master Corps along with the wartime Construction and Real Estate Divisions.100

The managerial revolution engineered by General March with the assistance of Generals Goethals, Johnson, and Wood, their civilian assistants, and allies like Mr. Thorne, Mr. Swope, and Mr. Stettinius in little more than six months cast aside traditional methods and procedures, substituting rationalist principles of centralized control and decentralized operations. That the General Staff became an operating agency was necessary simply because Secretary Baker had allowed the department's operations to drift until the resultant anarchy threatened to paralyze the war effort. It was drastic surgery, but centralized executive control over the bureaus was necessary to avoid disaster, and the General Staff was the only agency within the War Department able to perform this task. The administration had rejected the only other alternative, a separate civilian supply department, although businessmen and some Army officers favored it.101

As for the bureau chiefs, they would not admit failure. Like the Bourbons they remembered nothing and forgot nothing. They complained to Congress that the new organization was inefficient and violated the principle of unity of command, meaning the unity of their commands. The Surgeon General charged that his hospitals were getting the wrong kinds of surgical gauze, the Chief of Ordnance that arsenals were getting the wrong kinds of lubricating oil, and all complained of delays. The Chief of Ordnance summed up the general attitude of the bureaus by asserting that ". not one single construc

tive thing has come out of the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division." All it did was interfere with the bureaus' operations which until then, he also asserted, had been running smoothly.102

100 (1) Order of Battle (1917-19), ZI, pp. 92-105, 130-34, 492-93, 540-47. (2) War Department General Orders 51, 21 May 18, and 62, 28 Jun 18. (3) On production of military aircraft, see Irving B. Holley, jr., Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapon by the United States During World War I: A Study in the Relationship of Technological Advance, Military Doctrine, and the Development of Weapons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).

101 Report of the Chief of Staff, 1919, pp. 252-53.

102 (1) Testimony of Maj Gen Merritte W. Irland, Surgeon General, Army Reorganization Hearings, 1919-20, pp. 464-65. (2) Testimony of Maj Gen C. G. Williams, Chief of Ordnance, Army Reorganization Hearings, 1919-20, pp. 489-536. Quotation from p. 493.

General Johnson on the other hand blamed the "cluster of jealous and ancient bureaus" as responsible for the failure of the War Department to unify them completely. He predicted correctly that they would soon regain their independence. Such was the "tremendous tenacity of life of a government bureau.” He wrote:

Governmental emergency operations are entirely different from routine governmental operations. This country is so vast in every aspect that when any central authority steps in to control or direct its economic forces, coordination of such efforts is the principal problem. Lack of it is so dangerous that it may completely frustrate the almost unlimited power of this country.103

When World War II came the War Department was again forced to centralize control over the bureaus for the same reasons which forced March and Goethals to act as they did. The problem remains even today in almost all branches of government, federal and local, primarily because most Americans from the beginning of the republic have distrusted and resisted centralized control.

The Long Armistice, 1919–1939

Congress rejected the principle of tight executive control or unity of command developed by General March almost as soon as the war was over. The National Defense Act amendments of 4 June 1920 returned generally to the prewar traditional pattern of fragmented, diffused authority and responsibility with effective control again at the bureau level, subject as before to detailed Congressional supervision. In passing this legislation Congress accepted the General Staff as a permanent agency, but it was in the circumstances one bureau among equals. During the modest rearmament program of the late thirties the General Staff was able to assert itself over the bureaus more effectively.

In restoring the autonomy of the bureaus Congress also retained the Hay-Ainsworth provision prohibiting the General Staff from interfering in their administration. This limitation restricted the General Staff to the role of a planning and coordinating agency rather than the operating agency established by March to direct departmental activities.

103

Johnson, The Blue Eagle From Egg to Earth, pp. 93-94.

Specifically, the General Staff was to prepare plans for mobilization and war, "to investigate and report on the efficiency and preparedness of the Army," and to "render professional aid and assistance to the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of War." It was not to "assume or engage in work of an administrative nature that pertains to established bureaus or offices of the War Department" which might "imperil [their] responsibility or initiative," impair their efficiency, or unnecessarily duplicate their work. 104

The provisions defining the functions and responsibilities of the Chief of Staff underlined the fact that he was to act under the direction of the Secretary of War and the President as their agent. "The Chief of Staff shall preside over the War Department General Staff and, under the direction of the President," direct its activities in making the necessary plans for "recruiting, organizing, supplying, equipping, mobilizing, training, and demobilizing" the Army and "for the use of the military forces for national defense." He was to advise the Secretary on war plans. Once they had been approved by the Secretary he was to act as executive agent in seeing to it that they were carried out properly. In short, in the legal meaning of the term, the Chief of Staff did not "command" the Army.

