 Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate you showing up here. And I'm not lost on the fact that this is a little bit of an anomaly talking about an Army topic in a Navy venue. But what I'd like to do today is tell you a little background about how and why I came to be the editor of this book. And then I'm going to talk about the book itself and read a few excerpts from the book to highlight the thread of the major theme of the book, The Purge of the 30th Division. So as Mr. Kennedy said, I'm currently an Army historian for US Army Cyber Command. But I first came into contact with this book several years ago. It might have been seven or eight or nine or ten years ago. And I saw a copy of this book in the Pentagon Library. And I picked it up and read it. And the teeth almost fell out of my mouth. I had never seen anything so controversial or seemingly critical of some senior Army leaders. I thought it was phenomenal. And so in the back of my mind, I said some day at some future time, because I had some other writing projects that I was working on at the time, that this would be something that's worth bringing to the forefront to see about getting it back in print. As I researched a little bit about the history of the book, I found that the Pentagon Library had won a 500 copies of the book that was originally printed. Now, I'm going to tell you about Major General Russell here in a few minutes. But suffice it to say that what made this book particularly of interest to me was the fact that it was never commercially published. General Russell, the copies that he had personally printed were never intended for a civilian audience's eyes. This officer who had a very promising career as a National Guard Division commander, who was destined to take his division to the wharf with the 30th division ultimately got sent to Europe, and had every expectation of going to war with his division, things fell short rapidly in the spring of 1942 because he wouldn't succumb to the pressures from officers above of high stature to relieve his senior officers in his National Guard Division. And I'm going to talk about that a little more in detail, hence that's the title of his book. So what happens is General Russell, somewhat disgruntled and dismayed, wrote his own view, his own memoir of his experiences, principally from the time that his division got mobilized in 1940 through the time of his relief as a division commander in 1942. And he gives a blow-by-blow account of training and mobilizing and equipping his division for getting ready for overseas service. And then these back channel issues, if you will, tensions that he was facing and challenges, pressures to modify some of his senior officers and replace them with regular army officers. So hence that's why when he printed this book and distributed 500 copies, from what I'd read is he planned on printing up more because there was a clamor for these books when they were handed out in 1948. But he never printed up another batch. And so this book remained under the radar screen of scholars and students of World War II. Unless you actually came across a copy as I did, you really wouldn't know this book was out there. So now we fast forward to where a few years ago I said, OK, I'm going to see about getting this book revised and possibly put back in print. And this is my third book that I've done. And my first book, I had done the Association of the US Army, a privately funded organization that sponsors big army projects and programs. The AUSA has their own history reading list. And my first book was published through the auspices of the AUSA and put on their reading list. So when it came time that I was working on this one, I said, you know what, I really need some people to write introductions to this book. And one of the people I contacted originally was a retired Army Brigadier General, who's the current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff History Office, who's an acquaintance of mine. And he offered, he said, hey, Larry, this sounds good book. I'll be happy to write an introduction for you. And I said, hey, this is wonderful. And then he started telling me, without ever reading the book or knowing anything about it, well, the guard in World War II, they weren't any good and you couldn't trust him, and they needed to be relieved and replaced. I mean, we all know that. And I said to myself, oh, wait a minute. He's got these preconceived ideas about how he's going to write this introduction. And I'm not sure if this is a real good idea. So I backed away from that. And I said, I know, I'll get a retired National Guard General to write an introduction for the book. So I called the National Guard History Office. And I got a recommendation for a Cracker Jack candidate of a retired adjutant general from South Carolina. His name was Harry Birchstead, major general retired, who's also a lawyer. Now what I'm going to tell you also is General Russell was a lawyer as well. So I thought that was kind of interesting. You get one adjutant general, major general, long distinction, good service, lawyer. And now he's got to assess the memoirs of a World War II general that happened to be a lawyer. And General Birchstead took the book. And then a month or two or three later, I heard from him. He says, Larry, I don't know about writing an introduction to this book. I said, sir, what do you mean? Oh, I think that General Russell was really out of line. I'm not comfortable in endorsing this. And I said, well, you don't have to endorse it. You just have to write what you honestly think about the book if you think it's worth reading. If you think it has any merit to people interested in the history of World War II. And so he agreed to do that. He agreed to do that. And so the book has General Birchstead's introduction, which I think is quite good. But then in addition to that, I wanted a scholar, somebody who specialized in National Guard history for the Army. And that's when I called the Association of the US Army. I didn't call them soliciting them to do anything with my book. I was simply calling a former colleague, head of their book program, to see if he could recommend the name of somebody distinguished with an academic background that possibly could write an introduction to this book. And he gave me a great name. Dr. Michael Dubbler, West Point graduate, National Guard officer, and a focused specialist on National Guard history for the Army. I said, hey, this is super. So I got in touch with Dr. Dubbler. Now, remember what I told you about this book never being commercially