the fact they did not have to go to camps or drill but only to agree to be ready in an emergency. The pay was meager but not insignificant during the Depression: $24 a month. The Army even issued special recruiting posters for these soldiers, calling them Modern Minute Men.14
At the end of World War I, the Army had contained more than two million men; since then it had been neglected and allowed to shrink in both size and stature. General Peyton C. March, the Army’s chief of staff at the end of that war, was of the opinion that the United States had rendered itself “weaker voluntarily than the Treaty of Versailles had made Germany.” He concluded that the country had made itself “militarily impotent.”15
The meager budget needed to run the Army dwindled as the Great Depression deepened. In 1935, the Army’s annual budget bottomed out at $250 million, and the force had declined to 118,750, at which point Douglas MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, observed that the entire Regular Army could be placed inside Yankee Stadium.16
“Let me give you a specific example of the effect of these reductions upon the efficiency of the Army,” George C. Marshall later observed. “During this period I commanded a post which had for its garrison a battalion of infantry, the basic fighting unit of every army. It was a battalion only in name, for it could muster barely 200 men in ranks when every available man, including cooks, clerks, and kitchen police, [was] present for the little field training that could be accomplished with available funds. The normal strength of a battalion in most armies of the world varies from 800 to 1,000 men.”17
American troops were learning obsolete skills and preparing for defensive warfare on a small scale. As military historian Carlo D’Este wrote: “So sorry was the state of the U.S. Army in 1939 that had Pancho Villa been alive to raid the southwestern United States it would have been as ill prepared to repulse or punish him as it had been in 1916.”18
The Army had only a few hundred light tanks and maintained a horse cavalry as an elite mobile force; it was no match for the heavily armored German divisions. Those who had advocated replacing horses with tanks and other armored vehicles during the period between the wars had actually been threatened with punishment. As a young officer, Dwight D. Eisenhower later recalled, when he began arguing for greater reliance on armored divisions, “I was told that my ideas were not only wrong but dangerous and that henceforth I would keep them to myself. Particularly, I was not to publish anything incompatible with solid infantry doctrine. If I did, I would be hauled before a court-martial.”19
In the late 1930s, a significant number of cavalry officers were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to mechanization in general and to any attempt to replace the horse with new combat vehicles, especially armored cars. In 1938, Major General John Herr became the chief of cavalry, and his position was that “mechanization should not come at the expense of a single mounted regiment.”20
Organizationally, the Army was divided into small sections that hardly ever trained together as larger coherent units because of a lack of funds. The paucity of travel money was underscored in 1938 when Marshall, stationed in the Vancouver Barracks in Washington State near Portland, Oregon, got orders to report for duty in Washington, D.C., as deputy chief of staff. The move precipitated a flow of letters back and forth between Marshall and then chief of staff Craig, discussing whether the funds could be raised to bring Marshall and his family east by train rather than sending them to Washington by military transport and through the Panama Canal. The funds were found, but the point was made that budgetary considerations were debilitating. Commanders billeted with larger units visited smaller units under their command only once a year—and then only if travel money could be found.21
The officer corps was demoralized because promotions were rare and based primarily on seniority. Army captains, for instance tended to be in their late 30s or early 40s. Many of the better-qualified younger officers had long before left the service.
Some soldiers wore the flat-brimmed steel doughboy helmets from World War I and carried bolt-action rifles from as far back as the Spanish-American War of the late 1890s. In 1939, supply wagons were still commonly pulled by teams of mules, and heavy artillery was moved by teams of horses. Soldiers’ pay was abysmal—$21 a month for a private, just as it had been in 1922. And expenses were high; if an infantryman wanted a calibrated rifle, he had to buy one from the Army for $35. Men who did not like the Army or the command to which they were assigned could buy their way out for $135 after a year. Transfers from one unit to another were unheard of, and the only way to make a move to another command was to pay the $135 and then reenlist with the unit one wanted.
The option to purchase one’s discharge coupled with the technical schooling the Army provided was also frustrating the Army’s efforts. Much of its recruiting was based on the premise that an enlistee could learn while he served. Men were joining the Army, acquiring skills, and then buying their way out. Between 1934 and 1938, 30,360 men bought their discharges; approximately 15 percent of them were technical school graduates.22
Making matters worse, in the early years of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, all troops were forced to take a mandatory “month without pay,” a flat cut that reduced soldiers’ monthly basic take from $21 to $17.85. Marshall himself defended the troops in a letter posted on April 13, 1934, to Brigadier General Thomas S. Hammond, then commander of the Illinois National Guard’s 66th Infantry Brigade. Marshall wrote of his men:
They cannot resign; they must present a certain standard of appearance no matter how closely pressed they may be financially; they must accept the added expenses of moves and special service; they constitute the government’s final backing in the event of grave emergencies; they must hazard their lives in the government service, with no choice of resigning if they do not care to serve. Yet on these servants the Federal government imposed its most drastic program of economy, and at a time when it was demanding more of the Army to meet the special requirements of the New Deal, than of any other branch of the government.23
The month without pay was a temporary measure and later lifted, but to many in the Regular Army the pay cut was a scar that remained. For those paying attention, Marshall had become the voice defending the average Joe who stuck with the Army through thick and thin.
Some units had better athletic teams and occasionally better food, but there were budgetary limitations. From 1922 until 1927, the government allocated 30 cents per day per man for food, and by 1938 the allocation had inched upward to 43 cents. For most men, potatoes were a staple of the evening meal, along with corn bread, beans, coffee, and a gloppy stew of meat and vegetables known as “slumgullion” or “slum” for short.
The desertion rate from the Army was not generally made public, but it was not significant; if a soldier went AWOL (absent without leave) and was not found after 90 days, the Army removed him from the rolls, convened an in absentia court-martial, and awarded him a dishonorable discharge. During the period from 1920 to 1932, any civilian law enforcement officer who returned a deserter to the Army was awarded $50; the bounty was reduced to $25 in 1933. Once returned, the offenders served their “bad time” at hard labor on work details, often making “little ones out of big ones”—smashing rocks with a sledgehammer. When they returned to normal duty, the bounty money was deducted from their pay in small amounts each payday until it was paid off.24
Despite the low pay and limited benefits, the job was a secure one, while work on the outside was often insecure and scarce. By 1932, approximately 13 million Americans were out of work, which amounted to one of every four able and willing workers in the country. Since the infantryman was the civilian labor-market equivalent of an unskilled laborer, not surprisingly the desertion rate reached a low point of 2 percent during these years, despite the reality that most of the Regular Army was housed in flimsy structures erected during the First World War and designed for temporary occupancy.
The
