From 1931 onward a number of senior officers of the Army had frequently expressed to me their conviction that the world was heading straight toward another global war. I shared these views. It seemed clear that every action of the dictatorships in Japan, Germany, and Italy pointed to their determination to seize whatever territories they might happen to want, and that these ambitions would early force democratic nations into conflict. Many believed, however, that in pushing England and France to war Hitler had at last miscalculated.
They reasoned that the French Army and the British Navy together would beat him into submission; not only did they scorn the reports of skilled observers who cast suspicion on the legend of French military efficiency but they failed to consider the record of the German General Staff for striking only when cold-blooded calculations gave promise of quick success.
I called upon the President of the Philippines and told him I wanted to return home to take part in the work of intensive preparation which I was now certain would begin in the United States. President Manuel Quezon urged me to stay, but my mind was made up. I requested permission to leave the islands before the end of the year.
When my wife, my son John, and I left Manila in December, General MacArthur saw us off at the pier. It was the last time I was to see him until my postwar visit, as Chief of Staff, to his Tokyo headquarters. We talked of the gloominess of world prospects, but our forebodings turned toward Europe—not Asia.
Our trip home took us through Japan, where we spent a few days in the coastal cities. At that time numbers of American Army officers made casual tours of Japan and there was nothing unusual about a transitory visit from another lieutenant colonel. Yet a rather unusual incident occurred. Scarcely had we gone through the formalities of landing when we met, apparently by pure chance, a Japanese graduate of an American university, who described himself as an assistant postmaster general. He said he knew, from friends of his, of the nature of my work in the Philippines and, while he asked no specific questions, he was much interested in my impressions of the Filipino people. He attached himself to us as a guide for the duration of our stay. He helped us shop, taking the lead in beating down prices; he took us to vantage points for interesting views, and in a dozen ways made himself agreeable and helpful. The burden of his conversation was the need for friendly understanding between his country and ours, for which he professed great admiration and affection. He seemed to have unlimited time to devote to us and I assumed that he made it a practice to meet and talk with visiting Americans, possibly in nostalgic memory of his student days. Some weeks later, however, when I mentioned him to others who had passed through Japan shortly before or after that period, I found no one who had met him or any other governmental official.
In early January 1940, I arrived in the United States and was assigned to troop duty with the 15th Infantry at Fort Lewis, Washington. After eight years of desk and staff duty in the rarefied atmosphere of military planning and pleading, I was again in daily contact with the two fundamental elements of military effort—men and weapons.
No better assignment than mine could have been asked by a professional soldier at a time when much of the world was already at war and the eventual involvement of the United States daily became more probable. In large part the troops of the 15th were either seasoned veterans who had been with the regiment in China before its 1938 return to the States, or volunteers who had recently enlisted; the officers were all professionals.
In case of war such outfits would be the bulwark of American defense and the spearhead of our retaliation, should there be a sudden attack on us. Given time to expand our military forces, they would provide the cadres around which would be built hundreds of battalions, and from their ranks would come instructors to convert recruits by the hundred thousand into trained soldiers. In either instance there was unlimited opportunity for men and officers to prove their professional worth.
In early 1940, however, the United States Army mirrored the attitudes of the American people, as is the case today and as it was a century ago. The mass of officers and men lacked any sense of urgency. Athletics, recreation, and entertainment took precedence in most units over serious training. Some of the officers, in the long years of peace, had worn for themselves deep ruts of professional routine within which they were sheltered from vexing new ideas and troublesome problems. Others, bogged down in one grade for many years because seniority was the only basis for promotion, had abandoned all hope of progress. Possibly many of them, and many of the troops too, felt that the infantryman’s day had passed.
The number of infantrymen assigned to organized units in the Army had been reduced from 56,000 on July 1, 1939, to 49,000 on January 31, 1940.6 On the face of things, to the average foot soldier who could not foresee his role in Europe or the Pacific, this reduction might with reason have been interpreted as a sign of his early disappearance from the military scene.
The situation in weapons and equipment added little to the infantryman’s esprit. The Springfield rifle was outmoded; there was no dependable defense against a modern tank or plane; troops carried wooden models of mortars and machine guns and were able to study some of our new weapons only from blueprints. Equipment of all sorts was lacking and much of that in use had been originally produced for the national Army of World War I.
Moreover, military appropriations during the thirties had restricted training to a unit basis. Even small-arms ammunition for range firing had to be rationed in occasional doles. The Army concentrated on spit and polish, retreat formations, and parades because the American people, in their abhorrence of war, denied themselves a reasonable military posture.
Military doctrine and theory, consequently, could not be supplemented with practical application; officers and men did not have the assurance that comes only with field experience and the tests of use. Nevertheless, it was apparent that the War Department was moving as rapidly as possible to be ready for the inevitable climax. Laborious preparation, against almost unbelievable difficulties, went on under the determined leadership of General Marshall. The handicaps were many.
