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Chapter 1

When the Military Became an External State

Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lucius Clay, the future military governors in Japan and Germany, entered the United States Military Academy (West Point) at a pivotal time in the development of the army—a moment when the military fundamentally shifted its focus from regional skirmishes to global power. A “regular” army had always fit uncomfortably within the republican framework that followed the American Revolution. The Bill of Rights aimed to prohibit the abuses perpetrated by King George III’s army during the Revolution. The country’s subsequent federalist structure and republican ideology made the hierarchical nature of the military seem out of step with the fabric of American life.¹

Thus, it is hard to understand today, from the vantage of the “militaryindustrial complex,” exactly how parochial the nineteenth-century army was. A few combat units functioned as an example for the many state militias which provided the bulk of America’s fighting force. The professional army mostly battled American Indians on the frontier. The state militias, in the meantime, remained accountable to individual governors who could form, staff, and disband them based on their own priorities, rewarding friends and supporters with appointments.²

Similarly, the army’s non-line bureaus—its Corps of Engineers, for example—often served as a source of federal patronage where various congressmen worked hand in glove with bureau chiefs to ensure and protect each other’s prerogatives. A particular congressman would secure appropriations for a particular bureau, and the bureau chief would ensure that the majority of the appropriation went to improvements in the congressman’s home district. Thus, while the Constitution theoretically made the president the “commander in chief,” in reality he had little to do with a military that functioned through states, Congress, and individual bureau chiefs. This kept the army tightly within the spirit of nineteenth-century republican ideology, but hardly an effective fighting force compared to the world’s best militaries.³

Surprisingly, the Civil War did not alter this pattern. The federalist spirit that dominated the antebellum period shaped military organization during the war for both the Union and the Confederacy. Each formed state militias led by officers elected by their troops or chosen by the governor. Many members of the regular army, who might have otherwise provided professionalism and leadership, simply blended into their state militias where they received no special privileges or leadership roles. As a result, both sides struggled to train and prepare soldiers for combat, a fact that undoubtedly increased casualties on both sides. The frontier experience produced surprisingly strong and courageous recruits who were fantastic fighters if not good soldiers.⁴ Then, just as quickly as they appeared, the militias dissolved once the war ended. The Union army included more than a million men in 1865. Congress reduced it to 54,000 by the next year. The atrophy continued over the following decade. By 1874, only 25,000 enlisted men and 2,151 officers remained.⁵

Then, on May 1, 1898, the American navy played a critical part in placing the American army onto that path that led it inexorably into becoming a part of America’s external state. On that day, the American Asiatic fleet, headed by Commodore George Dewey, engaged the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, Philippines. The first major event in the Spanish-American War, few people anticipated the one-sided outcome. Dewey’s cable announcing the victory dramatically understated his accomplishment: he listed the Spanish ships destroyed (ten in all) and then added simply, “[American] Squadron is uninjured.”⁶ American newspapers showed less restraint. “As a naval battle it stands alone in history,” wrote the Independent, “the glory of the achievement can never be dimmed or diminished.”⁷ Hundreds of other papers echoed the praise, and within days, Congress promoted Dewey to rear admiral.

The naval battle essentially sealed the fate of the Spanish garrison inside Manila, which had become surrounded by thousands of Filipino insurrectionists. With no fleet to protect it and no hope of resupply or reinforcement getting through the American naval blockade, the garrison lay trapped within its own walls. The end came on August 13, in the “Battle” of Manila.⁸ Historians place quotation marks around the word “battle” because the whole affair involved no genuine fighting. It had been choreographed by prior agreement. General Fermín Jáudenes y Álvarez sent word through intermediaries that he would surrender the city, provided he could plausibly preserve Spanish honor. He suggested each side fire near but not at the other. The Spanish soldiers would make an orderly retreat into the city, abandoning their posts in succession as the American soldiers advanced. Eventually, the city would “fall” to the Americans, who could raise the American flag and take the Spanish soldiers prisoner. American guards (not Filipino insurrectionists) could then safely escort the Spanish from the city for their journey back to Spain.⁹ The “battle” went as choreographed, and the garrison surrendered the city without the knowledge, input, or involvement of the Filipino rebels. As the Filipino insurrectionists looked on, the Americans advanced and the Spanish retreated. By the end of the day, American troops controlled the city, which they sealed off from the Filipinos.¹⁰

