Engaging day. And then you certainly are program this evening and well continue in that honor but we have here author and historian from the jenny craig institute, dr. Mark calhoon neal discusses his book. General Leslie Mcnair unsung architect of the u. S. Army. Now, marks book seeks to restore the general known as one of marshalls forgotten men, to his place in American Military history. Now with us on stage is dr. John mcmanus. He will lead the discussion john, as you know, had a great conversation yesterday with john was, of course, watching armynavy game. Now. Well, the wonderful third volume of of johns trilogy, johns been a tremendous friend of the museum including leading tours overseas to battlefields and sites where were always delighted to have him here and incredibly honored to have him for this afternoon session. So with john, with that over to you. Great. Yeah. Thanks, mike i appreciate it. Mark, its an honor to be with you here today and to talk to some Leslie Mcnair. So, i mean, maybe the place to begin our conversation. Its a kind of ease into where he fits in this larger context of the World War Two. Weve been exploring is what explains us. The allied victory in World War Two. And how does that lead us to to a discussion of mcnair, do you think . Yeah. So so what john is telling is that there is a pop quiz. So were going to start with im not doing the grading by the way. Thats right. Were not grading the quiz, though. So its its on your honor system. But take a quick look at these three brief statements and just think about which one would you choose as the best explanation for the us victory in World War Two. So i drew these from a review essay that a fellow named christopher lamb wrote, an analyst at the National Defense university and he began the review essay with these questions really to just kind of set up the purpose of the essay and to show that you know over time for one thing over time narratives and mythologies the way things happened in the past can change the predominant narrative shifts. But also that the study of mcnair and, you know, people like him can really help you see the differences in these different answers in which one you might want to choose. So just something to consider as we go forward, we might revisit it in the q a. Anybody wants to approach it then . Yeah. So who is mcnair . Where does he come from and why did you end up writing entire book about him . What what led you to that. Yeah. So, you know, ill go ahead, ill go and put this up so people can take a look at it. But so mcnair became became very interested in him because when i was at the i was active army. I retired in 2008 when i was a student at the general Staff College, and there just kept coming up, you know, we would study pastoring past, for example, and, you know, mcnairs name always seemed to pop up these different historical examples when someone needed to explain why the us army did really badly at something and it was really intriguing to me at first. It was just, it just made him seem like, you know, okay, this is really an interesting character. But then as i started to hear more about him and read more about him, you find out things like, you know, marshalls really close affinity to mcnair, referring to him as the brains of the army and you see the positions that he held. And, you know, i couldnt but wonder, why is somebody who is the explanation for so many with the World War Two, u. S. Army continue to elevated to more important positions and held in such high regard. So when i went into the project thats kind of what i wanted to figure out. And i originally initially had a lot of people discourage me from taking on this project for various reasons as you can see here on the on the slide. But one one of the ones that was most surprising to me is he didnt command in combat. He he not troops in the field. Hes just just a staff officer. So why would he even be interesting to people to write about . You know, but what i found is his career really, really interesting and as i started to dig into it, i found way more references that people said that i would far more references and and i started to find out that actually, you know, the record shows that many of the criticisms of mcnair kind of come from a oversimplification or taking things that he wrote out of context. Many of the sources that i found in the course, my research id never seen referenced in any work anywhere. So i think some of the homework that might have opened up the aperture a little bit and help people understand him a little bit better, you know, just wasnt was there. Yeah. And it seemed you really had to work harder and dig deeper to get to mcnair because theyre not an extensive letters collection. You really couldnt kind of get to know him on a personal level. He doesnt have major papers. Of course, his life is cut short sooner than it should have been. And in order to get the material you did, you really had to do more impressive research. And the rest of us would adore a normal biography because we had to dig around in all these various archives in something of the official sources, right . And so you begin to see him, you to paint this portrait of him in your book based on this really interesting blend of source material. But i think that the value, of course, is revising how. We view his role in World War Two, and i think thats the armys. Well, yeah, yeah. Some of the sources for example, you know, there was a rumor that a story that claire mcnair, general mcnairs burned his papers after his death in her grief. I was surprised when i went to the library of congress, checked to see if they had anything on mcnair. They had nine boxes in the first box. Theres a letter from claire mcnair, you know, dedicating this collection and her donation to the library of congress which made me wonder, you know, again, id never seen any of this stuff referenced in any any book id read. Im sure other people had looked at it, but for