The Armed Forces Officer Part 21

In the nature of things, the officer who has been an athlete can fit himself into this part of the program with little difficulty and with great credit, provided he acts with the moderation that is here suggested. The armed services put great store by this. A man with a strong flair for physical training can usually find a good berth.

By the same token, the officer who has shunned sports in school, either because he didn't have the size or the coordination, or was more interested in something else, will frequently have an understandable hesitation about trying to play a lead hand in anything which he thinks will make him look bad. Of this comes much buck-pa.s.sing. There is often a singular courtesy between officers within a unit, and they'll switch details, just to be friendly. So it frequently happens that the man who has no great knack at leading in exercise and recreation gets the mouse's share of it. And thereby the whole point is missed. For it should be perfectly clear that the man who has had the least active experience in this field is usually the one in greatest need of its strengthening effects. His case is no different than that of the enlisted man. If he has not kept himself in good physical shape, his nerves will not be able to stand the strain of combat, to say nothing of his legs.

It can be said again and again: _The highest form of physical training that an officer can undergo is the physical conditioning of his own men._ Nothing else can give him more faith in his own ability to stay the course and nothing else is likely to give him a firmer feeling of solidarity with his men. Study, and an active thirst for wider professional knowledge, have their place in an officer's scheme of things. But there is something about the experience of bodily compet.i.tion, of joining with, and leading men in strenuous physical exercise, which uniquely invigorates one's spirit with the confidence: "I can do this! I can lead! I can command!" Military men have recognized this since long before it was said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Bringing it down to the present, Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell said: "The civil comparison to war must be that of a game, a very rough and dirty game, for which a robust body and mind are essential." Even more emphatic are the words of Coach Frank Leahy of Notre Dame, an officer of the United States Navy in World War II: "The ability to rise up and grasp an opportunity is something that a boy cannot learn in lecture rooms or from textbooks. It is on the athletic field primarily that Americans acquire the winning ways that play such an important part in the American way of life. The burning desire to emerge the victor that we see in our contact sports is the identical spirit that gave the United States Marines victory at Iwo Jima. If we again know war, the boys who have received sound training in compet.i.tive athletics will again fight until the enemy has had enough."

Men like to see their officers competing and "giving it a good college try" no matter how inept, or clumsy they may be. But they take a pretty dim view of the leader who perennially acts as if he were afraid of a sweat or a broken thumb. In team sports, developing around interorganized rivalry, the eligibility of an officer to partic.i.p.ate among enlisted men is a matter of local ground rules, or special regulations. There is nothing in the customs of the services which prohibit it. To the contrary, it has been done many times, and is considered to be altogether within an officer's dignity. Where there is a flat ruling against it, it is usually on the theory that the officer, by competing, is robbing some enlisted man of his chance.

Need it be said that in any event, going along with the team, and taking an active interest in its ups-and-downs, is not only a service officer's duty, but a rewarding privilege, if he is a real leader? In this respect, he has a singular relations.h.i.+p to any group that represents his unit. He becomes part of their force, and his presence is important not only to the team but to the gallery. It is not unusual to hear very senior officers excuse themselves from an important social function by saying, "I'm sorry, but my team is playing tonight." That is a reason which everybody understands and accepts.

As for the ranks, even among those men who have had no prior acquaintance with organized sports, there is a marked willingness to partic.i.p.ate, if given just a little encouragement. This is one of the effects of getting into military uniform. As someone said about gunpowder, "it makes all men alike tall," and provides a welcome release from former inhibitions. The military company is much more tightly closed than any other. When men are thinking and working together in a binding a.s.sociation, they will seek an outlet for their excess spirits, and will join together in play, even under the most adverse circ.u.mstance. During World War I, it was common to see American troops playing such games as duck-on-the-rock, tag and touch football with somebody's helmet in close proximity to the front.

Because no other equipment was available, they improvised. So it is that in any situation, the acme in leaders.h.i.+p consists, not in screaming one's head off about shortages, but in using a little imagination about what can be done.

