The Army and Two World Wars
A much more professional Army spearheaded President Wilson’s crusade to reform the international order through American intervention in World War I. After Wilson’s war message in April 1917, Army officers worked with business and government counterparts to mobilize the nation’s resources, despite enormous friction resulting from the magnitude and unprecedented nature of the effort. To meet the need for a massive ground force capable of fighting on the European battlefield, the Army drew on its Civil War expertise and on popular acceptance of a more activist federal government to develop a more efficient system of manpower allocation through conscription. To utilize these levies in a rational fashion, it employed innovative intelligence tests that foreshadowed the widespread use of testing in the civilian sector. As the Army organized and trained the draftees for overseas duty, it found within its ranks many illiterates and recent immigrants who spoke little English. In response, it formed “development battalions,” each of which specialized in a particular task, and drilled the participants in reading, writing, and other skills. By the Armistice 225,000 men had passed through such units, and over half emerged fit for some form of military service. In addition to these remedial programs, the Army made available classes in vocational skills for soldiers eager for activity during the long period between the war’s end and the return home.
Although it had not yet reached its full potential as a fighting force by the Armistice ending World War I, the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) contributed morally and tangibly to the Allied victory and to President Wilson’s efforts to win the peace. Within three months of American entry into the war, the 1st Infantry Division reached Paris in time to participate in a Fourth of July parade, raising French spirits at a low point in the war. When the German offensive of 1918 penetrated to the outskirts of the French capital, American soldiers played a key role in turning back the enemy tide at Chateau
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“American Troops Advancing”
by Harold Brett
(Army Art Collection)
Thierry. Two months later the First U.S. Army launched its initial offensive at St. Mihiel. In the Meuse-Argonne campaign, the AEF contributed to the final Allied drive before the Armistice. Ultimately, 8 Regular Army divisions, 17 National Guard divisions, and 17 newly organized National Army divisions served in France. After numerous predictions that the unprepared United States would be unable to provide timely help to the Allies, such material evidence of American aid elated the British and French and utterly destroyed German morale. As commander in chief of the AEF, General John J. Pershing was determined to preserve the independence of the AEF and not allow its young men merely to be absorbed into existing British and French units. This stance served the diplomatic goals of President Wilson, who sought to maintain his freedom of action from the other Allies while trying to build a new world order around the League of Nations.
Any notions that the Army no longer had a reason to exist in the aftermath of “the war to end allwars” were soon dispelled by the events of the 1920s and 1930s. Despite isolationist rhetoric, the United States remained involved in international politics. American troops occupied the German Rhineland alongside other Allied contingents, doing much to restore normal economic life in their zone. At home, Army engineers by congressional mandate assumed a greater role in flood control, experimenting with ways to divert excess water into cutoffs and holding reservoirs. Dams constructed by Army engineers in the Missouri Valley not only helped prevent floods but also supplied hydroelectric power and recreation on reservoir lakes. By the 1920s disaster relief had become a routine feature of military activity. The Army helped with flood relief in the Mississippi Valley in 1927 and the Ohio Valleyin 1937, as wellas in other domestic and foreign natural disasters. The Signal Corps con-
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ducted important experiments with aviation and radar, and Army medics fought disease in the Balkans, Germany, and Poland while developing preventives for malaria and rabies. Responding to strikes, race riots, and fears of Communist revolutionaries in the postwar years, regulars and Guardsmen acted to preserve order. In a dramatic demonstration of federal authority in 1932, regulars performed the thankless task of evicting demonstrating veterans from Washington, D.C., after Congress had adjourned without meeting their demands for immediate payment of a promised bonus for military service in World War I.
When the United States was hit by the Great Depression of the 1930s, the worst economic crisis in American history, the Army joined the unprecedented federal response. It played an especially important role in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program to provide work for the unemployed through public improvements. Roosevelt sought to put 250,000 CCC youths to work on conservation projects throughout the United States, planting trees, c,earing firebreaksl digging irrigation ditches, and reclaiming land, while educating them and improving their general health. The greatest burden of the CCC fell on the War Department, which built the CCC camps and provided food, fuel, vehicles, medical care, and supervision. In its first six years, the CCC offered employment to over three million men, removing them from the poverty of the Great Depression and teaching them new skills. The program drew heavily on the Army’s manpower, involving over 20 percent of its officers at the start. This experience in supervising large numbers of young men would later pay benefits to Army personnel facing another world war and national mobilization.
As the nation emerged from the Great Depression, it faced the greatest e.ternal threat to its security since 1815x By mid-1940, Nazi Germany was supreme on the continent of Europe, while imperial Japan dominated the Asian mainland. With a mere 230,000-man professional constabulary that still included horse cavalry, the Army seemed ill-prepared to challenge either of those powers. Fortunately the Army had devoted much of its efforts during the interwar years to mobilization planning and to educating and preparing officer and enlisted cadres capable of handling a major expansion. Congress authorized the president to call up the National Guard and passed the Selective Service Act of 1940, the nation’s first peacetime draft. Under the leadersip of its Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, the Army expanded to a strength of over 1.6 million men by the end of 1941 and 8 million men and women by the end of 1945. It
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organized these soldiers into a modern fighting force that effectively used tanks, planes, and other implements of war to achieve victory. By the end of the war the Army had activated 17 Regular Army divisions, 18 National Guard divisions, 29 Army of the United States divisions, and 26 Organized Reserve divisions. As in World War I, many soldiers benefited from Army educational programs, notably the Army Specialized Training Program, which offered scientific, engineering, and linguistic courses at the college level to qualified soldiers, and the Army Institute, which gave thousands of soldiers the opportunity to earn the equivalent of a high school or junior college diploma. Also as in World War I, the Army collaborated with the other services, business, and government to mobilize the nation’s resources. Not least of the Army’s contributions was its role as a symbol of national unity, bringing together individuals from across the country in a common effort.
