As it was, MacArthur backed his approach to funding with a second principle: that the most valuable resource the army had was its manpower, not its materiel. He launched a virtual crusade to preserve the officer corps at its current strength and increase the number of cadets at West Point (an old favorite idea of his), while keeping reserve officers and enlisted men in training. He also pushed for support to increase the budgets for both the ROTC and the National Guard.
America had no need, he asserted, “for maintenance in peacetime of a huge military machine such as exists in almost every other major power.” But there was a need for a military command and control structure that would be ready for a general mobilization if war did come—and in September 1931 an event on the other side of the Pacific moved that war one step closer to being a reality.
On the night of September 18 at 10:20 P.M. a bomb went off on a remote section of the South Manchurian Railway near Lake Liutiao. Damage was minor; later a train from Changchun to Shenyang (Mukden) passed without a problem. But this portion of the line had been under Japanese control since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and when Chinese guards arrived to investigate, they were met by four irate Japanese officers who blamed them for the explosion and accused them of deliberate sabotage. Then early the next morning, September 19, Japanese artillery opened fire on the Chinese garrison at Mukden as Japanese infantry overran the post, killing 500 Chinese, while 200 Japanese lost their lives.
In fact, the Japanese officers themselves had planted the bomb. Their plan was to provoke a violent incident that would serve as pretext for Japan to seize control of southern Manchuria. It worked. Over the next two months, the Japanese army took over virtually all of Manchuria and installed a puppet government, even as the fighting spread steadily south.
MacArthur had been in France on a tour of European military installations when news of the Manchurian incident broke across the world’s wires, and he immediately headed for home. American prestige was on the line. Since the 1920s the United States had made supporting China’s territorial integrity a foreign policy priority, as part of its Open Door Policy. Back in Washington, MacArthur was adamant in discussions with Secretary of State Henry Stimson and President Hoover: the United States must impose economic sanctions against Japan and urge other Western countries to do the same.
Hoover, however, worried that this might trigger a war with Japan, refused. Beyond a strongly worded note from the Secretary condemning Japan’s actions, the White House did nothing.20
But by the end of January 1932 doing nothing was no longer an option. The Japanese army was at the gates of Shanghai, as Japanese aerial bombing killed thousands of residents and threatened to kill thousands more, including Americans living in the city’s International Settlement. The American consul general and commander of the Asiatic Fleet, Montgomery Taylor, urged Hoover to order an evacuation of Americans. Stimson and MacArthur persuaded the president to send the Thirty-first Infantry and six hundred marines to Shanghai; bolstered by the strong American response, Britain and France promised to send troops as well.
For two months Japanese and American troops eyed each other uneasily, as relations between the two countries hovered on a knife edge. But then after an initial show of backbone, the Western response to aggression fell apart in a wave of self-doubt, mutual recriminations, and pusillanimity combined with prudence.
The truth was, no Westerners were prepared to die to protect China against the Japanese juggernaut—not least Americans. The League of Nations prepared a report scolding Japan, a member of the League, for the use of military force but not proposing any punishment or sanctions. Japan withdrew from the League in protest anyway. The Hoover administration criticized the League for inaction, but did nothing to suspend American trade with Japan any more than Britain or any other Western powers did.21
In May Japanese troops withdrew from Shanghai, and the Thirty-first Infantry and the marines headed home. But the damage was done. Japan was now resigned to its role as international pariah, but since there was no incentive to stop, its behavior in China and elsewhere would become more and more reckless.
It may be going too far to say that World War Two began that day in September 1931. But the pattern of pusillanimity on the part of the Western democracies would repeat itself over the next decade as a new era of international lawlessness was ushered in. Both Italy’s Mussolini and Germany’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, watched events in Manchuria and drew the appropriate lessons for their future aggressions.
Certainly events in China did not bode well for an America that was putting its faith in international treaties, and both oceans, to protect itself from future wars.
It now became MacArthur’s mission as chief of staff to wake up the nation, and Congress, to the gathering danger.
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He had already set off a national firestorm in June 1931 when a national magazine, The World Tomorrow, ran a poll of nearly 20,000 American clergymen and found that 83 percent disapproved of military training in high schools or college. Fully 80 percent wanted the United States to unilaterally disarm; another 60 percent hoped members of their congregations refused to serve in the armed forces if America found itself at war again, while 54 percent said they themselves would not serve. Thirty-four percent said they would not serve even as chaplains.22
The magazine editor sent MacArthur a copy of the poll for comment, and MacArthur decided he couldn’t let this pass. He wrote back and expressed his surprise “that so many clergymen of our country have placed themselves on record as repudiating in advance the constitutional obligations that will fall upon them equally with all other elements of our citizenship” in the event of war being declared by Congress in the event of national attack.
“That men who wear the cloth of the Church should openly defend repudiation of the laws of the land…seems almost unbelievable. It will certainly hearten every potential or actual criminal and malefactor who either has or contemplates breaking some other law.”
