To some degree the growing revolution in military technology posed a bewildering range of organizational and doctrinal problems. Like other armies, the U.S. Army experienced an era of technical anxiety. In terms of ordnance, improved metallurgy, machine tooling, and chemistry made it possible for small arms and artillery to increase their ranges, rates of fire, and accuracy by a factor of three. In rifles and field guns, the United States kept pace by adopting the Springfield M 1903 and the M 1902 3-inch gun. The artillery piece had shells, a recoil mechanism, and optical sights comparable with the French 75-mm gun, the premier European fieldpiece. In 1905 the Army opened its first plant to produce the most advanced smokeless powder. The Ordnance Department also tested a wide variety of machine guns, including the models offered by John M. Browning, Hiram Maxim, and I.N. Lewis. Emphasizing the need for light weight for field mobility, the Army adopted a substandard automatic weapon, the Benet-Mercie, primarily because it thought the inventors would soon produce lighter models of their machine guns. In the meantime, Browning, Maxim, and Lewis guns turned the Western Front of World War I into a slaughter pit.
The revolution in military firepower posed serious problems for the battlefield control of tactical units, but the changes in communications did not keep pace. The telegraph, telephone, and radio had already improved administrative and strategic communications, but tactical communications depended upon visual signals and written messages until the Army adopted battery-powered field phones. With the development of an indirect fire capability, the artillery led the way in creating phone systems to link its forward observers, fire detection centers, and firing batteries. Wire, however, could be laid only as fast as men could walk or drive (both slow under fire), and it was vulnerable to enemy fire and careless teamsters.
The smell of oil and exhaust fumes around a few posts announced, too, that the Army had begun its love affair with the automobile. The military advantages of marrying the internal combustion engine to wheeled carriages had impressed the Army as early as the 1890s, but only after two years of limited tests did the Quartermaster Department in 1906 purchase its first six cars. More experiments followed, now including the use of trucks and cars in the field. When one colonel covered the same distance in three hours by car that he had traveled on horseback in three days, he vowed he would never again get into a saddle when a car was available. In 1912 an auto-truck test unit drove 1,500 miles and proved that it could average speeds twice those of mule-drawn wagons. Nevertheless, motorization faced substantial barriers. Army conservatives feared that their soldiers would use the vehicles for personal errands and would not maintain them properly. These proved reasonable concerns. The tradeoffs in cost and availability of gasoline and spare parts versus forage and harness perplexed quartermaster planning. Given the primitive state of American roads, horses looked like a better option than trucks, especially in the west, where much of the Army still trained and patrolled the borders. In addition, War Department requirements for field cars and trucks discouraged commercial builders, who saw no future in small Army orders. Nevertheless, the field experiments continued until 1916, when Army trucks got their first real test during the Punitive Expedition into Mexico. In a daring buy of 500 commercial vehicles valued at $450,000, the War Department formed twenty-two truck companies, which proved their worth carrying supplies. The Army stood on the curb of the motor age.
Like the motorization movement, the Army’s earliest experiences with airplanes were long on promise and short on performance, but the operations of 1916 in Mexico revived a flagging commitment. Discouraged by its fruitless donations to aerial inventor Dr. Samuel Langley, the War Department’s Board of Ordnance and Fortification avoided subsidizing the Wright brothers even after 1903 and believed that dirigibles offered more military potential than rigid-wing aircraft. In 1907, however, with President Roosevelt’s encouragement, the Signal Corps formed an aeronautical division and reopened negotiations for a test aircraft, which the Wrights eventually delivered in 1909. Army-dictated performance standards proved difficult to meet, but the potential use of the airplane for reconnaissance purposes kept Army interest alive. The Army demanded an aircraft powerful enough to carry two persons (one to fly, one to observe) for 125 miles at 40 miles an hour. Deterred by the cost and danger of manned flight (the first American fatality was an Army lieutenant), the Signal Corps conducted its tests cautiously in both the financial and operational sense. Although Army officers successfully rigged primitive bombing systems and machine guns on the test planes, most aviation pioneers (including Billy Mitchell) did not think aviation technology would soon produce anything other than reconnaissance planes. Nevertheless, by 1913 the Army could organize a 1st Aero Squadron in Texas, equipped with eight primitive Curtiss biplanes. In 1916 the squadron deployed into Mexico and performed yeoman service conducting scouting missions and carrying messages, but soon lost all its aircraft to crashes or maintenance problems. The squadron’s performance, however, broadened support for a more ambitious Army aviation program.
