Black Jack Pershing: Leadership Lessons from World War 1
How Pershing’s strategy and vision transformed the U. S. military for the 20th Century
I’ve always been intrigued by great military leaders who have shaped history, and especially interested in what in their background came to bear upon their most notable achievements. Often, we know them by short titles or events that unjustly simplify their impact. General “Black Jack” Pershing, as influential as he was, falls into this category.
In searching for a book on Pershing (and there are plenty out there), I wanted to understand the life experiences that shaped his thinking, which became pivotal in America’s experience in World War I. After some research, I honed in on Jim Lacey’s Pershing: A Biography: Lessons in Leadership. Lacey, a renowned scholar, war correspondent, and accomplished author, contributed this volume on Pershing as part of a 13-part series on The Great Generals, which includes notable figures such as Washington, Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower, Marshall, and LeMay.
In Lacey’s 2009 biography, I found what I was looking for and more. Lacey’s book offers not just insight into Pershing and his time of military transition to large industrial warfare, but also how many of his achievements were influential to the success of our modern military throughout the 20th century. The lessons of Pershing’s leadership captured by Lacey are worth considering today as the armed forces think through how to adapt to the changing character of conflict in the 21st century.
The moniker “Black Jack,” earned in his earliest days as a cavalry officer in the American West with the Buffalo Soldiers, stuck with John J. Pershing throughout his life. Originally intended by fellow officers as a racial slur for Pershing’s respect for the professionalism of black soldiers, Pershing embraced the nickname, reflecting his enduring admiration for African American soldiers.
Following his monumental role in shaping and leading the American army in World War I, he was promoted by Congress to six stars and bestowed the title of General of the Armies, ranking below only General George Washington. Although Pershing’s accomplishments were significant and his impact on the American military enduring, they are not well known and are fading with the passage of time.
In Lacey’s biography, he delves into Pershing’s life and the sweep of his 42 years of soldiering, providing both context and substance to a career intertwined with America’s rise to global influence, cemented with its role in the Allied victory in “The Great War.” The book, like many biographies, is a chronological account of Pershing's life. I appreciated Lacey’s approach and his investment in examining the span of Pershing’s life – from his earliest days through his retirement and death in 1948. Rather than rushing through Pershing’s early days and focusing solely on his role in the Great War, Lacey provides much-needed insight into Pershing’s life and career before those years.
In the pages of Lacey’s book, we learn that Pershing had aspirations of becoming a lawyer and saw an education at West Point as the means to that end. What follows is a remarkable career that the author traces in an insightful and effective style – from Pershing’s first leadership experience in the Indian Wars to instructor duty at the University of Nebraska, combat in the Spanish-American War, fighting the Moros in the Philippines, staff duty in Washington, leading the Punitive Expedition into Mexico chasing Pancho Villa, and through to the Great War. Throughout, Lacey portrays the personal character of Pershing – the ladies’ man, the gambler, his family, and the tragic loss of his wife and three daughters in a fire, his bravery in combat, and his resolute drive to fully invest himself in every task to achieve success.
Pershing had a vision and recognized the need to remake himself professionally and evolve with the times. From his earliest days fighting the Moros, he understood that to gain leverage, whether on the battlefield or in diplomatic negotiations, he needed to know his adversary. This meant learning the Moro language, culture, traditions, and religion, which he did to great effect. Lacey notes Pershing’s effort to understand culture as a decisive edge, briefly tying it to modern-day U.S. forces in Iraq who adopted a similar approach. It’s a missed opportunity by the author to expand on this important point, connecting the enduring value of understanding culture in today’s military operations planning and execution.
He recognized that modern war required different leadership. As an observer of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, Pershing realized that the character of war had changed with the increasing size of field armies and technology, making it impractical for the commander to see the entire battlefield. He concluded that future commanders had to develop other skills to build and fight large armies, mastering logistics, communications, planning, and coordinating large formations through professionally trained and trusted unit officers. His observations also impressed upon him the importance of military strategy and diplomacy in the outcome of conflicts, noting that the Japanese won the war in the peace negotiations. These lessons were key to Pershing’s mindset when fielding large armies in World War I.
