When DePuy arrived to lead a battalion in Budingen in the mid-50s, it was just as if it was the day after World War II:
Nothing had changed. The weapons were the same and the terrain was the same. So, I just felt very much at home. As I looked at the training of the battalion, which was as good as any of the battalions over there, I found that at the squad level it was a shambles, just like my battalion had been in World War II. At the platoon level, it was a little bit better. The company commanders were better. They had good potential. So, I decided to spend my time at the bottom. Now, that is when I first applied the overwatch — at least under that terminology. I had an opportunity when I was at corps to go over and watch 2nd Armored Division tank training under General Howze.* In my opinion, General Howze was the best trainer in the Army. Unfortunately, he wasn’t appreciated the way he should have been. Everything that he had written about how to train a tank platoon struck me as precisely the way to train a rifle squad since each of them have two operating sections or teams. So, I wrote up several little booklets which we used as training manuals and doctrine in that battalion. I trained all of the squads and platoons uniformly. I personally tested them all. I tested every squad three or four times. I used to spend days and weeks out there with those squads. I knew every squad leader well — both his good points and bad points. They got very, very good.
The other thing I brought with me from World War II was that I insisted that when the battalion was dug in, you couldn’t see it from the front. All of my colleagues had come from Korea, and they built big forts. When you got out in front, you could see everything. Well, one of the problems that I had was that the umpires who came to test me thought I was crazy. They didn’t understand why I hadn’t built Korean pillboxes on the military crest or at the bottom of the hill. Instead, I had my guys behind rocks, trees and bushes. I wouldn’t let them disturb the bushes, but made them dig in behind them, so you couldn’t see a thing from the front.
Well, to make a long story short, when I took my first annual training test at Wildflecken, the first thing we did was the defense, and all of the company and platoon umpires ran back to the battalion umpire and said, “This battalion is totally unsatisfactory. They don’t know how to dig in.” So, the battalion umpire came and told me that, and I said, “Okay, stop. Go and get the regimental commander, we’re going to have a little talk.” This was very ironic because the fellow testing me, Colonel Claude Baker, was the man who had previously commanded my battalion. I had taken over from him, and now he was testing me. But, he was a hell of a good man. He had been in the 5th Regimental Combat Team in Korea and was a terrific fighter. We talked it over, and he agreed one hundred percent with what we were doing. He got all his umpires together and instructed them. They also were skeptical about the overwatch, and bounding, and all of that. Anyhow, we took the test, and we got a low score. We got 80 on a scale of 100. Well, it turned out that when the year was over, 80 was the high score in the corps, but it was a hard way to get started.
The point of all this is, that if your squads are well-trained, and you know that they are doing one of three things, then you can visualize how much space they take. And, if the platoons are trained the same way, everything is uniform. Now, there is plenty of room for initiative on the part of the leaders to adapt this to the terrain and to the enemy, but at least you know what it is that they are working with. And, the battalion ran just like a clock. The problem was that it was about a decade or two ahead of its time. That sounds a little egotistical, but that’s exactly right, because if you went out and looked at a rifle squad or a platoon today, you would see exactly that. If you looked at the defensive positions, you would see what you knew in Vietnam as the DePuy foxhole, where they all had frontal cover and were all camouflaged. So, that’s what happened to the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry.