Woodring had strong support from the isolationists, and to remove him forcibly would have exposed Roosevelt to charges that he intended to enlist the United States in some kind of European entanglement. Making things even worse, Woodring was also engaged in a public feud with his own assistant secretary of war, Louis A. Johnson, an advocate of universal military training and the expansion of military aviation. One of the few things these two men agreed on was that there was no immediate need to expand the Army.
By maintaining his neutrality during this period of internal discord, Marshall kept the Army and the War Department functioning—a feat helped by his good personal relations with both Roosevelt and Woodring. A strong Marshall supporter when he was appointed Chief of Staff, Woodring would later brag that helping George Marshall get the job was the most important thing he had ever done to serve his country.50
Woodring’s isolationism was not at all unusual in Washington in 1939. A powerful isolationist, or anti-interventionist, movement emerged and grew in strength in the United States during the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1937, led by a strong isolationist bloc, Congress enacted three neutrality acts that banned Americans from giving loans to nations engaged in war, from shipping munitions to them, from traveling on their vessels, and from arming American merchant ships—effectively, an arms embargo against those countries at war with or trying to resist Nazi Germany. In September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, President Roosevelt asked for an end to the arms embargo created by the neutrality laws. Fierce battle ensued in both houses of Congress, ending in a win by the interventionists—but the 243–181 vote in the House of Representatives showed that isolationism was still a factor to be reckoned with.
Upon taking office, Chief of Staff Marshall immediately began to reshape the standard Army division by transforming its four large but undermanned regiments into three smaller and more effective regiments with full manpower and greater mobility. Marshall considered the old standard divisions, known as square divisions, to be too unwieldy for maneuvering, controlling, and supplying. By transitioning from square divisions to the new triangular ones, Marshall radically changed the way the infantry would fight in the future. He eliminated the brigade commander of the old division and sped up communications through the division so that an order could go from top to bottom in two hours or less, compared to the five hours it took the square division. Trucks would replace horses and be used to shuttle men and equipment, permitting forces to move 45 miles a day for many days at a time. The old divisions could move only 15 miles a day, which was only as long as the soldiers’ feet held up.
The square division had been created for trench warfare. It was composed of regiments in columns that could hurl themselves against enemy defenses in successive waves—becoming in effect cannon fodder. As military historian Christopher Gabel has noted, “Such tactics, obsolescent by 1918, were totally anachronistic by 1939, as was the square division itself.”51
These three new divisions, made up of infantry-artillery combat regiments, could operate separately or as a group. Marshall saw the triangular division as a flexible, faster, and more efficient way to wage war.52
In 1939, Marshall began training three streamlined infantry divisions* and one cavalry division for a series of war games that would be staged in an area somewhere in the arc extending from Georgia to Texas. Marshall let it be known that these would be the largest peacetime maneuvers in the history of the United States. He was keenly aware of the need to prepare American infantrymen for a new kind of brutal, fast, and merciless warfare—blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war.” There was nothing abstract about this German invention; what happened in Poland defined blitzkrieg.53
The Polish army was defeated before the end of September as 1.5 million Nazi troops, supported by more than 2,000 tanks and more than 1,000 aircraft, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw, which, after heavy shelling and bombing, surrendered to the Nazis on September 27, 1939, with some 140,000 Polish soldiers taken prisoner.
As Germany had invaded from the west, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east on September 17. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov declared that the Polish government had ceased to exist and that the Soviet Union was exercising the “fine print” of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact—the conquest and occupation of eastern Poland. On September 29, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide control of Poland roughly along the Bug River, with the Germans occupying everything to the west, the Soviets taking all territory to the east.
On September 4, the day after Roosevelt had delivered his fireside chat on the world situation, he met with Marshall to discuss the expansion of the nation’s military. This was the moment the administration took its first significant step in the mobilization the U.S. Army for the next world war. The invasion of Poland had triggered hopes of Marshall and other Army leaders for substantial increases in U.S. Army manpower, but those hopes were short-lived. On September 8, a week after the invasion, Roosevelt declared what he termed a “limited state of emergency” and allowed a modest increase of 17,000 troops in the Regular Army and 35,000 in the National Guard. Roosevelt had actually reduced new strength levels recommended by Marshall from 280,000 to 227,000 for the Regular Army and 435,000 to 235,000 for the National Guard. Roosevelt’s position was that it “was all the public would be ready to accept without undue excitement.” FDR’s fear was that a larger increase would further mobilize those who favored isolation in favor of intervention.54
Marshall then ordered his Army staff officers to begin planning for the increases in manpower. He said that “the initial figures were only the first increment” and that “future expansions would result in a larger number of officers.” This action was accompanied by an executive order that called up members of the Organized Reserve Corps to active duty. The War Department was also ordered to correct certain deficiencies in resources; this included the purchase of $12 million worth of motor transportation.55
The American public at this moment was still largely isolationist, and while Marshall and Roosevelt could see the potential for American involvement in a European war, they had to continue to move carefully and slowly.
* At some point early in the process, the new divisions were given the description streamlined, which made the change more quickly understood by the public and members of Congress. The word streamline had been coined in 1868 as an element of hydrodynamics (defined as the path of a particle in a fluid, moving in smooth flow without turbulence, relative to a solid object past which the fluid is moving). It soon came to have popular meanings (free from turbulence; shaped so that the flow around it is smooth) and by the 1930s had its modern extended meaning of “simplify and organize,” which is exactly what Marshall was doing.
In fiscal year 1939, the funds earmarked for training the Army amounted to $12 million or 2.7 percent of the Army’s meager appropriations—about $65 per man. The Army’s appropriations totaled $646 million, but of this, $192 million, or close to 30 percent, was earmarked for non-military purposes such as the cost of operating the Panama Canal, river and harbor work conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers, and work with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). A New Deal relief program that first went into operation in 1933 to provide work for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18 to 25, the CCC was established to help impoverished families during the Depression by requiring the men to send the larger portion of their monthly pay home.1
Little understood at the time—and largely forgotten in the intervening decades—was the Army’s major role in creating and maintaining the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC became a driving force for improving the Army and facilitating the education and professional