The Army and Its Critics
I
ELIHU ROOT, if he had lived to see it, would have understood better than anyone else the full significance of the recent reorganization of the War Department. Properly speaking, it carries through to a sound and logical conclusion the far-reaching reforms he initiated almost forty years ago. But by a comically misguided impulse of praise the press hailed the latest reorganization as the cleaning away of a century’s accumulation of dust and cobwebs in the administrative machinery. There were the usual catchword phrases in regard to Brass Hats, red tape, and bureaucratic routine, and the general impression given was that after a century of neglect a great mass of useless and inefficient bureaus had been ‘streamlined.’
All this is a caricature of the actual situation. Under the heavy burden of the past two years, the administration of the War Department has shown itself to be, not bad, but good. There have been amazingly few serious criticisms from the press; and Congress has tacitly recognized that the work of the Army and the Department was in good hands. (When one recalls the vindictive hostility of Congress in 1915, the contrast is striking.) We have a good Secretary of War and a good Chief of Staff. For the higher civilian posts in the Department the Secretary, without exception, has chosen highly competent men; and in the critically important post of Undersecretary, Judge Patterson has been an outstanding success.
Secretary Stimson himself has been no minor factor in this favorable record. When his appointment was announced, comment turned mainly on the question of his age. The remark was made by one who had known him in earlier days: ‘Stimson already knows more about the Army and the War Department than a stranger could learn in two years.’ For the first time we had an incoming Secretary of War who knew what it was all about: who was familiar with the language and the habits of thought of the Army, and with all the peculiar complications of the Department. Colonel Stimson had had first-hand acquaintance with all this ever since the time of Elihu Root. He had been Secretary of War after Root’s reforms were carried through; he had witnessed the vast expansion of 1917 and shared in it as an artilleryman in France; and at Washington during the post-war years he had known the anæmic régime which denatured the National Defense Act of 1920.
No other American, in the summer of 1940, could have offered the particular knowledge and experience which Colonel Stimson brought to the Department — at a most critical period. Such a period was not the moment for overworked officials to explain to an innocent newcomer the elementary points of the Army organization. In this instance the incoming Secretary fortunately knew a good many things which subordinates might have left unsaid. Above all, his previous experience had enabled him to avoid the apprentice solution of trying to deal with everything himself: only by a proper delegation of work to responsible subordinates is it possible for any chief to carry out the duties of a Secretary of War. His success in this has contributed largely to the efficient operation of the Department during these two years, and his own competence in the field has built up a position of quite exceptional authority in the eyes of Congress and the country at large. Never before in time of crisis have there been such good working relations between Congress and the Secretary of War.
II
Even during the early period of reduced appropriations, the Ordnance Department patiently kept at work in its own field; and when the time came, it was already getting into production the best automatic rifle in the world. The record of production and deliveries of essential weapons would be very different today if the warning given in 1937 had been heeded; it would not have been necessary to call up troops for training before these new weapons were on hand. Even so, it is due to the initiative of the Ordnance Department that any of the new types of weapons were forthcoming in 1941. Without waiting for the OPM to come into existence, the Ordnance Department got into production the new types of arms and fighting equipment for which money first became available at the beginning of 1939. Practically all the new weapons in the hands of the troops during the manœuvres of 1941 came from these early contracts. For nearly twenty years after 1918, there was no money, for example, to develop and test tanks on any useful scale. Even with this handicap, the new tanks the Ordnance Department sent out to Egypt proved far more rugged, and had a far greater range of durability, than any the British had on the scene. It is reported that one tank was put over 1800 miles of desert and stony ground without requiring the replacement of a single part. The record of the American tanks in the autumn battle in Libya was so conspicuously good that the British Commander-inChief in Egypt gathered the press correspondents together to hear a formal and comprehensive tribute. Moreover, all this was accomplished by the first model brought into production. The new medium tank, M-4, now coming into service, is a far better design in all respects.
The Quartermaster Department has made a correspondingly good record. The hearings on the Burke-Wadsworth Bill brought forth into print again the record of things left undone or mismanaged in 1917, such as the calling up of large numbers of draftees before clothing and blankets and proper shelter were available and ready. In 1940-1941 some 900,000 selectees and new recruits were absorbed into service without these complaints arising. Only old-timers took note of the fact that almost everything — uniforms, rations, the layout of camps — was far better managed than in 1917.
