At the end of the maneuvers I was promoted to the temporary grade of brigadier general.
October and November were as busy as the months preceding maneuvers. Measures to correct defects revealed in Louisiana were begun at the unit level; in many cases the return movement offered an immediate opportunity. Some officers, both Regular and National Guard, had of necessity to be relieved from command; controversies and rumors, following on this step, required quick action to prevent injury to morale among officers and troops.
Although the Washington negotiations with the Japanese ambassadors were nearing their dramatic climax at the beginning of December, a relaxation of tenseness among the civilian population was reflected within the Army. It seemed that the Japanese bluff had been called and war, at least temporarily, averted in the Pacific. On the Russian front the Germans had been stopped before Leningrad, Moscow, and Sevastopol. My daily paper, on December 4, editorialized that it was now evident the Japanese had no desire for war with the United States. A columnist a few days later reported that in Washington there was a strong feeling that the crisis in the Pacific had been postponed, although a week earlier betting odds in Washington circles had been 10 to 1 on immediate war.
On the afternoon of December 7 at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, tired out from the long and exhausting staff work of the maneuvers and their aftermath, I went to bed with orders that under no circumstances was I to be disturbed. My dreams were of a two weeks’ leave I was going to take, during which my wife and I were going to West Point to spend Christmas with our plebe son, John. But even dreams like these—and my strict orders—could be shattered with impunity by the aide who brought the news that we were at war.
Within an hour of the Pearl Harbor attack orders began pouring into Third Army Headquarters from the War Department. There were orders for the immediate transfer of anti-aircraft units to the West Coast, where the terrified citizens hourly detected phantom bombers in the sky; orders for the establishment of anti-sabotage measures; orders for careful guarding of industrial plants; orders for reconnaissance along our Southern border to prevent the entrance of spies; and orders to insure the safety of ports along the Gulf of Mexico. There were orders for rushing heavy bodies of troops to the West in anticipation of any attacks the Japanese might contemplate. In turn General Krueger’s headquarters had to send out instructions to a hundred stations as rapidly as they could be prepared and checked. It was a period of intense activity.
Immediacy of movement was the keynote. The normal channels of administration were abandoned; the chain of command was compressed at meetings where all echelons got their instructions in a single briefing; the slow and methodical process of drawing up detailed movement orders that specified to the last jot of equipment what should be taken with the troops, how it should be crated and marked, was ignored. A single telephone call would start an infantry unit across the continent; troops and equipment entrained with nothing in writing to show by what authority they moved. Guns were loaded on flatcars, if flatcars were available; on gondolas if they could be had; in freight cars if nothing else was at hand. The men traveled in de luxe Pullmans, in troop sleepers, in modern coaches, and in day cars that had been obsolete and sidetracked in the yards for a generation and were now drafted for emergency troop movements.
I had five days of this. Early in the morning of December 12 the telephone connecting us directly to the War Department in Washington began to jangle. I answered and someone inquired, “Is that you, Ike?”
“Yes.”
“The Chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away. Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later.” The “Chief” was General Marshall, and the man at the other end of the line was Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, who was later to become my close friend and chief of staff throughout the European operations.
This message was a hard blow. During the first World War every one of my frantic efforts to get to the scene of action had been defeated—for reasons which had no validity to me except that they all boiled down to “War Department orders.” I hoped in any new war to stay with troops. Being ordered to a city where I had already served a total of eight years would mean, I thought, a virtual repetition of my experience in World War I. Heavyhearted, I telephoned my wife to pack a bag, and within the hour I was headed for the War Department.
I had probably been ordered to Washington, I decided, because of my recently completed tour in the Philippines. Within a matter of hours after their assault on Pearl Harbor the Japanese had launched against the Philippines an air attack that quickly reduced our inadequate air forces to practical impotence.9 It was the spot upon which official and public interest was centered, and General Marshall undoubtedly wanted someone on his staff who was reasonably familiar with conditions then current in the islands, who was acquainted with both the Philippines Department of the United States Army and the defense organization of the Philippines Commonwealth, which war had caught halfway in its planned development.
The Commonwealth defense organization dated back to 1935, when General MacArthur was asked by newly elected President Quezon to plan and build a military force able to defend the islands; on July 4, 1946, when the Commonwealth was to become an independent republic, United States troops were to be withdrawn and armed defense would thereafter be a Philippines function. On General MacArthur’s acceptance, a military mission of American officers was formed and I was assigned to it as his senior assistant.
In 1935 we planned to turn out each year during the coming ten, through a program of universal military training, approximately 30,000 soldiers with five and a half months’ basic experience. At first we would form units of only platoon size, but within four or five years we hoped to produce regiments and by 1946, with a total of 300,000 men who had the minimum basic training, we would be able to form thirty divisions.
