IN THE ALLIED HEADQUARTERS AT REIMS, Field Marshal Jodl signed the instrument of German surrender on May 7, 1945. At midnight of the next day there ended, in Europe, a conflict that had been raging since September 1, 1939.
Between these two dates millions of Europeans had been killed. All Europe west of the Rhine had, with minor exceptions, lived for more than four years under the domination of an occupying army. Free institutions and free speech had disappeared. Economies were broken and industry prostrated. In Germany itself, after years of seeming invincibility, a carpet of destruction and desolation had spread over the land. Her bridges were down, her cities in ruins, and her great industrial capacity practically paralyzed. Great Britain had exhausted herself economically and financially to carry on her part of the war; the nation was almost entirely mobilized, with everybody of useful age, men and women alike, either in the armed forces or engaged in some type of production for war. Russian industry west of the Volga had been almost obliterated.
America had not been spared: by V-J Day in the Pacific, 322,188 of her youth had been lost in battle or had died in the service and approximately 700,000 more had been wounded.1 The nation had poured forth resources in unstinted measure not only to support her own armies and navies and air forces but also to give her Allies equipment and weapons with which to operate effectively against the common enemy. Each of the Allies had, according to its means, contributed to the common cause but America had stood pre-eminent as the arsenal of democracy. We were the nation which, from the war’s beginning to its end, had achieved the greatest transformation from almost complete military weakness to astounding strength and effectiveness.
Europe had been at war for a full year before America became alarmed over its pitifully inadequate defenses. When the nation began, in 1939, first steps toward strengthening its military establishment, it started from a position as close to zero as a great nation could conceivably have allowed itself to sink.
That summer the Germans were massing against the Polish frontiers 60 infantry divisions, 14 mechanized and motorized divisions, 3 mountain divisions, more than 4000 planes, and thousands of tanks and armored cars. To oppose them the Poles could mobilize less than a third that strength in all categories.2 Their force was doomed to quick destruction under the fury and weight of the German assault. But the Polish Army, easy victim though it was to Hitler’s war machine, far surpassed the United States Army in numbers of men and pieces of equipment.
On July 1, 1939, the Army’s enlisted strength in the United States—air, ground, and service—was less than 130,000; of three organized and six partially organized infantry divisions, not one approached its combat complement; there were two cavalry divisions at less than half strength; but there was not one armored division, and the total number of men in scattered tank units was less than 1500; the entire Air Force consisted of approximately 1175 planes, designed for combat, and 17,000 men to service, maintain, and fly them. Overseas, to hold garrisons from the Arctic Circle to the Equator and from Panama to Corregidor, eight thousand miles away, there were 45,300 soldiers.3
Two increases, authorized during the summer and fall of 1939, raised the active Army at home and overseas to 227,000. But there it remained during the eight months that Germany, brutally triumphant over Poland, was readying her full might for the conquest of western Europe.
The American people still believed that distance provided adequate insulation between us and any conflict in Europe or Asia. Comparatively few understood the direct relationship between American prosperity and physical safety on the one hand, and on the other the existence of a free world beyond our shores. Consequently, the only Americans who thought about preparation for war were a few professionals in the armed services and those far-seeing statesmen who understood that American isolation from any major conflict was now completely improbable.
In the spring of 1940, with the German seizure of Denmark and Norway, the blitz that swept from the Rhine through France to the Bay of Biscay, and the crippled retreat of the British Army from Dunkirk, America began to grow uneasy. By the middle of June the Regular Army’s authorized strength had been increased to 375,000. By the end of August, Congress had authorized mobilization of the National Guard; six weeks later Selective Service was in operation. By the summer of 1941 the Army of the United States, composed of regulars, Guardsmen, and citizen soldiers, numbered 1,500,000. No larger peacetime force had ever been mustered by this country. It was, nevertheless, only a temporary compromise with international fact.4
The million men who had come into the Army through the National Guard and Selective Service could not be required to serve anywhere outside the Western Hemisphere or for more than twelve months at home. In the summer of 1941, consequently, with the Germans racing across Russia and their Japanese ally unmistakably preparing for the conquest of the far Pacific, the Army could only feebly reinforce overseas garrisons.
The attack at Pearl Harbor was less than four months away when, by a one-vote margin in the House of Representatives, the Congress passed the Selective Service Extension Act, permitting the movement of all Army components overseas and extending the term of service.5 The congressional action can be attributed largely to the personal intervention of General George C. Marshall, who had already attained a public stature that gave weight to his urgent warning. But even he could not entirely overcome the conviction that an all-out effort for defense was unnecessary. Limitations on service, such as the release of men of the age of twenty-eight, reflected a continuing belief that there was no immediate danger.
