A Citizen-Soldier’s Road to Office of General: Memoir of Major General James R. Montgomery's Military Career

By James Montgomery

As a young boy growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, James R. Montgomery's sense of patriotism and duty to country is sparked by the United States' entry into World War II. Too young to serve his country, he joins Junior ROTC in high school and takes the first steps in a long and illustrious military career in the U.S. Army Reserve. A Citizen-Soldier's Road to the Office of General traces Montgomery's career from those early days of marching on a football field through active duty in Greenland and finally into his role as a Reserve officer. The book details the Reserve officer's job – the never-ending preparation for mobilization to active duty – and highlights the dedication of men and women willing to serve during the troubled times of the Cold War. The picture that emerges is one of how mentors, friendships, luck, and persistence influence Montgomery's journey through a maze of military pathways to his ultimate rank as major general of the 310th Theater Army Area Command.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publication Consultants
• Release date: Jan 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637470510

James Montgomery

James R. Montgomery has B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Tennessee (UT) in Knoxville. He received his Ph.D. in University Administration, with a minor in History, from Columbia University in New York. He is the author or co-author of three volumes on the history of UT and over fifty articles on administration and educational research. After service in the Active Army, he joined the staff of UT as its Director of Institutional Research and continued his military career in the Army Reserve. After eight years with UT, he became the Director of Institutional Research at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. In addition, he served as the president of the Southern Association for Institutional Research and the Association for Institutional Research. After a thirty-year academic career, he entered law school at age sixty and obtained his J.D. from Dickinson Law, a part of Penn State University. He then practiced law in Blacksburg for almost thirty years. He and his wife, Mary, have three children and are the proud grandparents of five grandchildren and, at last count, six great-grandchildren.

Book preview

Introduction

This is the story of Major General James R. Montgomery, United States Army, Retired. I marched into an Army-type unit at age fifteen in September 1945 and joined the Knoxville High School Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). Forty-one years later, I marched off a drill field into retirement to the strains of a military band playing the Washington and Lee Swing, the fight song of Knoxville High School. Those forty-one years closely parallel the years of the Cold War, which I witnessed and in which I played a role. Needless to say, there were many forks in my road, and this is the history of that journey.

The Cold War Emerges

Winston Churchill, then the ex-prime minister of Great Britain, visited the United States, and on March 7, 1946, he delivered a speech frequently considered to be the opening salvo of the Cold War. Churchill said, From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent [of Europe]. The armies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) followed the German Army as it retreated from the U.S.S.R. and occupied the nations previously under the control of Germany. Churchill called for the U.S. and its Allies to halt the U.S.S.R. from further expansion and from exporting communism across the world. The Cold War was fought along political and economic lines, continuing until the U.S.S.R. began a political and economic collapse. The first overt sign of this weakening appeared when German nationals began the destruction of the Berlin Wall that separated West and East Germany. The collapse of the Wall, in the fall of 1989, signified the U.S.S.R.’s exhaustion from participation in the Cold War. Three years later, fifteen countries reverted to their own governments. Thus, the Cold War, at least for this era, ended.

And So It Begins.

In the movie Twelve O’clock High, the old adjutant narrator literally steps over a fence and transports the viewer to a U.S. airbase located in Great Britain, where he proceeds to tell the story of his early days of World War II. Likewise, as your narrator for this story, let me fly you over the veils of time as I rose from a cadet in the JROTC to the grade of major general in the U.S. Army. The road to be traveled will have bumps in it. I know of no high-ranking officer for whom help and luck or fate (I equate the two) did not play a role in his or her career. A fellow major general once confided in me that he had achieved his success all by himself. He did it all – no help wanted; no help asked. What bunk! You will see how help and luck or fate intervened. So here is the story of my experience in the Army from the perspective of a citizen-Soldier in the Cold War.

This story began in the living room of Charles and Elizabeth Montgomery in their modest house in Knoxville, Tennessee on December 8, 1941. There, my father and I sat listening to President Franklin Roosevelt broadcast a declaration of war with Japan. Few teenage boys or girls could have avoided being swept into the hysteria that followed. Soon young men, and later young women, in uniform filled the streets of Knoxville. The home front enthusiastically entered the war. We bought savings stamps until we acquired $18.75; that amount converted into a war bond worth $25 at maturity. We collected scrap metal and paper. Victory gardens sprang up, and my parents planted a large one. In seventh grade shop class, students carved model planes from balsa wood to be used to help military personnel identify friend or foe aircraft.

At age eleven, I wanted to enlist right then. Fortunately, cooler heads had placed a minimum age on enlistment. My parents explained to me, Just wait awhile, you will get your chance. When you are older, join the Army Reserve and be a citizen-Soldier. As a citizen-Soldier, I would serve on active duty during wartime, and in peacetime, I would remain a citizen but be a member of the reserves. I had been brought up surrounded by soldiers. My Uncle Dave Lillard served as a captain with the 30th Division in World War I. My Uncle Riley Murphy died in that final Allied offensive in October 1918 to end the war. My Uncle John Montgomery rode a motorcycle and carried dispatches for the U.S. Army command in France, and my father had been a medic in an Army hospital at Le Mans, France. Thus, no discussion ever took place in my family about a branch of service other than the Army and being a citizen-Soldier. Frankly, I lacked any other alternative. My eyesight precluded the Air Corps; my knowledge of the Navy or Marines came from playing in the bathtub with a sailboat my parents gave me. The Army would be for me, via the Reserve.

While I champed at the bit to somehow get involved, my father said, You will soon be twelve. Join the Boy Scouts and get prepared. I took him to heart and counted down the days until I could join. The week following my twelfth birthday, I joined Troop 14 at the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Knoxville. Now in that day, only boys could join the Boy Scouts; there were no girls hanging around to ask, in our opinion, silly questions and get in the way. Of course, six years later we shamelessly chased those same girls.

We hiked and camped in the Smoky Mountains on the Appalachian Trail. We ate raw food until we learned to cook over a campfire. This era of the Scouts, in the 1940s, came before the guidelines for using gas stoves in the National Parks and Forests. As Scouts, we learned how to kick a hole in the ground and remove all the rocks. This enabled us to place a hip in that hole and sleep soundly all night. We tied knots, climbed ropes, used a compass with our maps, and practiced leadership. We learned other useful, and some not so useful, skills. Among those useful skills came swimming and lifeguarding. In lifeguarding, to rescue a drowning person we learned to make a surface dive, turn the person so their back was toward us, place our hand in the crotch, and push up to level the body. Then with a hand across the chest and using the sidestroke, we swam to shore. Some of these activities we hoped never to use.