NOT READY IN 1932

Perhaps nothing is more illustrative of American provincialism four decades ago than a brief glance at the military establishment; it requires no more. The U.S. had the sixteenth largest army in the world, putting it behind, among others, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Spain, Romania, and Poland. When every $ 17.85-a-month private had suited up, there were 132,069 Americans in uniform. On paper they could have put up a stiff fight against Yugoslavia (138,934), but in reality they would have been torn to pieces, because most of MacArthur’s men were committed to desk work, patrolling the Mexican border, and protecting U.S. possessions overseas. The chief of staff was left with 30,000 troops—fewer than the force King George sent to tame his rebellious American colonies in 1776.

Moreover, the quality of the Army was appalling [1932]. It cost roughly a quarter of one percent of today’s military juggernaut, and looked it. Fortune called it the “worst equipped” of the world’s armed forces; no one disputed the judgment. In a crisis MacArthur could have fielded 1,000 tanks, all obsolete; 1,509 aircraft, the fastest of which could fly 234 mph; and a single mechanized regiment, which had been organized at Fort Knox that spring, and which was led by cavalrymen on horses which wore mustard-gas-proof boots. The United States Army, one writer reported, “forever walks the wide land in the image of a gaping-mouthed private with an ill-fitting uniform carrying an obsolete rifle at an ungraceful angle.”

MacArthur was the only four-star general in the country—and there were no three-star generals. As chief of staff he received $ 10,400 a year, a home at Fort Myer, and the exclusive use of the Army’s only limousine. To his aide he seemed to occupy a distant pinnacle. Major Eisenhower’s annual salary was $ 3,000. Because he doubled as the military’s congressional lobbyist, he frequently went up to Capitol Hill. But his employer never loaned him the limousine. Nor was the major given taxi fare; in all of official Washington, there was no such thing as a petty cash fund. Instead, as he liked to recall in later life, Eisenhower would walk down the hall and fill out a form, in exchange for which he received two streetcar tokens. Then he would stand outside on Pennsylvania Avenue and wait for a Mt. Pleasant trolley car.

It wasn’t a long wait. Washington was laced with trolley tracks; there were nearly seven hundred streetcars in service. Except in winter, when they were vulnerable to short-circuits, the cars were efficient, and traffic jams lay a generation away. If you drove to work (observing the 22 mph speed limit), you parked in front of your office. There was almost always room at the curb. There was also an extraordinary variety among the square-shouldered Packards, Studebakers, Grahams, Pierce Arrows, Terraplanes, and Stutzes, for the automobile business, by later corporate standards, was practically a cottage industry.

Manchester, William (2013-11-08).
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972
(6-7). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
New York: Random House, 1959, pp. 329-331


    Reports from men drifting back from the front were alarming. Entire units, claimed many wild-eyed refugees, had been cut off and were being wiped out. Back at Division, General Grow had no clear idea of how great his casualties were. But he did know that it was the worst day in the history of his 6th Armored Division.

    The retreat of the 6th Armored wasn’t the only reverse on George Patton’s front. For the savage meeting engagement was at its climax. Violent German attacks had struck all along the Bastogne front. In particular the 17th Airborne Division, in their first real day of action a few miles west of town, had been dealt shocking casualties, some battalions losing 40 per cent of their men.

    Ordinarily the most optimistic of American generals, Patton was now in a despondent mood. Each man lost that day weighed heavily on him. He sat at a desk and wrote in his diary, “We can still lose this war.”

    But at the front, later that night, a strange thing began to take place where the day’s disaster had been greatest. Men stopped running, and were digging in. Terror was being replaced by anger.
 
    Not far behind the 6th Armored Division breakthrough area, Colonel John Hines was in a stone house where refugees from the front were thawing out their frozen rifles and frozen bodies.

    One man, his face covered with blood and dirt, his eyes two bitter holes, was saying, “I used to wonder what I was doing in the army. I didn’t have anything personal against the Krauts, even if they were making me live in a freezing, frigging foxhole. But I learned something today. Now I want to kill every goddam Kraut in the world. You know why? To save my own ass.”

    There was a new GI in the Ardennes.

    The good-natured, rather careless, supremely confident GI who had known one victory after another since landing in Normandy; who had assumed he would be well clothed, well fed, and well led; who accepted it as his heritage to outgun and outmachine the enemy, was gone. Since December 16 he’d had few days of the overpowering air support and air cover he’d taken for granted; his clothing didn’t keep out the cold; his boots were traps for trench foot, his tanks were outnumbered; often his machines were immobilized by cold, snow, and terrain.

