West Point was a vastly different place in the interwar era than it is today. It was much harder to get into and graduate from. Its system of academic and military instruction had a different focus. And its corps of cadets had a different socio-economic composition. In short, it was an institution that had only a vague resemblance to its modern successor, in ethos, flavor, and philosophy.
Contrary to the assertions of historians like Stephen Ambrose, admission to West Point in the early 20th Century was predicated on more than just an ability to read, write, and do simple arithmetic (the statutory requirements for admission); it also involved a rigorous, exhaustive, and comprehensive three-day long examination that covered almost every subject in the typical high school or undergraduate curriculum. Ambrose got it wrong because he confused winning a nomination to the Academy with gaining admission to the Academy—two very different things. Candidates who secured a nomination still had to pass the extremely difficult admissions test. Many (and in some years most) nominees were not admitted. Unlike today, when West Point bases only about 60 percent of its admission decision on intellect and academic achievement, the interwar Academy’s admissions calculus rested completely on measures of mental acuity. The sole purpose of the admissions process was to ascertain a candidate’s intellectual fitness for a commission and subsequent assignments as an officer.
Most candidates spent considerable time preparing for the entrance exam. Many, like David Eisenhower, attended one of the scores of one-year “cram” schools to ready themselves for the challenge. Others, up to 50 percent in some years, attended civilian colleges to prepare for the test. In 1921, one successful applicant spent four years at Yale and entered the Academy with a B.A. He was an outlier, of course, but was not entirely unrepresentative of the quality of applicants attracted to the Academy in that era. Many collegians spent one to four years attending civilian schools before taking the Academy’s admissions test. Perhaps the quality of the applicants transferring from a civilian college can best be illustrated by considering the academic backgrounds of students who failed to win admission. In 1931, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania was rejected for admission because he was adjudged to be unprepared for West Point’s rigorous curriculum, largely because he was incapable of handling the math. Failed applicants also included students who had attended colleges like Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, Berkley, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Unlike today, when the Academy essentially tries to educate the motivated, in the interwar years, it tried to motivate the educated (and, it should be added, abundantly intelligent). [1]
But a candidate’s admission to the Academy was only the first hurdle he had to negotiate. The next, and even more formidable obstacle, was the Academy’s STEM-laden academic program. A large portion of the cadets who were accepted at the Academy failed to successfully finish West Point’s difficult curriculum. In the interwar era, 35 to 40 percent of each entering class did not graduate. The overwhelming bulk of the failures were for academics.
West Point’s focus on engineering and mathematics largely explains this high failure rate. These subjects were more difficult and less forgiving than the humanities and social sciences. Even today we know that history and social science majors lag physics and math majors in standardized tests of mental ability and academic achievement. At West Point, this certainly holds true. Cadets who score above 1400 on the SAT cluster in the math and physics departments. Law, sociology, and other social sciences attract students at the other end of the intellectual scale. West Point gradually shifted away from its rigorous STEM-curriculum after Vietnam principally because it felt it had to make itself more attractive to and retain the less capable students that it was getting.
West Point’s primary purpose in maintaining its STEM curriculum was vetting. To be sure, tradition played a part but weeding out the unfit, incapable, and incurious was the institution’s primary motivation. It wanted to shed low-performing cadets and ensure that its graduates were intellectually up to their duties in an Army that was focused on national mobilization and all that implied from a cognitive standpoint. Some have criticized West Point for this, arguing that a broader curricular focus would have produced more well-rounded leaders who would be able to understand all facets of national security. This idea misses a fundamental point. The Academy was not interested in producing scholars and subject matter experts but abundantly intelligent, mentally agile leaders capable of directing large armies, fashioning grand strategy, and adjusting to a wide range of security threats. The Army did not want domain expertise in its graduates but graduates capable of domain transfer, a much rarer and precious quality that a college cannot develop but must acquire though strict admissions standards. In the environment in which the Academy was operating, IQ trumped everything else, including a broad, liberal arts education.
Critics scored West Point for using serving officers as faculty instead of civilian scholars. West Point may have had first class students but a second-class faculty, was the assertion. Again, this misses the point and reflects a civilian academic perspective. West Point did not employ scholars, but it did employ intelligent, professional army officers who were focused on evaluation and assessment. They were engaged to ensure that the cadets who graduated had the “right stuff.” Cadets were quizzed every day in every subject and those that couldn’t absorb the instruction or didn’t prepare for class fell by the wayside.
In proceeding in this way, West Point showed that it understood traditional education had limitations and could not substitute for native intelligence. It wanted autodidacts, who could master new and challenging subject matter, and who were natural, to borrow a hackneyed phrase, “life-long learners.”
