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Great Generals
Pershing: A Biography
In this persuasive biography, Jim Lacey sheds light on General Pershing's legacy as the nation's first modern combat commander, setting the standard for today's four-star officers. When the US entered into World War I in 1917, they did so with inadequate forces. In just over a year, Pershing built and hurled a one-million-man army against forty battle-hardened German divisions, defending the hellish Meuse-Argonne and turning the tide of the war. With focus and clarity, Lacey traces Pershing's development from Indian fighter to guerrilla warrior against the Philippine insurgency to victorious WWI commander.
1 pages, MP3 CD
First published June 10, 2008
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About the author
Jim Lacey
20 books12 followersJim Lacey is an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a professor of conflict and global issues at Johns Hopkins University. Lacey was an embedded journalist with Time magazine during the invasion of Iraq, where he traveled with the 101st Airborne Division. His opinion columns have been published in The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and The New York Post. Lacey is the author of Takedown, Fresh from the Fight, and Occupation of Iraq. He lives in Alexandria, VA.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 10, 2017
His career is a striking example of the “American Way of War” – pre-World War II. That way being: grudgingly educate a skeleton cadre of poorly paid military professionals that in “peacetime” polices the frontier – policing, for the indigenous people, having a spectrum of meanings, from sympathetic mediation to pitiless massacre – and build canals, dams, roads and bridges. But when a big war starts up, they have to slap into shape sudden levees of volunteers and/or draftees.
Of all American generals, it seems Pershing had to build the greatest army in the shortest time – two million men and women in nineteen months – the rather modestly titled “American Expeditionary Force” – and ship it across the U-Boated Atlantic, and fight for prestige in Allied councils whose leading members looked down on him, and wished to feed his divisions into German guns under their tattered banners, instead of under his own blessed Stars and Stripes. His wife and two daughters died in a fire, a few years before his arrival in France, so there was that in the mix, somewhere behind the soldierly scowl.
He got the job done. He staffed and trained an independent army and slotted it into the Allied line, in time for the final go. He then conducted a “vast campaign that was a hideous disaster in every respect save one – it worked,” to borrow William McFeely’s description of Grant’s Wilderness battles. Hindenburg later said, “The American infantry in the Argonne [forest] decided the war.” Woodland fighting is what Americans knew, or had to remember. “Indian War” was the army’s traditional phrase for an ambiguous ordeal of sniping, ambush, and infiltration, over rugged ground. Riflemen popped their sticks in the gloom of trees. I think of Winslow Homer’s Skirmish in the Wilderness, and Private Witt’s jungle death sprint in Malick’s The Thin Red Line. But I’m getting picturesque. They also threw grenades, stuck knives, swung their rifles as clubs, and cleared trenches with pump shotguns, “trench brooms” (in Swiss meetings, the Germans, having perfected the flamethrower at Verdun, decried the American pump shotguns). Anyway, that American infantry decided the war, but at horrifying cost. Interwar “isolationism” can be heard as a slur on the American communities that lost sons and were barely told why.
What I like about the officer intelligentsia, call it that, is their realistic, no-bullshit understanding that the United States was on the course of empire, bent on expansion, and that markets open markets, wars make wars, and you must kill or frighten lots of of people. They have their own philosophic tone, a pessimism borne of the practical, of handling masses of men. Sherman is a phrasemaker I group with Benn and Cioran. Grant is a shrewd monk come down to lead armies. I picked up this book with a negative impression of Pershing – but he comes off looking pretty good next to his civilian chief, the village preacher Woodrow Wilson.
They also understood that the nation’s large-scale wars were spasms of expansion, volatile compounds of oligarchic scheming and public sentiment; the motley of citizens is more or less herded, but they can be powerfully whimsical. America’s best generals have always been courtiers and politicians, and their political-media performances make for an interesting gallery of characters. High command reveals how strength and weakness – or say shrewdness and folly – adaptability and cussedness – ambition and indifference – are mixed within each man. Patton was Pershing’s protégé, but they were entirely different men, when it came to sniffing political winds, not to mention tank theory.
Their greatest challenge, aside from combat, was the civilian, and therefore Congressional delusion that American democracy was guaranteed by the public refusal to fund an expensive standing army and its attendant bogey, an arrogant and parasitic officer class. That conceit is amusing because America’s first president was a general – though a theatrically humble one – and notable military managers have always contended for or been proposed for the presidency; and Americans have often elected them. Jackson, Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower. Scott tried in 1852 but lost – so did McClellan in 1864. Pershing went through the exploratory motions in 1920, but in Lacey’s account his heart wasn’t in it.
