Читать книгу The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941 - Paul Dickson - Страница 12

CHAPTER 2

THE TREE ARMY TO THE RESCUE

In fiscal year 1939, the funds earmarked for training the Army amounted to $12 million or 2.7 percent of the Army’s meager appropriations—about $65 per man. The Army’s appropriations totaled $646 million, but of this, $192 million, or close to 30 percent, was earmarked for non-military purposes such as the cost of operating the Panama Canal, river and harbor work conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers, and work with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). A New Deal relief program that first went into operation in 1933 to provide work for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18 to 25, the CCC was established to help impoverished families during the Depression by requiring the men to send the larger portion of their monthly pay home.¹

Little understood at the time—and largely forgotten in the intervening decades—was the Army’s major role in creating and maintaining the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC became a driving force for improving the Army and facilitating the education and professional development of key officers, including Omar Bradley, George Marshall, and Roosevelt’s inherited Army chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur.

On March 21, 1933, less than three weeks after he was elected, President Roosevelt proposed the formation of the CCC; it was established by an act of law on March 31. Within a week after enactment, the first camp opened near Luray, Virginia, with an enrollment of 2,500 men.

A stated goal of the CCC was to conserve, protect, and enhance the nation’s natural resources, and it was given tasks ranging from combating soil erosion in the Dust Bowl to increasing the nation’s recreational assets by building vacation lodges and laying out mountain trails. By the time the program ended in 1942, its cadre of young men had planted nearly three billion trees, constructed more than 800 new parks, and upgraded most existing state parks. They built trails and roads in remote areas of the country, improved beaches on both coasts, and created golf courses and softball fields close to urban areas. The CCC was known far and wide—by both its admirers and detractors—as FDR’s Tree Army.²

The other goal of the CCC was to enlist young, unmarried men and get them into a disciplined environment in which they could serve the nation while helping their families. The target recruits included the unemployed, troubled city kids, and menacing young hoboes who roamed the nation and were often referred to as the “wild boys of the road,” after the title of a 1933 movie.

In order to be successful, the CCC needed the deep commitment of the leaders of the U.S. Army. It was born at a time when the image of the Army was suffering because of the recent use of Regular and National Guard troops to quell strikes and subdue other domestic disturbances. The most dramatic, distressing, and photogenic of these incidents was the Army’s role in the expulsion of the so-called Bonus Army from its camp at the Anacostia Flats in Washington, D.C., in July 1932.

Five and a half years after the armistice ending World War I, in May 1924 Congress finally reacted to the increasingly loud and public demands of veterans that the Congress fulfill its earlier promises to compensate them for their wartime service by passing a bill granting a bonus payment to those veterans that the legislation termed “adjusted service compensation.”

The intent of the bill was to make up for the vast difference between what a man in uniform was paid and what was paid to a war worker at home. A man working in a shipyard building warships could easily earn six or seven times as much as a man in uniform. The legislation was passed but only after overriding the veto of President Calvin Coolidge, who had declared in his veto message that the nation owed nothing to able-bodied veterans and “patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.”

Under the terms of the new legislation, any man who had served in the Armed Forces during the war was due compensation at the rate of $1 a day for time served in the United States and $1.25 for every day spent abroad—exactly the same basic pay given them when they were in uniform. But there was a stunning catch to this bonus: any man entitled to a bonus of $50 or less was to be paid immediately, but all the others were to be issued certificates that could not be converted to cash until 1945 when they would receive full payment. It was cynically nicknamed the “Tombstone Bonus” by disappointed veterans because the only way to get cash payment before 1945 was for the veteran to die.

Nothing happened until May 1929, when Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, a fellow veteran of the war who had suffered its privations, proposed a bill calling for the immediate cash payment of the bonus. The bill, however, did not make it out of committee, and any momentum in Congress for early payment died as the stock market crashed in October. Then came the Great Depression, and at the beginning of the bleak new year of 1932—when unemployment had reached 25 percent of the workforce and hundreds of thousands of Americans were homeless—Patman resurrected the legislation, but it again landed in committee with little hope of getting out, let alone being passed.