published and available? Here's Dr. Dubbler, who's an expert, I think, on the history of the Army National Guard. He never knew anything about this book. Never heard about it. And he was just floored when he read it. He said, we've got to get this back in print. We just can't not just leave this to risk of being neglected for another 40, 50 years. So I've got two introductions. Both of them from people with a great deal of expertise, much more than I would ever know. I'm not a specialist or a historian of Army National Guard history. But I think the value added that I'm going to talk about is why this book is particularly of interest in the context of all the genre of everything written about World War II and the Army. What I believe is this book is unique. So you've got an outlook of a senior officer who by no means is a loser, who by no means is somebody that should have been given the heave-ho under ordinary conditions and has a certain degree of credibility in his viewpoints of what he states. I mean, he's very critical. And I think, frankly, if anybody reads the book, you'll see he goes a little overboard. He's embittered. This is an embittered officer. There's no question about that. But that doesn't take away from his main thread, which I'm going to talk about. OK, so now a little bit about General Birchstead. General Birchstead went to the University of Georgia, graduated in 1912 with a bachelor's degree, and got a law degree two years later. In 1916, he got a captain's commission in the Georgia National Guard, 121st Infantry Regiment. Goes to the Mexican border, gets federalized. OK, that's 1916. World War I comes along, serves overseas. Then after the war, it goes back into the guard and really moves up quickly. So he became a colonel of the 121st Infantry in 1921. He was a captain in 1916. Now he's a colonel in 1921. He promoted Brigadier General of the 59th Infantry Brigade 30th Division in 1923, and then received a promotion to Major General in 1932. So he's a Major General Division commander for 10 years. So when he's federalized in 1940, he's already had eight years of experience with this guard division. And his is one of the first four guard divisions that's mobilized. Now again, there's going to be 18 guard divisions. And the 30th is one of the very first four, scheduled for early mobilization and early deployment, when the army is mobilizing and getting forces ready for World War II. So what happens is, what I'm going to talk about primarily is his time in federal service. General Russell discusses three significant maneuvers that his division took part in. The Louisiana maneuvers in 1940, and then the Tennessee and Carolina maneuvers in 1941. He really just gives lip service. He doesn't talk much about the Louisiana maneuvers. So that's not really that germane to understanding how the 30th Division did in that. It was pretty raw and getting trained up to speed and the like. But his insights into the Tennessee and Carolina maneuvers, I think, are very insightful because this is a window by a division commander telling you how it is on training up a division, an infantry division in World War II, and what a division commander had to expect at those times and those days. Now I'm not an expert on every facet of World War II. But I will tell you the number of general officer memoirs that I've looked at from commanders from World War II. You get maybe a chapter or a few paragraphs on training up to go to Europe or the Pacific, and then the rest of the memoirs about commanding in the theater. So getting a really comprehensive view, an authoritative, comprehensive view from a senior commander, I think is tremendously worthwhile in this memoir. I think of nothing else. Forget about his relations with the regular army and the National Guard tensions that might go back and forth. I think it's a wonderful window into how the maneuvers work from a senior commander's perspective. Now, I think it's also important and incumbent upon me at this time to explain the difference between official and unofficial history. I'm an official historian for the army. So when I write official history, I use official documents, official interviews, and things get draps are written up. And then they're vetted with a variety of people that the narrative is about. And typically, official histories for the army don't reflect poorly on individual commanders. I mean, it can happen. But typically, if somebody's still living, you're not going to do that. So the people who get the red pens out, they're going to have a say on what the final draft looks like. And that's fine. That's how official history should be. On big movements of organizations and logistics and all this and that and the other. An unofficial history doesn't go through a vetting process in the Department of Defense. So you can say whatever you want. You can have an axe to grind and you can say whatever you want that would never, ever in a million years end up in an official history. And how do you know what somebody's saying is true and accurate? How do you know what really reflects the official position? Well, you don't. So you really have to be kind of educated to understand what you're reading and how accurate or valid is it. And I've read some official history that had mistakes in it. I mean, that happens. And we can try to correct those. They're unintentional, but it does happen. I just want to give you a little anecdote. So back in the 1990s, I wrote an information paper. It was the anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa in World War II. And it was a paper I wrote for President Clinton. I worked at the Army Center Military History. So I went right to the official army history. And I copied this right out of there, because you can do plagiarism for information papers, for senior leaders. And my boss, Brigadier General, took it over to the White House, and they discussed it. And the next day I got a call from the head of the Marine Corps History Office. He said, you know, I got the number of the Marine Division wrong on the invasion. I said, well, I'm sorry, but it was wrong in the army history. How was I supposed to know? I think that's an example. I mean, these things happen. So what General Russell is arguing in his book, I haven't gone and cross-checked everything with official army records and sources. What I've said is, from what I've read, I don't discount or dismiss his observations. OK, so here we are. General Russell is in high command, one of the first divisions that's mobilized to C-Service. And he goes into the Louisiana maneuvers, and everybody