Aviation experimentation, funded by congressional appropriations for the Army and Navy, sailed along with relative safety and success, then crashed in both aircraft and funding terms. No one considered pioneer flying risk-free. Between 1903 and 1910 thirty-four pilots died in flying accidents. In one two-year period, 1911–1912, however, more than 200 pilots died, many of them pioneers. Control systems and engine mountings did not keep pace with engine power and the aerodynamics of faster flight. Aviation development in the United States stalled as Congress and aircraft designers became risk-averse. The opportunity to exploit the Lewis machine gun, Speery gyroscopes, and optical bombsights passed. Between 1909 and 1925 no American aircraft or aviation technology won a prize at the Paris air show, the showcase of international aviation.
Even without the stimulus of the world war, the Army and the National Guard by 1916 showed distinct signs of modernity despite the absence of a significant threat or any widespread public interest in military affairs. There was no “Great Khaki Army” to excite support, like the Great White Fleet. With the exception of a few civilian military enthusiasts, the heart of modernization was the regular Army officer corps, which depended upon fragile coalitions with civilian political leaders and technologists to make organizational changes. Modernization, moreover, could not break free from the expectation that the only war the United States would fight would occur either in the Pacific or in the Western Hemisphere. In either theater the enemies could be defeated by the regular Army and National Guard in the war’s early stages or overwhelmed eventually by America’s vast industrial and manpower resources. In any event, the battlefleet might decide the issue before the land forces even became engaged. While such assumptions proved naïve in 1917, they rested on political realities that Army officers themselves shared. In the face of such popular notions, the wonder is not that land force reform accomplished so little, but that it accomplished so much.
The Armed Forces and Imperial Defense
A major barrier to the modernization of the American armed forces before World War I was the military’s constant involvement with overseas interventions. Despite the fact that reformers argued that the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps should concentrate upon their wartime missions, all the armed forces found themselves busy with constabulary duties beyond the borders of the United States. These duties may have provided some favorable publicity, usually romantic nonsense, but by and large they distracted the armed forces from training for modern war. As European military observers noted, the United States had a declaratory policy of military modernization and national defense, but it had a military establishment still wedded to imperial policing.
Surveying the wreckage of the Spanish empire in the Caribbean, to which the United States had administered the coup de grace in 1898, American policymakers committed their own armed forces in order to reshape the destiny of the nations in “the American lake.” In the strictest terms of self-interest, the primary concern was building and pr
otecting an isthmian canal. But this self-interest did not exclude other rationales for interventionism, which included curbing European influence, protecting American loans, stimulating economic growth and international trade (primarily for American merchants), and encouraging the development of republican, democratic governments and private and public institutions much like those in the United States. Although American cultural imperialism fell short in reality, it kept substantial portions of the armed forces occupied in reformist occupations.
After the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Army made Cuba and Puerto Rico its laboratory for reform but soon surrendered its mission to the Marine Corps. Since Puerto Rico was an annexed territory, the Army’s administrative functions passed quickly to a civilian government, but not before Army officers had begun to reshape the island’s public services. In addition, the War Department formed the Puerto Rican Regiment, a regular Army infantry regiment, to provide federal authorities with a military response to civil disturbances and minor foreign threats. In Cuba the War Department ran a military government from 1898 until 1902, when Cuba officially became an independent nation. During the transition period the Army successfully found a way to curb yellow fever, pioneered public health and public works projects, reformed the island’s educational system, and introduced novel governmental practices like efficiency, justice, and honesty. None of these accomplishments proved transferable, however, and in 1906 the United States again assumed control of the island’s government when corrupt elections sparked a civil war. Again, Army officers led a drive for administrative reform, which ended with the American withdrawal in 1909. Disillusioned with the tool of reformist military occupation, the United States took a more limited role in subsequent Cuban civil wars.
