HISTORY OF U.S. ARMY
SOLDIER PHYSICAL FITNESS
by
The need for physical fitness and physical training in combat is as old as war itself. In ancient Greece, citizens were required to train themselves to carry the shields and long spears of the day. The same was true for Romans of the Republic and early empire. Later, however, the physical fitness and military training of the average Roman citizen declined--a decline that helped necessitate the development of standing, mercenary armies.
In fact, physical fitness is important not only as the basis for the stamina necessary for warfare, but also because such fitness carries with it a psychological discipline that is essential to win. We can draw a direct connection between a citizenry that is physically unfit, and one that is mentally as well as physically ineffective at the start of a war.
One may argue, of course, that physical fitness can be developed by military training. Basic wellness or fitness, however, is a necessary prerequisite for the physical stamina, training, and much of the technical training necessary to make a soldier. If the recruit entering service, either in ancient Rome or modern America, must undergo extensive remedial training to develop physical fitness, that remedial training consumes so much time that it limits the amount of technical and tactical training the soldier may receive prior to combat. Youth physical fitness is therefore an implied but vital correlative to the American tradition of maintaining the smallest possible professional Army and relying on citizen soldiers in wartime.
Yet, beginning with the Revolution, every American war has begun with a citizenry that was unprepared for the rigors of combat and every such war has ended with bills being proposed in Congress to improve the general physical fitness of youth, in part at least to prepare them for war.
The Stonewall Brigade
On the face of it, one would expect Americans in the 1700s and 1800s to be more rugged and fit than those of 1990, but in fact good American commanders have always found physical training to be a problem. In the American Civil War, General Stonewall Jackson first came to prominence by his rigorous training of a brigade of rural Virginians in 1861. Based on his experience in the Mexican War, Jackson insisted on long speedmarches and similar physical challenges. As a result, the Stonewall Brigade displayed both stamina in maneuver warfare and discipline on the battlefield long after Jackson had left them for higher command.
During Jackson's lightning maneuvers against his opponents in the Shenandoah Valley, such physical preparation was absolutely essential. A typical day's march in January 1862, for example, carried the Stonewall Brigade 28 miles across both the Caeapon River and the western Shenandoah Mountains to seize the key communications center at Romney, Virginia. This march, which drove two other Confederate units to the edge of mutiny, was carried out in driving sleet, with 60-pound packs and no time to rest or eat. Yet, the Stonewall Brigade was still ready to fight when it reached its destination.
Such physical stamina was the exception rather than the rule in the armies of the early Civil War. More typical was the experience of Robert E. Lee. In his approach to the Battle of Antietam, Lee lost 16,000 stragglers on the march-16,000 men that he desperately needed on the battlefield.
Development of Formal Programs
While the average citizen was found wanting in physical preparedness, even the regular U.S. Army lacked a systematic approach to fitness. For the first century of its existence, the Army was constantly involved either in warfare or in frontier police duties. As a result, physical training, like marksmanship instruction, was the exception rather than the rule. Enormous physical stamina was necessary to survive the primitive conditions and long marches of wartime, but recruits who entered in poor physical shape were unlikely to benefit from such a harsh practical school.
When the Indian Wars faded away during the 1880s, Army commanders considered physical training in garrison for the first time. In 1896, for example, General Nelson Miles ordered the soldiers at western posts to engage in at least 30 minutes per day of exercises and gymnastics.
During the later 1800s, the German Turnverein Movement, which advocated a scientific approach to physical development and training, arrived in the United States. As you might expect, West Point was one of the first schools in the country to integrate physical fitness and training into an academic program. In 1885, Lieutenant Colonel Herman J. Koehler, a graduate of the Milwaukee Normal School for Physical Training, joined the West Point faculty to teach gymnastics and physical culture. All entering cadets were required to participate in a course of calisthenics that Koehler invented. The construction of a gymnasium in 1892 allowed Koehler to expand the West Point Physical Education Program to include a variety of sports, producing officers with at least a minimum of personal experience and knowledge about physical fitness.