Congress added several new wartime agencies as permanent bureaus, the Finance Department, the Chemical Warfare Service, the Air Service (later the Air Corps), and a new one, the Chief of Chaplains. It extended the bureau system to the combat arms by creating the Offices of the Chiefs of Infantry and Cavalry in addition to the existing Chiefs of Field and Coast Artillery. The services also regained control over officer personnel, although the principle of a single promotion list for the entire Army initiated by March was retained. They also regained control over their budgets, subject to over-all control by the new Bureau of the Budget as an arm of Congress.

A major innovation assigned the Assistant Secretary of Wai specific responsibility for military procurement and industrial mobilization, leaving responsibility for the establishment of military requirements and supply distribution policy to the General Staff. Congress deliberately omitted provision for a

104 War Department Bulletin No. 25, 9 Jun 20, Amendments to the National Defense Act.

general manager like the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic to co-ordinate the technical services. Reporting directly to both the Chief of Staff and the Assistant Secretary, the supply services were the only formal link between military requirements and procurement and the principal source of information which both needed to formulate plans and policies intelligently. 105

Congress did not prescribe the internal organization of the General Staff. When General of the Armies John J. Pershing became Chief of Staff in 1921, he appointed a board under his Deputy Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. James G. Harbord, to recommend a proper organization. The result was a functional organization modeled on the "G" system developed in the AEF along British and French lines: G-1 (Personnel), G-2 (Intelligence), G-3 (Operations and Training), G-4 (Supply), and a War Plans Division (WPD). This involved one important transfer of functions. Training during the war had been the responsibility of the War Plans Division and its predecessor agencies. Under the Pershing reorganization this function was transferred to the new Operations and Training Division. In one form or another this remained the basic pattern of General Staff organization in the department as well as in the field for the next half century. Like March's organization it was functional in nature. But March's General Staff was an operating agency which actively administered the affairs of the department, while in accordance with the law the new General Staff was only an over-all planning and co-ordinating agency.

106

In the 1920 act Congress reaffirmed the traditional military principle contained in the National Defense Act of 1916 of reliance on a small standing army in peacetime supported by

105

05 (1) Ibid. (2) War Department General Order 20, 12 Aug 20, sec. II, Duties of the Assistant Secretary of War. (3) Goldthwaite Dorr, Certain Aspects of War Department Supply Reorganization, 1917-18, 1920, and 1942, pp. 10-14. Seminar on the reorganization of the War Department of 9 Mar 42, 14 Jun 45, Department of Research, Army Industrial College. (4) Goldthwaite Dorr, Memorandum-Notes on the Activities of an Informal Group in Connection With Supply Reorganization in the War Department, Jan-May 42, c. early 1946, pp. 5-6. Copy in OCMH.

106 (1) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, pp. 299–300. (2) War Department General Order 41, 16 Aug 21, and Army Regulation 10-15, 15 Nov 22. (3) Kreidberg and Henry, History of Military Mobilization, pp. 380-81. (4) See Hagood, Services of Supply, pp. 358-85, for a criticism of applying the pattern of a tactical headquarters to the organization of a civilian cabinet agency.

a citizens' militia, the National Guard and the Organized Reserves. Within this framework the department divided the Army inside the continental United States, Alaska, and Puerto Rico into nine corps areas for administration, training, tactics, and National Guard and Reserve activities. For maneuvers, mobilization planning, and in the event of war it grouped the corps into three field armies. The latter remained largely paper organizations. Finally the department organized overseas forces on the prewar pattern into three territorial departments, the Panama Canal Zone, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands. Each department had both administrative and operational responsibilities, 107

The Harbord Board recommended that the Chief of Staff be appointed also as commander in chief of the field armies in the event of war. This reflected the fact that General Pershing had two titles, one as Chief of Staff and another conferred on him by Congress as General of the Armies. The War Plans Division would provide the nucleus of a General Headquarters (GHQ) staff, and the Deputy Chief of Staff would remain behind as Acting Chief of Staff. This concept, which the War Department did not endorse officially until 1936, dominated Army planning between the wars. Presumably this arrangement was intended to avoid the conflict which had arisen between March and Pershing, but it still revived the position of Commanding General. As Mr. Root had earlier argued, this arrangement made future friction likely between the commander in the field and the department unless the commander in the field was clearly subordinate to whoever was acting as Chief of Staff in Washington and to the Secretary.

As it was, the Chief of Staff had to share power and influence with bureau chiefs who spent the bulk of the Army's appropriations and had direct access to Congress. At times Pershing and his successors endured the frustration of having bureau chiefs undercut their position and that of the Secretary on the Hill. In these circumstances it was not possible to achieve sub

107

(1) Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1964), p. 17. (2) War Department General Orders 50, 20 Aug 20, and 75, 23 Dec 20.