On March 15, 1932, Walter W. Waters, an unemployed former Army sergeant, stood up at a meeting of war veterans in Portland, Oregon, and proposed that all present join him by hopping a freight train and traveling to Washington to lobby for the money that rightfully belonged to them. Nobody took him up on his offer that night, but he kept working on the idea and by early May, when a revised version of Patman’s bill was introduced and quickly shelved in the House of Representatives, Waters had pulled together a group of about 250 followers who had to show evidence of war service, pledge to uphold the Constitution, and to submit to the discipline of Waters and other elected officers. Waters and his small band departed Portland with $300 between them, riding in empty freight cars, and headed to Washington to demand payment. These men saw themselves as lobbyists behaving in much the same manner as lobbyists for the large corporations had in demanding—and receiving—reparations for their war work.³

This defining moment of the Great Depression took shape as word of Waters’s group spread and, following their lead, some 20,000 World War I war veterans and their families converged on Washington, D.C., in May to demand that Congress and President Herbert Hoover pass legislation to allow them to immediately turn their bonus certificates into cash.

The House of Representatives passed Patman’s bonus bill by a 211–176 vote on June 15, which was cause for great rejoicing among the individuals and families in Washington whose numbers had been increasing by the thousands. The Senate was to vote two days later, and during that day more than 8,000 members of what was now known as the Bonus Army assembled in front of the Capitol. Another group of more than 10,000 headed for the Capitol from the main camp in Anacostia but were stopped by a drawbridge that the District of Columbia police had raised, anticipating trouble. Senate floor debate on the bill continued beyond dark. Finally, about nine thirty, Waters was brought inside by a Senate aide. Moments later he reappeared to deliver the bad news: the bill had gone down to defeat. At that moment, when it looked like the veterans might attack the Capitol, Elsie Robinson, a reporter for the Hearst newspaper chain, whispered something in Waters’s ear. Apparently taking her advice, Waters shouted out to his men: “Sing ‘America.’” When the song was over, the anger seemed to have become less fierce, and most of the assembled veterans headed back to their camp.⁴

After the Senate defeat, a large portion of the Bonus Army elected to stay and continue its struggle. Observers who visited the veterans’ main camp were impressed by the high degree of self-discipline and the good humor that prevailed among those encamped there, but what was most astonishing to those observers was that white veterans, from the Deep South as well as the rest of the country, shared rations, chores, and lodging in complete amity with the 2,000 or so black vets of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (the name the bonus marchers gave themselves). Historian Constance McLaughlin Green commented, “Not a trace of Jim Crow in the entire Bonus Army during the days of waiting, or the evening when the Senate defeated the bill, or in the weeks thereafter during which some 10,000 dejected ‘bonuseers’ stayed on in stubborn belief that Congress would still come to their rescue.”⁵

When it appeared that the bonus would not be paid and the marchers refused to leave, Hoover ordered the Army to evict them. Employing infantrymen of the Regular Army, tanks, tear gas, and a detachment of saber-wielding cavalrymen on horseback commanded by Major George S. Patton, Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur drove the marchers out of Washington across the Anacostia River Bridge. Later that night the Army set fire to the main camp on the Anacostia Flats, across from Capitol Hill.

Eyewitnesses, including MacArthur’s own chief of staff, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would insist that Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley, speaking for the president, had forbidden the Army to cross the river into the Anacostia camp and that Hurley had dispatched two high-ranking officers to bring this order directly to MacArthur. Eisenhower wrote later: “He said he was too busy and did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.”*^,6

Young Eisenhower escaped being tainted by the episode, as he had been the voice of reason in a chaotic situation. At first he had argued with his superior, MacArthur, that the Army should stay out of what was essentially a local police matter and later attempted to convince MacArthur not to cross the bridge into Anacostia. “The whole scene was pitiful” is how Eisenhower later described that night. It was assumed later that George Marshall considered himself fortunate that he had had other duties to perform during the period and had not been ordered onto the streets of Washington to superintend the dirty work of expelling the veterans and their families.⁷

In the days following the expulsion, newspapers, magazines, and newsreels showed graphic images of what had taken place in front of the Capitol dome, which was obscured by clouds of smoke and tear gas. Tanks rolled through a battle zone located between the White House and the Capitol as cavalrymen waved their swords at veterans, and infantrymen bearing fixed bayonets and wearing gas masks marched against them, forcing them out of downtown. “It’s war,” the voice on a newsreel narrated as images of the expulsion played across the screens in movie theaters from coast to coast, “the greatest concentration of fighting troops in Washington since 1865 . . . They are being forced out of their shacks by the troops who have been called out by the president of the United States.” Reports came back to Washington that in many of these movie houses, the Regular Army troops were booed along with MacArthur and Patton. To many Americans, those being gassed and driven from the Capitol were the heroes, not the infantrymen used to disperse them.⁸

Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Democratic nominee for the upcoming presidential election, was on the record stating his opposition to the immediate payment of the bonus because he felt that it would favor one specific group of Americans at a time when the whole nation was suffering. But after seeing pictures and reading the first newspaper reports of the eviction, he reportedly turned to an adviser and said, “This will elect me.” In fact, Roosevelt would win the election three months later by a landslide seven million votes. Laying aside the impact of the Depression on voters, Patton later posited that the Army’s “act[ing] against a crowd rather than against a mob” had “insured the election of a Democrat.” Hoover biographer David Burner felt that the incident “dealt a fatal blow to the re-election of the incumbent. In the minds of most analysts, whatever doubt had remained about the outcome of the presidential election was now gone: Hoover was going to lose. The Bonus Army was his final failure, his symbolic end.”⁹

The expulsion of the Bonus Army cast a long shadow over MacArthur and Hoover and helped pave the way for Roosevelt and his New Deal. When FDR took office, he began looking to reallocate funds for his new programs and initially demanded that the Army cut its budget by $50 million, or a full 33 percent. The number of infantrymen would be retained, by order of Army chief of staff MacArthur, but deep cuts would be made to normal field-training exercises, including target practice. Cuts were also proposed to flight training for the Army Air Corps, research and development, and a host of other activities deemed superfluous by the incoming administration. As part of this scheme, the number of junior officers would also be reduced substantially.¹⁰

After Congress authorized the formation of the CCC in March 1933, Roosevelt said that he wanted to enroll 250,000 men by July 1, a goal that quickly proved to be unattainable. When the CCC failed to meet Roosevelt’s early expectations, signing up only 100,000 men in its first two months, its director suggested that the War Department and MacArthur take over the program. Roosevelt and his top advisers reluctantly agreed when the president realized that the Army was his only viable option. On May 10, the CCC was placed under War Department control. After spending an initial few days on organization, MacArthur described CCC planning as “the greatest peacetime demand ever made upon the Army,” adding that it “constitutes a task of character and proportions equivalent to the emergencies of war.”¹¹

MacArthur mobilized those under his command, despite the opposition of some military men who felt the assignment could have a bad effect on the nation’s ability to wage war. He understood that Roosevelt was fighting the effects of the Depression rather than preparing for a foreign war and realized that it gave him added leverage in holding on to his officer corps, which Roosevelt and Congress wanted to substantially reduce in size.

MacArthur did everything possible to provide the CCC with Army officers for proper supervision and administration. Officers detailed to train the National Guard, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), and the Citizens’ Military Training Camps (CMTC) were sent back to their units to be reassigned to the CCC. Most of the Army’s schools were closed, their personnel now given teaching assignments with the CCC.

Overnight, the Army was forced to change. “We were en route to Fort Benning [from Fort Screven, Georgia] for Corps Area Maneuvers when the concentration was called off . . . because of the President’s emergency employment proposal for 250,000 men,” then major George C. Marshall wrote to an acquaintance.¹²

Officers had already seen a reduction in pay and travel and subsistence allowances under Hoover. But, as one historian wrote, “It was left to Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring the depression home to the soldier.” In order to reduce government expenses, Roosevelt dispensed with the reenlistment bonus for the men of the Regular Army. This amounted to a loss of $75 in the lowest pay grades and $150 above the rank of corporal. He cut the Army pay scale so that a private’s monthly pay of $21 was now cut to $17.85.¹³

The CCC created other challenges for the Army, not the least of which was caused by its pay grade, as a CCC enlistee would earn $30 per month. Never mind that most of the CCC recruit’s pay was sent home to help the man’s family, the difference was still dramatic, $12.15 more per month than the Army private received.¹⁴

The Tree Army felt like a slap in the face to the men of the Bonus Army and to other veterans who were told they were too old to qualify for the CCC. The veterans felt they were the first casualty in Roosevelt’s war on the Depression. During his election campaign, Roosevelt had promised a balanced budget. As soon as he became president, he started a quiet process that would achieve the balance by slicing $480 million from veterans’ benefits. He began by appointing Lewis W. Douglas as his director of the budget. A Democratic congressman from Arizona, Douglas had advocated a slash in appropriations for benefits during the Hoover administration. Millionaire heir to a Phelps-Dodge copper-mining executive, Douglas resigned from Congress to take the budget job.

