Читать книгу The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941 - Paul Dickson - Страница 13

CHAPTER 3

A “PHONEY” WAR ABROAD AND A MOCK WAR AT HOME

At the time of the invasion of Poland, the United States was fiercely divided. A majority of Americans were firmly isolationist, their stance based on an increasing belief that America’s involvement in World War I had been a terrible error, especially when viewed through the dim prism of the Great Depression. Many Americans were reminded of the old popular song “Don’t Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice.” A poll conducted by George Gallup at the end of 1938 found that 70 percent of American voters thought U.S. involvement in the earlier conflict had been an out-and-out mistake.¹

Hating a war in which many of its members had fought, the American Legion was at the heart of the movement trying to push neutrality acts and other isolationist laws through Congress. The rhetoric of the legion was more pacifist than martial, and this attitude became stronger after the Polish surrender, even though one-third of the members of Congress were legionnaires themselves.²

Furthermore, many of the men still occupying beds in Veterans Administration hospitals were draftees from the previous war whose wounds were significant enough to keep them in need of perpetual care. A wounded soldier on the street, including amputees on crutches and victims of gas attacks carrying portable devices they needed to help them breathe, was still a common sight in the United States in 1939.

The most radical isolationists claimed that virtually all of the nation’s current problems stemmed from the Great War. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota went so far as to blame America’s Great Depression on the unbridled economic expansion created by the war.³

The Nazi invasion of Poland had energized congressional isolationists and attracted powerful new celebrity voices. The retired Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner, became an ever-louder voice, declaring that “war is a racket.” This maxim, also the title of his book, was shorthand for his belief that the only victors in any war were banks and large corporations. Butler’s book had been published in 1935, and its message seemed to become louder over time.

On September 15, 1939, Charles Lindbergh delivered a nationwide radio address in which he strongly urged America to remain neutral—to “stand clear” of the squabble in Europe. Lindbergh envisioned a Nazi victory in Europe as a certainty and thought America’s attention should be directed toward Asia and Japan. “These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” he intoned in the passage that seemed to gather the most attention. “There is no Genghis Khan marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend our White race against foreign invasion.” Many newspapers carried long excerpts from the speech and some—including the New York Times and Herald Tribune—published the full text of the speech. Building on the theme of racial strength, Lindbergh would follow with an article in the November 1940 Reader’s Digest, warning Americans to not allow themselves to be led into “a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization.” He also warned against “dilution by foreign races . . . and the infiltration of inferior blood.”⁴

As a euphemism for genes, “blood” was very much an issue in 1939. A small but effective group was spreading the propaganda that humanity would be improved by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to produce more children and the “deficient” to produce fewer or no children at all. Several states were officially sterilizing those deemed to be inferior. Hitler proudly pointed out that he was only observing the laws of several American states, including California, that allowed for the forced sterilization of the “unfit.” The belief system, known as eugenics, held that certain good or bad genes were the monopoly of certain races and ethnicities, fueling the Nazis’ claim that they were creating a superior race.⁵

In addition to the isolationist faction, antiwar movements on American college and university campuses grew along with pro-German sentiment, egged on by radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and the minister Gerald L. K. Smith, both of whom preached anti-Semitism and lauded American fascism. The America First Committee—founded by pacifist Yale students but eventually dominated by conservative isolationists—became the most significant of the organizations fighting to keep America out of the European war.

The autumn of 1939 was a period of anxiety as the world tried to anticipate when Hitler would pick his next victim. Aggression finally came on November 30, but the aggressor was the Soviet Union, not Germany, and Finland was the victim. The attack was a clear act of aggression aimed at acquiring more territory, and it resulted in the Soviet Union’s expulsion from the League of Nations.

The ongoing reorganization of the United States Army made few headlines, and Roosevelt’s modest increase in the size of the infantry made scant difference. As military reporter John G. Norris wrote in the Washington Post on October 8, “The United States will still have to be grouped with small nations of the world in the size of their military establishment. It will rank perhaps 14th or 15th, gaining a rung or two by its own enlargement and by the disappearance of the Polish army, which ranked way ahead of the United States.”⁶

The invasion of Poland by the Nazis provided a stark reminder for the United States of its own weaknesses. Although popular attention seemed to be placed on the apparent superiority of the tanks of Hitler’s Panzer divisions, an even greater concern to Marshall and other military planners was how the airplane had been used by the Germans in the blitzkrieg that had razed Poland. As Donald M. Nelson, an American official later charged with the responsibility for arms production during the war, recalled: “Nothing like this technology for completely demolishing a modern nation had ever been seen before. Production centers had been smashed, communications completely disorganized. With their air force obliterated, the Poles might as well have been fighting with clubs. These reports were electrifying to the men who, sooner or later, would be responsible for American defense or war production.”⁷

The year ended with Roosevelt and Marshall working with quiet determination to improve the Army in size and efficiency, despite Secretary of War Woodring’s opposition. The situation was dire. “On New Year’s Day of 1940, when the peril was beginning to close in on us, the United States Armed Forces might almost have been called our ‘Disarmed Forces’” was Nelson’s view of the situation.⁸

At the end of December, Woodring had presented his annual report on the state of the military to the president and asserted once again that national defense could not be defined in terms of manpower or money but rather in terms of the efficiency of new weaponry. He argued, “One million naked savages armed with 1,000,000 spears and 1,000,000 shields would be slaughtered by 100 men armed with 100 of the Army’s new semiautomatic shoulder rifles and a baker’s dozen of the Army’s new tanks.”

