stantive unity of command over the department under the Chief of Staff or the Secretary.108

The successive Secretaries of War between World War I and World War II had little impact on the Army or on Congress. The one exception was Harry H. Woodring, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose feud with Assistant Secretary Louis A. Johnson in the late thirties demoralized the department and the General Staff. 109 Two of them, John W. Weeks, appointed by President Warren G. Harding, and Patrick J. Hurley, appointed by President Herbert C. Hoover, were men of considerable talent, but they served in a period when the American people and Congress deluded themselves that large armies were becoming obsolete.

The National Defense Act amendments of 1920 provided for a War Council composed of the Secretary, Assistant Secretary, "the General of the Armies" (General Pershing), and the Chief of Staff for the purpose of discussing and formulating military policy. It met infrequently and was of little significance since most secretaries chose to ignore it.

The most important function within the civilian secretariat was that of the Assistant Secretary of War to whom Congress on the recommendation of Benedict Crowell specifically assigned responsibility for procurement and industrial mobilization planning. Under his supervision the Army Industrial College, created in 1924 by Assistant Secretary Dwight F. Davis, trained officers from all the armed services in the problems of procurement and industrial mobilization. The Assistant Secretary's Office was divided into a Current Procurement Branch and a Planning Branch. The latter supervised the supply services in developing their plans and requirements. Among other areas the work of this branch included the development of contract procedures, the study of production facilities, and planning the construction of additional wartime facilities.

Industrial mobilization was hampered by the fact that the

108 (1) Preliminary Report of the Committee on Nucleus for General Headquarters in the Field in the Event of Mobilization, 11 Jul 21, in The National Defense, pp. 571-73. (2) Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1951), pp. 20–21. (3) Kreidberg and Henry, History of Military Mobilization, p. 432. (4) Army Regulation 10-15, 18 Aug 36. (5) Statement of General Marshall to the Secretary, re: Single Department of Defense, 18 Apr 44, pp. 1-4. Stimson Manuscripts. Copy in OCMH. 100 See Chapter II, pages 59-60.

General Staff's mobilization planning did not take into account the resources likely to be available. The argument advanced by the General Staff was that supply would have to adjust itself to strategic plans. The gap between planning requirements and material resources available to meet them did not begin to close until the middle thirties with the development of a Protective Mobilization Plan (PMP), the first such plan to take into account the industrial resources and capabilities of the nation.110

A major change in the organization of the War Department between the wars resulted from the efforts of Army airmen to establish an air service separate from the ground forces and independent of the General Staff. The drive had gained considerable momentum during World War I and benefited from the enthusiastic dedication of its supporters like Brig. Gen. William Mitchell. The creation of a separate Royal Air Force (RAF) in Great Britain was another factor. Finally the airmen obtained sufficient political support in Congress, which in 1926 provided for a separate Army Air Corps under its own chief, an Air Section on the General Staff, and an additional Assistant Secretary of War for Air.

110

10 (1) Marshall Statement, re: Single Department of Defense, 18 Apr 44, pp. 1-4. (2) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, pp. 284-87, 310-11. (3) Paul A. C. Koistinen, "The Industrial-Military Complex in Historical Perspective: The Inter-War Years," Journal of American History (March 1970).

As the celebrated court-martial of General Mitchell in 1925 demonstrated, the General Staff was determined to retain control over the development of the Air Corps in terms of equipment and doctrine for employment primarily in tactical support of ground troops. The airmen were more interested in developing long-range strategic bombers to carry the war to the enemy's industrial and transportation centers.

The airmen's drive for an independent air force marked time between 1926 and 1939. The office of Assistant Secretary of War for Air went unfilled after 1933 and was abolished by the Secretary of War in 1934. In the next year the War Department did create a separate General Headquarters for the Air Forces with control over all tactical air units in the United States whose commander, until 1 March 1939, reported directly to the Army Chief of Staff rather than to the Chief of the Army Air Corps. By the end of the thirties the Air Corps was still subordinate to the Chief of Staff and the General Staff.111

