Читать книгу The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941 - Paul Dickson - Страница 11
ОглавлениеAt 2:50 a.m. on Friday, September 1, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was awakened by a telephone call from the U.S. ambassador to France, William Bullitt, who reported that Nazi Germany had just invaded Poland and was bombing her cities.
“Well, Bill,” the president said. “It has come at last. God help us all.”1
At 4:30 a.m., Roosevelt issued a futile plea to Germany and other European nations to refrain from bombing civilian populations or unfortified cities from the air. He requested “an immediate reply,” which he knew would not be forthcoming.
Later that morning, FDR formally appointed General George C. Marshall chief of staff of the United States Army, a job that officially made Marshall the president’s top military adviser. Marshall replaced General Malin Craig, who had reached the mandatory retirement age of 64 the previous day. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, Marshall had been a highly regarded staff officer for General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in Europe during World War I. Marshall had later become assistant commandant at the Army Infantry School and had served as deputy chief of staff in Washington since 1938.
Roosevelt had actually selected Marshall on July 1, when Marshall was appointed acting chief of staff and had begun assuming the full responsibilities of the job. At the time, some noted that Roosevelt had jumped over 20 major generals (two-star generals) and 14 brigadier generals (one-star generals) to get to Brigadier General Marshall, though a majority of those men were within four years of retirement age.
The appointment came as something of a surprise to many in the military, who thought FDR’s new chief of staff would be General Hugh Drum, the next man in line for the position and the logical choice; but Drum, who wanted the job, had self-promoted himself out of it. He had been pushing for the job for a decade and had lobbied heavily to get it—for example, exhorting Colonel George S. Patton to visit then retired general Pershing to persuade him to recommend Drum to the president. Roosevelt had been lobbied so fiercely by Drum supporters that it was rumored he could be heard wandering about the White House muttering, “Drum, Drum, I wish he’d stop beating his drum.”2
Three other men wanted the job badly enough to lobby for it, and through their friends and political allies had bombarded the White House with arguments in their favor. Marshall, who clearly was interested in the job, was appalled by the other candidates’ lobbying and chose to remain silent. Marshall’s biographer, Leonard Mosley, later observed: “All the other hopefuls were making such a noise about themselves, and so many big drums were being beaten on their behalf, that it was his silence that would make him most audible to the President.”3
Roosevelt had summoned Marshall to his study in the White House the previous April to announce the decision to consider him for the job. Marshall let the president know quite directly that he always “wanted to be able to speak his mind.”
“Is that all right?” Marshall asked.
“Yes,” the commander in chief replied, smiling slightly.
“You said ‘yes’ pleasantly, but it may be unpleasant,” Marshall responded.4,5
This was what Roosevelt wanted to hear: he wanted someone who could stand up to him on military matters, as Marshall had done twice previously as deputy chief of staff, when he had respectfully but forcefully dissented. With perilous days ahead, the last thing FDR wanted was a yes-man as his chief military adviser. Marshall also had the support of Harry Hopkins, the president’s closest adviser, who admired Marshall and lobbied for him on his own, without Marshall’s knowledge or blessing.
From the outset, Marshall made it clear that he would not run the Army for the benefit of its senior officers. He informed Roosevelt that he was ready to get rid of those who did not measure up. In a real war, he later wrote, the needs of the enlisted men came first. He believed that the Army owed its soldiers competent leadership above all.
Marshall came to the job with a mission to prevent the errors of 1917–18, when he had planned offensive operations as a member of Pershing’s staff. Not only had Marshall’s position allowed him to witness the brutality and waste of war, but he had seen firsthand the limitations of a poorly prepared force. In September 1918, he helped orchestrate two U.S. operations in France—an attack on Saint-Mihiel and an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne region—both of which, though successful, resulted in the massive loss of American lives. According to Marshall, “the young officers did not know how to regroup their men after the initial advance . . . and when the time came to push on, they were unable to carry out their mission.”6
Marshall was a man of strong opinion based on that wartime experience. While still an aide to Pershing, he had published an article entitled “Profiting by War Experiences” that addressed the matter of orders issued in combat. Marshall took the position that a “hastily prepared order” was often better than a “model” one, particularly if the model order failed to reach frontline commanders in a timely fashion. According to Marshall, “Our troops suffered much from the delays involved in preparing long and complicated orders due to the failure of the staff concerned to recognize that speed was more important than technique.”7
Initially, the personal relationship between Roosevelt and Marshall was a cool one. Before the formal appointment, when FDR called him George, Marshall took it as a show of disrespect and insisted on being addressed as General. Roosevelt would never make the same mistake again. For his part, Marshall worked hard to keep his distance from Roosevelt; he even made a point not to laugh at FDR’s jokes.