    He was cold and hungry. He had just fought a humiliating series of retreats where terror roamed far behind the lines. He had tasted defeat.

    But he had learned bitter lessons that were beginning to pay off. In this first major winter battle ever fought by Americans he had learned that the wounded die fast in the zero cold. He had learned in a few weeks that cold is a living enemy and must be fought.

    Medics had learned to tuck frozen morphine Syrettes under their armpits; to put plasma under the hoods of trucks and jeeps. Infantrymen were saving their hands from frostbite by cutting four oversize mitten patterns from blankets and sewing them together. Trench foot, which was cutting down more Americans than bullets, was beaten with muffs made from blankets. At night the men learned to take off their soggy combat boots and socks, massage their feet, and then pull these blanket “Tootsie warmers” on, topped by overshoes.
    They learned how to dry socks and shoes: heat pebbles in a can; dump the hot pebbles into the wet socks and the socks into the shoes.

    They learned that ordinary field jackets were little protection against the biting winds of the Ardennes. Inner linings were made of blankets sewed to the inside.

    They learned that two wool shirts were equal in warmth—and less bulky to fight in—than a shirt and overcoat. But the shirts had to be switched every night, the one next to the body, wet from perspiration even in the coldest day, taken off and hung up to dry.
 
    They learned what tramps and people of depression days had long known, that paper was a good insulator. A few sheets of newspaper wrapped around the chest between shirts was a buffer against the rawest wind.

    They also learned to wear shoes and overshoes that were a little too big, for tightness, cutting off circulation, brought on almost instant trench foot. They would stuff paper between shoes and arctics—a trick long used by hunters. The paper not only anchored their misfit footgear but retained body heat.

    They learned to heat food over a  “flambeau”—a wine bottle filled with gas with a wick of twisted rags.

    The facts of cold, long known to men of Minnesota and Maine, were passed on to men from Alabama and Texas. Frozen toes, ears, noses were rubbed gently to start circulation. The old wives’ remedy of rubbing snow on these frozen parts often brought on gangrene. Hands stiff from cold, unable to trigger a gun, were placed under armpits. To survive a night in a freezing foxhole many a man lived by covering his head with a blanket and trapping his own warm breath.

    The GIs learned not to eat snow except in very small doses or their stomachs would become chilled. Tankers learned that their great friend, Calvados, was their great enemy in the cold. For alcohol brought body heat to the surface, causing radiation and deadly chilling.

    They learned that cold metal would sweat when brought indoors, and then quickly freeze when taken outside. All weapons and ammunition were left outdoors, protected only from the falling snow.

    They learned the big lessons too. That their tanks should be whitewashed to blend with the snow; that they should wear sheets like Halloween ghosts.

    Mechanics, with Yankee ingenuity, soon learned how to make their machines work under sub-zero conditions. Where rubber tracks were unavailable for tanks, great metal cleats were welded on steel tracks to conquer ice and snow.
 
    But the greatest lesson was one learned from the enemy: to hate. Word of the Malmédy Massacre, of the massacres of civilians at Stavelot, Trois Points, and Bande, passed from man to man, and from unit to unit. Until the Ardennes the GI had fought a civilian’s war. Now he was learning to kill without remorse or pity.

BIG RED ONE

 
    On the weather deck of S.S. Reina del Pacifico, a leathery, lantern-jawed major general paced the rail with the bowed stride of a horseman saddle-hardened as a child. Hair the color of gunmetal bristled from his crown. His thick neck and sloping shoulders implied his uncommon strength, fortified with Indian clubs and a medicine ball during the long passage from Britain. He often jogged three miles after breakfast, then spent the rest of the day cadging cigarettes from subordinates by elaborately patting his empty pockets. Two symmetrical scars dimpled his cheeks: a bullet through the face in the Argonne had removed his molars along with an annoying adolescent stutter. When he was intense—and he was intense now—the old wound caused an odd hissing, like a leaky tire. Pacing the rail, wheezing, he paused long enough to study the lime-green threads of phosphorescence trailing the landing craft below. As the first wave of troops beat toward the horizon, he murmured, “The shore.” Terry de la Mesa Allen: even his name swaggered, an admirer once wrote. Commander of the 1st Infantry Division, Terry Allen embodied the unofficial motto of the Big Red One: “Work hard and drink much, for somewhere they’re dreamin’ up a battle for the First.” His exotic middle name came from his mother, daughter of a Spaniard who fought as a Union colonel in the Civil War. From his father, an artillery officer posted mostly in Texas, Allen derived extraordinary equestrian abilities as well as a proclivity for chewing, drinking, and shooting dice. After flunking ordnance and gunnery his final year at West Point, Allen left the academy, graduated from Catholic University, and took a commission in 1912. Wounded at Saint-Mihiel in 1918 and carried from the field on a stretcher, he regained consciousness, ripped off the first-aid tag, and dashed back to rally his men. The next bullet drilled him through the jaw, right to left, but not before he had broken his fist on a German machine-gunner’s head....

