No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Despite the discordant note provided by Lindbergh’s blast, the president’s skillful speech achieved exactly what he wanted. Before the week was over, the Congress had voted to raise the debt ceiling and to authorize even more monies than the administration had requested. To the army would go a half-billion to train new troops, expedite munitions, and build new tanks and new planes. The navy would receive a quarter-billion to step up its shipbuilding program and to provide all vessels with the latest equipment. Also included in the congressional appropriations was the establishment of additional aviation schools and an increase in the number of pilots from twelve hundred to seven thousand a year.

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  Even the most lavish appropriations, however, could not shorten the waiting period of eighteen months projected for the actual delivery of the new tanks, planes, and weapons. The president’s optimism about the future was one thing; the reality of America’s present state of preparedness—as evidenced by the army’s sorry maneuvers currently under way in Louisiana—was quite another.

  Under a hot May sun, “on russet roads of sand and clay,” the army’s “Blue” forces, forty-thousand strong, were on the march in the biggest peacetime maneuver in the history of the United States. The Blues were heading west from Fort Benning, Georgia, to the Sabine Forest in Louisiana to defend their “mythical nation” against a lightning attack by thirty thousand “Red” forces moving east from Texas. (The defenders were given the benefit of more troops.) The war games were intended to serve as a field test of the new triangular divisions, to evaluate the use of horse cavalry against mechanized forces, and to provide practice in advancing large units under danger of air attack.

  Through nine months of strenuous training, the soldiers had been living in the field and sleeping on the ground in rain and freezing weather to harden them for this first great maneuver. The supply officers had been preparing nearly as long to accumulate the 177 freightcar-loads of food, 190 tankloads of gas, 10,000 pieces of artillery, 3,500 horses, 1,600 observer stations, and 9,000 civilian volunteers. The games were scheduled to last two weeks and to cost more than a million dollars a day.

  The announcement of the war games conjured an image of mock battles with long columns of soldiers running toward each other through the woods, waving flags, shooting blanks, hurling sham explosives into the air. In this glorified image, victory would be accorded to the side that reached a certain goal line first. Anticipating an exciting display of action, men, women, and children lined the Louisiana streets and the Gulf Coast highways to cheer the men on.

  In reality, the maneuvers comprised a series of discrete and often invisible exercises—such as penetrating a line, crossing a river, bringing down a plane, or establishing a machine-gun nest on a knoll. At every point, an umpire, with a distinguishing badge on his arm, would determine which side had achieved the advantage. If, for instance, a squadron of Red airplanes came upon a line of Blue trucks moving along the highway in broad daylight, the penalty assessed against the Blues for leaving themselves exposed to “aerial attack” would be severe. Or, if the Blues reached a particular bridge first and could prove they had sufficient explosives to blow it up, then the Reds, upon reaching the “blown-up bridge,” would be forced to stay in place until their engineers were able to improvise a new bridge in the same spot. In each instance, an umpire would be on top of the action, record his scores in a small book, and compare with the other umpires that evening to create a pattern of all the advances and losses during the entire day’s actions.

  “Consider the task,” a Times-Picayune reporter observed, “faced by the men who shall umpire the war games.” Whereas football referees must be on top of every play and watch the movements of twenty-two players on a level playing field, the field of play in the war games included muddy swamps, thick forests, and steep hills, nearly a hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, encompassing nearly seventy thousand players moving an average of 150 miles a day.

  On May 10, the first day of the maneuvers, the Red forces, under General Walter Krueger, gained the advantage by surprising the Blues with an early-morning attack. At 4:30 a.m., a column of big armored trucks, their headlights “drilling bright tunnels through the blackness,” roared down the back roads of Louisiana, awakening farmers and setting their dogs to howl. At the same time, a squadron of Red bombers attacked the Blue airport at McComb, Mississippi, causing damage to scores of Blue planes. The advance guard of the Blues, led by General Walter Short, had just arrived in the Sabine Forest when the Reds attacked. Exhausted from an overland march from Georgia covering more than six hundred miles, the Blues were no match for the Reds, who won the first encounter decisively. But two days later, the Blue reinforcements arrived at the scene, and the Blues succeeded in penetrating the Red line of resistance. And so it continued for two weeks, as first one side, then the other gained the advantage.

  Before the maneuvers officially started, a series of landing accidents destroyed three pursuit planes and so completely damaged the undercarriage of a transport plane that twelve soldiers had to parachute out before it spiraled to the ground. One of the twelve became entangled in his parachute and drowned in the Pearl River. Two days later, Private Harold Vanderbilt of Cove, Arkansas, was killed when he slipped off a log and was crushed under a heavy army truck. That same day, Private Marion Caudell was electrocuted when the radio antennae on his scout car came in contact with a high-tension wire. By week’s end, twelve soldiers were dead and nearly four hundred had been admitted to the hospital for injuries and diseases. As the war games progressed, the death toll rose. In a related maneuver, two entire flight crews, eleven men in all, were killed when two army bombers crashed to the earth in the middle of a suburban development.

