Armies on Wheels

New York: William Morrow & Company, 1941. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. Francis Arnoldy (Maps and Diagrams), and Joseph Be. 251,[3] pages. Foreword by J. F. C. Fuller. Footnotes. Maps. Index. DJ has some wear and soiling. Some endpaper soiling and discoloration. Some marks to text noted. Brigadier General Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, also known as Slam, (July 18, 1900 - December 17, 1977) was a military journalist and historian. He served with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, before leaving to work as a journalist, specializing in military affairs. In 1940, he published Blitzkrieg: Armies on Wheels, an analysis of the tactics used by the Wehrmacht, and re-entered the U.S. Army as its chief combat historian during World War II and the Korean War. He officially retired in 1960 but acted as an unofficial advisor during the Vietnam War. Marshall wrote some 30 books about warfare. His most famous work was Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, which concluded fewer than 25% of men in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. His overall conclusion - a significant number do not fire their weapons in combat - has been verified by multiple studies performed by other armies, going back to the 18th century. Why this is so remains contested; Marshall argued that even with their own lives at risk, the resistance of the average individual "...toward killing a fellow man" was such that "he will not...take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility and at the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector". In this work, Marshall points out that the greater the mobility of an army, the greater the need for perfect integration and co-ordination. He advocated a much closer organization of infantry and artillery than then currently existed. He believed that tanks and planes would be relatively ineffectual unless integrated with bodies of troops mechanized and mobile beyond anything then deployed except in small, experimental units.