The military also served as the spearhead of American action in Panama. When the Roosevelt administration decided to exploit Panamanian nationalism and investors’ cupidity in 1903 and take direct control of the isthmian canal route and construction, it blocked Colombian military intervention with Navy squadrons at Colon and Panama City and landed Marines to protect the Panamanian revolutionaries. When a highly favorable treaty created the Canal Zone and heralded the beginning of American construction, the Roosevelt administration gave the military principal roles in making the canal program work. The Corps of Engineers—under the eventual guidance of Brigadier General George W. Goethals—and the Medical Department, represented by Colonel William C. Gorgas, received the mission to overcome the engineering and disease problems that had frustrated earlier canal builders. Both groups of officers succeeded, and the canal opened in 1914. Small naval units and a Marine regiment assumed the initial responsibility for ensuring order and defense, but the Marines were replaced by World War I with a mix of Army coastal defense and mobile troops. In the meantime, the Marines and Navy supported State Department policies in nearby Nicaragua, another possible canal location and site of American political and financial commitments. In 1912 American expeditionary forces intervened in a Nicaraguan civil war and waged active military operations to crush the revolt. A Marine legation guard remained in Managua to dramatize American concern with Nicaraguan politics.
Across the sun-kissed Caribbean, the green island of Hispaniola also concerned the State Department, primarily because its governments courted foreign intervention and failed to establish effective, democratic administrations. The neighboring countries of Haiti and Santo Domingo both proved running sores in American Caribbean policy. Justified by the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the United States would intervene to preempt European intervention, various formulas for diplomatic pressure and fiscal supervision for both countries proved unsuccessful in reducing governmental instability. Civil wars in Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 drew Navy squadrons and Marine expeditionary brigades to both countries, first to break up the rebel armies and then to impose reformist occupations. In both countries Marine units, assisted marginally by Marine-created native constabularies, fought vicious guerrilla wars with rural terrorists. The twin occupations, which lasted in the Dominican Republic until 1924 and in Haiti until 1934, absorbed many of the Marine units assigned to Advanced Base Force training and brought no special credit to the Corps, which was accused of atrocities. The general effectiveness of American military administration in both countries did not prove publicly appealing or lasting, and both nations lapsed into dictatorships after American withdrawal.
Willingly ceding the pacification mission in the Caribbean to the Marine Corps (“State Department troops,” soldiers called Marines), the Army did not escape the toils of America’s Latin diplomacy, for from 1911 until 1917 much of the Army’s attention focused upon the possibility of war with Mexico. While the Mexican Revolution twisted its way to eventual success, American diplomacy followed the same complex path. Under the Taft administration, the government tried to seal the border to gun-runners and guerrilla organizers with scant success. When cavalry patrols proved insufficiently impressive to the Mexicans, the administration in 1911 and 1913 formed an entire division of combined arms in Texas. The first mobilization had little clear direction, but the second was the first stage in War Plan Green, which included an overland campaign (à la 1847) from Veracruz to Mexico City. The Wilson administration considered military intervention seriously, since it feared German and Japanese penetration in Mexico and found the counterrevolutionary Heurta regime (1911–1914) distasteful. Favoring a rebel victory, Wilson committed a Navy-Marine task force to Veracruz in 1914, where the Americans fought their way through the city and established an occupation zone. An Army brigade from Texas soon followed, but, assessing the unexpected bloodshed, the Wilson administration chose to talk, not fight. The American forces withdrew by the end of the year, but not before the Huerta regime had collapsed.
