About an Infantry Company

 

From "Reflections on C Company"
Captain Page Smith
C Company, 85th Mountain Infantry, 10th Mountain Division

[Editor's Note.   When I decided to get serious about my study of the First World War,  I tried to interview every historian of the war in the Northern California area I could track down.  One who responded positively to my request, and provided the best interview of all, was retired history professor and author Page Smith, most recently based  in Santa Cruz at the University of California campus there.  He had recently published the latest volume in his "Peoples History" of the U.S., America Enters the World, that covered both the Progressive Era and the nation's effort in the First World War.  

His 1042-page book contained only 27 pages on the fighting by the AEF, but  I had found it very insightful on the homefront, Wilson's war management and diplomacy, and the overall impact of entering the war on American life.  I found it much superior, and by miles more readable, to David Kennedy's similar and better known Over Here.  In September 1988, Professor Smith invited me down to Santa Cruz for a chat and we spent an enjoyable afternoon in his barn/office. (He had become a chicken farmer in retirement years so it was a mixed-use space.)  Professor Smith turned out to be a great story teller and needed minimal prodding from his interviewer. Over five or so hours he got off on a lot of tangents, of course, some barely connected to the events of 1914-1918.  One of these involved his WWII service of which he had fond and proud memories.  He had commanded an infantry company with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy.  His war was ended by a German mine that injured both his legs during the division's most famous exploit, the capture of Mte Belvedere, north of Florence, in early 1945.  

All-in-all it was enjoyable and fruitful day at the end of which the professor and his wife Eloise invited me to stay for dinner. For some damn reason, to my lasting regret, I declined.  Now to the point.  I recently ran across my notes from that day and am planning to do an article on that interview. In checking some details online, I discovered that Page Smith had written about his service in the Second World War and part of it appeared in a history of his company.  When I read it, I could hear his voice again. 

Below are his thoughts on commanding a combat infantry company, that seem to me apply to any war in history. I thought the readers of Roads to the Great War ought to be able to read them. MH]

The Professor About the Time I Met Him

I had never commanded an infantry company before. All I had to go on was my brief experience in the CCC and in Camp William James (which, limited as it was, proved invaluable). I suppose that at the Infantry School we must have gotten the rudiments of leadership as it related to an infantry company: "Follow me!" But all the subtler points were, I suspect, more or less ill-suited to be "taught." So we had whatever advantages accrue to innocence.

Next to the first sergeant in a company, the most important individual is the mess sergeant-more important, certainly, than the captain. Captains come and go, are promoted or shot and succeeded by other captains, but mess sergeants go on forever. Or should. There is no doubt in my mind that the food that Sergeant Wargo fed us was a vital ingredient in the formation of the esprit that came to characterize C Company. That being the case, my principal contribution to C Company may have been to defend Sergeant Wargo against [the battalion commander] Colonel Woolley.

There is something unique about the infantry. There are certainly many honorable branches of the service in which men (and now, women) may serve their respective countries honorably and well. Each has its own ethos: the navy, where men go down to the sea in ships, has its glories and legends, heroes and patron saints; and, more recently, the air force, flung through the skies in exultant flight; the cavalry, once full of dash and romance, now gone; the artillery, the engineers, and so on, all useful and important. But, in the last analysis, when all is said and done, there is the infantryman, ancient and essential, the man on the ground, the occupier, a man of the elemental element, the earth, the man to whom the earth is friend and shelter and final resting place. The veteran infantryman reads the terrain as his ally; the earth is his refuge and shelter. He hides in the earth; he gets earth in his shoes, under his fingernails, in his hair. Everything is auxiliary to him. Every other military activity is subordinate, exists finally to enable the infantryman to carry out his mission: to occupy a specific piece of earth.

So there are, of course, innumerable companies that are good or bad, competent or incompetent, as the case may be--companies of medics, of engineers, of missile operators and communications experts, supply depots, intelligence units, headquarters companies, personnel companies, sanitation companies, transportation companies, heavens knows how many or in what varieties as demanded by the exigencies of modern wars-but, we can only say again, they are all auxiliary to, supportive of, the infantry.

A Wounded Member of C Company at Mte Belvedere
(I Don't Know If This Could Be Capt. Smith)

So a company, made up typically of young men as yet relatively unmarked by life, innocent and beautiful in youth, is called upon to form a unity, perhaps the most basic unity the race has known, a unity whose task it is to form such a union of souls that it will be unflinching in the face of the most terrible testing that the race knows, the test of death experienced in anticipation not once or twice but day after day, week after week. So to say that C Company was a "good company" is, in the last analysis, to say that, like all brave and trustworthy companies, it was the best company that could be. It can claim a rightful place in the long line stretching from Caesar's legionnaires through Cromwell's Ironsides, Wellington's Invincibles, and the companies that made up the Continental armies that fought for freedom from Great Britain.

Read Capt. Smith's full account of his WWII service HERE.

Sources:  Good Times and Bad Times: A History of the C Company, 10th Mountain Division