Sua Sponte  – US Army Rangers in the Modern Era
Part One  –  Who are the Rangers?
by James L. Rairdon, DM, FLMI

Field Marshal Douglas Haig
Nickname(s): “Master of the Field”, “The Butcher of the Somme”, ‘Butcher’ Haig
Born: 19 June 1861, Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, Scotland
Died: 29 Jan 1928, 21 Prince’s Gate, London, England
Allegiance: United Kingdom
Service/branch:British Army
Years of service: 1884–1920
Rank: Field Marshal
Commands held: British Expeditionary Force (1915–19); First Army (1914–15); I Corps (1914); Aldershot Command (1912–14); Chief of the General Staff in India (1909–12); 17th Lancers (1901–03); 3rd Cavalry Brigade (1900)
Battles/wars: Mahdist War, Second Boer War, First World War
Awards: Knight of the Order of the Thistle, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, Member of the Order of Merit, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire,
Mentioned in Dispatches.

   Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE was a senior officerof the British Army during the First World War. He commanded the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front from late 1915 until the end of the war. He was commander during the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras, the Third Battle of Ypres, the German Spring Offensive, and the Hundred Days Offensive.

    Although he had gained a favorable reputation during the immediate post-war years, with his funeral becoming a day of national mourning, Haig has since the 1960s become an object of criticism for his leadership during the First World War. He was nicknamed “Butcher Haig” for the two million British casualties endured under his command. The Canadian War Museum comments, “His epic but costly offensives at the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) have become nearly synonymous with the carnage and futility of First World War battles.” Conversely he led the BEF during the final Hundred Days Offensive when it decisively crossed the Canal du Nord and broke through the Hindenburg line capturing 195,000 German prisoners. This campaign led to the armistice of 11 November 1918 and is considered by some historians to be one of the greatest victories ever achieved by a British-led army.

    Major-General Sir John Davidson, one of Haig’s biographers, praised Haig’s leadership, and since the 1980s many historians have argued that the public hatred in which Haig’s name had come to be held failed to recognize the adoption of new tactics and technologies by forces under his command, the important role played by British forces in the allied victory of 1918, and that high casualties were a consequence of the tactical and strategic realities of the time.

General John Joseph Pershing

Nickname: “Black Jack”
Born: 13 Sept 1860 on a farm near Laclede, Missouri.
Died: 15 July 1948 Walter Reed General Hospital Washington, D.C.
Buried: Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia
Allegiance: United States
Service/branch: US Army
Years of service: 1886–1924
Rank: General of the Armies
Commands held: 8th Brigade; Mexican Expedition; American Expeditionary Force; First United States Army; Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
Battles/wars: Indian Wars; Apache Wars, Sioux Wars;
Spanish–American War; Battle of San Juan Hill; Philippine–American War; Moro Rebellion; Russo-Japanese War; Mexican Revolution; Pancho Villa Expedition; World War I; Western Front
Awards: Distinguished Service Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star, Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (United Kingdom), Légion d'honneur (France).

    General of the Armies John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing’s most famous post was when he served as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) on the Western Front in World War I, 1917–18

    Pershing rejected British and French demands that American forces be integrated with their armies, and insisted that the AEF would operate as a single unit under his command, although some American divisions fought under British command, and he also allowed all-black units to be integrated with the French army. His soldiers first saw serious battle at Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Soissons.

    To speed up the arrival of the ‘doughboys’*, they embarked for France leaving the heavy equipment behind, and used British and French tanks, artillery, airplanes and other munitions. In September 1918 at St. Mihiel, the First Army was directly under Pershing’s command; it overwhelmed the salient–the encroachment into Allied territory – that the German Army had held for three years.

    For the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Pershing shifted roughly 600,000 American soldiers to the heavily defended forests of the Argonne, keeping his divisions engaged in hard fighting for 47 days, alongside the French. The Allied Hundred Days Offensive, which the Argonne fighting was part of, contributed to Germany calling for an armistice. Pershing was of the opinion that the war should continue and that all of Germany should be occupied in an effort to permanently destroy German militarism

    Pershing is the only American to be promoted in his own lifetime to General of the Armies rank, the highest possible rank in the United States Army. Allowed to select his own insignia, Pershing chose to use four gold stars to distinguish himself from those officers who held the rank of General, which was signified with four silver stars. After the creation of the five-star General of the Army rank during World War II, his rank of General of the Armies could unofficially be considered that of a six-star general, but he died before the proposed insignia could be considered and acted on by Congress.

    Some of his tactics have been criticized both by other commanders at the time and by modern historians. His reliance on costly frontal assaults, long after other Allied armies had abandoned such tactics, has been blamed for causing unnecessarily high American casualties. In addition to leading the A.E.F. to victory in World War I, Pershing notably served as a mentor to many in the generation of generals who led the United States Army during World War II, including George Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Lesley J. McNair, George S. Patton, and Douglas MacArthur.

[SOURCE: Wikipedia and various others] *    Doughboy was an informal term for a member of the U.S. Army or Marine Corps, especially used to refer to members of the American Expeditionary Forces in WW I, but initially used in the Mexican–American War. A popular mass-produced sculpture of the 1920s designed by E. M. Viquesney–The Spirit of the American Doughboy–shows a U.S. soldier in WW I uniform. The American usage was adopted in the UK by 1917. Although it was best known from its usage for American troops in WW I, the origins of the term are unclear. The word was in wide circulation a century earlier in both Britain and America, albeit with different meanings. Horatio Nelson’s sailors and the Duke of Wellington’s soldiers in Spain, were both familiar with fried flour dumplings called “doughboys”, the precursor of the modern doughnut. Independently, in the former colonies, the term had come to be applied to bakers’ young apprentices, i.e., “dough-boys”. In Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville nicknamed the timorous cabin steward “Doughboy.” Doughboy as applied to the infantry of the U.S. Army first appears in accounts of the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848, without any precedent that can be documented. A number of theories have been put forward to explain this usage:

1) Cavalrymen used the term to deride foot soldiers, because the brass buttons on their uniforms looked like the flour dumplings or dough cakes called “doughboys”, or because of the flour or pipe clay which the soldiers used to polish their white belts.

2) Observers noticed U.S. infantry forces were constantly covered with chalky dust from marching through the dry terrain of northern Mexico, giving the men the appearance of unbaked dough or the mud bricks of the area known as adobe, with “adobe” transformed into “doughboy”.

3) The soldiers’ method of cooking field rations of the 1840s and 1850s into doughy flour-and-rice concoctions baked in the ashes of a camp fire. This does not explain why only infantrymen received the appellation. One explanation offered for the usage of the term in WW I is that female Salvation Army volunteers went to France to cook millions of doughnuts and bring them to the troops on the front line, although this explanation ignores the usage of the term in the earlier war. One joke explanation for the term’s origin was that, in WW I, the doughboys were “kneaded” in 1914 but did not “rise” until 1917.
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