The Veracruz expedition did not end the Mexican deployment, since the civil war—now waged between two revolutionary factions led by Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa—spilled over the American border and spawned lesser political and racial violence along the Rio Grande. Frustrated by American support for Carranza, Villa’s band raided Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916, and killed fifteen American civilians and soldiers. Wilson ordered the Punitive Expedition of 10,000 soldiers under the command of Brigadier General John J. Pershing, a very hard taskmaster, into Mexico to destroy Villa’s army. When the Mexican government sent troops to seal the flanks of the expedition, which it had tacitly accepted but disliked, Wilson mobilized most of the regular Army along the border and reinforced it with 112,000 National Guardsmen. Despite two battles between American and Mexican regulars, both nations backed away from war, since the Americans had also dispersed Villa’s mounted columns. As the threat of war with Germany mounted in early 1917, the Punitive Expedition returned across the international border, rich in field experience and disgruntled with the ambiguities of Wilsonian diplomacy.
Across the Pacific other American soldiers guarded the Philippines from external attack (an unlikely threat) and internal violence (an ever-present possibility). To discourage any invader, Army engineers began to fortify and arm the islands at the mouth of Manila Bay, principally Corregidor and El Fraile, which became the “concrete battleship” known as Fort Drum. North of Manila, the Army formed a composite brigade of two infantry regiments, two cavalry squadrons, an artillery battery, and an engineer detachment as its mobile defense force. These troops, however, did not bear much of the burden of insular peacekeeping, which fell to the American-officered regiment of Philippine scouts and the paramilitary Philippine Constabulary. The most active operations occurred on the Moro islands of Mindanao and the Jolo archipelago, where Muslim Filipinos resisted civilization American style. Unassociated with the insurrectos of 1899–1902, the Moros defended their traditions of slavery, tribal warfare, and religious frenzies. Some American generals like Leonard Wood and John J. Pershing enhanced their reputations as the civil governors and military commanders of the Moro territory, largely by conducting ca
mpaigns to disarm the Moros or to break up dissident bands. The American “bamboo army”—usually a combination of regular Army, Scout, and Constabulary companies—began operations against the Moros in 1902 and fought them through a series of arduous campaigns: Lake Lanao and Jolo (1903), the Cotabato Valley (1905), Bud Dajo Mountain (1906 and 1911), and Bud Bagsak Mountain (1911 and 1913). While these campaigns tempered a whole generation of Army officers, the battles with the Moros harked back to the nineteenth-century clashes with the American Indians.
The World War and the Preparedness Movement
The roar of the guns of August 1914 reached the United States in indistinct tones, but a year after the outbreak of World War I, the European conflict brought a major reconsideration of American military policy. By the autumn of 1916 the Preparedness Movement had become a force in a presidential election and had produced ambitious legislation that reshaped naval and land force policy. Like all American mass political phenomena, the Preparedness Movement contained policy contradictions and antagonistic goals and represented the diverse interests of many political groups. Nevertheless, it represented the first time that defense policy in peacetime influenced American politics and involved more people than a limited policymaking elite. On the other hand, its legislative products came too late to have any substantial impact on American military readiness, either to fight World War I or to avoid intervention by imposing a peace before American entry into the war.
Concerned by the early indecisiveness of the European war and the German conduct of submarine warfare, American internationalists (largely eastern, Republican, and pro-Allied) formed a complex network of preparedness lobbies and began propaganda programs in order to build support for increased military spending. The Germans cooperated in the organizing phase of the movement by sinking the British liner Lusitania in May 1915 and killing over 100 Americans. The Lusitania crisis shifted American animus toward Germany, awakened a larger audience to military affairs, and converted President Wilson to preparedness, if only to stay in front of public opinion. German submarine warfare also focused public and congressional attention upon American naval policy, since freedom of the seas was a concept relatively free of political division that transcended the wisdom of intervention. Americans who found no attractions in aiding the Allies could support naval preparedness because a larger fleet could still be an instrument of unilateral action, foreign trade, and protection of the Western Hemisphere during and after the war. Interventionists, on the other hand, saw a new building program as a useful way to mobilize public opinion, coerce Germany, and hearten the Allies. Building upon a generation of public faith that the fleet would protect the United States from foreign unpleasantness, the uneasy coalition of navalists fashioned an ambitious new plan to give the nation a “Navy second to none.”
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