III
The carrying out of the draft is another item on the list of things well done. With a minimum of time for preparation, the draft of 1917 had succeeded, for one reason, because General Crowder had taken carefully into account the report of the Provost-Marshal General of 1865. This contained among other things a survey of the lessons taught by the Civil War, with a list of things not to do if a draft ever had to be undertaken in future. Possibly no other American in 1917 was aware even of the existence of this report, but General Crowder had taken it fully to heart. For the first time in our history, perhaps, the lessons of one great war were studied and turned to profit in preparing for the next. One result of this was to entrust to the country at large the effort and the responsibility of making the draft work: not through Deputy Provost-Marshals (as in 1864), but through volunteer civilian boards in every community, which summoned their fellow citizens to register, sifted out those who were to serve, and sent them off to the designat ed training areas. Only then did the drafted man pass into the hands of the Army. The apparatus of this whole process, which in Europe had been a routine part of the mechanism of the état civil, had to be wholly improvised in the United States — and in a few months’ time. General Payot, one of the outstanding officers of Maréchal Foch’s staff, remarked that this improvised effort, on so immense a scale, was the most surprising achievement in our whole war effort.
The Selective Service Act of 1940 was a private measure, drawn up outside the War Department and introduced without the backing of the Administration. But in its final form it gathered up practically all the lessons of the experience of 1917-1918. A small and inconspicuous office of the War Department kept these lessons alive in a practical sense and, by coöperation with the Governors and the National Guard of the various states, gradually worked out improvements upon the administrative machinery of 1917. Lieutenant Colonel Hershey, who had directed the work of this bureau, took a leading part in explaining to Congressional committees (during the hearings on the Burke-Wadsworth Bill) the practical questions involved in the new phenomenon of peacetime conscription. His success in this had a singularly reassuring and convincing effect in Congress. It became an immense advantage to be able to entrust to him the application of the law, once the Selective Service Act was passed.
There was next the hurdle of actually applying select ive service in peacetime — a thing never imagined before in American history. Although a majority of opinion very clearly had approved the law, the opinion of those to whom it applied was a less known quantity. A large proportion of the opposition press continued to denounce the law as a shattering of American traditions, while Mr. Hanson Baldwin led a chorus of militaryexpert opinion in protesting loudly that the whole thing was a stupid professional blunder. Infantry, in the view of these experts, was a thing of the past; a small mechanized army of professional soldiers was what was needed in 1940 — even to face a German army of 200 divisions! It was folly to expand our ‘highly trained regular forces’ into a mass army—a chaotic aggregation that could be no more than cannon fodder against tanks and dive bombers.
If this view had prevailed, we should now have no prospect of being more than a cheering section for the countries fighting Hitler. Yet this view filled the front page at the time the first contingents of selectees were being called up for service. As a cheering send-off, it loudly assured them that they were being uprooted from a useful life in order to waste their time in the empty forms of outmoded military routine. They were surprised and disgusted not to find themselves riding about in tanks within a week or two after they reached training camps. This was the first step toward the ‘bad morale’ the press exploited so eagerly in the following summer; and for months on end the press and the popular magazines did their best to encourage the new soldier in the view that he was a useless sacrifice to military stupidity.
In retrospect, the whole process of drafting the first contingent seems to have run on oiled wheels; today it would almost seem that there had never been a problem at all. This is in fact the highest praise that can be given. Handled differently, conscription coidd have become an irritating and dangerous and more or less incurable problème àa trois between Congress, the Army, and the country at large. Colonel Hershey handled the matter in such a way that this alignment will not arise, even in the future.
IV
In so vast an effort, working at such pressure, it would be ludicrous to look for perfection at any point: the great thing has been to get the work done. In none of the major tasks it shouldered a year ago has the Department failed. Whatever success our forces may have in the field later on will be due initially to the administrative accomplishment of these past two or three years.
Never before has the Army carried through, in so well-planned and orderly a fashion, the immense task of expanding suddenly from a peacetime framework to a full war establishment. Never before, when mobilization has begun, has there been ready a clear and workable plan for training a large body of civilian soldiers — an essentially different task from that of absorbing occasional batches of recruits into the established routine of a Regular Army unit. General Marshall saw in France the handicaps of the improvised expansion and the improvised training methods we were forced to turn to in 1917. In 1940 he was not caught napping.
Nothing has done more serious harm to the thinking and morale of the country at large than the loudly trumpeted charges by the chorus of critics that the ‘mass army’ was a chaotic and planless effort — a mere groping for larger numbers and size, without a clear idea as to the aims in view. This is exactly the opposite of the fact. The National Defense Act of 1920 (now almost forgotten) set up what might be called an administrative structure within the Army which offered a far sounder basis for expansion than ever before. The plan for this expansion had been worked out at least by the autumn of 1939 — possibly some time earlier. It was in no sense a mysterious secret: a simple chart which summed it up could be seen in General Marshall’s office by any visitor interested in the matter — and the main outlines had been confided to a littleinterested press and public. This plan provided for forming 9 Regular and 18 National Guard divisions — exactly the establishment actually set up in 19401941. Armored units and an increased Air Force were by no means overlooked, but to bring these into being upon a substantial scale depended upon appropriations such as were beyond the wildest stretch of the American imagination in 1939. (By now, Undersecretary Patterson has pointed out, the proportion of armored units to infantry divisions is at least equal to that in the German Army, and the proportion of motorized equipment is much larger.)