Douglas had been gassed in France during World War I and decorated for bravery, and he believed, as a veteran, that service in uniform did not guarantee special privileges, especially since veterans—including those dating back to the Civil War—garnered 24 percent of the federal budget while representing only 1 percent of the population. He sought to implement the $480 million in cuts through the Economy Act of 1933, Roosevelt’s major budget proposal. The act was rushed through Congress and signed by Roosevelt so swiftly that veterans’ organizations did not have time to mount a full-scale lobbying campaign against it.¹⁵

Too late to stop it, those representing veterans flooded congressional offices with heart-wrenching stories of vets hurt by the Economy Act. Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, wrote: “Down many Main Streets go armless veterans who used to get $94 a month from the Government, and now get $36.” Men who had lost two legs or two eyes would have their pensions reduced as well. Those with service-related illnesses would lose up to 80 percent of their pensions. Veterans with diseases such as tuberculosis and neurosis would lose their entire pensions if their conditions were not unequivocally connected with their service in uniform.¹⁶

“I know many, many veterans will soon be laid in there [sic] graves, death being brought on by the additional worry which is bound to come,” an Ohio official of the Disabled American Veterans organization wrote to a member of Congress, who passed the letter on to the White House.¹⁷ Death did indeed come to troubled veterans. A Philadelphia man killed himself and left a message to President Roosevelt, saying that because his benefits were gone, he had no way to provide for his family except through his death, which would give his wife the remaining $275 from his bonus. A patient in a Dayton, Ohio, veterans’ hospital killed the chief of the medical staff after being told that because he no longer got a $60 benefit check, he had to leave the hospital. Veterans sometimes owned no civilian clothes, and those who were reclassified and evicted from soldiers’ homes often ended up on the streets, wandering about in their old uniforms.¹⁸

Reports of suicides poured into congressional offices, and members of Congress began to regret their hasty endorsement of the Economy Act. Roosevelt held firm and appealed to the veterans’ patriotism in a special message. “I do not want any veteran to feel that he and his comrades are being singled out to make sacrifices,” he said. “On the contrary, I want them to know that the regulations issued are but an integral part of our economy program embracing every department and agency of the government to which every employee is making his or her contribution.”¹⁹

In early May 1933, a new wave of Bonus Army marchers began to show up in Washington, again demanding their bonuses but also arguing for the restoration of benefits veterans had just lost. Unlike the first Bonus Army, this group came in with a list of grievances, including the lament that they were too old to be eligible for the nascent CCC. They seemed angrier than the 1932 marchers. Hoover’s problem became Roosevelt’s, as the trickle turned into a steady stream.

Soon some 3,000 veterans had arrived and were housed in a tent city, which the new president had ordered the Army to build on the grounds of an abandoned fort near Mount Vernon, on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. In an outing arranged by the White House, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt withstood the rain and the mud to join the vets in a friendly get-together and sing-along. “Hoover sent the Army; Roosevelt sent his wife” became a new rallying cry among the vets.²⁰

Opposed to paying the bonus, Roosevelt realized that he needed to get the marchers out of town by any means other than force. Although the Civilian Conservation Corps had been created for single young men, FDR unveiled a plan on May 11 to include war veterans, waiving age and marital requirements. Executive Order 6129 provided special camps for an initial placement of 25,000 veterans, including older men who had fought in the Spanish-American War.

About 2,500 of the vets in Washington signed up immediately; others rejected the proposal, likening the dollar-a-day wage to slavery. On May 19, about 400 of the men who had rejected the offer marched to the White House, chanting: “We want our back pay—not a dollar a day.” But the edge had been taken off the demonstrations, and many of those who rejected the CCC accepted the government’s offer of a free ride home. Eventually, 213,000 mostly middle-aged vets would spend time in the CCC during its nine years of operation.²¹

Under MacArthur’s direction, all Army training programs were suspended and all resources of the Regular Army were made available to the CCC. For example, all the instructors and recently graduated officers from the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, were ordered to report immediately to CCC camps throughout the country.

