Unlocking "Ridgway's Notebook"

"A Series on Theory" - Short Hits on Airborne Warfare

The astute military eye perhaps has picked up on an undercurrent through Ridgway’s Notebook. If they did—and stout of heart they are of following so closely my ramblings on!—they sensed the inspiration for starting this humble publication: division operations.

The US Army’s new catch phrase, wrapped in a nomenclature of buzzwords so voluminous and opaque as to require a special dictionary to decode it. The old wrapped in the new. The concepts, anyway. Let’s travel back to the time of old and, much like George Marshall did in his day, remove the “bonk, complication and ponderosities” and “uncover the essentials”—the fundamentals—of the subject.

It was the dawn of a new era where the army would have to learn division operations in a period of technological advancement. There was this new thing called “combined arms” and “mobile/maneuver warfare,” new force structures, robust airplanes, and fast tanks. To put it generously, what it all meant was not yet clear to everyone in army leadership. Idolizing this era of technological advancement was the 82nd Airborne Division. Its deployment overseas to Word War II was done without much practical testing of the airborne division as a division, in the missions it was supposed to enact.

Beginning with “Paratroopin’ from the Sea” some of the practical issues faced in Sicily were explored. Supply personnel not trained deeply enough, shortfalls in equipment. The non-identification of these in the USA were symptoms of inadequate division maneuvers.

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In the effort to make as much of the division as air-mobile as possible, they had left their services of supply without the trucks needed to transport the necessary commodities of war in the right volumes, their medical personnel inadequately equipped to deal with the realities of mobile warfare, and two of their four artillery battalions reliant on manpower(!) to move their 75 pack howitzers.

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They were emblematic of issues in employment. And while “Paratroopin’ from the Sea” enlivened the practical, “Ridgway’s Notes” painted with a broad brush the challenges General Ridgway, as division commander, faced in planning employment. It goes on to address the general views he developed in his mind about the future. But what is meant by this term employment so ubiquitously expressed throughout Ridgway’s Notebook?

Enter Major General William “Bud” Miley and the 17th Airborne Division. “Miley’s Notes,” the single most important in the roll-up, offers definition to the fundamentals. If Ridgway’s school of war was Sicily and Italy, Miley’s was North Carolina and Tennessee.

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Out of the July 15 discussion, they delineated in terms of tactical employment and tactical principles.

Tactical employment they understood as armament, methods of supply and other such functions that made the division capable of fighting. Tactical principles were the act of fighting.

Early on, up until the invasion of Sicily, the employment of the airborne division had been treated the same as a ground unit. Sicily had proven that to be fallacy…

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Starting with “Sharpening the Talon: Part 1,” a stark contrast between the two divisions begins to emerge. The 17th had the benefit of two division air-ground field maneuvers. It allowed them the benefit of discovery and refinement in a fail-safe environment. Told through the lens of casualty evacuation, the tunings were akin to the tunings made overseas by the veteran 82nd Airborne Division, a product of combat experiences.

Similar tunings, differing prices.

Conclusions independently so similar can only lead to a look at the one constant: they were all born in division operations.

In the context of the airborne division, training was perfected by General Miley. An innocuous pencil scribble at the bottom of the minutes from Miley’s July 15 conference is easily overlooked. But it summarized his approach to the salient matter:

Div will plan problems as map exercises or tactical walk-thru, [command post exercise] it, then have [U/I] put it on.

It echoed the spirit to education George Marshall toiled unceasingly to instill in the Army for 10 years against stiff resistance. In 1935 he wrote of (a) method he appreciated and used. “We worked it out first as a map problem, later carried it on as a war game—which consisted of a two-sided [command post exercise] indoors… Then this summer on the last day of camp, while they were packing up their tenting, etc., I took them all 18 miles to the site of the war game and worked it out as terrain exercises on the ground. This proved the most profitable part of the whole business, and a splendid lesson in map reading.”¹

It’s once again time for the Army to learn and hone this craft. When the paratrooper lands on a hostile drop zone, the commander should not have to afford learning institutional lessons for the first time, in battle.

The Reads📚

• War of Supply by David Dworak (University Press of Kentucky, 2023)

  • Key line: “US officers had failed to plan for the landing of a balanced assault force—one that could not only preform its combat mission but also sustain itself…”

• Battalion Commanders at War by Steven Thomas Barry (University Press of Kansas, 2013)

  • Key line: “A poorly trained unit cannot learn profitably by combat, since it is not prepared to make the most of the battle experiences it receives and the confidence that battle experience imparts to the soundly trained organization.”

1. George Marshall to Benjamin F. Caffey. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, Volume 1, The Soldierly Spirit, December 1880-June 1939. Johns Hopkins University Press (1981). p. 472