Finally, the Navy Department recovered some of the leadership it had lost during World War I in the field of radio communications and electronics. By the 1930s it had forged a collaborative relationship with the new Radio Corporation of America and initiated an aggressive program to modernize ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore radio communications, both essential to successful operations. Operational communications programs profited by their relationship to general maritime navigation and rescue problems. In addition, Navy intelligence experts joined with communications officers to develop radio intercept techniques and equipment that would allow them to record Japanese messages. Although codebreaking was still an arcane, imprecise, and officially ambivalent activity, the Navy communications-intelligence experts added an invaluable dimension to naval operations. In the related field of radio detection and ranging (radar), however, the Navy did not make parallel progress, largely because of low funding and technical equipment problems.
In 1934 the Houghton Mifflin Company published a second edition of Hector C. Bywater’s 1924 bestseller, The Great Pacific War. As in the first version of his fictional account of an American-Japanese war, Bywater described a bleak campaign characterized by early American naval defeats. An informed student of naval affairs, Bywater saw no reason to temper his earlier pessimism despite both negotiated naval limitations and fleet modernization and diversification. Like many of his navalist contemporaries, Bywater believed that the United States and Japan had charted collision courses over Asia’s future, yet American naval policy had not yet adjusted to the provocative nature of American diplomacy. Bywater had few doubts that the United States could eventually overwhelm Japan with its industrial might, a conclusion shared by Japanese planners as well, but he wondered if the United States could muster the will to reverse the defeat of the “treaty” Navy. Bywater’s skepticism reflected the private views of a series of chiefs of naval operations. From the Navy Department’s perspective, the future of the Navy depended less upon the flaws in War Plan ORANGE and fleet readiness than upon the political determination to increase naval appropriations. That determination appeared to depend primarily on two incongruous friends of the Navy: A crippled yachtsman from Hyde Park, New York, and a rural Georgia lawyer. The former, however, was now president of the United States and the latter the new chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. On the shoulders of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Carl Vinson rested the responsibility of ensuring that Hector Bywater’s fiction did not become reality.
Mobilizing and Modernizing the Army
In September 1924 the War Department staged a “Defense Test Day,” its first rehearsal of the plans based on the National Defense Act of 1920. The exercise was a farce. Since the War Department wanted to show “that every unit is a part of its own community,” the series of patriotic rallies and base open houses must have represented success of a sort, but veteran officers knew that the affair was less a mobilization test than a social gala to honor General Pershing on his retirement. Although regulars, Guardsmen, and reserves manned their mobilization posts, the great muster day produced no new soldiers, since the law had not created a mass citizen army trained in peacetime. Spending only 2 percent of each tax dollar on the Army, the United States had disarmed itself more effectively than the Versailles Treaty disarmed Germany.
For a decade after the passage of the National Defense Act of 1920, the War Department attempted to nurture the Army of the United States. Budgetary pressures kept the half-strength regular Army at around 130,000 officers and men, backed by a National Guard of 180,000. General Staff studies in the 1920s grappled with organizing an army of the future, but the mobilization plans had little success in reconciling a series of critical problems. The General Staff perfected its organizational schemes only by divorcing them from actual contingency plans and ignoring logistical problems. The War Department’s basic goal was to weight its plans toward total mobilization and to maintain as many cadre units and individual fillers as the Army of the United States could afford. In reality all elements of the land forces entered the 1930s in a pitiable state of readiness.