     ...Less successful was Allen’s tenure at the Army staff college at Fort Leavenworth: he finished near the bottom of the class in which Major Eisenhower graduated first, and was denounced by the commandant as “the most indifferent student ever enrolled.” But as an instructor at the Fort Benning Infantry School, he impressed the assistant commandant, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, who rated Allen superior or excellent in nine of ten categories on his 1932 efficiency report (he was only satisfactory in “dignity of demeanor”). His gorgeous young wife, Mary Frances, concluded that horses were Terry’s second love, after fighting. When Allen’s photograph appeared in a Missouri newspaper article about promising young officers, the caption identified him as a “champion rioter and rebel.” 

    With war, the rioters came into their own. In contemplating who should command the Army’s multiplying regiments and divisions, Marshall and his training chief, Lesley J. McNair, kept a list in a safe of more than 400 colonels with perfect efficiency reports. Allen, neither a full colonel nor perfect, was not on it. Rather, he was facing court-martial for insubordination in 1940 when word arrived of his double promotion, from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. He was the first man in his former West Point class to wear a general’s stars. No man better exemplified the American military leadership’s ability to identify, promote, and in some cases forgive those officers best capable of commanding men in battle. Among the encomiums that followed Allen’s promotion was a penciled note: “Us guys in the guardhouse want to congratulate you, too.”

Rick Atkinson, (2013-10-22). The Liberation Trilogy Box Set (Kindle Locations 1760-1794). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

CHURCHILL

 The New Criterion
“One Hundred Fifty Years of Churchill” (excerpt)
by Larry P. Arnn

 There has been no better eulogy for Churchill than that given by Leo Strauss, a German Jew who left Germany in time to escape the death camps. One of his teachers was Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of note and a Nazi, who provided some of the impulse for Strauss to return to the classics and begin the recovery of political philosophy as a quest for the truth. Churchill died on January 24, 1965. When Strauss came into class and was informed of Churchill’s death, he said:

“The death of Churchill is a healthy reminder to students of political science of their limitations, the limitations of their craft.

“The tyrant stood at the pinnacle of his power. The contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant—this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.

“No less enlightening is the lesson conveyed by Churchill’s failure, which is too great to be called tragedy. I mean the fact that Churchill’s heroic action on behalf of human freedom against Hitler only contributed, through no fault of Churchill’s, to increase the threat to freedom which is posed by Stalin or his successors. Churchill did the utmost that a man could do to counter that threat—publicly and most visibly in Greece and in Fulton, Missouri.

“Not a whit less important than his deeds and speeches are his writings, above all his Marlborough—the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be required reading for every student of political science.

“The death of Churchill reminds us of the limitations of our craft, and therewith of our duty. We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.”

Franklin to Washington, 1787

“I confess that I do not entirely approve of this Constitution at present, but Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For having lived long, I have experienced many Instances of being oblig'd, by better Information or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

“When you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. From such an Assembly can a perfect Production be expected?”

“It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our Enemies, who are waiting with Confidence to hear that our Councils are confounded, like those of the Builders of Babel, and that our States are on the Point of Separation, only to meet hereafter for the Purpose of cutting one another’s Throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

“The Opinions I have had of its Errors, I sacrifice to the Public Good. I have never whisper’d a Syllable of them abroad. Within these Walls they were born, & here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the Objections he has had to it, and endeavour to gain Partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received. . .

“Much of the Strength and Efficiency of any Government, in procuring & securing Happiness to the People depends on Opinion, on the general Opinion of the Goodness of that Government as well as of the Wisdom & Integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own Sakes, as a Part of the People, and for the Sake of our Posterity, we shall act heartily & unanimously in recommending this Constitution, wherever our Influence may extend, and turn our future Thoughts and Endeavours to the Means of having it well administered.

