Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815-1917 PDF
Preview Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815-1917
Preparing for War J. P. Clark Preparing for War The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917 Cambridge, massaChusetts, and London, engLand • 2017 Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Clark, J. P., author. Title: Preparing for war : the emergence of the modern U.S. army, 1815–1917 / J. P. Clark. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016004678 | ISBN 9780674545731 Subjects: LCSH: Military art and science—United States—History—19th century. | Military art and science—United States—History—20th century. | United States. Army—Officers— Attitudes—History. | United States. Army—Officers—Training of—History. | Military education—United States—History—19th century. | Military education—United States— History—20th century. Classification: LCC U43.U4 C55 2016 | DDC 355.00973/09034—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004678 To Kelly, Faith, and Abigail Contents Preface ix Prologue 1 1 A Profession Born in War 10 2 Trials on the Frontier and in Mexico 37 3 The First Upheaval 64 4 The Civil War’s Legacy 99 5 Between Old and New 129 6 The Second Upheaval 163 7 Old Soldiers in a New Army 197 8 The Great War 231 Epilogue 269 Abbreviations 279 Notes 281 Acknowledgments 323 Index 325 Preface This book began as an investigation into the Root reforms of the early twentieth century. During my early research, a small band of officers emerged as critical figures in the implementation of those seminal changes, arguably the most far-reaching in the history of the U.S. Army. I soon became curious as to whether this group was representative of, or somehow different from, their peers in the larger officer corps. If the latter, was it possible to identify some feature in their education or experience that had made them atypically open to change? Thus, in its primordial state, this project was a search for distinct groups of “reformers” and “conservatives.” That focus changed one day when a misrouting of materials led me to take up a well-worn copy of reports written by American observers of the Russo-Japanese War. In that volume, I found two starkly different accounts of the same assault, one written by an attaché with the Japanese, the other by one with the Russians. Indeed, they were so different in their interpreta- tion of events that it took some time before I realized that the two reports were describing the same action. Conditioned by my methodology to cor- relate outlook with an officer’s background, I was at first perplexed, then intrigued, and eventually excited, to see that the two observers were as iden- tical in age and professional experience as I could reasonably hope to find.
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