Combat Jump
The Young Men Who Led the Assault Into Fortress Europe, July 1943
By Ed Ruggero
Rebound by Sagebrush
Copyright © 2004
Ed Ruggero
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781417700684
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...
Excerpted from Combat Jump
by Ed Ruggero
Copyright © 2004 by Ed Ruggero.
Excerpted by permission.
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