This plan, moreover, was no mere paper project; it provided a practical means of expansion by making the fullest use of the materials then available: the officers and men of the Regular Army; the 50,000 or more officers on the active list of the Officers’ Reserve Corps, and all the better-organized units of the National Guard. With the collapse of France, the country suddenly woke up and provided the man-power necessary for bringing the planned army into being. Without waiting, even before the machinery of selective service could be set up, General Marshall immediately formed a special command, under General McNair, with full authority and responsibility for training the forces already in service and the new divisions then being brought into the field.
The striking success of the training program in 1941 has been due first of all to this prompt and farsighted decision. It was out of the question for General Marshall to take charge of training so many divisions in the field and at the same time to carry his work as Chief of Staff in Washington. As Chief of Staff he had to bring before the Administration all matters of general Army policy, to represent the Army when called on by House and Senate committees, to lend a hand in new legislation, to deal with the press and public opinion, to oversee the production of weapons and equipment, and to direct the expansion of our whole military establishment. These duties, moreover, he could not delegate to subordinates or helping hands. He could delegate to General McNair the sweeping authority which would allow him to take full charge of training troops, and of organizing and directing manœuvres, without having to refer things back to the General Staff at every turn for confirmation and approval. The point worth noting is that this critically important fact was appreciated in advance, without waiting for a bottleneck to develop; and at the very outset General McNair was given full control.
The result of this wise decentralization of functions has been that for the past year and a half all the field troops within the United States have formed, in effect, a distinct army under General McNair’s command. As it proved, also, he had a clear and definite idea of what he wanted to do, and the divisions in the field soon realized that they were not marking time or puttering along in the mere outward forms of a training routine. By the autumn of 1941, General McNair had acquired the additional authority built up from the fact that every corps and every divisional commander in the Army shared the opinion that his appointment had put the right man in the right place. The success of this measure has now been reaffirmed by General McNair’s appointment to the new post of Commanding General of the Ground Forces. (‘ Ground Forces’ is a singularly unmilitary phrase; why not ‘Field Armies’?) It is not so much a change as an extension and a formal recognition of the authority he has exercised with such outstanding success during the past year.
V
Least of all is it true that this building up of the Army according to previous plans involved the ‘shattering’ of a highly trained Regular Army. Such was the lament set up for a year and a half by the ‘mass army’ critics, led by Mr. Hanson Baldwin, who sees no hope of safety outside the Regular Army and the professional soldier. In his volume United We Stand (which appeared early in 1941) Mr. Baldwin complained: ‘We are attempting to expand our mobile forces from three infantry divisions in September, 1939, to twenty-seven in the spring of 1941. . . .’ This mistaken effort, he added, would ruin the Regular divisions in order to build up a ‘pudgy amorphous mass.’ This is no stray individual comment. It is the main theme chanted for so long by all the hostile critics of our military policy.
It would be hard to imagine a more complete misstatement of the actual facts. First of all, 18 of the 27 infantry divisions were National Guard divisions in existence long before 1938. They came into Federal service with their own cadres of officers and their own personnel: in no sense did they represent an ‘expansion’ of the Regular Army. Next, the three Regular divisions of 1939 themselves might fairly have been called a ‘pudgy amorphous mass’: they had recently been assembled for the first time from fragments of the Regular Army previously scattered about in many small posts. Whether or not they were professional soldiers, they were the very opposite of trained and seasoned divisions. In point of fact, nothing could be more misleading than to apply the timehonored phrase, ‘a small but highly trained army,’ to the Regular forces of the two decades following the World War. The active service of the old days (on the frontier or in the Philippines) was gone once and for all. The divisions were scattered in small permanent posts and never assembled for large-scale manœuvres; in many ways this became one of the most stagnant periods in the Army’s history.
In respect to the Army, the period of post-war economy continued into the second Roosevelt administration. By 1937 or so, no unit of the Regular Army had ever seen a force of tanks in action in field manœuvres; no division had ever been engaged as a unit in manœuvres against another division; no unit was familiar with weapons of a more modern type than those left over from World War I. The ‘highly trained force of professional soldiers’ was still the accepted slogan, but in reality it was no more than a rhetorical fiction. By its weapons and equipment, and by the opportunities for training allowed it, our army was no longer able to take its place in a modern line of battle.
