MacArthur's Turn
ARMY & NAVY
(See front cover)
The month of Mars, 1935, could be set down positively last week by historians as the moment when the Great Powers frankly abandoned all the hopes and pretenses of the post-War peace period and openly squared away to rearm. With only two exceptions, "national defense" is each government's official reason for rearming, but that does not alter the exciting spectacle of seven major nations simultaneously girding themselves to fight, on land as well as at sea.
P: Japan's and Italy's military expansions are least exciting because their motives are most obvious. Their plans for Manchuria and Abyssinia have been accepted by the world as their own respective businesses.
P: Red Russia has practically doubled her world's largest standing Army from a half-million to nearly a million men (TIME, Feb.11).
P: France's 1935 defense budget of $792,000,000 is the hugest peacetime appropriation in her history. And last week the Chamber of Deputies upped the Army conscript period from 12 to 18 and 24 months for the next five years while the lean "War Baby" classes are being called to the colors.
P: England made her rearmament move, after long reluctance, in last fortnight's determined White Paper (see p. 21).
P: And last week Adolf Hitler, casting to the winds his last semblance of obedience to the Treaty of Versailles, calling for a German conscript Army of half a million men (see p. 20), set all Europe seething with the most real war talk in 21 years.
$755,000,000, U. S. citizens could know for sure last week what their Government is going to do about Rearmament. With several minor alterations, the Senate passed the House's bill of appropriations for the War Department and the bill went to conference, whence it would soon emerge for final passage and the President's signature. Carrying some $400,000,000, all but $50,000,000 for the Army, it is the biggest U. S. armaments expenditure since 1921. And, barring the possibility of the passage of an amendment sponsored by Senator Borah prohibiting the use of work relief money for rearmament, coupled to it will be some $405,000,000 from the Public Works Administration, to be spent in 36 states on Army buildings, repairs, Air Corps, mechanization and motorization. As in the case of England, most of these vast expenditures will represent the rehabilitation of war machinery that was allowed to run down during the peace-tuned 1920's. To the man responsible for obtaining such big figures, and for spending the money when voted, the 1935 Army budget represents a personal triumph and a national insurance policy.
Holdover Chief. Every year since he became Chief of Staff in 1930, General Douglas MacArthur had vainly pleaded for funds to build the military establishment up to what he considered minimum requirements. Just as success seemed about to come to him, his four-year tour of duty, fixed by law, ran out last November. By an unprecedented executive order, President Roosevelt continued General MacArthur in office indefinitely to help Secretary of War Dern press the Army's "modernization" plans before Congress.
General MacArthur's first assets in his assault on Capitol Hill were charm and eloquence. He was able to call many members of the House Military Affairs Committee by their first names. Democrats were moved when the Army's No. 1 fighting man, relating his financial woes in Hoover times, declared: "I have humiliated myself seeking allotments to replace leaking, slum-like barracks housing our soldiers. I have almost licked the boots of some gentlemen to get funds for motorization and mechanization of the Army. . . . Unless we move quickly we'll be a beaten nation paying huge indemnities after the next war!''
G. H. Q. If any government department is not run by its politically-appointed Secretary, it is the War Department. George Henry Dern, good Democrat and Utah's onetime Governor, sits in the Secretary's office on the "War side" of the old State, War & Navy rookery on Pennsylvania Avenue. Onetime Secretary of War Jefferson Davis' clock ticks on the mantel behind him. Overhead in a case is the flag which draped Abraham Lincoln's coffin. In an anteroom is a comfortable couch where Secretary Dern refreshes himself with an occasional nap. In an office nearby sits John W. Martyn, the chief civil continuing officer of the War Department. Assistant Martyn's job for years has been to tell succeeding Secretaries what to do next.
Actual operators of the War Department's chief charge* are the General Staff, composed of the Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief and five Assistant Chiefs, professional soldiers all. After that victorious fiasco, the War with Spain, wise Elihu Root perceived that running even a standing army of 25,000 was a task too intricate for the civilian chief of the War Department, of which he was then Secretary. Under his direction the Army's command was radically reorganized in 1903, the General Staff system adapted from the British, French and Germans.
At the top of the military pyramid, Chief of Staff MacArthur has at his right hand a Deputy: Major General George S. Simonds, a brilliant onetime commandant of the War College and former armaments adviser to the Geneva Disarmament Conference.
Each of the five Assistant Chiefs is selected to advise the Chief within a special field. They are picked for intellect rather than exploits. All of the present Assistants (see pp. 16 & 17) are veterans of both the Spanish-American and World Wars, though none has commanded a division in the field. Two out of five are non-West Pointers, a just proportion since the ratio of Military Academy graduates to non-graduates among Army officers is about 1-to-4.
G-I (Personnel) is Brigadier General Andrew Moses, field artilleryman and expert on materiel. Brigadier General Harry Knight, who entered the Army from the New York militia during the Spanish-American War, is G-2 (Intelligence). G-3 (Operations & Training) is Brigadier General John H. Hughes, who got out of West Point in 1897, just in time to be wounded in Cuba. Brigadier General Charles Sherman Lincoln, G-4 (Supply), started out to be a farmer by graduating from the Iowa State College of Agriculture, enlisted in the ranks in 1895, won his commission in 1898.