realizes you need to improve what's going on. And right out of the starting blocks, in the Louisiana maneuvers, they had three regular army instructors that were assigned to his division. So it's 1940, and he comes back. And now I want to read you some illustrations of what he was facing and dealing with. So one of these officers was Lieutenant Colonel Frank Brokaw. And Colonel Brokaw, after the maneuvers, recommended several officers in the National Guard be relieved and possibly reassigned. Now at this point, let me also interject, and maybe this is a good opportunity to do this. But the overall theme that this ties into is a cause of debate that's gone on since the end of World War II, has to do with the relief of senior guard officers in the US Army in their divisions. I don't know of any smoking gun document officially that the Army has published that says there was a conspiracy to relieve senior guard people in Army divisions in World War II. It's just like my acquaintance, who was that retired brigadier general I told you about in the Joint History Office, said, well, everybody knows that if these people weren't up to the task for health reasons or age and grade reasons, they had to go. And everybody knows that the guard doesn't have the same standard as the regular army. Everybody knows that. So naturally, there's going to be a lot of people that go. We all know that. We don't need to hear some general grinding an axe because he thinks that there's this conspiracy. So now I focus in on this premise that the context of what he's saying is in the context of what he's hearing at the time, that there's this movement of foot, that General Marshall had very strict standards. General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the Army. And I think most of us know much about World War II know that. There was an age and grade policy, and they wanted efficient commanders because what they learned in the big lesson of World War I is that many of the commanders were too old, too old for the field. And so General Marshall knew we needed younger commanders more capable and able for World War II. And the Army and the interwar period had spent a lot of time and effort training people to move up in the ranks and take charge. And we had some marvelous commanders in World War II that did that. And so General Russell, in his division, again, he's with these people for at that point eight years. He's proud of his accomplishments. He's taken them into the maneuvers. And he's attached under the First Army Corps. And the Corps commander has two regular Army divisions in him under the Corps, the 8th and 9th Division and the 30th Division, the Guard Division. So when the times come in to go to the Tennessee maneuvers in 1940, excuse me, 1941, Russell is struggling like everyone else to get everybody up to speed, get them trained. And then he gets the warning order that, hey, you need to be chopped over to the Second Army. They're heavy maneuvers in Tennessee. And Lieutenant General Ben Lear, the head of the Second Army, doesn't have enough of his own forces on hand. So we're going to give a First Army division over to him to help him in his maneuvers. And we're going to send you, General Russell, with your 30th Division to support the Second Army maneuvers. And General Russell says, wait, wait, wait a minute. I'm laboring under the same problems the rest of you are. I'm not ready to send troops into the maneuvers. I'm just struggling to just do everyday training. And in the meantime, at his division had about 12,000 people in about peacetime strength. And about 6,000 of them were getting discharges. And so they're going to have to flush up about half the division with new people while this was going to be happening. And he's making this impassioned plea to his core commander saying, please don't send me. I'm not ready. And the core commander says, sorry, you're going. So General Russell at that time says, they're setting me up. They're setting me up. They're sending me over there. I've been pressured already to relieve some of my men. And they're setting me up. OK, so now let's get to the backdrop of the excerpt I was going to read before. Let's back up a little bit. It's before the Tennessee maneuvers, right after the Louisiana maneuvers in 1940. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Brokaw was recommending that General Russell relieve some of the senior officers. He said, when Lieutenant Colonel Frank Brokaw selected the chief of staff and pointed him out as one of the senior officers of the division who must be replaced and in the same talk called my attention to his qualifications to be chief of staff, I realized that the move in on the division by the professionals had begun. So they had real words. They were arguing with each other. Then General Russell goes on. When he was about exhausted, and I was thoroughly mad, he asked me what I expected to do about it. And when I would begin the elimination of the guard officers whose relief he had recommended. As placidly as possible, I told Brokaw that I did not plan any wholesale relief of national guard officers. That same changes, excuse me, that some changes were inevitable, but I could not agree with him on the qualifications of the regular army officers, Brokaw on the other instructors. Then on duty with us. This seemed to outrage him. And looking across the desk from me, he said, quote, I want to tell you something. If you don't reorganize your division along the lines that I have described, you're going to get the ax. He said further, you are a good officer, a fine division commander, a natural leader. And you should be retained in the service. But I am warning you now that unless you bring regular army officers into your division, your head is going to be cut off. Now this is a Lieutenant Colonel telling them this. OK, now we fast forward where he's being sent to Tennessee. He doesn't believe he's ready. His division is ready by any stretch of the imagination to take part in these maneuvers. He's going into the maneuvers under Lieutenant General Ben Lear, OK? So here's an excerpt I want to read about that. At that time, his corps commander was Lieutenant General William Shed. And Russell was making the argument why he shouldn't have to go. So here's what he says, when the corps commander refused to consider favorably my request to be relieved from going to Tennessee and gave as his reasons our superior state of training on equipment, I was very apprehensive that the real reasons for sending us to Tennessee had not been stated. At that time, I was convinced that the War