Quote:
Originally Posted by Adm.Lee
Re: the square division: The Army convened a board to discuss organization after WW2. A fourth regiment was rejected early, as too cumbersome for the division commander to deal with.
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Pulled this from the Doughboy Center.com, its a RAND Corporation review of the AEF and the 1918 Division:
"Although it possessed tremendous firepower, this division could not fully capitalize on its assets and was also hindered by insufficient numbers of combat service support troops and equipment. Coordination between infantry and artillery was poor, hampered by unreliable communications equipment and the inability to keep track of the movement of infantry units in the offensive. Successful offensives were thereby slowed tremendously. A shortage of personnel and equipment specifically reserved for general logistical requirements, medical evacuation, and transporting rations and the dead further slowed the advance. In short, the square division lacked coordination and was unwieldy and difficult to support logistically."
"The interwar period would prove to be important for incorporating lessons learned from World War I into the division design. Chief among them was the fact that greater coordination among the combat arms and support was required to enhance combat effectiveness. Advances in weapons, communications, and transportation technology were needed to improve the division’s lethality, while properly integrating the advances into Army formations and operations was equally important."
"Immediately after the war, many veteran officers recommended that the Army retain the square divisional structure. General Pershing objected, believing that these evaluations came too soon after the conflict and were heavily influenced by the special circumstances of the Western Front. He favored a division that was much more mobile and flexible and proposed a design possessing a single infantry brigade of three infantry regiments, an artillery regiment, a cavalry squadron, and combat support and combat service units. Time and distance factors were paramount: “The division should be small enough to permit its being deployed from . . . a single road in a few hours and, when moving by rail, to permit all of its elements to be assembled on a single railroad line within twenty-four hours; this means that the division must not exceed 20,000 as a maximum.”
"The debate over the divisional structure was framed by the assumption that North America would be the theater in which it would most likely be deployed. The static battlefield, characteristic of World War I in Western Europe, was viewed as a thing of the past as “technological advances in artillery, machine guns, and aviation made obsolete stabilized and highly organized defensive lines whose flanks rested on impassable obstacles, such as those encountered on the Western Front.”
"However, despite Pershing’s preference for a much smaller and flexible division of three regiments, two prominent redesign efforts, the Superior Board (1919) and Lassiter Committee (1920), recommended square designs. In answering the call to increase mobility, the division was cut in size by reducing from four to three both the number of platoons in infantry companies and the number of companies in battalions; 155-mm howitzers and some support troops were also eliminated. It is interesting to note that the Lassiter Committee wished to retain the brigade-based square division in part because a triangular design would have eliminated the brigade command billets filled by brigadier generals. The reduced square division was tentatively approved by Army Chief of Staff General Peyton March in August 1920 at 19,385 men and grew to 19,997 men a year later."
"Pershing, who was to become chief of staff soon after, may have ultimately acceded to a smaller square design because he wished to avoid embarrassment: many of his own officers had recommended the square design while serving on the Superior Board. At the same time, following much criticism for the bloated and unwieldy 1917 design, the postwar cavalry division was radically reduced from approximately 18,000 men to 7,463."