dire. “On New Year’s Day of 1940, when the peril was beginning to close in on us, the United States Armed Forces might almost have been called our ‘Disarmed Forces’” was Nelson’s view of the situation.8
At the end of December, Woodring had presented his annual report on the state of the military to the president and asserted once again that national defense could not be defined in terms of manpower or money but rather in terms of the efficiency of new weaponry. He argued, “One million naked savages armed with 1,000,000 spears and 1,000,000 shields would be slaughtered by 100 men armed with 100 of the Army’s new semiautomatic shoulder rifles and a baker’s dozen of the Army’s new tanks.”
What Woodring did not point out was that these new weapons were in short supply, and many of the specific items existed only as prototypes. Only 15,000 of the Garand M-1 rifles he alluded to were then available, and only 300 new ones were being produced a week. Also, pitting “naked savages” against the United States Army displayed Woodring’s unwillingness to confront the fact that the next war was not going to be fought with spears and shields but with arms, aircraft, and armored vehicles forged from German steel.9
In January 1940, Roosevelt tried once again to move Woodring out of the way, this time offering him the ambassadorship to Italy. Again Woodring declined, choosing to hold on to his office despite the fact that a large part of the United States Army now saw him as a roadblock rather than a facilitator. Marshall, on the other hand, was letting Congress know in no uncertain terms that the Army was improperly trained and prepared. “We have been forced [by lack of funds] to build up our technique of command and control, and even our development of leadership, largely on a theoretical basis,” he declared at one point.10
Congress listened but was slow to move, as the clouds of war seemed to be dissipating rather than gathering. Over the winter of 1939–40, a certain quiet fell over Europe, which led to a feeling of stalemate and inaction that lasted into the spring and past Easter. Some described the inactivity as a truce of sorts and the basis for a negotiated settlement. The situation became known as the Phoney War,* an odd, slangy phrase that came into use within days of Poland’s defeat.11 During this time, French and German troops eyed one another across Germany’s Siegfried Line and France’s Maginot Line, the latter a 280-mile-long defensive line of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and installed weapons built in the 1930s to deter invasion by Germany. Named for André Maginot, a former French minister of war, it ran along the entire length of the Franco-German border. The French believed it to be impregnable.
In the United States, the issue of the Phoney War became fodder for columnists and editorial writers, some of whom saw it as a hiatus in a larger period of aggression. “It is being said that this is a phoney war. But we shall understand the war better if we remember that it was preceded by eight years of phoney peace,” wrote Walter Lippmann in his widely syndicated New York Herald Tribune column in late October. “From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the peace of the world was disintegrating under the demoralization of class war, the pressure of subversive propaganda and intrigue, and the intimidation of armed and ruthless conspirators.” He concluded by calling the phoney peace an act of war.12
But Lippmann appeared to be in the minority, as others declared the Phoney War* to be the end of, or a long-term deferral of, hostilities. As journalist and Army historian Mark Skinner Watson later wrote about this period, it had “lulled the fears of only the uninformed, but the uninformed were numerous.”13
Many of those who had fled Paris and London fearing a Nazi attack returned home reassured that the Nazi saturation bombing they had dreaded had not come to pass. By Christmas, Londoners were neglecting to carry the gas masks they had been issued, and many prefabricated bomb shelters lay unclaimed at distribution points. By the end of January, nearly 60 percent of Britain’s 1.5 million evacuees had returned to their homes. And 43 percent of British schoolchildren had returned to their classes, often to schools that had been shut down in September 1939 because they were in areas considered dangerous and now needed to be reopened to accommodate the children who had returned to their homes.14
The Phoney War compromised the British public’s dedication to fighting the war against Germany. There was widespread antipathy toward food and gasoline rationing, blackouts, and other wartime restrictions that now appeared to be unnecessary. Citizens of England and France had to be constantly reminded that their countries had already declared war on Germany.
Especially in the United States, odd opinions and prophecies were frequent, including those relentlessly spewing forth from the mouth of Charles Lindbergh. He now took to the pages of the Atlantic magazine to declare that it was time for Germany, France, and England to come together in common defense against the “Asiatic hordes” who would soon penetrate and devour Europe.
Because London and Paris were not being bombed at this moment, some even thought that it might be possible to restart peace talks with Hitler. The Harvard Crimson ran a series of hopeful editorials pleading for a negotiated settlement between Germany and the Allied powers. One of the Crimson editors, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, son of the American ambassador to England, wrote to his father in early 1940 to report: “Everyone is getting much more confident about our staying out of the war but that of course is probably because there is such a lull over there.”15
As military activity reached a virtual standstill and the diplomatic front became quiet, the volume of press coverage shrank during the winter months. Foreign affairs had dominated front pages in the fall, but by February such articles were scarce. In their place were silly stories, such as “Real, Phoney War Finds George Snoring Peacefully,” the tale of George, a toothless, 120-year-old alligator in the London Zoo, who had been asleep since the beginning of the Phoney War and not affected at all by food rationing.16
On February 23, 1940, as Marshall argued for funds before skeptical members of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, he addressed the issue of the Phoney War: “If Europe blazes in the late spring or summer, we must put our house in order before the sparks reach the Western Hemisphere.”17 Marshall believed that the conflagration would come soon enough, and he told the committee he was doing all he could to get ready for it by obtaining the arms and equipment needed to outfit an Army of one million men.
At the time of this testimony, Marshall had already begun to inform Congress of his plans to test his new triangular divisions in large-scale maneuvers. During the course of the hearings, Marshall disclosed that in addition to maneuvers scheduled to take place in May somewhere along the Gulf Coast, which had already been revealed, three other exercises would be held in August 1940.18
To many members of Congress the concept of such maneuvers was new. Some knew about the “sham battles” or “sham wars” staged earlier in which two opposing forces in formation fired blanks at one another while civilians watched the show from a safe distance, as had been true of the 1939 Manassas maneuver, but this was an entirely different operation mounted on a large scale for a period of days or weeks.19
Under Marshall’s direction, a maneuver was envisioned as a carefully prepared operation, undertaken for training soldiers in the field in large numbers, concentrated at great distances from their normal home stations. These maneuvers would have as much to do with troop movements, communication between units, and logistics as they would with the actual faux combat. Aircraft from both the Army Air Corps and the Navy would be involved. And unlike the 1939 exercises in Manassas and Plattsburg, which were straightforward, scripted attack-and-defend operations, these maneuvers would allow officers on the ground to operate as they would in a real war, without a script, and thus serve as a test of tactical leadership.
Marshall
