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Overview
Donn Starry, one of the most influential commanders of the Vietnam War, went on to become one of the “intellectual giants” who reshaped the US Army and, throughout his career, worked to improve training, leadership, and conditions for the men who served under him.
Starry was a leading advocate for tank warfare in Vietnam. His recommendations helped shape the American armor position in Southeast Asia and paved the way for his success as commander of the 11th Armored Cavalry during the invasion of Cambodia.
As commander of Fort Knox and the US Army Armor School in the 1970s, Starry brought new advances to armor tactics, training, and strategy. Most notably, he created the new “AirLand Battle” doctrine, which paved the way for a decisive US victory in the Gulf War. Like most Vietnam-era commanders, Starry’s legacy has been overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the war itself—but few have had as much of an impact on modern maneuver warfare.
In this new biography of Gen. Donn Starry, armor officer Mike Guardia examines the life and work of this pioneering officer using extracts from interviews with veterans and family, as well as from Starry’s personal papers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504055482 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Casemate Publishers |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Mike Guardia is an internationally recognized author and military historian. A veteran of the United States Army, he served six years on active duty as an Armor Officer. He has twice been nominated for the Army Historical Foundation's Distinguished Book Award and is an active member in the Military Writers Society of America. He holds a BA and MA in American History from the University of Houston. He currently lives in Minnesota.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Call of Duty
The story of Donn Albert Starry begins, in earnest, during the Gilded Age of American history. His father was born Don Albert Lacock near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1897. Orphaned at the tender age of six, the young Don Lacock was taken in by the widow Emma J. Starry. Madam Starry had lost her own daughter several years earlier. "So the townsfolk, as was the custom in country farm communities in those days, took in the kids. Some of them were old enough to fend for themselves. The younger ones they just took in and raised as members of their own family." Thus, the elderly widow formally adopted Don Albert Lacock and changed his surname to Starry.
For most of her young ward's formative years, it was a time of peace and prosperity — both at home and abroad. The US had emerged victorious from the Spanish–American War and had become a superpower on the world stage. With new overseas territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the US now had easy access to foreign markets. Acquisition of the Panama Canal in 1901 further solidified America's dominance in the Western hemisphere. Under the steady hand of President Theodore Roosevelt, "Big Stick Diplomacy" and "Trust-busting" became the rule of the day. Europe, for the first time in nearly two centuries, was at peace and the Industrial Revolution had improved the quality of life for Europeans of every stripe.
For Don Albert Starry (formerly Lacock), however, there was little concern beyond finishing his studies at Cornell College and starting a nuclear family, the likes of which he had never known while growing up. But as the elder Starry enjoyed the stable, idyllic life of the Roosevelt–Taft era, a storm was brewing on mainland Europe. Indeed, the political geography of the continent, and the fate of two generations, were about to change.
In August 1914, after years of ethnic tension, a young Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. A series of war declarations followed as Austria-Hungary mobilized against Serbia. The ensuing Great War took the brutality of combat to a new level. It was a war where bomber aircraft and tactical fighter planes made their debut. Machine guns provided a deadly, rapid fire capability to infantrymen in the field. It was also the first war that harnessed the destructive power of chemical weapons, including phosgene and mustard gas. Meanwhile, the opposing sides had dug themselves into a network of trenches and made minor advances against the other in what quickly became a stalemate along the Western Front. The most innovative killing machine, however, was the tank.
The story of Sir Ernest Swinton's invention, the tank ... began in World War I [said Starry]. Born independently in both the British and French armies, tanks became the subject of considerable debate regarding design, development, and employment. In the United Kingdom a coterie of single-minded tank and mobility enthusiasts persisted in developing concepts for mobile, all-arms warfare built around tank-led striking forces. In France, Col. Jean Estienne, with the backing of industrialist Louis Rheault, was able to convince the General Staff of the potential worth of light tanks employed in mass to break the trench-bound stalemate and restore maneuver to the battlefield.
Still, many Americans were confident that the war in Europe would run its course without their involvement. Those hopes were dashed, however, in the wake of German aggression on the high seas and their pernicious behavior on the diplomatic front. When America finally entered the war in 1917, some 14,000 men of the American Expeditionary Force were mobilized to join the fight in Western Europe. A year later, however, nearly 2,000,000 men had been deployed to the European battlefront.
My father enlisted in the Tank Corps out of college. The Tank Corps and the Air Service [which later became the Army Air Corps] were the premier branches of the time. Recruiters from both services worked college campuses of the nation, seeking to enlist the brightest and most active young men into these elite organizations rather than rely on conscripted forces. They also sought — at least in places like rural Iowa, where my Dad went to college — young men from the farms, men who had at least some experience with engines and the running gears of machinery. Some soldiers of the day enjoyed basic soldier training at Camp Colt, a site now buried in the town or on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Such was the case for the elder Starry, who took a liking to the soldier lifestyle. As a young corporal, his promotion orders to sergeant were signed by none other than Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower, the camp commander. Eisenhower would, of course, go on to become the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II and serve two terms as the 34th President of the United States.
