Creating the Modern Army

Front matter

Creating the Modern Army

Citizen Soldiers and the American Way of War, 1919—1939

William J. Woolley

CHAPTER 4 The Civilian Components in the Era of Stability 98

CHAPTER 5 Creating Orthodoxy and Predictability: Professional Military Education in the Army, 1919-1939 118

CHAPTER 6 Building a Throne for the Queen: Infantry Branch Organization and Branch Culture in the 1920s 128

Contents

CHAPTER 7 Branch Stagnation: American Field Artillery, 1919-1939 143

CHAPTER 8 End of the Big Guns: Mission and Branch Identity Crisis in the Coast Artillery, 1919-1939 161

PART III Mechanizing the Army, 1930-1939 177

CHAPTER 9 The Army Besieged: The Army and the Nation in the Decade of the Depression, 1930-1939 178

CHAPTER 10 Stability amid Crisis: The Civilian Components in the 1930s 192

CHAPTER II Modern Weapons and Traditional Tactics: The Infantry and Tanks,

1919-1939 206

CHAPTER 12 Mounts or Motors? The Cavalry and Its Response to Mechanization,

Conclusion 247 Abbreviations Used in Citations 254 Notes 255

Foreword

William A. Taylor

In Creating the Modern Army: Citizen-Soldiers and the American Way of War, 1919-1939, William J. Woolley, previous Victor and Carrie Palmer Chair of Leadership Values, Helen Swift Nielson Professor of Cultural Studies, and longtime professor of history at Ripon College, provides a comprehensive institutional history of the U.S. Army from 1919 to 1939 based on decades of extensive and meticulous research. Woolley demonstrates that leaders, both civilian and military, worked in tandem to craft the modern American army during this formative period of U.S. history. He lucidly shows that the central elements of this modern army—citizen-soldiers, professional officers, branch structure, and industrial armaments—first emerged with the National Defense Act of 1920, coalesced in the two decades that followed, and ultimately remained familiar foundations to the present day.

This excellent study is a unique and pivotal addition to our understanding of the distinct origins of the modern U.S. Army—and its vital relationship to American society from its very design—during the interwar years after World War I and before World War II. This significant interval was an especially critical period for the army, which sought to integrate the concept of a citizen army, deployed successfully by the United States in World War I, into peacetime while transforming the small constabulary career-professional force of previous years into a larger modernized and industrialized military. Throughout this meaningful story, Woolley illuminates the centrality of policy, especially the momentous consequence of crafting a national military policy in the decades prior to passage of the National Defense Act in 1920. He reinforces the dynamic linkages between a government, the military that it forms, and the society within which these changes take place. Most important, Woolley shows that such civil-military relations, while absolutely significant, are rarely uniform. To his credit, he reveals both high hopes for the modern army and hefty frustrations xi xii Foreword with the accompanying results, ambitious yet somewhat naive plans beset by the harsh realities of budget cuts fueled by political and social apathy about military matters, and the potential benefits of careful preparation offset by glaring shortcomings in the ultimate outcomes. The result is that Woolley elucidates a critical lesson: militaries are rarely organizations unto themselves; instead, leaders—both civilian and military—must forge and hone them within a particular society, even if they are beset by fits and starts and endless challenges in doing so. Such a complicated process also imbues militaries with their own specific institutional culture, as was the case with the modern U.S. Army.

Military organization is a woefully understudied yet enormously consequential aspect of civil-military relations. This thought-provoking history goes a long way toward rectifying this imbalance and shines a critical light on how a nation crafts its military and why that very process informs not only its marshal prowess but also its social fabric. Woolley tells a worthwhile story and conveys it well. He deftly bares the significance of several of the most essential facets of civil-military relations writ large, namely how a nation organizes its military and the many hindrances of achieving effectiveness when military roles are in constant flux due to political, technological, and social upheavals as well as countless vagaries about the future battlefield for which it must prepare. The end result is that Woolley exposes the delicate balance between the military, the government, and the broader society as each partner exerts influence—at times in concert and sometimes in opposition—when crafting military power. The clear message is that civilian and military leaders dictate policies that shape armies within a specific social milieu. Such was the situation with the National Defense Act of 1920 and the subsequent interwar period; it remains the case today. Overall, Creating the Modern Army is a valuable contribution to a nuanced understanding of the vast difficulties yet supreme importance of effective organization, not only for the military itself but also for the government and society that the armed forces seek to protect.