What Woodring did not point out was that these new weapons were in short supply, and many of the specific items existed only as prototypes. Only 15,000 of the Garand M-1 rifles he alluded to were then available, and only 300 new ones were being produced a week. Also, pitting “naked savages” against the United States Army displayed Woodring’s unwillingness to confront the fact that the next war was not going to be fought with spears and shields but with arms, aircraft, and armored vehicles forged from German steel.⁹

In January 1940, Roosevelt tried once again to move Woodring out of the way, this time offering him the ambassadorship to Italy. Again Woodring declined, choosing to hold on to his office despite the fact that a large part of the United States Army now saw him as a roadblock rather than a facilitator. Marshall, on the other hand, was letting Congress know in no uncertain terms that the Army was improperly trained and prepared. “We have been forced [by lack of funds] to build up our technique of command and control, and even our development of leadership, largely on a theoretical basis,” he declared at one point.¹⁰

Congress listened but was slow to move, as the clouds of war seemed to be dissipating rather than gathering. Over the winter of 1939–40, a certain quiet fell over Europe, which led to a feeling of stalemate and inaction that lasted into the spring and past Easter. Some described the inactivity as a truce of sorts and the basis for a negotiated settlement. The situation became known as the Phoney War,* an odd, slangy phrase that came into use within days of Poland’s defeat.¹¹ During this time, French and German troops eyed one another across Germany’s Siegfried Line and France’s Maginot Line, the latter a 280-mile-long defensive line of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and installed weapons built in the 1930s to deter invasion by Germany. Named for André Maginot, a former French minister of war, it ran along the entire length of the Franco-German border. The French believed it to be impregnable.

In the United States, the issue of the Phoney War became fodder for columnists and editorial writers, some of whom saw it as a hiatus in a larger period of aggression. “It is being said that this is a phoney war. But we shall understand the war better if we remember that it was preceded by eight years of phoney peace,” wrote Walter Lippmann in his widely syndicated New York Herald Tribune column in late October. “From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the peace of the world was disintegrating under the demoralization of class war, the pressure of subversive propaganda and intrigue, and the intimidation of armed and ruthless conspirators.” He concluded by calling the phoney peace an act of war.¹²

But Lippmann appeared to be in the minority, as others declared the Phoney War* to be the end of, or a long-term deferral of, hostilities. As journalist and Army historian Mark Skinner Watson later wrote about this period, it had “lulled the fears of only the uninformed, but the uninformed were numerous.”¹³

Many of those who had fled Paris and London fearing a Nazi attack returned home reassured that the Nazi saturation bombing they had dreaded had not come to pass. By Christmas, Londoners were neglecting to carry the gas masks they had been issued, and many prefabricated bomb shelters lay unclaimed at distribution points. By the end of January, nearly 60 percent of Britain’s 1.5 million evacuees had returned to their homes. And 43 percent of British schoolchildren had returned to their classes, often to schools that had been shut down in September 1939 because they were in areas considered dangerous and now needed to be reopened to accommodate the children who had returned to their homes.¹⁴

The Phoney War compromised the British public’s dedication to fighting the war against Germany. There was widespread antipathy toward food and gasoline rationing, blackouts, and other wartime restrictions that now appeared to be unnecessary. Citizens of England and France had to be constantly reminded that their countries had already declared war on Germany.

Especially in the United States, odd opinions and prophecies were frequent, including those relentlessly spewing forth from the mouth of Charles Lindbergh. He now took to the pages of the Atlantic magazine to declare that it was time for Germany, France, and England to come together in common defense against the “Asiatic hordes” who would soon penetrate and devour Europe.

Because London and Paris were not being bombed at this moment, some even thought that it might be possible to restart peace talks with Hitler. The Harvard Crimson ran a series of hopeful editorials pleading for a negotiated settlement between Germany and the Allied powers. One of the Crimson editors, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, son of the American ambassador to England, wrote to his father in early 1940 to report: “Everyone is getting much more confident about our staying out of the war but that of course is probably because there is such a lull over there.”¹⁵

As military activity reached a virtual standstill and the diplomatic front became quiet, the volume of press coverage shrank during the winter months. Foreign affairs had dominated front pages in the fall, but by February such articles were scarce. In their place were silly stories, such as “Real, Phoney War Finds George Snoring Peacefully,” the tale of George, a toothless, 120-year-old alligator in the London Zoo, who had been asleep since the beginning of the Phoney War and not affected at all by food rationing.¹⁶

On February 23, 1940, as Marshall argued for funds before skeptical members of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, he addressed the issue of the Phoney War: “If Europe blazes in the late spring or summer, we must put our house in order before the sparks reach the Western Hemisphere.”¹⁷ Marshall believed that the conflagration would come soon enough, and he told the committee he was doing all he could to get ready for it by obtaining the arms and equipment needed to outfit an Army of one million men.

At the time of this testimony, Marshall had already begun to inform Congress of his plans to test his new triangular divisions in large-scale maneuvers. During the course of the hearings, Marshall disclosed that in addition to maneuvers scheduled to take place in May somewhere along the Gulf Coast, which had already been revealed, three other exercises would be held in August 1940.¹⁸

To many members of Congress the concept of such maneuvers was new. Some knew about the “sham battles” or “sham wars” staged earlier in which two opposing forces in formation fired blanks at one another while civilians watched the show from a safe distance, as had been true of the 1939 Manassas maneuver, but this was an entirely different operation mounted on a large scale for a period of days or weeks.¹⁹

Under Marshall’s direction, a maneuver was envisioned as a carefully prepared operation, undertaken for training soldiers in the field in large numbers, concentrated at great distances from their normal home stations. These maneuvers would have as much to do with troop movements, communication between units, and logistics as they would with the actual faux combat. Aircraft from both the Army Air Corps and the Navy would be involved. And unlike the 1939 exercises in Manassas and Plattsburg, which were straightforward, scripted attack-and-defend operations, these maneuvers would allow officers on the ground to operate as they would in a real war, without a script, and thus serve as a test of tactical leadership.

Marshall knew exactly what he was looking for as a stage for the maneuvers: a largely underpopulated area able to sustain the damage and destruction that the maneuvers would inevitably produce. Scouts went out all over the United States to locate ideal areas. After studying their reports, Marshall finally decided on the lower Sabine River area for the first exercise. The river formed a natural border between Texas and Louisiana, and the area long ago had been involved in boundary disputes between the United States and Mexico. The mock war zone selected was a sparsely populated, reptile-rich swampy area presenting its own set of challenges. The front for the staged warfare would extend along the river for 25 to 30 miles.