The greatest obstacle was psychological—complacency still persisted! Even the fall of France in May 1940 failed to awaken us—and by “us” I mean many professional soldiers as well as others—to a full realization of danger. The commanding general of one United States division, an officer of long service and high standing, offered to bet, on the day of the French armistice, that England would not last six weeks longer—and he proposed the wager much as he would have bet on rain or shine for the morrow. It did not occur to him to think of Britain as the sole remaining belligerent standing between us and starkest danger. His attitude was typical of the great proportion of soldiers and civilians alike. Happily there were numerous exceptions whose devoted efforts accomplished more than seemed possible.
Despite the deepening of congressional concern, the nation was so unprepared to accept the seriousness of the world outlook that training could not be conducted in realistic imitation of the battlefield. We had to carry it on in soothing-syrup style calculated to rouse the least resentment from the soldiers themselves and from their families at home. Many senior officers stood in such fear of a blast in the headlines against exposing men to inclement weather or to the fatigue of extended maneuvers that they did not prescribe the only type of training that would pay dividends once the bullets began to fly. Urgent directives from above and protest from the occasional “alarmist” could not eliminate an apathy that had its roots in comfort, blindness, and wishful thinking.
The induction of the National Guard sharply increased the Army’s numerical strength, particularly in infantry and anti-aircraft. Although undermanned, underequipped, and undertrained, the organizational structure of the Guard outfits was complete; only recruits, equipment, time, and the right kind of training were needed to make them effective.
Bright spots in the military picture gradually emerged. Congress in the fall of 1940 provided some money for critically n
eeded field training. This training, under the supervision of Major General, later Lieutenant General, Lesley J. McNair, one of our ablest officers, became the chief preoccupation of the Army. From Fort Lewis the 15th Infantry, as part of the 3d Infantry Division, went on extended field maneuvers to outlying districts in the state of Washington and to the Monterey Peninsula, some distance south of San Francisco. The attendant marches, logistic planning, tactical problems, and necessary staff work provided the best possible schools for officers and men, both Regular and emergency. One of these problems involved an eleven-hundred-mile motor march, from Fort Lewis to the Jolon Ranch, south of Monterey, California. We assumed tactical conditions and during the movement tested out our control procedures, communication systems, and march discipline.
While serving in the 3d Division, I renewed a friendship of my cadet days with Major Mark W. Clark. He and I worked together constantly in many phases of the field exercises we both so much enjoyed, and I gained a lasting respect for his planning, training, and organizing ability, which I have not seen excelled in any other officer. But in answer to the rapidly expanding needs of the new headquarters springing up all over the country he soon went to Washington as an assistant to General McNair, while, in November, I was again removed from direct command duty to become the chief of staff of the 3d Division. That post was to be mine only four months, when again I was transferred, this time to be chief of staff of the IX Army Corps, which had shortly before been established at Fort Lewis. This assignment brought me my first emergency promotion; I became a temporary colonel in March 1941.
The corps commander was Major General Kenyon A. Joyce. On his staff I met an exceptionally keen group of men, three of whom I tried, with some success, to keep close to me throughout the ensuing war years. These were all of relatively low rank at the time but they emerged from the war as Lieutenant General Lucian K. Truscott, Major General Willard G. Wyman, and Colonel James Curtis. Such men as these were ready, even anxious, to support every measure that promised to add realism and thoroughness to training, but it was an uphill fight.
During the spring of 1941 every post and camp was astir with the business of building the Army of the United States, into which had been fused all elements of the country’s military front—Regular, Guard, and Reserve, augmented by the hundreds of thousands of men inducted through Selective Service. For us at Fort Lewis the process of development began on September 16, 1940, when the advance echelon of the 41st Infantry Division arrived on the post. Within a short time the entire division and other units of the National Guard were encamped there.
By the following spring the entire West Coast area was in a state of almost endless movement—men arriving in groups for assignment to units; cadres of men being withdrawn from units to form new organizations; officers and men leaving for and returning from specialist schools; cities of tents and barracks with all the multiple utilities of modern living—hospitals, water systems, light and power plants—springing up overnight where before had been open fields.
Our objective was to turn out physically fit men, schooled in their military and technical jobs, adjusted to discipline and unit teamwork, with the greatest possible measure of a soldier’s pride in his mission; because of public unreadiness to support true battle training we could not hope to turn out masses of toughened fighting men, emotionally and professionally ready for warfare.
But even our limited objective absorbed all the energy officers and men could give it. For those on staff work the days became ceaseless rounds of planning, directing, inspecting; compromising what had been commanded with what could be done; adjusting assignments of men and quotas of vehicles to the shortages that continually plagued us; striving always to keep pace in our area with the Army-wide pace.
