I have been watching a lot of war movies lately and it has struck me that since the Spanish-American War most officers above the rank of capt spend their time away from the front lines and their troops. I am currently watching Gettysburg (again) and if you have seen it you will notice that all of the officers including generals are at the front lines with their men. It has always been the officers that have led their men all the way back to Washington, Napoleon, Grant and Lee etc. After the Spanish/American war however the more rank you got the further removed you were from actual combat. No there are a handful of generals and other officers that were with the troops but as a whole they seem to have disappeared. Today's army is even worse to an extent. You will only see a general at a change of command ceremony or a review of the troops. This trend has hit the army of all countries so it must be correct. Apparently you can "lead from behind". Has anyone else noticed this?

__________________
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. General Douglas Macarthur

I've noticed it to Steve. During WW2 commanders still led from the front. Reichanau, Rommel, Patton, and many others.

As it is now most Generals aren't even in the field instead their giving press conferences. This is partly because wars have all this media coverage for some reason, but still a leader should be in the field with his men. Press conferences should be left to staff officers.

__________________
"Family, friends, religion. These are the demons you must slay if you are to become successfull in bussiness. When opportunity knocks, you don't want to be sitting in some phoney-baloney church... or a SINAGOGUE!" - Montgomery Burns

Just read about a grunt lying in a ditch, when someone thumps in beside him. Looking up he stares into the eyes of a buddy in the ditch with him, Maxwell Taylor..."Kinda hot around here, ain't it trooper?" he said and jumped up with carbine in hand and moved on.

General Taylor was not one of those content with leading from the rear. I am sure there were many others.

Let's not permit media hype to cloud history. We often do that. Generals have other work to do.

It is not really the place for a General to be in the front lines. That place is reserved for Lieutenants and Captains who lead their platoons and companies into the fight. They often suffer disproportionate casualties as a result.

Generals the like of Patton and Rommel stir our hearts because of their flair and bravery in action but it is the good general who wins wars and campaigns. Generals such as those are usually found in the rear, directing supply lines and organising replacement pools, training areas, etc.

Such 'rear echelon" Generals are often maligned for their lack of flair. Montgomery and Bradley come quickly to mind. But they understand the concept (and the importance) of how an army marches on its stomach.

Generals with the mind of a corporal can never grasp this and lose campaign after campaign, not learning the art of grand strategy.

__________________
If dogs don't go to heaven, I'd like to go where they go.

Good point, MajorD...

Although we thrill to exploits of Generals-in-the-field, by being too close to the action they can lose the overview so necessary to conduct their forces to the maximum effect.

One thinks for instance of Urquhart at Arnhem in almost hand-to-hand contact with the enemy, yet he has been criticised for not remaining at the rear and so losing all influence on events.

Ironically, when it worked well, Montgomery's system of remaining close behind the line but with a team of dynamic liaison officers reporting back to him could be extremely effective. Allied to Montgomery's 'PR' method of personally adressing troops, he did not appear to British Army soldiers as being 'distant'.

There has to be a balance, though. The WW1 'chateau generals' commanded little respect, then or now.... [img]graemlins/no.gif[/img]

__________________
"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

How is it that since WW1 it has been fairly easy for a general to be at the front and be able to return to his HQ for needs to be done there while during the Civil War and before a general never had that kind of mobility and was still able to be at the front lines and trake care of supply and replacements.

__________________
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. General Douglas Macarthur

Probably of little interest, but this sentiment/analysis bears little relevant to Commando officers.

No.9

In the ETO, during WWII, the American Army used huge amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel and huge quantities of artillery ammunition. This all had to be supplied through the beaches until first, Marseille was opened and then Antwerp. Supply of these two critical requirements was always short and often, convoys intended for Divisional dumps were hi-jacked by Generals for their own usage. George Patton comes immediately to mind as one who took whatever he needed. And he was the one who complained most about other Generals hogging all the supplies.

In the American Civil War (ACW), the primary mode of transport was the horse. Armies foraged the land for their needs.

In the ACW, when a regiment was destroyed it was replaced by a new replacement regiment. In WWII when a regiment was destroyed it was rotated out of the front line, brought up to strength by replacement soldiers and then re-trained before going back to the front line.

Of course, Generals in the ACW did not have the luxury of radios, personal aircraft and armoured vehicles to move around, so they would have to go on horseback to the front line to evaluate a situation then return to their command post to plan an operation. Events moved at a much slower pace. Also, once a battle commenced there was little they could do to influence events outside of using runners ro relay messages.

The two wars are not at all comparable and I expect that future wars will not be comparable either.

__________________
If dogs don't go to heaven, I'd like to go where they go.

Hi MajorD, I'm not comparing wars, just noting that the more mobile armies have become the less frequent we see generals at the front lines.

__________________
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. General Douglas Macarthur

and the more mobile a war becomes the less wise it is for a commanding officer to come have a look-see. Modern battles differ from old-fashioned battles in that most of them now cover vast distances, it would be impossible for a general on the front line to get a clear picture of the whole battle.

