Military Leaders Of World War I

"Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son."

"Here is a chief in the Latin sense of the word, that is to say une tête ... confident hope rings a carillon of bells in our hearts."

"Good impression; clear eyes which look you in the face, neat and precise thoughts, no bluff in his speech, good sense dominates everything."

"Meteor-like, his orbit was swift and brilliant; also like a meteor, he was to disappear without trace. In the rapidity of his early promotion he resembled Pétain, but no further. He was an out-and-out Grandmaisonite, and like Foch he believed that victory was purely a matter of moral force. ... [T]he supreme attribute of Nivelle—cultured, courteous, suave and eloquent—was his ability to handle the politicians. His allure seems to have been almost hypnotic."

"Ils ne passeront pas! [They shall not pass!]"

"[Nivelle was] not only a rash commander, he was representative of the national temperament. This is the reason that he was blindly followed."

"This belief in immediate translation to paradise is at the bottom of most of the troubles of Sulu and the Mohammedan Asiatic islands as it can readily be seen to be largely responsible for the contempt of death especially in dealing with the white man and the white man's penal laws. Even regarding battle, the Sultan of Sulu has said to me many times: "It will not frighten my people if I tell them, 'The Americans will fight you if you rob and murder.' They will reply: 'Well, what of that? If a man dies to-day he won't have the trouble of dying to-morrow.'"

"His great service to the country was shown in the remarkable control and influence which he exercised in dealings with Moros, Mexicans and Indians which was invariably used in promoting peace. By personal effort he prevented many hostile outbreaks on the part of Indians. Blessed Are The Peacemakers"

"Japan and some of the other allies thought that we could never put more than three hundred thousand men in France. The achievements of our army and navy contributed much to the downfall of the empires of Germany and Austria and placed our country in the front rank of nations. The tremendous effort we were also able to put forth astonished the world, including ourselves, and served to make known to all that the United States will fight if necessary and cannot be attacked with impunity."

"HUGH LENOX SCOTT was born at Danville, Kentucky, on 22 September 1853; graduated from the United States Military Academy, 1876; was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned to the 9th Cavalry, June 1876, assuming that month a vacancy in the 7th Cavalry created by Little Bighorn battle casualties; was stationed at various posts in Dakota Territory and participated in the Nez Percé campaign, 1877; was promoted to first lieutenant, June 1878, and engaged in scouting and constructing telegraph lines, 1879-1882; married Mary Merrill, 1880; studied and became an authority on the language, customs, and history of the Plains Indians; served on an exploring expedition with the Geological Survey, 1884; was on recruiting service, 1886-1888; was on duty at Fort Sill and scouting in the Central Plains, 1889; served in the Sioux outbreak of 1890, being involved in actions at Porcupine, Wounded Knee, and White Clay Creeks; organized and commanded Troop L (composed of Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Indians), 7th Cavalry, at Fort Sill, 1892-1897; was promoted to captain, 1895; was in charge of Geronimo's band of Chiricahua prisoners of war, 1894-1897; was assigned to the Adjutant General's Department to work on the Indian sign language, 1897-1898; was promoted to major of volunteers and assigned as assistant adjutant general, I Corps, 1898-1899; became lieutenant colonel of volunteers and assistant adjutant general on the staff of the military governor of Cuba, 1899-1900; was military governor of Sulu Archipelago, Philippines, and commander of the Jolo military post, 1903-1906; was wounded in action at Crater Lake while campaigning against the Moros, November 1903; was superintendent of the United States Military Academy, 1906-1910; served in the Office of the Chief of Staff, 1911; dealt with problems of various Indian tribes, 1908-1915; was promoted to lieutenant colonel (March) and colonel (August), 1911; commanded the 3d Cavalry, 1912, and the 2d Cavalry Brigade, 1913-1914, on the Mexican border; was assistant chief of staff of the United States Army, 1914; was promoted to brigadier general, March 1913, and major general, April 1915; was chief of staff of the United States Army, 16 November 1914-21 September 1917; supervised the concentration of troops on the Mexican border preliminary to the Punitive Expedition; laid the foundations for mobilizing, training, and equipping the Army for World War I; espoused conscription over a volunteer system for the Army; was a member of the Root commission to Russia, 1917; retired from active duty, September 1917, but was recalled to inspect the battlefront in Europe; commanded the 78th Division and Camp Dix, 1918; retired permanently from the Army, May 1919; was a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners, 1919-1920; died in Washington, D.C., on 30 April 1934."