The really good thing about the gain in moral force deriving from all forms of physical training is that it is an unconscious gain. Will power, determination, mental poise and muscle control all march hand-in-hand with the general health and well-being of the man, with results not less decisive under training conditions than on the field of battle. A man who develops correct posture and begins to fill out his body so that he looks the part of a fighter will take greater pride in the wearing of the uniform. So doing, he will take greater care so to conduct himself morally that he will not disgrace it. He will gain confidence as he acquires a confident and determined bearing. This same presence, and the physical strength which contributes to it, will help carry him through the hour of danger.

Strength of will is partly of the mind and partly of the body. In combat, fatigue will beat men down as quickly as any other condition, for fatigue inevitably carries fear with it. Tired men are men afraid.

There is no quicker way to lose a battle than to lose it on the road for lack of preliminary hardening in troops. Such a condition cannot be redeemed by the resolve of a commander who insists on driving troops an extra mile beyond their general level of physical endurance.

Extremes of this sort make men rebellious and hateful of the command, and thus strike at tactical efficiency from two directions at once.

For when men resent a commander, they will not fight as willingly for him, and when their bodies are spent, their nerves are gone.

Looking after the welfare of men, however, does not connote simply getting them into the open air and giving them a chance to kick the ball around. The services are pretty well organized to provide their personnel with adequate sport and recreational facilities, and to insure an active, balanced program, in any save the most exceptional circ.u.mstance. Too, the provisions made for the creature comforts of men are ample, experience-tested, and well-regulated.

It is not so much that a young officer needs to have book instruction about the detail of these things. Such is the system that they can hardly escape his notice, any more than he can escape knowing where to get his pay check and by which path he goes to the barbershop.

What counts mainly is that he should fully understand the prime importance of a personal caring for his men, so that they cannot fail of a better life if it is within his power and wisdom to lead them to it.

Once the principle is grasped, and accepted without any mental reservation, time and experience will educate him in the countless meetings of situations which require its application.

There are times and situations which require that all men be treated identically, for the good of organization. There are also occasions when nothing else suffices but to give the most help, the most encouragement, the most relief to those who are most greatly in need.

Grown men understand that, and the officer, approaching every situation with the question in his mind: "What does reason say about what const.i.tutes fair play in this condition?" cannot go far wrong in administering to the welfare of those who serve under him.

_It is moral courage, combined with practice, which builds in one a delicate sense of the eternal fitness of things._

One example: Under normal training conditions, it would be fair play, and the acceptable thing, to rotate men and their junior leaders to such an onerous task as guard duty. But if a unit was "dead beat"

after a hard march, and an officer, pursuing his line of duty, walked among his men, inspecting their blistered feet and doing all he could to ease each man's physical discomfort, he would then be using excessively poor judgment if he did not pick out the men most physically fit to do whatever additional duty was required that night.

But infinite painstaking in attending to the physical welfare of men is not more important than thoughtful attention to their spiritual wants, and their moral needs. In fact, if we would give a little more priority to the latter, the former would be far more likely to come along all right.

The average American enlisted man is quite young when he enters service, and because he is young, he is impressionable. What his senior tells him becomes a subst.i.tute for the influence and teaching that he shed when he left his home or school. That need not mean a senior in age! _He looks to his officer, even though the latter may be junior in years, because he believes that the man with rank is a little wiser, and he has faith that he will not be steered wrong._

Despite all the publicity given to VD, American kids don't know a great deal about its reality, and even though the greater number of them like to talk about women, what they have to say rarely reveals them as worldly-wise.

If an officer talks straight on these subjects, and believes in what he says sufficiently to set the good example, he can convince his better men that the game isn't worth the candle, and can save even some of the more reckless spirits from a major derail.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

KEEPING YOUR MEN INFORMED

n.o.body ever told the South Sea savage about the nature of air in motion. He had never heard of wind and therefore could not imagine its effects. Thus when he heard strange noises in the treetops and there was a howling around certain headlands, while other headlands were silent, he could believe only that the spirits were at work. He would strain his ear to hear what they had to say to him, and never being able to understand, he would become all the more fearful.