The exact location of the first of these events had been kept under wraps until February 7, 1940, when Senator John Holmes Overton Sr. (Democrat of Louisiana) announced to the press that he had gotten word directly from Marshall that the maneuvers would take place in Louisiana. Marshall had told the senator that the Army needed a large area with plenty of rivers as obstacles for a mobile infantry to overcome. Overton was pleased, as he saw the maneuvers as a boon to Louisiana’s economy. He estimated that the cost of the exercise would be $28 million; Louisiana would receive a large slice of that amount.²⁰

Gaining permission to trespass on private land was a process that moved rapidly once the mock war zone had been mapped out. Some 6,500 individual and mostly small landowners signed on granting access to 3,400 square miles. A mere three and a half square miles were denied outright, and there was an additional ten square miles where the owner could not be found. By the time the maneuvers were ready to start, more than two million acres had been set aside for the mock war. The area was almost three times the size of Rhode Island.^21,*

As the Phoney War dragged on overseas, Marshall gradually brought other southern politicians into his plans. On March 21, Marshall told Representative William M. Colmer (Democrat of Mississippi) that in the early part of May, 36,000 troops would pass through his state as they traveled from Fort Benning, Georgia, to the Sabine River in Louisiana for the exercises, which would soon be known far and wide as the Louisiana Maneuvers. These maneuvers were scheduled to begin on May 5 and end on May 23.²²

But war games were one thing and war another. One effect of the Phoney War on the United States was that in the spring of 1940, public opinion was strongly opposed to American involvement. One poll, taken in March, held that 96.4 percent of Americans were against going to war with Germany.²³

To many, Marshall’s requests for more troops and equipment were regarded as “mere warmongering,” in the words of Marshall’s wife, Katherine. As if to underscore the point, on April 3, 1940, the House Appropriations Committee—the same body that Marshall had warned about the coming blaze—cut the modest defense budget by 10 percent, more than $67 million below the amount requested by the president. Among the items cut was $12 million for a cold-weather air-training base in Alaska, which caused Marshall to be “very much concerned,” as the base was needed to protect naval bases planned for the Aleutian Islands as well as the rest of Alaska—all of which would be a prime invasion point for Imperial Japan if it attacked North America. Without the new base, Alaska’s defense would rest on the occupants of some wooden barracks constructed in Sitka about 40 years earlier.²⁴ The cuts were especially damaging to the Army Air Corps, which had requested 496 new aircraft but was granted only 57.²⁵

“One thing is certain,” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said of Hitler on April 4, 1940, in a speech delivered in Central Hall, Westminster. “He missed the bus.” Five days later, Chamberlain was proven disastrously wrong when the Phoney War came to an abrupt end. Germany invaded Denmark, which surrendered in only six hours, and at the same time Nazi warships entered Norwegian waters, attacking ships and landing troops that began to occupy key cities by the end of the day.²⁶

The next morning’s eight-column headline in the New York Times read: GERMANS OCCUPY DENMARK, ATTACK OSLO. By the next day, as the Associated Press announced, a new Norwegian government had been formed under the leadership of Vidkun Quisling, the head of the Norwegian Nazi Party. Almost immediately, the name Quisling became a powerful eponym for collaborator and traitor. Despite the Nazi flag flying over Oslo and the flight of the royal family and much of the government to the north, the Norwegian resistance and the regular army continued to fight, along with expeditionary forces sent by the British and the French.²⁷

The Louisiana Maneuvers of 1940 were billed as the greatest military maneuver in U.S. history. Seventy thousand uniformed army men from camps and bases in 33 states began assembling in two locations in the Deep South in March. Texas was sending the greatest number of men to the event, 12,000, and Georgia and New York State provided 7,000 apiece. The 70,000 troops represented about half the standing U.S. Army. In addition, the Army was sending almost all of its 400 or so working tanks, including several of experimental design, along with 340 armored vehicles and 3,000 trucks. One hundred and twenty-eight aircraft, including bombers and pursuit, attack, and observation aircraft, would take part in the games.

Units were assigned to one of two armies, which would assemble approximately 600 miles apart, a separation made more difficult by swamps and muddy terrain. The troops of the Blue Army headed to Fort Benning, Georgia, while the Red Army gathered around Natchitoches, Louisiana. As the ordered equipment arrived, the two armies moved forward, the Red taking up positions along the Texas side of the Sabine River and the Blue Army on the Louisiana side. Marshall provided the two armies’ commanders with the following information on the countries at war:

Blue (East) is a small nation with a common boundary at the Sabine River with another small nation, Red (West). Blue has a small army, normally scattered throughout the country. Red has an even smaller army. These troops, however, are highly trained and are concentrated along the border.

Boundary disputes, local border incidents and alien minorities have resulted in increasing tension between the two nations. On April 20, the Red government provocatively announced it would hold its spring maneuvers just west of the Sabine River.

The Blue government became alarmed, increased its garrison at its border town of Alexandria and announced that it would move its Army to the vicinity of Alexandria for large-scale maneuvers.

The Red Army was to be the aggressor nation, schooled in the tactics of blitzkrieg, and the Blue, the defending force, protecting its national border along the Sabine River from a foreign invader. The Sabine, much of which marks the Texas-Louisiana line, was also regarded by many as the border between the Old South and the Southwest, so the sense of it as a national border was not far-fetched.

As the director of the maneuvers, Marshall was quick to point out that these exercises would have importance far greater than that normally attributed to war games. These maneuvers would be unscripted and, as in real war, based on “free play.” Commanders would be tested on the ground, where their errors and achievements would be boldly displayed. The maneuvers were meant to be a test of man, machine, and command. The maneuvers were to allow American troops to test tactics similar to those the Nazis were employing in Europe and to learn how to defend against them.²⁸

The exercises would test not only the new triangular divisions but also the methods of marching men into battle. Gone were the close formations of 1917–18. Advancing or retreating troops would now move through the underbrush, spaced several yards apart in irregular patterns, an approach exemplifying the differences between the old square divisions and the new triangular ones.²⁹

The stated premise of the maneuvers was that they were designed to test American forces in case of an invasion of North America, but this would be essentially a cover story, as Roosevelt, Marshall, and everyone else involved in the event knew they were also an early test of an expeditionary army.

