The Armed Forces Officer Part 17

Therefore, it is as well to say now that from all of the careful searching made by the armed services as to the fighting characteristics of Americans during World War II, not a great deal was learned in addition to what was already well known, or surmised. The criteria that had been used in the prior system of selection proved to be substantially correct; at least, if it had faults, they were innate in the complex problem of weighing human material, and were beyond correction by any rule of thumb or judgment. Men were chosen to lead because of personality, intelligence at their work, response to orders, ability to lead in fatigues or in the social affairs of organization, and disciplinary record. In combat these same men carried 95 percent of the load of responsibility and provided the dynamic for the attack. But in every unit, there was almost invariably a small sprinkling of individuals, who having shown no prior ability when measured by the customary yardsticks of courtesy, discipline and work, became strong and vital in any situation calling for heroic action. They could fight, they could lead, they knew what should be done, they could persuade other men to rally around, and by these things, they could command instantly the previously withheld respect of their superiors.

Neither the scientific nor the military mind has yet been able to provide the answer as to how men of this type--so indispensable to the fighting establishment in the thing that matters most, though lacking in strong surface characteristics--can be detected beforehand, and conserved, instead of being wasted possibly in a labor or housekeeping organization.

All concerned recognize the extreme importance of the problem, and would like to do something about it. What is as yet not even vaguely seen is the large possibility that the problem might be self-liquidating if all junior officers became more concerned with learning all they could about the private character and personal nature of their subordinates. This does not mean invading their privacy; but it implies giving every man a fair chance to open up and to talk freely, without fear of contempt. It means studying the background of a man even more carefully than one would read a map, looking for the key to command of the terrain. These are usually repressed men; many of the foreign-born are to be found among them; they cover up because of pride, but they are not afraid of physical danger. Once any man, and particularly a superior, gets through the outer sh.e.l.l, he may have the effect of a catalyst on what is happening inside. If such men did not have basic loyalty, they would never fight. When at last they give their loyalty to an individual, they are usually his to command and will go through h.e.l.l for him.

There was an Oklahoma miner named Alvin Wimberley in 90th Division during World War I. On the drill field, he could do nothing correctly.

He couldn't step off on the left foot; he would frequently drop his piece while trying to do right shoulder. Solely because his case was unfathomable, his platoon leader asked that he be taken to France with the unit instead of separated with the culls. At the front, Wimberley immediately took the lead in every detail of a dangerous sort, such as exploding a mine field, or hunting for traps and snares. His nerve was inexhaustible; his judgment sure. There was, after all, a simple key to the mystery. Wimberley had led a solitary life as a dynamiter, deep under ground. He was frightened of men, but danger was his element.

When he saw other men recoil at the thing which bothered him not at all, he realized that he was the big man, though he only stood 5 feet 3 inches in issue socks.

To know men, it is not necessary to wet-nurse them, and no officer can make a sorrier mistake than to take the overly nice, worrying att.i.tude toward them. This, after all, is simply the rule of the well-bred man, rather than an item peculiar to the code of the military officer. But it is a little less becoming in a service officer than in anyone else, because, when a man puts on fighting clothes in the name of his country, it is an insult to treat him as if he were a juvenile.

In any situation where men need to know one another better, someone has to break the ice. Where does the main responsibility lie within a military unit? True enough, the junior has to salute first, and in some services is supposed to say, "Good morning!" first, though beating a man to the draw with a greeting is one way to win him.

However, the main point is this: unless an officer has himself been an enlisted man, it is almost impossible for him to know how formidable, and even forbidding, rank at first seems to the eyes of the man down under, even though he would be loath to say so.

Many recruits have such a mistaken hearsay impression of the United States military system, that it is for them a cause for astonishment that any officer enjoys free discussion with them. They feel at first that there is a barrier there which only the officer is ent.i.tled to cross; it takes them a little while to learn better.

But in the continuing relationship, it is the habit of the average well-disciplined enlisted man to remain reticent, and talk only on official matters, unless the officer takes the lead in such way as to invite general conversation. For that matter, the burden is the same anywhere in the service in relations between a senior officer and his subordinates, and the former must take the lead if he expects to really know his men.

Many newly joined officers believe, altogether mistakenly, that there is some strange taboo against talking to men except in line of duty, and that if caught at it, it will be considered _infra dig_. There is always the hope that they will remain around long enough to learn better.

CHAPTER TWENTY

WRITING AND SPEAKING

Other things being equal, a superior rating will invariably be given to the officer who has persevered in his studies of the art of self-expression, while his colleague, who attaches little importance to what may be achieved through working with the language, will be marked for mediocrity.

A moment's reflection will show why this has to be the case and why mastery of the written and spoken word is indispensable to successful officership.

As the British statesman, Disraeli, put it, "Men govern with words."