During the Spanish-American War, Brigadier General Charles E. Kilbourne, born to the Army but a V. M. I. man, climbed up a telegraph pole to mend a wire under rifle fire. So doing, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor. In France his gallantry got him the D. S. C. From War Plans Division he has just been transferred to strategic Manila, to take charge of harbor defenses. His successor on the General Staff is Brigadier General Stanley D. Embick, U. S. chief on the Supreme War Council and a Peace Conference delegate.
Service Chiefs. After the General Staff come the Arms & Service chiefs: Chiefs of Infantry, Coast Artillery, Air Corps, Medical Department and twelve other services. They report directly to the Chief of Staff. Their prime function is to supervise training in their service schools.
Nine Corps. The actual fighting strength of the Army is divided into nine corps areas in the U. S., Alaska and Puerto Rico and the Hawaiian, Panama and Philippine Departments. These are administered by Major Generals who usually are alumni of or headed for the General Staff. From the corps commander, the Army's organization traces directly down through the division, brigade, regiment, battalion, company, platoon and squad to the man who fires the gun.
Men. When Douglas MacArthur took over command of the Army in 1930 he was assuming charge of a failing concern. Its personnel totaled 129,903 officers and men, less than half the number approved by the National Defense Act of 1920. Detachments for garrisons in the territories and dependencies, for general administration, for militia, R. O. T. C. and reserve officer extension training, for service schools, brought the number of available mobile troops in the U. S. down to 56,779. This was considerably less, as General MacArthur was quick to point out, than the 100,000 troops allowed by the Versailles treaty to the 65,000,000 people of beaten Germany.
The MacArthur administration will go down in General Staff history as the one in which the Army's fighting strength was revived. The new appropriations bill includes $20,000,000 for 46,250 more men.
Materiel. Even more important to the Army is the promise of adequate and up-to-date supplies of ordnance and materiel. "By 1930," General MacArthur reported last December, "important classes of equipment left to the Army as a legacy of the World War were either almost completely used up or were approaching mechanical exhaustion."
General MacArthur began laying plans to have specifications and samples of proper equipment ready if ever the country should decide to rearm. With what money there was available, he began motorizing small units. In 1933 a squadron of the 7th Cavalry "marched" 630 mi. across Texas desert country in half the time it would have taken on horseback. A pair of fast, efficient tanks, T-2 and T4, were evolved. Also perfected was the Garand semi-automatic rifle, which General MacArthur calls the world's best.
Some of the Army's new money will be spent for the following:
Improved munitions supplies $45,000,000
Modernization of field artillery 37,000,000
New anti-aircraft equipment 35,000,000
Automotive equipment 22,189,000
Mechanization 16,000,000
New types of equipment 18,000,000
The Army expects to spend $11,000,000 on a new Hawaiian air base, to shove the U. S. first line of defense 2,000 mi. westward (TIME, Feb. 18). To coast defense projects would go $23,000,000, to the Air Corps, $90,000,000 to bring it up to 2,320-plane strength. New barracks and landing fields will cost another $44,600,000.
Chief of Staff, Professional soldiers, who rate General MacArthur the most brilliant Chief of Staff since Wartime General Peyton C. March, speak as highly of his innovations in the Army's higher tactical organization as they do of his wangling money from Congress. For Douglas MacArthur is a curious mixture of philosopher and politician, gallant and grind.
When Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur violated all etiquet expected of a military observer and charged up the hill with the Japanese soldiers at Mukden; when Colonel Douglas MacArthur behaved as no Divisional Chief of Staff ordinarily does and attacked a German machine gun nest with a bayonet on the du Feys salient; when Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur refused to pass a buck which had been passed to him and personally directed the ousting of the 1032 Bonus Army from Washington--he was merely obeying impulses like the one which sent Lieutenant Arthur MacArthur tearing up Missionary Ridge in 1863 to plant his Union colors on the Rebel breastworks. For that deed of valor, Arthur MacArthur got a Congressional Medal of Honor, the only important bestowal in the U. S. Army which his son has missed.
Son of a Lieutenant General, who capped his career by his able administration of the Philippines, it was only natural that Douglas MacArthur should go to West Point. His slim-fingered hands were as adept at fielding a baseball as they were at turning in perfect mechanical drawings. He was graduated first in his class and First Captain of the Cadet Corps, which is all you can do at West Point, a record matching those of John Joseph Pershing and Charles Pelot Summerall. A vital, handsome young officer, "Doug" MacArthur soon earned the respect and reliance of his superiors. And wherever he went the hearts of Army ladies fluttered. They still do.
