attached riders to remove Wood from office and to return power to the adjutant general’s office. President Taft vetoed them all. He stood by his war secretary and army chief of staff. The adjutant general’s office would remain under the thumb of the general staff. But congressional opponents did not go quietly; they fired a parting shot by reducing the general staff from forty-five to thirty-six officers. MacArthur got his assignment even as the staff downsized—a telling testament to the legacy of his father.46
As soon as he arrived in Washington, MacArthur ingratiated himself with Wood. Whether he understood it or not, his arrival after the bitter feud worked with his pedigree to make him a neutral arbiter with the still embittered officers throughout the army’s bureaus who had come to loathe Wood but still respected the MacArthur name. Wood, however, clearly understood this dynamic, and so he utilized MacArthur extensively. Soon after becoming president, Woodrow Wilson apparently recognized the same dynamic at work and offered MacArthur a job as a White House aide in 1913. MacArthur, loyal to Wood, declined.47 In any event, as Eisenhower and Clay still made their way at West Point, MacArthur had already managed to move to the nexus of army politics.
The outbreak of hostilities in Europe in the summer of 1914 made MacArthur’s position especially interesting. Initially, President Woodrow Wilson struggled to keep the United States out of the war, suspecting the motives of all the belligerents. Yet other prominent Americans feared that eventually the United States would be dragged into the conflict. In particular, Theodore Roosevelt, Stimson, and Wood—all out of office by 1914—argued that the army should actively prepare for that eventuality. Wilson would have none of it. As if to emphasize his feelings he refused to meet with his military leaders with any regularity; worse, he threatened to fire any military leaders caught making contingency plans in case war came.48 In theory, the Joint Army and Navy Board should have allowed for some provisional discussions of American involvement in the war. Here, again, the Wilson administration remained intentionally unprepared. Assistant Secretary of War Henry Breckinridge summed up the views of the Wilson administration: he only “fooled with” the board “on hot summer afternoons when there was nothing else to do.”49
When Germany’s decision to unleash unlimited submarine warfare forced Wilson’s into the war on the side of the British and French Entente, the army suddenly found itself facing a first-rate opponent on the other side of a wide ocean. Unsurprisingly, the broader national security state remained extraordinarily unprepared. When Congress declared war on April 6, 1917, the combined army and National Guard had a little over 200,000 men under arms. By comparison, at that same moment the Niville Offensive in Europe cost the Germans, British, and French more than 400,000 casualties. America’s pittance of an army could not have lasted a single battle in the kind of grinding war Europeans had endured since 1914.50
Congress proved particularly slow to understand what it had committed the army to do. Even as it deliberated declaring war, the House Military Affairs Committee rejected the army’s budget request of $3 billion for armaments and soldiers’ pay. Eventually, Congress managed to provide the requested funds, but not until June 5, two months after it had declared war. A second appropriations request waited until October to wend its way through Congress.51
In a few aspects, though, the army anticipated the problems it would face. When Congress passed the Selective Services Act, army officials insisted that the law prohibit bounties, paid exemptions, or substitutions as part of conscription—those provisions that produced so much resentment during the Civil War.52 More important, rather than revert to an organization built around the state militias, the army parceled out its existing soldiers to train the millions of doughboys called into service. Professional soldiers then served as the commanding officers of new combat units.53 This way the army could best leverage its existing expertise and filter that expertise throughout the new fighting divisions.
Ironically, the decision to parcel out its regular soldiers ultimately kept Eisenhower and Clay from seeing combat. The army sent Eisenhower to Texas in the spring of 1917 as part of the newly formed Fifty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, promoting him at the same time to captain and placing him in charge of supply. He then moved to the training school at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he managed to enroll in the army’s first tank school. By February 1918, he was again reassigned, this time to develop a training facility for a new tank division in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Just three years out of West Point, he suddenly faced the daunting task of commanding thousands of volunteers in using this new and unfamiliar weapon (for which the army had no training manuals or field guides). Eventually, he learned that he would lead his trainees into battle as part of an offensive scheduled for spring 1919, with a planned departure of November 18, 1918—as it turned out, one week after the Armistice.54
Having narrowly graduated in 1918, Clay requested a post in the artillery. The army assigned him to the Corps of Engineers instead. Ever the iconoclast, Clay wired the adjutant general saying, “[You] made a mistake.” The adjutant general wired back telling Clay he had better show up as ordered. At Camp Lee, Virginia, Clay went through an accelerated training for engineers. No sooner had he finished that September than he got a new assignment to act as an instructor for new recruits at Camp Humphreys, Virginia, where he remained throughout the war.55
By contrast, MacArthur managed to use his position on the general staff to move out of the Corps of Engineers and obtain a command position within the newly formed Forty-Second Division. MacArthur named it the “Rainbow Division” because it included twenty-six different state national guards: it stretched “over the whole country like a rainbow.”56 MacArthur’s reputation soared. By July of 1918, he had been promoted from colonel to brigadier general. Once the American army began to engage the Germans, MacArthur showed an almost reckless willingness to personally lead in battle. In a grinding fight that ultimately ended the war, he was twice wounded and got so close to the front that his own troops mistook him for a German soldier and arrested him as a prisoner of war. By the time of the Armistice, MacArthur had received seven Silver Star medals, two Distinguished Service Cross medals, two Purple Hearts, and two Croix de Guerre awards from the French army, along with membership in France’s Legion of Honor. Second only to General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander in chief of all American forces, he had become the most famous American general in the world.57
Chapter 2
The War, the Economy, and the Army
By the end of the First World War, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lucius Clay were still too early in their professions to affect the subsequent peace. Yet the war had important consequences for these men as they moved forward in their careers. First, it taught them critical lessons in preparing for any subsequent wars; in particular, it focused their thoughts on the relationship between America’s industrial might and its military might. Second, the army continued to professionalize as key officers recognized that the army would be an important part of America’s increasing involvement in global politics. Third, individual soldiers became at least informally more informed about governing foreign people as they maintained America’s interwar external state. Finally, as the peace treaty negotiated at Versailles in 1919 led within a decade to the Great Depression and then a Second World War, Eisenhower and Clay in particular began to become more involved in domestic political economy and think about what mistakes had led to depression and a Second World War.
In this last regard—the lessons that followed the Treaty of Versailles—Woodrow Wilson cast the longest shadow. In many ways, he provided the blueprint for a global order that American foreign policy has often followed since. At the same time, he ignored or misunderstood enough of his plan to almost guarantee its failure.1 In fairness to Wilson (and the statesman he negotiated with), World War I had drastically changed the globe. It involved almost thirty nations, killed almost ten million soldiers and sailors, and introduced