Preface

The modern American citizen army as we know it was largely created in the years between the two world wars. The foundations for that structure were laid in the three decades before America’s participation in World War I. During that time, a new organizational structure based on a general-staff system was created that essentially transformed the army from what had been primarily an administrative organization into a tactical one while endowing it with centralized leadership. In addition, the military created schools providing various levels of professional education, fitting them into a hierarchical structure corresponding to the needs of an officer at various points in his career. More important, a new generation was taking over the army, officers who accepted the idea that successful leadership in war rested on an acquired professional education rather than on mere personal experience. And, finally, officers in leadership positions increasingly accepted the idea that building a new army could not take place as a series of random developments but needed to be an enterprise guided by a distinct military policy that enjoyed the support of the nation. In short, the earlier period provided many of the elements out of which the modern U.S. citizen army would be built.

Yet the modern American citizen army itself was actually assembled in the 1920s and 19308, known as the interwar period. It began with the legislative ratification of a long-sought military policy in the National Defense Act of 1920. The act established the concept of a three-part military, with the professional Regular Army at its core, joined in times of emergency by one or both of two citizen components, the National Guard and the Organized Reserve Corps, and provided the basic blueprint for constructing that force. It organized the various professional schools into a single progressive system and carefully defined the jurisdiction of each element. The National Defense Act finished the transformation of the U.S. Army itself into a European-style mass army by completing the creation of the combat branches, which not only guided the further development of those parts of the army under their competence but also took over from the regiment the task of socializing new officers into the culture of military service. Finally, the army began the process of adapting itself to the opportunities xiii xiv Preface and challenges associated with the rapid industrialization of societies. In the interwar period this meant initiating the process of mechanizing firepower and movement. All of these—the citizen army with its three components, the progressive system of professional military education, the branch structure, and the creation of mechanized forces—remain the central features of the American army in the twenty-first century, were created between 1920 and 1939.

A modern army, even one that was as small as the U.S. Army in the interwar period, is a highly complex and multifaceted organization composed of a myriad of different units. Any effort to carry out an encyclopedic history that would chronicle the changes experienced in every element of the army, especially in the detail needed to understand how those changes took place, would end up so massively detailed that no common thread could be seen. Hence, I have restricted this study to examining the development of what I consider to have been the four major characteristics of the modern American army:

1. The creation of the citizen components of the new army.

2. The development of the branches as the structural basis for organizing the army as well as the creation of the means to educate new officers and soldiers about their craft and to socialize them into military culture.

3. The creation of a rationalized and progressive system of professional military education.

4. The initial mechanization of the combat branches.

In addition, the army’s development in this period was greatly influenced by its interaction with the government and with American society, so this interaction is discussed as well.

Although change is often best understood by means of a chronological narrative, treating developments in each of these areas together in a single narrative proved impossible. Hence, I have broken this study down into four chronological periods. The introduction covers the period from 1878 to 1920, during which time the primary issue was the creation of a nationally accepted military policy upon which a modern army could be built. That policy was finally established by the National Defense Act of 1920.

Part I then covers 1920-25, when the principal focus was on the creation of a new national army based on the defense act and the development of the civilian components of a citizen army that was the centerpiece of the policy established by the act. The army’s experience with this effort, along with its interaction with both the American government and with American society in this early period, was discouraging and disillusioning. This, together with the fact that the work of

Preface Xv creating the citizen components was largely complete by 1925, meant that during the next four years the army tended to direct its attention and efforts inward to building its own structure and culture. So, Part II, while continuing the story of the development of the citizen components as well as the army’s ongoing relationship with the government, is primarily concerned with the development of the army’s branch structure during the years and the development of its system of professional education. In doing this, I have focused only on the four main combat branches of the army—the infantry, the cavalry, the field artillery, and the coast artillery—since they best illustrate the changes being made and were the elements most involved with the development of the new citizen army and with mechanization. Chapter 6, devoted to the infantry, also illustrates the principal means by which branch structures as well as their culture and identity were developed in the 1920s. Chapters 7 and 8 then deal with the histories of the field artillery and the coast artillery, respectively, for the entire twenty-year period. While these branches, especially the coast artillery, underwent important changes in this period, neither was significantly involved with mechanization— the focus of the last section—so it seemed best to treat their stories all at once rather than arbitrarily divide them among the sections.

Part III concentrates on the army in the 1930s and its main concern of the interwar period—mechanization. Issues related to the further development of the citizen components are treated in chapter 10. The final two chapters are then devoted to the two branches most involved with mechanization, the infantry and especially the cavalry. Since the cavalry was most involved with mechanization and responded to it within the framework of its own long-term development, its entire story during the period is told in chapter 12.