In 1931 a new chief of staff, the charismatic Douglas MacArthur, began to shift War Department priorities toward modernizing and training only the most active portions of the Army of the United States. A controversial officer noted for his imperious treatment of existing Army plans and values, MacArthur directed the General Staff to focus on specific war plans or “probable conflicts” and to increase the president’s ability to order a partial mobilization on a discretionary basis, meaning free of congressional interference. By 1934 the General Staff had consolidated the paper army active and reserve into a twenty-two-division force, organized into four field armies, of regulars and National Guardsmen. Instead of emphasizing the organization of a mass army to protect the United States from invasion, MacArthur wanted the War Department’s funds to go to an “Initial Protective Force” of 400,000 soldiers that could respond to a real crisis, especially a war with Japan. Continued by his successor, Malin Craig, MacArthur’s approach—the Protective Mobilization Plan—included a series of six-year programs designed to modernize the regular Army and Guard. The latter force made steady progress in the interwar period, for in 1924 the federal government began to pay the Guardsmen for weekly drills. In 1933 additional legislation ensured that mobilized Guard units would not be broken up and required that Guard officers hold federal reserve commissions and meet regular Army standards in order to draw drill pay.
The War Department foray into peacetime planning for industrial mobilization posed new challenges and produced minimal progress. The constraints on economic planning were political, not technical. Taking its charge from the National Defense Act, the office of the assistant secretary of war created a planning staff for assessing the relationship of the nation’s industrial capacity and the Army’s projected wartime needs. In 1924 this staff received assistance from a new institution, the Army Industrial College, whose faculty and students collected and analyzed industrial data. Formed in 1922, the Joint Army-Navy Munitions Board reviewed and coordinated industrial planning from the interservice perspective. Although Army and Navy officers did not regard industrial mobilization planning as a pressing matter, industry and trade associations took the War Department’s primitive studies seriously, and some 14,000 industry consultants, many of them reserve officers and World War I mobilization veterans, provided information and advice. Among the most influential was Bernard Baruch. After several false starts, the War Department produced its first official, comprehensive Industrial Mobilization Plan (IMP) in 1930.
When the War Department finally published an IMP, it found that the plan stirred interest and substantial criticism. The first plan largely duplicated the World War I system, emphasizing the decentralization of power and minimal interference with the existing economic system. When Congress created a War Policies Commission in 1930 to review economic mobilization planning, industrial spokesmen and veterans’ lobbies criticized the IMP’s pro-business treatment of corporate profits, industrial wages, consumer prices, and the allocation of the labor force between nonmilitary civilian jobs and military service. Responding to these critics, the planners revised the IMP to provide more centralized direction of the wartime economy, rigorous wage and price fixing, and even the hint of a wartime labor draft. Although the IMP did not place the military in control of the economy, another set of critics thought they saw a conspiracy to give large corporations huge “war profits” for military orders and a concerted effort to “militarize” the economy and destroy organized labor. Although it focused on the export of weapons and the effect of foreign loans on causing wars—especially ones the United States entered—the Senate munitions inquiry by the Nye Committee further eroded the legitimacy of the IMP by pursuing the “military-industrial” conspiracy theme. The result was that the initial appropriations to test portions of the IMP, to encourage raw-materials stockpiling, and to finance a small enlargement of industry’s war production
capacity all became politically impossible until 1938.
The War Department’s planners responded to the IMP’s critics by reducing direct Army-Navy participation in making broad wartime economic policy, but their organizational solution of more comprehensive civilian control found little favor. In 1936 the planners designed a War Resources Administration, to be headed by a single director, with powers substantially greater than those of the War Industries Board in World War I. Although Army and Navy planners and corporation executives supported the War Resources Administration concept, virtually no one else did. Satisfied that the WRA would curb high wages and profits, the American Legion accepted the proposal, but peace groups, consumer lobbies, farm groups, organized labor, and the rest of the federal bureaucracy resented their lack of a voice within the WRA’s inner circle. Speedy, cost-effective, rational military procurement did not impress the IMP’s critics, whom Assistant Secretary of War Louis A. Johnson unfairly characterized as “semi-Communistic wolves.” More important, President Roosevelt had no intention of alienating the critics or sharing presidential power with some future economic czar. The 1936 and 1939 revisions of the Industrial Mobilization Plan brought the United States no closer to a wartime system. Instead, the administration turned to the existing agencies, principally the Army-Navy Munitions Board, whose powers and functions were both limited and conservatively administered.
