Word: mcnair
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...year and a half of kaleidoscopic transition failed to change General McNair's dissatisfaction. A soft-spoken man with light blue eyes, he is perhaps the 20-minute hardboiled realist of the U.S. high command. When others were gasping at the growing might of the U.S. Army in October 1941 (around 1,600,000), McNair said only: "Our great potentialities must not lull us into complacency." Earlier (in Louisiana) he got to the verge of unbridled praise: "If the troops' equipment were completed, they would give a better account of themselves today than American troops...
Today General McNair sees vast qualitative as well as quantitative improvements in the Army of 1942 over the Army of 1941. But when others boast about planes and plane production, McNair observes: "We haven't got enough for proper air-ground training." The spirit of the soldiers-the persisting tendency to seek an easy war-troubles him. In a nationwide broadcast last month to the troops in his home command, he said: "There is no doubt that Americans can and will fight; when aroused they are brave in battle. You are going to get killing mad eventually...
...Professor." Lesley McNair wanted to be a naval officer. Back home in Minnesota he had an alternate appointment to Annapolis, but he tired of waiting and got into West Point by competitive examination. His West Point colleagues remember him only as the sort of mathematical shark that makes promising material for the field artillery. At the Point he acquired the nickname "Whitey," and met Clare Huster, whom he married three years later...
...month after the fall of France, Whitey McNair got his biggest job of teaching: to organize and supervise the wartime education of the millions who were about to be called to the colors. It was only slightly less of a hodgepodge Army than the one assembled in 1917 and 1918. Reserve officers were mostly college R.O.T.C. graduates. The National Guard often had politicians or politicians' friends as its commanders and average adolescents as its soldiers...
...Whitey McNair sailed into the job. He did the best he could with the sticks and stones he used for arms and ammunition. He hammered on the necessity of adequate leadership. ("Young officers are the broad foundation on which our war army must be built.") He weeded out incompetents. He lectured on the fundamentals of warfare, knowing that he had to get as many men as nearly ready as he could. And he acquired a smart, towering, young lieutenant colonel as his deputy, Mark Wayne Clark, who was to pave the way for the African invasion...