Department was planning a reorganization of National Guard divisions and that sooner or later all senior officers in the National Guard of the United States would be replaced by regulars. It was my fear that the days of the senior officers of the 30th Division were numbered and that the Tennessee maneuvers would be used as a vehicle for our elimination. Already, rumors were reaching for Jackson, South Carolina, that's where he was stationed, of the relief of National Guard Division commanders and other parts of the country and of the complete reorganization of National Guard divisions. So you're getting General Russell's introspective thoughts on what he believed. I'm not sure if he kept a diary or a journal, because these reminiscences are pretty detailed on these meetings in particular days and times. But if you put yourself in his place, you're proud of the accomplishments of your division, you're apprehensive, you're hearing across the country that other senior officers are being replaced. And the standard was it's all the 06 colonels and above. So those are the officers that are being targeted. If you're a colonel or a general officer in a National Guard Division, he's being pressured to relieve those people. And the point that the thread that he pulls again in the title of this book, he's a division commander. Whoever heard in the US Army of somebody from outside your division telling you who's good enough to be in your division, that's a commander's priority. So General Russell is telling Broca on these others. He says, look, I've gotten rid of a few officers already that are no good, age and grade that are infirm or people that are leaving. I've gotten rid of them. They're gone. There's no reason to just put names on the list and just give these guys the heave-ho. I'm not going to do it. So he goes into the Tennessee maneuvers. And again, this is his perspective, but I think it can be confirmed with official reports. The 30th Division does reasonably well. The 30th Division does reasonably well. Now he and Lieutenant General Lear don't hit it off. And General Lear, frankly, General Russell has very tough critical things to say about General Lear, which General Burstead, I told you about earlier, was offended by, and maybe some of you in the audience might be offended by, some of his remarks against Lieutenant General Lear. He doesn't pull any punches. Again, this is an embittered officer. So that's going to come back later. So he gets through the maneuvers. He does reasonably well. General Lear is particularly honed in on one of the artillery brigades, that the artillery isn't up to speed. And General Lear is criticizing him about that. Now one of the undertones about maybe some of the politics about getting officer positions and promotions, and maybe some of the politics between reservists and regular army folks, are that General Lear may or may not have had his own inclinations to think that the guard were maybe second class soldiers. I don't know. General Lear, as far as I know, didn't write a memoir, and I don't know what his thinking was. But General Lear and some of his people, according to General Russell, rigged some of the maneuvers to reflect badly on the 30th Division. And so they cooked the books on the official reports. And General Russell took issue with that, especially on the artillery brigade, saying, this brigade is good. Your after-action report of how we did in the maneuvers and the Second Army report, it's wrong. I mean, it's just you guys are intentionally misrepresenting our capabilities. Now that's an issue as an army historian. I'd have difficulty coming to grips with today, because if somebody assigned me to write a history of those maneuvers, I use official documentation. I might use a footnote or say that this one division commander took issue privately in his own writings. But unless there's somebody in the official record to show that, I'm not going to say that General Lear's people were cooking the books. I don't know that to be a fact. But it's very insightful that there's, again, this is a major general, distinguished division commander, and this is his point of view. So the thread that you pull there is, throughout the maneuvers, the Tennessee and the Carolina maneuvers, there might have been a double standard for some of the guard divisions on how they were treated, which led to some of their senior officers being reclassified and reassigned because they're cooking the books on them. And that's a case that General Russell makes, particularly about one of his brigade artillery commanders. So to go on, I'd like to read you an excerpt to some of the value added, if you will, about just some of his insights in the maneuvers. The Tennessee maneuvers is where we introduce tanks under George Patton for the first time in the maneuvers to see how the operations were going to work. And he has some insightful anecdotes about General Patton and some of his peculiarities. And the Army Ground Forces commander, Lieutenant General McNair, and he had this discussion about anti-type warfare. And I think for a student of military history in World War II, they might find this of interest. So let me read you this section on tanks. It has been stated already that the purpose of the Tennessee maneuvers was to test the operation of our tank units and to give the infantry division some training and defense against mechanized forces. As a test of the efficiency of mechanized units and as training for defense against them, the Tennessee maneuvers were premature. There were several hundred tanks brought into the area and the area of maneuvers for defense against these tanks were taken by non-mechanized forces. Nevertheless, the type of tanks available to the Army and the weapons for defense against them were very inadequate. After we had operated against the tanks on two or three occasions, I discussed the situation with McNair of the Army ground forces. In this talk, I told McNair that the weapons given us for fighting tanks were wholly impractical from many standpoints. We would pull 37 millimeter guns around in the field behind large trucks. Before going into action, these guns would be detached from the trucks and moved by hand into firing positions. The trucks would be concealed under the nearest cover. This operation was clumsy and crude, and in an engagement with tanks, all the advantages were with the tanks. In my talk with McNair, I told him we must have a mounted gun that would fire without all the preparation just described. In his usual upstage tone, he advised me, in that is none of your business