Still, West Point training plus the individual efforts by many Army leaders in troop units were not the same as a systematic program of military fitness for the average soldier. Such a program developed, like so many other institutions of the modern U.S. Army, at the turn of the century, when a growing professional officer corps combined with progressive politicians who believed in reform and development in all areas of government.
The key figure in this development was J. Franklin Bell, Army chief of staff between 1906 and 1910. While still a cavalry lieutenant in the 1880s, Bell had experimented with gymnastic equipment to train his troopers on a regular basis. He pursued this interest after he was appointed as professor of military art and tactics, the forerunner of ROTC ' at the Illinois Normal School. During the summer of 1887, Lieutenant Bell at his own expense studied physical culture and training under one of the foremost representatives of that field, Professor Sargent of Harvard University.
The experience of the Spanish-American War reemphasized Bell's belief in physical training, with numerous instances of unprepared regular soldiers and volunteers collapsing under the heat and stress of tropical combat. By 1905, Brigadier General Bell was commandant of the General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and visited France to observe the French Army maneuvers. He was impressed with the physical fitness and rapid movement of French infantrymen, reinforcing his determination to establish similar standards in the U.S. Army.
Even before he became chief of staff in 1906, General Bell was instrumental in the development of the first systematic program of unit training for the Army. General Order No. 44 of 1906 was a comprehensive document, but pride of place went to physical conditioning. In garrison, soldiers were supposed to undergo regular exercise in gymnastics, outdoor athletics, and swimming. In addition, they were required to conduct weekly marches of 12 miles for the infantry and 18 miles for the horse-mounted artillery and cavalry. The capstone of this program was an annual period of extended training in the field, including one march per month of three day's duration. In short, the tough standards practiced by some commanders for two decades became mandatory for all.
The impact of this program on field units was predictable: opposition was widespread. During 1907, General Bell toured western Army posts along with the secretary of war. At every stop, commanders told him that the new requirements, especially the marches, were discouraging many recruits from entering the service. On further investigation, however, Bell found that in many instances the source of soldier discontent was the fact that their senior officers did not undergo the same training. Instead, these commanders accompanied their troops in horse-drawn wagons, sometimes renting civilian wagons with softer suspension systems than the official vehicles!
Frustrated, General Bell discussed the matter with President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had experienced firsthand the rigors of the War in Cuba, reacted characteristically. He directed the secretary of war to require that, regardless of whatever physical training the troops underwent, all officers must pass an annual test of stamina. Every officer had to be able to ride 90 miles on horseback or march 45 miles on foot within a three-day period. To prove his point, Roosevelt then exceeded his own standards by riding the required distance in two days, rather than three, over icy roads. At the same time, the 1906 program for enlisted soldiers was modified to waive the requirement to carry full equipment on all marches.
Unfortunately, even a Presidential order did not settle the matter. General Bell spent much of the next three years defending physical training policies from the determined opposition of the bureau chiefs who dominated the War Department. An obese chief of engineers, for example, persuaded Congress to exempt certain staff positions, including his own, from the riding/marching test. When the surgeon general protested that such long marches were dangerous medically, General Bell remarked acidly that he expected such objections to disappear if he exempted surgeons from the marches!
1919-1980
All this debate, however, centered on the training of a small professional Army, which was swamped by the expansion of World War I. In this war, again, the lack of physical fitness and simple health on the part of the average citizen entering the Army became a stumbling block in the effort to improvise a mass Army in 18 months. For example, the tough peacetime enlistment standards of the Army were repeatedly revised and relaxed because the ferocious demand for soldiers in France rapidly exhausted the pool of perfectly fit conscripts. For the first time, soldiers were admitted to the service for limited duty only. The training camps spread throughout the United States inevitably spent a large portion of their time developing the physical fitness of the conscripts. Army leaders needed guidance on how to develop physically unprepared trainees in all aspects of health and physical conditioning.
