Part 1

SOLDIERS UNMASKED

SOLDIERS UNMASKED

_By_

WILLIAM ADDLEMAN GANOE

COLONEL, U. S. ARMY

Author of “The History of the United States Army,” etc.

1939

FIRST EDITION, COPYRIGHT, 1935, BY WILLIAM ADDLEMAN GANOE

SECOND EDITION, COPYRIGHT, 1939

FIRST PRINTING JANUARY, 1939

Published by THE MILITARY SERVICE PUBLISHING COMPANY HARRISBURG, PA.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE TELEGRAPH PRESS HARRISBURG, PA.

_To George Washington ever revered seldom obeyed_

_HOW IT STARTED_

This booklet cropped out from a mixture of chance happenings. One day last October, Captain R. B. Lovett, Adjutant General’s Department, came into my office. I hadn’t seen him since he was a student at the Infantry School in Georgia when I was an instructor. He said Colonel Harvey W. Miller, Adjutant General, 1st Corps Area, thought it would be a good thing for the recruiting service and the public in general to be informed about the soldier. There were so many misunderstandings about him. Would I do ten talks over the radio? They looked mountainous with all my other work. But if you knew Lovett, you’d appreciate how convincing he can be. He put in a plea of public service and I succumbed. The next thing I heard was that the Yankee Network had generously given time to the series Saturday nights. I began December eighth. I felt the first talk was a beautiful flop. I got no fan mail and my friends who phoned me were just pleasant. I suspected they were letting me down easily. Anyway, I kept plugging along. After the third talk, fan mail from strangers in Portland, Newburyport, Bridgeport and little towns began to come in. After the fifth talk, there was a flood of requests for copies. Then letters began to pile in from every walk of life. The copies asked for couldn’t be furnished. There were no means or money to get them out and mail them. My friends suggested printing the whole series at as little cost as possible. Well, this is the result. I hope you’ll get something out of it.

W.A.G.

_I_

WHAT IS A SOLDIER

In a certain town in the United States a sign in front of a theater boldly announced: “No dogs or soldiers admitted.” After some complaint the sign was taken down. And after the people of the community got to know the soldier, they were sorry the sign had been put up.

Prejudice against the military man hasn’t ordinarily gone to that length, but many citizens are at least disinterested. Not long ago I was called upon to speak to a rather cultured group on the soldier’s work. A few days later, an acquaintance, an intelligent, elderly woman, met me on the street. “I liked the way you talked,” she said, “but I’m not in sympathy with anything you spoke about. I don’t want to hear about the soldier or anything military.” I thanked her for her frankness, and dropped the matter, knowing it was useless to try to give her the facts which are presented here, and which she probably wouldn’t have believed anyway.

Here are some of the questions which have been asked me by educated people: “What do you fellows in the army do when there’s no war? Do you just go out and drill the boys and then loaf around? What’s the need of an army in a depression? Where’s the army now? How big is it? What’s the use of an army when we have an air corps?”

Whether or not such questions sound foolish, they do show ignorance of what the soldier and the War Department are really doing. But the citizen is not to blame for this lack of knowledge. A combination of circumstances has deprived him of knowing what has happened and what is happening with the military man. Certainly no true American wishes to be unfair. First of all our school and college histories, our literature, our entertainment have a habit of either misrepresenting or omitting the actual deeds and purpose of the soldier. Second, anyone associated with weapons usually has a bad name nowadays. Third, the soldier, away off in our island possessions or in an army post, has too little intimacy with the general run of people. Fourth, the name War Department has a misleading sound. It makes us think of a great mail-fisted demon, breathing fire and smiting with a red-hot sword. Before we get through with the stories and facts given later, we’ll see that it could much more faithfully be called the Peace Department. Fifth, there’s the term “preparation for war,” which is about as far from the truth about what the soldier is trying to do, as saying that firemen are preparing to cause fires.

The soldiers in this country have never prepared to have a war and they are not doing so now. They have always prepared _against_ war. There is no place in our history where they have been the remotest cause of war. And would you believe it, they have actually been the outstanding pacifists of American History? You know it seems peculiar that the trained fighter has done more for peace in this country than any other class. But it is so. In normal times he has repeatedly saved us from war. In public works he has been one of the chief builders of the nation, if not the chief one. In disaster he has been the first on the spot to restore order, and feed and shelter the helpless. In war he has aimed to bring back peace and return the people to restful firesides, with the least loss of life and treasure. A multitude of facts enforce these statements--facts which can be verified in the archives in Washington--facts which we have ordinarily been denied in our formal education.

You know there’s a short paper about 150 years old that we Americans are pretty keen about. In that document it says that Congress shall provide for the common defense. And hand in hand with that provision goes its twin brother--the general welfare. Our wise old forefathers, who had plenty of time to reason, analyse, contemplate human nature and be soundly practical, in contrast to us who must dash through this complex civilization on high, used a sound bit of horse sense when they coupled those two phrases. For it’s easy to see that you can’t have general welfare without common defense any more than you can have an undisturbed household without locks and policemen. Of course, we need a little more than common defense to get general welfare in these times, but that’s quite another subject. However, that business of common defense brings the soldier onto the stage by our Constitution. And one of the big tragedies of our country is that the stage failed to produce him so many times until the play had actually begun. About a million tombstones scattered in this country and in France can be charged up to his absence when he was vitally needed. For it takes time to train a soldier, and it’s pretty expensive and bloody to train him when bullets begin to fly. Besides it makes the war drag on. So you see the loss accumulates. I can make this idea clearer by an illustration. Let us suppose you are a night watchman and have to pace around a spooky industrial plant every night. And suppose your employer armed you with a night stick, saying that firearms were dangerous, expensive and might lead to trouble. You plead with him that all you want is a decent break, that you’d like to have a pistol and learn how to use it. He still contends that the night stick is good enough. Sometime later a bandit scouts around the plant and sees you wandering along with your club as your only defense. The next night you see him entering a window. You chase him. He carefully aims, drops you in your tracks, pilfers the cash box and makes a get away. Now suppose thousands of watchmen are in the same fix. That in principle is what has happened to our untrained men in all our wars. They haven’t had a chance. And because they haven’t had a chance, they have come home from the catastrophe with all sorts of ill-feeling against the army, the soldier, the officer, when the fault has been not in the military service, but in the neglect of proper training before the enemy pounces upon us. Just how much waste and hardship to individuals would result, if the country grocery store at Seven Corners had to expand to a thousand chain-stores in thirty days? Can you imagine it? And yet such an expansion is a drop in the bucket to what the Army and the War Department have been compelled to produce in a twinkling, when war caught us flat-footed. Of course, when we got into the World War we were pretty lucky, for we had Allies who held off the enemy for nearly a year before we had to go into real action. Just what would have happened had we not had such a wall of strength in Europe to stave off our enemies is not pretty to think about. As it was, many an American went to the front untrained, unskilled, an easy prey to disease and explosives. From this lack of preventive medicine, which is what training in peace time amounts to, many men have come out of our wars disgusted, and sayings have arisen which have put the army in a mean light. There’s the word “soldiering” which oddly has come to mean idleness. Yet if you were to go into any army post, any army school, or any C.M.T.C. camp you’d see the soldier anything but idle. Then there’s the term “passing the buck” which expresses an army habit to some people. Just why it should, after your experiences and mine in everyday life, is hard to explain. But the “old army game” is the one we hear so often. It may mean anything from four-flushing to downright crookedness. All these slanders seem to have arisen because men have been rudely and unjustly snatched from the counter, the plough and the mill to face a new desperate life, to live in mixed-up conditions under hasty shelter, to find themselves square pegs in round holes, and to be under officers as unskilled as they, officers not even a quarter baked, whose leadership was too often faulty and cruel. How could it be otherwise when we plunge fine young men who can’t swim into a raging sea? These men come out of the conflict with heavy hatreds, justifiable ones oftentimes, hatreds that go deep into their souls. And whom would they hate? Naturally the professional soldier. He’s the one at hand. But curiously enough it’s the trained soldier who has tried to prevent the awful haste, waste and unnecessary mortality that have caused these hatreds.

The American soldier is the last man to want war or the unnecessary loss of life and treasure in war. He shies at war’s hardships, and the added horrors, resulting from unpreparedness against war. He knows too much about them to want himself or anyone else to be in a war. But he feels that it’s not quite practical in the present state of the world to say that there will be no more armed conflicts. With Europe seething with hatreds, Japan flying at Asia’s throat, Russia making its militant inroads, with no practical progress in abolition of war to date, with industrial strife breaking out here and there, and with an Army of organized crime in this country greater than the Army and Navy of the United States, he feels it’s inviting disaster not to prepare against war and calamity. So he’s out to reduce the tragedy when it comes, or to stop it from coming by a proper show of force.

