Lesley J. McNair

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Lesley J. McNair

General Lesley James McNair (May 25, 1883 – July 25, 1944) was an American Army officer who served during World War I and World War II.

He was born in Verndale, Minnesota, which was then a farming and mercantile community of 1,500. McNair, the son of a merchant, went on to graduate from West Point at the age of 21, and saw service under Gen. John J. Pershing, first in Mexico and then in France in the First World War. For his outstanding service, he was awarded both the Distinguished Service Medal and the French Legion of Honor.

In 1940, he was made major general—and undertook the reorganization of general headquarters at the U.S. Army War College. In 1941, he became a lieutenant general and commanding general of the Army Ground Forces. Chris Gabel has written of McNair's training skills, in which he still has no peers, in a book entitled Louisiana Maneuvers.

As Commandant of the Command and General Staff College, McNair initiated changes that prepared the College's graduates to meet the upcoming challenges of World War II.

In 1939, eighteen years after serving as an instructor at the General Service School at Fort Leavenworth—during which time he graduated from the Army School of the Line—General McNair returned to Fort Leavenworth to reform and update the instruction.

In 1941, the first African American combat soldiers for WWII entered Army training. ^{[citation needed]} McNair had fought the bigotry in the Army for years to allow the formation of integrated units during the war.

In 1942, General McNair was designated Commanding General, Army Ground Forces. Once he was satisfied that the Army could operate in large bodies he concentrated on revising training to simulate the conditions that the Army was facing in North Africa.

McNair, who had already received a Purple Heart for being wounded in the North African Campaign, was killed July 25, 1944 near St. Lo during Operation Cobra, by friendly fire during a pre-attack bombardment by B-17s of the Eighth Air Force. At the time, he was the highest-ranking American to be killed in action in World War II (although he was later surpassed by the death of Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr.)

Gravestone at the World War II Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial

It was said of LTG McNair that he did more than train men—he realized that no army can be fully effective unless it is properly organized, correctly equipped, adequately led, and completely trained. His insistence on these fundamentals, especially realistic training, helped save untold thousands of American lives. However McNair also espoused controversial doctrines on armour support of infantry forces which were later found to be inadequate. He particularly came in for criticism over tank destroyer doctrine. McNair was an artillery officer and he favoured towed anti-tank artillery over self-propelled tank destroyers. The American towed anti-tank artillery was never really effective during the war and the towed battalions which McNair favoured suffered disproportionate casualties when compared to the self-propelled tank destroyer battalions.^[1]

Fort Lesley McNair in Washington, D.C. was renamed in his honor in 1948. McNair Barracks, a kaserne in Berlin, Germany that housed the infantry units of the Berlin Brigade, U.S. Army Berlin, was named in his honor.

In 1954 Congress promoted him posthumously to the rank of general.