As the Army’s mobilization planners realized, all of the General Staff’s complicated studies brought no measurable improvement in the Army’s readiness to fight. Even when General MacArthur chose to emphasize modernization instead of maintaining all the elements of the Army of the United States, the six-year programs brought little improvement. Army dollars did not stretch far enough. From 1925 until 1940 the War Department spent about $6.2 billion. Of this sum $854 million (roughly two years’ appropriations) went to weapons procurement and research and development; the ground forces received only $344 million of these appropriations, or an annual average of $21 million for new procurement.
The Army knew what it needed. In 1934 the General Staff established its modernization priorities: Tank and artillery mechanization, field force motorization, aircraft, communications equipment, and a new semiautomatic rifle. Three years later it placed antiaircraft artillery and target location equipment at the top of its list. Nevertheless, the available funds limited the Army to developing weapons prototypes; it did not have enough money to reequip its field forces to contemporary European standards. Some of the model weapons were first rate: The 60-mm and 81-mm mortars, the 105-mm howitzer, the M1 Garand rifle.
Saddled with World War I weapons and ammunition surpluses, the Army had difficulty winning modernization funds from Congress until it had exhausted its obsolescent stocks. It also chose to maintain its personnel strength when pushed to the fiscal wall; even MacArthur fought to hold trained soldiers rather than buy new weapons. In addition, the Army damaged its own case for modernization by intense, if honest, disputes over modernization priorities and the future use of new weapons. Some congressional critics—for example, Representative Ross A. Collins—hectored the General Staff for its supposed conservatism, but the Army’s vague missions made modernization decisions difficult. If the most likely opponent was Mexico, the two divisions of horse cavalry and horse artillery would be more useful than all the tanks in Europe. If the Japanese attacked the Canal Zone or the Philippines, coast artillery would have more importance than either tanks or horse cavalry. In sum, the regular Army and the National Guard hedged against the future by maintaining a wide variety of units, all minimally equipped.
The Army’s halting development of armored forces typified all the problems of interwar modernization. By 1920 the wartime Tank Corps of some 5,000 vehicles and nearly 20,000 officers and men had shrunk to 700 French- and British-model tanks and 2,600 soldiers. Despite some interesting exercises by two small tank battalions stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, the Tank Corps disappeared after the National Defense Act of 1920. (The two battalion commanders, George S. Patton Jr., and Dwight D. Eisenhower, returned to the cavalry and infantry, respectively.) Congress and the General Staff agreed that tanks should support infantry, the decisive arm in combat, so tank units joined the regular infantry for training. The doctrine for tank use remained wedded to the concepts (and speed) of infantry combat. Building on World War I experiments, European forces in the meantime explored new ways of using tanks to wed firepower and mobility and thus restore the decisiveness of offensive ground operations. The fundamental theories were simple to understand but difficult to execute. British theorists argued that future armies could penetrate or flank enemy positions with true armored forces. These forces would combine tanks, mechanized and motorized artillery and infantry, reconnaissance elements, and supporting aircraft. Once through enemy positions, the armored forces would wreak havoc on command and logistical units and so demoralize the enemy that his combat units would retreat or disintegrate.
When the Army began a major motorization program in 1926, it allowed too much innovation, which produced 360 different types of vehicles and maintenance problems. In 1939 it settled on six basic vehicles, all superior performers in World War II. Meanwhile, between 1927 and 1931 the Army flirted with armored warfare but eventually abandoned the experiment, largely because of cost, doctrinal disputes, organizational politics, and technological limitations. After observing the maneuvers of a primitive British armored force in 1927, Secretary of War Dwight Davis ordered the General Staff to create a similar unit. After exhaustive study, the Army assembled two different armored forces, which conducted exercises in 1928 and 1930–1931. Only the most enthusiastic officers, especially Adna R. Chaffee and Sereno Brett, recognized the potential of an armored force, for the tanks themselves were so technologically limited. In addition, the Army’s senior officers disagreed about the value of mechanization, and few of them thought armored warfare doctrine justified organizing a separate force for its application. When MacArthur ordered all arms of the ground forces to begin mechanization in 1931, the experimental mechanized force disappeared from the troop list.