Military strategy in the Philippines followed President William McKinley’s interest in keeping his options open. With Manila in American control, he had flexibility in negotiating peace with Spain and could also deal with the Filipinos from a position of strength. If it worked out that the United States ended up annexing some part of the archipelago, then possession avoided the problem of “retaking” the city. While not using those words exactly, McKinley ordered the military to “use any means in your judgment necessary” to maintain American authority over Manila, its bay, and the surrounding area against the Filipinos.¹¹

The fateful decision to take Manila, however, created a genuine dilemma as to what to do with it along with the entire archipelago. McKinley might have simply freed the Philippines. But he worried the islands might be gobbled up by a growing German or Japanese empire (both seemed interested). He also wanted to open Asian trade and markets, and the Philippines provided a strong foothold in the Western Pacific. Finally, in an age when to the victor went the spoils, he feared a political backlash if he simply walked away from a great military victory “empty-handed.” Certainly race played a part in his thinking. Whatever the motivation, in the end he decided to make the entire archipelago an American colony. The Spanish had stalled the peace negotiations in the hopes that the American people would repudiate the acquisition of the Philippines in the 1898 midterm election. They didn’t. Once the election returns became known, Spanish negotiators conceded. The final treaty, signed on December 10, 1898, ceded the Philippines to the United States for a payment of $20 million. It also made Cuba independent (although still under American supervision) and added Guam and Puerto Rico to the American empire.¹²

Despite the election returns, an imperial project remained controversial if for no other reason than it seemed contrary to an American identity born out of a revolution against an imperial power.¹³ Perhaps to finesse this uncomfortable historical fact, McKinley argued that Americans should take hold of the Philippines in the interest of the Filipinos. The Filipinos would become “Christian” and “civilized” under the supervision of their more experienced older brothers. “Bear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands,” McKinley explained.¹⁴ American rule would be temporary and benevolent, which would distinguish it from the permanent subservience demanded by European empires.¹⁵ More to the point, “Every step taken was in obedience to the requirements of the Constitution,” McKinley liked to say of his foray into imperialism.¹⁶ But his concern with the American Constitution and interest in distinguishing American empire from its European alternative meant that he had made little preparation for governing the Philippines once they became an American possession. In short, what entity would do the actual job of governing the Filipinos and how would that entity fit within the broader institutional framework of American governance?

The army became the default answer—at least to the question of which entity would do the actual job of governing abroad. The logic of the situation dictated as much. The army was already there, in large numbers, with clear lines of communication and a functioning command structure. No other branch of the federal government possessed these capabilities in a form that allowed for extension outside of the continental United States. In a scenario that would repeat itself in future conflicts, the army was always “there” wherever “there” happened to be.

As it turned out, in the Philippines the job of military governor fell to Arthur MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur’s father. Arthur MacArthur was a career soldier and decorated veteran of the Civil War. After the treaty with Spain, he stood at the center of McKinley’s effort to remake the Filipinos in an American image. Arthur MacArthur initially took this to mean using the army to restore basic services: fixing sewers and roads, sponsoring schools and markets, and generally pursuing the basic aims of “normal” civic life.¹⁷ At the same time, he had the obligation to put down a growing insurrection as Filipinos realized the war had largely traded one colonial overlord for another. Already armed and practiced at fighting an empire, the Filipinos proved a formidable antagonist.¹⁸ Thus, Arthur MacArthur had to make effective on the ground the contradictory orders to subdue the Filipinos in their own interest. At the same time, he had the practical task of retooling what the army does best (organized violence) for the purpose of establishing a legitimate governing authority among a conquered people.

