.A. and Second Bishop of

Tennessee (Sewanee, TN: The University

Press, 1905), 83-86.

11. Much of this analysis draws on the

speaker's Embattled Courage: The

Experience of Combat in the American

Civil War (New York: The Free Press,

1987).

12. Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's

Story (Garden City, NY: Garden City

Publishing Co., 1924), 284.

13. Ibid., 281-82.

14. Ibid., 282.

15. Field Manual 22-100, Military Leadership,

32.

20