This approach means that as a history of the army in this period, this work is scarcely encyclopedic. The stories of the development of the air service (later air corps), then part of the army; the development of the many support services such as the quartermaster corps or the transportation corps so vital to the success of any military operation; and the massive efforts behind the development of mobilization plans that consumed enormous blocks of the General Staffs time and effort are not covered. Fortunately, these aspects of the army’s history in this period have been examined elsewhere. Also, this story involves only the experience of officers, especially those in top leadership positions. The U.S. Army was a top-down organization, with the basic changes being the result of decisions coming from its senior leadership. Lower-ranking officers then carried out these decisions. The experience of enlisted men and, especially, noncommissioned of ficers is a story that has not been told and should be, no matter how challenging xvi Preface it would be to construct. But, as important as all these topics are, they had little to do with the four-part development of the army. The aviators in the air service/ corps were focused on establishing the autonomy of their arm as a means of carrying on strategic warfare based on long-range bombing rather than acting as tactical air support for other elements of the army, so they rarely interacted with the soldiers in the ground forces. One notices the virtual absence of any discussion of the air service/corps in the branch-oriented professional military journals of that period. The various service bureaus also had their own stories of change, but theirs are not particularly related to the issues that are central here. With those caveats in mind, it is my hope that this volume will provide a look at how the modern American citizen army was created and how it established itself in a period of almost revolutionary proportions in the ways wars would be fought.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge and express my appreciation to those who were helpful to me in this project over the course of many years. These include John Taylor at the National Archives and Richard Sommers at the archives of the U.S. Army Military History Institute as well as the archivists at the Command and General Staff College and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. I also wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to J. P. Clark, William A. Taylor, David Silbey, Brian North, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen F. Mowe, Richard Scamehorn, Stephen D. Woolley, and Eric P. Black, who read and offered valuable suggestions on all or part of my manuscript. In addition, I want to acknowledge my thanks to Joyce Harrison, Kevin Brock, Lisa Stallings, and the people at the University Press of Kansas who helped this work make its way to final publication, and to Michael Taber for producing the index. Their contributions made the book a better one, any faults in it are my responsibility. Lastly, I wish to express appreciation for their ongoing encouragement and support to my family—A llen, Pamela, Jennifer, Stephen, Maria, Mindy, Eric, Brent, Michelle, and especially to my wife, Jean, who was my chief proofreader, editor, critic, and cheerleader.

CREATING THE MODERN ARMY: CITIZEN-SOLDIERS AND THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR, 1919-1939

Introduction

The Quest for a National Military Policy, 1878-1920

N THE LAST QUARTER of the nineteenth century, a small number of officers became aware of two major developments that would be of concern to the U.S. Army. The first was the disappearance of the frontier and with it the disappearance of one of the military’s major missions, serving as the constabulary force controlling relations between white settlers in the West and Native American residents. The other was recent and dramatic changes in warfare that could affect American security. The officers were especially influenced by the wars fought between 1866 and 1871 that led to the unification of Germany. In these wars Prussia, although smaller and far less prosperous than its two major opponents, Austria-Hungary and France, quickly and decisively defeated each of them. For these officers, the Prussian successes stood in dramatic contrast to the prolonged and excessively bloody slugging match that was the American Civil War. Aware also that the new drives to imperialism also left areas outside of Europe vulnerable, including the United States, they sought to reform the U.S. Army by organizing it along European, and especially German, lines. This meant, in particular, creating a centralized control structure such as a general staff, developing an officer corps that would be professionally educated, and creating a trained reserve force that could be quickly called up in the event of a war. Two major factors, however, made this seem an almost hopeless task. One was that American public opinion was traditionally antipathetic, if not openly hostile, to regular armies organized by central governments. This attitude was inherited from English experience with standing armies in the seventeenth century under both the Stuart kings and Oliver Cromwell, during which the army was seen as an instrument of despotism and threat to liberty. This attitude was then reinforced by Americans’ experience with the British Army immediately before and during the American Revolution. Hence, while those who framed the Constitution accepted the need for a regular army, they hedged it about with safeguards to prevent it from becoming a tool of despotism.