whatever reason, it had never seemed to influence the narrative about general mcnair. The other thing about him is he spent the war in dc. I mean, he was in the field a lot, you know observing and participating in training and all of that. But he didnt. He was at home. He didnt need to write to his wife regularly. Like, you know, most of the people downrange would have done. And and the other thing is he had a really i mean, was he was kind of a workaholic, like lots of these officers were. He was he was at work all the time. And and claire kind of managed the family correspondence for him. So he didnt have a lot of personal correspondence with anyone. Usually the letters i found on mcnair were all, you know, there would be Friendly Introductions and conclusions and then it would mostly just be about business. So once his background, why does he choose a military and end up at west point . Yeah, this so were going to focus on on World War Two here for obvious reasons, but this is just a summary of all the all the things that general mcnair did during his career. And i say the reason that he joined the army, general mcnair, a very talented student from, the very, very earliest years and his family lived with his family, was the second child. And and they lived in ferndale, minnesota, in a pretty rural area, a town of 500 people. And his father was in the lumber business. And he had these camps in, the woods that he loved. He loved to spend time in the woods. And mcnair got through ninth grade. Leslie made it through ninth grade and was a phenomenal. And that was as far as he could go in ferndale. So his family actually moved to minneapolis to afford him the opportunity to go to a Good High School and his dream was to get into the Naval Academy, which is really interesting. But, you know, when you finish high school in minnesota applied to the Naval Academy and the waiting list was so long that he he took additional courses to try to you know College Courses just to try to further educational is waiting to hear from the Naval Academy finally after a year and a half he gives up and applies to west point and they take him right away but he had he had wanted to be in the services his life. And then if you take a look at the the things that he did, i mean, its a its kind of a typical career in some ways for interwar officers that is kind of age and seniority, you know civilian conservation corps assignments, the princeton expedition. And in the punitive expedition lots of folks in his time period were involved those things. But one of the unique things about it is that very early on that that intellect of his, you know, at west point, he was one of the best students in math or, ordnance, design, drawing, you graduated 11th in his class. And those courses, those subjects were also very high around the top ten of his class. And so his second assignment there is an ordinance assignment. He actually spent a year out west at fort douglas Field Artillery, but he applied for a Branch Detailed ordnance. So part of the reason might be because that branch detail took him to the east coast and claire was on the east coast. He hadnt married her yet. He married very quickly after he got out there. But that for your assignment, he spent a lot of time working on how ordnance did the kinds of tests and field studies that they used to develop equipment and any other huge talent for it. So that really kind of shaped his career thereafter. So youll see assignments where it says hes a commander, for example, second brigade, 1937 and 1939, right on the eve of the war. He is the commander of, the second Field Artillery brigade, but hes also the chief of staff of the second division, which is the provisional Infantry Division and mcnair, basically the man responsible for designing the tests of the triangle or Infantry Division. So his responsible for the redesign of the Entry Division and and and hes there, you know, doing that while hes command and you see the same kind of thing throughout his career where this skill and talent with ordnance and math and doing objective tests comparative studies it continued to kind of shape his career thereafter and then it you know i guess one of the big takeaways for me of all of that is each time i kind of looked into a specific area where mcnair had a big influence on something the army and i had read in the past that he wasnt really qualified to do those things. I would find these experience that you had that absolutely qualified to do them. For example, umpiring the the Army Maneuvers in louisiana, in the carolinas and tennessee you know, id read that he qualified to be an umpire in maneuvers. And then i found at the war college he was the lead umpire for his war college class. You know, when they did their their exercises, he was the lead umpire for the third army in 1938, i believe it was. So before the louisiana maneuvers, even really got going, he had probably more experience umpiring maneuvers than most of the officers in the army. Yeah. I mean, what stands out to me when you look at his career path and trajectory, you see this kind of pattern of exceptional competence and value. I mean, right from from his cadet days that hes acing math of the time when you when you look at, you know, the experiences of future, theyre like, well, they had a tough time getting by in math or in chemistry or whatever is usually one of the stem fields. Mcnair has no trouble with the academics, and then hes always seems to be kind of ahead of the curve. The example is, you know, you show in in world war one and he becomes really quite indispensable to general pershing is one of his influential proteges hes a one star general temporary course by by the end of the war. Yeah there there he is getting decorated there are constantly relying on him. He gets coveted spots at the command and general Staff College at the army war college. So these were things that were not happening for an everyday officer. But when you look