Military Monographs

Military Monographs

Background note on the Military Monographs of the Infantry School, the Armored School, and the Command and General Staff School:

After the war, many field grade officers (captains and majors, lieutenant colonels) who participated in military campaigns in the Philippines attended the Advanced Officers Courses at the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, the Armored School in Fort Knox, Kentucky, or the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. This was a requirement for promotion to higher ranks, and in order to finish the course, a term paper was required, wherein tactical principles and lessons learned would be emphasized over personal experiences. The resulting papers are called Military monographs and focus on specific battles and campaigns from a special point of view, usually reflecting the author’s own experience during the war.

Thus, for the Infantry School, there are papers on battles in Bataan, Leyte, Luzon and Manila; for the Armored School there are monographs on the use of armor in Luzon and others. Since these were field officers, they wrote about their observations as division or regimental staff officers, in the Infantry, Field Artillery, Cavalry and other branches of service. The principles and lessons learned were the most important aspect of the monographs (some penned in comments question the rationality of some conclusions), and these monographs were written for this purpose. They serve as historical source materials, but some have to be double-checked with other sources since occasionally an author took liberties to fit his experience into the so-called “school solution.” (cf. the discussion in Corregidor.org regarding some of the monographs on Corregidor).