Carroll H. Dunn
than two years from the time that he was talking to us, I was a battalion commander.
I have thought many times about this statement of his. Here was a man who probably
had spent or 17 years as a lieutenant or captain; yet he had kept the mission of the
Army in his mind. And, as he saw mobilization beginning to take place, he knew there
was going to be very rapid promotion with increased responsibilities for the young
officers with very little service. His job was to be sure that we understood in this small
unit what it meant to be a battalion commander of 700 to 1,000 men.
This experience stayed with me. At Leonard Wood, in certain officers who were there,
I also saw this same degree of looking ahead and seeing what the mission was. On the
other hand, at Leonard Wood there were among those officers sent there as a cadre
some who had retired on the job a number of years before. Even as a young lieutenant,
it didn't take me very long to decide who were the officers who were going to be
effective during the war and who were the ones with very little imagination or notion
as to what it was all about. In the very small Regular Army, clearly, among the
with whom I came in contact in the Corps of Engineers, there were some who had
vision and knew what they were doing and others who had to be goaded and led around
and hadn't had an original thought for years. I very quickly realized both were there.
It became necessary (and while I had nothing to do with it), I saw, to replace these
people because they weren't the ones who had the qualifications to be training new
people.
At that time there was a forced retirement from the Army of some officers, even as we
prepared for war. These
were removed from the service because they simply
didn't have what it took to be effective in a wartime situation. This was not limited to
the Corps of Engineers. It was an
thing for which the Corps furnished a few
candidates. It was an early experience in knowing that there comes a time when you
have to be willing to make a choice of who has the capability and who doesn't.I found
it very intriguing that in the midst of preparation for war this action was taken to
eliminate from the officer roll those who by experience, training, or initiative didn't
appear to have what it took to go ahead. would assume that this was an action by
General [(George] Marshall as the chief of staff who recognized there had to be some
elimination of dead wood. While there probably were some individual injustices, in
general, I thought it showed remarkable foresight in terms of the importance of being
sure that the people who were in charge of training were qualified, not only by
experience, but also by attitude and initiative to do the work.
England, February-June 1944
Q.
What
your feeling, then, as you sailed for Europe in
You knew that you
were going to England with the 105th Engineer Combat Battalion as the commander,
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