Major General William Luther Sibert (October 12, 1860 – October 16, 1935) was a senior United States Army officer who commanded the 1st Division on the Western Front during World War I.
Early life and education
Sibert was born in Gadsden, Alabama, on October 12, 1860. After attending the University of Alabama from 1879 to 1880, he entered the United States Military Academy and was appointed a second lieutenant of Engineers, United States Army, on June 15, 1884. His appointment was a distinction as only the top 10 percent of each West Point class was then commissioned into the Engineers.
Military career
He graduated from the Engineer School of Applications in 1887 and went on to hold several Engineer positions in the United States and overseas.
In 1899, he was assigned as the Chief Engineer of the 8th Army Corps and the Chief Engineer and General Manager of the Manila and Dagupan Railroad during the Philippine Insurrection. Later, he returned to the United States where he was in charge of river and harbor districts and headquarters in Louisville and Pittsburgh.
From 1907 through 1914, Sibert was a member of the Panama Canal Commission and was responsible for the building of a number of critical parts of the Panama Canal, including the Gatun Locks and Dam, the West Breakwater in Colon, and the channel from Gatun Lake to the Pacific Ocean.
On March 15, 1915, Sibert, by now a lieutenant colonel, was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. This promotion, while not an uncommon practice in the Regular Army of the time, was still unusual. Congress wanted to make Sibert a brigadier general, but the Engineer Corps was only authorized one, so instead of expanding the Corps, they appointed Sibert to a line officer slot (i.e., Infantry). The Army not knowing what to do with an engineer who had never led troops or trained for combat suddenly elevated to a general of infantry, decided to assign Sibert, who had been working on canal projects in the Mid-West and advisory missions to China, to command the Pacific Coast's Coastal Artillery. Here, it was felt he could do little harm.
Unfortunately for Sibert, when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Brigadier General Sibert was one of the only senior infantry officers on active duty. He was duly breveted to major general and deployed with the initial four regiments of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) which formed the 1st Division (nicknamed "The Big Red One") once in France. The AEF's Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C), General John J. Pershing, a long serving cavalry officer famous for his exploits at San Juan Hill in the Spanish–American War, and recently in charge of the campaign against Pancho Villa, was short on qualified general officers (he himself had only recently been promoted to his position) so Sibert was placed in charge of the 1st Division.
To his credit, Sibert opposed his own promotion as a line officer, protesting his own lack of experience. In the peacetime Army prior to 1917, though, it was relatively harmless. In the cauldron of the Western Front, it was a serious problem. The AEF suffered a serious leadership problem throughout the final year of the war, as officers were rapidly promoted to positions with little or no experience. The American Army was singularly unprepared for the war, and the strain of its rapid expansion created many personnel problems like Sibert's.
Part of the problem was the Army's promotion system, which continued to cause problems into World War II. The rank a Regular Army officer might hold, and their official rank were not always the same. Thus a "peacetime rank" and a "wartime" rank differed. An officer might start the war as a lieutenant colonel, end the war as a major general, and then revert to being a lieutenant colonel after the war. Incidentally, pay was not necessarily tied to rank, but depended on time in service and an individual's official rank. In the small Regular Army of 1917, most officers were below the rank of colonel, and few serving in general officer billets actually were recognized by Congress as holding the rank of general, rather, they were "breveted" to the higher rank. Actual promotion required Congressional approval, the number of positions limited by law, and was based solely on seniority. Breveting allowed the Army to bypass these restrictions, for better or worse. Thus, the problem of promoting Sibert to brigadier general in the Engineer Corps and the subsequent trouble it caused.