Later in the day that he was formally given the job, the Washington, D.C., Evening Star reported that in the space of three minutes, Brigadier General Marshall had accepted two promotions and three additional stars—the first as a major general in the Regular Army and two more as he took the oath of chief of staff, an automatic promotion to the rank of four stars, normally the highest rank attainable in the U.S. Army in peacetime. Marshall made no statements in connection with the promotions and declined “for political reasons” a request from newsreel photographers to pose in front of a map of Europe. The last thing Marshall wanted at that moment was to give the impression that he and the president he served were scheming to get the nation involved in the conflict in Europe.8
“My day of induction was momentous,” Marshall later wrote to a friend, “with the starting of what appears to be a world war.”9
On September 3, two days after Marshall’s swearing in and the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany and the Second World War was fully underway in Europe. That night, Roosevelt took to the radio waves in one of his customary fireside chats with the American people to lament the situation in Europe. He then added: “I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will. And I give you assurance and reassurance that every effort of your Government will be directed toward that end.” Roosevelt then uttered his oft-quoted thought about war: “I have said not once but many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again.”10
What Roosevelt did not say that night was that if and when the nation was drawn into this war, the United States Army was not even prepared to wage a defensive battle to protect North America, let alone stage an offensive campaign on the other side of the Atlantic. But of this both he and Marshall were fully aware.
In France and Great Britain, the few days between Germany’s invasion of Poland and the declaration of war had been spent preparing for the hostilities to come. This was most dramatic in London, where more than 1.5 million people, mostly children, had been moved to the countryside in four days, and all schools located in areas felt to be prime targets for Nazi bombers were closed for the duration of the war. London-based CBS Radio reporter Edward R. Murrow told his American audience that he found it difficult to describe a city in which there were no youngsters shouting on their way home from school or playing in the parks. Responding to the belief that the bombs were about to rain down, London veterinarians opened their offices so that people could come in to have their dogs put to sleep. “Outside the vets’ surgeries,” said one eyewitness, “the slain lay in heaps.”11
As the Nazi conquest of Poland played out, the world absorbed the lesson that Hitler had violated Western rules of warfare that had stood for centuries. “There had been no time allowed to redress the grievances before the invasion, no declaration of war by the aggressor, no will to honor commitments on the part of the Allies, no time for the ponderous machinery of the democracies’ military might, no refusal to hurt civilians, and no courteous treatment of a vanquished enemy,” as one historian summed it up.12
At the time of the invasion of Poland, the German army had 1.7 million men divided into 98 infantry divisions, including nine Panzer divisions, each of which had 328 tanks, eight support battalions, and six artillery batteries.
In stark contrast, the U.S. Army, comprising 189,839 regular troops and officers, in 1939 was ranked 17th in the world, behind the army of Portugal. Furthermore, the Regular Army was dispersed to 130 camps, posts, and stations. Some 50,000 of the troops were stationed outside the United States, including the forces that occupied the Philippines and guarded the Panama Canal. The Army was, as one observer described it, “all bone and no muscle.” The United States Marine Corps stood at a mere 19,432 officers and men, fewer than the number of people employed by the New York City Police Department.13
The United States did have Reserve officers and the National Guard, which required its members to attend 48 training nights and two weeks of field duty per year to fulfill their obligation, but this was hardly enough to prepare them for combat without sustained additional training. Making matters worse, an attempt to get former soldiers to sign up for the Army Reserve, begun in 1938, was failing. Fewer than 5,000 men signed up within the first year, despite the fact they did not have to go to camps or drill but only to agree to be ready in an emergency. The pay was meager but not insignificant during the Depression: $24 a month. The Army even issued special recruiting posters for these soldiers, calling them Modern Minute Men.14
At the end of World War I, the Army had contained more than two million men; since then it had been neglected and allowed to shrink in both size and stature. General Peyton C. March, the Army’s chief of staff at the end of that war, was of the opinion that the United States had rendered itself “weaker voluntarily than the Treaty of Versailles had made Germany.” He concluded that the country had made itself “militarily impotent.”15
The meager budget needed to run the Army dwindled as the Great Depression deepened. In 1935, the Army’s annual budget bottomed out at $250 million, and the force had declined to 118,750, at which point Douglas MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, observed that the entire Regular Army could be placed inside Yankee Stadium.16
