they had with Regular Army troops, so they had to turn to reason and the power of personality to lead the CCC. These skills would later be essential during a mass mobilization for war. Marshall biographer David L. Roll concluded that the CCC experience “buttressed Marshall’s faith in the value and effectiveness of a citizen army.”47
On April 5, 1937, FDR recommended to Congress that the CCC be made a permanent agency of the federal government. On June 28, 1937, Congress passed and the president signed an act extending the CCC for a period of three years, to begin on July 1, 1937. One of the arguments made for the extension was that the Tree Army could become the backbone of a new, expanded Army when it was needed. Two years later, when Germany invaded Poland, Marshall knew the time had come and that expansion would happen sooner rather than later.
After the Second World War, Bradley declared that the CCC had saved the Army and that without it the Army might have seen a massive cut in the officer corps and gone into the war without many important leaders, including himself, Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, and many other officers. He added that those three million CCC workers who left their camps to go on active duty went on to “save the world.”48
* It is apparent from their writings that MacArthur and Eisenhower did not like each other. All MacArthur says in his memoir, Reminiscences, about their prewar association was that in confronting the Bonus Army, “I . . . brought with me two officers who later wrote their names on world history, Majors Eisenhower and Patton.”
A “PHONEY” WAR ABROAD AND A MOCK WAR AT HOME
At the time of the invasion of Poland, the United States was fiercely divided. A majority of Americans were firmly isolationist, their stance based on an increasing belief that America’s involvement in World War I had been a terrible error, especially when viewed through the dim prism of the Great Depression. Many Americans were reminded of the old popular song “Don’t Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice.” A poll conducted by George Gallup at the end of 1938 found that 70 percent of American voters thought U.S. involvement in the earlier conflict had been an out-and-out mistake.1
Hating a war in which many of its members had fought, the American Legion was at the heart of the movement trying to push neutrality acts and other isolationist laws through Congress. The rhetoric of the legion was more pacifist than martial, and this attitude became stronger after the Polish surrender, even though one-third of the members of Congress were legionnaires themselves.2
Furthermore, many of the men still occupying beds in Veterans Administration hospitals were draftees from the previous war whose wounds were significant enough to keep them in need of perpetual care. A wounded soldier on the street, including amputees on crutches and victims of gas attacks carrying portable devices they needed to help them breathe, was still a common sight in the United States in 1939.
The most radical isolationists claimed that virtually all of the nation’s current problems stemmed from the Great War. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota went so far as to blame America’s Great Depression on the unbridled economic expansion created by the war.3
The Nazi invasion of Poland had energized congressional isolationists and attracted powerful new celebrity voices. The retired Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner, became an ever-louder voice, declaring that “war is a racket.” This maxim, also the title of his book, was shorthand for his belief that the only victors in any war were banks and large corporations. Butler’s book had been published in 1935, and its message seemed to become louder over time.
On September 15, 1939, Charles Lindbergh delivered a nationwide radio address in which he strongly urged America to remain neutral—to “stand clear” of the squabble in Europe. Lindbergh envisioned a Nazi victory in Europe as a certainty and thought America’s attention should be directed toward Asia and Japan. “These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” he intoned in the passage that seemed to gather the most attention. “There is no Genghis Khan marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend our White race against foreign invasion.” Many newspapers carried long excerpts from the speech and some—including the New York Times and Herald Tribune—published the full text of the speech. Building on the theme of racial strength, Lindbergh would follow with an article in the November 1940 Reader’s Digest, warning Americans to not allow themselves to be led into “a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization.” He also warned against “dilution by foreign races . . . and the infiltration of inferior blood.”4
As a euphemism for genes, “blood” was very much an issue in 1939. A small but effective group was spreading the propaganda that humanity would be improved by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to produce more children and the “deficient” to produce fewer or no children at all. Several states were officially sterilizing those deemed to be inferior. Hitler proudly pointed out that he was only observing the laws of several American states, including California, that allowed for the forced sterilization of the “unfit.” The belief system, known as eugenics, held that certain good or bad genes were the monopoly of certain races and ethnicities, fueling the Nazis’ claim that they were creating a superior race.5
In addition to the isolationist faction, antiwar movements on American college and university campuses grew along with pro-German sentiment, egged on by radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and the minister Gerald L. K. Smith, both of whom preached anti-Semitism and lauded American fascism. The America First Committee—founded by pacifist Yale students but eventually dominated by conservative isolationists—became the most significant of the organizations fighting to keep America out of the European war.
The autumn of 1939 was a period of anxiety as the world tried to anticipate when Hitler would pick his next victim. Aggression finally came on November 30, but the aggressor was the Soviet Union, not Germany, and Finland was the victim. The attack was a clear act of aggression aimed at acquiring more territory, and it resulted in the Soviet Union’s expulsion from the League of Nations.
The ongoing reorganization of the United States Army made few headlines, and Roosevelt’s modest increase in the size of the infantry made scant difference. As military reporter John G. Norris wrote in the Washington Post on October 8, “The United States will still have to be grouped with small nations of the world in the size of their military establishment. It will rank perhaps 14th or 15th, gaining a rung or two by its own enlargement and by the disappearance of the Polish army, which ranked way ahead of the United States.”6
The invasion of Poland by the Nazis provided a stark reminder for the United States of its own weaknesses. Although popular attention seemed to be placed on the apparent superiority of the tanks of Hitler’s Panzer divisions, an even greater concern to Marshall and other military planners was how the airplane had been used by the Germans in the blitzkrieg that had razed Poland. As Donald M. Nelson, an American official later charged with the responsibility for arms production during the war, recalled: “Nothing like this technology for completely demolishing a modern nation had ever been seen before. Production centers had been smashed, communications completely disorganized. With their air force obliterated, the Poles might as well have been fighting with clubs. These reports were electrifying to the men who, sooner or later, would be responsible for American defense or war production.”7
The year ended with Roosevelt and Marshall working with quiet determination to improve the Army in size