Thus for two years, as war engulfed the world outside the Americas and the Axis drove relentlessly toward military domination of the globe, each increase in the size, efficiency, and appropriations of the armed services was the result of a corresponding decrease in the complacency of the American people. But their hesitation to abandon compromise for decisive action could not be wholly dispelled until Pearl Harbor converted the issue into a struggle for survival.
Thereafter, in the space of three and a half years, the United States produced the fighting machine that played an indispensable role in beating Germany to its knees, even while our country, almost single-handed, was conducting a decisive war against the Japanese Empire.
The revolutionary transformation of America was not achieved overnight; the fact that it was ever achieved at all was due to the existence of staunch allies and our own distance from the scene of combat. At the outset none of us could foresee the end of the struggle; few of us saw eye to eye on what was demanded of us as individuals and as a nation; but each began, step by step, to learn and to perform his allotted task.
America’s transformation, in three years, from a situation of appalling danger to unparalleled might in battle was one of the two miracles that brought Jodl to our headquarters to surrender on May 7, 1945. The other was the development, over the same period, of near perfection in allied conduct of war operations. History testifies to the ineptitude of coalitions in waging war. Allied failures have been so numerous and their inexcusable blunders so common that professional soldiers had long discounted the possibility of effective allied action unless available resources were so great as to assure victory by inundation. Even Napoleon’s reputation as a brilliant military leader suffered when students in staff colleges came to realize that he always fought against coalitions—and therefore against divided counsels and diverse political, economic, and military interests.
Primarily the Allied task was to utilize the resources of two great nations with the decisiveness of single authority.
There was no precedent to follow, no chart by which to steer. Where nations previously had been successful in concert against a common foe, one member of the coalition had usually been so strong as to be the dominating partner. Now it was necessary to produce effective unity out of concessions voluntarily made. The true history of the war, and more especially the history of the operations Torch and Overlord, in the Mediterranean and northwest Europe, is the story of a unity produced on the basis of this voluntary co-operation. Differences there were, differences among strong men representing strong and proud peoples, but these paled into insignificance alongside the miracle of achievement represented in the shoulder-to-shoulder march of the Allies to complete victory in the West.
On the day the war began, in 1939, I was in the Philippines, nearing completion of four years’ duty as senior military assistant to General Douglas MacArthur, who had been charged with building and training an independent Filipino military establishment.
Local interest in the war was heightened by outbreaks in Manila clubs of arguments and fist fights among members of foreign consulates—Hitler was a deep-dyed villain to most but a hero to a small though vociferous element. Hirohito was rarely if ever mentioned: all attention centered on the next move of the Nazi dictator.
The news of the invasion of Poland reached us and we heard that the Prime Minister of Great Britain was to make a radio address. With my friend, Colonel Howard Smith, I listened to the declaration that Britain and Germany were again at war. It was a solemn moment, particularly so for me because I was convinced that the United States would soon find it impossible to retain a position of neutrality.
I was certain that the United States would be drawn into the whirlpool of the war, but I was mistaken as to the manner of our entry. I assumed that Japan would make no move against us until after we were committed to the European war. Moreover, I was wrong as to time. It seemed to me that we would be compelled to defend ourselves against the Axis within a year of the war’s outbreak.
From 1931 onward a number of senior officers of the Army had frequently expressed to me their conviction that the world was heading straight toward another global war. I shared these views. It seemed clear that every action of the dictatorships in Japan, Germany, and Italy pointed to their determination to seize whatever territories they might happen to want, and that these ambitions would early force democratic nations into conflict. Many believed, however, that in pushing England and France to war Hitler had at last miscalculated.
They reasoned that the French Army and the British Navy together would beat him into submission; not only did they scorn the reports of skilled observers who cast suspicion on the legend of French military efficiency but they failed to consider the record of the German General Staff for striking only when cold-blooded calculations gave promise of quick success.
I called upon the President of the Philippines and told him I wanted to return home to take part in the work of intensive preparation which I was now certain would begin in the United States. President Manuel Quezon urged me to stay, but my mind was made up. I requested permission to leave the islands before the end of the year.
When my wife, my son John, and I left Manila in December, General MacArthur saw us off at the pier. It was the last time I was to see him until my postwar visit, as Chief of Staff, to his Tokyo headquarters. We talked of the gloominess of world prospects, but our forebodings turned toward Europe—not Asia.