In general, Arthur MacArthur took the position that aggressive violence would, over the long run, undermine American legitimacy. As a result, he issued orders offering amnesty to any Filipino willing to lay down arms and swear loyalty to the American government. He also prohibited his troops from using torture to gain information from captured guerillas (an order often difficult to enforce in practice). When a daring raid captured the rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo alive, Arthur MacArthur spent weeks convincing him to use his influence to encourage an end to the insurrection. When Aguinaldo finally relented and agreed that the insurrection should end, Arthur MacArthur wanted to release all Filipino political prisoners and send Aguinaldo on a tour of the United States, treating him as an honored diplomat. McKinley recoiled at the thought. In general, Arthur MacArthur showed a surprising lack of racism as well as a willingness to use the promise of American freedom and prosperity to pacify the Filipinos. Mostly, he wanted to get the military out of the job of governing a foreign people as quickly as possible.¹⁹

Perhaps his greatest challenge came not from the insurrection but from his own government. While McKinley initially relied upon military government in the Philippines, he soon afterwards decided upon a civilian version of colonial government to supplement the military. While Arthur MacArthur served as military governor, McKinley sent a civilian commission headed by future president William Howard Taft to also function as the American government in the Philippines. Without clear lines of authority the two men never got along. In letters home Taft begged McKinley and anyone else he could in Washington to order Arthur MacArthur home. But officials in Washington worried that the insurrection might have widespread support, suggesting the army should remain in charge. Once, however, the insurrection had dwindled to a small group of incorrigibles, then a civilian government could take charge. In this regard, Arthur MacArthur and Taft sent conflicting reports: Taft insisted the rebellion had spent itself and the last remnants would melt under the heat of more aggressive military action; Arthur MacArthur insisted that the rebellion had popular support, and aggressive military action would prove self-defeating.²⁰

When rebel activity in fact began to decline, Washington officials decided to finally give Taft sole authority in the Philippines. On July 4, 1901, he relieved Arthur MacArthur and assumed all executive power in the occupation. The shift proved ironic. Taft’s civilian supervision inspired the bloodiest period of the occupation, with more than two hundred thousand Filipinos dying as part of a broad-based pacification. In the end, the Filipinos were subdued, but at extraordinary cost in blood and treasure. As opponents of imperial policy liked to point out, the United States spent $20 million to buy the Philippines and another $200 million to subdue it. In the meantime more than four thousand Americans died from disease and wounds.²¹

While the conflict between Taft and Arthur MacArthur certainly involved each man’s pride, it also turned on genuine questions of law and policy. Since they found themselves in a new kind of state, outside the norms of American governance, they often fought over the nature of their authority. Taft took the position that American government in the Philippines functioned under the authority of the president. Arthur MacArthur agreed. But he insisted that the president’s authority came through his role as commander in chief, and, thus, it extended only through the military. A civilian authority (such as Taft possessed) required an “organic act” (an act of congress creating or establishing a territory of the United States).²² Taft, a jurist and aspirant to the Supreme Court (he became chief justice in 1921), could hardly stand hearing MacArthur lecture him in areas where he saw himself as expert, even if MacArthur had a point.

The question of authority grew more complicated when it came to mundane tasks. If, for example, Taft ordered the construction of a sewer (a task that seemed civilian in nature), he needed help from the Army Corps of Engineers. To whom should an officer in the corps report, MacArthur or Taft? As it turned out, some of the nastiest fights between Taft and Arthur MacArthur turned on exactly these kinds of questions.²³

In 1902, Congress resolved the question in the Philippine Organic Act, which “approved, ratified, and confirmed” Taft’s position as civil governor. At the same time, it declared that “inhabitants of the Philippine Islands … shall be deemed and held to be citizens of the Philippine Islands” and that this citizenship entitled them “to the protection of the United States,” but not American citizenship. The Act guaranteed for Filipinos the rights contained in the U.S. Constitution. It also provided for the creation of a Philippine republic able to pass its own laws, enter into treaties, and mint its own currency. However, it limited this power by declaring that “all laws passed by the Government of the Philippine Islands shall be reported to Congress, which hereby reserves the power and authority to annul the same.”²⁴

