Draftee Division
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Draftee Division

The 88th Infantry Division in World War II

John Sloan Brown

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Draftee Division

The 88th Infantry Division in World War II

John Sloan Brown

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About This Book

The involuntary soldiers of an unmilitary people such were the forces that American military planners had to pit against hardened Axis veterans, yet prewar unpreparedness dictated that whole divisions of such men would go to war under the supervision of tiny professional cadres. Much to his surprise and delight, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall found that the 88th Infantry Division, his first draftee division, "fought like wildcats" and readily outclassed its German adversaries while measuring up to the best Regular Army divisions. Draftee Division is at once a history of the 88th Division, an analysis of American unit mobilization during World War II, and an insight into the savage Italian Campaign.

After an introduction placing the division in historical context, separate chapters address personnel, training, logistics, and overseas deployment. Another chapter focuses upon preliminary adjustments to the realities of combat, after which two chapters trace the 88th's climactic drive through the Gustav Line into Rome itself. A final chapter takes the veteran 88th to final victory. Of particular interest are observations concerning differences connected with mobilization between the 88th and less successful divisions and discussions of the contemporary relevance of the 88th's experiences.

Draftee Division is especially rich in its sources. John Sloan Brown, with close ties to the division, has secured extensive and candid contributions from veterans. To these he has added a full array of archival and secondary sources. The result is a definitive study of American cadremen creating a division out of raw draftees and leading them on to creditable victories. Its findings will be important for military and social historians and for students of defense policy