__________________
if in doubt....Panic!!!!

Hi Redcoat, My reference to army mobility was a comparison to say horse versus Jeep. If Grant and Lee could travel by horse to the front lines and still return to their HQ why cant a modern general do the same thing by jeep or other vehicle.

__________________
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. General Douglas Macarthur

Because from a military standpoint it would be a complete waste of time. thanks to modern communications it's easy for the commanding general to gain a good viewpoint of the whole battle while at headquarters, but if he's stuck at the front in the middle of a battle,where communication tends to be difficult. He won't have a clue about what's going on on other parts of the battlefield.
Going to the front line in the middle of a battle may be good PR, but that's all it would be.

__________________
if in doubt....Panic!!!!

Hi Redcoat, The whole point of a general being at the front is so that his troops know that he is in it with them not sitting comfortably at a desk at HQ.

__________________
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. General Douglas Macarthur

I think that it is the rear where generals ought to be. First of all, because they already have been junior officers who shared a little bit more of the 'front'. Second, they are aged people - even if not much - who cannot be sleeping in trenches and running hither and tither. Rommel made this in WWII and the result was that his health was severely damaged. And third and maybe most important of all, that you cannot allow to have generals KIA and that is a major risk when they are in the front line. Generals are 1% of all Armies and if you lose that 1% automatically the remaining 99% of your Army finds itself be-headed and useless.

However, there are certain exceptions to the rule. And I am going to refer only WWI and WWII examples, avoiding other ages examples.

In WWI, it is obvious that men as Joffre, Haig and Ludendorff couldn't be in the filthy and flooded trenches commanding millions of men from there. Why? Because it's impossible to command from there, it is to risky and not proper for a general. (I am not saying that it wouldn't have been useful, since men like Haig would have known that attacking through the mud at Ypres was impossible...) But in WWI not even NCOs were at the trenches... you barely saw a platton or company commander, forget about batallion or regiment commanders. When did you see a captain in the mud with the rats?! Never! And there's where the problem is. Those officers did have to be in the trenches seeing the horrible situation. WWI precisely had so many useless casualties because of officer's incompetence. A captain in his bunker thought that a line on a map called enemy trench could be taken with his men's bayonets though he had never seen that trench. The he ordered the NCOs to carry on the attack by telephone and the NCO had no other option but to send his men against machine guns and barbed wire... And when the first wave failed, the captain wanted a second, and a third, an even a fourth. In the night, his batallion was gone, no enemy trench had been taken but the captain won a medal because of his bravery. [img]graemlins/no.gif[/img] That's an insult for the men... You had of course, exceptions like field marshal Von Mackensen in WWI who commanded from the back of his horse in a Napoleon-like way. Or brigadier general Sir Hugh Elles who commanded his Royal Tank Corps from the back of his own steel horse... But as Martin says, most WWI generals were sitting drinking wine in their Châteaus yelling everybody on the phone and sending thousands of troops to useless and secure deaths.

In WWII you have a very important improvement in comunication thanks to the radio and therefore it's easy for divisional commander or even corps commanders like Rommel, Guderian, Model to see the action themselves and react in the quickliest way. But do you think that field marshal Von Bock or Von Runstedt could have had huge annihilation battles like those in Minsk, Smolijensk or Kiev by commanding from the first tank in the front? Of course not. They had to command hundreds of thousands of men, thousands of guns, tanks, planes and millions of tons of supplies. You can only do that by having a headquarters full with maps, telephones, radios and a bunch of staff-officers.

Another example: Stalingrad. Can you imagine general Friedrich Paulus sitting with a telephone in the rubble of the tractor factory, avoiding sharpshooters' bullets while he commands 350.000 men in the city?! You can say that lieutenant general Vasili Chuikov did command his Army from a filthy hole inside the rubble of the city. Yes, he did that because there was a river between his forces and because his forces were only a Army Corps!

In modern wars, in which you can see the action when it happens and how it happens in CNN then it's far easier to seat in your headquarters and react as if you were in the very front.

__________________
"War is less costly than servitude, the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau." - Jean Dutourd, French veteran of both world wars

"A mon fils: depuis que tes yeux sont fermes les miens n’ont cessé de pleurir." - Mère française, Verdun

I have almost finished General Patton's book "War as I Knew It".
Man that is one hell of a read if you think you know anything about this topic, this book will set you straight. Highly recommended!

he says,

"......we were to move our command post from Erlangen to Regensburg or Ratisbon, where Napoleon fought the famous battleand inspired the poem beginning, You know we French took Ratisbon, about a mile away, On a little mound Napoleon stood, etc.
Apparently army commanders did not get as relatively near the front in those days as they do now."

Hmmm, relatively.........

__________________
If dogs don't go to heaven, I'd like to go where they go.

Try also to get hold of a copy of ' The Patton Papers ' ( edited by Martin Blumenson ), MajorD - equally good to read and less 'watered down'....

__________________
"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson