The Rhineland Catalyst: British Colonialism and the Development of U.S. Strategies for Military Occupation after World War I

The cross-Atlantic tensions between the British and American militaries throughout the nineteenth century resulted in their cultures being defined in opposition to each other. For the United States, it was the American experiences of frontier conflict, the Civil War, and republican-style imperialism that inspired the nation’s military strategy, including the principles of foreign occupation. This article asserts that, on the contrary, the U.S. approach to occupation governance was greatly informed by a British model from the early twentieth century on. We contend that American failures in the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I prompted the interwar development of new strategies based on the British example. While this strategy may have been borrowed from the British, it was also subject to a retrospective myth-building that selected examples from American history that conformed to the new model, affording it a greater degree of subcultural legitimacy.

The Infantry’s “Problem of Quality”: Classification and Assignment to MOS 745, Rifleman, 1942–1945, by John S. Reed, 83–116

This article examines the classification and assignment of U.S. Army inductees to military occupational specialty (MOS) 745, rifleman, between 1942 and 1945. Before fall 1944, “high-quality” inductees were primarily sent into the Army Service Forces or Army Air Forces, while “low-quality” men were channeled into the ground combat arms, in particular the infantry. This was a utilitarian error that led to poor combat performance in early deploying divisions and a social inequity that imposed a higher burden of lethal risk on less-privileged men. Only out of dire necessity, late in the war, did high-quality inductees become riflemen in significant numbers.

“An Island of Integration in a Sea of Segregation”: Maxwell Air Force Base and Civil Rights from the 1940s to the 1960s, by Robert B. Kane and Jerome Ennels, 117–38

On 26 July 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, directing the integration of U.S. military forces. Earlier publications on this topic generally covered the origins, proclamation, and implementation of the executive order, and the actions of senior military officers in the Pentagon down to commanders of military installations from mid-1948 to the early 1960s. While these works use specific events at specific installations in specific time frames, none tell the complete story of integration at a specific military installation over time. This article details the actions of installation commanders at Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama, a central focus of the civil rights movement, from the 1940s to the 1960s.