Those Who Have Borne the Battle (9 page)

In April 1898, when the war with Spain began, there were only 40 soldiers of the 28,000 serving in the army who were younger than twenty-one years of age. At this time parental permission was necessary for anyone who wished to enlist before his twenty-first birthday. Suggestive of the maturity and experience of the army, the year before the war a report revealed that more than a third of the soldiers then on active duty had served five years or more.

The army had been changing. The composition of enlisted forces had peaked at two-thirds foreign born in the 1850s, and by the 1880s and 1890s it was about one-third foreign born. The recruits for the period of the 1890s leading up to and immediately following the Spanish-American War were about 12 percent foreign born; most of the new recruits were native-born farmers or laborers. Following the quick victory in Cuba—and, it turned out, in Puerto Rico and the Philippines as well (the latter largely a naval victory)—the United States found itself in a longer war in the Philippines with Filipinos who were not satisfied to substitute an
American colonial power for a Spanish one. This proved to be a particularly vicious campaign for the Americans, one in which Filipino civilians were the victims. The army then expanded to 65,000, plus 35,000 volunteers. The black regiments played major roles in these wars, notably in Cuba—and then returned throughout the South, where they encountered major racist harassment, including an attack on these American soldiers in Huntsville, Alabama, and gunfire directed toward their troop trains in Texas and Mississippi.
⁵⁷

The entire Spanish-American War experience underlined some major shortcomings in American military mobilization, training, and organization. These shortcomings could prove potentially more troubling and dangerous, as the United States now emerged as a major international power—and a colonial power with territorial control in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. In unrelated actions, the United States annexed Hawaii and Wake Island.

During the war, the American forces had serious logistical and supply problems, had major issues trying to coordinate efforts, and failed tragically in providing basic sanitation measures and medical care. One military historian estimates that fewer than 7 percent of the nearly 2,500 deaths during the war were due to combat. (For comparison, in the Civil War, combat deaths caused nearly 40 percent of the deaths among soldiers; in World War I, 46 percent were due to combat. In World War II and following, the noncombat deaths declined significantly due to the development of antibiotics and the battlefield availability of more sophisticated medical care.) In the Spanish-American War, dysentery and malaria along with typhoid swept through units camped in the mud during the tropical rainy season and wearing wool uniforms. General William Shafter, who commanded in Cuba, warned of an “army of convalescents.” He ended the playing of taps and rifle salutes at funerals in one encampment since these sounds of death were occurring so frequently that they were undermining morale.
⁵⁸
When 106 men from Galena and surrounding communities marched off with Company M of the 6th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, they never actually made it to Cuba. Two died in their camp in Puerto Rico of disease, and thirteen others were hospitalized for an extensive period.
⁵⁹

The large number of volunteers placed a heavy burden on the senior officers and administrators of the regular army and the War Department. State militia units were largely unprepared and untrained and were poorly equipped. Federalizing them meant that the army had to remedy these situations—a difficult assignment. This was complicated more by the politics involved—including a view held by some that the president could not force militia units to serve outside of the United States. This position had hampered the sending of state militia into Canada during the War of 1812, and it would burden this mobilization at century's end.

In 1899 President McKinley asked Elihu Root to take over the War Department and to review US military organization and policy. Root was a strong choice for this task, and when McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency, the latter worked with Root to reform the army and its administration. One of the major results was the Militia Act of 1903, totally revoking the Militia Act of 1792, which had not worked very effectively in wartime from the beginning. Under the new legislation, the state militia units basically became reserve forces for the army and navy—and the federal government assumed far greater obligations for equipping and training these state units.

The 1903 act and subsequent legislation provided that the militia units were subject to presidential call, and they were explicitly obligated to serve overseas if the president so directed them. These changes would begin to position the militia as a federal reserve force, a critical role for the wars of the twentieth—and the twenty-first—century. By 1916, the eve of US involvement in World War I, Congress proclaimed that these state militia units would all be designated as National Guard and that when called up by the president, they would be fully integrated into the national army. It also obligated more direct federal support for training—including for the first time payment for attendance at National Guard drills.
⁶⁰

Theodore Roosevelt, working with Elihu Root, oversaw a major expansion of the regular army in order to man garrisons at new international posts in the Philippines and the Caribbean. The army had expanded to 64,000 in the fall of 1899; it stood at 54,000 in 1907 and
107,000 in 1916, much larger than ever before in peacetime, largely as a result of precautionary expansion due to the war in Europe. The US Army was still considerably smaller than any of the other world armies.
⁶¹

Prior to World War I the army still had horses and mounted cavalry even as it began to acquire motorcycles, autos, and trucks. In 1911 Congress made the first significant appropriation for aircraft, and by 1912 the US Army established its first formal flight school. When the war in Europe began in 1914, the army had 18 officers, 104 enlisted men on aviation duty—and 15 planes.

These years between the Spanish-American War and the First World War saw a period of major modernization of the curriculum at West Point, the strengthening of the Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and the creation of the Army War College. War Department and army officials were also engaged in rethinking the structure and organization of the army and its command.
⁶²

Despite all of these efforts at modernization of the military, the United States still lagged significantly behind other nations. When war began in Europe in 1914, there was little belief among those nations that the United States could be militarily consequential. The US Army was smaller than that of Switzerland, and most senior European military officers did not have high regard for US officers and their volunteer-based enlisted ranks. Europeans, especially Germans, misjudged badly how quickly the United States could mobilize and place an army in the field, and they had underestimated the impact of American involvement on supplies and on morale of the Allies. When Congress declared war in 1917, the US Army was at about 200,000—this included some National Guard troops already called up. By November 1918 there were some 4 million Americans in uniform.