Do you know that one army officer, single-handed, without an army at his back, saved or helped save this country from six big wars? And do you know that another officer staved off another big war by being on the spot with three trained corps? Do you know that many other officers stubbornly opposed the powers in Washington when those powers wanted to fight the Indian? Do you know who built all our first trails and roads in the west and south? Do you know who constructed the first railroad to span our United States from east to west? Do you know what the army has done to help build this country in time of peace? Do you know that one branch of the army alone has literally saved millions of lives in peace time by its courageous discoveries and safeguards? Do you know what another branch has done in the riddance of pests from industrial plants? Do you know who laid the Alaskan Cable? Do you know that not a single covered wagon ever reached the coast states in the west without being accompanied by soldiers? We rarely hear the soldier mentioned or see him shown in the movies in his protection of the wagon trains, but there is no record of any of those trains ever reaching Oregon or California over the wild prairie tracts unless soldiers went with them. This is but one instance of the suppression of truth about the soldier. We’re pretty well acquainted with what the soldier has done in war. But do we know what he’s done for the up-building of men and construction of public works in peace time? Do we know what he’s done against war?

Listen to what comes next.

_II_

WHAT HAS HE DONE

Two big pool operators of Wall Street one evening were standing in front of a prominent theater watching the crowds surge into the doorways. There was much display of ermines, sables, diamonds and general wealth. One of the two asked the other: “Say, where do these lambs get all the money we bears take away from them?”

Today many people say, “Where do these soldiers get all this peace stuff we extreme pacifists take away from them?” The answer lies in cold facts--cold facts the historians don’t tell us--cover up almost completely. Lewis and Clark, for instance. Why, yes, they were two fellows who were the first to go across our Continent and back again. But who ever told you that it was _Captain_ Meriwether Lewis and _Lieutenant_ William Clark who took four sergeants and twenty-three privates in that hazardous trek between the Atlantic and the Pacific from 1803 to 1806--that it was the soldier who made surveys and maps and created friendships with the Indians, many of whom were seeing a white man for the first time?

Pike’s Peak! O yes, that was discovered by a man by the name of Pike. But where was it mentioned that it was _Lieutenant_ Z. M. Pike? And what did he do? With three non-commissioned officers and sixteen privates, he explored in 1806 and 1807 from the source of the Mississippi to its mouth, doing from north to south what Lewis and Clark had done from east to west. Turning west he discovered the peak which bears his name. In what is now New Mexico, he even beguiled the Spaniards into taking him prisoner so that he could learn their intentions, customs and country. For his great deeds of exploration and pacification he received the personal praise of the President of the United States. Then there was Captain Long who in the same way went through what is now Colorado, and for whom Long’s Peak is named; Captain Bonneville who voluntarily lived with the Nez Perces and Flatheads for five years, creating friendships and learning their language; Lieutenant Litgreaves, who explored the Colorado River; and Lieutenant Whipple and Lieutenant Ives, who separately went through the southwest. And then John C. Fremont. O yes, the histories are crazy about calling him the Pathfinder, but never told you that it was Lieutenant John C. Fremont in 1838 when he started out, and Lieutenant Colonel John C. Fremont in 1844--after he had explored 10,000 miles of freezing mountain and sickly basin? In this brief space I can’t even touch on many of these gigantic wedges of understanding. It was the soldier who made the first trails, dug the first wells, built the first roads, bridges and canals, made the first maps, surveyed most of our boundaries, erected most of our lighthouses, dredged our harbors and waterways, escorted the settlers, braved the Indian and suffered in silence. The Hon. John W. Weeks, former Secretary of War and United States Senator, wrote: “The Army was virtually the pioneer of pioneers. As our citizens moved west over the prairies and through forests, they traveled routes which were surveyed by army engineers, constructed by the army and protected by military posts. The titles of their land were valid only because of army surveys.... Up to 1855 there was scarcely a railroad in this country that was not projected, built, and operated in large part by the Army. Army engineers located, constructed, and managed such well-known roads as the Baltimore and Ohio; the Northern Central; the Erie; the Boston and Providence; the New York, New Haven and Hartford; and the Boston and Albany. Practically all of the transcontinental railroads were projected by the army. An army officer, Lieutenant G. W. Whistler, built the best locomotive of his time, after his own design.” The building of the Union Pacific Railroad, the first to connect the two oceans, illustrates the soldiers’ contribution to national welfare. The set-up for this mighty link was a military one. The workmen were organized into companies and battalions. Soldiers would dig and hammer and at the cry “Indians,” would rush to their stacked arms and give battle. Nearly every man was a veteran of the Civil War. The heads of the most of the engineering parties and all chiefs of construction had been officers in the Civil War. The chief of the track-laying force, General Casement, had been a distinguished division commander. In a twinkling, General Dodge, the chief engineer, could call into the field a thousand men, well-officered, ready to meet any crisis. General Sherman also furnished troops. The builders contended that this great bridge of progress could not have been finished without soldiers and army training. During the enterprise Oakes Ames said, “What makes me hang on is the faith of you soldiers.”