“Let me give you a specific example of the effect of these reductions upon the efficiency of the Army,” George C. Marshall later observed. “During this period I commanded a post which had for its garrison a battalion of infantry, the basic fighting unit of every army. It was a battalion only in name, for it could muster barely 200 men in ranks when every available man, including cooks, clerks, and kitchen police, [was] present for the little field training that could be accomplished with available funds. The normal strength of a battalion in most armies of the world varies from 800 to 1,000 men.”17
American troops were learning obsolete skills and preparing for defensive warfare on a small scale. As military historian Carlo D’Este wrote: “So sorry was the state of the U.S. Army in 1939 that had Pancho Villa been alive to raid the southwestern United States it would have been as ill prepared to repulse or punish him as it had been in 1916.”18
The Army had only a few hundred light tanks and maintained a horse cavalry as an elite mobile force; it was no match for the heavily armored German divisions. Those who had advocated replacing horses with tanks and other armored vehicles during the period between the wars had actually been threatened with punishment. As a young officer, Dwight D. Eisenhower later recalled, when he began arguing for greater reliance on armored divisions, “I was told that my ideas were not only wrong but dangerous and that henceforth I would keep them to myself. Particularly, I was not to publish anything incompatible with solid infantry doctrine. If I did, I would be hauled before a court-martial.”19
In the late 1930s, a significant number of cavalry officers were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to mechanization in general and to any attempt to replace the horse with new combat vehicles, especially armored cars. In 1938, Major General John Herr became the chief of cavalry, and his position was that “mechanization should not come at the expense of a single mounted regiment.”20
Organizationally, the Army was divided into small sections that hardly ever trained together as larger coherent units because of a lack of funds. The paucity of travel money was underscored in 1938 when Marshall, stationed in the Vancouver Barracks in Washington State near Portland, Oregon, got orders to report for duty in Washington, D.C., as deputy chief of staff. The move precipitated a flow of letters back and forth between Marshall and then chief of staff Craig, discussing whether the funds could be raised to bring Marshall and his family east by train rather than sending them to Washington by military transport and through the Panama Canal. The funds were found, but the point was made that budgetary considerations were debilitating. Commanders billeted with larger units visited smaller units under their command only once a year—and then only if travel money could be found.21
The officer corps was demoralized because promotions were rare and based primarily on seniority. Army captains, for instance tended to be in their late 30s or early 40s. Many of the better-qualified younger officers had long before left the service.
Some soldiers wore the flat-brimmed steel doughboy helmets from World War I and carried bolt-action rifles from as far back as the Spanish-American War of the late 1890s. In 1939, supply wagons were still commonly pulled by teams of mules, and heavy artillery was moved by teams of horses. Soldiers’ pay was abysmal—$21 a month for a private, just as it had been in 1922. And expenses were high; if an infantryman wanted a calibrated rifle, he had to buy one from the Army for $35. Men who did not like the Army or the command to which they were assigned could buy their way out for $135 after a year. Transfers from one unit to another were unheard of, and the only way to make a move to another command was to pay the $135 and then reenlist with the unit one wanted.
The option to purchase one’s discharge coupled with the technical schooling the Army provided was also frustrating the Army’s efforts. Much of its recruiting was based on the premise that an enlistee could learn while he served. Men were joining the Army, acquiring skills, and then buying their way out. Between 1934 and 1938, 30,360 men bought their discharges; approximately 15 percent of them were technical school graduates.22
Making matters worse, in the early years of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, all troops were forced to take a mandatory “month without pay,” a flat cut that reduced soldiers’ monthly basic take from $21 to $17.85. Marshall himself defended the troops in a letter posted on April 13, 1934, to Brigadier General Thomas S. Hammond, then commander of the Illinois National Guard’s 66th Infantry Brigade. Marshall wrote of his men:
They cannot resign; they must present a certain standard of appearance no matter how closely pressed they may be financially; they must accept the added expenses of moves and special service; they constitute the government’s final backing in the event of grave emergencies; they must hazard their lives in the government service, with no choice of resigning if they do not care to serve. Yet on these servants the Federal government imposed its most drastic program of economy, and at a time when it was demanding more of the Army to meet the special requirements of the New Deal, than of any other branch of the government.23
The month without pay was a temporary measure and later lifted, but to many in the Regular Army the pay cut was a scar that remained. For those paying attention, Marshall had become the voice defending the average Joe who stuck with the Army through thick and thin.
Some units had better athletic teams and occasionally better food, but there were budgetary limitations. From 1922 until 1927, the government allocated 30 cents per day per man for food, and by 1938 the allocation had inched upward to 43 cents. For most men, potatoes were a staple of the evening meal, along with corn bread, beans, coffee, and a gloppy stew of meat and vegetables known as “slumgullion” or “slum” for short.