Because the news of what was happening in Europe dominated the headlines and the front pages of newspapers in the United States, news of these maneuvers tended to fall on the back pages of news sections in papers outside the region. The events became a boon to the daily newspapers of the Deep South and the Gulf Coast, however, which often played the maneuvers as front-page news; BIG BATTLE EXPECTED IN MANEUVERS TODAY was the lead story on May 5 in a Columbus, Georgia, daily.³⁰

Although members of Congress and the press were allowed to witness the maneuvers, foreign military attachés would not be invited for a number of reasons but especially to prevent the disclosure of tactics the Army was developing with regard to the use of its newest weapons and revised structure.³¹ The United States was beginning to fully awaken to the reality that some were out to do it harm. Although details were scarce, at least one dispatch filed by Henry N. Dorris of the New York Times mentioned that he had been privately informed by several National Guard officers of “fifth column activities”—espionage and/or sabotage—in their units and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been called in to “uproot” such elements.³²

* * *

Once assembled, for the remainder of March and April the two armies trained and prepared for the battle ahead. The Red Army recruited thousands of civilian volunteers from several states to act as spotters of enemy aircraft. The lion’s share of the spotters were members of the American Legion, and the name of their unit was the Third Army Aircraft Warning Service. Volunteers clamored to join this force.³³

Getting men and machines in place for the maneuvers showed that despite shortages, the Army had the ability to move motorized columns quickly over long distances, as 41,000 men of the Blue Army moved 600 miles in six days from Georgia through Alabama and Mississippi to converge on Alexandria, Louisiana. The feat—achieved thanks to the use of a large number of trucks to transport men and horses as well as weapons—was immediately termed the largest and fastest mass movement of armed troops ever witnessed in the United States during peacetime.³⁴

On May 8, 1940, all but a few of the Army’s 70 generals were present to observe the maneuvers in Louisiana. It was the greatest assemblage of American generals ever in one place. The Associated Press described the initial ground attack, which began at 4:30 a.m. on May 9 as the smaller Red Army drove east out of Texas toward the Blue Army: “Detouring, doubling back in sudden withdrawals and heavily camouflaged with green boughs, the big armored trucks roared down back roads and country lanes, awakening farmers, and setting their dogs to howling.”³⁵

The predawn attack by horse and mechanized units was halted only temporarily by the Blue Army, which was unable to summon its reserves in time.

Within a few hours, the Red Army had forded the shallow, murky Sabine River, and its First Cavalry had thundered into Leesville, 20 miles east of the river. Other Red units captured Slagle, DeRidder, Hornbeck, and Robeline. The Blue Army forces defending Louisiana suffered a stunning defeat under a battering attack by mechanized troops. The Red Air Corps then gained further ground, theoretically destroying Mississippi River bridges at Vicksburg and New Orleans, virtually isolating the Blues. One element of the Red Army moved quickly toward Alexandria, the Blue capital, but just as it began to look like the objective was in sight it ran into a large Blue Army force that had dug in on the grounds of a local college. In New Orleans, the Red’s Fifth Division rolled into the city in a 60-mile-long procession.

The Associated Press report called the defeat of the Blue Army “bewildering” and noted that in order to keep the maneuvers going, umpires ruled that Blue troops could move across certain bridges that had been “destroyed” by Red warplanes. A reporter embedded with the Blue Army declared it unprepared for war.³⁶

The first of three planned phases of these maneuvers ended on May 9 with the apparent defeat of the Blue Army, although the generals running the operation reminded the press that this was not a contest and that keeping score was inappropriate. At this point in the maneuvers, it was up to the press to decide who had won and lost, which it did in dispatches that told of a quick, decisive, and bewildering Blue defeat.³⁷

In Europe the next day, in excess of two million German troops invaded France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, employing blitzkrieg tactics.* Reaction came in many forms and forums, including prophetically on Wall Street, where stocks hit the low point of the year the next day. By contrast, the stocks of steel, copper, and aircraft and munitions makers shot up. What Charles F. Speare of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) described as the “peace stocks” took a beating. The market seemed to be betting on nothing less than total war for the United States.³⁸

Word of the Nazi invasion of France and the Low Countries spread quickly among those participating in the maneuvers. An Associated Press dispatch filed from Louisiana described “a sobering atmosphere of grim reality” settling over the mock battlefields. The only official statement came from Lieutenant General Stanley D. Emrick, commander of the Third Army, who said at a press conference: “The Army is ready for any ‘M’ day to defend this country.” M day in Army parlance then stood for general mobilization day, and despite Emrick’s confidence, as the maneuvers continued they showed that the Army was ill prepared for such a mobilization.

While the maneuvers were still underway, Marshall testified before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, pointing out that the armies involved had no reserves in terms of men or materiel: “In other words, if they were bombed actually instead of theoretically in the maneuvers today there is no duplicate truck to take the place of the one that is destroyed. If our pilots operating in the maneuvers today were shot down we do not have the actual pilots to take their places.”³⁹

That situation was beginning to change, slowly, in the early months of 1940, as more and more money was being laid out for arms and munitions, and the new factories to produce them were coming online. On May 16, six days after the Nazi attack on France and the Low Countries, President Roosevelt appeared personally before both houses of Congress and called for “arms to make our defenses invulnerable, our security absolute.” He asked for new arms appropriations of $1.182 billion and then urged the aircraft industry to establish a production capacity of 50,000 warplanes per year.⁴⁰

During the second phase of the exercises in Louisiana, the tide turned quickly. Now the Red Army was suddenly overwhelmed and unprepared for war; its only hope was to bring reinforcements to the front, with which it tried to repel a Blue attack. But the Blue Army was successful, driving the Reds back to the Sabine River and into Texas. The Red forces, outnumbered three to two, were simply unable to hold their positions against the highly mobile teams of the Blue Army.