West Point, after all, was charged with commissioning officers who could organize, train, equip, and administer a mass army like the one the U.S. had sent to Europe in World War I and, at the same time, who could become strategic thinkers and leaders. It wanted to ensure that the cadets it sent out into the Army had the intellectual ability to serve as high-level planners and staff officers. It really wasn’t concerned, as it is today, with turning out skilled platoon leaders. In fact, it expressly rejected this role.
This is reflected in the Academy’s rather (by today’s standards) anemic military training program. Cadets in the interwar era participated in relatively little tactical military training. Summer camp ran at a leisurely pace and was punctuated with social events and athletic activities. (Evidence of this bygone era can still be seen in military training sites around West Point where abandoned and decaying tennis courts are now filled with shipping containers that hold tactical gear and other supplies). Military training during the academic year consisted largely of lectures focused on Army organization, the various branches, and how these branches interacted with one another. Its focus was like that of the Army officer education system, which was charged with preparing officers for positions three levels up from their existing rank. In the Army system of professional military education, lieutenants would study the regiment, captains the division, and majors the corps and above. In a mobilization army, all officers had to be ready to assume positions far above what their present rank entailed. To wait until M-Day to prepare them for their responsibilities would be too late.[2] Thus, at West Point, authorities busied themselves with grooming cadets to be field grade officers, not second lieutenants.
Army leaders, especially after the international situation began to change in the mid-1930s, sometimes scored West Point for its undue emphasis on academics and neglect of tactical training. They complained that newly commissioned Academy graduates were not prepared to perform the duties of platoon leaders. Military Academy leaders agreed but rejected these complaints as irrelevant. West Point, they countered, did not, could not, and should not strive to turn out thoroughly trained lieutenants. Its mission was to furnish cadets with “a general education of collegiate grade” and “sufficient basic military training to enable them to enter upon the duties of a second lieutenant.” “Enter upon,” they reminded critics, means “to begin” or “to take up.” In other words, the Academy was in the business of preparing and identifying men who could be intellectually capable field grade officers and who could excel as a planner and leaders at the strategic level of war. It was more intent on developing strategists than platoon leaders. West Point leaders in that era were intelligent enough to realize that the skills and mental abilities of good platoon leaders don’t necessarily align with the skills and mental abilities of good strategists. And that the best platoon leaders don’t always develop into the best generals.
Once cadets graduated and entered the Army (especially those who were marked for high rank), they spent considerable time in professional military schools either as students or instructors, on diplomatic assignments, in embassies studying languages, in CCC camps, on Chautauqua Lecture tours, as aides and assistants to general officers, on ROTC duty, and in high-level staff assignments. The generals who advanced to three- and four-star rank in World War II spent, on average, less than 20 percent of their time in tactical assignments or troop duty. This is in stark contrast to today, when combat arms officers spent 80 percent of their time with troops. Neither did they, as a group, actively pursue troop duty. Bradley vigorously avoided it as did Eisenhower. Lieutenant Bradley chose to be an ROTC instructor and a teacher in West Point’s mechanical engineering department rather than command a battalion performing security duties in Siberia after WW I. When presented with the choice of serving as a regimental executive officer in an infantry regiment or going to France to write a battlefield guidebook for the American Monuments Commission under the supervision of General Pershing, Eisenhower chose the latter option. Neither he nor his sponsors wanted him wasting his talents as a regimental officer. Ike knew, as did Bradley, Ridgway, Simpson, Stillwell, Taylor, and other generals, what the Army valued. The later protestations of these generals of their attempts to get troop duty should be approached with kilograms of salt. (Many trumpeted their passion for troop duty in their memoirs when their memories were becoming dim).
One must keep in mind that the interwar Army had a different focus than the Post-World War II Army. The former prepared for mobilization and for total war on the order of World War I, or something approaching it. The Regular Army’s officer corps had to be ready to take charge of a national mobilization that touched on all areas of national security, not just military preparations. Its duties required broadly educated officers capable of comprehending war and mobilization in the broadest terms and responding to rapidly changing circumstances and requirements. That is why the Army assigned Eisenhower to work under Bernard Baruch on plans to convert the economy to a war footing in the event of mobilization and with the President of the Philippines to establish a nation defense system. Because the nation faced no immediate threat throughout most of the period under consideration and because its geographic position afforded security from foreign invasion, the army could assign its officers to positions that would challenge their intellectual and managerial skills and allow time for professional study and reflection. Thus, duties like ROTC instructor, CCC commander, military attaché, and West Point instructor had great currency. They were not peripheral assignments but, in modern military lingo, key developmental assignments that were at the heart of the Army’s interwar mission. (The idea that budget restrictions prevented training occurring in troop units and made it impossible for units to prepare for operational missions misses the point and reflects a present-day mindset).