An anecdote: teenage Ulysses S. Grant didn’t want to go to West Point, and on his long, dallying journey there from Ohio, he was heartened by news that the Congressmen were then debating the abolition of the Academy, lest it become a nest of aristocracy. Four years later Grant, clad in the sharpest blue, rode home through Cincinnati – fitting place-name! A grimy scamp barked from the gutter: “Soldier! Will you work? No, sir—ee; I’ll sell my shirt first!” The incident gave him, he said, “a distaste for military uniform that I never recovered from,” and it is one of the reasons why, at the capitulation of Lee, in the hour of triumph, Grant was mudspattered and swordless, in his “travelling suit,” his finery in baggage far behind. He then got back to Washington as fast as possible, to cancel the war contracts – the real parasites.
But back to Pershing. What a life! When age three – 1863 – Confederate-allied guerillas burned his father’s store in Missouri. Missouri, of the famous Compromise that staved off civil war for one last generation; a middle-border arena of partisan militias, divided families, volunteer mobs, and finally of the flagless Jesse James, continuing the war in outlawry; a state where Grant’s slaveholding in-laws held a shabby country seat, and put on plantation airs. Pershing remembered his mother holding him to the floor during the raid. He went to West Point opportunistically, like so many in those days – industrious young provincials looking for a free college education, not a life in the profession of arms. “A man who graduates from here is set for life,” scribbled teen Grant to home. At West Point Pershing glimpsed Grant, and developed a cult of the old man. As Captain of Cadets his senior year – 1885 – Pershing marched the Corps of Cadets down to the tracks, where they presented arms as Grant’s funeral train passed.
After graduation, Pershing was assigned to a regiment of the “Buffalo Soldiers,” the all-black Tenth US Cavalry, and saw service in the desert Southwest, and in Cuba, where he led his company in the mixed-unit multiracial charge up San Juan Hill that the media attributed solely to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. He was for a time an instructor at West Point, where he was something of a martinet. Lacey calls the teaching stint Pershing’s only “failure of leadership.” The cadets hated him and called him “Nigger Jack” for his service with the Tenth. The nickname stuck, in army circles. The newspapers of 1917 genteeled it to “Black Jack.”
After the Spanish-American War, Pershing served two stints in the newly annexed Philippines, among the Muslim Moros of Mindanao. In Lacey’s telling Pershing was a tactful master of counterinsurgency – “prestige” before “body count.” He studied Moro dialects and tribal rivalries, and made himself fearsome, but eased off when diplomatically appropriate, alternately fighting and befriending the tribal chiefs, or sultans, as they styled themselves. In one instance he disdained to give battle to an ambush he sensed to be harmlessly demonstrative, and so shamed the band into something like allegiance, or temporary placidity.
I want to read more about his march around Lake Lanao, a feat that astonished the Moros, and lived on in a sort of legend, as the Spanish had never been able to do such a thing; to my ear, the march echoes Sherman’s through Georgia, and Sherman’s aphorism that a feebly opposed stomp through an enemy’s inner country provides the essence of humiliation. Lacey says that Pershing besieged many Moro strongholds, but always left an obvious path of escape through his lines, for the fighters who didn’t want to die the next day. That is the way of Grant, who after the fall of Vicksburg wisely paroled his prisoners, rather than carting them North. Deserters and the dispirited make a shadow army. Send them home, where they will spread stories of your power. In 1944, when Pershing was a permanent resident of the Walter Reed Army Hospital, he was told that
when MacArthur and his senior commanders came ashore on the Philippine island of Jolo the first person to greet them was the old sultan of Jolo. He told MacArthur that he had submitted to Pershing as a warrior in 1905 and had stayed loyal to the United States ever since. He also informed MacArthur that he and other Moros had proven their loyalty by killing any Japanese soldier who ventured away from their camp.
That may have been bullshit, but Pershing’s name is lodged in it, and bullshit always means something.
Of all American generals, it seems Pershing had to build the greatest army in the shortest time – two million men and women in nineteen months – the rather modestly titled “American Expeditionary Force” – and ship it across the U-Boated Atlantic, and fight for prestige in Allied councils whose leading members looked down on him, and wished to feed his divisions into German guns under their tattered banners, instead of under his own blessed Stars and Stripes. His wife and two daughters died in a fire, a few years before his arrival in France, so there was that in the mix, somewhere behind the soldierly scowl.