Our trip home took us through Japan, where we spent a few days in the coastal cities. At that time numbers of American Army officers made casual tours of Japan and there was nothing unusual about a transitory visit from another lieutenant colonel. Yet a rather unusual incident occurred. Scarcely had we gone through the formalities of landing when we met, apparently by pure chance, a Japanese graduate of an American university, who described himself as an assistant postmaster general. He said he knew, from friends of his, of the nature of my work in the Philippines and, while he asked no specific questions, he was much interested in my impressions of the Filipino people. He attached himself to us as a guide for the duration of our stay. He helped us shop, taking the lead in beating down prices; he took us to vantage points for interesting views, and in a dozen ways made himself agreeable and helpful. The burden of his conversation was the need for friendly understanding between his country and ours, for which he professed great admiration and affection. He seemed to have unlimited time to devote to us and I assumed that he made it a practice to meet and talk with visiting Americans, possibly in nostalgic memory of his student days. Some weeks later, however, when I mentioned him to others who had passed through Japan shortly before or after that period, I found no one who had met him or any other governmental official.
In early January 1940, I arrived in the United States and was assigned to troop duty with the 15th Infantry at Fort Lewis, Washington. After eight years of desk and staff duty in the rarefied atmosphere of military planning and pleading, I was again in daily contact with the two fundamental elements of military effort—men and weapons.
No better assignment than mine could have been asked by a professional soldier at a time when much of the world was already at war and the eventual involvement of the United States daily became more probable. In large part the troops of the 15th were either seasoned veterans who had been with the regiment in China before its 1938 return to the States, or volunteers who had recently enlisted; the officers were all professionals.
In case of war such outfits would be the bulwark of American defense and the spearhead of our retaliation, should there be a sudden attack on us. Given time to expand our military forces, they would provide the cadres around which would be built hundreds of battalions, and from their ranks would come instructors to convert recruits by the hundred thousand into trained soldiers. In either instance there was unlimited opportunity for men and officers to prove their professional worth.
In early 1940, however, the United States Army mirrored the attitudes of the American people, as is the case today and as it was a century ago. The mass of officers and men lacked any sense of urgency. Athletics, recreation, and entertainment took precedence in most units over serious training. Some of the officers, in the long years of peace, had worn for themselves deep ruts of professional routine within which they were sheltered from vexing new ideas and troublesome problems. Others, bogged down in one grade for many years because seniority was the only basis for promotion, had abandoned all hope of progress. Possibly many of them, and many of the troops too, felt that the infantryman’s day had passed.
The number of infantrymen assigned to organized units in the Army had been reduced from 56,000 on July 1, 1939, to 49,000 on January 31, 1940.6 On the face of things, to the average foot soldier who could not foresee his role in Europe or the Pacific, this reduction might with reason have been interpreted as a sign of his early disappearance from the military scene.
The situation in weapons and equipment added little to the infantryman’s esprit. The Springfield rifle was outmoded; there was no dependable defense against a modern tank or plane; troops carried wooden models of mortars and machine guns and were able to study some of our new weapons only from blueprints. Equipment of all sorts was lacking and much of that in use had been originally produced for the national Army of World War I.
Moreover, military appropriations during the thirties had restricted training to a unit basis. Even small-arms ammunition for range firing had to be rationed in occasional doles. The Army concentrated on spit and polish, retreat formations, and parades because the American people, in their abhorrence of war, denied themselves a reasonable military posture.
Military doctrine and theory, consequently, could not be supplemented with practical application; officers and men did not have the assurance that comes only with field experience and the tests of use. Nevertheless, it was apparent that the War Department was moving as rapidly as possible to be ready for the inevitable climax. Laborious preparation, against almost unbelievable difficulties, went on under the determined leadership of General Marshall. The handicaps were many.
The greatest obstacle was psychological—complacency still persisted! Even the fall of France in May 1940 failed to awaken us—and by “us” I mean many professional soldiers as well as others—to a full realization of danger. The commanding general of one United States division, an officer of long service and high standing, offered to bet, on the day of the French armistice, that England would not last six weeks longer—and he proposed the wager much as he would have bet on rain or shine for the morrow. It did not occur to him to think of Britain as the sole remaining belligerent standing between us and starkest danger. His attitude was typical of the great proportion of soldiers and civilians alike. Happily there were numerous exceptions whose devoted efforts accomplished more than seemed possible.