It all sounds pretty silly. And yet civilization is a great deal like that. We pride ourselves today in saying, particularly within the western nations, that men and women are better informed than ever before in the history of the world. What we really mean by that is that they are overburdened with more kinds of fragmentary information than any people of the past. They know just enough about many major questions of the day that either they are driven to the making of fearful guesses about the unknown, or they try to close their minds to the subject, vainly seeking consolation in the half-truth, "What I don't know can't hurt me."

Therein lies a great part of the problem. For it is a fair statement that if all of the mystery could be stripped from such a complex topic as the nature of atomic power, so that men everywhere would understand it, universal fear would be displaced by universal confidence that something could be done, and society would be well along the road toward its control.

In World War I, the men who had the least fear of the effects of gas warfare were the gas officers who understood their subject right down to the last detail of the decontamination process and the formula for dichlorethylsulphide (mustard gas). The man to whom the dangers of submarine warfare seem least fearsome is the submariner. Of all hands along the battle line, the first aid man has the greatest calm and confidence in the face of fire, largely because he has seen the miracles worked by modern medicine in the restoring of grievously wounded men. The general or the admiral who is most familiar with the mettle of his subordinate commands will also have the most relaxed mind under battle pressure.

This leads to a point, which it is better to state here than anywhere else. In all military instruction pertaining to the weapons and techniques of war, the basis of sound indoctrination is the teaching that weapons when rightly used will invariably produce victory, and preventive measures, when promptly and thoroughly taken, will invariably conserve the operational integrity of the defense. It is wrong, _dead wrong_, to start, or carry along, on the opposite track, and try to persuade men to do the right thing, by dwelling on the awful consequence of doing the wrong thing. Confidence, not fear, is the keynote of a strong and convictive doctrine.

In war, in the absence of information, man's natural promptings alternate between unreasoning fears that the worst is likely to happen, and the wishful thought that all danger is remote. Either impulse is a barrier to the growth of that condition of alert confidence which comes to men when they have a realization of their own strength and a reasonably clear concept of the general situation.

Man is a peculiar animal. He is no more p.r.o.ne to think about himself as the central figure amid general disaster than he is to dwell morbidly upon thoughts of his own death. Left in the dark, he will get a certain comfort out of that darkness, at the same time that it clouds his mind and freezes his action. Disturbed by bad dreams about what might happen, he nonetheless will not plan an effective use of his own resources against that which is very likely to happen. Only when he is given a clear view of the horizon, and is made animated by the general purpose in all that moves around him, does he understand the direction in which he should march, and taking hold, begin to do the required thing.

It is almost gratuitous that this even needs to be stated. No high commander would think of moving deliberately into the fog of war if he was without knowledge of either the enemy or friendly situation.

Even to imagine such a contingency is paralyzing. But in their nervous and spiritual substance, admirals and generals are no different than the green men who have come most recently to their forces. Such men can not stand alone any more than can the recruit. They draw their moral strength and their ability to contend intelligently against adverse circ.u.mstance largely from what is told them by the men who surround them. That is why they have their staffs. They could not command even themselves if they were deprived of all information.

Toward the a.s.suring of competent, collected action, the first great step is to remove the mystery. This is a process which must be mastered in peacetime, if it is to stand the multiplied strains of war. What mystery? Let it be said that it surrounds the average file on every hand, even though the average junior officer does not realize it, while at the same time he himself is completely mystified by much that transpires above him. For example, we all like to throw big words about, to air our professional erudition; and we do not understand that to the man who does not know their meaning, the effect is a blackout which makes even the simplest object seem formidable. To ill.u.s.trate, we can take the word "bivouac," common enough in military parlance, but rare in civilian speech. When green men are told, "We are going into bivouac," and they are not sufficiently grounded in the service to know that this means simply going into camp for the night without shelter, their instinctive first thought is, "This is another complex military process that will probably catch me short." Similarly if told that they are detailed "on a reconnaissance mission along the line of communications with a liaison function," they could not fail to be "flummoxed." And if then instructed to take a BAR up to the MLR and follow SOP in covering a simulated SFC party, they wouldn't be far from justified if they blew their tops, and ran shrieking from the place.