The desertion rate from the Army was not generally made public, but it was not significant; if a soldier went AWOL (absent without leave) and was not found after 90 days, the Army removed him from the rolls, convened an in absentia court-martial, and awarded him a dishonorable discharge. During the period from 1920 to 1932, any civilian law enforcement officer who returned a deserter to the Army was awarded $50; the bounty was reduced to $25 in 1933. Once returned, the offenders served their “bad time” at hard labor on work details, often making “little ones out of big ones”—smashing rocks with a sledgehammer. When they returned to normal duty, the bounty money was deducted from their pay in small amounts each payday until it was paid off.24
Despite the low pay and limited benefits, the job was a secure one, while work on the outside was often insecure and scarce. By 1932, approximately 13 million Americans were out of work, which amounted to one of every four able and willing workers in the country. Since the infantryman was the civilian labor-market equivalent of an unskilled laborer, not surprisingly the desertion rate reached a low point of 2 percent during these years, despite the reality that most of the Regular Army was housed in flimsy structures erected during the First World War and designed for temporary occupancy.
The Army that General Marshall inherited in 1939 was one that did not like to enlist married men. If a private or corporal wanted to marry, he had to get permission from his commanding officer, and it was granted only on rare occasions. As Victor Vogel pointed out in Soldiers of the Old Army, his memoir of the prewar Army, “This eliminated a great deal of trouble for the Army and saved the United States a lot of money, because few professional soldiers would give up military service for a wife.”25
Soldiers were officially discouraged from marrying until they had reached the rank of sergeant. That could easily mean waiting for a decade, because an enlistee served his first three-year enlistment as a private and his second hitch as a private first class, and then he often remained at that rank. Many men who enlisted with an eye to raising a family were long gone from the service before they made sergeant.
Vogel observed that the pay of the lower ranks was too meager to support a family, and no special benefits covered the expenses incurred by dependents. During the years between the wars, married enlisted men below the rank of sergeant were often forced to live in poverty. “They exist in squalid surroundings, dingy dark, overcrowded rooms where the simplest rules of sanitation and hygiene are difficult if not impossible of accomplishment,” wrote Brigadier General William P. Jackson, commander of Madison Barracks at Sackets Harbor, New York, in a 1931 report on men under his command. He added, about his married men: “Their health, morale, vitality and efficiency is bound to suffer.” Jackson concluded his report by pointing out that his married men became objects of charity, providing this example: “Recently a donation of $19 was made by officers to provide fuel and milk for a new mother and her baby.”26
This Army of primarily single men lived in barracks on outposts surrounded by honky-tonks, where beer sold for a dime a bottle and “sporting houses” were populated by women who, in Vogel’s words, were “out to fleece as many men as possible in as short a time as possible.” Prostitutes would arrive from the nearby cities on payday and be gone a few days later when the men’s money ran out. Many of the smaller western Army posts of the time were isolated relics of the Indian Wars, held open for political rather than military reasons, that had in some cases devolved into slums in the middle of nowhere.27
The men entering the Army in the years before the Second World War were generally poorly educated; high school graduates who showed up in camp as privates were rare. In terms of society at large, the men of the Regular Army were often regarded as outcasts.
In addition to all this, the weapons provided to Regulars and Reservists were for the most part obsolete and inadequate. The basic anti-aircraft gun was a .50-caliber machine gun, entirely insufficient for its intended purpose. The 37 mm gun developed by the U.S. Army Ordnance Department was then considered an excellent anti-tank weapon, but when Marshall was testifying before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs in February 1939, he reported that the Army had only one of these weapons in its arsenal.28
If conditions were bad on the ground, they were worse in the air. In the fall of 1939, at the moment Hitler’s Luftwaffe warplanes were destroying Kraków and Warsaw, the United States’ air forces ranked 20th in the world and possessed only a few modern combat aircraft. German airmen, who had visited the United States before the Polish invasion, often as guests of aviator Charles Lindbergh, concluded that American airpower was an oxymoron. Lindbergh, a bona fide American hero for his 1927 pathbreaking solo transatlantic flight, had become sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
Earlier in 1939, in asking for more money for the air forces, Roosevelt himself had termed their strength as “totally inadequate.” Following up on Roosevelt’s assessment, General Frank Andrews, who headed the air forces, then known as the U.S. Army Air Corps, described the United States as a “sixth-rate airpower,” with only a handful of planes equal to those being flown by the Germans or the British.29
Historian Russell Weigley later wrote that during the 1920s and 1930s the U.S. Army “may have been less ready to function as a fighting force than at any time in its history.” As George Marshall himself wrote in his first biennial report on the armed forces: “During the post-war period, continuous paring of appropriations has reduced the Army virtually to the status of that of a third rate power.”30