Despite the deepening of congressional concern, the nation was so unprepared to accept the seriousness of the world outlook that training could not be conducted in realistic imitation of the battlefield. We had to carry it on in soothing-syrup style calculated to rouse the least resentment from the soldiers themselves and from their families at home. Many senior officers stood in such fear of a blast in the headlines against exposing men to inclement weather or to the fatigue of extended maneuvers that they did not prescribe the only type of training that would pay dividends once the bullets began to fly. Urgent directives from above and protest from the occasional “alarmist” could not eliminate an apathy that had its roots in comfort, blindness, and wishful thinking.
The induction of the National Guard sharply increased the Army’s numerical strength, particularly in infantry and anti-aircraft. Although undermanned, underequipped, and undertrained, the organizational structure of the Guard outfits was complete; only recruits, equipment, time, and the right kind of training were needed to make them effective.
Bright spots in the military picture gradually emerged. Congress in the fall of 1940 provided some money for critically needed field training. This training, under the supervision of Major General, later Lieutenant General, Lesley J. McNair, one of our ablest officers, became the chief preoccupation of the Army. From Fort Lewis the 15th Infantry, as part of the 3d Infantry Division, went on extended field maneuvers to outlying districts in the state of Washington and to the Monterey Peninsula, some distance south of San Francisco. The attendant marches, logistic planning, tactical problems, and necessary staff work provided the best possible schools for officers and men, both Regular and emergency. One of these problems involved an eleven-hundred-mile motor march, from Fort Lewis to the Jolon Ranch, south of Monterey, California. We assumed tactical conditions and during the movement tested out our control procedures, communication systems, and march discipline.
While serving in the 3d Division, I renewed a friendship of my cadet days with Major Mark W. Clark. He and I worked together constantly in many phases of the field exercises we both so much enjoyed, and I gained a lasting respect for his planning, training, and organizing ability, which I have not seen excelled in any other officer. But in answer to the rapidly expanding needs of the new headquarters springing up all over the country he soon went to Washington as an assistant to General McNair, while, in November, I was again removed from direct command duty to become the chief of staff of the 3d Division. That post was to be mine only four months, when again I was transferred, this time to be chief of staff of the IX Army Corps, which had shortly before been established at Fort Lewis. This assignment brought me my first emergency promotion; I became a temporary colonel in March 1941.
The corps commander was Major General Kenyon A. Joyce. On his staff I met an exceptionally keen group of men, three of whom I tried, with some success, to keep close to me throughout the ensuing war years. These were all of relatively low rank at the time but they emerged from the war as Lieutenant General Lucian K. Truscott, Major General Willard G. Wyman, and Colonel James Curtis. Such men as these were ready, even anxious, to support every measure that promised to add realism and thoroughness to training, but it was an uphill fight.
During the spring of 1941 every post and camp was astir with the business of building the Army of the United States, into which had been fused all elements of the country’s military front—Regular, Guard, and Reserve, augmented by the hundreds of thousands of men inducted through Selective Service. For us at Fort Lewis the process of development began on September 16, 1940, when the advance echelon of the 41st Infantry Division arrived on the post. Within a short time the entire division and other units of the National Guard were encamped there.
By the following spring the entire West Coast area was in a state of almost endless movement—men arriving in groups for assignment to units; cadres of men being withdrawn from units to form new organizations; officers and men leaving for and returning from specialist schools; cities of tents and barracks with all the multiple utilities of modern living—hospitals, water systems, light and power plants—springing up overnight where before had been open fields.
Our objective was to turn out physically fit men, schooled in their military and technical jobs, adjusted to discipline and unit teamwork, with the greatest possible measure of a soldier’s pride in his mission; because of public unreadiness to support true battle training we could not hope to turn out masses of toughened fighting men, emotionally and professionally ready for warfare.
But even our limited objective absorbed all the energy officers and men could give it. For those on staff work the days became ceaseless rounds of planning, directing, inspecting; compromising what had been commanded with what could be done; adjusting assignments of men and quotas of vehicles to the shortages that continually plagued us; striving always to keep pace in our area with the Army-wide pace.
In June 1941, I was assigned to Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Third Army as his chief of staff at San Antonio headquarters. There I was brought closer to the problems of the Army of the United States as a whole. The four tactical armies, into which the ground forces were divided, varied in numerical strength; but all were alike in their core of Regular units, around which had been assembled the Guard outfits, with vacancies in all units filled by Reserve officers and soldiers from Selective Service. Consequently the reports coming across my desk at Fort Sam Houston on the training, morale, and capacity of our divisions and units in the field were accurate indications of our progress throughout the United States.