But MacArthur wasn’t done. “It is a distinct disappointment to know that men who are called upon to wield the sword of the spirit are deluded into believing that the mechanical expedient of disarming men will transform hatred into love and selfishness into altruism”—men who, more than anyone else, should know the origins of war, not in social or political systems, but in the sinfulness of man.
Disarming America would invite destruction of not only the country’s political and economic freedom, but its religious freedom as well.
“History teaches us that religion and patriotism have always gone hand in hand,” he wrote, while it was Jesus Christ Himself who said, “When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace” (Luke 11:21). But MacArthur went further. “It is my humble belief that the relation which He came to establish is based on sacrifice, and that men and women who follow in His train are called by it to the defense of certain priceless principles, even at the cost of their own lives”—like the soldiers who followed his father in the Civil War and the Philippines, or died on the slopes of the Côte de Châtillon, and would in a decade be dying in the jungles of New Guinea.
It was as broad a philosophical basis for MacArthur’s understanding of the duties of soldiering as he had ever written. While his response to the World Tomorrow poll led to a deluge of angry letters lasting all summer, including one death threat from an anonymous pacifist,23 Mac would continue for the rest of his life to frame the issues of American defense and military service in forthright religious terms.
“I confidently believe that a red-blooded and virile humanity,” he had concluded, “which loves peace devotedly, but is willing to die in the defense of the right, is Christian from center to circumference, and will continue to be dominant in the future as in the past.”24
It was that future that MacArthur was now fighting for, with every political and rhetorical weapon at his disposal.
His battleground was the War Department, where his chief antagonist was R
oss Collins of Mississippi, chair of the House Subcommittee on Military Appropriations. In addition to tanks, Collins was an enthusiast for the kind of strategic airpower Billy Mitchell had advocated, and he saw no reason more funds of the military’s already anorexic budget shouldn’t be shifted to building fighters and bombers, not to mention tanks. As an amateur strategist, Collins was deeply enamored of the new theories of mass mechanized warfare coming out of Britain and Germany in those years. Let any additional funds go to these future weapons, Collins would thunder at MacArthur as he sat across the table during hearings, instead of ROTC, the National Guard, the Reserves, or maintaining bases at home that had no place in a modern war—or were wasted in training thousands of officers for an army that didn’t exist.
It is easy in retrospect to sympathize with Collins’s position or the views of others who wanted money shifted to the Army Air Corps, given what planes and tanks would do on the plains of Poland and then France in the next war. But MacArthur’s responsibility was not just stockpiling weapons for future wars but maintaining a force structure that could, in the event of war, be rapidly expanded to wield those weapons effectively. That meant, in his mind and in the view of the General Staff, spreading their slender resources as evenly as possible through all the arms of the service—including West Point and the ROTC—in order to cover all contingencies, instead of dumping all appropriations in a couple of as-yet-unproven technologies.
This also meant some hard choices. One was spending no more on the Air Corps than was necessary to build pilot models of new bombers, tanks, and other costly weapons, he told a livid Ross Collins.25 Another was closing down Major Chaffee’s experimental armored unit in the late spring of 1931, and deciding that instead of creating an independent tank force within the army, it was better and more economical to let each service arm, including the artillery and cavalry, develop its own mechanical and armored vehicles. It was a fateful decision.* Yet an army chief of staff starved for funds by both Congress and the Hoover administration had few other options, especially when shutting down outmoded army bases around the country that would have brought paroxysms of rage from every congressional district, including Collins’s own.
In May 1931 President Hoover summoned MacArthur and Secretary Hurley to his presidential retreat in Rapidan, Virginia. The national economic slump was deepening, Hoover told them; they had to find ways to cut still more from the military budget. The president suggested imposing a round of forced retirements on a military that had already shrunk from 200,000 personnel in 1920 to fewer than 140,000 in 1931. He also urged closing as many as semi-active installations as possible.
Despite MacArthur’s misgivings, the War Department acquiesced by announcing it was shutting fifty-three army posts.26 Soldiers’ pay was cut by 10 percent; headquarters staffs of the army’s nine corps areas fell by 15 percent, and the army’s overall strength was reduced by another 6,000 soldiers and officers—leaving an army that was the sixteenth largest in the world, not much bigger than Portugal’s.
But the truly epic fight for the army’s survival didn’t begin until May 1932, when Congressman Collins released his army appropriations bill for 1933. It was a shocker.
The War Department had asked for $331 million; the president’s own Bureau of the Budget had slashed that by $15 million. Ross Collins’s final number cut that by another $24 million, but the biggest shock of all was an amendment requiring a reduction in the number of Regular Army officers from 12,000 to 10,000. That was not much more than half of the 18,000 officers the 1920 National Defense Act considered essential for maintaining strength in peacetime. To MacArthur, it seemed as if the very survival of the U.S. Army itself was at stake.
That was the gist of the blistering letter he fired off to House Minority Leader Bertrand Snell. Beyond the numbers and MacArthur’s protests over Collins’s amendment, the letter offers an illuminating window on MacArthur’s thinking about how to maintain an effective fighting force in the face of straitened budgets.
