OUR MILITARY PAST
Ekirch, Arthur A. Jr.
Our Military Past Arms and Men: a study in American military history, by Walter Millis. Putnam. 382 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. IN THE 1930's Walter Millis' popular books, The...
...Later, as author of This Is Pearl Harbor and The For-restal Diaries, Millis' point of view changed...
...Attempting to predict the uncertain future of war, Millis inclines to the view that, except in a few areas of the earth, it may have no function at all as an instrument of policy...
...He pressured a reluctant Congress to pass legislation transforming the state militia into a federalized National Guard and establishing a professional General, Staff...
...John Hay's "splendid little war" opened the way for "the new militarism that ruled after 1898," and Elihu Root, appointed Secretary of War a year later, became the architect of "reform...
...It may be that for final sanctions in our human affairs we shall have to look toward other factors...
...To accomplish this in a modest-sized volume is no small achievement, and readers will find Millis' new book a most enlightening and thoughtful account of America's military past...
...It provided all the excitement and glamour of war, while promising to keep the country out of combat...
...During World War I the armies were mechanized by the use of the tank, machine gun, and airplane...
...Thus the mild American militia service, theoretically an obligation of every able-bodied male, led inexorably to the universal conscription of the French levee en masse, and the assault upon the freedom of the individual in the name of the liberties of mankind...
...But in such terrifying proficiency there was also evidence of the hypertrophy or inutility of modern war...
...Whether democratic or totalitarian, the centralized modern state had become an incomparably efficient and tyrannical instrument for waging war...
...As Millis points out, it was Root who in large part "brought the military managerial revolution to the United States...
...Following the Armistice the United States returned to its traditional policy of a skeletonized regular Army to be expanded in time of need...
...The American Revolution, characterized as "a triumph of improvisation," began a democratization of war that reached a climax in the French Revolutionary concept of the nation in arms...
...Arms and Men is not primarily concerned with strategy or tactics, nor with battle history...
...While Europe fought, the United States engaged in a bitter debate over preparedness—an unreal question because it was couched in terms of a strictly home defense when all signs pointed to the likelihood of American intervention overseas...
...IN THE 1930's Walter Millis' popular books, The Martial Spirit and Road to War, expressed the disillusionment with which Americans had come to regard imperialism and the First World War...
...The German Great General Staff was admittedly his model...
...Now, in Arms and Men, his most recent work, Millis reverts to the questioning, critical mood of his earlier volumes...
...Our Civil War, often considered the first modern war because of the number of new weapons put to use, witnessed what was perhaps the most noteworthy innovation of all—"the first extensive application of mass-production and assembly-line techniques in several areas of American industrial production...
...Along with the majority of his fellow Americans, he seemed to accept as inevitable national policies he had previously decried...
...But preparedness was an inspired and popular idea that helped pave the way psychologically for American belligerency...
...In the era of relative peace following Napoleon's defeat, war, and preparation for war, was transformed by the industrial revolution...
...Civilian and military leaders alike should read this book and ponder especially the conclusion of its author that "the old certainty of military action as the final answer to every problem . . . seems no longer available...
...After Appomatox the regular Army, reduced to some 25,000 men, resumed its role of policing the Indian tribes and the even less attractive "strike duty" occasioned by the labor-capital disputes of the '80s and '90s...
...What Millis has attempted in a summing up of our military policy in the light of the changing character of warfare since the day of Lexington and Concord...
...A naval race with Great Britain and Japan was averted by the Washington Disarmament Conference, "unquestionably the most rational of all the postwar settlements...
...There was something in it for everyone...
...even if Root did not see it, the conscript mass army, available for aggressive action upon a world stage, was the logical end...
...Seen in this light, most of the post-World War II controversies in regard to military planning take on an almost inconsequential air...
...More than ever before, war absorbed the total energies of peoples and visited its enormous destructive powers upon civilian populations...
...Later made a whipping-boy for the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the Conference actually relieved the taxpayers of "much useless hardware" and enabled the Navy to follow new trends toward aircraft carriers and submarines, rather than battleships...
...World War II saw a scientific revolution in warfare...
...Unification, UMT, B-36's, and supercarriers all become archaic issues more fit for consideration in the pre-1945 world than in the age of the atomic, hydrogen, and cobalt bombs...
...The Navy went back to sail and costal defense until the stirrings of imperialism in the War with Spain and the evangelism of Mahan, Roosevelt, and Lodge persuaded the country to embark on an extensive battleship building program...
Vol. 21 • January 1957 • No. 1