Within the military establishment, command is exercised through what is said which commands attention and understanding and through what is written which directs, explains, interprets or informs.

Battles are won through the ability of men to express concrete ideas in clear and unmistakable language. All administration is carried forward along the chain of command by the power of men to make their thoughts articulate and available to others.

There is no way under the sun that this basic condition can be altered. Once the point is granted, any officer should be ready to accept its corollary--that superior qualification in the use of the language, both as to the written and the spoken word, is more essential to military leadership than knowledge of the whole technique of weapons handling.

It then becomes strictly a matter of personal decision whether he will seek to advance himself along the line of main chance or will take refuge in the excuse offered by the great majority: "I'm just a simple fighting file with no gift for writing or speaking."

How often these or similar words are heard in the armed services! And the pity of it is that they are usually uttered in a tone indicating that the speaker believes some special virtue attaches to his kind of ignorance. There is the unmistakable innuendo that the man who pays serious attention to the fundamentals of the business of communication is somehow less possessed of st.u.r.dy military character than himself.

There could hardly be a more absurd or disadvantageous professional conceit than this. It is the mark only of an officer who has no ambition to properly qualify himself, and is seeking to justify his own laziness.

Not all American military leaders have been experts at polishing a phrase or giving clear expression and continuity to the thoughts which made them useful in command. But of those who have excelled in the conduct of great operations, at least four out of five made some mark in the field of letters. A long list would include such names as U. S.

Grant, W. T. Sherman, Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, James G.

Harbord, Henry T. Allen, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, Jr., H. H. Arnold, Douglas MacArthur, William F. Halsey, W. B. Smith, Joseph W. Stilwell, Holland M. Smith, and Robert L. Eichelberger among many others.

Of them all, it can be said without exception that they acquired their skill at self-expression by sustained practice which was part of a self-imposed training in the interests of furthering their military efficiency. No one of them was a born writer. There is no such thing.

Nor did any one of them owe his abilities as a writer to any other person. Writers are self-made. But it is a reasonable speculation that history might never have heard of the greater number of these men had they not worked sedulously to become proficient with the pen as well as with the sword. Granting that they had other sound military qualities in the beginning, an acquired ability to express themselves lucidly and with force became a touchstone to preferment. The same thing holds true of their celebrated military contemporaries almost without exception. Even those who had no public reputation for authorship, and would have been ill at ease if called upon to speak to an average audience, knew how to use the language in presenting their thoughts to their staffs and their troops, whether the occasion called for a succinct operational order, a doctrinal exposition or an inspirational message on the eve of battle.

Wherever one looks, the same precept may be noted. It was not coincidence merely, but related cause and effect, that Ferdinand Foch was one of the ablest military writers of the twentieth century before he won immortality on the field of war, that the elder von Moltke was as skilled with ink as with powder, and that we still marvel at the picture of the great von Steuben dictating drill manuals far into the night so that there would be greater perfection in his formations on the following day. The command of language was one of the main sources of their power over the mult.i.tude.

As it was with these commanders, so it is with leadership at every level: _Men who can command words to serve their thoughts and feelings are well on their way to commanding men to serve their purposes._

All senior commanders respect the junior who has a facility for thinking an idea through and then expressing it comprehensively in clear, unvarnished phrases. Moreover, even when they are stilted in their own manner of expression, they will warm to the man whose style achieves strength through its ease and naturalness. They will quickly make note of any young officer who is making progress in this direction and will want to have him around. He is a rare bird in the services, and for that reason his opportunities are far above the average. Staff work could not be carried forward at any of its levels if it were not for this particular talent, and command would lose a great part of its magnetism.

Toward the building of a career, the best break that can come to any young man is to have three or four places bidding simultaneously for his services. There are possibly better arguments than that as to why perfection in writing should be a main pursuit of the service officer, such as the sense of personal attainment which comes of it.

Any man who has the brain to qualify for commission can make of himself a competent writer. Because of natural limitations, he may never come to excel in this art. But if he has had average schooling, knows how to open a dictionary, can find his way to a library, is willing to commit himself to long study and practice, particularly in nonduty hours, and will finally free himself of the superst.i.tion that writing is a game only for specialists, he can acquire all the skill that is necessary to further his advance within the military profession.

That is the great difference between writing ability and specialized knowledge in such fields as electronics and atomic research.

But where should work begin? How about a little practical advice?

The only way to learn to write is to write. That is it--there is no other secret than hard, unremitting practice. Most writers at the start are mentally muscle-bound, and poorly coordinated. They have thoughts in their heads. They think they can develop them clearly. But when they try to apply a largely dormant vocabulary to the expression of these thoughts, the result is stiff and selfconscious.

