Pershing's AEF would be formed from a literal standing start. The plan to field 100 divisions to help the Allies drive the Germans out of France was particularly daunting given the fact that the United States Army in 1917 had no divisions. The largest standing maneuver organizations the Army had were a handful of infantry regiments of a few thousand men each. The plan that Conner and his fellow planners had developed in the few short months since the United States had declared war on Germany in April of 1917 called for very large (28,000 men) divisions organized in two brigades of two regiments each.
Organizing and training this behemoth force was one thing. Getting a million men and their equipment to France in a matter of months was quite another. Shipping was at a premium and German submarines were sinking allied shipping at an alarming rate.
Colonel Fox Conner's office in Chaumont, France, near the border with Switzerland, was a world away from the cotton fields of his youth in Calhoun County, Mississippi. He could not have arrived at this opportunity for professional stardom on the world stage from a more unlikely beginning. This son of a Confederate soldier blinded at Shiloh is perhaps the epitome of the uniquely American ideal that one's starting point has no bearing (except that which one allows) on one's life accomplishments.
Fox Conner's path from Mississippi cotton fields to prominence in the United States Army was kick-started by his thirst for reading, which in turn was nurtured by his educator parents. Accepted into the Class of 1898 at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Conner persevered through persecution for his humble southern beginnings and graduated near the top of his class. The prevalent attitude amongst American military professionals at the end of the 19th Century was that graduation from West Point was all the professional military education one needed for the duration of a career. Conner didn't buy into this attitude. The first two decades of his career were marked by continual study, particularly in his occupational specialty (artillery), but also in the art and science of high level staff planning and strategy.
Perhaps the seminal assignment of his first two decades of service, was Conner's posting to a French artillery regiment in 1912. At the time, the French Army possessed the world's preeminent artillerists, as well as general staff planners second only to the Germans. Conner returned to the United States in 1914 with three strengths unique in the American Army -- fluency in French, knowledge of world-class artillery, and advanced staff planning expertise. When the first coordination meetings occurred with the French (and British) following US entry into the war, Conner was an obvious choice to participate in a supporting role. His inclusion by Pershing on the AEF staff was largely in recognition of the highly professional way in which Conner had contributed to those early meetings.
As American forces arrived in France throughout the first year of US involvement, Pershing and Conner withstood tremendous pressure from the British and French to piecemeal small American units into British and French formations. The American plan was to assemble a nearly three million-man army in France and then employ that force in a war of maneuver (as opposed to the static trench warfare of the first three years' fighting) to take the war to the heart of Germany. Conner's plan called for this massive force to be available in the Spring of 1919.
One of the cardinal rules of war is that the enemy gets a vote. When Lenin's Revolution took the Russian Army out of the war in the fall of 1917, the German Army was able to shift scores of divisions from the Russian front to face the Allies in France. By the time of the German's 1918 Spring offensive, the AEF had barely established only one of the planned four dozen Corps (each comprising four divisions). With Paris threatened by a rapidly advancing German offensive, Pershing and Conner, despite their desire to hold their forces out of the fighting until 1919, threw their four divisions into the fight.
Long war-story short, the German offensive faltered short of Paris and the ensuing counter-offensive by the Allies ended the war with the Armistice signed into effect on the 11th of November, 1918.
But Fox Conner's story doesn't end there -- not by a long shot. In the run-up to the First World War, Conner befriended and began a mentorship with two young officers you may have heard a little bit about. One was a profane squeaky-voiced tank enthusiast by the name of Patton. The other was a serious and strikingly intelligent young staff officer by the name of Marshall. George C. Patton and George S. Marshall had a little bit to do with the successful execution of a little scrape known as the Second World War.
Patton introduced Fox Conner to a down-on-his-luck friend by the name of Eisenhower. Young Ike's career was going nowhere fast. He had missed out on the fight in France in 1918 -- his tank unit was scheduled to embark on shipping for France in late November 1918. Conner saw potential in Eisenhower, when no one else did. When Conner was given command of the garrison in the Panama Canal Zone, he took Major Eisenhower with him as his second in command. Duty in Panama in the inter-war years was stultifyingly boring, but Conner drilled Eisenhower incessantly in staff planning, strategy, combined operations with multi-national allies, and, perhaps most importantly in the art of recognizing talent. Two years with Conner gave Eisenhower a professional education that twenty years in staff colleges couldn't touch.
Eisenhower later praised Conner as the "outstanding soldier of my time," and credited Conner as the "one more or less invisible figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt."
At the end of his career Fox Conner was one of the leading officers of the United States Army. In retirement, he was a highly respected lecturer at the U.S. military's war colleges.
He wrote no memoir. He ordered his letters and papers destroyed on his death. He survives in memory nearly as invisibly as he served.
It shouldn't be so.
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