Combat Jump

The Young Men Who Led the Assault Into Fortress Europe, July 1943

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By Ed Ruggero

Rebound by Sagebrush

Copyright © 2004 Ed Ruggero
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781417700684

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Chapter One

In Theory

The United States Military Academy at West Point was a backwater assignment in the winter of 1941. While the cadets studied the Napoleonic Wars and waited out the endless gray days in upstate New York, the Army was in an uproar. America's first peacetime draft had been signed into law during the hot summer of 1940, though the term of enlistment for draftees and federalized National Guard troops was optimistically limited to one year. Although large segments of the public still hoped the war raging in Europe and Asia would pass America by, a million men were about to be inducted into the armed forces. Whatever happened in the diplomatic world, the nation was girding for war. For professional soldiers like Captain James M. Gavin, the only prudent thing to do was to prepare.

Gavin was thirty-three years old that winter, tall and slender -- his nickname was Slim Jim -- with movie-star looks and a passion for athletics. He was also one of the most junior officers assigned to the Academy's Tactical Department. He didn't draw one of the plum assignments for a "Tac," overseeing the military development of a company of cadets, but his duties did include supervising the seniors who ran the cadet corps. Like other members of the Tactical Department, he spent time enforcing the mind-numbing minutiae of regulations: inspecting how cadets folded their clothes, polished their shoes, cleaned their weapons and their rooms. Officers in the Tactical Department also taught classes about the organization of the Army and the role of the junior officer. Major Johnny Waters even instructed cadets on the proper table etiquette an officer and a gentleman needed to know. Waters was aided in this by his wife, Bee, who was herself the daughter of a not-yet-famous West Pointer named George Patton.

Though classes on the Army supply system were necessary, they were hardly inspiring, for instructors or cadets. Fortunately, the department was also responsible for teaching tactics: how small elements actually battled the enemy, the artistry of fire and maneuver, the use of artillery and machine guns and tanks to overwhelm an enemy position or defend a hilltop, all the things the cadets, as future combat leaders, had to master. Jim Gavin shone as a teacher, and the cadets could see the fire in the young infantry officer as he coached them on the technical side of their new profession. Like all good teachers, Gavin wasn't satisfied with simply covering the curriculum; he expanded his students' horizons to an in-depth study of modern war. He wanted the cadets to see the bigger picture.

In his classes, often conducted in the high-ceiling rooms above the mess hall, where the cadets learned to draw engineering diagrams of bridges, roads, and machinery, Gavin took the cadets on a world tour of modern military organizations. Together they dissected the German Wehrmacht -- at that point the world's most formidable and successful army -- studying how it was built and how it fought. The young captain and his younger charges discussed how the Germans blended tanks and low-flying attack aircraft with their maneuver formations, how they coordinated all the arms -- artillery, air power, armor, and infantry -- to bring the greatest amount of force to bear on the critical spot on the battlefield. The cadets began to understand that war, particularly since the introduction of the internal combustion engine and all that did for speed, required a complex set of skills. It was more than a matter of training individual soldiers and pointing them toward an enemy (which had proved so disastrous in the trenches of World War I). The modern commander had to choreograph air and sea power, had to communicate over vast distances to put his units at the exact right place at the exact right time, with the right arms and the will to use them. He had to master new techniques: faster artillery, motorized formations, more lethal weapons. He had to understand his enemy, and that understanding had to go beyond organization, tactics, and weapons. It had to include the social system that put enemy soldiers on the battlefield, all the cultural and political factors that made men fight.

Gavin was soft-spoken for a soldier, but he made the war headlines come alive, and in his teaching there was always an undercurrent, that this was knowledge the West Point class of 1941 would soon put to use. The lessons on how small units fought were often conducted over sand tables, large flat boxes filled with dirt the instructor used to shape hills and valleys, like museum dioramas. (Although the organizations varied depending on the mission, the basic element in the infantry was a squad of ten or eleven men, led by a sergeant. Three to four squads made up a platoon, led by a lieutenant, and three or four platoons made up a company, commanded by a first lieutenant or captain. West Point cadets who went into the infantry could expect to become platoon leaders.)

Gavin would brief the cadets on situations they might face as platoon leaders. While these lessons were designed to help cadets see and understand how to employ soldiers, they had another use as well. Gavin and other instructors added elements to drive home the point that warfare, especially the up-close kind of fighting they would see as junior officers, was often a confusing mix of incomplete information, rapidly shifting priorities, and the highest stakes imaginable.

Most important, Gavin wanted his cadets to think -- not just spit back programmed responses to questions about military history or tactics. Although he didn't invent it, the technique he used would become the norm in all the forces Gavin would command: he pushed decision-making down to the level where decisions would actually be made, to the junior leaders on the ground ...

Continues...

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Excerpted from Combat Jump by Ed Ruggero Copyright © 2004 by Ed Ruggero. Excerpted by permission.
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