at like a lot of other biographies, you know, bradley or or patton or eisenhower or ridgway, whatever, they end up in command somewhere, you know, in a key spot in World War Two. Mcnair, a kind of different career path, although hes always ahead of the curve, like they are too. Thats right. Yeah, absolutely. And and he he make you know, this is a very small army, you know, the post world war one or army was very small army. He knew all of these people. He had known them for for a very long time. And and developed very Close Relationships with them. Another thing you know from mcnairs world war one experience i drew another lesson from it. Ive read before that general was trapped in a world war one mindset during his you know, his during World War Two. And that really stunted his thinking and caused him to make some bad recommendations. But one of the things that mcnair clearly took from from world war one was that we absolutely to move forward, we need to modernize the army, we need to do away with these giant square divisions. You know, after the after the war, theres a superior board that writes a report and they basically i mean, to oversimplify it a little bit, but they kind of come to the conclusion that we pretty much did everything about right. And we dont really need to change very much of what did in general pershing ends up writing a rapid endorsement takes him six months so delays the issuance of the report for six months and then he puts the rapid endorsement on it essentially just discredits what these folks had just written and their superior board report and he says, no, we need a smaller, lighter more powerful but more mobile divisions. We need modernized equipment. We need artillery that move forward with the infantry as it attacks so that the infantry doesnt just push forward little bit. And then we have to pause and laborious, fully bring everything forward. I mean these these were very kind of forward thinking ideas. And, you know, general pershing a lot about open warfare during world war one. And the reality was that we werent really able to train open warfare effectively before the war as were preparing for world war one. And we didnt really we werent able to do it in the way it was envisioned, but it became an aspiration. And, you know, as we move forward and we modernize, this is what we want to be able to do. And so you see in as late as 1939, general marshall with mcnair appointed to be the commandant of the command general staff school. Right. Simmons says, im really pleased that youre there because i know that youre going to build and imbue open warfare thinking onto this organization thats really of stuck in the past. So, you know, again, these kind of conflicting things, the narrative says he was stuck in a world war one mindset and kind of had this archaic way of looking at warfare. But the historical record says the exact opposite. Now, hes really quite an innovator. I mean, theres absolutely no doubt, and i think your book shines a great light on that. And you another really interesting point. This is a small army. Its a place where Everybody Knows everybody in the officer corps to some extent. So hes had relationships that hes developed over time, none more productively, of course, than George Marshall. And so i just want to throw a few names at marshall macarthur. Whats the nature of his relationship with these really influential then . Yeah. So marshall, i think with eisenhower, ill start with eisenhower. I think with eisenhower there was a there was a mutual respect, but i dont think they really got to know each other all that well. I mean they obviously interacted quite a bit, but they kind of ran a little bit different circles. You know, when eisenhower was with the War Department, he was in the operations division, which was, you know, separate from the general headquarters and then the Army Ground Forces later. So they knew each other, obviously, but they werent very close. I think with marshall, the relationship was much closer. I think they they thought very alike and they they shared about how should we shape our force and how should we train personnel, how should we the force they really had a long standing exchange of ideas with macarthur. Hes really kind of absent from the record in terms of the things that i found about general mcnair, youd probably have insight, as is his relationship with macarthur than i than i do. But i know that, you know, all of these folks, you know, one of the things that mcnair was responsible for was recommending which officers should command these units as we create divisions and we get reticent to the field. The same is true for corps commanders and even recommending commanders for field command. So he to all of these maneuvers and participated in training and he got to know all of these people, not just personally, but also in seeing their performance in these really stressful situations. And so he knew everyone and because he had been involved in sort of this intellectual development of the army for the past 20 years, over the interwar period, he had exchanged with all of these folks and they would continue to correspond with and share ideas with him and send him feedback. And, you know, that thats exactly i mean. You know, of course, what we know best for his being head of Army Ground Forces. And in that capacity, this is just fascinating. Think one of the things i found is how much correspondence there was between field commanders and mcnair. Two examples ill give you off the top of my head robert eichelberger, who was in touch with him, the whole war and kind of relating to him. Heres whats happening on the fighting. Oscar griswald, who isnt very well known, but ought to be the commander of 14th corps in in the South Pacific later on in the philippines. He too is sending some really descriptive correspondence to mcnair back and forth. All right. So that takes time and it takes trust, i think, because, you know, youre basically r