03-12-2012, 05:04 PM
desantnik Wrote:Ed, I'd be curious to see that. It's pretty well known that the US military post WWI had its own existential problems and an invasion was probably far from anyone's real priorities. After being gutted post-WWI, for at least the '30s it was pretty focused on the growing threat that materialized on the Old Continent.
I wish I could remember the name of the classmate from graduate school, but it is one of those things that have gone over the decades. I know he was a fairly young US Army major who was being groomed to go back to West Point and teach history. Most of those folks had very little to do with the other graduate students, with those they called the "civlians". I took some military history courses, until I realised that I'd never get a visa to do the research I wanted to do. He'd been sent off to do a MA (or was it a PhD) before returning to "mother church". Somehow, given the deep and serious work he did it must have been a PhD? He actually a decent historian. Anyway, he was working on the efforts to justify a larger and stronger US army in the post-Great-War period, as the experiences of that conflict came together with postwar economic reality to make the task of keeping that large military very difficult. I felt sorry for him when he discovered the material on the "threat from/to Canada", as he had drunk very deeply of the "Kool Aid" and didn't want to believe of the US military what he was discovering in the documents. I suspect none of his research was ever published (that would be a shame), but most of those guys who went off to teach at the academies never published anything (and most of these theses and dissertations were witheld from University Microfilms -- as it was in those days).