"Robert Oliver Skemp (1910-1984), portraitist and muralist, studied at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Vincent DuMond, and Robert Laurent; at the Grand Central Art School under Harry Ballinger and Pruett Carter; and at the George Luks and Charles Baskerville studios. He enlarged upon this background with study in France and Spain. During his career he received a number of awards for his work, which is represented in numerous collections. He painted the portraits of many prominent personalities, including J. Paul Getty of Getty Oil Corporation, Chief Executive Officer Walter B.Wriston of Citibank, and Chief Executive Officer Donald T. Regan of Merrill Lynch & Company. His portrait of Maj. Ge. Hugh L. Scott is reproduced from the Army Art Collection."

"I soon found that the Sioux language was quite limited in the scope of its usefulness, but that the sign language of the Plains was an intertribal language, spoken everywhere in the buffalo country from the Saskatchewan River of British America to Mexico, east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Missouri, and I began this study at the same time with the Sioux, and have continued its study right down to this very day."

"As I look back over the circumstances of my life, I feel deeply grateful for the friendship, the cooperation and support I have received from those with whom I have been associated in and out of the army and in all parts of the world- contacts with the peoples of many races and colors by which our lives have been filled with joy and gladness, and which have contributed much to the delightful memories of a soldier's career."

"The Germans were not, as the phrase 'more or less' makes clear, optimistic. Moltke himself had warned the Kaiser as early as 1906 that the next war would be 'a long wearisome struggle' which would 'utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious'. 'We must prepare ourselves', he wrote in 1912, 'for a long campaign, with numerous tough, protracted battles.' He was just as gloomy when he discussed the issue with his Austrian counterpart, Franz Conrad von Hôtzendorff, in May 1914: T will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.' In any case, 'The sooner the better' was not the watchword of Moltke alone. His Russian counterpart, Yanushkevich, threatened to 'smash his telephone' after the Tsar had finally approved general mobilization, to avoid the risk of being told of a royal change of heart."

"It is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated."

"The puzzle is why [France's] heavy losses did not lead to a complete collapse - as had happened in 1870 and would happen again in 1940. Some credit must certainly go to the imperturbable French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre, and particularly to his ruthless purge of senescent or incompetent French commanders as the crisis unfolded. Fundamentally, however, time was against Moltke for the simple reason that the French could redeploy more swiftly than the Germans could advance once they had left their troop trains. On August 23 the three German armies on Moltke's right wing constituted twenty-four divisions, facing just seventeen and a half Entente divisions; by September 6 they were up against forty-one. The chance of a decisive victory was gone, if it had ever existed. At the Marne, the failure of Moltke's gamble was laid bare. He himself suffered a nervous breakdown."

"We are ready [for war], and the sooner it comes, the better for us."

"Revolution in India and Egypt, and also in the Caucuses...is of the highest importance. The treaty with Turkey will make it possible for the Foreign Office to realise this idea and to awaken the fanaticism of Islam."

"If there is no change in the political situation in Europe, Germany's central position will compel her to form a front on several sides. We shall therefore have to hold one front defensively with comparatively weak forces in order to be able to take the offensive on the other. That front can only be the French. A speedy decision may be hoped for on that side, while an offensive against Russia would be an interminable affair. But if we are to take the offensive against France, it would be necessary to violate the neutrality of Belgium. It is only by an advance across Belgium that we can hope to attack and defeat the French army in the open field."