During the same transitional period the Philippines Department of the United States Army, while working closely with the Commonwealth defense force and supplying it with officer and enlisted instructors, arms, and equipment, was planning also for its own part in defense should war come before Philippine independence. In such a contingency it was planned to withdraw our troops on the main island of Luzon into the Bataan Peninsula across from Corregidor so that the two areas would constitute one almost impregnable position where our forces could hold until reinforcements arrived. In 1938, I witnessed a maneuver demonstrating this plan, and shortly after I left the islands it was repeated on a larger scale.
Traveling to Washington on December 12, 1941, I had no clear idea of the progress of fighting in the Philippines. The reports we had received at Fort Sam Houston were fragmentary and obscure. Undoubtedly the Japanese would not dare by-pass the islands. But the direction and weight of their assault was still unknown when I arrived at the War Department.
Chapter 2
GLOBAL
WAR
WASHINGTON IN WARTIME HAS BEEN VARIOUSLY described in numbers of pungent epigrams, all signifying chaos. Traditionally the government, including the service departments, has always been as unprepared for war and its all-embracing problems as the country itself; and the incidence of emergency has, under an awakened sense of overwhelming responsibility, resulted in confusion, intensified by a swarming influx of contract seekers and well-meaning volunteers. This time, however, the War Department had achieved a gratifying level of efficiency before the outbreak of war. So far as my own observations during the months I served there would justify a judgment, this was due to the vision and determination of one man, General Marshall. Naturally he had support. He was backed up by the President and by many of our ablest leaders in Congress and in key positions in the Administration. But it would have been easy for General Marshall, during 1940–41, to drift along with the current, to let things slide in anticipation of a normal end to a brilliant military career—for he had earned, throughout the professional Army, a reputation for brilliance. Instead he had for many months deliberately followed the h
ard way, determined that at whatever cost to himself or to anyone else the Army should be decently prepared for the conflict which he daily, almost hourly, expected.
I reported to General Marshall early on Sunday morning, December 14, and for the first time in my life talked to him for more than two minutes at a time. It was the fourth time I had ever seen him. Without preamble or waste of time the Chief of Staff outlined the general situation, naval and military, in the western Pacific.
The Navy informed him that the Pacific fleet would be unable for some months to participate in major operations. The Navy’s carriers remained intact because they had not been at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack,1 but supporting vessels for the carriers were so few in number that great restrictions would have to be placed upon their operation. Moreover, at that moment there was no assurance that the Japanese would not quickly launch a major amphibious assault upon Hawaii or possibly even upon the mainland, and the Navy felt that these carriers should be reserved for reconnaissance work and defense, except only when some great emergency demanded from them other employment. The Navy Department had given General Marshall no estimate of the date when they expected the fleet to be sufficiently repaired and strengthened to take offensive action in the Pacific area.
The garrison in Hawaii was so weak that there was general agreement between the War and Navy Departments that its air and ground strength should be reinforced as rapidly as possible and should take priority over other efforts in the Pacific.2
At the time of the Japanese attack American army and air forces in the Philippines had reached an aggregate of 30,000, including the Philippine Scouts,3 formations integrated into the United States Army, but with all enlisted personnel and some of the officers native Filipinos.
United States outfits provided the garrison for Corregidor and its smaller supporting forts. Other American units were organized into the Philippine Division, which consisted of Philippine Scout units and the 31st Infantry Regiment. National Guard units—three field artillery regiments, one anti-aircraft artillery regiment, one infantry regiment, two tank battalions, and service troops—had recently arrived as reinforcements.4
The air strength had been increased during 1941, and on the day of attack there were 35 modern bombers, B-17s, stationed in the Philippines. Present also were 220 airplanes of the fighter type, not all of them in operating readiness.5 General Marshall knew that this air detachment had been hit and badly damaged during the initial Japanese attack, but he had no report upon the circumstances of that action.
There were known to be shortages in essential items of supply, but in the matter of food and normal types of ammunition it was thought there would be little difficulty, provided the garrison was given time to concentrate these at their points of greatest usefulness.
The Navy Yard at Cavite, just outside Manila, had been damaged very severely by Japanese bombers on December 10. That portion of the modest task force comprising the Asiatic Fleet which was disposed at or near Manila consisted mainly of small divisions of submarines. The largest warship in the Asiatic Fleet was the heavy cruiser, Houston, at Iloilo.6
Against a strong and sustained attack, forces such as these could not hold out indefinitely. All the evidence indicated that the Japanese intended to overrun the Philippines as rapidly as possible, and the problem was to determine what could now be done.
General Marshall took perhaps twenty minutes to describe all this, and then abruptly asked, “What should be our general line of action?”
I thought a second and, hoping I was showing a poker face, answered, “Give me a few hours.”
“All right,” he said, and I was dismissed.