Lacey’s coverage of Pershing in the Great War is particularly insightful, exploring his adept diplomatic skills amidst the untrodden terrain of how to build what became the largest force the U.S. had ever put in the field, but perhaps most importantly, how to employ it as a U.S. fighting force. His lessons learned over the transformation of the U.S. Army from 130,000 troops to over 2 million soldiers of the AEF persist today in the organization of the general staff, unit-level training, professional military education, and the importance of combined operations and working with allies. Pershing’s navigation of continual friction with allies – especially over ‘amalgamation,’ the British and French pressure to fill out their depleted ranks with U.S. soldiers – all while focusing on defeating the enemy, is remarkable. I could not help but relate how Pershing faced those challenges then without a doctrinal ‘map’ to reference and how those same challenges persist today, but we are better informed today because of the AEF experience with combined and joint warfare.
Throughout the chapters on the Great War, Lacey traces Pershing’s insistence that the AEF fight as an American force under American command. What we take for granted today was not the case in 1918. Pershing resolutely opposed the concept of ‘amalgamation’ and set the standard that American forces would only fight under American command - a standard that is foremost in U.S. policy to this day.
In parallel, the biography also tells the story of conflict's changing character by tracing Pershing’s career from low-intensity, small-unit fights with cavalry to counter-insurgency operations and, finally, the challenge of adapting rapidly advancing technologies in building and commanding large industrial armies of the 20th century. This context is indispensable to appreciating Pershing’s role in transforming the American military for World War I and shaping it for the 20th century and beyond.
An unexpected gem of Lacey’s book is his cautionary guide to the reader on post-war memoirs. Lacey provides two key observations on how to interpret Pershing’s memoir, which won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. First, Pershing’s insistence on giving equal attention to each unit and commander was a disservice to history. Lacey believes that Pershing's sense of fairness obscured his true insights and the key lessons and noteworthy events, making the work resemble an after-action report rather than a memoir. Second, Lacey highlights the professional animosity between Pershing and General Peyton March, Army Chief of Staff, which skewed their contributions to the historical record in their respective memoirs. Pershing’s memoir deliberately restricted references to March, while March’s memoir (which came out in 1932) characterized Pershing unfavorably. Lacey notes that the book by Major General Harbord, the AEF’s Chief of Staff, provides more balance and may offer better insights from those who led the U.S. war effort…another book to chase down!
These are but a few of the insights from Lacey’s book. I highly recommend this book if you’re looking for an introduction to General Pershing or the AEF’s role in the Great War. It offers plenty of practical detail while maintaining an insightful narrative. While there are other books on Pershing and the American experience in the Great War, I found Lacey’s work to be comprehensive and balanced, serving as a worthy starting point for deeper exploration into related topics. To those who have read this book, what’s your take?
Tags: New Read, World War 1
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Thanks for the recommendation here - I am a fan of Lacey's other work, but have not read this one - it is now on my "to-read" list. I anticipate an imminent acquisition...
In return, let me note another Pershing-focussed work along with the brief review I wrote of it on Good reads:
Pershing in Command: A study of the American Expeditionary Force in the Great War
by William Stroock
An excellent overview of the AEF in World War I, its creation, deployment and year in combat. The title implies a command study of Pershing during the war, but the bulk of the narrative is a battle history with a primary focus on the various American commanders, and their influences, broadly, on the course of American operations. I had hoped for more Pershing - his presence in the narrative is not as in depth as the title would lead us to think. That said, his success in retaining the AEF as an army independent of the French and British forces was hard won. The high level machinations of our allies attempting to disperse and amalgamate US forces among and within their forces was relentless, and Pershing, as perhaps only a Pershing could, stood fast against it. This is touched on vividly as it occurred, again and again, but as with the rest of the book, not in depth. The battle history is similarly an overview - seldom venturing below the division level of fighting and maneuvering, with some brigade level actions and an occasional battalion level action. The best value in this book is as a starting point to acquaint an interested reader with the unprecedented difficulty of creating, training, transporting, organizing and fighting a three-million strong army out of literally nothing... starting from what was effectively a 300,000 man colonial occupation force. All credit to General Pershing for this stupendous feat, in the face of adamant and relentless pressure to merely feed manpower into French and British armies, and despite the doctrinal mistakes that led to unnecessarily high casualties among American troops. But they learned - they changed, albeit slowly - and they prevailed.
As an aside, the short introduction puts the American experience and World War I into context, and does so in such a compelling and evocative manner as to make the reader impatient to read more. What a perfect introduction and invitation into the subject matter!
I hope the book discusses his actions on November 11, 1918. After the armistice was signed and the fighting would stop at the 11th hour, thousands of casualties still occurred in the morning hours for no reason at all. That was definitely a failure on his part. Definitely the best leader of our military in the early 20th century and created the WWII generals but he wasn’t perfect either.