These are horrible examples, put forward only to illuminate a fairly simple point. Exaggerated though they may be, something of the same sort happens in almost every installation nearly every day. The difference is only in degree. _Every man in the service has an inalienable right to work and to think in the clear._ He is ent.i.tled to the why and the wherefore of whatever he is expected to do, as well as the what and the how. His efficiency, his confidence and his enthusiasm will wax strong in almost the precise measure that his superior imparts to him everything he knows about a duty which can be of possible benefit to the man. Furthermore, this is a two-way current. Any officer who believes in the importance of giving full information in a straight-forward manner, and continues to act on that principle, will over the long run get back more than he gives. But the chump who incontinently brushes off his subordinates because he thinks his time is too valuable to spend any great part of it putting them on the right track dooms himself to work in a vacuum. He is soon spotted for what he is, and if his superiors can't set him straight, they will shrug him aside.

These are pretty much twentieth century concepts of how force is articulated from top to bottom of a chain of command. Yet the ideas are as old as the ages. Ecclesiastes is filled with phrases pointing up that clarification is the way of strength and of unity. "All go unto one place." "Two are better than one." "Woe to him that is alone when he falleth." "A threefold cord is not quickly broken."

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." "Folly is set in great dignity." "Truly the light is sweet." Great commanders of the past have reflected that knowledge is the source of the simplifying and joining of all action and have pondered how better to resolve the problem. But it is only in our time that this great principle in military doctrine has become rooted deep enough to stay, because the technological complexity of modern war is such as to permit of no other course.

It is folly to attempt to oversimplify that which is of its nature complex. War cannot be made less intricate by conjuring everyone to return to kindergarten and henceforth use only one-syllable words. No such counsel is here intended. The one thought worth keeping is that the military system, as we know it, will prove far more workable, and its members will each become a stronger link in the chain of force, if all hands work a little more carefully toward the growth of a common awareness of all terminology, all process and all purpose.

Once p.r.o.nounced, the object also requires to be seen in due proportion. The principle does not entail that a corporal must perforce know everything about operation of a company which concerns his captain, to be happy and efficient in his own job. But it does set forth that he is ent.i.tled to have all information which relates to his personal situation, his prospects and his action which it is within his captain's power to give him. A c.o.xswain is not interchangeable with a fleet admiral. To "bigot" him (make available complete detail of a total plan) on an operation would perhaps produce no better or worse effect than a slight headache. But if he is at sea--in both senses of that term--with no knowledge of where he is going or of his chances of pulling through, and having been told of what will be expected of him personally at the target, still has no picture of the support which will be grouped around him, he is apt to be as thoroughly miserable and demoralized as were the sailors under Columbus, when sailing on and on, they came to fear that they would override the horizon and go tumbling into s.p.a.ce.

Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan wrote of the policy applied at his COSSAC planning headquarters during World War II: "Right down to the cook, they were told what had happened, what was happening, along with their part in it, and what it was proposed to do next."

Paraphrasing Montaigne, President Roosevelt told the American people during a great national crisis that the main thing they need fear was fear itself. In matters great and small, the fears of men arise chiefly from those matters they have not been given to understand.

Fear can be checked, whipped and driven from the field when men are kept informed.

The dynamics of the information principle lies in this simple truth.

We look at the object through the wrong end of the telescope when in the military service we think of information only as instruction in the cause of country, the virtues of the free society and the record of our arms, in the hope that we will make strong converts. These are among the things that every American needs to know, but of themselves they will not turn an average American male into an intelligent, aggressive fighter. Invigorated action is the product of the free and well-informed mind. The "will to do" comes of the confidence that one's knowledge of what requires doing is equal to that of any other man present.

This is the controlling idea and all constructive planning and work in the field of information is shaped around it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

COUNSELING YOUR MEN

Among the ever-pressing problems of the commander, and equally of the young officer schooling himself to the ways of the service, is the seeking of means to break down the natural timidity and reticence of the great majority of men.