  But the accidents were not the only problem. It was the antiquated equipment, measured against the backdrop of the fast-moving war in Europe, that turned the gigantic maneuvers into a farce. In every critique, inside the army and out, lack of equipment was cited as the major problem. Though the morale of the American soldiers was universally praised, it was clear from the shape of the European struggle that courage and daring mattered less than the heavy power of the Germans’ revolutionary form of attack—with dive-bombers, artillery, and heavy tanks all tied into one consolidated force. The most glaring weakness the maneuvers revealed was a stunning lack of combat planes. Though the assembly of planes at Barksdale Field was billed as “the greatest concentration of combat planes” ever brought together in the United States, virtually “a sea of planes,” the actual total was only four hundred, a mere one day’s supply in the current war. Until their opinion was undercut by Germany’s shocking use of its air force as the spearhead of its blitzkrieg, the American generals had maintained that the air force was merely an auxiliary force. Consequently, the American army had almost no warplanes. At the end of the maneuvers, General Short admitted that, of the thirty-four missions he had requested of the air corps, only two were accomplished.

  Nor were the American ground troops accustomed to shaping their behavior in response to air power. “Too frequently,” The Army Navy & Journal observed in its critique of the maneuvers, “roads were jammed with motor vehicles closed up bumper to bumper, thus affording excellent targets, not only for artillery fire and air bombing, but also giving the enemy excellent information regarding locations and movements. The occasions when attempt was made to hide vehicles at halts, even in this wooded country, were rare.”

  Lack of tanks posed a problem almost as troubling as lack of planes. For too many years, high-ranking traditionalists, still believing in the superiority of the horse, had opposed action to upgrade the armored forces. As late as February 1940, even though the Polish cavalry had been dismembered by the German panzers in a matter of minutes, the Cavalry Journal was still arguing for the supremacy of the horse. “It is a mistake to persuade the public to attach exaggerated importance to motorization and mechanization,” the Cavalry Journal contended, “because these can only play a sma
ll part in static warfare, which would seem to be the only sort of warfare probable in Western Europe . . . . The idea of huge armies rolling along roads at a fast pace is a dream. Apart from all questions of space and capacity of roads and bridges, rivers and mountains hamper the mass employment of motor vehicles.” Besides, “men can keep animals in health and work for indefinite periods without difficulty or outside assistance, but oil and tires cannot like forage be obtained locally.”

  As a result of such attitudes, though there were acres and acres of land literally covered with the thirty-five hundred horses available for the maneuvers, only 450 tanks participated. And these tanks, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., pointed out, were virtually all the tanks the United States had, or about “one finger of the fan-like German advance.” When these few tanks were put into action, the results were electrifying. As townspeople watched from porches and roofs, two hundred horses galloped through the streets to their “deaths” in a futile effort to fend off the “slashing, onrushing mechanized brigade.” In another exercise, witnesses watched in amazement as a tank brigade roared down an overgrown hill through briars, sumac, and bushes, over ravines where no horse could have crossed. “They were hit on all sides by these red hot bullets but the tanks were immune to rifle fire and small machine gun fire,” one observer noted. “I wonder what would have been the effect if we had had on the hillside a unit of horse cavalry, where those red-hot bullets were shooting through the air.”

  Though cavalry leaders adamantly denied that the motor had made the horse obsolete, General Brees acknowledged that during the maneuvers the infantry and the horse cavalry had tended to become “road-bound”; the infantry was reluctant to detruck and the cavalry stuck to the roads, even when the muddy terrain made forward movement all but impossible.

  In addition to numerical superiority, the German tanks were far superior to the American tanks in quality. Whereas the German soldiers sat in comfort and convenience in their heavy vehicles, complete with upholstered seats, shock absorbers, and bumpers, the driver of an American tank, buttoned up in fifteen tons of steel, with virtually no windows, was dependent for sight and direction on signals from the car commander, who sat above him in the turret. And since the clatter of the tank was like “the noise often robots tap dancing inside a cement mixer,” the business of signaling was no easy matter. Amid such din, the commander in the turret had to rely on foot signals to the driver’s shoulder and back. Two kicks meant “Go straight ahead.” One kick on the right or left shoulder called for a right or left turn. If the soldier on top was shot, the driver was completely blind. Not surprisingly, soldiers dubbed the American machines “hell buggies.”

  “The gravity of this situation,” Senator Lodge told his colleagues, “consists in the fact that it is almost as difficult to produce tanks as it is to produce planes.” To manufacture even one light tank, more than half a dozen time-consuming steps had to be taken, with each part made in a different place: the motor by Continental Aircraft, the armor plate by Diebold Company in Ohio, rubber treads by Goodyear, weapons by Browning, special gears by a variety of firms. Then all the parts had to be sent to Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois to be assembled.