Moreover, well before the Revolution the American colonists had already developed two other forms of military organization based on the principle of citizen-soldiers as alternatives to a standing army. The first of these was the local militia, made up of citizens who maintained arms and underwent some degree of training. Headed by local officers who were often elected, these units were usually sufficient to maintain social order and to defend their communities from threats from Native Americans. The second came in the form of ad-hoc volunteer forces usually formed to meet specific military exigencies. These units were usually recruited in communities by prominent civilians who became their officers. A large number of such units fought in colonial wars and in the Revolution. They also played a major role in the Mexican War (1846-48) and, until conscription was introduced, made up almost entirely the Union and Confederate armies in the Civil War. Similar units, notably the Rough Riders, were still active in the Spanish-American War (1898). During the nineteenth century, civilian leaders of some of these units had received at least the rudiments of military education at a few private colleges, most notably Norwich Academy in Vermont. During and after the Civil War, many regular officers were suitably impressed with the fighting quality of volunteers so that they sought to regularize the volunteer tradition. The Morrill Act of 1862 that created the land-grant university system included a provision requiring these schools to provide some form of military training to students so they might later take on leadership roles in volunteer units if needed.’

One major problem for the reformers, then, was that any effort to reorganize the army along German lines would be highly unacceptable to an American public that was not only deeply suspicious of regular armies but also felt that the two homegrown civilian-based alternatives were more than adequate for meeting the nation’s needs, especially since an ocean separated the United States from any major European power.

The second major factor facing reformers was conservative resistance from within the army itself. There were two aspects of this. First, until well into the 1890s, much of the army’s senior leadership was comprised of officers who had served in the Union army during the Civil War. Many of these officers entered the war as part of volunteer units. As historian J. P. Clark points out, having been virtually selftaught, this generation of officers saw little value in reforms that stressed professional military education. The fact that the Union army had been victorious in the war seemed to vindicate their approach to military leadership to the point that they saw no need to change.” The second aspect was that the major political power in the nineteenth-century American army lay with the chiefs of the bureaus, such as the Quartermaster Corps, that supported the army. These senior officers, having lifetime tenure in their posts in Washington, had built up close relations with Congress. As James M. Hewes has observed, “Bureau chiefs in office for life... had greater Congressional influence than passing secretaries or line officers.” As a result, during the 1800s, the bureaus had become virtually independent fiefdoms within the army, and unsurprisingly, the chiefs were hostile to any reform movement that challenged their position.

The reform movement was initiated by the efforts of one officer, Lieutenant Colonel Emory Upton.‘ One of America’s most influential military reformers, Upton, born in 1839, had graduated from West Point in 1861 just in time to participate in the Civil War. In the eastern campaigns, he proved to be a brilliant and courageous officer, becoming a brigadier general of volunteers by the end of the war. Upton was greatly impressed by the fighting quality of the volunteer soldiers in the army but was disgusted by what he saw as the ignorance of many senior volunteer officers. He attributed the latter to both the almost dominating role played by political influence in the selection of senior officers, especially in the state militias, and to the lack of any systematic military education.

After 1865, Upton began to develop a program of reform to address the problems he had seen during the war. He started by developing a new and simplified system of infantry tactics more suitable for volunteer soldiers. This was adopted by the army in 1867. After that he turned his attention to the issue of officer education. In 1875 he convinced General William T. Sherman, then the commanding general of the army, to send him to Europe and Asia to study military systems there. In Europe Upton was particularly impressed by the German army and its rigorous system for the professional education of its officers. Returning to the United States, he wrote a report of his trip, later published as The Armies of Asia and Europe, in which, among other things, he lauded the Prussians’ progressive military-education system, their general-staff system, and their reserve system.’ In addition, he proposed his own idea for raising an army based on volunteers, which he called National Volunteers since they would be trained by the Regular Army rather than by what he saw as the heavily politicized state militias. Regular regiments would then contain one or two skeletonized battalions of National Volunteers that, given the popular excitement typical at the beginning of hostilities, would be filled with new volunteer recruits.

Upton had also come to see that America’s major military failing was a lack of a distinct military policy to guide the development of its assets. The objective of such a policy should be to have the nation prepared for war before hostilities started. Its major elements would be, first, that the Regular Army was to be free of political influences outside of those provided for in the constitution. Second, the nation’s existing military force would be supplemented by volunteer soldiers trained by the Regular Army rather than the state militias. And third, the professional officers would receive a progressive military education to prepare them for each level of command.

Upton’s ideas initially attracted little attention even in the army. Few officers saw any purpose in a progressive education system aimed at higher command in what was essentially a frontier constabulary force and in which few could expect to be promoted beyond captain. Frustrated, Upton planned a second book in which he would make his appeal for a modern European-style military policy directly to Americans rather than as a gloss on an official report. The new work, to be called “The Military Policy of the United States from 1775,” was to excoriate the nation for never having developed such a policy while advocating his own ideas. Upton, however, died in 1881 before he could finish it himself.