While the law clarified Taft’s power in the Philippines, it muddied the relationship of the United States to its new territories. Ultimately, the Supreme Court tried to resolve the legal status of America’s new colonial possessions (including Puerto Rico and Guam) in the Insular Cases (so called because “insular” served as a synonym for “islands”). The Supreme Court explained that the new territories were “not a foreign country” since they were “subject to the sovereignty of” and “owned by the United States.” However, they were “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” since they “had not been incorporated into the United States” as new states and were instead “merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”²⁵ And therein lay the nature of the confusion: whether out of racism, or fear of upsetting the domestic political balance, or whatever else, no branch of the federal government contemplated the eventual incorporation of the new possessions into the constitutional design of the country.²⁶ At the same time, the federal government did not create an institutional framework that looked like the kind of imperial ministries developed by the British, French, and other European powers. Indeed, in an era in which progressive Americans borrowed so many ideas from Europe, no broad effort emerged to administer the new American possessions through a ministry modeled on European precedents.²⁷ Instead, the Philippines remained in a state of semi-independence, codified in 1916 by the Jones Act, which dramatically expanded self-government and promised Filipinos that “tutelage” would eventually come to an end, while nevertheless insisting that the time had yet to come.

In a general sense, the complications that resulted from annexing the Philippines left a bad taste in the mouth of future policy makers. “If Old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed the Spanish fleet,” McKinley once observed to a friend, “what a lot of trouble that would have saved us!”²⁸ Indeed, after the Spanish-American War the United Stated did not attempt to duplicate the outcome of that war and colonize on a semipermanent basis new territory. Yet it has frequently ventured abroad and conquered foes under a wide variety of circumstances. After 1900, these forays took the army to Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Europe; and with each foray, territory outside the United States came under the sovereignty of the United States without becoming a part of the United States. Elihu Root, secretary of war under William McKinley, and later Theodore Roosevelt, famously described the relationship this way: “As near as I can make out, the Constitution follows the flag, but doesn’t quite catch up with it.”²⁹ Precisely because the country refused to create a distinct and lasting bureaucracy dedicated to governing new territories as part of an American empire, the task of governing the space between flag and Constitution fell to the military. As a result, after the Spanish-American War the United States army began to grow governing capacities almost in spite of itself, out of sheer necessity.

* * *

If the federal government spent little time thinking about how to govern territories outside the boundaries of the U.S., it is fair to say that army leaders spent just as little time contemplating the way the army had started to expand its governing capacities into an external state. Military leaders saw counterinsurgency operations (including what today is called “nationbuilding”) as an aberration, as something unlikely to be repeated and unnecessary to future missions. As the army intervened in Latin America, West Point added a course in Spanish but little else to note this new experience in modern warfare. The army’s new War College focused on “catching up” to European powers and preparing the American army for set-piece battles against the Great Power armies. It did not plan to repeat the experience of military government.³⁰

In fairness, the army had a great deal of “catching up” to do. The Spanish-American War had revealed this fact. While John Hay, secretary of state in 1898, called it a “splendid little war … favored by that Fortune that loves the brave,” and while the Spanish-American War lasted only one summer and resulted in a total victory for the United States, the war hardly cast the army in a favorable light.³¹ In reviewing the conduct of the war afterward, congressional investigators realized that the military’s command structure had been deeply disorganized and unprepared. Victory had, indeed, come through “fortune” more than American military know-how.³² Theodore Roosevelt, a firsthand witness to the disorganization, wanted a “thorough shaking up” of the War Department even before becoming president, largely to streamline the army’s command structure.³³ Once in the presidency, he turned to his war secretary Elihu Root to create a centralized military leadership in a single general staff responsible for strategic planning and military preparedness (largely on the model of the Prussian military).³⁴ At the same time, Root spearheaded reforms to revamp education for all levels of the military. He created the Army War College and worked to coordinate its offerings with the service academies and the growing number of state colleges that emerged after the Morrill Land-Grant College Act (1862). That act required colleges to offer military training as part of their curriculum, and Root wanted to standardize the curriculum to train future officers.³⁵

While much more can be said about the process by which the army professionalized at the turn of the century, for our purposes, the events that followed the Spanish-America War emphasize the fact that Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lucius Clay entered military service at a time when the army itself undertook a broad transition in its capabilities and focus. In fits and starts over the next two decades it transformed from a small frontier garrison to a global projection of American power that included nation building efforts outside American borders. Thus, the careers of all three men were swept along by these broader currents of institutional change, and their ability to anticipate and lead that change in turn advanced their careers.

