Great Commanders [Illustrated Edition] by Dr Christopher Gabel

Author:Dr Christopher Gabel [Gabel, Dr Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2013-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5 — John J. Pershing -“The Very Model of A Modern Major General?”

by Richard S. Faulkner, Ph.D.

When the news of the impending Armistice reached him at his headquarters at Chaumont at 6 a.m. on 11 November 1918, General John J. Pershing had every reason to reflect upon his seventeen-month tenure as the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France. He commanded the largest American army yet assembled and oversaw the efforts of doughboys scattered across France from the battlefields of the Meuse-Argonne to the ports of Brest and St. Nazaire. Perhaps Pershing also considered the massive changes in warfare and generalship that had occurred over his thirty-two years in uniform. When Pershing entered active service as a cavalry officer in 1886, his world was one of horses, single-shot carbines and the occasional Gatling Gun or mountain howitzer. In those days, the army’s strength hovered around 28,000 men. On 11 November 1918, Pershing ‘s world was one of rapid firing artillery, tanks, machine guns, aircraft, and the industrial strength logistics and administration of an army of two million men in the AEF alone.

When one thinks of the famous commanders in history, the image that often comes to mind is the “great man on horseback”: the general leading his army to battlefield victory by his charisma and battlefield presence, valor and skill. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the dramatic increase in the size of armies and the growing complexity of moving, supplying and leading them fundamentally changed the role and expectations of senior-level command in war. The era’s arch military-technocrat, Alfred von Schlieffen, argued—

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