American Rifle - Alexander Rose [180]
Some old soldiers dismissed Marshall’s “15 percent” ratio-of-fire statistic as hogwash. Among them were General James Gavin, legendary commander of the 82nd Airborne Division during World War II; Harry Kinnard, who fought in every single one of the 101st Airborne Division’s engagements and later commanded the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam; and General Bruce Clarke, who defended St. Vith during the Battle of the Bulge. Clarke denounced Marshall’s numbers as “absolute nonsense.”36
Indeed they were. It now appears that Marshall exaggerated them. His own assistant could not remember Marshall asking soldiers whether they had fired their weapons, and the general left behind no statistical record.37 As for the apparent rise in the percentage of men firing at the enemy between 1945 and Korea, a more likely explanation than the alleged adoption of Marshall’s vaguely expressed training methods is the army’s organizational changes to the squad/platoon structure to ensure a higher ratio of machine-gunners to riflemen while teaching soldiers to more tightly bond and act together.38
Revelations of Marshall’s misdemeanors would come later. Initially, however, as a result of Marshall’s influence, the Infantry School at Fort Benning relaxed its marksmanship standards. In June 1951 Paul Cardinal published an exposé, in the NRA magazine The American Rifleman, of the trendy “aimless fire” doctrine and its dire effect on training. A year earlier, he revealed, the Infantry School had cut M1 shooting practice to just forty hours in its thirteen-week basic training course. (The Marines, holdouts as usual, had stuck to 150 hours.) The lack of training, said officers recently returned from Korea, was making American soldiers unconfident and hesitant in the face of “an enemy as determined and as numerous as the Chinese communists.” They were too reliant on “automatic rifles, rocket guns, recoilless weapons and atom bombs” to do the killing for them.39
The Cardinal article caused a stir, especially among NRA readers. One of them, George Thomson of Minneapolis, sent eleven copies of the piece to congressmen from his state, and one of those contacted the Department of the Army for an explanation.40 Within the year the Infantry School scurried away from its Marshall-induced methods and had upped rifle training to seventy-eight hours while placing renewed emphasis on accuracy. Fort Benning even reverted “to the Pershing World War I concept of an ‘army of sharpshooters,’ ” according to Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times. The “World War II concept of spraying an entire area with a great volume of fire has been succeeded—in part, as a result of the lessons of Korea—by an emphasis upon marksmanship, on the basis that only the shots that hit count.”41 Irritated by the diversity of views and the sudden policy reverses, the army chief of staff General J. Lawton Collins vainly tried to steer a middle course by writing that “the primary job of the rifleman is not to gain fire superiority over the enemy but to kill with accurate, aimed rifle fire”—but only at short range, he added, confusingly.42
These internal debates, over aimed versus aimless, of fire volume versus fire moderation, of small caliber versus large caliber, may seem obtuse and obscure, but their importance cannot be exaggerated. It is from such controversies that military doctrine, economic might, foreign relations, and grand strategy are ultimately made. Culturally, too, they encapsulate