This was made clear by the critique of the Regular Army manœuvres in Louisiana, in the spring of 1940, drawn up by the Commanding General directing the operation. This critique, moreover, was confided to the press without delay; the full text appeared in the Army and Navy Journal. After this, it was clear to those in authority that the time had come for a fresh start. By this time, also, half or more of the rank and file were green recruits: Regulars or not, they were no more professional soldiers than the draftees of the coming year. Whether the army was to be organized on a basis of 5 or 50 divisions, in the matter of training it would be necessary to start from scratch.
This, in a word, was the task General Marshall and General McNair set to work on for 1941. The arrival of the selectees made it possible (for the first time since 1919) to bring units up to full strength; and with few exceptions more than half the strength of each division in 1941 was made up of selectees. But all selectees and new recruits were put through a carefully planned period of field training over a period of thirteen weeks — a professional initiation far more thorough than ever had been given new recruits by the Regular Army. Next, every division was kept steadily at work in the field — first in exercises by divisions, and then by entire Army corps. By the end of the season every division and corps had taken part in Army manœuvres on a scale never before attempted in this country.
The Carolina manœuvres, in November, brought into the field 300,000 men, with more than 40,000 vehicles and tanks: there entered into the fray two Army commands; an air force for each army; five Army corps; and thirteen combat divisions — a much larger force than the whole army which made the opening attack of the Meuse-Argonne. All in all, the forces General McNair brought up to the point of being able to play the game in large-scale manœuvres comprised more Army and corps commands than all those the AEF brought into battle in 1918.
The point is that this is the first time such a thing has happened in the history of the United States. In 1917, as in 1861, no officer in active command had ever seen a division of American troops actually gathered together in the flesh. No officer had had the experience of actual command of large units of troops. In 1917 it was still an undetermined question what an American division would consist of if such a thing were to come into existence — and the question remained unanswered until Pershing reached France. Such a thing as an organized headquarters of an American division or Army corps was a purely hypothetical entity. In 1941 all these have been brought into being.
When over half the personnel of an army were civilians in civilian clothes in January or February, it would be absurd to pretend that by the end of November that army was ready for battle. Both General Marshall and General McNair then offered the sensible reminder that there was still a good deal of ground to cover before these combat units would be ready to take their place in a modern line of battle. Many of them had not yet received their full equipment of the newer types of weapons. But the fact remains that all these units were in a higher state of training than any American division had been before it entered the line in France: no division of 1918 had ever carried its training to the point of taking part in corps and Army manœuvres. For the first time in our history we have Commands and Staffs who have been given — in time of peace — the actual experience of handling large units in the field.
VI
In all this accomplishment, the Army was hard at work long before the general public or the press was prepared to pay attention to what was being done. Even today there is little appreciation of the importance of the new policies thus carried through. So, likewise, in the recent reorganization of the General Staff, the Army has not yielded to ‘the necessity of a change,’ but has taken the initiative and acted long in advance of public opinion.
Least of all is this change a sweeping away of ‘rusty and incompetent bureaus.’ For all practical purposes, the organization of real powers and authority at the War Department derives from the reforms of Elihu Root. Before him, in effect, there was no General Staff. In order to bring into a real and workable subordination the planless and haphazard War Department of earlier days, Root had to create a Chief of Staff with real authority over every bureau and every branch of the service. The thing was not accomplished without a fight. It took the full weight of Theodore Roosevelt’s administration to overmaster the Mandarin régime of jealously independent bureau chiefs—firmly entrenched in a sort of feudal power by adroit legislative provisions. Following that conflict, it took the full authority conferred on the Chief of Staff to enable Leonard Wood to achieve a final decision. By unsparing use of this same authority, General March rescued the Department from the collapse that threatened in the midst of World War I; and by the strength of this central authority General Marshall has been able to carry through the present expansion of the Army.
But all this was achieved at the cost of the Chief of Staff being responsible for every phase of the Army’s work. The centralized control necessary to carry through a basic reform was an impossible and thoroughly unsound administrative burden for a Chief of Staff who has to direct an army in time of war.
The decentralization now put into force follows well-tried and proven lines. The tripartite divisions of functions and authority which has long been the basis of every well-organized European army falls into three distinct tasks: command of troops; General Staff; administration and supply. This in fact was the ultimate aim of the process of reform which Elihu Root got under way. It has been achieved, at last, in March 1942.
The ‘command of troops’ passes to General McNair and General Arnold, as heads of the Field Army and the Air Forces. All the branches of administration and supply are grouped together under a single head: the Quartermaster and Ordnance Departments; the AGO; the Army finances; the Judge Advocate General’s Department; the medical services, and all the others. The General Staff has at last been freed from administrative tasks and can devote itself to its proper duties of war plans and the specific direction of military policy. The streamlining of our higher command in 1942 is thus in no way a risky or experimental venture. Its effect will be to put the Chief of Staff and his subordinate organization in a far better position for carrying on the direction and management of an army in time of war.