In World War I there was little delay in implementing a comprehensive draft, one that allowed for few exemptions and no substitutes. The Selective Service Act of 1917 provided for the first comprehensive national draft in American history. Some 77 percent of World War I military personnel were draftees—10 percent were Guardsmen on federal service, and 13 percent were “regular” army (these enlistees were not serving
simply for the duration of the war). By the fall of 1918, some 24 million men had registered for the draft. The initial legislation defined as draft-eligible all men between the ages of twenty-two and thirty; this was subsequently expanded to include all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five.

There were no educational exemptions from the draft (only 3 percent of Americans between eighteen and twenty-four were in college at this time), but Congress did exempt categorically clergy and divinity students. The legislation allowed local draft boards to grant exemptions on an individual basis for reasons of health, work in a “useful” war industry, and dependent family members. From this pool of eligible men, a lottery was the mechanism for selection. Working hard to avoid the controversy and tensions of the Civil War draft, the government turned the first draft registration day on June 5, 1917, into an occasion of national celebration of patriotism.
⁶³

Such patriotism—coupled with coercive powers of enforcement—left little space for dissenters. Those who balked at being drafted—and those who urged people to resist—were held legally accountable in a culture with little toleration of dissent. There was significant pressure on everyone to do their part for the war effort. Shirkers were ostracized—or arrested. General Hugh Scott said, “There is no reason why one woman's son should go out and defend . . . another woman and her son who refuses to take training or give service.” And former president William Howard Taft said the war provided a necessary correction in the attitude of the young: “Our youth have been taught that government owes everything to them with no emphasis upon their debt to the government.” John Chambers concluded, “Pressure for conformity and outright repression helped fragment and suppress opposition.”
⁶⁴

Unlike any previous US wars, the First World War was served by a true national army. State units came fully under the control of the War Department. By early 1918 there was no real distinction between the regular army, the “national” army of draftees, and the National Guard. During the Civil War, most of the training of volunteer regiments was at the state level, but this twentieth-century war fielded a federal army with standard training and equipment. Jennifer Keene summarized the process:
“Army officials also worked to create a relatively closed institutional environment in which common values and behavior would help distance citizen-soldiers from their previous lives and foster a sense of common purpose among them.” It was a “changing American military establishment, revealing its evolution into both a powerful state agency and a giant bureaucratic enterprise.”
⁶⁵

In the first weeks following the declaration of war, the army had hoped for substantial voluntary enlistments. This never materialized at the level the War Department required, so they had to turn to the draft more than they had anticipated in order to meet their manpower objectives. For the new soldiers, there was little talk about a war for democracy—they seemed to be focused more on the task at hand. Some enlistees were caught up in the sense of adventure, but this proved to be unsustainable on the ground.
⁶⁶

The draft boards were controlled by local communities, and they followed general guidelines in providing exemptions—generally offering deferments for married men with dependents. In 1918 Congress extended the age for the draft, dropping it to age eighteen, because drafting younger men was considered far more preferable to drafting married men. More controversial than these decisions was the uneven pattern of community draft boards in defining “useful” industries as a basis for issuing exemptions for those engaged in critical industrial or agricultural work.

It turned out that African American and foreign-born men were disproportionately drafted. The foreign-born soldiers were integrated into native white units. Blacks were segregated—and the army's original plan to make black units combat units was sidetracked by southern resistance and fears of trained and armed blacks in the United States. The racist culture of Jim Crow prevailed over the record of black soldiers performing admirably and courageously in the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the Spanish-American War.
⁶⁷

The draft process with individual physical examinations and testing revealed much about the draft-eligible men. It turned out that many potential draftees had physical and medical problems. The army emphasized training that depended upon literacy. There was some real national
shock and embarrassment over the level of illiteracy among many draftees. Newly designed intelligence tests confirmed a regional variation in education and in preparation. The army needed people with skills—or with the capacity to be trained in skills.
⁶⁸

Even so, World War I also demonstrated just how dependent modern warfare was on putting in the field large numbers of troops. Trench warfare with increasingly lethal weaponry, including horrible gas and chemical weapons, took incredibly heavy casualties. The European armies were reeling by the time the Americans reached the front. The presence of the Yanks proved a morale booster—and it also provided more young bodies for volleys of death and canisters of crippling material. In this war, as one front-line chaplain noted, “the abnormal was normal.” Young Americans returned from the war shaken and cynical as a result of this experience.
⁶⁹

The authorized strength of the US Navy was fewer than nine thousand officers, men, and apprentices in the period shortly after the Civil War until the Spanish-American War. For the latter war, it expanded to some twenty thousand men. With the enlarged global responsibility and with the support of Theodore Roosevelt, the navy in the early twentieth century stood at a force finally of more than fifty thousand. By the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the navy began recruiting sailors inland, away from the ports. This was a major shift in the navy's approach to recruiting, now taking young men with no maritime experience. As the ships of the navy shifted from sails to engines and men were trained in the skills for the modern navy, seafaring experience became less critical.