The Making Of The American G.I.

By John Keegan

There is something Kiplingesque about the modern American warrior. He is a volunteer and a professional, as the long-serving regular of Rudyard Kipling's day was. He is a patriot; his modern British comrades, patriots themselves but shy of admitting it, express surprise at the American warrior's outspoken devotion to flag and homeland. He feels a personal relationship with his Commander in Chief, the President, as Kipling's archetypal soldier, Tommy Atkins, seems to have done with his Queen. Above all, like Tommy, he ships out. Ordered to a strange corner of the world, often at the ends of the earth, he packs his kit, says his farewells and departs. He does not ask how long he will be away or where he is going or why. If the President gives the word, that is enough.

America's armed forces are becoming imperial without their country's becoming imperialist. There is an important difference. Empires take many forms. One is that of an entity that exercises power far from its base without assuming political authority. That promises to be the new American way. America has always been and remains profoundly anti-imperialist.

Offered the opportunity to exercise direct power--in the Philippines, in China, in Vietnam--America's military representatives on the ground always sought to foster domestic rule on the American national model. Whatever mistakes American commanders have made, even in Vietnam, that of trying to usurp power has not been one of them. Americans are incurably democratic, often to their disadvantage.

Hence the distinctive character of the American military. I first learned its flavor through my father, a soldier of the First World War. After that war, he served as a member of the army of occupation in defeated Germany. He made friends with doughboys. Their high-spirited and easygoing ways delighted him. When the G.I.s appeared in my corner of embattled Britain in 1943, I saw what had attracted him. G.I.s were ambassadors of their country: easy, outgoing, generous and above all, ready to make friends. So they did. Every unattached girl acquired an American boyfriend--60,000 G.I. brides went back to America in 1945.

Then, overnight it seemed, the G.I.s disappeared. They had gone to D-day to begin the liberation of Europe. It was a campaign that put American soldiers side by side with British, not always with happy results. Many of the British were veterans of the battles against Rommel in the Western Desert. They considered themselves hardened campaigners and thought the G.I.s amateurs. The Americans expended vast quantities of ammunition to gain ground and expected air support in every attack. They were also much more generously equipped than the British, regarded luxuries as necessities and seemed to have money to burn. American privates were better paid than British junior officers.

The G.I.s learned fast, but the British continued to regard the Americans as junior partners long after American divisions were teaching their German enemies lessons in mobility and maneuvers. It was the Americans who led the breakout from Normandy. It was American parachutists who seized all their objectives at Nijmegen and Eindhoven while the British parachutists were defeated at Arnheim in the same operation.

"Combat snobbery" was a term used to define the British attitude; it also applied to America's new German allies when the Federal Republic joined NATO in 1955. The German veterans who had fought in the great tank battles against the Russians on the eastern front made it plain that they doubted the ability of America's postwar army to check a Soviet offensive if the cold war ever became hot. The Germans, like the British before them, pointed to American reliance on firepower and air cover, an expectation of overgenerous supply of materials, as reasons to question the U.S. Army's capacity to meet the Soviet forces on equal terms. What they heard of America's performance in Vietnam, once that war began, reinforced their skepticism.

The latter stages of the war in Vietnam marked a low point in the American services' fortunes. Opposition to the war at home isolated the armed forces, and the antiwar mood was transmitted to the theater of combat. A key group of Vietnam veterans, among them Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and Tommy Franks, became reformers. They recognized that combat units had been drip-fed individual replacements, instead of being sent whole units, and the reserves had not been mobilized. As a result, all units had too many men who had only just arrived or alternatively were soon to leave.

They determined that such a situation should never recur. With the abolition of the draft and the inception of the all-volunteer services, they saw the opportunity to create units that could be trained to the highest level, as long as the high quality of the entrants was guaranteed. The solution was found in the plan to offer enlistees free college education at the completion of their term of service--and the services found no shortage of recruits.

Thus were born the new American services, which since 1990 have fought five wars--in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq--with outstanding success. Even a superpower, however, is only as good as the forces through which it exercises that power. But Pax Americana, like Pax Britannica, is guaranteed by a body of servicemen and -women who have no equal elsewhere on the globe.

Sir John Keegan is a distinguished military historian