The final phase of the maneuvers lined the two armies up along a 60-mile front. After two days of stalemate, the Blue Army defeated the Red Army. The final engagement was, however, based on imaginary numbers and assumptions, as the aircraft that actually attacked the other side were so small in number that the judges had to multiply their impact to get a score. Rather than display American airpower, the exercises were a display of its total inadequacy. One reporter, noting the reliance on imaginary aircraft to stage an attack, compared the simulation of war to nothing more than a penny firecracker.⁴¹

These maneuvers revealed how ill prepared the Army was for waging the kind of well-led mobile warfare being waged in Europe by the Germans. At one level, problems such as a shortage of reliable tanks and trucks and repair teams to keep these vehicles moving could be solved with money, but the greater problem was the failure of leadership. Commanders in Louisiana chose to lead from behind their lines rather than out in front with their troops. “Commanders and staffs mistakenly believed that they could run the war from headquarters,” Army historian Christopher R. Gabel concluded, “relying on maps and telephones, much as they had in the static warfare of 1918.” The result, on display in Louisiana, was that both offense and defense were poorly coordinated.⁴²

The most severe early criticism came on May 27, in a room full of senior officers at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana. The bearer of bad news was Major General Herbert J. Brees, the chief control officer for the maneuvers. “If results would not have been so tragic,” he said, “some of the so-called attacks without use of supporting weapons were so absurd as to be farcical.”

Brees claimed that officers at all levels, showing a disinclination to move across country to engage the enemy, had failed to play the game. Because of poor or absent communication, there were instances of friendly troops firing into one another. He also cited the officers for not ordering the infantry out of their vehicles and into the field to engage the enemy. “You can’t fight in a truck,” he shouted.

As tough as he was on the officers, Brees praised the men under them: “My hat is off to our enlisted men, be they private, corporal or sergeant.” His highest praise was reserved for the non-commissioned officers—enlisted men who had risen to the rank of sergeant and whom he termed the backbone of the Army—who “acted on their own, intelligently, with initiative, with a keen and complete understanding of what it was all about and what they were trying to do.” Finally, Brees called for a major increase in the number of armored vehicles: “We need more tanks—light, medium and heavy.”⁴³

Good intelligence and airborne reconnaissance were lacking. To some, the exercises took on the aura of comic opera, complete with slapstick props. Trucks were dispatched with the word TANK written on their canvas covers. Stovepipes served as stand-ins for mortars, and broomsticks mounted on wood blocks acted as machine guns. As one of the supply officers later said, it was galling to see what should have been the most powerful army in the world “playing soldiers.”⁴⁴

Time pointed out the lack of Air Corps participation, practically no realistic antiaircraft practice, and no practice whatsoever with and against parachute troops—which the U.S. Army had not yet officially recognized as a functional element. The magazine too dismissed the exercises as kids playing soldiers: “Overnight, the pleasant doings in Louisiana became old-fashioned nonsense. Against Europe’s total war, the U.S. Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.”⁴⁵

Noting the costs, more than 200 injuries, and the accidental deaths of a dozen men, several members of Congress questioned the validity of the exercises. One of the problems underscored by the maneuvers was the fact that any camaraderie and shared experience among the soldiers who had trained over the course of many weeks were lost when the exercises were over, as the men were dispersed to points as far away as Fort Lewis, Washington, 13 days away by truck under ideal conditions and precise planning.

Nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler listened to an unnamed general boast that action in Louisiana proved the U.S. Regular Army was as tough as the German army. Pegler took strong exception, pointing out that the Regular Army was badly scattered and could not possibly be assembled quickly in the continental United States during an emergency.⁴⁶

One of the most direct critiques came from reporter T. A. Price of the Dallas Morning News, who began by pointing out the “alarming inadequacy” of the combat aircraft available, in both the exercises and the Army at large. But his strongest criticism concerned the fact that two armies—one highly mechanized and mobile (Blue) and the other preponderantly infantry (Red)—had been created at great expense and were now being sent home. Relying on comments from officers on the scene, Price insisted that the armies created for Louisiana should be held intact as a model for other armies that would be needed in the future. If allowed to disperse, he noted: “We not only will have no Army but will have torn up the only model we ever have made for an Army. Most of the sweat, toil and improvement in morale that have been won here will have been lost forever.”⁴⁷

One of the participants in the Maneuvers was Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, who had also served in the 1939 exercises in Plattsburg, New York. Lodge was now a captain in the cavalry reserves assigned to Patton’s Second Armored Division as a staff officer. The grandson of his namesake, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, he was clearly the most important political figure in uniform in Louisiana. Speaking to an Associated Press reporter during the maneuvers, he noted shortages in manpower and tanks and called for the immediate creation of a Regular Army of 750,000 men, a demand he repeated on the Senate floor when he returned to Washington. Lodge told the Senate that the shortages were “very grave deficiencies.” Money was needed to effect such changes, and Lodge immediately began to help Marshall convince Congress to increase Army appropriations to improve the nation’s military readiness.

Lodge’s strongest demand in terms of weaponry was for more tanks. Referring to his recent days in Louisiana he testified: “I have recently seen all the tanks in the United States, about 400 in number, or about one finger of the fanlike German advance about which we have read, or about the number destroyed in two days of fighting in the current European War. The Germans have a rough total of 3,000.” Lodge went on to point out that all but a few of the tanks held by the United States were light tanks weighing in at 12 tons or less, whereas some of the Nazi tanks were 80-ton giants.⁴⁸

Marshall, who had hoped to attend the maneuvers himself but was unable to because of the press of events in Washington, carefully reviewed the reports from Louisiana and expressed his dismay in “the ragged performance of officers and troops and the lack of realism.” He immediately began thinking ahead to a second round of maneuvers, in 1941.⁴⁹

In perspective, the 1940 Louisiana Maneuvers were in the words of military historian Mary Katherine Barbier: “significant because it was the first of its kind. Never before had the Army practiced for war on such a vast scale during peacetime.”⁵⁰

Only African American newspapers reported that a division of black troops in the Blue Army had taken part in the second and third phases of the maneuvers. A report in the Chicago Defender, with the headline NEW ORLEANS HOST TO 1,000 RACE SOLDIERS,* noted that the unit’s commander was pleased these men had entered New Orleans as part of the victorious Red Army. If hostile racial incidents occurred in the 1940 maneuvers, they did not make news in the black press, which had an ear to the ground for overt incidents and would have reported them.⁵¹