Framing this grim overall picture, war-related industries in 1939 were minor, marginal operations doing little to improve the quality or quantity of military equipment and munitions. This was most distressful to Marshall, who told a writer from the New York Times in May 1939, when it became apparent that he was in line to become Army chief of staff: “A billion dollars the day war is declared will not buy ten cents worth of such material for quick delivery.” In 1957, Marshall would tell an interviewer of the “tragic feeling” that a prompt, forceful rearmament program in 1939–40 would have shortened the war that was surely coming to the United States, perhaps saving billions of dollars and countless casualties.31
If the Army’s deficiencies were not already apparent to Marshall, they were on full display beginning on August 5, 1939, less than a month before he was formally sworn in as chief of staff, when more than 1,200 trucks carrying 17,000 members of the National Guard passed through Washington, D.C. If Marshall needed a firsthand reminder of the challenges he faced, all he had to do was look out his office window in the sprawling Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue and watch as the convoy passed through on its way to field exercises on the Civil War battlefield at Bull Run, in nearby Manassas, Virginia. The men were ill equipped, many carrying dummy arms, and poorly trained for real warfare, as many had never fired a weapon—even an ancient one—in training. Some of the men rode into their mock battle packed into station wagons, giving one writer the impression he was watching troops heading out for a picnic.32
The Manassas exercises were staged as a theatrical event, harking back to a 1904 maneuver reenacting the Battles of Bull Run. In 1904, members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, and much of the capital’s social elite sat under an enormous circus tent to watch the mock battle unfold. These 1939 maneuvers, dubbed “the third battle of Manassas”—essentially restaged the original Civil War battles, albeit with aircraft and trucks, to discover the strengths and shortcomings of the 1939 Army.33
One army, the Blue, composed of National Guardsmen, aimed to attack Washington, which was defended by the Black Army, represented by the Regular Army. All told, the exercise involved 23,000 troops brought in from three states and the District of Columbia. As in 1904, it was staged as a highly visible event meant to be viewed by the public.
During the same period in August, the Army staged a second series of exercises in the piney landscape around Plattsburg, New York, located across Lake Champlain from Vermont. It involved 52,000 troops from 11 states. Both operations were designed to test the strengths and weaknesses of the Regular Army as well as National Guard units. As was the case in Virginia, the invaders in northeastern New York were the National Guard and Reservists, while the defenders were Regular Army.
The Manassas exercises ended with the Regular Army defenders of the capital driving back the mechanized National Guard invaders to a line two miles short of Manassas, at which point a cease-fire was called. “The battle of Washington was over. Washington was safe from attack, with invaders in stubborn retreat,” declared a reporter for the Washington Post. What seemed most evident here was that the Guardsmen and Reservists were not ready for war, even with the assistance of an array of tanks and trucks. The Regular Army was still viewed as the winner when it came to land warfare.34
The man in charge of the maneuvers in Upstate New York was Lieutenant General Hugh Drum, commander of the First Army, who on the night before the first phase of the mock battle declared that the army taking the field was “in fact not an army at all, but rather a collection of individual units . . . partially equipped, and woefully short in manpower, weapons, motors.” Drum’s First Army, a portion of which was in the exercise, was supposed to have 320,000; instead a mere 75,000 were under his command.35
But the main conflict of the Plattsburg exercises ended early, with a cease-fire called after two days of torrential rain and thunderstorms that left three men dead from a single lightning strike and 15 others injured from the effects of the storm. Many of the men on the field—soaked, demoralized, and mired in mud—left much of their personal equipment behind when the event was called off, and they were immediately herded into trucks and trains to take them home. The men on the field had been defeated by the weather.36
The problems brought to light were many and were not restricted to the Guardsmen. Although the spirit of the rank-and-file troops was praised, their ability as warriors was not. More than half the 52,000 men mobilized in Plattsburg had never fired their weapons in a combat course of instruction. Training had been utterly and totally inadequate. As one senior officer put it, the men and many of their officers were totally unprepared for “the mechanism of battle—the conduct of the fight.” The list of specific failures was nothing short of appalling. Cover and concealment on the battlefield was neglected, as was liaison and support between units. Serious delays had occurred in the distribution of orders, and many officers and men were unable to properly read maps. Men were led into battle in close formation, and scouts had to work too close to the columns they were supposed to protect. Food supplies to the men in the field were delayed or broke down completely. All these failures made clear the deep logistical problems the Army faced.37