manner, that such guns would cost a lot of money. I have never understood McNair's views about anti-tank guns. Some of these 37 millimeter guns were employed by our own troops in North Africa in their engagements with Rommel's forces. They were wholly inadequate as anyone should have known. And so some of the narrative is laced with those types of observations. His infantry division, for instance, was being motorized at the time, getting trucks for the first time. And so there were some insightful observations about how they were making these transitions in the middle of trying to train up and then to support these maneuvers. Well, after the Tennessee maneuvers, when General Russell came back to Fort Jackson, his new first corps commander was a major general, Charles Thompson. And General Thompson, again, was applying pressure for him to relieve officers. So let me just read you some insights that General Russell has about that. When Thompson left division headquarters, he suggested I go over to the situation and call him. I told him I could not agree that it would benefit the 30th division to replace all of its senior officers with regulars, but that I would cooperate in every way possible to eliminate inefficient officers as rapidly as we could determine who they were. I told him further that in my view, the reorganization of the division was about complete. With one or two possible exceptions, I knew of no officers who should be replaced. Again, now he's the division commander. He's already replaced several different officers. And I neglected to tell you that earlier his first Army commander, Lieutenant General Hugh Drum, had looked at his division before Tennessee and said, look, I'm looking things over. You're the division commander. As far as I'm concerned, there's just this one officer that needs to go. And then you're good to go. You're the division commander. Just do your job. And so now we're flash forward in here as General Thompson's calling him in. And so later General Russell met with General Thompson. Thompson locked his door after I entered. He then opened a drawer in his desk and took from it a piece of paper and handed it to me. On this paper appeared names of about 15 officers of the 30th Division. I looked them over in amazement. Among them were some of the best officers in the 30th. And for that matter, the entire Army of the United States goes on. On several occasions, I met and talked with Thompson. He would drop by a division headquarters. Or I would see him in the field. He was always on every occasion pressing for relief of National Guard officers. We were very busy. The first Army was to go into maneuvers in early fall of 1941. That's Carolina. And General Drum was commanding that Army. And so hence, again, General Drum was not micro managing General Russell. General Drum was not trying to interpret General Marshall's guidance the same way that some of these other senior officers were. And in that respect, that was probably some of the undoing of General Russell, was the personalities. So I'm not trying to paint a picture that there was this conspiracy that every senior officer in the Army wanted to do away with National Guard officers. But there were a coterie of senior officers and how they interpreted General Marshall's guidance. Some people interpreted it very aggressively. Hence, his former corps commander, Major General Shed, and excuse me, Lieutenant Major General Shed and General Thompson. And some officers were willing to just let him be a division commander and run his own division. So part of his undoing led to the fact that he got lined up with some of the wrong people at the wrong time in his career. So he goes to the Carolina maneuvers. And General Thompson is his corps commander there. And General Drum is the first Army commander. I'm sorry, I always mention General Lear later. I'll get back to that. And in the Carolina maneuvers, General Thompson and he have a real falling out. Now General Russell is very critical of General Thompson. General Thompson thought he was destined for great things to get a real field command in this Army that's getting mobilized and go to the Pacific of Europe. And General Thompson pretty much washed his career out in the Carolina maneuvers in late 1941. But at the time, he didn't know that. At the time, he thought he had a viable career. And so General Thompson is not doing too well on the prosecution of the movement of his divisions under him. But the 30th is doing well. And there's a point in the narrative where Lieutenant General Drum has got Major General Thompson, the corps commander, and he's got Major General Russell, the division commander, and the division commander is outwardly criticizing his corps commander, saying he doesn't know what he's doing, he's not a good commander, he's wrong. And now General Russell is waiting. What's General Drum going to do? Is he going to relieve me for being insubordinate and not a good division commander? Or is he going to back drum? Or is he going to back Thompson? Is he going to back me? And really, Thompson at that point said, well, look, sir, we can work together. There's not an issue here. We can work together. So what happens is the 30th division distinguishes itself further in the Carolina maneuvers. General Thompson comes at the end of the maneuvers and says, hey, you know what? I was wrong. You guys did a super job. Forget about that list of 15 officers to replace. These guys are good to go. I made a mistake. OK. So now it's the end of 1941. We get into March of 1942. And the 30th division now and the first corps are reassigned under Lieutenant General Ben Lear, March of 1942. And that's the end of how this is the end of General Russell's career as a division commander. Had he stayed under General Drum, he actually might have kept his division command. I'm not sure if that would have happened or not, but he might have. But it was a kiss of death for him to come under General Lear. Now remember, General Thompson had already relented. He gave him a super high efficiency rating as a division commander in December of 1941 as a 30th division commander. And now he's under Lieutenant General Lear. And now he's got new marching orders. So on March 26, about a week or two after the division was reassigned under Second Army, General Thompson had a meeting with General Russell. Here's what General Russell has to say. Thompson looked out the window, he turned to me and in a very plaintive voice said he had told me on so many occasions that I was a very fine division commander, a very capable leader of men, but I needed