The Blue forces had also field-tested the Army’s new C rations (combat rations), billed as “the balanced meal in a can,” which had been in development since 1938.** Along with tins of spaghetti and meatballs, Irish stew, or pork and beans, C rations included condiments, soluble coffee, chocolate bars, and a small can opener. The meal was the first designed to be heated in its own can. When the Blue Army was suddenly switched from fresh food (A rations) to what the soldiers then called battle rations, it came as a complete surprise, and the canned food was not well received. By all accounts, the ration was palatable when warmed but tasteless when served cold.⁵²

An important aspect of the maneuvers was the testing of new equipment, including new portable two-way radios, which soldiers dubbed walkie-talkies. (“Soldiers are masters at nicknames,” Ralph McGill commented in the Atlanta Constitution.) These wireless devices were used to keep commanders in touch with forces up to two miles away.⁵³

One bit of good news to come out of the maneuvers was that no epidemics or large-scale infections occurred. The Army’s “health defenses” had been tested and found to be working. This was no minor concern, as death due to infection and disease among U.S. forces in the Great War had occurred at a one-to-one ratio to combat deaths. (The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more than 657,000 Americans, including tens of thousands of military members.) The health report was delivered to the Army by Surgeon General Thomas Parran Jr., following an Emory University conference on malaria control and eradication. Parran said that the Army had a larger number and better quality of health-service units than it had had at the beginning of the previous war and that in the event of a draft, malaria, tuberculosis, and syphilis would be the main concerns regarding men coming into the service.^54,*

Although the officer corps was sharply criticized for its actions during the exercises, certain officers and units had outperformed others, and Marshall could determine, through reports coming back to him, who might be part of his next generation of leaders. Perhaps the most outstanding young commander in these first maneuvers was Colonel Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. During an important moment in the conflict between the Blue and Red Armies, Stilwell had led a Blue blitzkrieg-style invasion of northern Louisiana with a high-speed column of tanks—just the kind of bold initiative Marshall was looking for. Because of the enterprise and quick thinking Stilwell displayed, Marshall marked him for a major leadership position and would later choose him to lead Allied forces against the Japanese in Burma and China.

Another officer who unexpectedly benefited indirectly from the maneuvers was 53-year-old colonel George S. Patton, who had been invited to participate in the exercises as a referee. Patton hated being relegated to the role of umpire, and his redemption began at a clandestine meeting at a high school in Alexandria, Louisiana, on May 25, the last day of the maneuvers. It was also the day the Germans took Boulogne, France, and British troops were ordered to retreat to Dunkirk.

The men at the meeting had individually come to the conclusion that the most important lesson driven home by the maneuvers was an immediate need for a unified armored force separated from both the infantry and the horse cavalry. Envisioned was a powerful American version of the German Panzer divisions now slicing through European defenses. Beloved by many, the cavalry was beginning to look like an anachronism during the exercises, as trucks were required to haul the horses on long marches.⁵⁵

The group at the meeting, led by Brigadier General Adna R. Chaffee Jr., included Brigadier General Bruce Magruder, head of the Provisional Tank Brigade, who had been arguing for this transformation for years before the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland; Alvan C. Gillem Jr., Magruder’s executive officer; and other advocates of tank warfare. The group met with Brigadier General M. Frank Andrews, one of Marshall’s closest advisers, in the Alexandria schoolhouse to discuss the future of mechanization. The goal of the meeting was to take tanks out of the hands of the horse cavalry and the infantry. What Chaffee and those who agreed with him faced was unyielding opposition from the chiefs of the cavalry and the infantry, who were in Louisiana but not invited to the schoolhouse session.

One of the men Chaffee did invite was Patton, who had been a standout tank commander during the Great War. Although he held a lower rank than most of the others in attendance, Patton seemed to be the ideal candidate to help bring this transformation to fruition.

At the end of World War I, the nation had had a tank corps of more than 20,000 officers and enlisted men, but it had been eliminated by Congress in 1920. At that point, Patton’s focus had returned to the horse cavalry and the equine pursuits that went with it. He organized society horse shows from his base at Fort Myer, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. In the early 1930s, Patton was regarded as one of the most accomplished polo players in the United States, and he was a driving force in creating enthusiasm for the sport within the Army.

But the interwar years had not been kind to Patton’s public image. Many Americans knew him only as the man who had led Army troops against the Bonus Army marchers in 1932—presenting an image of the commander that was compelling, damaging, and photogenic. Patton’s cavalry, followed by tanks and infantrymen carrying loaded rifles with fixed bayonets, had driven members of the Bonus Army and their families off the streets of Washington, D.C., along with curious bystanders and civil servants on their way home from work. His infantrymen, protected with gas masks, had thrown hundreds of tear gas grenades at the dispersing crowd; it was the same powerful tear gas that had been used as a weapon in World War I. One of the men Patton drove out of downtown and from his makeshift quarters, Joe Angelo, of Camden, New Jersey, had been decorated for saving Patton’s life during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918. The morning after the Bonus Army’s camps were burned, Angelo had approached Patton, who curtly announced that he did not know him and instructed that he be taken away, a situation that produced most unflattering headlines.⁵⁶

For a moment in 1932, thanks to reports in major news outlets, Angelo was the hero and Patton the goat. Between that unfortunate event in 1932 and his public reemergence in 1940, Patton’s service had been pedestrian, especially to a man who saw himself as a warrior waiting for the next conflict in which to shine. What attracted Patton to Chaffee, whom he met for the first time during the maneuvers, was the firm belief that the United States needed large tank divisions—and men like Patton to lead them.⁵⁷

The participants in the schoolhouse meeting agreed that Andrews should go back to Washington and suggest that two armored divisions be created, employing the mechanized Seventh Cavalry Brigade and the infantry’s Provisional Tank Brigade as their basis. One division would be stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and the other at Fort Benning, Georgia. The group assumed that Marshall would be receptive to the idea.