The oldest of the three, MacArthur entered West Point in June 1899, just as his father began to serve as military governor in the Philippines. His entry seemed predestined by the fact that his father had already become an army legend whose legacy he struggled to match. Eisenhower entered West Point in 1911 almost entirely through personal ambition. His family had little money or fame. Clay, the youngest of the three, entered West Point in 1914. He gained admittance as a political legacy: his father, Alexander Clay, had been elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat from Georgia three times before dying suddenly in 1910.

MacArthur was the best student of the three, finishing first in his class.³⁶ Clay had a chance to match that record, finishing first in several subjects (including English and history); however, he finished 128th in “conduct” out of about 150 plebes. Seven weeks before graduation he stood only four demerits short of expulsion. “The discipline at West Point was mainly petty,” he said, “I thought it was foolish.”³⁷ It showed. Eisenhower, in contrast to the other two, finished middle of the pack, generally more interested in athletic rather than academic competition. That said, his graduating class, the class of 1915, became famous as “the class the stars fell on.” More than one-third of its 164 members went on to hold the rank of brigadier general or higher, including (obviously) Eisenhower and his longtime friend and collaborator during World War II, Omar Bradley.³⁸

Unlike their counterparts in European military academies, many plebes did not plan on a life in the military. Students often attended West Point for the free college education it offered. Unfortunately, they often got what they paid for. West Point lagged far behind the new research universities popping up around the country.³⁹ Its curriculum had hardly changed since its creation during the presidency of James Monroe in 1817. Students memorized and regurgitated. Nothing more. Grades reflected the accuracy of the regurgitation. Nothing else. When plebes studied strategy, they consulted the battles of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant.⁴⁰ If a plebe asked a question or wanted to understand the material he recited, the faculty cut him short: “I’m not here to answer questions,” they said, “but to mark you.”⁴¹

The absurdity of this approach nearly got Eisenhower expelled. One morning he forgot to prepare a math lecture. He stood at the board puzzling it out and, after a few tries, succeeded—but not in the prescribed way. “Mr. Eisenhower,” his instructor said, “you memorized the answer, put down a lot of figures and steps that have no meaning whatsoever … in hope of fooling [me].” Eisenhower took this as an accusation of cheating. He became “red-necked and angry” and went right back at his professor, a clear act of insubordination. As tensions rose, a more senior faculty member happened to walk by. After looking over Eisenhower’s work, the senior instruction said, “Eisenhower’s solution is more logical and easier than the one we’ve been using. I’m surprised that none of us … has stumbled on it.” Eisenhower survived. But so did the academy’s hostility to initiative or innovation. This particular professor never forgave him.⁴²

A decade earlier, in 1903, when MacArthur graduated from West Point, most plebes thought that the best assignment lay with the Corps of Engineers—probably because it led most easily to a private sector career. Promotions in this branch often came sooner than in the other branches. MacArthur, as the top of his class, obviously ended up in the corps. His first assignment took him to the Philippines, just a few years after his father had left. He took up the job of constructing roads and barracks and, eventually, a wharf. Once, while searching for timber, two Filipino insurrectionists ambushed him, shooting his hat from his head. MacArthur returned fire and killed both men. An observing sergeant, figuring that only Providence had saved MacArthur, predicted “the rest of the Loo’tenant’s life is pure velvut.”⁴³

A year later, it seemed anything but. MacArthur had contracted malaria and the “dhobe itch.” In October 1904, he returned to San Francisco to recover. By this point his father had become a major general, and Arthur MacArthur arranged for his recovering son to become his own aide-decamp. As a perk, the assignment included a long tour of Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. In particular, the two MacArthurs observed the workings of the Japanese, German, French, and British colonial empires. In all, they traveled nearly twenty thousand miles, and the experience convinced the younger MacArthur that America’s future was “irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts.”⁴⁴