help and needed help badly. He wanted me to reconsider my views about the senior officers of the 30th division and send them before a reclassification board. He stated, you have some of the finest men in the Army and your junior officers are outstanding. If you would eliminate your generals and colonels and replace these with regulars, it would satisfy everyone, including the War Department. And you would have one of the best divisions in the American Army. Now before I tell you what happens, I've already told you he had one of the best divisions in the American Army. At the end of World War II, they were rated as the very best infantry division in Europe, a guard division. So now he says after hearing those words from General Thompson, two courses of action were open to me. I could ask for my relief as commanding general of the 30th division on the ground that the First Army Corps commander and I were in disagreement as to the progress that the division had made and the efficiency of our senior officers. In this event, I could seek another assignment in the Army or return to civil life. Had I followed my personal inclination at the time, I would have gone back to the practice of law. So what happened is he's convinced by a number of officers in the division, serve stick with it, you're a great commander, you'll see this through. There's no way they can reclassify you. I mean you've got an efficiency report from General Thompson saying you're an outstanding commander. And that's the rub. In December 1941, this is what General Russell says, Thompson rated me as an exceptional division commander. On April 13, 1942, Thompson rated me as an unsatisfactory division commander. Nothing had occurred in the meantime that changes opinion. So he goes through a reclassification hearing and gets reclassified. He loses his division command. And he has a lot of unkind things to say about Lieutenant General Walter Kruger, who went on to get a fourth star in the Pacific, because Kruger presided over what he called the Kangaroo Court. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave you with these thoughts that, again, if you're interested in the history of World War II, and I'm not sure if anyone here is interested in the history of the Army National Guard in World War II, but if you know somebody who is, that this would be an apt book to add to your professional bookshelf. Because there's no other book like it written from a senior officer's perspective that deals with these issues between the guard and the regular army. To give you the different insights of how the guardsmen see things and how the regular army personnel saw things. And there's no other book that I know that gives you a blow-by-blow count of how a division commander got through some of these key maneuvers, getting ready to deploy and send troops overseas. So I think on both those counts it's really an invaluable work. And the fact that it was printed in 1948 and distributed to a number of senior guard people, well, that's fine and good. But those people, frankly, they're all gone. And those 500 books, most of them are sitting maybe on some bookshelves in their homes, or one or two at maybe Pentagon Library. Maybe they've got a copy here in the library. But if you were interested in this time period, having this back in print, I think it's just a win situation for people interested in putting together a full balanced history, whether you agree with it or not, to help put a better history together of how we acquitted ourselves and how we trained and fought in World War II. So with that said, I'll entertain any questions that anyone in the audience has. Yes, sir? What about the divisions in the north as opposed to the ones in the south? Did they have problems like this? Well, what I can say is I haven't studied every division, but what we know for sure is this. Of the 18 guard divisions, only one division went to war, Major General Robert Beekler from Ohio with his division. As soon as he got out to the South Pacific, there were efforts to relieve him. The paint wasn't even dry on the sign. So he kept his division, but he had a fight for it. And what General Russell is saying and what you heard about in some of his personal remarks is there was a systematic plan to train and equip and mobilize the army with the most efficient people that the leadership thought were the most efficient people. And you can't argue with the fact that a regular army officer is going to be better trained and equipped, just generally speaking, than a part-time guardsman. And you really can't take issue with that. But a division commander, if you're not going to micromanage and he's got top-rate officers, then whoever heard of just this standard, well, they all got to go. Why should they all have to go? Certainly, there are some that don't need to go. And so as far as I know, and I haven't researched every division, as far as I know, this policy did take place that every division, colonel and above, were replaced by guardsmen. Excuse me, the guardsmen were replaced, regardless of how good they were. And plus, the whole thing is that the army had a service of senior officers that they didn't have post-war, so therefore they were going to put them into the guardsmen. But that's exactly what happened. At that time, the U.S. army was exploding inside. Yes. But how could they find? Because they think it would be a shortage. No, here's another point. We were going to get a lot of people from ROTC. Now, that's an excerpt I didn't read in here, OK? So I think it was Lieutenant, I remember which general it was, one of General Russell's commanders said, hey, look, you've got a bunch of vacancies and a bunch of openings. Now, in the interwar army, up until this time, the practice of the army that had predated World War I is that in times of expansion of mobilization, especially for the guard, you're going to promote the person up to the next step. So an NCO will become a lieutenant. Or a lieutenant might be a captain. I mean, this is what the thinking was in the army, OK, in pre-World War II. So everybody had been ingrained with the belief that there's opportunities to rise from within. Now, the regular army officers, like Lieutenant Colonel Brokaw and others, were looking for opportunities to get on their move up. And they were going to get those opportunities first and foremost in the guard, because that's where the weakest links were. That's where the weakest links were. The regular army divisions already had regular army people in them. So where are you going to find these openings to get these guys