In addition to all this, the weapons provided to Regulars and Reservists were for the most part obsolete and inadequate. The basic anti-aircraft gun was a .50-caliber machine gun, entirely insufficient for its intended purpose. The 37 mm gun developed by the U.S. Army Ordnance Department was then considered an excellent anti-tank weapon, but when Marshall was testifying before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs in February 1939, he reported that the Army had only one of these weapons in its arsenal.28
If conditions were bad on the ground, they were worse in the air. In the fall of 1939, at the moment Hitler’s Luftwaffe warplanes were destroying Kraków and Warsaw, the United States’ air forces ranked 20th in the world and possessed only a few modern combat aircraft. German airmen, who had visited the United States before the Polish invasion, often as guests of aviator Charles Lindbergh, concluded that American airpower was an oxymoron. Lindbergh, a bona fide American hero for his 1927 pathbreaking solo transatlantic flight, had become sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
Earlier in 1939, in asking for more money for the air forces, Roosevelt himself had termed their strength as “totally inadequate.” Following up on Roosevelt’s assessment, General Frank Andrews, who headed the air forces, then known as the U.S. Army Air Corps, described the United States as a “sixth-rate airpower,” with only a handful of planes equal to those being flown by the Germans or the British.29
Historian Russell Weigley later wrote that during the 1920s and 1930s the U.S. Army “may have been less ready to function as a fighting force than at any time in its history.” As George Marshall himself wrote in his first biennial report on the armed forces: “During the post-war period, continuous paring of appropriations has reduced the Army virtually to the status of that of a third rate power.”30
Framing this grim overall picture, war-related industries in 1939 were minor, marginal operations doing little to improve the quality or quantity of military equipment and munitions. This was most distressful to Marshall, who told a writer from the New York Times in May 1939, when it became apparent that he was in line to become Army chief of staff: “A billion dollars the day war is declared will not buy ten cents worth of such material for quick delivery.” In 1957, Marshall would tell an interviewer of the “tragic feeling” that a prompt, forceful rearmament program in 1939–40 would have shortened the war that was surely coming to the United States, perhaps saving billions of dollars and countless casualties.31
If the Army’s deficiencies were not already apparent to Marshall, they were on full display beginning on August 5, 1939, less than a month before he was formally sworn in as chief of staff, when more than 1,200 trucks carrying 17,000 members of the National Guard passed through Washington, D.C. If Marshall needed a firsthand reminder of the challenges he faced, all he had to do was look out his office window in the sprawling Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue and watch as the convoy passed through on its way to field exercises on the Civil War battlefield at Bull Run, in nearby Manassas, Virginia. The men were ill equipped, many carrying dummy arms, and poorly trained for real warfare, as many had never fired a weapon—even an ancient one—in training. Some of the men rode into their mock battle packed into station wagons, giving one writer the impression he was watching troops heading out for a picnic.32
The Manassas exercises were staged as a theatrical event, harking back to a 1904 maneuver reenacting the Battles of Bull Run. In 1904, members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, and much of the capital’s social elite sat under an enormous circus tent to watch the mock battle unfold. These 1939 maneuvers, dubbed “the third battle of Manassas”—essentially restaged the original Civil War battles, albeit with aircraft and trucks, to discover the strengths and shortcomings of the 1939 Army.33
One army, the Blue, composed of National Guardsmen, aimed to attack Washington, which was defended by the Black Army, represented by the Regular Army. All told, the exercise involved 23,000 troops brought in from three states and the District of Columbia. As in 1904, it was staged as a highly visible event meant to be viewed by the public.
During the same period in August, the Army staged a second series of exercises in the piney landscape around Plattsburg, New York, located across Lake Champlain from Vermont. It involved 52,000 troops from 11 states. Both operations were designed to test the strengths and weaknesses of the Regular Army as well as National Guard units. As was the case in Virginia, the invaders in northeastern New York were the National Guard and Reservists, while the defenders were Regular Army.
The Manassas exercises ended with the Regular Army defenders of the capital driving back the mechanized National Guard invaders to a line two miles short of Manassas, at which point a cease-fire was called. “The battle of Washington was over. Washington was safe from attack, with invaders in stubborn retreat,” declared a reporter for the Washington Post. What seemed most evident here was that the Guardsmen and Reservists were not ready for war, even with the assistance of an array of tanks and trucks. The Regular Army was still viewed as the winner when it came to land warfare.34
The man in charge of the maneuvers in Upstate New York was Lieutenant General Hugh Drum, commander of the First Army, who on the night before the first phase of the mock battle declared that the army taking the field was “in fact not an army at all, but rather a collection of individual units . . . partially equipped, and woefully short in manpower, weapons, motors.” Drum’s First Army, a portion of which was in the exercise, was supposed to have 320,000; instead a mere 75,000 were under his command.35
But the main conflict of the Plattsburg exercises ended early, with a cease-fire called after two days of torrential rain and thunderstorms that left three men dead from a single lightning strike and 15 others injured from the effects of the storm. Many of the men on the field—soaked, demoralized, and mired in mud—left much of their personal equipment behind when the event was called off, and they were immediately herded into trucks and trains to take them home. The men on the field had been defeated by the weather.36
The problems brought to light were many and were not restricted to the Guardsmen. Although the spirit of the rank-and-file troops was praised, their ability as warriors was not. More than half the 52,000 men mobilized in Plattsburg had never fired their weapons in a combat course of instruction. Training had been utterly and totally inadequate. As one senior officer put it, the men and many of their officers were totally unprepared for “the mechanism of battle—the conduct of the fight.” The list of specific failures was nothing short of appalling. Cover and concealment on the battlefield was neglected, as was liaison and support between units. Serious delays had occurred in the distribution of orders, and many officers and men were unable to properly read maps. Men were led into battle in close formation, and scouts had to work too close to the columns they were supposed to protect. Food supplies to the men in the field were delayed or broke down completely. All these failures made clear the deep logistical problems the Army faced.37
Nor was either maneuver well planned in terms of the field of play. “Troop movements were ludicrously held up at roadside fences, not because of the barbed wire,” observed Newsweek, “but because, in the absence of a suitable field for maneuvers in the area, the nation’s defenders could not trample a farmer’s corn.” Perhaps the most stunning omission from the mock battlefields was the conspicuous absence of aircraft. A small item in one newspaper explained the omission: “The airmen are too busy with expansion to put on a show.”38
Using both named and unnamed sources from both maneuvers, the newspaper criticism rose to a crescendo. ARMY ADMITS WAR SHOWED DEFICIENCY read a headline in the Baltimore Sun above an article arguing that the maneuvers showed the Army was relatively less prepared than it had been in 1917 and that there had been a deplorable lack of training, especially among the Guardsmen and Reservists. “It must be remembered as far as the National Guard is concerned,” one general told the Sun reporter, “that they are civilian soldiers who get only a small amount of training each year and with other things to do than learn soldiering.”39
Finally, the man in charge of these war games, General Drum, labeled the performances of all those involved “deplorable and inexcusable.”