He got the job done. He staffed and trained an independent army and slotted it into the Allied line, in time for the final go. He then conducted a “vast campaign that was a hideous disaster in every respect save one – it worked,” to borrow William McFeely’s description of Grant’s Wilderness battles. Hindenburg later said, “The American infantry in the Argonne [forest] decided the war.” Woodland fighting is what Americans knew, or had to remember. “Indian War” was the army’s traditional phrase for an ambiguous ordeal of sniping, ambush, and infiltration, over rugged ground. Riflemen popped their sticks in the gloom of trees. I think of Winslow Homer’s Skirmish in the Wilderness, and Private Witt’s jungle death sprint in Malick’s The Thin Red Line. But I’m getting picturesque. They also threw grenades, stuck knives, swung their rifles as clubs, and cleared trenches with pump shotguns, “trench brooms” (in Swiss meetings, the Germans, having perfected the flamethrower at Verdun, decried the American pump shotguns). Anyway, that American infantry decided the war, but at horrifying cost. Interwar “isolationism” can be heard as a slur on the American communities that lost sons and were barely told why.
What I like about the officer intelligentsia, call it that, is their realistic, no-bullshit understanding that the United States was on the course of empire, bent on expansion, and that markets open markets, wars make wars, and you must kill or frighten lots of of people. They have their own philosophic tone, a pessimism borne of the practical, of handling masses of men. Sherman is a phrasemaker I group with Benn and Cioran. Grant is a shrewd monk come down to lead armies. I picked up this book with a negative impression of Pershing – but he comes off looking pretty good next to his civilian chief, the village preacher Woodrow Wilson.
They also understood that the nation’s large-scale wars were spasms of expansion, volatile compounds of oligarchic scheming and public sentiment; the motley of citizens is more or less herded, but they can be powerfully whimsical. America’s best generals have always been courtiers and politicians, and their political-media performances make for an interesting gallery of characters. High command reveals how strength and weakness – or say shrewdness and folly – adaptability and cussedness – ambition and indifference – are mixed within each man. Patton was Pershing’s protégé, but they were entirely different men, when it came to sniffing political winds, not to mention tank theory.
Their greatest challenge, aside from combat, was the civilian, and therefore Congressional delusion that American democracy was guaranteed by the public refusal to fund an expensive standing army and its attendant bogey, an arrogant and parasitic officer class. That conceit is amusing because America’s first president was a general – though a theatrically humble one – and notable military managers have always contended for or been proposed for the presidency; and Americans have often elected them. Jackson, Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower. Scott tried in 1852 but lost – so did McClellan in 1864. Pershing went through the exploratory motions in 1920, but in Lacey’s account his heart wasn’t in it.
An anecdote: teenage Ulysses S. Grant didn’t want to go to West Point, and on his long, dallying journey there from Ohio, he was heartened by news that the Congressmen were then debating the abolition of the Academy, lest it become a nest of aristocracy. Four years later Grant, clad in the sharpest blue, rode home through Cincinnati – fitting place-name! A grimy scamp barked from the gutter: “Soldier! Will you work? No, sir—ee; I’ll sell my shirt first!” The incident gave him, he said, “a distaste for military uniform that I never recovered from,” and it is one of the reasons why, at the capitulation of Lee, in the hour of triumph, Grant was mudspattered and swordless, in his “travelling suit,” his finery in baggage far behind. He then got back to Washington as fast as possible, to cancel the war contracts – the real parasites.
But back to Pershing. What a life! When age three – 1863 – Confederate-allied guerillas burned his father’s store in Missouri. Missouri, of the famous Compromise that staved off civil war for one last generation; a middle-border arena of partisan militias, divided families, volunteer mobs, and finally of the flagless Jesse James, continuing the war in outlawry; a state where Grant’s slaveholding in-laws held a shabby country seat, and put on plantation airs. Pershing remembered his mother holding him to the floor during the raid. He went to West Point opportunistically, like so many in those days – industrious young provincials looking for a free college education, not a life in the profession of arms. “A man who graduates from here is set for life,” scribbled teen Grant to home. At West Point Pershing glimpsed Grant, and developed a cult of the old man. As Captain of Cadets his senior year – 1885 – Pershing marched the Corps of Cadets down to the tracks, where they presented arms as Grant’s funeral train passed.