In June 1941, I was assigned to Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Third Army as his chief of staff at San Antonio headquarters. There I was brought closer to the problems of the Army of the United States as a whole. The four tactical armies, into which the ground forces were divided, varied in numerical strength; but all were alike in their core of Regular units, around which had been assembled the Guard outfits, with vacancies in all units filled by Reserve officers and soldiers from Selective Service. Consequently the reports coming across my desk at Fort Sam Houston on the training, morale, and capacity of our divisions and units in the field were accurate indications of our progress throughout the United States.
The situation contrasted favorably to that of a year earlier. The Army of the United States now totaled approximately 1,500,000 officers and men. However, grave deficiencies still existed. Vehicles, modern tanks, and anti-aircraft equipment were critically short. Supporting air formations were almost non-existent. Moreover, the approaching expiration of a year’s service for National Guard units and Selective Service soldiers was a constant worry, not to be relieved until two months later. In June we feared the exodus of men, beginning in September, would not be matched by a comparable inflow.
But even the rapid growth of the Army and the latest manifestations of Axis military power had not jolted some Regular officers out of their rigid devotion to obsolete tenets and routine. For their blindness there was no longer an acceptable excuse. In the civilian components another type of difficulty was encountered. Many Guard and Reserve officers had grown old in the prewar struggle to maintain a citizen security force, and now that their efforts of the twenties and thirties were bearing fruit, they themselves were physically unable to meet the demands of field duty in combat echelons.
General Krueger himself was one of the senior officers of the Army. A private, corporal, and sergeant in the late 1890s, he had an Army-wide reputation as a hard-bitten soldier. But through more than forty years of service he had kept pace with every military change, and few officers had a clearer grasp of what another war would demand of the Army; few were physically tougher or more active. Relentlessly driving himself, he had little need of driving others—they were quick to follow his example.
His Third Army was now directed to concentrate in Louisiana for a great maneuver, with Lieutenant General Ben Lear’s Second Army as its opponent. Not one of our officers on the active list had commanded a unit as large as a division in the first World War. Like a vast laboratory experiment, the maneuvers would prove the worth of ideas, men, weapons, and equipment. More than 270,000 men—the largest army ever gathered in the United States for a single tactical operation—were assembled by General Krueger that September. Moving out of Second Army camps at the same time were another 130,000.7
The beneficial results of that great maneuver were incalculable. It accustomed the troops to mass teamwork; it speeded up the process of eliminating the unfit; it brought to the specific attention of seniors certain of the younger men who were prepared to carry out the most difficult assignments in staff and command; and it developed among responsible leaders skill in the handling of large forces in the fields. Practical experience was gained in large-scale field supply of troops. No comparable peacetime attempt had ever been made by Americans in the road movement of food, fuel, and ammunition from railhead and depot to a constantly shifting front line. Advance planning, consequently, was thorough and intensive; as is always the case, it paid off.
“The essential effectiveness of supply,” General McNair, expert in the conduct and assessment of maneuvers, told the assembled staffs in a critique of the operations, “was an outstanding feature of the maneuvers. The magnitude of the problem alone was sufficient to warrant apprehension as to whether the troops would be supplied adequately. Combat commanders and the services alike deserve the highest praise for the results achieved.” The efficiency of American trucks in the movement of troops and supply, demonstrated so magnificently three years later in the race across France, was forecast on the roads of Louisiana in September 1941.
In the Third Army the officer directly responsible for supply efficiency was Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy Lutes. His brilliance in this type of work was to bring him, long before the
end of this war, the three stars of a lieutenant general.
Many of the military faults revealed in the maneuvers, General McNair believed, had their root in discipline. “There is no question,” he said, “that many of the weaknesses developed in these maneuvers are repeated again and again for lack of discipline. Our troops are capable of the best of discipline. If they lack it, leadership is faulty. A commander who cannot develop proper discipline must be replaced.”8
During this time I had my first important introduction to the press camera, which, since the days of Brady, has been a prominent feature of the American military scene. In the fall of 1941, however, flash bulbs were a fairly novel element in my daily life and I was only an unknown face to the men who used them. During the critique at Camp Polk a group shot was made of General Krueger, Major E. M. Bolden, a British military observer, and me; in the caption my two companions were correctly identified, but I appeared as “Lt. Col. D. D. Ersenbeing”—at least the initials were right.
The maneuvers provided me with lessons and experience that I appreciated more and more as subsequent months rolled by. We conducted in Louisiana an extensive test of the usefulness of the cub plane for liaison and observation purposes. Its worth was demonstrated so conclusively that later, in the War Department, I was able to argue successfully, under the leadership of Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, for its inclusion in the normal equipment of every division. These planes enabled our heavy and long-range artillery to gain an accuracy and quickness of adjustment previously restricted to the light guns within eyeshot of the target; and field commanders could get a grasp of the tactical situation—terrain, avenues of movement, concentrations of troops and artillery—almost as complete as in the eighteenth century, when the opposing commanders, from horseback or a hillock, could view all the regiments committed to battle.
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