As if to underscore the importance of the schoolhouse meeting, before the end of the month, Nazi armored columns broke into France and shot through all the way to the English Channel, cutting off British and French units in Northern France and Belgium. The French army began to fall apart, and the British, who were in France as an allied force, evacuated 400,000 troops from Dunkirk and lost most of their heavy equipment between May 26 and June 4. France held on until June 14, when the Nazis invaded Paris, which fell easily and without a fight. France asked for an armistice three days later and surrendered on June 22. The grim reality was that Nazi Germany had successfully invaded and occupied six European nations in fewer than 100 days.⁵⁸

With each wave of bad news from abroad came a new request for arms spending. As the British debacle was unfolding in Dunkirk, Roosevelt went back to Congress and asked for an additional $1.278 billion over and above the $1.82 billion he had asked for two weeks earlier. After the French collapse, the Navy requested an additional $4 billion to establish a two-ocean fleet of warships. Despite the power of the isolationists at this moment, these funds were easily obtained in the name of national defense, and the Navy’s request passed the House, 316–0. The largest naval procurement bill to that point in U.S. history, it increased the size of the Navy by 70 percent, adding 257 new ships, including 18 aircraft carriers and a large fleet of aircraft to go with them. On August 19, the Senate Appropriations Committee bundled these requests together and unanimously approved a more than $5 billion supplemental national defense measure, designed to finance both the construction of an Atlantic and Pacific Navy and the establishment of a fully mechanized Army.⁵⁹

On June 2, 1940, exactly a week after the end of the maneuvers and the schoolhouse meeting, George Gallup released the results of a national poll, which were widely reported in newspapers across the country. Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, which he had founded in 1935, commanded a high level of attention and respect in 1940, its reputation launched in 1936 when Gallup successfully predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Republican candidate Alf Landon and win re-election in a landslide.

The new poll concluded that Americans were well aware of what was going on in Western Europe. It also discovered that more than four voters in every five had concluded that the present Army and Navy were inadequate to protect the United States from foreign attack.

As had been shown in earlier surveys, two out of three Americans believed that if Germany should defeat England and France, she would sooner or later attack the United States. The survey also revealed that the greatest apprehension of Germany’s intentions was among southerners, of whom 82 percent feared a German attack. By contrast, the Upper Midwest, where isolationism was strongest, showed less apprehension, though 61 percent expressed concern.

Gallup also discovered that one-half of the American people now believed the United States should follow the path of various European nations and “institute compulsory military training for all able-bodied young men of military age for a period of one year.” By an overwhelming margin (85 percent to 15 percent), Gallup found that the public believed military training should be introduced into the hundreds of Civilian Conservation Corps camps.⁶⁰

On June 24, General Chaffee was ordered to return to Washington, where he was made the first chief of the armored force. On June 30, the War Department announced the creation of an American tank force, headquartered at Fort Knox, Kentucky. It quickly attracted the nickname of the “American Panzer force,” underscoring the belief that it would soon equal the German tank force. Command of the Second Armored Brigade, part of the Second Armored Division at Fort Benning, Georgia, was assigned to Patton, who arrived at his new post on July 29, 1940. In taking the assignment, Patton relinquished command of the Third Cavalry Regiment and Fort Myer.⁶¹

With the American tank force established, the need for more tanks was urgent. When Patton took his new assignment, the Army had only about 500 tanks, and some of these were not sufficiently armored for use in the kind of battle operations the Nazis were engaging in. More were being produced, but they were at first slow in coming, and only a few hundred were built in 1940. However, in 1941 production went into high gear, along with a search to find the men to operate them. Those in charge assumed volunteers and men eager to transfer from other units would step up but that ultimately, the force of proud, brave tankers would have to be recruited from the civilian population.⁶²

The country not only had to manufacture tanks, aircraft, and other up-to-date tools of war, but it also had to create well-trained, well-equipped, highly mobile, motivated, and disciplined armed forces numbering in the millions. And at some point, these men had to be field-tested under battlefield conditions.

Many felt it was not feasible to simply attract a massive group of able volunteers and that the only way to create this force was through conscription. However, Marshall himself at least initially believed that an intensive recruiting program could attract the number of volunteers needed to populate a new army and was not convinced that conscription was necessary.

Roosevelt was up for re-election in November, and isolationist factions continued to stifle any talk of intervention in Europe. Roosevelt and his inner circle feared the Republicans would nominate a candidate who would campaign against any military expansion, including a peacetime military draft. The president had a second reason to be reluctant about a draft: Americans were historically resistant to compulsory military service of any type, let alone the peacetime variety.

Opposition to the idea that all able-bodied young men should be required to perform military service dated back to the early days of the republic, residing in the words of then vice president Elbridge Gerry in 1784: “Standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism.” Instead, Gerry thought reliance should be placed on each state’s “well regulated and disciplined militia.”⁶³

For this reason, the United States disbanded the Continental Army of 1783, after the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the Revolutionary War and the final British forces had departed New York City. The federal government then called up four state militias to provide some 700 men to confront any new threats from native tribes and the British. A newly organized version of his First American Regiment was all that President George Washington had under his command as commander in chief upon taking office in April 1789.

Later that year, Secretary of War Henry Knox proposed a plan for a system of defense that called for all free American men to perform military service as a means of countering the powerful standing armies of Europe. However, suspicions about a creating an American standing army, especially in view of the recent war and the despised British Quartering Act, which had required Americans to provide shelter for British military forces, prevented the enactment of the plan.

The first real test of the militia system came with the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, which began when farmers in Western Pennsylvania, outraged by a federal excise tax on distilled spirits imposed to relieve the federal deficit, attacked and burned the home of a tax collector. With their ranks enlarged to 6,000, the men camped outside Pittsburgh and threatened to march on the city. One rebel, inspired by the French Revolution, pressed for the use of guillotines to dispatch tax collectors.