When Arthur MacArthur suddenly passed away in September 1912, his widow’s health began to decline rapidly, and Douglas asked for reassignment near his mother. Secretary of War Henry Stimson felt that, “In view of the distinguished service of General Arthur MacArthur, the Secretary of War would be pleased if an arrangement could be effected” that would keep Douglas close to his widowed mother in Washington. The best way to do this was to make Douglas an assistant within the office of the newly created chief of staff.⁴⁵

He arrived in Washington just as the dust settled following an existential struggle between Major General Leonard Wood, the new chief of staff, and Adjutant General Frederick Crayton Ainsworth. Wood represented the progressive wing of the military: he wanted centralization, professionalization, and greater executive control over the military. As adjutant general, Ainsworth headed one of the army’s bureaus. He stood for the old model: independent bureaus, a more federalized organization, and congressional perks. As is often the case in institutional fights, the issue that sparked the showdown involved something minor: how to handle military paperwork more efficiently. Yet it quickly escalated to a fight over the army’s future: would it fashion itself after European armies (particularly Prussia)? Or would it resemble the nineteenth-century citizen-army of the American past?

Henry Stimson, who served as secretary of war during Wood and Ainsworth’s battle, ultimately favored the progressive wing of the army. An austere patrician from New York with a strong sense of duty and a clear sense of right and wrong, Stimson entered public service when President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1906. He quickly built a strong reputation as a capable antitrust champion, which led to his appointment in 1911 as secretary of war to William Howard Taft. In the fight between Wood and Ainsworth he favored Wood generally but not decisively, hoping the two could resolve their differences despite the fact that their exchanges grew terser through 1911 and into the next year. Stimson finally felt compelled to act when Ainsworth finally sent a message that suggested Wood, as well as War Secretary Stimson, could not comprehend the “evil effects” of their paperwork “plan.” Ainsworth had violated Stimson’s sense of decorum. Wood wanted Stimson to initiate a court martial. But Stimson settled on simply relieving Ainsworth. In February 1912, Ainsworth “retired,” indicating that the progressive wing of the military had become ascendant.

Congress, of course, did not go unaware of the bureaucratic battle. Many members understood that Ainsworth’s departure called in question the old arrangement of using army bureaus to funnel appropriations back to home districts. Thus, in successive appropriations bills, Congress attached riders to remove Wood from office and to return power to the adjutant general’s office. President Taft vetoed them all. He stood by his war secretary and army chief of staff. The adjutant general’s office would remain under the thumb of the general staff. But congressional opponents did not go quietly; they fired a parting shot by reducing the general staff from forty-five to thirty-six officers. MacArthur got his assignment even as the staff downsized—a telling testament to the legacy of his father.⁴⁶

As soon as he arrived in Washington, MacArthur ingratiated himself with Wood. Whether he understood it or not, his arrival after the bitter feud worked with his pedigree to make him a neutral arbiter with the still embittered officers throughout the army’s bureaus who had come to loathe Wood but still respected the MacArthur name. Wood, however, clearly understood this dynamic, and so he utilized MacArthur extensively. Soon after becoming president, Woodrow Wilson apparently recognized the same dynamic at work and offered MacArthur a job as a White House aide in 1913. MacArthur, loyal to Wood, declined.⁴⁷ In any event, as Eisenhower and Clay still made their way at West Point, MacArthur had already managed to move to the nexus of army politics.

