The Impact of Lessons Learned When Really Learned

World War II Soldier

In 1942, in the war in North Africa, the Americans were stung by a serious defeat at Kasserine Pass. In that defeat, their eyes were opening to the realities of war. They received a further sting from a British general’s biting criticism. General Alexander, the 18th Army Group Commander, called his American allies “soft, green, and quite untrained [lacking] the will to fight. My main anxiety,” he said— 

“is the poor fighting value of the Americans. They simply do not know their job as soldiers and this is the case from the highest to the lowest. Perhaps the weakest link of all is the junior leader, who just does not lead, with the result that their men don’t really fight.”[1]

But even as the U.S. soldier was licking his wounds, something was changing. Ruthlessly, Eisenhower began sacking incompetent commanders. Soldiers who could lead started doing so. The Brits, who had been fighting for almost two years, referred to the Americans’ experience as Kasserine as their “being blooded.” There is a line in Rick Atkinson’s history on the war in North Africa that succinctly describes this change. Atkinson’s line was this, that— 

“a great sorting out was under way: the competent from the incompetent, the courageous from the fearful, the lucky from the unlucky. It would happen faster in the American Army than it had in the British. Alexander was not wholly wrong, but he was wrong.”[2]

“The Battle of Kasserine Pass was humiliating.” That’s how one of General George C. Marshall’s biographers described it.[3] It had the effect, however, of galvanizing the American fighting spirit. Eisenhower himself spoke of “lessons learned,” and of how all his soldiers and commanders were actively “seeking from every possible source methods and means perfecting their own battlefield efficiency,” and of how good a teacher combat had been.[4] Kasserine Pass was to the Atlantic theater what Pearl Harbor had been in the Pacific. It was defeat, it didn’t taste very good, and it made GIs want to do something about it. 

What they did about it, first, was how to improve their battlefield tactics. In addition to having fresh new faces in several command slots, from brigade to corps, Americans set about to learn. They learned proper infantry tactics, the manual of arms, noise, light, and communications discipline. They became more careful about their defenses, their fighting positions, their camouflage, and they became more diligent in their training. They became more serious, more courageous, more determined. And they soon won back what they had lost at Kasserine. Eventually, with the help of their British partners, they pushed the Axis armies clean off the African continent. 

The GI, however, was never going to win the war by himself, and while he was turning things around at the individual and unit level, the nation backing him was also transforming. The arsenal of democracy was kicking itself into high gear. In 1942 and 1943, the United States “raised and equipped … fifty combat divisions …. The air force had grown thirty-five-fold, to 2 million men and more than 100,000 aircraft of all types.” For his part, General Marshall, the Army chief of staff, “intended to … see that the American soldier was not limited in ammunition or in equipment, that he had sufficient training and medical care, in other words, to see that for once in the history of [the] country he is given a fair break in the terrible business of making war.”[5] Marshall and the nation gave new meaning to the term American forces. 

These great strides aside, the areas where the Americans made the most critical improvements in their conduct of military operations was in their “capacity to make strategic decisions that balanced ends against means.[6] They learned the great value of allies and the art of coalition warfare. They knew that Hitler’s armies would, sooner or later, have to be faced on the continent of Europe. But they did not challenge him there until they were ready. They were a different army on the summer of 1944 than they had been at Kasserine Pass. They made mistakes, yes, plenty of them; but they had learned by then that maxim of warfare that victory tends to go to the side that makes the least mistakes. Not that this was a matter of sheer luck, but rather that as a direct result of their rapid and profound improvement—in operational planning, in intelligence, in resourcing their formations, in leadership, in strategic bombing—they forced their enemies to make far more mistakes than he otherwise would have just by the law of averages. And, what must have really impressed General Alexander, was the great strides made in the improvement of junior leaders. 

Effective military operations, the kind that produce victory, are among the most difficult things to achieve. Sometimes, the catalyst that leads to victory is a defeat. This was so, at least for the American Army in World War II. Thinking that the war would be easy, perhaps just because they, the Americans, were now in it, was one of the things that led to the embarrassing defeat at Kasserine Pass. That battle, however, lit a fire under the U.S. soldier and the organization in which he fought. Incompetence was cast off like the plague—for a plague is what it was. Men became serious about their training, their equipment, their duties, their buddies, in short, everything about the job of fighting a war. This deepening of seriousness in the soldier was reflected in the purposefulness of the nation. The year of the Army’s defeat in North Africa because the turning point of the war. From that point, the American forces continually improved at all things necessary to win the war, and they kept improving until the war was won.

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[1] Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 377.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990), 380.

[4] Ibid., 381.

[5] Ibid., 403.

[6] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War To be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), x.