Ecstatic to have surpassed FDR’s goal by mobilizing close to 300,000 recruits by the July 1, 1933, deadline, MacArthur sent out a personal congratulatory message to all members of the Army in which he deemed the mobilization an exercise that boded well for the actual preparation for war. “Such splendid results,” MacArthur declared, “could have only been possible because of ‘high morale’ and ‘devotion to duty’ by the Army.”²²

By embracing FDR’s plan, MacArthur had not only helped to reestablish his public reputation after the Bonus Army expulsion, but he had also gained strength in his battle to keep the Army from suffering even deeper budget cuts. Using the Army’s dedication to making the CCC a success, MacArthur was able to convince the White House and Congress to revise the originally demanded 33 percent cuts in the Army’s budget down to 11 percent. “Gen. MacA. finally won the most important phases of his fight against drastic cutting of National Defense,” Dwight Eisenhower wrote in June 1933. “We will lose no officers or men (at least at this time) and this concession was won because of the great numbers we are using on the Civilian Conservation Corps work and of Gen. MacA’s skill and determination in the fight.”²³

MacArthur also saw the CCC as a windfall to the Army. Although the demands of this massive new program brought to a sudden halt the Army’s normal garrison routine, as officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) went off to establish and supervise the camps, these camps could be converted to military use and were populated with potential military recruits. The young men of the CCC were vaccinated, properly fed, subjected to basic discipline, and in many cases taught to read and write. Emergency dental care was widely given, and simple skin diseases were treated with drugs—including some that were too expensive for poor civilians. When a man left the CCC in good standing, he was given honorable discharge papers containing work experience and a health record that could be used in applying for a job.

In addition, anyone who wanted to sign up for a second hitch in the CCC had to rise to a leadership position. This meant that the CCC was, in effect, training its own cadre of disciplined non-commissioned officers—including that ofttimes rarest of wartime commodities: sergeants.²⁴

However, the new administration feared that this welfare program would be seen as the American equivalent of the paramilitary Hitler Youth movement, which was making headlines in 1933. Roosevelt thus forbade military training as part of the CCC curriculum. American Socialist Norman Thomas was quick to remark that the CCC work camps seemed more like the product of a fascist state than a socialist one.

Furthermore, not all CCC recruits were comfortable with the relationship between the Tree Army and the real one. Oscar Baradinsky, a recruit from New York City, saw the CCC as nothing more than a propaganda and recruiting arm of the military. He made his case in an open letter to the president, which was published in the July 1934 edition of Panorama: A Monthly Survey of People and Ideas, an ephemeral periodical with a clear antiwar slant published in Boston. Baradinsky reported that at his camp in New Jersey, on the night of June 21, 1934, the Army was recruiting men from the camp for three-year hitches. “He painted a pretty picture of Army life, sunny Hawaii, glamorous Panama, etc.,” Baradinsky wrote of the recruiter. The young Corpsman believed this was contrary to the president’s promise that the camps would not be used to recruit.

Disturbed by the realization that the CCC had strong military ties, Baradinsky entered the mess hall a few nights later and recalled for his fellow Corpsmen accounts that he had read of shrapnel blowing away the faces of young soldiers in the previous war. He foresaw a terrible tragedy in the offing, fearing these faces were fated to be blown away in the next war. He then got up from the table, walked to headquarters, and told the Army captain in charge that he was quitting, which he was allowed to do without penalty.²⁵

As if to bolster Baradinsky’s case, in early 1935—in opposition to Roosevelt’s stance—MacArthur proposed that two months of military training be added to service in the CCC. He suggested this before the House Appropriations Committee, saying, “I think there would be nothing finer than the men in the CCC camps should be used as a nucleus for an enlisted reserve.” He added: “These men are already fit for military training. I think the idea would be popular with them. I think if we had, for instance, 300,000 list reserves who could be called up to the colors immediately our military condition of preparation for defense would be immeasurably better.” MacArthur argued that the program would be cost-effective and that the new Reservists could be paid as little as a dollar a month for their service as Reservists.²⁶ The proposal was rejected then and again later. Congress and the administration had no stomach for the inevitable photographs in the papers of CCC men drilling with rifles and bayonets rather than laboring with rakes and shovels.

