Well-Tempered Amateurs

ELEVEN GENERALS (355 pp.)--Flefcher Praff--Sloane ($5).

Ask the average citizen what the U.S. military tradition consists of and he might mumble something about plenty of planes, tanks and guns. In Eleven Generals, Military Chronicler Fletcher Pratt argues that the unique U.S. contribution is something different: the inbred American conviction that "wars are ultimately won through the aimed fire of individuals."

From the Revolution on, Pratt thinks, the basis of U.S. military success has been the well-tempered amateur squinting down a rifle barrel. "Don't fire till you can see the whites of their eyes" was plain common sense to colonials facing the parade-ground tactics of the 18th Century Brit ish army; later, as any World War II infantryman who sweated out the world's most thorough rifle instruction in training camp knows, the common sense of the 17703 became doctrine. Pratt leaves it to his publishers, in a jacket blurb, to add that "the national tradition that included Daniel Boone and the Mountain Man . . . would naturally produce high-altitude precision bombing, and the Task Force in a later century." Pratt himself concentrates on the infantryman.

Infantry on Horseback. His eleven generals (not necessarily the best), from the Revolution's Nathanael Greene to Omar Bradley, include several that few readers ever heard of, e.g., Indian Fighter Richard Mentor Johnson and Grant's divisional commander, James Harrison Wilson. Each, says Pratt, operated on the simple basis that "nobody is going to win a battle until somebody goes in there on foot and wins it with a hand gun."

Pratt begins with essays on the temper and tactics of such well-known generals as Greene, who forced Cornwallis into his hopeless position at Yorktown, and "Mad Anthony" Wayne, the hero of Fallen Timbers. But it is Country Squire Jacob Brown, onetime secretary of Alexander Hamilton, whom Chronicler Pratt considers "the best battle captain in the history of the nation." Once, during a British attack at Buffalo in the War of 1812, Brown's Kentucky squirrel hunters (under General Gaines) emptied the first two boats so quickly that the others didn't even come in. Brown, says Pratt, had "some ineluctable secret of leadership that made green country boys fight like the devil . . ."

In much the same way, another amateur-turned-general, Richard Mentor Johnson, licked Tecumseh by using cavalry as mounted infantry. In the Civil War, two Northern generals, John Buford and Phil Sheridan, carried Johnson's tactic still further; they broke completely with the flashy hit & run use of men on horseback, and employed cavalry as "a fast motorized column of infantry."

Cannon for Doughfeet. Four of Pratt's eleven are Civil War generals, all of them Northern. The best of the studies in this group is that of George H. Thomas, "the old gray mare of the Union," a Virginia-born artilleryman who commanded infantry and was certain that the chief role of the big guns was to give the footsloggers a hand. Wearing his finest uniform, "all togged out like a Christmas tree," the famed Rock of Chickamauga "rode along the line, bellowing in a voice audible to every man within a hundred yards that help was coming; all they had to do was keep down and shoot low."

From the U.S. Army of World War I, Pratt picks Charles P. Summerall, another artilleryman who rose to be a corps commander. Unlike his big-gun colleagues who advocated steamroller barrages, Summerall believed in pinpoint targets, but what endears him most to Pratt is his flat belief that "artillery exists only to protect and support infantry."

Among Marine officers, only Vandegrift is considered, and Pratt describes his handling of the Guadalcanal action with fine clarity. The casualty figures underline the sharpshooter tradition perfectly. Japanese dead: 32,000; U.S.: 2,000. The second World War II choice is Bradley, of whom Pratt says flatly: "The ablest soldier in any service during World War II."

Readers who know that it takes ships, planes, artillery and service troops to get the infantryman within range of a live target, may feel that Pratt has cheered the role of the foot soldier to the point of oversimplification. Actually he takes nothing away from the other arms; his peep-sight view merely assumes that their work had already been done. None of these sketches is exhaustive, but every one is readable, informal history that few armchair tacticians would wish to miss and few professional soldiers could fail to learn from. What will keep Eleven Generals and many a plain reader apart is its inflationary price.

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