Yet, within a few years of his death, Upton’s vision of an American Army led by a new breed of officers who identified themselves primarily as educated military professionals began to attract a growing number of adherents. These men could be called the “new professionals.” A small trickle of such officers began to follow Upton in making trips to Germany to study its military system. Initially, the new professionals were just a tiny minority in the army, but their numbers grew, and their influence grew even faster. That influence depended on their organization and their control of powerful positions in the army. Their organization was founded in the new military schools and professional associations that they helped establish in this period. The most important of these organizations was the Military Service Institute, founded in 1879. Headed by General Sherman, the institute gave respectability to the idea of officership in the army as a learned profession, while its organ, the Journal of the Military Service Institute, became the major intellectual clearing house of ideas concerning reform. Other new professional associations, such as the Cavalry Association founded in 1885 and the Infantry Society founded in 1893, along with the journals sponsored by these groups, provided the new professionals with additional opportunities to form networks, read the ideas of others, widen their circle, and establish their reputations through publications.

The influence gained by the new professionals by means of their leadership in these associations was then reinforced by their slowly taking control of the Adjutant General’s Office. Located close to the office of the secretary of war, the Adjutant General’s Office was seen as the premier bureau in the post—Civil War army and the only one concerned with the overall direction of the military. As such it attracted reform-minded officers and, by the 1880s, became a center for institutional change.

By the 1890s, this movement had coalesced to the point that its adherents could begin to articulate a program of reform largely based on Upton’s ideas. The elements of this program clustered around the general idea that the Regular Army should be transformed from a western constabulary and garrison force into a small but compact European-style mobile striking force. This would call for a number of major changes, including the reorganization and concentration of the army, then organized around regiments, into tactical units such as divisions and corps; a shift of focus in its leadership structure from administration to strategic direction; the development of a professional, educated officer corps; and the creation ofa means by which the limited strength of the peacetime army could be temporarily augmented in time of an emergency by militarily trained civilian reserves.

Progress toward achieving these goals was made in several directions during this decade. In particular, the army began to systematize its professional-education system. In 1890, officers below the rank of major were required to pass a written test before being considered eligible for promotion. To help prepare for this examination, authorities encouraged regiments to create “lyceums” as the basis for an informal junior-officer educational system. At the same time pressure grew for creating more branch schools, such as the older School of Artillery at Fort Monroe, Virginia, while the existing School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was gradually upgraded into a more academic staff college. Finally, some officers began to call for the establishment of an Army War College as a counterpart to the recently formed Naval War College.

Thus, in the later 1890s, the new professionals began to feel confident that they had the organization, power, and articulated program necessary to carry out a major reform of the army along Uptonian lines. They were still a distinct minority, but the disaggregated structure of the army and its tradition of quiet loyalty deprived any opposition of a focal point to oppose the reform movement now emanating from the Adjutant General’s Office. The reformers, therefore, were far more concerned with congressional and public apathy or even hostility to updating the military. While army leadership could carry out many reforms internally without the sanction of Congress, most major programs would require legislative action. Yet in the previous three decades, the army had enjoyed little success in getting reform measures through Congress. A major effort to make use of the rising war sentiment in 1897 to push through such legislation also foundered.

The cause of the failure was opposition from the increasingly energized National Guard, as the former state militias were now called, which underscored the fact that it would now be necessary for army reformers to take this service into consideration in any plans for further development of a military reform program. As professionals, many officers in the Regular Army had little more than contempt for the Guard. Seen as both the institutional descendent of the American militia tradition and the product of state-centered political patronage, they considered the Guard to be the embodiment of military amateurism. Since such amateurism directly denied the value of the systematically acquired military education that the new professionals considered central, the Guard was anathema to most of the reformers. Finally, as Michael Neiberg points out, regular officers were suspicious of and prejudiced against the democratic character of guard units, with the election of officers and the familiarity inherent when officers and men came from the same community.’

This contemptuous view of the National Guard was, in many respects, neither fair nor accurate. While many guard officers did owe their position to patronage, many were also sincere military enthusiasts who sought to be as well trained and professional as time and resources would allow. And while it was still a state organization, the National Guard, as its new name implied, was also acquiring a sense of national identity, which was institutionalized by the creation of the National Guard Association in 1879. Finally, guardsmen saw themselves as the embodiment of the citizen-soldier, a military tradition they considered to be uniquely American, just as many felt that the European-inspired military vision of a professional soldier was distinctly un-American. Thus, in early 1898 the Guard was able to take advantage of its powerful state political backing and of its attractiveness to many in Congress as a truly American fighting force to defeat the army’s reform plan, instead winning for itself the reserve role in any significant war in the future. This victory was an educational experience for the new professionals, who now understood the need to work in cooperation with the Guard in developing further reforms.