  In recognition of the weaknesses revealed by the games, a secret meeting took place in the basement of Alexandria High School on the day the maneuvers ended. At this meeting, Generals Adna Chaffee and John Magruder, commanders of the army’s sole tank brigade, and other officers committed to tanks, such as Colonel George Patton, presented their case for an independent armored force. Up to this moment, the tank brigade was under the calvary and infantry divisions, which had deliberately reduced the number of tanks. Pointedly, the chiefs of cavalry and infantry were not invited to the meeting, though they were nearby at the time. The basement conspirators sent their recommendation for an independent branch to Washington. General Marshall responded positively. He withdrew all armor from Cavalry and Infantry and placed it in a new, independent armored force.

  American arrogance died during the maneuvers. “Overnight, the pleasant doings in Louisiana became old-fashioned nonsense,” Time reported. “Against Europe’s total war, the U.S. Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.”

  “The fact remains,” Senator Lodge asserted, “that our Army today is not what it ought to be.” For, if these troops were the cream of the U.S. Army, the best-trained, the most fully equipped, and if they evidenced such great problems, then one could only begin to imagine the situation in the rest of the army.

  This was the desolate backdrop to the president’s call for arms in his address to the Congress. “What smoldered beneath his words,” Time observed, “was the warning that the U.S. will have to arm with all its might and main, because the world that is closing in on it is no longer safe for democracy.”

  • • •

  Encouraged by the generally positive reaction to his congressional speech, Roosevelt turned his attention next to the difficult task of translating the idea of preparedness into reality. So complex were the demands of modern warfare, requiring the conversion of existing plants and the creation of new facilities, compelling the transfer of scientific research from objects of peace to weapons of war, demanding new accommodations between business, government, and labor, that dozens of critical policy decisions had to be made.

  It was Roosevelt’s primary strength that he saw how one decision related to another. The way the government was organized to meet the crisis, for example, would influence the cooperation of industry, the allocation of manpower, and the control of scarce resources. “There were evidently many times when he could truly see it all,” Frances Perkins’ biographer George Martin wrote, “men, guns, ships, food, the enemy, the Allies.”

  The first undertaking was to mobilize the business community behind the drive for preparedness. The Congress could provide the money, but it could not build the planes, design the tanks, or assemble the weapons. Without the cooperation of private industry, Roosevelt believed, the massive production effort needed for defense would never get off the ground. The fundamental challenge, as Roosevelt saw the situation that spring, was to bring the proprietors of the nation’s chief economic assets—the men who ran the steel mills, the coal mines, the factories, and the automobile plants—into the defense effort as active participants.

  It would not be an easy task. For years, business had been driven by an almost primitive hostility to Roosevelt, viewing his zealous support for the welfare state and organized labor as an act of betrayal to his class. Indeed, so incoherent were most businessmen in their rage at Roosevelt that they refused even to say the president’s name, referring to him simply as “that man in the White House.” The story is told of Howland Spencer, one of Roosevelt’s wealthy neighbors, whose anger at the president was so fierce that he exiled himself to the Bahamas through the thirties and forties and only came back after Roosevelt’s death.

  The hostility had begun in the early days of the New Deal, when business felt steadily encroached upon by the never-ending series of laws which set minimum wages, regulated working conditions, and bolstered unionization. The ill-will had crystallized in 1935, when the Chamber of Commerce formally broke with the president, issuing a vicious denunciation of the New Deal. Roosevelt was wounded by the ferocity of the attack. As he looked back on his first term, he believed he had saved capitalism from itself by tempering its harshest effects. Without the New Deal, he believed, capitalism in America would have been overcome, as it was in Europe, by fascism or communism. Yet, Roosevelt complained, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce appreciated none of this, preferring to castigate him as a traitor to his class.

  Roosevelt had responded in kind, lashing out at businessmen as “economic royalists” who were using their economic power to block equality of opportunity for the ordinary citizen in the same way the English Tories had sought to control the lives of the colonists. In the months that followed this outburst, the president’s split with business deepened. Indeed, Roosevelt had found in class divi
sions an important source of political strength. The forces “of organized money are unanimous in their hatred of me,” the president told a tumultuous working-class crowd during the 1936 campaign, “and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match . . . . I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”

  As the situation in Europe darkened, the fears of business blazed into hysteria at the prospect of the increased power war would bring to the president. If war came, the president of the American Iron & Steel Institute said, “as certain as night follows day,” while we are fighting “to crush dictatorship abroad,” we will be “extending one at home.” Some businessmen went so far as to suggest that Roosevelt was maneuvering the country into war in order to accomplish his Machiavellian design to install a permanent form of socialism in the United States.

  But now, with thousands of people dying at the hands of Hitler every day, Roosevelt decided that the time had come to bring an end to his private war with business, to change his tack and give business a piece of the action, a chance to show whether or not it could truly deliver. “It was a political necessity on the eve of war,” the Washington correspondent for The Nation, I. F. Stone, wrote at the time, “for a left-centered government in the United States to conciliate the Right by taking some of its representatives into the government. The same process, in reverse, occurred in England, whereby a Conservative government under Churchill conciliated Labor by taking the Bevins and the Morrisons into the Cabinet.”