Such was the formal organization of the War Department in 1939 when General George C. Marshall became Chief of Staff. Until the late thirties the Army had been little more than a peacetime constabulary force of less than 150,000 men scattered in nine skeletonized divisions, not one of them ready for combat. It had been emaciated by repeated budget cuts, debilitated by the Great Depression, and demoralized by widespread public disillusionment over the United States role in World War I. Tight budgets had also cut back vital research programs for developing the air and infant armored forces, and the bureaus and combat arms quarreled constantly over dividing reduced appropriations."1

111

112

11(1) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, p. 300. (2) Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, eds., Plans and Early Operations, January 1939 to August 1942, vol. I, "The Army Air Forces in World War II" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 1-32. (3) See Irving B. Holley, jr., Buying Aircraft: Matériel Procurement for the Army Air Forces, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1964), pp. 43-79, for a detailed treatment of the air arm's fortunes between the wars.

112 (1) Mark S. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1950), pp. 23-56. (2) John W. Killigrew, The Impact of the Great Depression on the Army, 1929-1936. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1960. Copy in OCMH. (3) Precedent and History Section, AGO, Quotations of War Department Spokesmen Relative to the Inadequacy of the National Defense During the Period 1919-1941, c. Sep-Oct 46. In Cater files (1941), OCMH.

CHAPTER II

The Marshall Reorganization

When General George C. Marshall became Chief of Staff in 1939, he inherited not only the staff structure sketched in the previous chapter, but also a set of planning assumptions on the nature of the next war laid down in the Harbord Board report. The basic assumption was that any new war would be similar to World War I and would require similar command and management methods. In fact the circumstances of World War II would differ radically from those of World War I, and this difference made the Harbord Board doctrine and the planning based upon it almost irrelevant from the start. In the prewar period, 1939-41, the War Department struggled along trying to adapt the Harbord concepts to the new situation, revising them piecemeal in response to the immediate needs of the moment. When war came General Marshall determined to sweep the entire structure aside and develop a new and radically changed organization adapted to the circumstances of World War II.

The Harbord Board had assumed that the next war would involve a single theater of operations, that the Chief of Staff would take the field as commanding general with the nucleus of his GHQ taken from the War Plans Division, and that military planning in GHQ would be primarily on tactics for a one-front war. It took into consideration neither the new importance of air power and armor, nor the necessity for genuinely joint operations with the Navy or combined operations with the Allies. The board also assumed there would be a single M-day (mobilization day) on which the United States would change overnight from peace to war as in April 1917, a concept which dominated mobilization planning between the two wars. Instead the nation gradually drifted from neutrality to active belligerency between September 1939 and December

1941, and the war developed as a global affair on many fronts involving combined ground, air, and naval forces. A complicated series of combined arrangements with the British evolved, and the Army found itself, from 1939 onward, caught up in vital questions of global political and military strategy for which it was not thoroughly prepared.1

Probably the most important assumption of the Harbord Board was one never stated, but clearly implied: that the President and Secretary of War would follow the practice of Woodrow Wilson and Newton D. Baker in delegating broad authority for the conduct of the war to professional military officers. This was a questionable assumption since President Wilson was the only President in American history who did not play an active role as Commander in Chief in wartime. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to exercise an independent role in determining political and military strategy was more consistent with the traditional concept of the President as Commander in Chief developed by George Washington, James Madison, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley. Even if Roosevelt had not deliberately chosen to play an active role, the vital political issues raised by World War II would have forced him to do so. Every major decision on military strategy was almost always a political decision as well and vice versa. There was, consequently, no clear distinction between political and military considerations during World War II, although many, including the President himself at times, imagined there was one.

The Chief of Staff and the Secretary

Since President Roosevelt played an active role as Commander in Chief, he dealt directly with General Marshall rather than through the Secretary of War. General Marshall's primary role became that of the President's principal Army adviser on military strategy and operations. As a result, the Chief of Staff also became the center of authority on military matters within

1 (1) For the Harbord Board report, see Chapter I, pages 52-53. (2) Cline, Washington Command Post, pp. 1-39. (3) Kreidberg and Henry, History of Military Mobilization, pp. 373-587. (4) R. Elberton Smith, The Army and Economic Mobilization, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1959), pp. 73-112. The so-called color plans developed in the War Plans Division were contingency plans and not considered by the rest of the General Staff as part of their daily operational planning.