Armies on Wheels, by S. L. A. Marshall ... with a Foreword by Major General J. F. C. Fuller ... and Illustrated with Maps and Diagrams by Colonel Francis Arnoldy and Joseph Bernstein
(S.L.A Marsha''s Armies on Wheels is a study of the signif...)
S.L.A Marsha''s Armies on Wheels is a study of the significant campaigns since Dunkirk, with particular emphasis on what these campaigns teach us about the "Ideal Army" for an offensive anddefensive modern war.
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S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall was a veteran of World War I and...)
S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall was a veteran of World War I and a combat historian during World War II. He startled the military and civilian world in 1947 by announcing that, in an average infantry company, no more than one in four soldiers actually fired their weapons while in contact with the enemy. His contention was based on interviews he conducted immediately after combat in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II.
To remedy the gunfire imbalance he proposed changes to infantry training designed to ensure that American soldiers in future wars brought more fire upon the enemy. His studies during the Korean War showed that the ratio of fire and more than doubled since World War II.
Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action: Korea, Spring, 1953 (Twelfth in The Combat Arms Series)
(In 1953, the American Strategy in Korea's Yokkokchon Vall...)
In 1953, the American Strategy in Korea's Yokkokchon Valley dictated a series o lightly defended outposts hunched upon the region's rugged hilltops. these were live bait, drawing the Chinese out of their fortifications so that the massed U. S. artillery could chew them to hell. on april 16, 1953, the enemy swallowed the lure, hurling a human wave against the 7th Division's outposts on Pork Chop Hill. In 48 hours of vicious close-quarter and hand-to-hand fighting, Pork Chop was taken and lost a dozen times. The author delivers a riveting account of that bitter battle, which stands as a true classic of military history.--The book is illustrated with maps.
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A "full-dress history of the war by one of our most dis...)
A "full-dress history of the war by one of our most distinguished military writers" (NEW YORK TIMES), WORLD WAR I takes us from the first shots in Sarajevo to the signing of the peace treaty in Versailles and through every bunker, foxhole, and minefield in between. General S.L.A. Marshall drew on his unique firsthand experience as a soldier and a lifetime of military service to pen this forthright, forward-thinking history of what people once believed would be the last great war. Newly introduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, David M. Kennedy, WORLD WAR I is a classic example of unflinching military history that is certain to inform, enrich, and deepen our understanding of this great cataclysm.
Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall was an American journalist, military historian, and soldier.
Background
Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall was born on July 18, 1900 in Catskill, New York. He was the son of Caleb Carey Marshall, a British-born brickmaker, and Alice Medora Beeman. After a series of moves, his family settled in Niles, Calif. , in 1912, and for the next two years Marshall was a juvenile actor with the Western Essanay Company.
Education
In 1915, he attended high school in El Paso, Tex. In 1917 he enlisted in the United States Army, where he advanced rapidly from the rank of private in the engineering corps to first lieutenant of infantry. He was the youngest army officer in World War I, seeing action in the Soissons, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne, and Ypres-Lys campaigns. Marshall's formal education was limited to a year at the Texas College of Mines after his release from the army in 1919.
Career
By 1923 he was established as a sports editor and then city editor of the El Paso Herald. He left that paper in 1927 for the Detroit News, where for the next thirty-five years (interrupted by military service) he worked variously as chief editorial writer, military critic, and foreign correspondent. Inevitably known as "Slam" because of his initials, Marshall traveled the world in search of stories for his paper, for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and for magazines. He reported from Latin America in the 1930's, from both Europe and the Pacific during World War II, from Korea in the 1950's, from the Congo and Southeast Asia in the 1960's. By his own count, he covered twenty-one wars. He wrote hundreds of articles, many of them technical papers for the military, in which he analyzed a broad range of subjects, from Jimmy Doolittle's historic raid on Tokyo in May 1942, to the psychological stress suffered by combat infantrymen. Marshall was transferred to Europe in time for D-day, as the chief historian for the European Theater, participating in the Normandy and Brittany invasions, the siege of Brest, the airborne invasions of Holland, and the major campaigns in Germany. In a memorable moment, he and Ernest Hemingway "liberated" Paris on August 25, 1944. In the company of seven other Americans, they inadvertently entered the city some minutes before the arrival of the French forces, and well in advance of the American troops waiting in the suburbs, while rear-guard German units were still present. Amid sniper fire and occasional explosions, Marshall and Hemingway drove triumphantly down the Avenue Foch to the Hotel Claridge and that night had dinner at the Ritz. Marshall left the army in 1946 but was recalled to active duty two years later, as the Cold War intensified. Assigned to the Pentagon, he assisted in staff planning for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1951, while serving as chief combat historian in Korea, he was promoted to brigadier general, the rank he held at his death. Although he returned to civilian life in 1952, Marshall continued to cover the Korean War and later reported on the Sinai War between Israel and Egypt in 1956, the war in Lebanon in 1958, and the Vietnam War between 1960 and 1967. He periodically consulted with the Defense Department and various military commands until 1977.
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S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall was a veteran of World War I and...)
Views
Marshall produced thirty books, most of which were based on firsthand observation. Their popularity was in large measure a result of his crisp, clear, often vivid prose style, his eye for the telling detail, and his keen sense of what it was like to be a soldier on the battlefield, which he once described as "the lonesomest place which men may share together. " He developed that theme in Men Against Fire (1947), an unsparing and controversial study of World War II troop training and battlefield performance. In it, Marshall argued that only 25 to 30 percent of American soldiers carrying hand weapons in combat had fired them the result, he wrote, of inadequate preparation and the military command's widespread misunderstanding of the fear and uncertainty that all troops must feel in combat. The army responded to the book by redesigning its training procedures over the next two years, incorporating a number of Marshall's suggestions. His critics were not persuaded by either his evidence or his conclusions. With the onset of World War II, Marshall renewed what became a lifelong association with the United States Army. Convinced that headquarters reports were often misleading, Marshall insisted on interrogating combat soldiers in company units as soon after a battle as possible, relying on the group memory of the particular moment, when joined to other such reports, to provide an all-encompassing picture of the larger battle that no one person was in a position to describe. Through this attention to detail his books had their impact on both civilian and professional military readers.
Connections
Marshall married Ruth Elstner in 1920; they had one child and were divorced. His second wife, Ives Westervelt, developed multiple sclerosis shortly after their marriage in 1932. She died of the disease in 1952. Marshall married Catherine("Cate") Finnerty on March 10, 1954; they had four children.