During the first year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Army’s major task was to stave off disaster and preserve American morale while building strength for the eventual counteroffensive. Cut off from relief, American troops in the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur held out for over four months against overwhelming Japanese air, naval, and ground power before they were forced to surrender. MacArthur, who had obeyed President Roosevelt’s orders to evacuate to Australia prior to the final capitulation, vowed to return to the Philippines, a promise which, combined with the heroism of the American defenders, gave the nation a needed symbol of defiance. In India, Lt. Gen. Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell surveyed the remnants of his Chinese army after an arduous retreat from Burma and frankly admitted, “We got a hell of a beating.... I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back, and retake it.” Not until November 1942 could American soldiers take the offensive on any scale, with the invasion of North Africa and the campaign against Buna in New Guinea. When they did so, they received rude lessons in the demands of modern combat. At Buna they bogged down in the jungle against strong Japanese positions. After having overrun Morocco and Algeria against little opposition, they took heavy losses at the hands of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps near Kasserine Pass in Tunisia.
During 1943 and early 1944, the Army overcame its early mistakes and, along with other services and the Allies, turned the tide against the Axis. In Tunisia, American troops recovered from the defeat at Kasserine Pass to participate in an offensive that forced the surrender of Axis forces in North Africa. Under the leadership of
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General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., they joined with Allied forces to drive the Germans and Italians from the island of Sicily, knocking Italy out of the Axis alliance. American and Allied troops then landed on the Italian mainland and, against fierce German opposition, slowly advanced up the peninsula to Rome by early June 1944. In the Pacific, MacArthur’s forces finally captured Buna and leapfrogged their way along the northern New Guinea coast line. Army troops joined their Navy and Marine counterparts in advances through the Solomon and Marshall Islands of the South and Central Pacific. In northern Burma Stilwell’s Chinese army, aided by a special infiltration force of Americans known as Merrill’s Marauders, drove back Japanese defenders and laid siege to the key crossroads city of Myitkyina. By reopening the Burma Road to China, Stilwell hoped to supply the Chinese with the means to defeat the Japanese on the Asian mainland while American forces converged on Japan from the Pacific.
The unprecedented mobilization of national resources and the long drive back from initial defeat bore their ultimate fruit in the final advance into the Axis homelands. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, Eisenhower’s Allied armies landed in France. The same month American soldiers and marines came ashore on the Mariana Islands, part of the inner ring of Japan’s Pacific defenses. After two months of near stalemate in the hedgerows of Normandy, American troops under Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley and Patton broke through the German cordon and raced across France to the German border. Only stiff German resistance along the border during the autumn and a last-ditch enemy counteroffensive in the Ardennes in December could delay the final Allied push into the German heartland in the spring of 1945 and the unconditional German surrender in May. In Burma, the fall of Myitkyina in August 1944 and a further Sino-American advance to the south finally reopened the Burma Road in February 1945. In the Pacific, American soldiers and marines captured the Marianas in July 1944, bringing American B–29 bombers within range of the Japanese home islands. MacArthur’s forces landed at Leyte in October, fulfilling the general’s promise to return to the Philippines. By February 1945 American forces had retaken Manila and were reestablishing American authority over the main Philippine island of Luzon. When American soldiers and marines completed their bloody occupation of Okinawa in June, they had closed almost the last link of the ring around Japan.
The blow that finally forced the Japanese surrender, however, came not from ground combat units but from the American scientific research and development community. The Army was a key partici-
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“Omaha Beach” by Joseph Gary Sheahan
(Army Art Collection)
pant in the unparalleled wartime mobilization of American scientific expertise, a cooperation of scientists and the military that would become a permanent feature in the postwar era. Along with involvement in the wartime development of radar, the proximity fuze, computers, and other innovations, the Army supervised the development of the atomic bomb through the enormous, supersecret Manhattan Project directed by Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves. Originally launched to counter a German program to develop an atomic weapon, the Manhattan Project assembled thousands of scientists, engineers, and other experts at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The $2 billion project paid off in July 1945, when the Los Alamos team exploded the world’s first nuclear device. Civilian use of atomic energy would benefit greatly from the Army’s wartime work on the bomb, but the initial fruits of that research were military: the raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These forced Japan to surrender and brought to an end history’s greatest conflict.
One of the most lasting, yet least noticed, contributions of the Army to the nation and the world was the reconstruction of defeated Germany and Japan after World War II. In both conquered nations, the Army’s occupation governments restored order and economic prosperity, eliminated prewar fascist and militaristic parties and cultures, and
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nurtured democratic forms of government through innovative political reform. In Germany occupation authorities revived comprehensive health insurance for 80 percent of the population; in Japan the Army instituted a massive program to prevent and treat communicable diseases and to raise the standards for medical personnel. By reconstructing both countries along democratic, capitalist lines, the occupation governments converted them into strong allies in the postwar confrontation with communism.
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Last updated 7 September 2006 |