For the education of the House leader, he went back to basics. Prior to 1920, he wrote, “there existed in the world only two general systems under which military forces were organized and maintained.” One was a force organized around mandatory conscription or a draft; the other was a force made up entirely of professionals. The United States, however, had elected a third way: “a small professional force to act as a training cadre—a covering force in case of need, and a framework upon which mobilization of our full force could be effected.”
To make this system work, “the Regular Army is the bulwark and basis of the whole structure. It is the instructor, the model, and, in emergency, the leader of the whole” as the repository of “the professional knowledge and technical skill capable of accumulating, organizing, training, and leading to victory a national army of citizen soldiers.”
The 1933 budget appropriation, he stated, now threatened that vital role. The minimum number of officers required to do the job was 14,000, now down to 10,000. “Trained officers constitute the most vitally essential element in modern war; and the only one that under no circumstances can be improvised or extemporized.” An army can get along on short rations, poor housing, even too few or inadequate weapons. However, “it is doomed to destruction without the trained and adequate leadership of officers.” Those trained officers form the vital margin between victory and defeat, he warned. Now the Congress was asking the American people to accept defeat as a matter of course.
MacArthur explained that he could understand the need for economy in public expenditures, especially when the rest of the country was in such poor shape. Even so, the United States still ranked number one in the world in wealth compared to size of population, while its army barely ranked sixteenth. “But the Department insists that any retrenchment which destroys or seriously damages a vital element of our already weakened defensive structure is not economy but extravagance of the most expensive kind.”27
MacArthur had thrown down the gauntlet in what his friend John O’Laughlin, editor of The Army and Navy Journal, was calling the army’s most serious fight since the Civil War. Congressman Collins was bound to pick it up. So began a three-month siege, with MacArthur going to Capitol Hill to cajole individual congressmen and twist arms, and Collins following up with individual meetings to untwist them. Collins had an unexpected ally in members of the House who were fans of a strong U.S. Navy, and saw cuts in army appropriations as a way to forestall cuts in the navy’s. Their members included the powerful House Speaker John Nance Garner, and so it was no surprise that in the end the House passed Collins’s bill 201 to 182.
MacArthur had lost, but he was not about to quit. Instead he went to the office of Colonel Ernest Graves, who was on the staff of the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps was in the middle of a massive project, involving the floodwaters of the Mississippi, that covered more than a dozen states—each of which was represented by senators with whom Graves had cultivated strong relations, and MacArthur knew it. He urged Graves to go to see them, lobby them for the army’s sake on the appropriations bill and urge them to vote against Collins’s dangerous scheme to trim back the officer corps.28
It worked. The officer reduction amendment went down to defeat in the Senate. Collins fought furiously to revive it by overriding the Senate veto in the House but lost on a final vote.
MacArthur was jubilant. He sent a telegram to Frederick H. Payne, assistant secretary for procurement: “Just hog tied a Miss. cracker. House voted our way 75 to 54. Happy times are here again.”
It was, however, a bittersweet victory. The final appropriation for 1933 was only $305 million, the lowest since 1923. The cut in pay for 1932 remained in place. In addition, money for the War Department’s non-military expenditures, like the Corps of Engineers, was actually going up—especially since Congress saw these as sources of civilian jobs that were getting harder to find in the broader economy, not to mention sources of political pork.29
But it was another mil
itary-related appropriation, passed back in 1924 over President Coolidge’s veto that would cause MacArthur the most personal pain in the late summer of 1932. It would also earn him the totally unexpected—and totally undeserved—title of “the most dangerous man in the country.”
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The end of World War One had discharged more than two million men from the armed forces—the largest pool of military veterans, and the largest potential political lobby, since the Civil War. In an effort to placate that lobby, in 1924 Congress passed a law issuing to veterans “adjusted compensation certificates” based on their time of service and redeemable in twenty-one years, in 1945, but with the right to borrow against the bonus certificates up to 22½ percent of their value. President Coolidge didn’t think much of this largely unnecessary outlay of federal money (the economy was booming and unemployment at barely 6 percent), and he vetoed the bill. Congress, however, overrode his veto. World War veterans could now look forward to borrowing up to $220 against certificates averaging one thousand dollars per veteran.
Then came the Depression, and suddenly a certificate represented not just a bonus but a lifeline—but not if veterans couldn’t borrow more or redeem the certificates now. Congress complied with a law allowing them to borrow up to 50 percent, but veterans’ groups decided that was still not enough. And so in late 1931 Representative Wright Patman of Texas proposed a new law ordering immediate payment of the entire bonus and setting aside $2.4 million in the army budget for the purpose.30
This aroused the ire of President Hoover, who smelled a political rat (Patman was a progressive Democrat) as well as a whiff of a measure that would fuel inflation. He launched a sharp counterattack, including getting the American Legion to reject a resolution supporting the Patman bill at its national convention.31 But the veterans’ allies in Congress and out rallied, and by the spring of 1932 the Patman bill was inching toward possible passage in the House—and a certain veto at the White House.
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