After graduation, Pershing was assigned to a regiment of the “Buffalo Soldiers,” the all-black Tenth US Cavalry, and saw service in the desert Southwest, and in Cuba, where he led his company in the mixed-unit multiracial charge up San Juan Hill that the media attributed solely to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. He was for a time an instructor at West Point, where he was something of a martinet. Lacey calls the teaching stint Pershing’s only “failure of leadership.” The cadets hated him and called him “Nigger Jack” for his service with the Tenth. The nickname stuck, in army circles. The newspapers of 1917 genteeled it to “Black Jack.”
After the Spanish-American War, Pershing served two stints in the newly annexed Philippines, among the Muslim Moros of Mindanao. In Lacey’s telling Pershing was a tactful master of counterinsurgency – “prestige” before “body count.” He studied Moro dialects and tribal rivalries, and made himself fearsome, but eased off when diplomatically appropriate, alternately fighting and befriending the tribal chiefs, or sultans, as they styled themselves. In one instance he disdained to give battle to an ambush he sensed to be harmlessly demonstrative, and so shamed the band into something like allegiance, or temporary placidity.
I want to read more about his march around Lake Lanao, a feat that astonished the Moros, and lived on in a sort of legend, as the Spanish had never been able to do such a thing; to my ear, the march echoes Sherman’s through Georgia, and Sherman’s aphorism that a feebly opposed stomp through an enemy’s inner country provides the essence of humiliation. Lacey says that Pershing besieged many Moro strongholds, but always left an obvious path of escape through his lines, for the fighters who didn’t want to die the next day. That is the way of Grant, who after the fall of Vicksburg wisely paroled his prisoners, rather than carting them North. Deserters and the dispirited make a shadow army. Send them home, where they will spread stories of your power. In 1944, when Pershing was a permanent resident of the Walter Reed Army Hospital, he was told that
when MacArthur and his senior commanders came ashore on the Philippine island of Jolo the first person to greet them was the old sultan of Jolo. He told MacArthur that he had submitted to Pershing as a warrior in 1905 and had stayed loyal to the United States ever since. He also informed MacArthur that he and other Moros had proven their loyalty by killing any Japanese soldier who ventured away from their camp.
That may have been bullshit, but Pershing’s name is lodged in it, and bullshit always means something.
August 24, 2009
This was a very good book. It was good enough that I'm thinking of reading some more from this series (Great Generals). Pershing started his military career fighting Indians in the American South West. Then he moved to fighting the ghost dancers in South Dakota.
From those beginnings, he moved onto fighting in the Philippines on the island of Mindanao. I'd never had a good grasp of the fighting that took place in the Philippines until reading this book.
Then Pershing finally ended up commanding the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in Europe during World War One. He lead the American forces to victory and to being a world power.
Very good book. I have a lot greater appreciation for General Pershing than ever before. I mean I knew that he was important, after all, we have a whole missile system named after him. But just who he was, wasn't clear until reading this history book.
From those beginnings, he moved onto fighting in the Philippines on the island of Mindanao. I'd never had a good grasp of the fighting that took place in the Philippines until reading this book.
Then Pershing finally ended up commanding the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in Europe during World War One. He lead the American forces to victory and to being a world power.
Very good book. I have a lot greater appreciation for General Pershing than ever before. I mean I knew that he was important, after all, we have a whole missile system named after him. But just who he was, wasn't clear until reading this history book.
November 19, 2013
Finally getting to know the man I've heard so much about, General John "Blackjack" Pershing. Jim Lacey's writing is smooth, technically solid and the book moves along well. Lacey doesn't spare the hero of his faults, but reasons as we all probably do, that no one is perfect. I think the account is balanced and fair, concluding some may argue Pershing wasn't among history's greatest Generals, but there's no doubt he was a great soldier. I believe the man was in fact a great General, among America's finest. He rose through the officer corps making General ahead of a field of officers of greater rank than himself, and led the allies to victory in WWI against seemingly impossible odds. The personal side of his story is marked with love, tragedy and eventually contentment, all of which Lacey handles beautifully. I really feel like I know this great American icon now, or as much that can be known. Loved the book.