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Information

Year
2021
ISBN
9780813185880
Topic
History
Subtopic
World War II

1

Draftee Divisions: The Historical Roots

H hour was 2300, 11 May 1944. From Cassino to the Gulf of Gaeta, artillery barrages broke the stillness of the Italian night as fifteen Allied divisions hurled themselves against the Gustav Line, Hitler’s string of defenses sealing southern Italy from Rome and points north. In the American sector infantrymen stormed into German positions seconds after carefully coordinated artillery barrages ceased. Mount Damiano, a critical point, fell in fifty-one minutes; the scarcely less important Mount Rotondo fell the following day. American time-on-target artillery fire annihilated a German battalion surprised in an assembly area, and in three days of savage fighting the Americans pushed tenacious German defenders out of Santa Maria Infante Village, another critical point.
The fall of Santa Maria, a subsequent push through the village of Spigno, and the progress of French Goumiers across the trackless Mount Majo area north of the American sector ripped open the vaunted Gustav Line. Within two weeks the attackers, at times moving so quickly that supporting artillery had difficulty keeping them in range, linked up with divisions attacking out of the Anzio beachhead fifty miles to the north. The Germans soon found themselves struggling to extricate their battered Tenth Army from a closing trap.
The identity of the assaulting units was at first held secret, but Americans soon knew that their newly mobilized all-draftee divisions had seen their first major combat. The army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, was delighted with the draftees’ performance and called it “the first confirmation from the battlefield of the soundness of our division activation and training program.” Many other Americans were scarcely less pleased. Headlines in Stars and Stripes read, “Something New Has Been Added,” while the Washington Post exulted, “All-Draft Divisions Chase Nazis 30 Miles.” The Muskogee Daily Phoenix noted “88th Division Spearheads Yank Smash in Rome Drive” and laid claim to a species of participation by referring to a nearby training camp in the sub-headline, “Gruber-Trained Units Make History in 14-Day Battle.” In an article published a year after the war, the Saturday Evening Post concluded, “The Blue Devil’s 88th Infantry Division Stumped the Experts,” forcing a revision of thinking upon “regulars who once refused to believe that a draftee could ever be anything but a sad sack.”1
Although they may not have been aware of it at the time, the soldiers of the 88th Infantry Division provided the nation’s first effective test of conscripted divisions in the conduct of foreign wars. This test addressed a controversy as old as the United States itself: whether the professional soldier or the “citizen-soldier” is more properly the heart of America’s military establishment.
A case study of a World War II draftee division sheds light on this important issue and speaks to the assertion of critics that all-draftee formations cannot measure up to standards of performance demonstrated by long-established units. Such a case study also contributes to the understanding of America’s mobilization and subsequent conduct of ground operations in World War II. The 88th Infantry Division—the first into combat, the longest-lived, and perhaps the most highly regarded of the draftee divisions—seems an ideal subject for this study of the draftee divisions as a genre.2
Americans won their War for Independence because of the efforts of nonprofessional volunteers in state militias or the Continental Army. No major American leader and few American soldiers were professional military men. Anglo-Saxon practice had long held that all ablebodied male citizens had an obligation of military service. This tradition rested on the assumption that such service was intended for the defense of “home and hearth”—and in reasonable proximity thereto. Most post–Revolutionary War Americans opposed the expense of maintaining a professional army—the traditional instrument of monarchs or “men on horseback”—in the young republic. National leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Mason were philosophically opposed to a professional army; Mason even went so far as to assert that “when once a standing army is established in any country, the people lose their liberty.”3
Advocates of a strong national government, on the other hand, believed an army essential. Alexander Hamilton, a spokesman for strong central government, considered federal military forces necessary to suppress such insurrections as Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 or the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. George Washington was also dissatisfied with the militia system as it stood. He proposed that to guard arsenals and frontiers the country would be better served by a small professional army backed by an improved militia.4
The federal convention of 1787 compromised between these opposing points of view. Military clauses in the new Constitution balanced congressional prerogatives “to declare war” and “raise and support armies” against the president’s role as commander in chief. Another balance was established between the right of the central government to call state militias into federal service and the guarantee that states would be liable to this federalization for limited purposes. Thus the military instruments in the hands of the commander in chief were subject to the largesse of the national legislature, and the states retained an independent military capability. In practice, Congress and the states assumed an even greater role in the direction of military affairs than the Constitution might have suggested.5
Legislative openhandedness proved less than the supporters of a strong national military establishment had desired. Nevertheless, the dismal militia failures of Josiah Harmar (1791) and Arthur St. Clair (1793), and subsequently the striking victory of Anthony Wayne’s highly trained Legion of the United States at Fallen Timbers (10 August 1794) convinced even the skeptics that a standing army was necessary on the frontier.6 Legislators found this army acceptable if it remained small, far away, and preoccupied with Indians rather than politics.
Whatever the lesson of Fallen Timbers, the government could not agree on how best to expand the military to a wartime footing. Washington had suggested that regulars—”professionals” by virtue of a three-year enlistment—could become the cadre of a larger military establishment. His critics viewed the regular army as a police force and preferred to expand military capability by mobilizing militias. These mobilizations would be under state control, whereas an enlarged regular army would be under federal control. This latter formula, with regulars and militia thrown together on the battlefield itself, proved adequate for the country’s needs prior to 1812. A succession of defeats in the War of 1812, however, demonstrated the inadequacy of state militias in the face of sophisticated opponents. The British burned Washington, for example, after routing a militia force of forty-four hundred—stiffened by four hundred regulars and six hundred marines—at Bladensburg. The militia was so baffled by British fire and maneuver that it fled in terror after losing only eight killed and eleven wounded. Indignant Washingtonians faulted the secretary of war for the disaster. They drove him from their charred city even before he could resign and forced him to submit his resignation from Baltimore.7
Early in the 1820s Secretary of War John C. Calhoun sought to improve upon the discredited mobilization system. He proposed organizing the regular army as a leadership cadre that could be expanded with volunteers as necessary.8 Under his plan the army would ordinarily consist of 6,316 officers and men and would be organized so that it could expand to 11,558 without adding a single officer or unit. His notion that an established unit could approximately double in size without losing efficiency would gain importance in later times. Calhoun was the first important American exponent of an expansible army.
Although Calhoun’s Jacksonian contemporaries thought his plan rooted in a military elitism they found abhorrent, Calhoun did succeed in providing the army with a reservoir of leaders through increased professionalism of West Point under Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer. This leadership proved invaluable in the Mexican War. In 1846 Congress expanded the regular army as Calhoun had recommended, and it performed well throughout the war. The record of nonprofessional volunteer formations during the war was more uneven. Some, such as the 1st Missouri Regiment, did well, whereas others, such as the 2nd Indiana, did poorly. The concept of an expansible regular army supplemented, if necessary, by volunteer formations seemed vindicated during the Mexican War.9
