a cease-fire called after two days of torrential rain and thunderstorms that left three men dead from a single lightning strike and 15 others injured from the effects of the storm. Many of the men on the field—soaked, demoralized, and mired in mud—left much of their personal equipment behind when the event was called off, and they were immediately herded into trucks and trains to take them home. The men on the field had been defeated by the weather.36
The problems brought to light were many and were not restricted to the Guardsmen. Although the spirit of the rank-and-file troops was praised, their ability as warriors was not. More than half the 52,000 men mobilized in Plattsburg had never fired their weapons in a combat course of instruction. Training had been utterly and totally inadequate. As one senior officer put it, the men and many of their officers were totally unprepared for “the mechanism of battle—the conduct of the fight.” The list of specific failures was nothing short of appalling. Cover and concealment on the battlefield was neglected, as was liaison and support between units. Serious delays had occurred in the distribution of orders, and many officers and men were unable to properly read maps. Men were led into battle in close formation, and scouts had to work too close to the columns they were supposed to protect. Food supplies to the men in the field were delayed or broke down completely. All these failures made clear the deep logistical problems the Army faced.37
Nor was either maneuver well planned in terms of the field of play. “Troop movements were ludicrously held up at roadside fences, not because of the barbed wire,” observed Newsweek, “but because, in the absence of a suitable field for maneuvers in the area, the nation’s defenders could not trample a farmer’s corn.” Perhaps the most stunning omission from the mock battlefields was the conspicuous absence of aircraft. A small item in one newspaper explained the omission: “The airmen are too busy with expansion to put on a show.”38
Using both named and unnamed sources from both maneuvers, the newspaper criticism rose to a crescendo. ARMY ADMITS WAR SHOWED DEFICIENCY read a headline in the Baltimore Sun above an article arguing that the maneuvers showed the Army was relatively less prepared than it had been in 1917 and that there had been a deplorable lack of training, especially among the Guardsmen and Reservists. “It must be remembered as far as the National Guard is concerned,” one general told the Sun reporter, “that they are civilian soldiers who get only a small amount of training each year and with other things to do than learn soldiering.”39
Finally, the man in charge of these war games, General Drum, labeled the performances of all those involved “deplorable and inexcusable.” The Army simply did not know how to fight. Plattsburg showed Drum and others that the nation’s armed forces needed to learn the mechanism of war—just how, under complex modern conditions, to advance, hold ground, and maintain liaison, supply, and command. Drum would later say that for the Army the Plattsburg revelations ended the old era and began a new one.40
On August 31, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, who had participated in the Plattsburg maneuvers as a uniformed Army Reserve Cavalry officer, spoke before the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars; he pointed out how poorly things seemed on the ground during those maneuvers and decried the state of the Army in general. “In the mechanization of the army we are surpassed in quantity by every first-class European power.” Within a few hours of Lodge’s speech one of the powers, Poland, was attacked by a highly mechanized Nazi army.41
Even though the 1939 maneuvers had been staged before he became chief of staff, Marshall was bothered by their poor outcome, and he renewed his efforts to plan improved maneuvers for 1940 and 1941.42
The deficiencies spotted in Plattsburg and Manassas tended to be magnified after Germany’s invasion of Poland and were cited by newspaper editorialists in arguments for greater preparedness. The Army needed an overhaul—but not the enlisted men, who in the words of an editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle showed “splendid spirit and morale,” despite their inability to fight.43
The treatment of African American soldiers in the American Revolution provided a sad prism for the future. Although black men served with honor at the Battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, the Continental Congress voted then to keep black people—both enslaved and free—from serving in the Continental Army. To train black men for armed warfare, the delegates believed, might lead to slave insurrections. The ban was a sop to slaveholders in both the South and North. But early in the war, the royal governor of Virginia offered to emancipate slaves who joined the British Army, which led Congress to reverse its decision, fearing that those emancipated men might become part of the army it was fighting.
Race remained a major issue for the Army in the decades that followed. As had been true during World War I, black soldiers in 1939 were required to join black units whose commissioned officers were white. In that earlier war, black Americans had been quick to enlist, not only to serve their country but also to demonstrate to their fellow Americans that they were entitled to the full rights of citizenship and an end to the discriminatory laws and practices known as Jim Crow. By the First World War’s end, 2.3 million black men had registered for the draft; 367,000 eventually served in uniform.44
In retelling the story of the black military experience, important figures in the traditional narrative emerge as men of duplicity and dishonor. A most notable example of this was President Woodrow Wilson who, in June 1917, was aware of the transfer and ultimate discharge from the Army’s highest-ranked black officer and a West Point graduate named Charles Young. An outstanding officer, Young had advanced to the rank of colonel, where he now outranked both white junior officers and all enlisted men, who were required to salute him. Making him more of a liability to those protecting the Jim Crow Army was the fact that his next promotion would make him a brigadier general and more disruptive to a hierarchy that depended on exclusion based on race.45
In World War I, General John Pershing denied black Americans the right to go into combat under the American flag, placing them instead under the French flag. In France they fought with spirit and valor and became an inspiration to the war-weary French. Soon after their reassignment, Pershing issued a directive to the French commanders, instructing them to “treat black Americans as white Americans did” and went on to say that “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of Americans. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black.” The French dismissed the order, which had no bearing on the reality of a war being waged in foul, rat-infested trenches, but this same American military attitude toward black people was still in place when Marshall took command of the Army in 1939.
The Army had no interest in recruiting black Americans, and the proof was in the numbers. The editorial page of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading black newspapers of the time, began arguing in 1938 for an American army that mirrored the general population and was at least 10 percent black. The Courier reported at the end of 1939 that the Regular Army of the United States “contained only 4,451 black enlisted men and five black officers, as compared with 229,636 white enlisted men and 1,359 white officers.”46
The fact that black men were totally excluded from the Army Air Corps was particularly irksome, especially to African American leadership. The cover of the July 1940 issue of the Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), graphically summed up this grievance by depicting military aircraft flying over an airfield, with the words FOR WHITES ONLY splashed across the image and a caption at the bottom reading: “WARPLANES—NEGRO AMERICANS MAY NOT BUILD THEM, REPAIR THEM, OR FLY THEM, BUT THEY MUST HELP PAY FOR THEM.” Focusing on the same issue, the magazine’s December 1940 cover showed an Army aircraft over a well-appointed airfield. This time the caption read: “FOR WHITES ONLY—A U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS TRAINING PLANE OVER THE ‘WEST POINT OF THE AIR’—RANDOLPH