"If we again slink out of this affair with our tail between our legs, if we cannot pull ourselves together to present demands which we are prepared to enforce by the sword, then I despair of the future of the German Reich."

"The moment Russia mobilizes, Germany also will mobilize, and will unquestionably mobilize her whole army."

"One should not comment on the actual motivating factor of the whole expedition, for if we were completely honest it is greed [Geldgier] which has encouraged us to cut into the big Chinese cake. We wanted to earn money, build railways, run mines, bring European culture, that means in one word, earn money. In this we are not an ounce better than the English in the Transvaal."

"[The next war will be between France and Germany and it will be] a question of life or death for us. We shall stop at nothing to gain our end. In the struggle for existence, one does not bother about the means one employs."

"O.M.G. - Oh! My God!"

"thumb|O.M.G. (Oh! My God) - Letter to Winston Churchill|Churchill, 9 Sept 1917We want brave men! ANY BLOODY FOOL CAN OBEY ORDERS!"

"If any subordinate opposes me, I will make his wife a widow, his children fatherless and his home a dunghill."

"Length of course depends on the stupidity of the class..."

"I went the whole hog, totus porcus."

"Can the Army win the war before the Navy loses it?"

"D-mn the Dardanelles! they'll be our grave!"

"I found Fisher a veritable volcano of knowledge and of inspiration..."

"There was always something foreign to the Navy about Fisher. He was never judged to be one of the 'band of brothers' which the Nelson tradition had prescribed. Harsh, capricious, vindictive, gnawed by hatreds arising often from spite, working secretly or violently as occasion might suggest by methods which the typical English gentleman and public-school boy are taught to dislike and avoid, Fisher was always regarded as the 'dark angel' of the Naval service."

"To be a 'Fisherite' or, as the Navy called it, to be in 'the Fish pond' was during his tenure of power an indispensible requisite for preferment."

"It is very silly indeed to build vessels of War so strong as to last a hundred years. They are obsolete in less than ten years."

"When by-and-by the Chinese know their power, they hae only to walk slowly westwards and, like the locusts in Egypt, no Pharaohs in Europe with all their mighty boats will stop them. They won't want to fire guns or bombs. They'll just all walk along and smother Europe. (Richard Hough, First Sea Lord, p. 35)"

"I knew his weakness as well as his strength. I understood his extravagances as much as I admired his genius. In sheer intellect he stood head and shoulders above his naval fellows."

"I found many remarkable men, but he was on the whole the most extraordinary personality of them all, and charged with genius."

"The best scale for an experiment is 12 inches to the foot."

"The Frontiers of England are the Coasts of the Enemy."

"As age increases, audacity leaks out and caution comes in."

"It is an historical fact that the British Navy stubbornly resists change."

"The Submarine will be the Battleship of the future!"

"But it does so happen that at the very moment when the changed conditions of naval sea-power rendered administrative revolution necessary, in Sir John Fisher was found a man of genius peculiarly fitted to aid in its execution."

"To tell you the truth this is another proof that Fisher's intellectual flaws are on the same great scale as his intellectual virtues. I told you his proposal about the German fleet at Kiel [to "Copenhagen" it]. It was no use of paradox nor said to shock. He meant it."

"No man I have ever met ever gave me so authentic a feeling of originality as this dare-devil of genius, this pirate of public life, who more than any other Englishman saved British democracy from a Prussian domination."

"There is no doubt whatever that Fisher was right in nine-tenths of what he fought for."

"Never Deny : Never Explain : Never Apologise"

"EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL.... Nature is no respecter of birth or money power when she lavishes her mental and physical gifts. We fight God when our Social System dooms the brilliant clever child of a poor man to the same level as his father."

"Hit first! Hit hard! Keep on hitting!! (The 3 H's)"

"Even a man's faults may reflect his virtues."