The post–Mexican War expansible regular army probably would have proven adequate for the limited international needs of nineteenth-century America. Unfortunately, the contingency with which the regular army was next called upon to deal was neither limited nor international. The fratricidal warfare that followed the attack on Fort Sumter was on a scale far greater than that for which the regular army had been prepared. Regular formations were swamped early in the Civil War; the strength of the Federal army climbed from 16,000 in 1861, 637,000 in 1862, and 900,000 in 1863.10
In 1861 some military men suggested that the regulars might best be used if scattered as cadre among the numerous volunteer formations being raised by the states. General in Chief Winfield Scott rejected such proposals. The regular army expanded but remained small and intact while the states organized volunteers with their own resources. Except for a few veterans and West Pointers in civil life, the resources available to the northern states did not include many men with military experience. The southern states were only somewhat better off. The presence of the regular army itself was not much felt during the mobilization of volunteer forces on either side, although West Pointers did ultimately come to dominate the military leadership on both sides.11
The Civil War forced a change in recruitment philosophy. Prior to the Civil War military thinkers thought in terms of volunteers when they anticipated sustained or distant operations. Washington blandly asserted that there was a sufficient proportion of ablebodied young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who had “a natural fondness for military parade (which passion is almost ever prevalent at that period of life).”12 Young men with such a passion proved sufficient for military needs prior to 1861, but the manpower demands of the Civil War greatly exceeded this supply of enthusiasts. Faced with total war, first the Confederacy and then the United States resorted to conscription.13
European nations had frequently resorted to military drafts, and the mass warfare of the Napoleonic era brought conscription on an enormous scale. In the United States and the Confederacy, however, conscription proved a divisive issue, requiring as it did posing the rights of the individual against the rights of the state. Recognizing this implication, both the North and South avoided the universal application of the draft. Ever-increasing bounties were offered to encourage enlistment. In both the North and the South, a drafted man could hire a substitute. In the North a drafted man could purchase commutation with three hundred dollars. In the South one slaveholder or overseer was exempt for every twenty slaves owned or supervised. Individuals in “essential” occupations were also exempted.
Since conscription was conducted under the auspices of the individual states, inconsistencies inevitably invited abuse and evasion. One-third of the South’s manpower under arms was the product of conscription, but this fraction comprised not so much newly drafted men as previous volunteers forced by new laws to extend terms of service. Similarly, only 6 percent of the two and one-half million who served the United States from 1861 to 1865 were conscripts. The extent to which the threat of conscription encouraged volunteering remains unknown. There were no separate conscript formations. Conscripts remained in or joined existing units or newly organized volunteer formations.14
The United States government never gained effective control of its military manpower, and it directly recruited relatively few units: the tiny Regular Army, the United States Colored Troops, two regiments of sharpshooters, the Invalid Corps, and six regiments of Confederate prisoners (the last used for Indian duty only). Each state was sovereign when raising its own units. Until 1863 all states save Wisconsin met new manpower quotas by organizing new units rather than by providing replacements to older ones. Postitions thus created may have contributed to political patronage, but the system did little to enhance military efficiency. Throughout the war new regiments went into action under inexperienced leadership, despite War Department efforts to standardize recruitment and training. Insofar as manpower mobilization and training were concerned, the Civil War was ambitiously, yet inefficiently, waged. This influenced the thinking of later military theorists.15
America’s seminal military theorist, Emory Upton, wrote in the 1880s that the Civil War had been a bloodbath simply because “instead of expanding the Regular Army and making it the chief instrument in executing the national will . . . [Congress] violated the practice of every civilized nation by calling into existence an army of a million untrained officers and men.” The failure to train troops properly was, in Upton’s view, negligent homicide.16
Upton had commanded a division in the Civil War and had traveled widely after the war. During his travels he was much impressed by what he saw of the German army. In his great work, The Military Policy of the United States (published in 1904, long after his death but also long after his ideas had been publicized by others), he proposed a major reworking of America’s military. He thought that the chaotic manpower mobilization employed in the Civil War should be replaced with a fully federalized draft. He further thought that the army should abandon the prewar militia system, professionalize leadership at all levels, develop a military educational system to improve and standardize training, and enlist troops for not less than three years. The army, he argued, should expand to wartime footing along the lines of “the expansive principle.” Inductees, whether drafted or volunteer, should be assigned to established units.
Another former Union general took issue with Upton’s somewhat elitist outlook. John A. Logan’s The Volunteer Soldier of America (1887) was a testimonial to the citizen-soldier rather than the professional. Logan thought the “effect of the West Point system . . . had been to manacle and even to crush . . . the volunteer and his aspirations for recognition.”17 He did not propose to do away with the Regular Army altogether; he believed it necessary on the frontier and suitable as a repository of specialized skills (such as artillery ballistics). Logan’s point was that in an emergency the Regular Army would—and should—be swamped in a mobilization so vast as to make the “expansive principle” meaningless. The idea of enlarging the Regular Army to anticipate such demands, an idea favored by Upton, was repugnant to Logan. In Logan’s view, such a decision would mean enlarging, at considerable expense, an inbred elitist institution that would stifle the talents of volunteer citizen-soldiers.
Rumination concerning “Uptonian” ideas remained academic through the late nineteenth century. Congressional parsimony and the absence of a serious military threat from abroad—as well as the strength of the militia cum volunteer tradition and the states’ preference for using “organized” militia (by then increasingly called “National Guard”) to suppress disturbances—all dictated against radical revisions.
Americans saw no particular reason to “tinker” with existing military arrangements prior to their embarrassingly disorderly mobilization for the Spanish-Amerian War in 1898. The Regular Army, even when expanded, proved too small to undertake the full burden of the war, yet volunteer and National Guard units were too poorly prepared initially to deploy overseas. Although of shorter duration, the mobilization effort in 1898 was as confused and inefficient as that of the Civil War. After the war, revelations and scandals, including the testimony of the commanding general of the army against his own commissary general, kept the memory of wartime confusion in the public mind. Among other miscarriages, the commissary general stood accused of serving the hastily mobilized troops “embalmed beef.”18 It may be the nature of armies to complain about their food.
The Spanish-American War experience was sufficiently sobering to give the new secretary of war, Elihu Root, support for thoroughgoing—if tactfully executed—reforms. Root borrowed heavily from Upton’s Military Policy of the United States when he professionalized the schooling and staff structure of the Regular Army. Requirements overseas justified the enlargement of the Regular Army to about seventy thousand men in 1903,19 thus assuring that growth along the lines of the expansive principle could generate a substantial force in a reasonable time. State “militias” reorganized and standardized under effective federal control as the National Guard. The Dick Act of 1903 identified the Nationa...

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