A most important general that you've probably never heard of!

Maj. General Fox Connor was Gen. Pershing's Chief of Staff in WWI. While he never held any combat commands but he became the USA's leading military theorist and personally influenced many of the US Army's promising young officers in the inter-war years. His main advice on war to these officers was as follows (Assuming they would rise to high command):

1. Never fight unless it's absolutely necessary.

2. Never fight alone. This means that an officer would have to work alongside officers of other nations and would need diplomatic and political skills as well as military ones.

3. Win as quickly as possible before the people become tired of losing their sons.

Two officers he thought exceptionally promising were George Marshal and Dwight Eisenhower. Both these men have stated that his mentoring was exceptionally important in their military development. His teachings undoubtedly had a profound effect on WWII and its conduct at the highest level. Connor might be one of the main reasons the Anglo-American alliance worked. He not only promoted the careers of Marshal and Eisenhower but of George Patton as well. Because he never wrote a book that I know of, he disappeared into obscurity and no one seems to know his name or his teachings. Can anyone here add to my account?

 

Point 3 is the one that often don´t work. And to be honest, i never found a officer who was very diplomatic.
And as Eisenhower said: "In sheer ability and character, he was the outstanding soldier of my time."[SUP][/SUP]

 

I personally proposed, in response to another "what if" sort of question with General Connor as the replacement for "Big Mac" if he had been killed or captured in the Philippines. He was only slightly older than MacArthur (six years ?), and probably as capable if not more so than MacArthur for command. I (to this day), think that not including him in the effort was a major mistake by the US military. He had retired, as had MacArthur, and might very well have responded to the "call to duty" with gusto.

 

His policy was directly inspired by WWI (alliances, long trench wars etc...) . Therefore his theories were already old fashioned in 1939 and would not have worked in my opinion.
Many Europeans made the similar mistakes ( Maginot, but also many WWI Veterans Officers and politicians) and alliances did not stop Hitler (czecoslovaquia, Poland, France etc ).
The quick war didn't work either (Phoney war = long months with few losses and Blitzkrieg = fast but huge casualties)
As to diplomacy with Hitler? Munich showed its limits.

 

Hey Ulrich, your right on that number 3 point. However, I suspect that Connor's teaching was what was behind American desire to cross the Channel at the earliest possible time and get fighting the German Army. Eisenhower, Marshal and probably Roosevelt understood that there was a certain limit in time in which the public would be 100% behind the war, after which support would dwindle-especially if casualties were high to boot. This was a factor that our leaders didn't think about in the late 1960s and early 70s.

As far as soldierly dipolomacy goes, it's a little different than State Department diplomacy. I've read an account of Eisenhower firing an American officer before D-Day. He told the man, "I don't mind that you called him an SOB, it's the fact that you called him a British SOB!".

 

Skipper,

I think you missed the point. The fact that we had allies (USSR & GB) certainly helped keep our losses down. Would you have like to have us have fought the Third Reich on our own?

Diplomacy. Senior officers have to be politically astute. They have to understand the political situation in their allies' countries and of course, in their own. Contrast Rommel and Kesselring in Italy and why "Smiling Albert" was more effective-not only with the Italians, but with Hitler.

 

Thanks harolds! The military diplomacy is a diplomacy of a very small sort and its is often limited to persons of the same rank or at maximum to officers. Noramly the soldiers aren´t very good in dipolmacy therefore the Diplomats and the Politicians don´t understand how the Army works.
Connor had right with his points and as you mentioned they weren´t in use for the Korean and Vietnam war and if you take a close look, they´re actually not in use at AFG and the Iraq.

Hi Skipper, the Connor´s theory wasn´t that old fashioned as you will think. They are good, but the problem is that nobody hold to this points. And for Hitler, there were many so called "Top-Politicans that were to blind to see what Adolf´s targets were. And they played the same Vabanque game as he did! Youst a thought.

