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(More customer reviews)Back in the early 1950s a movie starring Donald O'Conner called "Francis the Talking Mule" was a big hit that spawned several sequels. As a young 2nd Lt. in his first combat zone, an island in the South Pacific, O'Conner was befriended by a practical but chatty U.S. Army mule named Francis, who gets the young shavetail into and out of several scrapes, but also helps him capture a Japanese sniper.
I thought of Francis often while reading Essin's History of the U.S. Army Mule. For one thing I learned that the term "Shavetail", which by the Second World War meant a green officer just out of O.C.S., actually referred to untrained mules during the Indian wars of the late 19th century.
In those days of the horse cavalry, mules were trained to follow a mare with a bell around her neck, and usually did not require a handler with halter line in hand. These were the Bell Sharps. Untrained mules who did not know to line up at their own aparejo (pack saddle) and which might kick without warning, had their tails shaved.
From the Mexican wars of the 1840s to the China-Burma-India and Italian Theaters of World War II, the mule, and especially the pack mule, was a stellar performer in a wide variety of combat applications. Essin traces this history, and by giving a view of warfare from the standpoint of moving supplies to the troops, he subtly changes some opinions we may have of military leaders, and perhaps confirm suspicions we may have had about other leaders.
A history professor at East Tennessee State University, in the heart of traditional mule territory, Essin makes an unfortunate assumption that modern readers know where mules come from. I don't recall him ever stating that the mule is the sterile offspring of horse and donkey, even though he dances all around the subject by describing how mares were held in shallow pits to allow their breeding by smaller jackasses.
He does not lapse into sentimentality, but ever the historian he lets the data tell the story of the Army's use and misuse of the mule in a factual, but dispassionate manner. In every theater where mules performed their qualities were appreciated, even extolled by officers at all grades, but individual mules were considered to be expendable. No doubt this sort of thinking is what made the term "military intelligence" into an oxymoron.
To read of case after case through over a century of service until the last mule units were disbanded in 1956, is to marvel at how many times the Army found itself short of enough mules to do the job, but so little valued them that they were worked to the point where they died in harness.
Perhaps the mule's greatest champion was General George Crook, a cavalryman in the Indian wars, who actually used mules as his personal mounts, recognized the value of the custom-fitted aparejo (Mexican pack saddles) and double-diamond hitch means of tying packs to the mules. Crook was one officer who realized mules needed to be trained to the rigors of the trail, given a means of loading that would not disable them with pack sores, and rested in shifts from remount depots.
The techniques devised by muleteers (mostly borrowed from the Mexicans) under Crook were refined to the point that by the time of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. Army and its mule-centered system of supply, primary by pack mules, was the envy of the world, and the lesson was quickly taken up by the horse-loving English. We failed to learn our own lesson, and much of our front line supply in World War I was by English and French mules. The U.S. Army had still not learned the value of field veterinary care, and was still in a mental fog that dictated replacing rather than healing sick and wounded mules.
When one views the callous attitude of wasting its badly needed pack animals, it is easy to understand how this same attitude by general staff officers extended to the common soldier, who was considered to be cannon fodder in the Civil War and wasted in suicide charges against machine gun emplacements in World War I.
At least when the war was over, the men were returned home, probably so they could breed another generation of cannon fodder, sired by survivors. Not so lucky was the sterile mule. Most of the mules who supplied Merrill's Marauders and "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell's campaigns in the Burma campaigns of World War II, were simply shot at the end of the war to prevent them from falling into Chinese hands. Yet one old survivor of this campaign with a U.S. Army brand was captured from the Chinese service during the Korean War, and re-enlisted into U.S. Army service.
Essin's account is very readable, in spite of his occasion lapses into supplying pedantic information. It is entertaining and informative. I do wish he had a bit more of a sense of symbolism in history.
During the Burma campaigns he mentions the discovery that mules were terrified by the presence of elephants, which were used as pack animals by the Japanese. Whether tame or wild herds of elephants were detected, the mules would bolt. Given that the mule is sired by the donkey, symbol of the Democratic party, this is an understandable attitude, which might have helped Essin to understand why, when President Ronald Reagan declared that defense spending was not a budget item during the 1980s, that the prospect of re-establishing mule units for Special Forces or National Guard Mountain Battalions never got off the ground. Clearly the GOP elephants were not about to let donkeys in any form back into the Army.
It is refreshing to see military history written from the viewpoint of supply 50 years after Dwight D. Eisenhower, a specialists in logistics, mounted the greatest logistics-based operation ever in the Normandy invasion. I take issue with Essin's one lapse into sentimentality in the final line of the book, "We have yet to win a war without mules." Although Francis would have approved, I find it difficult to see how he could have overlooked so recent an event as Desert Storm.
- James Brooks
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Shavetails and Bell Sharps: The History of the U.S. Army MuleThe last U.S. Army mules were formally mustered out of the service in December 1956, ending 125 years of military reliance on the virtues of this singular animal. Much less glamorous than the cavalryman's horse, the Army pack mule was a good deal more important: from the Mexican War through World War II, mules were an indispensable adjunct to army movement.
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