There's a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II by Perret Geoffrey

Author:Perret, Geoffrey [Perret, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307801401
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Logistics was wings and handcuffs, freedom and slavery. Chiefs of staff proposed, logistics disposed. Some commanders never bothered their heads with such matters as supply, and paid for it. Patton’s failure to make sure that ammunition dumps were created for the Seventh Army in Sicily, for example, proved a drag on operations. A fuming Bradley had to step in and try to get ammunition from the beach to the front to keep the invasion going.1

On the other hand were those commanders who worried too much about supply. Krueger demanded guarantees of sixty days’ supplies before committing himself to major offensives. Eichelberger, by contrast, asked for a fifteen-day provision and trusted Army Service Forces to keep him going from there.2

Although there was some logistics instruction in the Army school system between the wars, it proved to be rudimentary when set alongside the demands of a global conflict. Here too, though, the Benning influence was evident: the supply system the wartime Army used was based on simplified methods devised by Major (later Lieutenant General) Harold “Pinky” Bull, an Infantry School instructor during Marshall’s tenure.

Like love or art, logistics was one of life’s great mysteries: for all its undeniable importance and inescapable presence, no one could say what it was. Army dictionaries tried to limit it to supply and transportation. Field manuals, however, were careful to avoid “logistics,” because manual writers couldn’t agree on what the word meant.

From time to time Somervell and his staff wrestled with this will-o’-the-wisp, and lost every bout.3 In their hearts they knew only that whatever ASF did, that was logistics. Theirs was a pragmatic, if intellectually untidy, solution; much like Oliver Wendell Holmes’s definition of the law: “whatever the courts decide.”

There was more to logistics, though, than quartermasters handling supplies, Ordnance developing the Army’s weapons and engineers bridging rivers under fire. Signals were a crucial part of logistics, as was transportation.

The Signal Corps had a fairly traumatic war. Its pride was wounded deeply by the creation of ASF. Signal Corps personnel saw themselves as the essential link between Marshall and the rest of the Army: without them, he controlled nothing beyond the Pentagon. Lincoln and Grant had fought and won the Civil War by hourly dependence on Signal Corps telegraphers. After 1865 the Chief Signal Officer was one of the key figures in the Army.

Under the War Department reorganization, however, his direct access to Marshall ended; and he had to report through Somervell. In other armies, moreover, the importance of signals was marked by putting it under a three-star general; in this army it was a two-star post. Signal Corps officers were unhappy with the new arrangements. No one disliked them more than the Chief Signal Officer, Major General Dawson Olmstead.

The Signal Corps had been roundly condemned for its performance in North Africa. All Patton’s radio communications were wiped out during the Torch landings because his Signal Corps radios failed. Eisenhower was furious that he hadn’t heard of the assassination of Admiral Darlan for twelve hours because a Signal Corps messenger couldn’t find him.

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