Significantly and characteristically, he did not even hint at one of the most important factors in the problem: the psychological effects of the Philippine battle upon people in the United States and throughout the Pacific. Clearly he felt that anyone stupid enough to overlook this consideration had no business wearing the star of a brigadier general.
I took my problem to a desk assigned me in the division of the War Department then known as “War Plans,” headed by my old friend Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow. Obviously, if I were to be of any service to General Marshall in the War Department, I would have to earn his confidence: the logic of this, my first answer, would have to be unimpeachable, and the answer would have to be prompt. A curious echo from the long ago came to my aid.
For three years, soon after the first World War, I served under one of the most accomplished soldiers of our time, Major General Fox Conner. One of the subjects on which he talked to me most was allied command, its difficulties and its problems. Another was George C. Marshall. Again and again General Conner said to me, “We cannot escape another great war. When we go into that war it will be in company with allies. Systems of single command will have to be worked out. We must not accept the ‘co-ordination’ concept under which Foch was compelled to work. We must insist on individual and single responsibility—leaders will have to learn how to overcome nationalistic considerations in the conduct of campaigns. One man who can do it is Marshall—he is close to being a genius.”
With that memory I determined that my answer should be short, emphatic, and based on reasoning in which I honestly believed. No oratory, plausible argument, or glittering generality would impress anyone entitled to be labeled genius by Fox Conner.
The question before me was almost unlimited in its implications, and my qualifications for approaching it were probably those of the average hard-working Army officer of my age. Naturally I had pursued the military courses of the Army’s school system. Soon after completing the War College in 1928, I went to serve as a special assistant in the office of the Assistant Secretary of War, where my duties were quickly expanded to include confidential work for the Chief of Staff of the Army.
In these positions I had been forced to examine world-wide military matters and to study concretely such subjects as the mobilization and composition of armies, the role of air forces and navies in war, tendencies toward mechanization, and the acute dependence of all elements of military life upon the industrial capacity of the nation. This last was to me of especial importance because of my intense belief that large-scale motorization and mechanization and the development of air forces in unprecedented strength would characterize successful military forces of the future. On this subject I wrote a number of studies and reports. Holding these convictions, I knew that any sane preparation for war involved also sound plans for the prompt mobilization of industry. The years devoted to work of this kind opened up to me an almost new world. During that time I met and worked with many people whose opinions I respected highly, in both military and civil life. Among these an outstanding figure was Mr. Bernard Baruch, for whom my admiration was and is profound. I still believe that if Mr. Baruch’s recommendations for universal price fixing and his organizational plans7 had been completely and promptly adopted in December 1941 this country would have saved billions in money—possibly much in time and therefore in lives.
From tasks such as these I had gone, in 1935, to the Philippines. Now, six years later, I was back in the War Department, the nation was at war, and the Philippines were in deadly danger.
So I began my concentration on General Marshall’s question. Our naval situation in the western Pacific, as outlined by the Chief of Staff, was at that moment completely depressing. The fleet could not attempt any aggressive action far from a secure base and dared not venture with surface vessels into Philippine waters. The clamor of ground and air commanders in Hawaii and on the West Coast for defensive strength—clamors emphasized in hysterical terms by mayors, city councils, and congressmen—would, if answered, have absorbed far more than all United States shipping, troops, and immediately available anti-aircraft force then in existence.
It was painfully clear that the Philippines themselves could not, at that time, be reinforced directly by land and sea forces. Any hope of sending major reinforcements into the islands had to be ba
sed upon such future rehabilitation of our Navy as would permit it to operate safely in the Philippines area. At the moment there was no way of estimating when this could be done.
To prolong the duration of the defense while the Navy was undergoing repair, there was the possibility that we could ship to the islands vitally needed items by submarine and blockade runners, and, provided we could keep open the necessary line of communications, something could be shipped by air. Australia was the base nearest to the Philippines that we could hope to establish and maintain, and the necessary line of air communications would therefore follow along the islands intervening between that continent and the Philippines.
If we were to use Australia as a base it was mandatory that we procure a line of communications leading to it. This meant that we must instantly move to save Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, and we had to make certain of the safety of Australia itself.
It seemed possible, though not probable, that the Netherlands Indies, in some respects the richest area in the world in natural resources, could be denied to the Jap invader, who would soon be desperately in need of Indies oil to continue his offensives. Unless this could be done short-range fighter planes could not be flown into the Philippines; and fighter planes were vital to successful defense.
In spite of difficulties, risks, and fierce competition for every asset we had, a great nation such as ours, no matter how unprepared for war, could not afford cold-bloodedly to turn its back upon our Filipino wards and the many thousand Americans, troops and civilians, in the archipelago. We had to do whatever was remotely possible for the hapless islands, particularly by air support and by providing vital supplies, although the end result might be no more than postponement of disaster. And we simply had to save the air life line through Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii.
Crusade in Europe Page 3