"Since but a single tank was available for training at Camp Colt, Sergeant Starry and some of his buddies were trained in their tanks — French-made Renaults — at the Tank Corps School at Langres, France." The commandant of the Tank Corps School was the young Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton Jr. Even during his formative years as an officer, Patton had a reputation for his hard-charging, "piss-and-vinegar" approach to combat leadership. During the Battle of Saint Mihiel and the Meuse Argonnes Offensive, Patton stormed through the barbed-wired, trench-laden fields on foot as he accompanied his tanks into battle.
For the young Sergeant Starry, life in the Tank Corps was nearly too much of a whirlwind to recount. The Camp Colt-based units arrived in France during the latter months of the war. Essentially, "they deployed to France, then turned around and came right back home." Indeed, neither Starry nor any of his immediate comrades from Camp Colt saw action along the Western Front. Barely a few months after the Armistice was signed in November 1918, the US Military demobilized in a manner more helter-skelter than its 1917 buildup. Thus, "after rushing to the colors, undergoing partial training in the United States and France, and hustling off to combat," Sergeant Starry took a brief respite to the casino resorts of Monaco before returning to the hinterlands from which he had come. Many of Starry's comrades would eventually go to war again. "But in 1919, such a possibility was so remote as to be unthinkable to the men of C Company, 329th Battalion, Tank Corps, AEF."
That spring, the elder Starry returned to the United States to pick up where his civilian life had left off. He returned home with back pay and bonuses totaling $81.53 ($1,295.88 in 2016 dollars). The pellmell demobilization, meanwhile, continued and by November 1919, more than 3,000,000 soldiers had been mustered out. But despite this downsizing, and his own discharge, Sergeant Starry's life in the military was far from over.
As "Return to Normalcy" became the rule of the day, Don Albert Starry married his college sweetheart, Edith Sorter, and took a job in New York City at what is now the Kraft Food Company. Among these concrete jungles, his only son — Donn Albert Starry — was born on May 31, 1925. Originally, the scion's name was identical to his father's. But, for reasons unknown, the elder Starry later decided that he did not want his son to be a "Junior" — and thus amended the birth certificate to read "Donn," spelt with the double "n."
Before making the family's home in New York, however, Sergeant Starry taught secondary school in Iowa for a year. "I guess he thought that [teaching] wasn't for him," said the younger Starry, "and was lured off to Boston by a Tank Corps buddy named Bill Helms, who was the son of an earlier Helms, the founder of Goodwill Industries of America. The idea was that my dad and Bill Helms were going to work in Goodwill Industries, which Dr. Helms was just starting. My dad went to Kansas City and married my mother ... and took her off to the East Coast with him. Eventually, he decided he didn't want to stay with the Helms organization and went to work, first for Marshall Fields, then as the Export Manager for Kraft." Shortly after their son's birth, however, the Starrys decided that New York City was not the ideal place to raise a child, and moved to rural Kansas. Once there, young Donn enjoyed a childhood that was typical of most boys growing up in small-town America.
In many ways, Donn Starry was a product of his time. His was the so-called "Greatest Generation," raised on the harrowing tales of the Great War, the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, and the hardships of the Great Depression. The Starry family, though not untouched by the economic turmoil, still fared better than most. Kansas was at the farthest edge of the Dust Bowl, and the Starry siblings recalled the faint traces of sand and soil that blew into Kansas City — the dying strands of the dust storms that had destroyed lives and communities elsewhere in the Great Plains. The Starrys also recalled that it was a time of transient labor — a time when men roamed from town to town looking for any means of employment they could find. It was not uncommon for itinerant workers (victims of the Great Depression) to show up in a strange town and go door-to-door, asking to cut lawns, prune gardens, or chop wood in exchange for a meal or even a few cents of pocket change.
A good portion of Starry's childhood, however, revolved around his father's membership in the Kansas National Guard. "I think he always regretted, really, that he never stayed in the Army or accepted a commission during World War I," said the younger Starry, "because he had an affinity for the military." Thus, shortly after the family's arrival in Kansas City, the elder Starry accepted a commission in the local National Guard armory. In his civilian career, many of his business colleagues were National Guardsmen; it was they who probably persuaded him to accept an officer's commission. With the stroke of a pen, the former Sergeant Starry became First Lieutenant Starry, commander of Headquarters Company, 2d Battalion, 137th Infantry Regiment, 35th Division, Kansas National Guard. "Of course, there was no longer a Tank Corps ... [and] for reasons now lost he elected to join the infantry."
Shortly after his father's appointment to command Headquarters Company came the younger Starry's own appointment as Brevet First Lieutenant in the Kansas National Guard. In other words, "I was the company mascot," Starry said.
I suppose that was what started my interest and whetted my appetite for military service. The year was 1929 and I was four years and some months of age when Governor Clyde M. Reed "assigned" me to my father for quarters, rations, discipline, and for such other duties as might be assigned by the company commander. Those included, as it turned out, periodic drills at the local armory — first located in an abandoned movie house and later a more substantial building — and attendance at all or part of an annual two-week summer camp at nearby Fort Riley.
