The career of Colonel G. C. Thorpe
George Cyrus Thorpe was born in 1875. He began his career as a Marine Corps officer with the rank of second lieutenant during the Spanish-American War. During combat operations in the Philippines, he demonstrated bravery and was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant on April 8, 1899. Unfortunately, he suffered a foot injury and began to fall seriously ill. On July 23, 1900, he was promoted to the rank of captain. In the following years, Thorpe served in the West Indies, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone, in the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets, and in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He completed studies at the Naval War College, the United States Naval Academy, and the General Staff College. Furthermore, he studied psychology and international law at Brown University and New York University, earning a Bachelor of Laws as well as a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in the humanities. Between 1917 and 1919, Thorpe was stationed in Santo Domingo. While commanding a regiment, he developed a personnel training model for the armed forces, which he submitted to the Secretary of the Navy. Unfortunately, his proposal met with little interest, as the First World War was ongoing. Later, he served as a brigade chief of staff and subsequently as the commandant of the Dominican National Guard. As a colonel with an excellent reputation, he could count on further promotion. However, poor health rendered him unfit for further military service, and he left the army in 1923. Thorpe also worked in the judiciary in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In the final years of his life, he published several articles, though they did not concern military affairs. He died in 1936.
Logistics from the perspective of G. C. Thorpe
From December 1914, Thorpe studied and subsequently worked at the Naval War College in Newport, where he had the opportunity to scientifically examine various issues in the fields of military history, the art of war, and logistics. He quickly discovered that the subject of logistics was generally treated superficially in military studies. He noted that “military personnel know almost nothing about logistics“. These findings prompted him to write the work Pure Logistics: The Science of War Preparation, which he completed in the summer of 1916. It was published a year later.
In his work, Thorpe examines, among other things, the definition of logistics, the logistical problems of Napoleon’s Russian campaign and General Sherman’s operations during the Civil War, the organization of logistics in the German and American armies, the logistical conditions of arms production during peacetime and wartime, as well as the issue of training logistical personnel for the needs of the army.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 1/2009.