He got the most interesting details the Army had to offer, was one of Roosevelt I's aides in 1906-07, went to Vera Cruz in 1914 and when War came was already attached to the General Staff in Washington. It was MacArthur's idea to form a National Army division from militia troops of the various states to make the folks back home as quickly War-conscious as possible. He became the outfit's Chief of Staff. It became known as the "Rainbow" (42nd) Division and at the end of the War MacArthur, at 38, was in command. Fellow officers now recall that it was worth one's life to go to MacArthur's headquarters. He habitually located it up between his assault battalions because that shortened his line of communications.
Back home, and back to the Lieutenant-Coloneley with which he entered the War, "Doug" MacArthur shone in the social firmament of post-War Washington. He entered the competition for the hand of vivacious Louise Cromwell, step-daughter of potent Edward T. Stotesbury, and won. General Pershing's aide lost, which did not ease the friction which still exists between the Chief of Staff and the retired General of the Armies. Known as the "Kid General" during the War, MacArthur was given command first of the Fourth Corps Area, then of the Third, a time-killing process necessary before he could reasonably be made Chief of Staff. The year he took the Army's highest job his divorced wife married Actor Lionel Atwill.
"Four Army Plan." General MacArthur's trips to Europe in 1931 and 1932 were not quite the pleasure junkets which gossips imagined. He was investigating with the concentration of his student days the organization plans of foreign armies. Nor did his conventional forays into Washington society (he much prefers less formal fun) give proper perspective to the long evenings spent at his office and home across the Potomac at Fort Myer, digesting and arranging the material he had gathered. Result of these studies was his ''Four-Army Plan" of mobilization and command.
"Until 1932," according to the General, "there was no complete chain of tactical control paralleling the administrative system represented in the corps area commands. Consequently the American Army, if mobilized for field service, would have comprised . . . simply a collection of skeletonized divisions, each reporting directly to the War Department."
With the executive genius for which RKO wanted to pay him $30,000 a year if he would leave the Service, General MacArthur grouped the nine corps areas into four army areas: (1) North Atlantic States, (2) Upper Mississippi Basin, (3) Southern & Southwestern States, (4) Western. & Northwestern States. In emergency, these four Field Armies would probably be placed in command of the Army's ranking generals. Each corps commander would still function within his own "zone of the interior," attending to matters of mobilization, supply, training and transport on his own familiar ground, while his Army commander took over the broader "theatre of operations." Designed to "place emphasis upon instant availability of a maximum proportion of existing forces," the Four-Army Plan eliminates much costly delay and confusion during the early and critical days of conflict. Such an innovation, calling for reorganization and amplification of the echelons of command from G. H. Q. down, required tireless indoctrination and was not accomplished merely by issuing a general order. A comparable task would be scrambling and rewiring under an entirely different system New York City's telephone exchange.
In New Jersey last autumn the plan received its first field test. Troops were not used, but lines of communication and Staffs were actually set up by the First and Second Army commands, to operate under War conditions.
A further test of the plan will come this summer in upper New York State, when some 60,000 regular and militia troops will be concentrated near Watertown. For this grandest of U. S. peacetime military games, Congress is expected to earmark $447,000.
Doctrines of War. A basic principle of modern military strategy is the Decisive first punch. Contrary to belief of most U. S. laymen, their nation, with the smallest standing Army of any great power, with a tradition for an Army in embryo rather than an Army in being, is amazingly well equipped to deal just such a punch defensively or offensively anywhere on its own continent.
The U. S. Army has four unique and potent mobilization aces up its olive drab sleeve. For all the Army's poor-mouth talk, the U. S. has on hand equipment for 1,000,000 men, largely old War stores. The method of its maintenance is the one U. S. military secret foreign nations would like to know.
Second ace is the National Guard, 185,000 men whom the Army has helped bring to tip-top fighting trim in the past decade and who constitute the potent Second Wave after the regulars.
Third ace is the 114,000 reserve officers, who, having completed their four years of instruction in college, are subject to a fortnight's training every year and are encouraged to raise their rank through extension courses.
The last ace is psychological, but figures heavily in the Army's War plans. With the exception of the 1846 War with Mexico, violent popular opinion has sent the U. S. into all its conflicts. From this mass will-to-fight the Army expects a traditional surge of volunteers which will fill the ranks commanded by reserve officers.
The fact that the U. S. has no natural enemies makes the task of the Army more difficult. It does not know whether it will have to go to War in a pith helmet or on snowshoes, must maintain and know how to use both.
The average Naval officer, imbued with his service's tradition for headlong gallantry, jovially declares that the politicians make the Wars and the Navy fights them, that Naval policies merely follow national policies. More philosophic, the Army man ponders historic moments when popular diplomacy ran afoul of military foresight. For example, from the military point of view Theodore Roosevelt committed the gravest folly when, instead of letting the belligerents fight each other to their knees, he stopped the Russo-Japanese War with a peaceful parley and advanced the present Far Eastern problem by 100 years. The watchword of the cautious, far-seeing Army is SAFETY. And the Army's G. H. Q., looking out across the two oceans, sees almost no peace anywhere today.
* Besides the Army, the War Department is in charge of: rivers & harbors improvement, the Panama Canal, Inland Waterways Corp. (barge services), the Philippines, the Dominican customs receivership.
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