Although forbidden by the president to recruit CCC prospects directly, MacArthur’s recruiters resorted to a sly scheme to convince men who were on the fence. The CCC paid $30 a month, compared to only $21 a month in the Army (full pay had been restored in 1934). But clever recruiting officers quietly pointed out that $25 a month from the CCC was automatically sent home to help the man’s family, while a private in the Army could keep the whole $21. “The sales talk is working,” wrote Ray Tucker in his syndicated column, Washington Whirligig, of August 5, 1935. “Soldiers are signing up at the rate of 2,500 a week—faster than quartermaster and medical office accounts can handle them.”²⁷

The overall impact of the CCC on the military proved to be positive in that it made the Army stronger and better able to deal with a sudden influx of new men. At Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1933, Major Omar Bradley took command of six all-black CCC companies. These recruits he said were from the poorest farm areas of Georgia and Alabama, and some of the men had not had a square meal for at least a year. Bradley gave them food and physicals, set up a pay account, put them through a few weeks of training, and sent them on to replant the large deforested areas of the Deep South.

Bradley’s enthusiasm for the CCC seemed boundless. “The Army’s magnificent performance with the CCC in the summer of 1933, undertaken so reluctantly, was one of the highlights of its peacetime years,” he later recalled. “It all ran with clockwork precision; the CCC itself was judged first rate. It was a good drill for us.” To some in the Army, the CCC had been seen as a burden, but to Bradley and others it was a blessing.²⁸

The CCC’s impact on Marshall was even more significant and enduring. From his Eighth Infantry Regiment headquarters at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, a large base on Sullivan’s Island near Charleston, Marshall found himself the administrator of an enormous labor project involving 25,000 young men flooding 17 work camps across the southern United States. Marshall threw himself into the CCC assignment with great enthusiasm. As he was facing a shortage of officers, his wife, Katherine Tupper Marshall, volunteered to help. As she encountered these young Americans, she was appalled by the all-too-visible effects of the Great Depression on them and the price they were paying for it. The men were underfed, and sores and skin rashes were the norm. The general condition of their teeth was appalling. They fought for food, even when there was an abundance of it, and they snarled at one another like packs of feral dogs. Fully half of the men being processed were illiterate.²⁹

During this period, George Marshall praised the CCC, saying it was “the greatest social experiment outside of Russia.” He pointed out in a letter to a friend that he was “struggling to force [the recruits’] education, academic or vocational, to the point where they will be on the road to really useful citizenship by the time they return to their homes.” Marshall saw his role in rebuilding these men’s lives as helping to rebuild the country, noting that he considered the corps “a splendid experience for the War Department and the Army.”³⁰

Marshall was unforgiving when it came to officers who complained about their CCC duties. A major came into Marshall’s office to announce that he was resigning. “I’ve put twelve years in the Army,” he said. “I’m a graduate of West Point. I’m not going to come down here and deal with a whole lot of bums. Half-dead Southern crackers, that’s what they are!”

“Major, I’m sorry you feel like that,” Marshall responded. “But I’ll tell you this—you can’t resign quick enough to suit me. It suits me fine! Now get out of here!”³¹

Conversely, the officers who assumed leadership roles in the CCC under Marshall were often singled out for praise and ultimately promotion. When a national award was offered to the best camp in the country, Major Alex Starke’s camp at Sumter, South Carolina, was named the winner. Starke later became a brigadier general during the Tunisian campaign in 1942.³²

Marshall was also cognizant of the problems of his own soldiers, whose incomes had been slashed by the new administration, and he did much to alleviate their distress. “In order that the men could manage to feed their families on their small pay, my husband personally supervised the building of chicken yards, vegetable gardens, and hog pens,” Katherine Marshall remembered. “He started a lunch pail system whereby the men could get a good hot dinner, cooked up at the mess to take home to their families at a very small cost.”³³

But the stress on the Regular Army went beyond hot meals. In April 1934, after leaving his southern post, Marshall wrote to a commander in the Illinois National Guard outlining the extent of the stress created by the CCC assignment coupled with Roosevelt’s pay cuts: “Officers and men were suddenly scattered in 1,400 Camps throughout the United States, under the necessity of maintaining their families in one place and themselves in another. The wives and children of married soldiers were often without funds for food and rent.” Marshall then pointed out that because of the pay cuts many soldiers struggled to keep up with a $10 a month allotment sent home to their parents, while the CCC man was able to send home a monthly allotment of between $25 and $40 depending on the circumstances back home. He then went on to compare the two situations: “While the soldier had no choice of post or duty. The CCC recruit was free to terminate his connection with the government at any time, and he could not be worked more than six hours a day. The regular soldier in the CCC camp was usually on duty twelve hours a day.” Marshall concluded, “Despite the inequalities and injustice of this arrangement, the regular soldiers gave their earnest and most efficient services to make the CCC the success it has been.”³⁴