in quick and up? I mean, sure enough, if you wait long enough, you'll get into the great scheme of things, because the army expanded to 89 divisions. But at the outset, this is Lieutenant Colonel Brokaw. I mean, we haven't even declared war yet. And Brokaw and these others are saying, hey, look, I want this job. And one of the other officers that Brokaw was representing was an artillery officer saying, hey, relieve the regimental commander. Give me his job. And so what happened later in the narrative is General Russell did relieve one of his artillery brigade commanders. And he thought the tests were rigged against him. He thought he did a great job in artillery. General Lear was dead set against this guy. And so in the meantime, to placate the army a little bit, General Russell had taken as one of the regimental commanders under this Brigadier General, a regular army officer. So when the Brigadier was getting reclassified, the Brigadier says, well, Colonel so-and-so, regular army Colonel, well, you're going too. And the regular army officer says, what? Well, he says, yeah, I mean, we've been viewed as dirtbags. We're viewed as no good. So you've got to get reclassified, too. And that Colonel hightailed it out of that division and got himself another assignment. And that's the irony. The Colonel protected his equities and ended up becoming a Brigadier General and moving up. But the Brigadier General, so what I'm saying, you get a double standard. How is it you can look at one person's efficiency reports and promote him up saying he's doing a sterling job, and at the same time his boss gets fired because he's not doing a good job? And that's the point that General Russell is making. That if you read through this, and you'd have to get through the official records, too, he's making a claim that the tests were rigged against his guard unit. And he gives examples of this officer and that officer and some of the regular Army officers he had that didn't cut the mustard. Again, he's got an axe to grind. I'm not suggesting you take this on face value that this is the absolute truth of how the Army ran in World War II. But you're not going to find another perspective from a senior level like this. This is it. You mentioned General Marshall. Yes, sir. Do you have any information relative to his thinking in this regard, or directives, correspondence? He mentions in the book that I'm not sure. Well, again, this is General Russell speaking. I haven't looked at Marshall's papers. One of the officers, after the Louisiana maneuvers, a colonel, wrote a letter to the War Department in Washington, a regular Army colonel, complaining about the 30th Division. And then somebody from Washington comes down and tells Russell, Marshall has it in for you. He doesn't like you. And he's told us to keep our eyes on the 30th Division. Marshall didn't micromanage. Marshall was running the Army. Marshall really gets an unfair treatment here. Marshall and McNair did not micromanage the 30th Division. But the people who were executing what they thought were their guidance, again, in my view, might have been a little overambitious. And so General Marshall, we all know, maybe for those of us who are students of World War II, or maybe some of us who were in it, we all know that he wanted to get more efficient officers. And so the Army is mobilizing huge mobilization. I mean, that the general policy was successful. I mean, you couldn't afford to go to war with people that were questionable or too old or not trained well. And so General Russell's division was probably the exception. And I don't remember if I told you this, but when General Russell was relieved and reclassified in 1942, he had a number of staff jobs in the Army. He ends up World War II, goes back to the guard, and gets to be a division commander of a brand new guard division right after World War II, the 48th Division. Now, you don't give a division command to somebody that's not qualified for the job. So he demonstrated his capabilities as a division commander prior to World War II, after World War II, and he probably would have been a heck of a division commander in World War II. But he didn't have the opportunity. I mean, I believe if he hadn't been reassigned under General Lear, he might have been the second guard division commander to go to war, two out of 18, instead of one out of 18. Was there a feeling in the Army that the people who had gone to West Point hated everybody else or reserve officers? Well, I can't speak about that in this book. I mean, that doesn't come through in this book. He doesn't really discuss that. I mean, in passing, he might say something about West Pointers, but he's talking about people at that time that were West Pointers or regular Army officers. I don't have enough subject matter knowledge to know if there were West Pointers in the guard. I really don't know that. But he's not looking at West Point. He's just looking at this corporate battle because there was age and grade policies for regular Army officers and that people had to get into commands because if they couldn't get into a command, that their career would flat line out. At least that's what they thought. And so they were looking to advance their careers on assignments. I mean, who doesn't do that? When you start talking about Marshall, you've got to start talking about VMI because that's all he cared about. And to get more of southern officers be general. Well, I'm glad you brought up that point. I don't have anything to say about VMI here. But there is one of the officers that was advising General Russell to replace his officers that was a schoolmate. It might have been a VMI. He'd just say he had a personal connection with General Marshall from an earlier time. And that if you've got that kind of link, oh, by the way, Leslie McNair was a bunkmate of George Marshall on the ship over to Europe in World War I. They had a personal relationship together. And so it's not uncommon. I mean, of course it's not uncommon when you have senior people that there are these personal relationships. I think they can create George Army National Guard. I'm a student over at the War College. And one thing we've talked about is leaders integrate into their units and differences between active component and general component. One knock that people can play out against the Army National Guard is we can get entrenched because it's almost a regimental system. People grow up in the same organization. As you mentioned, General Russell himself was in position as a division commander for 10 years, which is unusual given the active