While the infantry continued to see the tank as a supporting weapon, some senior cavalry officers welcomed mechanization, since modern weapons had already demonstrated the limitations of horse cavalry. Still prohibited by law from having tanks, the cavalry reformers created a highly experimental mechanized brigade in 1933–1937. The cavalry forces, built around light tanks or “combat cars,” emphasized the traditional cavalry virtue of mobility and shock action rather than mobile firepower. They also undervalued the importance of integral infantry and artillery units, also mechanized. Compared with contemporary European armored forces, the mechanized cavalry was long on blitz and short on krieg. In the meantime the War Department decreed that a medium tank could not weigh more than fifteen tons, the load limit of the army’s temporary bridges. Armor experts put the likely weight of a medium tank at twenty-five tons. The first U.S.-designed tank, the M1921, weighed twenty-three, but subsequent 1930s models dropped to under fifteen tons. The Army dropped a project with J. Walter Christie, who built a tank that could exceed 25 mph, because the tank weight exceeded fifteen tons. Christie sold his chassis design to the Russians, who turned it into the T-34, an exceptional tank of World War II. On the eve of World War II, the Army had made some progress on integrating tanks into its field forces; both infantry and cavalry doctrine dictated that tanks be used in mass to provide shock action. Nevertheless, the Army’s four mechanized regiments did not yet represent a new form of ground warfare.
For aviators of the new Army Air Corps, the modernization of the ground forces had no more relevance than buying more horses, since they believed air power would make land forces obsolete. As one ardent lieutenant testified to a presidential commission in 1934, “the defeat of the enemy results from breaking his will to resist and . . . this is most quickly accomplished, in the scheme of modern war, by disruption, by direct action, of his means of prosecuting war.
. . . An Air Force is an arm which without the necessity of defeating the armed forces of the enemy, can strike directly and destroy those industrial and communications facilities, without which no nation can wage modern war.” Although its post-1926 progress did not satisfy Army aviators, the Air Corps in the decade after the Air Corps Act of 1926 took giant strides in winning an important, nearly independent position in Army strategic planning and force structure. With about one-tenth of the Army’s manpower, the Air Corps spent about one-fifth of the War Department’s appropriations and built a strong base of public support. By the eve of World War II the air fleet had virtually supplanted the battlefleet as the uniquely American first line of defense—at least in the popular imagination.
The development of the Air Corps depended upon the complex, fragile interrelationship of strategic thought, military planning, aviation technology, tactical doctrine, and organizational politics. As aviators learned in the Mitchell era, the future of military aviation was not exactly self-evident to Congress, the General Staff, and the U.S. Navy. Mitchell’s vision was particularly cloudy when he and his disciples argued that airplanes alone would win future wars by strategic bombardment. Nevertheless, Air Corps strategic theorists argued that independent air action would be critical to the next victory—or defeat. The center of Air Corps doctrinal development was the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), which drafted field manuals for the Office of the Chief of the Air Corps. Although the General Staff did not approve of severing air operations from land operations, the conventional wisdom of Air Corps planners by the early 1930s centered on the primacy of bombing enemy industrial targets. The ACTS faculty predicted that a future war would require, first, bombing strikes upon the enemy’s air forces (built or building), then a concentrated attack upon his war production base in order to destroy his military materiel. Aware of Douhet’s concepts of attacking the morale of urban populations by bombing with high explosives, gas, and incendiaries, American air war theorists rejected such notions as wasteful and too unpredictable.
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