May 1, 2015
This was a very good book. I got it so that I could learn something about Pershing without listening to his (boring and long) memoirs. The book was only a 5+ hour listen and balanced his life without the detail of many tactical movements of Indians Wars, the Spanish American War, Pancho Villa's conflict or Germans in France during WWI...his career spanned those times. Best known for insisting on and maintaining unity of command during WWI of American forces, the book describes the many arrogant French and English attempts to assimilate Americans into an already unsuccessful meat grinder...and Pershings repeated repulses. So, it would seem that his contributions are logistics, command relations and officer development. Additionally, one sees the impact of generations of American military from Grant through Marshall and their impact on 20th century history. I think that I'll read some more from this series.
July 26, 2018
Wonderful short and easy read about a time, a war, and a general that for the most part are forgotten and over looked by the Civil War and World War II. World War I is the intersection between the two more popular wars. 1.5 million US soldiers would eventually engage in this war and become the tipping point of a war the allies were losing to the Central Powers. If you do not know much about this time in US History and don’t have the desire to dig deep, I highly recommend this abbreviated and short narrative to a critical time in US history and the lessons both learned and forgotten even today in our current wars.
August 4, 2013
Nice biography, at less than 200 pages it makes for a quick read while hitting most of the major events and analysis of his life. Good info on the Indian Wars, the Philippians, Mexico and WWI.
February 6, 2025
This is a gem of a book – a condensed but focused and intelligent biography of a giant figure from US military history. Pershing has been largely overlooked in ratings of US military leaders, wrongly. Lacey details in brief, but compelling, outlines of his life and experiences, his accomplishments, and their significance. Most notably, Pershing‘s command of the American Expeditionary Force in France in WWI was an achievement of staggering magnitude and lasting importance. Prior to the US joining in the war, the US Army was little more than a colonial police force with a total strength under 150,000 regular troops.
In the course of a year, Pershing created an Army of 3 million troops. He created the logistical train and supply depot system to support them. He created the staff system to plan, command and operate them. He trained them, organized the division, corps and army command and control, and selected the officers throughout to exercise that command and control. His goal was an independent American army operating under American command and control. He did all this despite unrelenting pressure from our British and French allies to subsume US troops into British and French forces as replacements for their losses. British and French military, diplomatic and political figures were equally unrelenting in their efforts to minimize Pershing’s position, to undermine his authority and even to relieve him from command. The subversive actions of our “allies” were contemptable and disgraceful. Another man would have succumbed. Pershing did not, despite enormous pressure to comply.
Because of Pershing, the American army did in fact come into being as an independent and decisively effective force. It shortened the war, and it established the framework for the even more massive forces to come in WWII. The illustrious command figures of WWII were almost all Pershing subordinates from WWI whose abilities and experiences were identified, sharpened and applied under his aegis. Pershing was a fascinating and significant figure, with accomplishments comparable to other more illustrious military figures such as Washington and Grant. He deserves attention and the historical recognition that they have received. Lacey’s book is an excellent corrective step – engaging, objective and perceptive even as brief as it is.
In the course of a year, Pershing created an Army of 3 million troops. He created the logistical train and supply depot system to support them. He created the staff system to plan, command and operate them. He trained them, organized the division, corps and army command and control, and selected the officers throughout to exercise that command and control. His goal was an independent American army operating under American command and control. He did all this despite unrelenting pressure from our British and French allies to subsume US troops into British and French forces as replacements for their losses. British and French military, diplomatic and political figures were equally unrelenting in their efforts to minimize Pershing’s position, to undermine his authority and even to relieve him from command. The subversive actions of our “allies” were contemptable and disgraceful. Another man would have succumbed. Pershing did not, despite enormous pressure to comply.
Because of Pershing, the American army did in fact come into being as an independent and decisively effective force. It shortened the war, and it established the framework for the even more massive forces to come in WWII. The illustrious command figures of WWII were almost all Pershing subordinates from WWI whose abilities and experiences were identified, sharpened and applied under his aegis. Pershing was a fascinating and significant figure, with accomplishments comparable to other more illustrious military figures such as Washington and Grant. He deserves attention and the historical recognition that they have received. Lacey’s book is an excellent corrective step – engaging, objective and perceptive even as brief as it is.
October 27, 2022
The US general who came to Europe with the AEF, and builds a great fighting force, which helped win WWI. Here he battles with French and English generals attempts to coop the American Army into their fighting forces, but does not allow the Americans to be taken advantage of, almost in the process of getting relieved of his duties. The rest is, as they say history.
May 7, 2018
Good short basic biography.
December 1, 2020
The author does a great job of explaining the obstacles and challenges that Pershing had to overcome in putting together an effective American fighting force.
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September 20, 2013excellent overview of this overlooked general...
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews