In 1941, the Army’s cavalry chief assured Congress that four well-spaced horsemen could charge half a mile across an open field to destroy an enemy machine-gun nest, without sustaining a scratch. There was also a mental unreadiness in many quarters. Army owned a total of 464 tanks, mostly puny light tanks with the combat power of a coffee can. The senior British military officer in Washington told London that American forces “are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.” In May 1940, the month that the German Blitzkrieg swept through the Low Countries and overran France, the U.S. Some American coastal defense guns had not been test fired in 20 years, and the Army lacked enough antiaircraft guns to protect even a single American city. At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing. Not a single officer on duty in 1941 had commanded a unit as large as a division in World War I. The average age of majors-a middling rank, between captain and lieutenant colonel-was nearly 48 in the National Guard, nearly one-quarter of first lieutenants were over 40 years old, and the senior ranks were dominated by political hacks of certifiable military incompetence. (It would grow to 8.3 million in 1945, a 44-fold increase.) When mobilization began in 1940, the Army had only 14,000 professional officers. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania. When the European war began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, the U.S. Army Was a Puny Weakling When the War Began This is a malleable list, and we can probably all agree that we’d like students to know more than only ten things. In an effort to get our arms around this stupendous catastrophe, the greatest calamity in human history, let’s examine ten points every American student ought to know about the U.S. That’s just one day, in a war that lasted 2,174 days and claimed an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every three seconds. For example, on this very date, May 2, in 1945, Berlin fell to the Red Army, and, in Italy, the war ended, as the surrender of German forces there took effect. Army in World War II is obviously a big subject.
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