Nor was either maneuver well planned in terms of the field of play. “Troop movements were ludicrously held up at roadside fences, not because of the barbed wire,” observed Newsweek, “but because, in the absence of a suitable field for maneuvers in the area, the nation’s defenders could not trample a farmer’s corn.” Perhaps the most stunning omission from the mock battlefields was the conspicuous absence of aircraft. A small item in one newspaper explained the omission: “The airmen are too busy with expansion to put on a show.”38
Using both named and unnamed sources from both maneuvers, the newspaper criticism rose to a crescendo. ARMY ADMITS WAR SHOWED DEFICIENCY read a headline in the Baltimore Sun above an article arguing that the maneuvers showed the Army was relatively less prepared than it had been in 1917 and that there had been a deplorable lack of training, especially among the Guardsmen and Reservists. “It must be remembered as far as the National Guard is concerned,” one general told the Sun reporter, “that they are civilian soldiers who get only a small amount of training each year and with other things to do than learn soldiering.”39
Finally, the man in charge of these war games, General Drum, labeled the performances of all those involved “deplorable and inexcusable.” The Army simply did not know how to fight. Plattsburg showed Drum and others that the nation’s armed forces needed to learn the mechanism of war—just how, under complex modern conditions, to advance, hold ground, and maintain liaison, supply, and command. Drum would later say that for the Army the Plattsburg revelations ended the old era and began a new one.40
On August 31, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, who had participated in the Plattsburg maneuvers as a uniformed Army Reserve Cavalry officer, spoke before the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars; he pointed out how poorly things seemed on the ground during those maneuvers and decried the state of the Army in general. “In the mechanization of the army we are surpassed in quantity by every first-class European power.” Within a few hours of Lodge’s speech one of the powers, Poland, was attacked by a highly mechanized Nazi army.41
Even though the 1939 maneuvers had been staged before he became chief of staff, Marshall was bothered by their poor outcome, and he renewed his efforts to plan improved maneuvers for 1940 and 1941.42
The deficiencies spotted in Plattsburg and Manassas tended to be magnified after Germany’s invasion of Poland and were cited by newspaper editorialists in arguments for greater preparedness. The Army needed an overhaul—but not the enlisted men, who in the words of an editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle showed “splendid spirit and morale,” despite their inability to fight.43
The treatment of African American soldiers in the American Revolution provided a sad prism for the future. Although black men served with honor at the Battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, the Continental Congress voted then to keep black people—both enslaved and free—from serving in the Continental Army. To train black men for armed warfare, the delegates believed, might lead to slave insurrections. The ban was a sop to slaveholders in both the South and North. But early in the war, the royal governor of Virginia offered to emancipate slaves who joined the British Army, which led Congress to reverse its decision, fearing that those emancipated men might become part of the army it was fighting.
Race remained a major issue for the Army in the decades that followed. As had been true during World War I, black soldiers in 1939 were required to join black units whose commissioned officers were white. In that earlier war, black Americans had been quick to enlist, not only to serve their country but also to demonstrate to their fellow Americans that they were entitled to the full rights of citizenship and an end to the discriminatory laws and practices known as Jim Crow. By the First World War’s end, 2.3 million black men had registered for the draft; 367,000 eventually served in uniform.44
In retelling the story of the black military experience, important figures in the traditional narrative emerge as men of duplicity and dishonor. A most notable example of this was President Woodrow Wilson who, in June 1917, was aware of the transfer and ultimate discharge from the Army’s highest-ranked black officer and a West Point graduate named Charles Young. An outstanding officer, Young had advanced to the rank of colonel, where he now outranked both white junior officers and all enlisted men, who were required to salute him. Making him more of a liability to those protecting the Jim Crow Army was the fact that his next promotion would make him a brigadier general and more disruptive to a hierarchy that depended on exclusion based on race.45
In World War I, General John Pershing denied black Americans the right to go into combat under the American flag, placing them instead under the French flag. In France they fought with spirit and valor and became an inspiration to the war-weary French. Soon after their reassignment, Pershing issued a directive to the French commanders, instructing them to “treat black Americans as white Americans did” and went on to say that “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of Americans. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black.” The French dismissed the order, which had no bearing on the reality of a war being waged in foul, rat-infested trenches, but this same American military attitude toward black people was still in place when Marshall took command of the Army in 1939.