The soldier went further than highways in his works. Let’s look at buildings. How many know that the difficult Washington Monument, the wings and dome of the National Capitol, the old Post Office Building, the Municipal Building, the Washington Aqueduct, the Agriculture Building, the Government Printing Office, the War College and the beautiful Library of Congress were all built by the Army? Army engineers supervised the building of the Lincoln Memorial, the Arlington Bridge, the parks and even the playgrounds of the District of Columbia. They even organized the Weather Bureau--and all this our government got at the comparatively small pay of the soldier.

But the soldier didn’t stop at exploring and building. He didn’t stop at just contributing to development and peace. He went further. He even tried his best to prevent war. So many were his attempts that they can scarcely be hinted at tonight. Here is one conspicuous example. In 1832, South Carolina was verging on secession and civil war. President Jackson called in General Winfield Scott and sent him to the scene of the trouble. There Scott by skillful persuasion and conference helped to quiet the difficulties and return the state to peace, without any troops at his back. In 1838 there was a revolt against Great Britain by Canadian patriots. Many in our border states were sympathizing with the rebels. Blood had been shed. It looked horribly like a third war with Great Britain. Scott was sent north to the place of the struggle. After great effort and the most tactful arbitration he brought harmony between the British officials and our own sympathizers. By his work, war was averted. In the same year the great educated, peaceful tribe of Cherokees in Georgia and the Carolinas, was enraged at the attempt of the whites to force it away from its native home because gold had been found there. 15,000 Indians refused to move. General Scott was sent by the government to conduct them west to what is now Oklahoma. Sensing the right on their side, but being compelled to carry out the government’s unjust orders, he was left with nothing but his personality and good sense to keep us out of a big fight. By his masterful appeal to the Indians not to cause war, by his instructions to his soldiers to be gentle and firm, by his square dealing and carrying out of his promises to the letter, he was able to escort the whole tribe west, without the slightest sign of trouble. So great was his kindly power, that he even had these superstitious redmen submit to vaccination. It is estimated that this prevention of war saved the government two and one-half billion dollars and untold loss of life. (Besides he very nearly washed clean the government’s dirty linen.) But he had scarcely finished this delicate task when he was called to Maine. There the boundary question was about to plunge us into that third war with Great Britain. The government had already called out eight thousand militia. Things were pretty bad. Scott hustled back and forth holding conferences, calming this party and that, and finally closed the issue to the satisfaction of all. In 1848 after he had conducted the brilliant campaign which closed the Mexican War, Mexico was in a state of unrest. It was there that he established a rule so just and kindly that peace came more rapidly, and possibly composed Mexico for many years. Never had the Mexicans been treated so decently. Their representatives came to him and begged him to be their dictator. Though he didn’t accept, it was probably the first time in history where a conqueror of foreign territory had been so cordially urged. Two years later after he had returned to the United States, trouble in Vancouver Island in the northwest again threatened that ever-skulking third war with Great Britain. The British Navy was already beating down upon the little island of San Juan. Scott arrived on the scene. By the cleverest tact he engineered a joint evacuation of the island. And no war came. Six times had this man, who towered six feet five and weighed two hundred forty pounds, showed us that his heart and character were as great as his stature. Six times had he saved us. In keeping us out of war who can compete with him? But he is not alone. Many another soldier gave us peace and many another built for peace.

In 1907, after long years of trial, President Theodore Roosevelt came to the conclusion that high-salaried civilians could not complete the Panama Canal. They would walk out on him and were inclined to the spoils system of wasting money. He wanted someone who would stay on the job, who would carry on the work for the work’s sake. He turned to the Army. He appointed a commission of soldiers. Colonel George Goethals with his able assistants, Colonels Gaillard and Sibert, Corps of Engineers and Colonel W. C. Gorgas of the Medical Corps, were sent south to construct the Canal. Gorgas purged the place of yellow fever and malaria while the others forged ahead on the building. After bitter trials and maddening set-backs, they finished the Panama Canal. This vast public work, which others had failed to complete in almost half a century, the soldier gave to his country in the surprising space of six years.