On August 31, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, who had participated in the Plattsburg maneuvers as a uniformed Army Reserve Cavalry officer, spoke before the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars; he pointed out how poorly things seemed on the ground during those maneuvers and decried the state of the Army in general. “In the mechanization of the army we are surpassed in quantity by every first-class European power.” Within a few hours of Lodge’s speech one of the powers, Poland, was attacked by a highly mechanized Nazi army.41
Even though the 1939 maneuvers had been staged before he became chief of staff, Marshall was bothered by their poor outcome, and he renewed his efforts to plan improved maneuvers for 1940 and 1941.42
The deficiencies spotted in Plattsburg and Manassas tended to be magnified after Germany’s invasion of Poland and were cited by newspaper editorialists in arguments for greater preparedness. The Army needed an overhaul—but not the enlisted men, who in the words of an editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle showed “splendid spirit and morale,” despite their inability to fight.43
The treatment of African American soldiers in the American Revolution provided a sad prism for the future. Although black men served with honor at the Battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, the Continental Congress voted then to keep black people—both enslaved and free—from serving in the Continental Army. To train black men for armed warfare, the delegates believed, might lead to slave insurrections. The ban was a sop to slaveholders in both the South and North. But early in the war, the royal governor of Virginia offered to emancipate slaves who joined the British Army, which led Congress to reverse its decision, fearing that those emancipated men might become part of the army it was fighting.
Race remained a major issue for the Army in the decades that followed. As had been true during World War I, black soldiers in 1939 were required to join black units whose commissioned officers were white. In that earlier war, black Americans had been quick to enlist, not only to serve their country but also to demonstrate to their fellow Americans that they were entitled to the full rights of citizenship and an end to the discriminatory laws and practices known as Jim Crow. By the First World War’s end, 2.3 million black men had registered for the draft; 367,000 eventually served in uniform.44
In retelling the story of the black military experience, important figures in the traditional narrative emerge as men of duplicity and dishonor. A most notable example of this was President Woodrow Wilson who, in June 1917, was aware of the transfer and ultimate discharge from the Army’s highest-ranked black officer and a West Point graduate named Charles Young. An outstanding officer, Young had advanced to the rank of colonel, where he now outranked both white junior officers and all enlisted men, who were required to salute him. Making him more of a liability to those protecting the Jim Crow Army was the fact that his next promotion would make him a brigadier general and more disruptive to a hierarchy that depended on exclusion based on race.45
In World War I, General John Pershing denied black Americans the right to go into combat under the American flag, placing them instead under the French flag. In France they fought with spirit and valor and became an inspiration to the war-weary French. Soon after their reassignment, Pershing issued a directive to the French commanders, instructing them to “treat black Americans as white Americans did” and went on to say that “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of Americans. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black.” The French dismissed the order, which had no bearing on the reality of a war being waged in foul, rat-infested trenches, but this same American military attitude toward black people was still in place when Marshall took command of the Army in 1939.
The Army had no interest in recruiting black Americans, and the proof was in the numbers. The editorial page of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading black newspapers of the time, began arguing in 1938 for an American army that mirrored the general population and was at least 10 percent black. The Courier reported at the end of 1939 that the Regular Army of the United States “contained only 4,451 black enlisted men and five black officers, as compared with 229,636 white enlisted men and 1,359 white officers.”46
The fact that black men were totally excluded from the Army Air Corps was particularly irksome, especially to African American leadership. The cover of the July 1940 issue of the Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), graphically summed up this grievance by depicting military aircraft flying over an airfield, with the words FOR WHITES ONLY splashed across the image and a caption at the bottom reading: “WARPLANES—NEGRO AMERICANS MAY NOT BUILD THEM, REPAIR THEM, OR FLY THEM, BUT THEY MUST HELP PAY FOR THEM.” Focusing on the same issue, the magazine’s December 1940 cover showed an Army aircraft over a well-appointed airfield. This time the caption read: “FOR WHITES ONLY—A U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS TRAINING PLANE OVER THE ‘WEST POINT OF THE AIR’—RANDOLPH FIELD, TEXAS. NEGROES ARE NOT BEING ACCEPTED AND TRAINED BY THE ARMY AIR CORPS AT ANY FIELD IN THE NATION, DESPITE ALL THE TALK OF NATIONAL UNITY AND OF THE URGENCY OF EVERY GROUP SERVING IN NATIONAL DEFENSE.” On the same cover, the magazine previewed two other articles on race and the Army: “When Do We Fly?” by James L. H. Peck, and “Jim Crow in the Army Camps,” by “A Negro Soldier.”47
The 1939 attack on Poland gave the world its first look at a devastating new form of brutal mechanized warfare. Within a matter of hours, huge columns of tanks working in close cooperation with the German air force attacked and quickly penetrated the Polish defenses. The speed and violence of the attack paralyzed the Polish defenders. The climax of these armored drives came far behind the frontlines, as the Nazi spearheads linked up, trapping the bewildered Polish formations in a series of isolated pockets.48
The skill of the Nazi propaganda machine added to the feeling of dread and despair in much of the Western world. One of the lies that stunned at first and lived on was the false assertion that the Polish cavalry had charged mindlessly into the face of Panzer tanks—a lie constructed to display the stupidity of the Poles and the futility of trying to fight the Nazis by conventional means. On September 1, 1939, just as Roosevelt was appointing Marshall as chief of staff, a Polish cavalry regiment operating on Poland’s northwestern border attacked a column of German infantry, scattering the invaders. Before the Polish horsemen had a chance to regroup, a squad of Nazi armored vehicles attacked them with cannons and machine guns, inflicting heavy casualties. Reporters were later brought to the battlefield, shown some of the dead horses, and told that the horses had been killed in a frontal attack on the German tanks. The manufactured myth took immediate root.
A Paris Soir account of the event, translated and syndicated to American newspapers, had the Polish general ordering his men to draw their sabers and charge the Panzer machine guns and flamethrowers. The battle lasted a mere ten minutes: “The cavalrymen were mowed down, the horses seared by fire. The general was killed. The few survivors rode into a near-by forest and, it was said killed themselves.” The headline for the story as it ran in the Miami Herald was POLISH CAVALRY COMMITTED SUICIDE IN HOPELESS CHARGE. The story was repeated again and again. Among others, Winston Churchill would mention it in his history of the Second World War. Yet the Nazis had staged the event.49
Many now began to see the Nazi attack as a trap that would lead to the inextricable involvement of more nations, a point underscored on September 10, 1939, as Canada, still a dominion of the British Empire, announced that it was now in the war and that it planned to quickly supply men for the British Armed Forces. As Canada joined the fight in the days after the fall of Poland, the U.S. Department of War stood by with no declared interest in enlarging its Army. Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring was a strong advocate of neutrality and unwilling to push for significant troop increases. A Roosevelt appointee and once a close friend of the president, Woodring was