It was a terribly lean Army. The National Guard was pretty much a reflection of the Regular Army. Although Headquarters Company was authorized several high-frequency radio sets, there was but one on hand. Radio operators and crews took turns operating this lone radio. Ammunition boxes salvaged from summer camp were painted to look like the real thing, complete with wooden knobs and dials and hand-painted scales. Operators and crews for whom there were not enough radios would go through the motions on their wooden mock-ups as the crew picked to operate the real radio practiced.
One older model Ford stake-and-platform truck was assigned to the Kansas City garrison. Companies assigned took turns using it for weekend field exercises. At night it was necessary to park the truck headed downhill for an easy, clutch-assisted start in the morning. It was easier than pushing.
Thus was the condition of the country's defense preparedness for whatever national security challenges might come next. It assured that there would be a reiteration of the mobilization frenzy of World War I.
Indeed it did.
For by 1940, as Donn Starry was coming of age, the political climate was much different than it had been during the late 1920s. Isolationism still rang high in the halls of Congress, but that ideology was quickly losing steam as Nazi Germany — which had initiated another European war on September 1, 1939 — advanced on all fronts. From these developments, the US government authorized a full-scale increase in military spending. Meanwhile, across the pond, the British relied heavily on American logistics in their life-and-death struggle against the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. The Empire of Japan, however, was of little concern to anyone. Despite their recent aggressions on the Chinese mainland, everyone knew that the Japanese could never challenge the US military.
But as the situation in Europe and the Pacific went from bad to worse, Donn Starry tended to his studies and excelled in all areas of his high-school career. "I played football for two years," he said, "I swam for three years and lettered in both sports. I played football, not very well, on a team that had some awfully good football players. Good crew, super coach, and a good bunch of guys, but they were out of my league." Nevertheless, his skills as a player were such to earn him a place on the varsity team. He was also active in student government and displayed remarkable skills as an amateur photographer, even going so far as to build a darkroom in his family's basement.
His favorite subject in school, however, was the young Leatrice Gibbs. "Letty," as she was called, lived down the street from Starry and had been the object of his affection since they were young children. Letty was a year older than Donn but the age difference (an unspoken taboo in the realm of adolescent dating) didn't dissuade him from pursuing her.
And pursue her he did.
By the end of their high-school years, Letty and Donn were a regular sight at the local movie houses and soda fountains — enjoying the blissful life of a teenage couple.
Meanwhile, as Donn outgrew his childhood role of Brevet First Lieutenant for the Kansas National Guard, he took on more practical jobs within the community. For several summers, he hauled samples of wheat from a silo at a local farm. It was a half-day's work, and good pay for a Depression-era job, but it left Starry with a debilitating allergy from the grain. During these long, allergy-inducing wheat hauls, Starry acquired a red handkerchief as the only means of relief from the constant congestion. That red handkerchief became his unofficial calling card as he kept it with him for the rest of his life. And although he eventually shed the role of the Headquarters Company "mascot," he still accompanied his father to their monthly drills, taking every opportunity that he could to feed his appetite for all things military.
"Somewhere along the line," he said, "someone described West Point to me and I decided I wanted to go there." Indeed, Starry was fascinated by West Point's legacy of leadership. Its graduates included military legends such as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and John J. Pershing. Since its founding in 1802, West Point had been the nation's premiere military academy and the primary source of commissioned officers for the US Army. A rockbound citadel ensconced on the banks of the Hudson River, West Point lay some 50 miles north of New York City. The school was renowned for its uncompromising standards of honor and discipline, and the Gothic architecture of the campus complemented its reputation as one of the most rigorous schools in America.
Gaining admission to West Point, however, was no easy task. The applicant files read like a "Who's Who" of America's best young scholars. Valedictorians, National Merit Scholars, and Eagle Scouts were among the many who sought to join the Long Gray Line. Admission to the Academy was further restricted by a Congressional nomination process.
About the time I was a freshman in high school I started taking the Civil Service Commission examinations that members of the Congress could use to select appointees to West Point. There were no college entrance exams to use as a standard, so the Civil Service Commission created these exams and then Congressmen — a lot of them just to avoid the image of political favoritism — would give the examination, and then allege, of course, that they were giving the appointments out on the basis of who did best on the exams. They were tough and comprehensive examinations and, if you didn't have some experience in taking that kind of exam, you were apt not to do well. So, most of us ... took the exams several times before we actually took them for record. I wasn't even old enough to go to West Point when I took it the first time.
Donn Starry took the test twice more before he took it "for record." In the midst of preparing for his test however, his fortunes changed in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crusader"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mike Guardia.
Excerpted by permission of Casemate Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover
- Dedication
- Foreword by General Martin E. Dempsey (USA, Ret)
- Introduction
- 1 Call of Duty
- 2 The Cold Warrior
- 3 Fields of Armor
- 4 Blackhorse
- 5 From the Ashes of Vietnam
- 6 Freedom’s Frontier
- 7 AirLand Battle
- Epilogue
- Appendix A: Starry on Leadership
- Appendix B: Fifty Years at the Business End of the Bomb
- Appendix C: Graduation Speech: Frankfurt American High School, Class of 1977
- Appendix D: West Point Founder’s Day Speech: March 25, 1974
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Plate section
- Copyright