PART I

WORLD WAR II

The Army of 1939 was a small, weak force of 197,000 men, “not even a third-rate military power,” as Gen. George Marshall later put it in an official Pentagon report. The Army had introduced a new semi-automatic rifle, the M1 Garand, but most soldiers still were issued the 1903 Springfield. Of the nine infantry divisions the Army had on paper, only three had divisional strengths, while six were actually weak brigades. By September 1944 the Army would number almost eight million and would have forty divisions in Europe and the Mediterranean and twenty-one in the Pacific.