The outbreak of hostilities in Europe in the summer of 1914 made MacArthur’s position especially interesting. Initially, President Woodrow Wilson struggled to keep the United States out of the war, suspecting the motives of all the belligerents. Yet other prominent Americans feared that eventually the United States would be dragged into the conflict. In particular, Theodore Roosevelt, Stimson, and Wood—all out of office by 1914—argued that the army should actively prepare for that eventuality. Wilson would have none of it. As if to emphasize his feelings he refused to meet with his military leaders with any regularity; worse, he threatened to fire any military leaders caught making contingency plans in case war came.⁴⁸ In theory, the Joint Army and Navy Board should have allowed for some provisional discussions of American involvement in the war. Here, again, the Wilson administration remained intentionally unprepared. Assistant Secretary of War Henry Breckinridge summed up the views of the Wilson administration: he only “fooled with” the board “on hot summer afternoons when there was nothing else to do.”⁴⁹

When Germany’s decision to unleash unlimited submarine warfare forced Wilson’s into the war on the side of the British and French Entente, the army suddenly found itself facing a first-rate opponent on the other side of a wide ocean. Unsurprisingly, the broader national security state remained extraordinarily unprepared. When Congress declared war on April 6, 1917, the combined army and National Guard had a little over 200,000 men under arms. By comparison, at that same moment the Niville Offensive in Europe cost the Germans, British, and French more than 400,000 casualties. America’s pittance of an army could not have lasted a single battle in the kind of grinding war Europeans had endured since 1914.⁵⁰

Congress proved particularly slow to understand what it had committed the army to do. Even as it deliberated declaring war, the House Military Affairs Committee rejected the army’s budget request of $3 billion for armaments and soldiers’ pay. Eventually, Congress managed to provide the requested funds, but not until June 5, two months after it had declared war. A second appropriations request waited until October to wend its way through Congress.⁵¹

In a few aspects, though, the army anticipated the problems it would face. When Congress passed the Selective Services Act, army officials insisted that the law prohibit bounties, paid exemptions, or substitutions as part of conscription—those provisions that produced so much resentment during the Civil War.⁵² More important, rather than revert to an organization built around the state militias, the army parceled out its existing soldiers to train the millions of doughboys called into service. Professional soldiers then served as the commanding officers of new combat units.⁵³ This way the army could best leverage its existing expertise and filter that expertise throughout the new fighting divisions.

Ironically, the decision to parcel out its regular soldiers ultimately kept Eisenhower and Clay from seeing combat. The army sent Eisenhower to Texas in the spring of 1917 as part of the newly formed Fifty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, promoting him at the same time to captain and placing him in charge of supply. He then moved to the training school at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he managed to enroll in the army’s first tank school. By February 1918, he was again reassigned, this time to develop a training facility for a new tank division in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Just three years out of West Point, he suddenly faced the daunting task of commanding thousands of volunteers in using this new and unfamiliar weapon (for which the army had no training manuals or field guides). Eventually, he learned that he would lead his trainees into battle as part of an offensive scheduled for spring 1919, with a planned departure of November 18, 1918—as it turned out, one week after the Armistice.⁵⁴

Having narrowly graduated in 1918, Clay requested a post in the artillery. The army assigned him to the Corps of Engineers instead. Ever the iconoclast, Clay wired the adjutant general saying, “[You] made a mistake.” The adjutant general wired back telling Clay he had better show up as ordered. At Camp Lee, Virginia, Clay went through an accelerated training for engineers. No sooner had he finished that September than he got a new assignment to act as an instructor for new recruits at Camp Humphreys, Virginia, where he remained throughout the war.⁵⁵

By contrast, MacArthur managed to use his position on the general staff to move out of the Corps of Engineers and obtain a command position within the newly formed Forty-Second Division. MacArthur named it the “Rainbow Division” because it included twenty-six different state national guards: it stretched “over the whole country like a rainbow.”⁵⁶ MacArthur’s reputation soared. By July of 1918, he had been promoted from colonel to brigadier general. Once the American army began to engage the Germans, MacArthur showed an almost reckless willingness to personally lead in battle. In a grinding fight that ultimately ended the war, he was twice wounded and got so close to the front that his own troops mistook him for a German soldier and arrested him as a prisoner of war. By the time of the Armistice, MacArthur had received seven Silver Star medals, two Distinguished Service Cross medals, two Purple Hearts, and two Croix de Guerre awards from the French army, along with membership in France’s Legion of Honor. Second only to General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander in chief of all American forces, he had become the most famous American general in the world.⁵⁷