Word: gavin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower was "out of touch" with technological advances in weaponry, says Gavin, as far back as SHAPE days...
...DEFENSE SECRETARY CHARLES E. WILSON. Gavin quotes an unnamed service chief on Wilson: "The most uninformed man, and the most determined to remain so." His "deception and duplicity," says Gavin, let him conceal slashes in combat-ready divisions by creating "Wilson" divisions out of paper groups of troops as far apart as Fort Benning, Ga. and the Panama Canal Zone. Wilson made good a foolish assurance to Congress that no additional soldiers were needed for Formosan defense, charges Gavin, by shipping groups over without shoulder patches...
...DEFENSE DEPARTMENT. The Defense Department civil servants who, more permanent in the Pentagon than either politically appointed Secretaries or rotated military career officers, pervert the decision-making machinery. Though he does not name Defense Comptroller Wilfred J. McNeil, Gavin bombs the fiscal officer in the Pentagon who often rejects projects without understanding of military needs...
Such harassing fire, the restless reaction of a hair-trigger combat commander caught in the paper and politics of the peacetime Pentagon, tends to obscure the best of his book and the special brand of Army "wild blue yonder" that is the best of Jim Gavin. After a hard-eyed assessment of a U.S. Army that could be stopped by the "primitive" Red Chinese in Korea, he makes a passionate demand for the money and decisions to provide the West with an atom-armed and airmobile fighting force that can hold down Communist threats, big and little, by being ready...
Impatient at the tendency of any peacetime armed force to think only of "what it did best in its last war," Gavin compares the Maginot Line, the French elaboration of their World War I trench tactics, with the present-day U.S. preoccupation with bombers and bases. A peace-or-bomb world would be a simpler place to live in, says he, but various Communist aggressions since the Korean war prove that it is not that kind of world. And once his much loved Army has added its potential to the strength of bombers, "we must learn to think...