After World War II, the Army expanded 10-fold and transitioned from a mobilization-focused force to a readiness-based one. This transition occurred as Army pay and benefits tanked. Units now had to be prepared to deploy quickly so they had to maintain a state of constant readiness. The pace of unit life became hectic with company and battalion commanders working 70-hour workweeks to get the work done. This readiness mindset, this imperative to be ready to “fight tonight,” fundamentally changed the nature of the army experience. There was little time for study, reflection, and intellectual development. The emphasis of officer development gradually shifted from the strategic level to the tactical and operational levels. Tactical and technical skill, not strategic insight, became the currency of the military profession. Assignments such as ROTC instructor or West Point instructor now became peripheral, even irrelevant.
As this transition occurred, the Army gradually lost its preferred place at the national decision-making table. Civilian officials (after the passage of the National Defense Act of 1947) now reigned supreme at the strategic level. This, too, detracted from the Army’s prestige and began (along with others forces) a decline in the nation’s enthusiasm for military service, which continues today.
The interwar corps of cadets came from a different stratum of society than its post-World War II successor. It had an upper-middle class flavor to it. Fewer cadets came from the enlisted ranks and the few that did had Congress (which recoiled at West Point’s elitism) to thank. The families of cadets came primarily from the professional and managerial classes. Religiously, Episcopalians, the denomination of the propertied classes, prevailed. Catholics and the poorer Protestant denominations became more numerous after 1920 but were still underrepresented and, some historians would argue, undervalued. After World War II, things changed. The institution lost its upper middle-class flavor. Fewer cadets came from families headed by professions and high-level managers. Religiously, Episcopalianism lost its hold. Roman Catholicism and less socially prestigious and affluent Protestant denominations became preponderant. As an academic institution, West Point also lost its luster. Beginning in the late 1940s, elite civilian schools began to pull away from the Academy in terms of the intellectual quality of their student bodies. West Point could no longer attract the quality of cadet it once did. Academy authorities attributed this to the increasing student aid that was becoming available throughout the nation but even more powerful forces were at play.
Popular history is replete with stories about famous generals from West Point who came from disadvantaged backgrounds. Much of this is due to a bad case of presentism among historians, especially military historians. They focus on the Bradleys and Eisenhowers but skip over the MacArthurs, Pattons, Stillwells, and Marshalls, all of whom came from families of means. Even Bradley and Eisenhower, although their families might have not been affluent, were headed by inquisitive, educated parents. Eisenhower’s parents were both college graduates (quite remarkable in the era under consideration) and provided their son a good environment to stimulate his intellectual curiosity. Both of Bradley’s parents taught school. Portraying Eisenhower and Bradley as disadvantaged is, from an educational perspective at least, probably not accurate.
Historians often project contemporary realities into their interpretations of the past. Patton emerges in their narratives as a cadet who was dyslexic and couldn’t spell. He flunked math as a plebe and had to repeat his freshman year. He was, in short, an intellectual lightweight and just barely made it through the Academy, graduating at the bottom of his class. Ignored is the fact that Patton was accepted at Princeton but chose instead to attend the Military Academy (after a stop at VMI); that he graduated in the top half of his class (despite the setback of his freshmen year), ended up the adjutant of the Corps of Cadets, a position that absorbed a lot of his time, and that he was an avid reader at the Academy and had been since his childhood.
Conclusion
Military historians frame the past through contemporary lenses. In the case of the Military Academy, they tend to apply the tropes of the present to the military realities of the interwar world. Time with troops, technical and tactical competence, unit command, key tactical assignments, field duty, and operational deployments did not hold the same professional import as they do today. Then, professional military education, language study, high-level staff assignments, and instructor duty at the Military Academy or in ROTC were the tickets to professional success. These priorities were reflected at the Military Academy, where the educational system was focused not on turning out skilled platoon leaders, as is the case today, but capable field grade officers and high-level staff officers. Consequently, tactical training and field exercises were downplayed while intellectual vetting and culling were paramount, as befitting an institution responsible for preparing future Army leaders for strategic level leadership.
[1] Admittedly, the prestigious schools that we recognize today in the interwar period were not as intellectually exclusive as they later became. The average IQ of students attending Harvard fell in the high mid-wit range of the intellectual spectrum, respectable but not stunning. Students attending elite universities were more renowned for their money and social standing than their intellect.
[2] Memorandum for the Assistant Commandant, The Army War College, Dennis E. McCunniff, Chairman, Committee No. 7, October 22, 1937, Subject: Military Education, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center (AHEC), 3.
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