The Army had no interest in recruiting black Americans, and the proof was in the numbers. The editorial page of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading black newspapers of the time, began arguing in 1938 for an American army that mirrored the general population and was at least 10 percent black. The Courier reported at the end of 1939 that the Regular Army of the United States “contained only 4,451 black enlisted men and five black officers, as compared with 229,636 white enlisted men and 1,359 white officers.”46
The fact that black men were totally excluded from the Army Air Corps was particularly irksome, especially to African American leadership. The cover of the July 1940 issue of the Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), graphically summed up this grievance by depicting military aircraft flying over an airfield, with the words FOR WHITES ONLY splashed across the image and a caption at the bottom reading: “WARPLANES—NEGRO AMERICANS MAY NOT BUILD THEM, REPAIR THEM, OR FLY THEM, BUT THEY MUST HELP PAY FOR THEM.” Focusing on the same issue, the magazine’s December 1940 cover showed an Army aircraft over a well-appointed airfield. This time the caption read: “FOR WHITES ONLY—A U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS TRAINING PLANE OVER THE ‘WEST POINT OF THE AIR’—RANDOLPH FIELD, TEXAS. NEGROES ARE NOT BEING ACCEPTED AND TRAINED BY THE ARMY AIR CORPS AT ANY FIELD IN THE NATION, DESPITE ALL THE TALK OF NATIONAL UNITY AND OF THE URGENCY OF EVERY GROUP SERVING IN NATIONAL DEFENSE.” On the same cover, the magazine previewed two other articles on race and the Army: “When Do We Fly?” by James L. H. Peck, and “Jim Crow in the Army Camps,” by “A Negro Soldier.”47
The 1939 attack on Poland gave the world its first look at a devastating new form of brutal mechanized warfare. Within a matter of hours, huge columns of tanks working in close cooperation with the German air force attacked and quickly penetrated the Polish defenses. The speed and violence of the attack paralyzed the Polish defenders. The climax of these armored drives came far behind the frontlines, as the Nazi spearheads linked up, trapping the bewildered Polish formations in a series of isolated pockets.48
The skill of the Nazi propaganda machine added to the feeling of dread and despair in much of the Western world. One of the lies that stunned at first and lived on was the false assertion that the Polish cavalry had charged mindlessly into the face of Panzer tanks—a lie constructed to display the stupidity of the Poles and the futility of trying to fight the Nazis by conventional means. On September 1, 1939, just as Roosevelt was appointing Marshall as chief of staff, a Polish cavalry regiment operating on Poland’s northwestern border attacked a column of German infantry, scattering the invaders. Before the Polish horsemen had a chance to regroup, a squad of Nazi armored vehicles attacked them with cannons and machine guns, inflicting heavy casualties. Reporters were later brought to the battlefield, shown some of the dead horses, and told that the horses had been killed in a frontal attack on the German tanks. The manufactured myth took immediate root.
A Paris Soir account of the event, translated and syndicated to American newspapers, had the Polish general ordering his men to draw their sabers and charge the Panzer machine guns and flamethrowers. The battle lasted a mere ten minutes: “The cavalrymen were mowed down, the horses seared by fire. The general was killed. The few survivors rode into a near-by forest and, it was said killed themselves.” The headline for the story as it ran in the Miami Herald was POLISH CAVALRY COMMITTED SUICIDE IN HOPELESS CHARGE. The story was repeated again and again. Among others, Winston Churchill would mention it in his history of the Second World War. Yet the Nazis had staged the event.49
Many now began to see the Nazi attack as a trap that would lead to the inextricable involvement of more nations, a point underscored on September 10, 1939, as Canada, still a dominion of the British Empire, announced that it was now in the war and that it planned to quickly supply men for the British Armed Forces. As Canada joined the fight in the days after the fall of Poland, the U.S. Department of War stood by with no declared interest in enlarging its Army. Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring was a strong advocate of neutrality and unwilling to push for significant troop increases. A Roosevelt appointee and once a close friend of the president, Woodring was a popular figure in Washington, but Roosevelt viewed him as an increasing liability. In December 1938, Roosevelt had tried to convince the secretary to resign and become ambassador to Canada, but Woodring chose to hang on.
Woodring had strong support from the isolationists, and to remove him forcibly would have exposed Roosevelt to charges that he intended to enlist the United States in some kind of European entanglement. Making things even worse, Woodring was also engaged in a public feud with his own assistant secretary of war, Louis A. Johnson, an advocate of universal military training and the expansion of military aviation. One of the few things these two men agreed on was that there was no immediate need to expand the Army.