component of the standard. So do you think that there is a legitimate criticism to be made there with respect to Russell favoring his guys and being clouded by the fact that they worked together for so long and that he could? I got to tell you what, I don't believe that. General Russell wanted the best division to go to war. I can't second guess what he thought about the capabilities of his officers. I just don't believe he would want somebody on his team that was substandard. I just don't see it. Because he relieved his officers that he agreed. He wasn't entrenched in it. When people said this guy needs to go or that guy needs to go, he agreed with them. He mentioned his book. Yeah, this person, that person. I mean, he says in his book that he's a loyal officer regardless of what he believes. He's going to follow his chain of command. But again, the thread you pull through here is he didn't want to participate in something he thought was unseemly and unfair. Unseemly and unfair. There's another anecdote I'll share with you. Because when I was looking for other division commanders that had similar circumstances, I don't know if I brought this quote with me. But the Texas Division, General Walker, he was a regular army officer that took over a guard division. And in General Walker's memoir, he just has a little bit about the pre-war time. His core commander, Lieutenant General Strong, was pressuring General Walker, newly just took over this guard division, to relieve a bunch of guardsmen. And General Walker's writing in his diary says, what's this all about? I'm the division commander. I decide who comes and goes. What's this deal with this pressure from above to relieve these guys? It's really strange. And that's the only other example I found from somebody attached with the guard division. And General Walker went along with it. But I mean, it's just not a common practice. You don't reach down from above and tell people who comes and who goes. That's your prerogative as the commander. Just a comment. First of all, I was an officer in the Army Reserve for a long time. And we always felt that the regular Army looked at us as sort of a black sheep. And they had to put up with us. But they didn't really think we were as good as they were. And in many cases, that was probably true in the 70s and 80s. But apparently, they've solved that problem because there's so many guard units in the Reserve units that serve in active duty, and they do a great job. That's right. Today they do. It would seem to me there must have been a lot of guard and reserve officers that were veterans of World War I. So their experience would have matched, probably, most of the regular officers. Well, General Russell talks about that. He has this conversation with Major General Parker, a regular Army officer, who some people might remember as machine gun Parker from the Spanish-American War. And General Parker, a regular, and he had had his discussion sometime in the 1920s about what's going to happen with the treatment of guardsmen in the future. Because they got a raw deal in World War I, and they were considered second-class citizens. And so there were some regular people that said, you know, we need a better relationship and accommodation. But are you going to be a Lieutenant General Drum, saying it's your division? You decide? Or are you going to be a Lieutenant General Lear, saying, they've got to go? And it's up to you. As I say, it's the personalities. But there was no overall general overarching conspiracy. Now, he does touch on this in his book. Actually, this is documented. General McNair, had he not died, he got killed in Europe. It was a casualty from one of our bombers. General McNair had drafted up a memo after the war to do what's called universal military training, to essentially do away with the guard and just make sure that we have a huge federal pool of people. And McNair did have an axe to grind against the guard. I don't think that anybody's going to deny that. But McNair was not micromanaging General Rassel. He wasn't. In the Navy, which I was in during the Korean War, we had a pretty strong group of opponents, primarily from Mustang officers. And they hated us. Well, I can tell you, I'm sure there's a history of these relations with the reserves and the guard and the army. Any student of army history knows that. And if you talk to people today and either of those components behind a closed door, they'll tell you that some of this still goes on. But it's the worst when you're competing for resources. So when right now, as what's called down-sizing the military, that's where the battle is on. And I can't remember now. Did I tell you why the Navy did this book? I told you that, right? Why not the Army did it? OK, so when I asked for Dr. Dubbler, when the head of the AUSA book program recommended Dr. Dubbler, the head of the AUSA book program, I never asked him this. He said, well, send me the manuscript. I never asked him to look for a publisher for me. I never asked him to publish the book. I was simply looking for somebody to write an introduction. So I send him the manuscript. And a week and a half later, he says, well, we can't publish this. I said, well, I wasn't asking you to publish it. He said, the Army, we won't do it. It's too controversial. It's too critical of senior leaders in the Army. No way, no how. But he says, look, one of the publishers that supports the Army history program is the Naval Institute Press. I'm going to contact them. They should do this. I never lifted the phone up to find a publisher for this book. The Navy did it because, well, that they got some great recommendations to publish this. But they didn't have any vested interest in the Army's equities. So that's why, as I said when I'm here before you today, here's a book that the Navy published that's a little peculiar. But the personal politics in the Army retiree community, this was never going to happen or be endorsed. Because just the retired senior Army leadership that has a very good connection with the current senior Army leadership, it would just create too many problems, especially because right now they're battling for resources. There's finger pointing for, it's a zero sum game, taking resources out of the reserves, out of the guard, out of the active establishment. And behind the scenes, this is what happens. So if there are none of the questions, I want to thank you all for your time and consideration. And yes, sir. I'm just going to say it didn't help very much to make a Marine head of the senior of the joint chief, does it? Well, time will tell.