Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army 1917-1945 by David E. Johnson. Cornell University Press 1998. ISBN: 0-8014-8847-8. 288 pgs.
Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers is a stolid, workmanlike review of the winding road for weapons development from World War I to World War II with an examination of the forces within the War Department that affected each. I read the book for a specific project at work, so I skipped the bomber development parts that were irrelevant to the project.
Institutional considerations were paramount in tank development. The infantry branch insisted on developing tanks as adjuncts to infantry and therefore taking total control of tank development. The senior officers who came out of WWI viewed their experience in that war as dispositive and utterly failed to see that the U.S. Army’s late arrival and the primitive nature of tanks made their experience almost wholly irrelevant.
Senior officers consistently made decisions based on an unexamined, indeed an unspoken, assumption that tank technology would remain where it was at the given moment. Rather than undertaking a serious study of what was likely to be possible by the time the U.S. Army would have to fight, they generally acted as if they would have to “fight tonight” even though there was little prospect of imminent ground combat. Consequently they made doctrinal and organizational decisions based on the weaknesses of early developmental tanks and then reinforced their prejudices by failing to upgrade their technology.
The July-August 1939 edition of the Cavalry Journal included two articles on the Polish horse cavalry claiming that it was well prepared to deal with a mechanized enemy. After the German panzers rolled over the Poles in September, the U.S. chief of cavalry, MG John K. Herr, felt a need to redouble his efforts to defend the primacy of horse cavalry while conceding to efforts at greater mechanization. Not surprisingly, MG Herr proved to be the last U.S. Chief of Cavalry.
It is important when developing new military technology to consider three questions:
- How mature is this technology?
- When to I expect to need it?
- How mature do I expect it to be when I need it?
These questions become ever more important as the cost of new technology sky-rockets. The U.S. paid a price for its belated preparations for World War II, but it also derived unexpected benefits. The Germans, French, British, and Japanese all conducted extensive field testing under the most realistic conditions from 1939 to 1941. While German and Japanese aircraft were superior in the early days of the war, they were a sunk cost. U.S., British and Soviet designs that benefitted from the lessons learned in the earliest day [confirm this] came online later and in greater numbers while the Germans were able to design superior aircraft but not to field them.
In tanks, however, the U.S. never caught up. General Eisenhower was outraged to learn near the end of the war that American tank crews believed their equipment to be inferior to the Germans’. He had either not paid attention or had been fed happy nonsense up to that point, when it was too late to fix the problem. [Patton anecdote is telling but may not fit here]. But even this failure presents an important lesson about modernization. U.S. tanks were never able to match German tanks one for one or even by swarming in greater numbers. U.S. forces, nevertheless, defeated German forces on the ground. While the tanks were inferior, U.S. artillery and close air support were far superior. With greater numbers, superior logistical support, better organization, and superior ground attack aircraft, the U.S. combined arms team was more than a match for the Germans panzers that had pioneered mechanized combined arms warfare.
James W. Vizzard 