By maintaining his neutrality during this period of internal discord, Marshall kept the Army and the War Department functioning—a feat helped by his good personal relations with both Roosevelt and Woodring. A strong Marshall supporter when he was appointed Chief of Staff, Woodring would later brag that helping George Marshall get the job was the most important thing he had ever done to serve his country.50
Woodring’s isolationism was not at all unusual in Washington in 1939. A powerful isolationist, or anti-interventionist, movement emerged and grew in strength in the United States during the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1937, led by a strong isolationist bloc, Congress enacted three neutrality acts that banned Americans from giving loans to nations engaged in war, from shipping munitions to them, from traveling on their vessels, and from arming American merchant ships—effectively, an arms embargo against those countries at war with or trying to resist Nazi Germany. In September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, President Roosevelt asked for an end to the arms embargo created by the neutrality laws. Fierce battle ensued in both houses of Congress, ending in a win by the interventionists—but the 243–181 vote in the House of Representatives showed that isolationism was still a factor to be reckoned with.
Upon taking office, Chief of Staff Marshall immediately began to reshape the standard Army division by transforming its four large but undermanned regiments into three smaller and more effective regiments with full manpower and greater mobility. Marshall considered the old standard divisions, known as square divisions, to be too unwieldy for maneuvering, controlling, and supplying. By transitioning from square divisions to the new triangular ones, Marshall radically changed the way the infantry would fight in the future. He eliminated the brigade commander of the old division and sped up communications through the division so that an order could go from top to bottom in two hours or less, compared to the five hours it took the square division. Trucks would replace horses and be used to shuttle men and equipment, permitting forces to move 45 miles a day for many days at a time. The old divisions could move only 15 miles a day, which was only as long as the soldiers’ feet held up.
The square division had been created for trench warfare. It was composed of regiments in columns that could hurl themselves against enemy defenses in successive waves—becoming in effect cannon fodder. As military historian Christopher Gabel has noted, “Such tactics, obsolescent by 1918, were totally anachronistic by 1939, as was the square division itself.”51
These three new divisions, made up of infantry-artillery combat regiments, could operate separately or as a group. Marshall saw the triangular division as a flexible, faster, and more efficient way to wage war.52
In 1939, Marshall began training three streamlined infantry divisions* and one cavalry division for a series of war games that would be staged in an area somewhere in the arc extending from Georgia to Texas. Marshall let it be known that these would be the largest peacetime maneuvers in the history of the United States. He was keenly aware of the need to prepare American infantrymen for a new kind of brutal, fast, and merciless warfare—blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war.” There was nothing abstract about this German invention; what happened in Poland defined blitzkrieg.53
The Polish army was defeated before the end of September as 1.5 million Nazi troops, supported by more than 2,000 tanks and more than 1,000 aircraft, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw, which, after heavy shelling and bombing, surrendered to the Nazis on September 27, 1939, with some 140,000 Polish soldiers taken prisoner.
As Germany had invaded from the west, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east on September 17. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov declared that the Polish government had ceased to exist and that the Soviet Union was exercising the “fine print” of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact—the conquest and occupation of eastern Poland. On September 29, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide control of Poland roughly along the Bug River, with the Germans occupying everything to the west, the Soviets taking all territory to the east.
On September 4, the day after Roosevelt had delivered his fireside chat on the world situation, he met with Marshall to discuss the expansion of the nation’s military. This was the moment the administration took its first significant step in the mobilization the U.S. Army for the next world war. The invasion of Poland had triggered hopes of Marshall and other Army leaders for substantial increases in U.S. Army manpower, but those hopes were short-lived. On September 8, a week after the invasion, Roosevelt declared what he termed a “limited state of emergency” and allowed a modest increase of 17,000 troops in the Regular Army and 35,000 in the National Guard. Roosevelt had actually reduced new strength levels recommended by Marshall from 280,000 to 227,000 for the Regular Army and 435,000 to 235,000 for the National Guard. Roosevelt’s position was that it “was all the public would be ready to accept without undue excitement.” FDR’s fear was that a larger increase would further mobilize those who favored isolation in favor of intervention.54
Marshall then ordered his Army staff officers to begin planning for the increases in manpower. He said that “the initial figures were only the first increment” and that “future expansions would result in a larger number of officers.” This action was accompanied by an executive order that called up members of the Organized Reserve Corps to active duty. The War Department was also ordered to correct certain deficiencies in resources; this included the purchase of $12 million worth of motor transportation.55
The American public at this moment was still largely isolationist, and while Marshall and Roosevelt could see the potential for American involvement in a European war, they had to continue to move carefully and slowly.
* At some point early in the process, the new divisions were given the description streamlined, which made the change more quickly understood by the public and members of Congress. The word streamline had been coined in 1868 as an element of hydrodynamics (defined as the path of a particle in a fluid, moving in smooth flow without turbulence, relative to a solid object past which the fluid is moving). It soon came to have popular meanings (free from turbulence; shaped so that the flow around it is smooth) and by the 1930s had its modern extended meaning of “simplify and organize,” which is exactly what Marshall was doing.
