Chapter 10 The Battle of the Bayous
Chapter 11 Promotion and Purge
Chapter 12 The Carolinas: The Final Scrimmage
Chapter 13 December 7, 1941
Chapter 14 “Little Libya,” Irish Maneuvers, and Operation Torch
Chapter 15 Victory Laps: V-E, V-J, and—Later—the Double V
Photo Section
Acknowledgments
Picture Credits
Bibliography
Notes
Index
The United States of America had let down its defenses. In contrast to the four million Americans armed by the end of World War I, by 1935 the United States Regular Army had declined to 118,750 men, which, as Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur noted, “could be crowded into Yankee Stadium” and he added that it would be “relatively helpless” in the event of a foreign invasion.
The situation was little improved on September 1, 1939, the day on which Germany invaded Poland and a day when the United States Army was smaller than that of Portugal, with fewer than 200,000 men. American troops were still learning obsolete skills and preparing for defensive warfare on a small scale rather than for a two-ocean war overseas. Most of the Army’s divisions were staffed at half-strength and scattered across numerous posts. Their equipment was also obsolete, and their reliance on horses and mules was anachronistic. The Army officer corps harbored many not suited to lead troops into combat.
In the latter part of the 20th century, many Americans either never knew or forgot that a vast American citizen army had been created prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Also largely forgotten was that during those 828 days between the beginning of the war in 1939 and the “day of infamy,” December 7, 1941, a fully functioning peacetime military draft system had been put in place and that after a purge of senior officers, a new cohort of senior officers was rising through the ranks, which would eventually lead the nation and its allies to victory. What is more, this new peacetime army was given a dress rehearsal for the war ahead in the form of three massive military maneuvers in the spring, summer, and fall of 1941, which ended just a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Heading into the third decade of the 21st century, this element in the narrative of the Second World War has moved farther in the margins of history. I base the assertion that all this has been lost or forgotten in recalling the World War II narrative on personal experience. Here is but one example: when first I began researching the extraordinary but largely untold story of the 1940 military draft and the 1941 maneuvers, I mentioned the prewar draft to several people at a Fourth of July party and was corrected by a well-read man who had served in the U.S. Air Force and fancied himself a student of American military history. He was convinced I was wrong and insisted that the nation in 1940 was still mired in a deep period of isolation and could not possibly have mobilized before the war. He advised me to check my facts.
The primary question I wanted to research was how the United States had been able to create a well-led, mobile army that was in place by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Beyond that, I wondered how the U.S. Army could have been ready to field infantry and armored divisions, made up in large part with draftees and volunteers, to stand up to Adolf Hitler’s Storm Troopers and Panzer divisions on the ground, first in North Africa and then Europe.
The roots of the answers could be traced to events a decade before Pearl Harbor. Henry L. Stimson was a leading member of what was once referred to as the Establishment. Born into a wealthy New York family in 1867, he graduated from Yale and then Harvard Law School. A Republican, Stimson’s career in public service began in 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the position of U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he became known for his vigorous prosecution of antitrust cases. Stimson served as secretary of war for President William Howard Taft in 1911, served as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army during the First World War, and in 1929, President Herbert Hoover made him his secretary of state.
In May 1931, Secretary Stimson, now 64, met with his old friend and fellow New York attorney Grenville Clark, 49. The two men had worked together in the period before the First World War. In 1915, Stimson had assisted Clark in creating the Plattsburg Plan, under which some 16,000 business and other professional men were trained at their own expense to be Army officers at the Plattsburg Barracks in New York State and other locations. Because of the success of the officer training program, which was in full operation well before the United States entered the war, Clark was seen as an apostle of military preparedness and, by extension, universal military service.*
During their 1931 meeting, Stimson made a bold prediction: that within ten years, Germany and Japan would join hands in an alliance and ignite a second world war. He thought that this time Germany would run all over France and the rest of Europe, Japan would run over much of China, and then Germany would attack Russia. He foresaw a ten-year war in which the United States would bear the brunt of the fight, unless a coalition of nations—namely Great Britain, Russia, and the United States—could be formed, in which case the war could be ended in five. He then asked Clark if he would undertake a secret mission, monitoring the situation through intelligence-gathering trips overseas, mainly into China and Russia.1
Clark turned down the assignment but did not forget Stimson’s prediction. After the Nazi invasion of Norway in April 1940, Clark believed Stimson’s prediction was about to come true and proposed that the United States establish its first-ever peacetime military draft.
After a long battle for approval, a bill was passed and made into law on September 16, 1940, calling for the registration of all American men between the ages of 21 and 34; they would be given a registration number based on a number assigned by their local draft board, where registration cards had been shuffled and numbered sequentially from one to the number of the last man registered by that unit. After the assignment of numbers was over, the numbers were printed on slips of paper, which were put into capsules that were then dumped into a ten-gallon fishbowl, to be drawn one at a time to establish the draft order. On October 29, 1940, Henry Stimson put on a blindfold, reached into the fishbowl, and pulled out the first capsule. Stimson was now President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s new secretary of war, appointed to that position at Clark’s suggestion. President Roosevelt then announced the number that had been drawn: 158. Across the nation, 6,175 young men who had been the 158th man to register at their local draft board held that number; many of them would be in uniform within a matter of weeks.
Many people believe that the United States built an army with volunteers and draftees after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But in fact, it was the controversial peacetime draft before Pearl Harbor that put the nation in a position to fight so quickly and effectively.
Beyond the draft itself, a key element of the transformation was a series of large-scale maneuvers. The most famous were the Louisiana Maneuvers of 1941, which allowed the United States to test itself and learn by the mistakes it made in mock warfare, in which the infantry fired blanks instead of bullets and warplanes dropped flour bags rather than bombs. Not only did the maneuvers train the men in crucial new weapons and methods of warfare, but they also helped create a new and unique “G.I.” culture that was invaluable in boosting morale and bonding men from all backgrounds into a cohesive group before they set off to fight around the world. These boys of the Great Depression brought with them skills and attitudes their fathers and uncles had not had during the First World War. To cite one small but significant example, these youngsters could read maps, having been brought up reading gas station road maps. They also knew engines and having seen their first jeep