The only cure for this is constant mental exercise, with one's pen, or over one's typewriter. After a man has written perhaps a half million relatively useless words there comes, sometimes almost in a flash, and at other times gradually, a mastery not only of words, but of phrases, sentences and the composition of ideas. It is a kind of rhythmic process, like learning to swim, or to row a boat, or navigate an airplane. When a writer has at last conquered his element, his personality and his character can be transmitted to paper. What is said will reflect the force, adaptability, reason and musing of the writer. In fact, the discipline through which one learns to write adds substance to thought, whereby one's ideas are given body and connection. Such common faults as wordiness, overstatement, faulty sentence structure and weak use of words are gradually corrected. With their pa.s.sing, confidence grows. This does not mean, however, that the task then becomes easy. Though its rewards will increase, good writing continues to be a strain even to the man who does it well. Many celebrated men of letters never get beyond the "sweating" stage, but have to fight their way through a jungle of words, and rewrite almost endlessly, before finding satisfaction in their product.

This description makes it all seem more than a little formidable. But what was promised in the first place was that any service officer, who will accept the necessary discipline, can make himself reasonably proficient as a writer, and thereby further his professional progress.

What he writes about during the conditioning period makes very little difference. It might be an operational order one night, a treatise on discipline the next, a lecture to his men on the elements of combat the third. Fortunately, the list of topics within the services and directly applicable to their operations, is practically inexhaustible.

That is a main reason why the military establishment is a better school for writing than perhaps any other place in our society.

Winston Churchill, whose gift of forceful expression is the envy of all other writing men, won his literary spurs in his early twenties as a soldier with the Malakand Field Force. He saw the essential idea--that to learn English, he had literally to learn, just as though he had been acquiring Latin or French. As a writer, his main strength is his employment of Anglo-Saxon, the words of our common speech.

But simply to take regular exercise in composition is not quite enough. Of it would come the shadow but not the substance. To progress as a writer, one must become a student of the best things which have been written by men who understand their craft. A military officer can do that without going beyond the field of military studies, if that should be his disposition, such is the richness and variation of available works in this realm of literature. The purpose at hand is not only to seek great ideas for their own sake but to make careful note of the manner in which they are expressed. So doing, one unconsciously invigorates his own powers and adopts techniques which the masters have used to great advantage.

To paraphrase what a distinguished journalist once said on this subject in a speech to young writers: "For an officer it is in the first place a shame to be ignorant--ignorant, as not a few are, of history and geography: and in the second place, it is a pity that any officer should lack a vigor in writing which can be produced through imitation of vigorous writers."

As to what is best worth seeking, a man can not go wrong by "falling in love" with the works of a relatively limited number of authors who kindle him personally. It is all right to widen the field occasionally, for diversion, for contrast, for sharpening style, and for balancing of ideas, but strength comes of finding a main line and holding to it. No man can read a book with sympathetic understanding without taking from it something that makes him more complex and more potent.

The main test is in this: if you read a book and feel stirred by it, even though alternately you strongly agree with certain of its pa.s.sages and warmly contend against others, something new has been added. The writer is making you see things. Your own powers of observation are being made more acute. All good writers are in a sense hitch-hikers. While going along for the ride, and enjoying the essence of some highly developed mind, they are not loath to study the technique by which some other man develops his driving power, and to make note of his strong words and best phrases for possible future use.

It is a good habit to underscore pa.s.sages in books which have contributed something vital to one's own thought--always provided that the books have not been borrowed.

Without mentioning names, we can take a cue from a man who some years ago entered one of the services while still a youth. He had had little formal education, but he began an earnest study of military literature, and the search for knowledge whetted his thirst to join the company of those who could speak to the world because they had something to say. He read such books as were at hand, and clipped pieces from magazines and newspapers which had particularly appealed to him, for one reason or another. Whenever he saw a new word, he wrote it down and sought the meaning in the dictionary, considering whether it had a shade of meaning which added anything important to his vocabulary. This done, he wrote sentences, many sentences, employing his new words in various ways, until their use became instinctive. On this foundation alone, he built his career as a national writer. There was nothing extraordinary about this start and the ultimate result. Literally thousands of Americans have qualified themselves for one branch or another of the writing profession by what they learned to do in military service. Too, an ability to "organize a good paper" has been a large element in the success of most of the men who have moved from the military circle into top posts in the diplomatic service, in education or in industrial administration. Had they been capable only of delegating this kind of work, their powers would never have been recognized.

As a practical matter, it is better to concentrate on a few elementary rules-of-thumb, such as are contained in the following list, than to bog down attempting to heed everything that the pedants have said about how to become a writer.

The more simply a thing is said the more powerfully it influences those who read. Plain words make strong writing.

There is always one best word to convey a thought or a feeling. To accept a weaker subst.i.tute, rather than to Search for the right word, will deprive any writing of force.

Economy of words invigorates composition.

To quote Carl Sandburg: "Think twice before you use an adjective."