The situation contrasted favorably to that of a year earlier. The Army of the United States now totaled approximately 1,500,000 officers and men. However, grave deficiencies still existed. Vehicles, modern tanks, and anti-aircraft equipment were critically short. Supporting air formations were almost non-existent. Moreover, the approaching expiration of a year’s service for National Guard units and Selective Service soldiers was a constant worry, not to be relieved until two months later. In June we feared the exodus of men, beginning in September, would not be matched by a comparable inflow.
But even the rapid growth of the Army and the latest manifestations of Axis military power had not jolted some Regular officers out of their rigid devotion to obsolete tenets and routine. For their blindness there was no longer an acceptable excuse. In the civilian components another type of difficulty was encountered. Many Guard and Reserve officers had grown old in the prewar struggle to maintain a citizen security force, and now that their efforts of the twenties and thirties were bearing fruit, they themselves were physically unable to meet the demands of field duty in combat echelons.
General Krueger himself was one of the senior officers of the Army. A private, corporal, and sergeant in the late 1890s, he had an Army-wide reputation as a hard-bitten soldier. But through more than forty years of service he had kept pace with every military change, and few officers had a clearer grasp of what another war would demand of the Army; few were physically tougher or more active. Relentlessly driving himself, he had little need of driving others—they were quick to follow his example.
His Third Army was now directed to concentrate in Louisiana for a great maneuver, with Lieutenant General Ben Lear’s Second Army as its opponent. Not one of our officers on the active list had commanded a unit as large as a division in the first World War. Like a vast laboratory experiment, the maneuvers would prove the worth of ideas, men, weapons, and equipment. More than 270,000 men—the largest army ever gathered in the United States for a single tactical operation—were assembled by General Krueger that September. Moving out of Second Army camps at the same time were another 130,000.7
The beneficial results of that great maneuver were incalculable. It accustomed the troops to mass teamwork; it speeded up the process of eliminating the unfit; it brought to the specific attention of seniors certain of the younger men who were prepared to carry out the most difficult assignments in staff and command; and it developed among responsible leaders skill in the handling of large forces in the fields. Practical experience was gained in large-scale field supply of troops. No comparable peacetime attempt had ever been made by Americans in the road movement of food, fuel, and ammunition from railhead and depot to a constantly shifting front line. Advance planning, consequently, was thorough and intensive; as is always the case, it paid off.
“The essential effectiveness of supply,” General McNair, expert in the conduct and assessment of maneuvers, told the assembled staffs in a critique of the operations, “was an outstanding feature of the maneuvers. The magnitude of the problem alone was sufficient to warrant apprehension as to whether the troops would be supplied adequately. Combat commanders and the services alike deserve the highest praise for the results achieved.” The efficiency of American trucks in the movement of troops and supply, demonstrated so magnificently three years later in the race across France, was forecast on the roads of Louisiana in September 1941.
In the Third Army the officer directly responsible for supply efficiency was Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy Lutes. His brilliance in this type of work was to bring him, long before the end of this war, the three stars of a lieutenant general.
Many of the military faults revealed in the maneuvers, General McNair believed, had their root in discipline. “There is no question,” he said, “that many of the weaknesses developed in these maneuvers are repeated again and again for lack of discipline. Our troops are capable of the best of discipline. If they lack it, leadership is faulty. A commander who cannot develop proper discipline must be replaced.”8
During this time I had my first important introduction to the press camera, which, since the days of Brady, has been a prominent feature of the American military scene. In the fall of 1941, however, flash bulbs were a fairly novel element in my daily life and I was only an unknown face to the men who used them. During the critique at Camp Polk a group shot was made of General Krueger, Major E. M. Bolden, a British military observer, and me; in the caption my two companions were correctly identified, but I appeared as “Lt. Col. D. D. Ersenbeing”—at least the initials were right.
The maneuvers provided me with lessons and experience that I appreciated more and more as subsequent months rolled by. We conducted in Louisiana an extensive test of the usefulness of the cub plane for liaison and observation purposes. Its worth was demonstrated so conclusively that later, in the War Department, I was able to argue successfully, under the leadership of Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, for its inclusion in the normal equipment of every division. These planes enabled our heavy and long-range artillery to gain an accuracy and quickness of adjustment previously restricted to the light guns within eyeshot of the target; and field commanders could get a grasp of the tactical situation—terrain, avenues of movement, concentrations of troops and artillery—almost as complete as in the eighteenth century, when the opposing commanders, from horseback or a hillock, could view all the regiments committed to battle.
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.