In response, President Washington, at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, under the provisions of the Militia Act of 1792, assembled 15,000 militiamen from eastern Pennsylvania and the surrounding states as a federal unit, commanded by Virginia’s Henry Lee, and prepared them to march upon the Pittsburgh camp. Washington himself took command of the federal force as it reached Bedford, Pennsylvania.* “The soldiers even set up a dazzling light display in town to honor the president,” wrote historian William Hogeland. “The blazing display read: ‘Woe to anarchy.’”⁶⁴

When it arrived, the federal militia found the rebels unwilling to fight. The mere threat of the federal force had stifled the rebellion and established once and for all the sovereignty of the federal government. The army configured for the Whiskey Rebellion was quickly disbanded, and the rebels who had been sentenced to be hanged were pardoned by Washington.

During the War of 1812, Congress repeated the experience of the Revolutionary War by encouraging voluntary enlistment, coupled with requests to the states for militia units. Thousands of militia units existed, but most had little military value; they met carrying guns only once a year, on an obligatory muster day, events that often turned into little more than drinking sprees. A paltry 20,000 men enlisted, and as the United States seemed headed for defeat, the secretary of war, James Monroe, proposed the nation’s first serious attempt at national conscription by proposing a universal draft. A modified version of Monroe’s plan was approved by Congress, but it came too late to have an effect on the outcome of the war. Reacting to this legislation, Congressman Daniel Webster declared that the United States was “not yet in a temper to submit to conscription. The people have too fresh and strong a feeling of the blessings of civil liberty to be willing thus to surrender it.”^65,*

The war with Mexico in 1846–48 did not require forces in sufficient numbers to raise the issue of conscription, but it did demonstrate that volunteers on short enlistment times created new problems. As General Winfield Scott led his troops on the approach to Mexico City, some 40 percent of his men had to be sent home because their one-year enlistment terms had expired. General Scott was forced to wait for reinforcements, while the army of the Mexican president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, defeated and dispersed, found time to recover.

The Union’s conscription act of March 1863, put in force at the height of the Civil War, made all men of able body between ages 20 and 45 liable for military service, but a draftee who produced a human substitute or paid the government a flat $300 was excused. A defective and greatly unpopular piece of legislation, the act provoked nationwide disturbances, known as the draft riots. The uprisings were bloodiest in New York City, where for four days in July 1863, large, violent outbursts occurred, some of such intensity that they were deemed to be a war within a war. Not only unfair, the Civil War draft was ineffective—only 6 percent of the 2.5 million who served in the Union Army from 1861 to 1865 were inducted by conscription.⁶⁶

Conscription in the South was far more demanding and inflexible than it was in in the North. The Confederacy’s conscription law, which was enacted on April 16, 1862, not only subjected all men between the ages of 18 and 35 eligible to be drafted into military service but also voided existing voluntary enlistment contracts and required those men to serve for the remainder of the war. Of the million men who fought for the Confederacy, close to 80 percent were volunteers now forced to stay for the duration with the remainder who were drafted under the provisions of the law.

Initially, substitutes could be hired to replace draftees, but this practice was eventually outlawed along with almost all occupational exemptions. The one major exception came under the Twenty-Slave Law, which allowed a legal exemption for one overseer or slaveholder for every 20 enslaved people owned. The law was enacted October 11, 1862, in reaction to a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by U.S. president Abraham Lincoln less than two weeks earlier. In the South, Lincoln’s proclamation was seen as an attempt to inspire a slave rebellion. The law, which only benefited the large landowner, contributed to the widespread belief that the war was fought by the poor—albeit poor whites—for the benefit of the rich and a negative factor for troop morale.⁶⁷

In May 1917, the United States committed itself to a full mobilization of manpower and resources to support its allies in a European war that had assumed the slogan “the war to end war” (or “the war to end all wars”). At the time, an overwhelming majority in Congress passed the Selective Service Act, creating “local, district, state, and territorial civilian boards to register, induct, examine, classify and ship out men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty” for active duty for the war’s duration. The boards could also issue deferrals.

Then secretary of war Newton Baker coined the term selective service to indicate that the Army would take only the men it wanted. Left out would be those who were essential to the wartime economy and those who were physically or mentally unfit for service. The system automatically exempted ministers, divinity students, and public officials from some of the higher categories. It also recognized that dependency could serve as a basis for exemptions.

The full military draft faced considerable opposition from southern and western Congressmen and their constituents. Some 300,000 men failed to respond to their draft notices, and 170,000 more deserted within weeks of reporting. In one dragnet staged in New York City in 1918 to catch those who had not reported, 16,000 men were arrested. Of the 3.5 million men who served during the war, 72 percent were conscripts.⁶⁸

The draft was canceled abruptly at the end of World War I in November 1918. On March 31, 1919, all the local, district, and regional medical advisory units were dissolved, and on May 21, 1919, the last state draft headquarters office shut its doors. The U.S. Army’s provost marshal general was relieved of all duties on July 15, 1919, thereby fully closing down all the elements of the Selective Service System of World War I and sidelining the giant goldfish bowl from which random numbers had been pulled.

* The word phony/phoney, which first appeared in print in the early 20th century, was spelled with an e by the British and without one by Americans. But during the era of the Phoney War, the British spelling tended to be used on both sides of the Atlantic.

* Equivalent labels were the bore war in English, la drôle de guerre (the strange war) in French, and der Sitzkrieg in German (the sitting war). Time magazine dubbed it the Lullablitz.

* Rhode Island’s area is 776,957 square acres.

* May 10 was also the day Neville Chamberlain resigned, replaced by Winston Churchill as British Prime Minister.

* During this period it was common for the newspapers united under the banner of the black press to refer to African Americans with the word race, just as race records was the term used to describe 78-rpm phonograph records produced for the African American market between the 1920s and the early 1950s.

** With modifications—some major—the C ration would remain the military’s combat meal until 1958.

* Parran gained notoriety later in the century because of his role in overseeing the early period of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which the government withheld treatment from poor black men suffering from syphilis in rural Alabama. The experiment lasted from 1932 to 1972.

* This marked the first and last time a sitting president led armed troops.

* It has been pointed out that Monroe’s plan embodied the four basic principles of conscription later adopted in the 20th century: universal obligation, individual selection, local administration, and national control.