William Frye, Marshall’s earliest biographer, believed that despite this situation Marshall refused to resent these recruits for the disparity in pay and chose to see them “as the bewildered victims of a depression which had broken them financially and shaken their spirits,” adding that “they received from him the same sympathetic interest and close attention he gave to his troops.”³⁵

Marshall’s greatest impact, however, was on the CCC recruits themselves, whom he taught to work together. He gave them a sense of discipline. “Most of all,” his wife later commented, “he gave those boys back their self-respect. That was the first time those boys came to realize they weren’t just nothing, that they were supposed to measure up to something.”

Colonel Laurence Halstead, acting chief of the infantry, wrote to Marshall in May to comment on the Army’s role in developing the CCC: “This work is onerous and probably distasteful to the Army as it is not exactly military work but I feel that it is the salvation of the Army. In fact, it is my opinion that the Army is the only Governmental agency that was able to handle this proposition. I have noticed a cessation of talk of reducing the Army by four thousand officers since we started in on the conservation work.”³⁶

When a French Navy cruiser, D’Entrecastaux, paid a courtesy call to Charleston, near Fort Moultrie, in mid-September 1933, Marshall entertained the officers and crew at a nearby CCC camp, which he dedicated as Camp Lafayette in honor of their visit. The Marquis de Lafayette, Marshall pointed out, had first landed near the site some 150 years earlier. The dedication was accepted by the French consul in the name of the Republic of France. After the band from Fort Moultrie played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise,” the French officers and men were fed CCC fare at the camp, and the CCC recruits led the sailors from the ship on a tour of the facilities.³⁷

The dedication at Camp Lafayette, which made headlines and was described in magazine features in France, illustrated the point that under Marshall’s tutelage, the camps were points of pride and patriotism rather than objects of pity. During the same month that Marshall staged the events at Camp Lafayette, he was promoted to the rank of colonel.

As it became clear that Marshall’s service to the CCC was both a triumph for the Army and the CCC, MacArthur began to see Marshall as a threat—“an enemy conspiring against him,” in the words of William Manchester in American Caesar—and sidelined him by taking him out of a command role and making him an instructor in the Illinois National Guard, based in Chicago.³⁸ Marshall wrote to MacArthur begging to remain with his regiment, insisting that another instructor’s job—away from his troops—would be fatal to his future in the Army. MacArthur chose not to respond, and the Marshalls headed north. One of his biographers, William Frye, termed the assignment “a savage blow” to Marshall. Later, Katherine Marshall recalled their early days in Chicago, describing her husband’s “grey, drawn look which I had never seen before and is seldom seen since.”³⁹

Despite his initial dislike of the Illinois assignment, work with National Guard units gave Marshall exposure to men who saw themselves as civilians first and soldiers second as well as experience dealing with politicians—both uncommon connections for officers at this time. Unlike many officers, Marshall did not see the men of the National Guard as second-rate, and he worked hard to improve Reserve facilities and training and made good use of Reserve officers.

Marshall still wanted a full military command, complete with CCC responsibilities. Finally, in August 1936, after MacArthur had resigned as chief of staff, Marshall got his wish when the new chief, Malin Craig, assigned him to be commander of the Vancouver Barracks in Vancouver, Washington. While there, Marshall supervised 27 CCC camps in the Pacific Northwest. His assignment, from new secretary of war Woodring, said: “A large part of your time will be taken up with CCC inspections and activities . . . The success of that movement depends upon constant inspections and holding up standards.”⁴⁰

When Marshall arrived in the Northwest, he was in command of camps populated with young men from more than 20 states, including those from as far away as Boston and Providence. He again became fascinated by the potential of the Corpsmen, paying special attention to the educational programs of these camps. “He strove to have the best instructors it was possible to get,” his wife recalled. “He wanted to prepare them as far as possible to take responsible jobs back home.” The welfare of the 10,000 CCC men under his command was paramount. “If the boy’s teeth were in bad condition, woe befell the CCC dentist who extracted when he could have filled!”⁴¹