“On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a Wish, that every Member of the Convention, who may still have Objections to it, would with me on this Occasion doubt a little of his own Infallibility, and to make manifest our Unanimity, put his Name to this Instrument.”

COOLIDGE

During most of my course George Sherman was the principal and Miss M. Belle Chellis was the first assistant. I owe much to the inspiration and scholarly direction which they gave to my undergraduate days. They both lived to see me President and sent me letters at the time, though they left the school long ago. It was under their teaching that I first learned of the glory and grandeur of the ancient civilization that grew up around the Mediterranean and in Mesopotamia.

Under their guidance I beheld the marvels of old Babylon, I marched with the Ten Thousand of Xenophon, I witnessed the conflict around beleaguered Troy which doomed that proud city to pillage and to flames, I heard the tramp of the invincible legions of Rome, I saw the victorious galleys of the Eternal City carrying destruction to the Carthaginian shore, and I listened to the lofty eloquence of Cicero and the matchless imagery of Homer.

They gave me a vision of the world when it was young and showed me how it grew. It seems to me that it is almost impossible for those who have not traveled that road to reach a very clear conception of what the world now means. It was in this period that I learned something of the thread of events that ran from the Euphrates and the Nile through Athens to the Tiber and thence stretched on to the Seine and the Thames to be carried overseas to the James, the Charles and the Hudson. I found that the English language was generously compounded with Greek and Latin, which it was necessary to know if I was to understand my native tongue. I discovered that our ideas of democracy came from the agora of Greece, and our ideas of liberty came from the forum of Rome. Something of the sequence of history was revealed to me, so that I began to understand the significance of our own times and our own country.

Calvin Coolidge, [1929] The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge: Authorized, Expanded, and Annotated Edition (51-52). Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.

NEW GI

But the greatest lesson was one learned from the enemy: to hate. Word of the Malmédy Massacre, of the massacres of civilians at Stavelot, Trois Points, and Bande, passed from man to man, and from unit to unit. Until the Ardennes the GI had fought a civilian’s war. Now he was learning to kill without remorse or pity.

 

John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
New York: Random House, 1959, 329-331


    Reports from men drifting back from the front were alarming. Entire units, claimed many wild-eyed refugees, had been cut off and were being wiped out. Back at Division, General Grow had no clear idea of how great his casualties were. But he did know that it was the worst day in the history of his 6th Armored Division.

    The retreat of the 6th Armored wasn’t the only reverse on George Patton’s front. For the savage meeting engagement was at its climax. Violent German attacks had struck all along the Bastogne front. In particular the 17th Airborne Division, in their first real day of action a few miles west of town, had been dealt shocking casualties, some battalions losing 40 per cent of their men.

    Ordinarily the most optimistic of American generals, Patton was now in a despondent mood. Each man lost that day weighed heavily on him. He sat at a desk and wrote in his diary, “We can still lose this war.”

    But at the front, later that night, a strange thing began to take place where the day’s disaster had been greatest. Men stopped running, and were digging in. Terror was being replaced by anger.
 
    Not far behind the 6th Armored Division breakthrough area, Colonel John Hines was in a stone house where refugees from the front were thawing out their frozen rifles and frozen bodies.

    One man, his face covered with blood and dirt, his eyes two bitter holes, was saying, “I used to wonder what I was doing in the army. I didn’t have anything personal against the Krauts, even if they were making me live in a freezing, frigging foxhole. But I learned something today. Now I want to kill every goddam Kraut in the world. You know why? To save my own ass.”

    There was a new GI in the Ardennes.

    The good-natured, rather careless, supremely confident GI who had known one victory after another since landing in Normandy; who had assumed he would be well clothed, well fed, and well led; who accepted it as his heritage to outgun and outmachine the enemy, was gone. Since December 16 he’d had few days of the overpowering air support and air cover he’d taken for granted; his clothing didn’t keep out the cold; his boots were traps for trench foot, his tanks were outnumbered; often his machines were immobilized by cold, snow, and terrain.

    He was cold and hungry. He had just fought a humiliating series of retreats where terror roamed far behind the lines. He had tasted defeat.

    But he had learned bitter lessons that were beginning to pay off. In this first major winter battle ever fought by Americans he had learned that the wounded die fast in the zero cold. He had learned in a few weeks that cold is a living enemy and must be fought.