In 1933, as a Lieutenant Colonel for the second time, Lesley McNair took command of 2nd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery Regiment at Fort Bragg, which changed shortly thereafter to 2nd Battalion 83rd Field Artillery Regiment. He would command the Regiment for about a year.
He would later serve as a commander with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), where he planned, directed, and supervised a wide array of CCC activities that also provided him the benefit of experience in that wide array of activities including mobilization.
McNair would also benefit from experiences with the housing and care of thousands of CCC members and working to improve their physical and mental resilience.
Likewise, his experiences working with civilian governments while commanding these CCC activities would prove beneficial later in his career.
This is an interesting 9 min video that talks a bit about the Civilian Conservation Corps in South Dakota. McNair was in Louisiana and Mississippi when he worked with the CCC, but the history of the program is the same and the type of work they did too. pbs.org/video/the-civi…
As a Colonel, McNair would serve as the Chief of Field Artillery, which one would assume involves a significant amount of work and yet he found the time to continue his experiments to improve artillery weapons and equipment, and he took time for self-directed studies and writing.
Interestingly, one of the things McNair wrote about in the late 1930s was autogiros, which are kind of like funny helicopters but not. He gathered research over 6 months and wrote a 13-page article about them. This work “anticipated the use of helicopters in modern warfare.”
It's sometimes spelled in different ways but the source material spelled it autogiro so that's what we went with. For those curious, here's a brief video that talks about how they worked.
And here's a briefer video that shows one taking off, flying, and landing and other home movie-style footage.
In 1937, two years after making Colonel, McNair was promoted again to Brigadier General and sent to command the 2nd Field Artillery Brigade @2INFDIV
In earlier threads we talked about the @USArmy changing from Square Divisions to Triangular Divisions. Well, @2INFDIV was chosen to test this concept. McNair took on additional duty to supervise the test division’s design, field tests, reports, etc.
He was sent back to @USACGSC in 1939. The Army Chief of Staff, Malin Craig, believed that the school needed an update to teaching methods and to streamline the planning and reporting processes they were teaching. General Craig saw McNair as just the man for the job.
The Deputy Chief of Staff, Marshall, thought that @USACGSC needed to change the way they taught leadership to include more flexibility, especially with things like planning mobilization, but also focus on maneuver-based operations (different from the trench warfare of WWI).
Marshall also recognized that CGSC needed to consider teaching leaders to train conscripts (draftees), Reservists, National Guardsmen – soldiers “who would report for duty with less training and experience than members of the Regular Army.”
McNair addressed the issues in several ways. He updated the curriculum at @USACGSC again, but he also shortened the course in an effort to better accommodate the @USNationalGuard and @USArmyReserve officers who might not be able to attend CGSC otherwise.
And in classic McNair style, why stop there when he could also update the @USArmy Field Service Manual? Which he did.
McNair joined the US Army General Headquarters (GHQ) staff in July of 1940, where he would serve as of Chief of Staff. GHQ would be responsible for the mobilization, training, equipping, and organization of the @USArmy forces that would fight in WWII.
George C. Marshall was the Army Chief of Staff and also commander of GHQ, but delegated GHQ command to McNair so that he (Marshall) could focus on his other responsibilities as Army Chief of Staff.
McNair would play a significant part in the planning and conducting of the GHQ Maneuvers in 1940 and 1941, particularly in Louisiana and the Carolinas.
These war games offered training experience with large-scale combat operations and provided the Army a chance to observe and assess training, leadership, Doctrine, and other aspects of the Maneuvers. The Army could also test new and changed Doctrine, equipment, and weapons.
If you're just tuning in or you've missed any of the previous threads, you can find them all saved on this account under ⚡️Moments or with this direct link twitter.com/i/events/13642…
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Operation Chastise was a night bombing raid carried out by the @RoyalAirForce on the evening of 16 May 1943. This raid is also referred to as the Dambusters Raid because the bombers were targeting several dams in the Ruhr industrial area, in western Germany.
The Möhne Dam, the Sorpe Dam, and the Eder Dam. Destruction would affect hydroelectric power plants as well as the industries depending on the water. There was also potential for flooding cities and nearby areas if the dams were broken.
It seems like it’s about time for a #TankTwitter thread, so today we will talk about the first, largely intact, Tiger I captured by the Allies.
The Tiger I was a heavy tank that provided Hitler’s army with the first armored fighting vehicle to feature a mounted 88mm gun. It was big and scary, and it was expensive, both to build and to maintain, which is partly why only a little over 1300 were built.
On Tuesday we talked about the Battle of Sidi Bou Zid, and that thread also served as a primer for the third episode of the accompanying #WhyWeFight1943 podcast.
“In their January attacks Axis units puzzled Allied commanders by limiting their own advances and abandoning key positions. Soon, however, the enemy displayed more determination.”
On Tuesday, we talked about the secret multi-day trip that President Roosevelt took from the White House on 9 JAN to Casablanca, arriving on 14 JAN, in order to attend a highly classified series of meetings with his British counterpart, Winston Churchill.
This conference involved both FDR and Churchill, and their most trusted senior staff and senior military leaders. During the meetings they established the way forward for the Allies in this war, mapping out “the grand strategy for both the European and the Pacific Theaters.”
George Patton was put in command of the Western Task Force, which sailed from the east coast of the US right to Morocco for Operation Torch. The other two task forces sailed from the UK.
Patton was on the USS Augusta, which was under the command of Admiral Hewitt (next to Patton in the picture). That little pouch on the front of Patton's belt is actually a police handcuff pouch but Patton used it for a compass.
Everyone knows that the United States used two atomic bombs in the Pacific in World War II, and that the US was the only nation in the war to use this new type of weapon. This week we will take a look at the efforts to create these bombs.
The Manhattan Project technically ran from 1942 until 1946, but the American effort itself had actually started in 1939, and we had British counterparts already working on nuclear weapons development by the time the United States jumped on that train.⚛️