Ever the idealist, Marshall worked hard to remake the lackluster educational system in his CCC district. He remarked to a friend: “I am struggling to force their education, academic or vocational, to the point where they will be on the road to really useful citizenship by the time they return to their homes. I have done over my corps of civilian educators, and their methods, until I think we really have something supremely practical.”⁴²

Marshall regarded his two years in Vancouver as among the happiest times of his life, and he lauded the experience as “the best antidote for mental stagnation that an Army officer in my position can have.” He turned the Vancouver Barracks from a decaying mess into one of the most beautiful bases in the western United States. The reenlistment rate by the men in his command was one of the highest in the nation. He later observed: “I found the CCC the most instructive service I ever had, and the most interesting,” adding that, because of the corps, the Army had “very much to learn about simplification and decentralization” during wartime. To General John J. Pershing, Marshall wrote that he regarded the CCC to be “a major mobilization exercise and a splendid experience for the War Department and the Army.” Personally, it was important to Marshall’s own career, as evidence suggests that Marshall first came to Roosevelt’s attention as a leader and staunch supporter of the CCC.⁴³

Unlike other Army officers who saw the men of the CCC as somehow inferior or lacking, Marshall respected them and held them in high regard. “As a whole,” he wrote to an associate a few months after arriving in the Northwest of the men in the CCC, “they are a fine lot, hardworking, studious in following the educational courses we provide, and seeming to develop considerable ambition, along with the necessary energy and resolution.” The letter, which was quoted in its entirety in William Frye’s 1947 biography of Marshall, prompted this comment from Frye on Marshall’s words on the men of the CCC: “His interest in those under his command or supervision [was] as individual human beings, not as units in a table of organization.”⁴⁴

Marshall, who had made a point of writing letters of recommendation for worthy Corpsmen seeking employment after their CCC time was up, had the favor returned in the form of a cartoon, published in the CCC district newspaper on his departure in 1938, when he was joining the Army general staff in Washington, D.C. The cartoon contained a “Letter of commendation” from the Corpsmen, reading: “Dear Gen. Marshall: We know you always placed our welfare first, signed enrollees of Vancouver CCC district.”⁴⁵

While both Marshall and Bradley would spend the rest of their lives alluding to their CCC experience, the outspoken conservative MacArthur never mentioned the experience in his memoirs or referred to it in his public speeches. As one MacArthur biographer remarked about the general’s leadership at the CCC, “It was as if it never existed. And yet, he found an odd fulfillment in running the program, as he made clear in a letter to CCC Director Robert Fechner: ‘it is the type of human reconstruction that has appealed to me more than I sometimes admit.’”⁴⁶

The point that MacArthur was loath to admit but that Marshall, Bradley, and others embraced was that the CCC allowed the Regular Army to achieve in a time of peace something of what it was trained to do in wartime, namely “to mobilize, organize, and administer an army of citizen soldiers.” The officers in charge of the CCC lacked the well-defined coercive power they had with Regular Army troops, so they had to turn to reason and the power of personality to lead the CCC. These skills would later be essential during a mass mobilization for war. Marshall biographer David L. Roll concluded that the CCC experience “buttressed Marshall’s faith in the value and effectiveness of a citizen army.”⁴⁷

On April 5, 1937, FDR recommended to Congress that the CCC be made a permanent agency of the federal government. On June 28, 1937, Congress passed and the president signed an act extending the CCC for a period of three years, to begin on July 1, 1937. One of the arguments made for the extension was that the Tree Army could become the backbone of a new, expanded Army when it was needed. Two years later, when Germany invaded Poland, Marshall knew the time had come and that expansion would happen sooner rather than later.

After the Second World War, Bradley declared that the CCC had saved the Army and that without it the Army might have seen a massive cut in the officer corps and gone into the war without many important leaders, including himself, Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, and many other officers. He added that those three million CCC workers who left their camps to go on active duty went on to “save the world.”⁴⁸

* It is apparent from their writings that MacArthur and Eisenhower did not like each other. All MacArthur says in his memoir, Reminiscences, about their prewar association was that in confronting the Bonus Army, “I . . . brought with me two officers who later wrote their names on world history, Majors Eisenhower and Patton.”