 

I did get the point. I simply foccus on the 1939 alliances, you on the post 1942 alliances. This Alliance started working because of the U.S was forced into war when Japan attacked her.

Germany had allies. Japan was a tough gamster, okay. Debating about the others would be another nice "what if" topic.

My point is that many WW2 successes were owed to modern, audacious strategies and technologies rather than theories based on WWI.

 

Actually I disagree that WW2 introduced any new technology or strategy that had not been developed by 1918.

The British Army of 1918 (and a lesser extent the French) was finally using combined arms, creeping-timed artillery barrage, breakthrough by massed tank with infantry and artillery support plus softening up by close tactical support aircraft and use of the radio to co-ordinate everything. Prior surveillance of the Battlefield was well reconnoitered by airplane and armed patrols, troops all well practiced and trained in the ground they were expected to take.

All that any sensible French\British (or American) General had to do was to apply these lessons with the greater firepower and equipment reliability available in WW2.

Amazingly, the one power which did not develop the technology\strategy in WW1 was Germany - but they learnt their lesson better the others, especially the French who went back to using the horse!



I can not see what is so clever about Connors views and they only seem to apply to American Forces - if you were a British Commander by 1941, you had no choice but to fight to the bitter end since the alternative was enslavement. I am sure that this is a misquote but as Churchill said - courage is going from one defeat to the next without giving up.

 

Thats easy said, That is how a war should run. Only fighting if the Politicians and Diplomates has no chance for a peaceful solution. Look for Allies makes it easier to win and it won´t cost that much for a single State. And winning quickly is neccessary to lower the cost of men and money and it has a psychological reason. Win before the People try to start questioning "Why make we war against...and are losing so many good young men?" What happens if that won´t work was to see at the Vietnam war.

 

Hmmm....I thought it was Germany that used the horse in WWII. Otherwise scipio, you are generally correct about the technology (other than some things like jet engines and atomic weapons) but the tactics (not strategy) you enumerated have been around since antiquity.

By the way folks, I made an error. His name is spelled Conner. My apologies. Conner's contribution to WWII was that he got Eisenhower's, Marshal's and even Patton's military thinking onto a higher plane as he realized that they would be the ones most likely to run the next war. He accurately predicted the war in Europe because of the treaty of Versailles.

 

Actually both armies did and the Germans were good at using the bicycle too. I remember pictures of September 1939 of Gamelin's incursion in Saarland with his soldiers bringing back looted bikes.
Both armies had learnt their lesson , but economics dictated the uses of cheaper warfare tools .
The last use of a cavalry charge by the French army was a charge at the Mareth line in 1943.

 

I don't to want send this tread off track. But I should have qualified my statement by saying no significant new technology was introduced on the battlefield - V1 V2 rockets, Henschel radio controlled flying bombs, jets, atomic bomb, radar etc had some influence on the wider war but not the battlefield. My view is that WW2 generals had less excuse for getting it wrong than WW1 ones who saw a plethora of new technologies and tactics on the battlefield.

The French having pioneered trucks to drag artillery around in WW1 then went and used huge 8 horse limbers in WW2 and these were an absolute nightmare constricting roads in the Dunkirk retreat. There were no horses in the German Panzer\Panzer Grenadier Divisions and it was these Divisions that did the damage at Dunkirk.

Back to Conner - If you are saying that he realised that Generals would in future need to consider the political aspect, then you are absolutely right. This was definitely a new dimension in WW2 and even more so today.

It is amazing how WW1 generals could ignore the politicians. Haig apparently wanted to shoot the ringleaders of the unrest caused by the slow demobilisation of the British Army in 1919!

 

Re. your comments on politics: absolutely!

The one point from Conner I think that perhaps E. & M. took too far was trying to finish the war in 1942-43 by an early cross-channel invasion. While I believe we actually could have invaded France with little cost in the Fall of 1943, an invasion in 1942 would have been way out of line. The British were right in that we needed to get some experience and N. Africa was the place to do it.