Building on this experience, the Army issued its first physical training manual, Field Manual 21-20, in 1919. This manual stressed basic physical fitness rather than combat stamina, with extensive discussions of body functioning and calisthenic exercises planned by Colonel Koehler of West Point. This very basic, remedial approach was the standard for Army physical training between the World Wars. In fact, Field Manual 21-20 was reissued with minor modifications in 1941 and served as the basis of physical training doctrine throughout World War II. In that war, fully 45 percent of selective service registrants failed entrance examinations for either physical or mental unfitness. As the war dragged on, all of these rejected citizens were reexamined in a desperate effort to find more qualified manpower. During one five-month period at the height of the war, however, 630,000 more men were added to the pool of IV-FS, unqualified for any service.
For those who passed entrance examinations, Field Manual 21-20 went a long way toward developing basic wellness and physical fitness during individual training, but physical preparation for combat remained largely a matter for individual commanders.
To take one example, General Lucian Truscott became famous (or infamous) for the "Truscott Trot," his emphasis on sustained speed marching in combat. An avid polo player, Truscott was a lifelong advocate of physical activity both for health and as a source of mental preparation for combat. At a time when the Army doctrine expected infantry to march at a rate of 2.5 miles per hour, Truscott required the 3D Infantry Division to cover 5 miles the first hour, 4 miles in each of the next two hours, and then 3.5 miles per hour for an additional five hours, for a total of 30 miles in the time normally allocated to cover only 20 miles. He also trained his division in mountain-climbing techniques of all kinds, enabling them to advance 100 miles in five days of fighting over rugged Italian terrain. Similar examples abounded in other units. Still, physical readiness remained a problem throughout the war. It has been estimated, for example, that on Omaha Beach on D-Day, 1944, more soldiers drowned while struggling ashore than were killed by enemy fire; drownproofing techniques were virtually unknown.
When the Army took stock at the end of World War II, it tried a different approach to physical fitness training. Remedial physical education was necessary for the majority of men entering the Service, but such training was inadequate without more advanced preparation for combat. In 1946, therefore, a physical training school was organized at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where it attempted to provide trained graduates for every regimental sized unit in the Army. The school immediately revised Field Manual 21-20. The resulting 1946 edition was radically different from its predecessors-instead of looking at conventional, basic physical fitness and wellness, it stressed combat-related physical training, including combatives, obstacle courses, carrying simulated casualties, drownproofing, etc. Soldiers had to be prepared to march to battle and then fight under extremes of stress. The manual stressed integration of strenuous physical activity into all training, in order to produce a soldier with the staying power and mental confidence to win.
These techniques had not had time to be institutionalized before the Korean War and thus the record of Army physical preparedness in that conflict was mixed. The garrison units deployed from Japan to Korea during the summer of 1950 were often poorly prepared for the grueling task of fighting up and down hills; units that arrived later were often better prepared than their counterparts of World War II.
In 1953, however, the physical training school at Fort Bragg closed its doors, a victim of austerity programs during the Eisenhower Administration. Belief in massive nuclear retaliation made the readiness of ground units, and especially physical fitness for conventional warfare, a very low priority. The Army continued to hold periodic conferences on physical fitness, seeking to bring military trainers in contact with civilian physiology experts.
Unfortunately, such conferences did not provide trained physical fitness experts at the unit level, where they were most needed. By 1957, Field Manual 21-20 was revised in a manner that greatly reduced the 1946 emphasis on combat readiness. Instead, the 1957 version reverted to the earlier emphasis on body structure, body functioning, physical fitness testing, and other basic subjects, more appropriate for training soft draftees to minimum standards.
During the 1960s, the doctrine of flexible response to a variety of military threats, coupled with the needs of the Vietnam War, inevitably brought a renewed emphasis on combat training. Speaking about a company commander who cared enough to prepare his troops for the demands of battle, one anonymous soldier remarked that "he used to hump us 'til our bones ached; we would want to stop and eat, stop and rest, and he'd just hump us. But I give him thanks, man, because if it weren't for him driving us, I'd be dead right now."
Again, however, as in other postwar eras, the neglect and discipline problems of the 1970s caused Army physical training to decline in many cases to a perfunctory set of exercises and a short daily run. Good leaders enforced high standards of training, but neither the entering recruit nor the average soldier in a unit was physically prepared for combat. By 1980, when President Carter asked his secretary of defense for a realistic appraisal of military physical ability, that ability had declined markedly.