MEN OF ARMS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4562, 20 April 1942, Page 6

MEN OF ARMS

AMERICA’S LEADERS COLOURFUL CAREERS Since President Franklin Roosevelt issued, on May 28 last, his proclamation for the strengthening of the United States defence to the extreme limit of national power and authority, America’s naval and military leaders have assumed an importance in the Allied structure that must gradually inspire in their country of 132,000,000 people a spirit of martial valour.

Universal service offers contrast with the year 1913, when the United States Army, 'which had been recruited on a voluntary basis, was restricted to 100,0C'J men.

In such a contrast is found the spark which Axis aggression has kindled in a potential forest of democratic manhood. For the first time in her history America is placed on a complete war footing. Washington and Lincoln live again.

Now, especially with the Battle of the Pacific an ever-present reality, the United States’ most prominent men of arms project themselves in public interest. Some already have been found wanting. The Japanese attack on Hawaii on Sunday, December 7, induced a critical evaluation of the men in control. But the nucleus of future leaders remains. Already there is a proud tradition of service in the essential personnel of the high command. In Admiral Ernest Joseph King, who took up aviation at 5 and has worked in submarines and aircraft carriers, the navy has probably its most picturesque and resolute character. General Douglas MacArthur, heroic leader of the Philippine Army, is recalled enthusiastically as the military aide of Theodore Roosevelt, a spy in Mexico, and a soldier who fought in France in 1918. Lieutenant-General Henry H. (“Happy”) Arnold was taught to fly by America’s aviation pioneers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and is the nation’s first flyer in the military sense. These are men for -the enemy to reckon with. Admiral King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleets, who also took over recently Admiral Stark’s post of Chief of Naval Operations, is 63. He saw service as an

Annapolis midshipman off Cuba, and during the first World War stood with Jellicoe on a British destroyer while Ostend was under fire. Last year he was present on the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Prince of Wales in the North Atlantic when Mr Churchill and Mr Roosevelt joined in an historic church parade. His tasks have ranged from submarines to aviation. As chief of naval aviation he established some Pacific air bases, and he has commanded aircraft carriers. Nearly a year ago King was put in command of some navy ships as a full admiral, and instructed: “This is the Atlantic fleet. Shoot if you must, but don’t go to war.”

To have undertaken a course in air training at 45, going through the strenuous round demanded of men half his age, is typical of Admiral King. He is lean, keen, versatile, and übiquitous. And he has a temper. An Annapolis class book comment on him was: “ Don’t fool with nitroglycerine.” Son of a railway mechanic of Lorain, Ohio, Admiral King, as captain of the New London submarine base in the twenties, conducted salvage operations on the two submarines S-51 and S-4, which sank off the New England coast. An experienced co-ordinator of air, surface and sub-surface craft, his command as Chief of the United States Fleet in the Seven Seas is the opportunity for which he has waited all his life. WHITE-HAIRED ADMIRAL Mild tempered, white haired and bespectacled, Admiral Harold R. Stark is Commander of the United States Naval Forces in European waters. Except for his weatherbeaten complexion, he might be taken for a college professor. In 1917 he took a squadron of over-age, coalburning destroyers from the Philippines to the Mediterranean in the typhoon season. He gets things done, and has spent much time in Washington recently on lease-lend arrangements. Before the pressure was exerted in this war he used to spend his holiday sailing a cat-boat on a lake, just like any sailor on ledve in a hired rowing boat. Admiral Thomas Charles Hart had reached the retiring age when the Navy Department put him in command of the Far East Fleet. He has since been recalled to Washington. He wore (and still wears) high starched collars, and. was called “Turtleneck” at the Naval Academy. He is short of stature, and was coxswain to Annapolis crews. “There

are two ways to get ahead. One is to lead, the other is to drive,” he once said. “So I had to drive.” Farsighted about air power, he also commanded two divisions of submarines which operated off Ireland in the last war.

One of the United States Navy’s key men is Rear-Admiral Samuel Murray Robinson, Chief of the Bureau of Ships. He is a mathematician, and builds and repairs ships. Grey, thin-lipped native of Texas, Rear-Admiral Robinson must translate the latest tactics and strategy into naval design, and then go before committees of Congress to have them approved. At odd moments he inspects construction progress at the navy and private ship-building yards, and takes a hand in wages disputes. Then he asks Congress for more tonnage. In June last he revealed that the navy was building and repairing faster than industrial plants could supply. The army’s Chief of Staff, General George Catlett Marshall, stood far down in the list of brigadier-generals when he was elected to this post over 34 senior officers. He is a product of the policy of advancing brains over age and seniority. His age is 61. Young Marshall’s father having been a Kentucky democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican State, he was deprived of a Congressional appointment to the West Point institution. He attended the Virginia Military Institute and played, football. Resourceful, the chief of staff is possessed of an amazing memory, a power of sound reasoning and the gift of toleration. One of his assets is that he does not claim to know anything. Equipped for training an army, he also has a way with Congressional committees. As a lieutenant in the Philippines, Marshall drew up a set of field orders, which, said Franklin Bell, the army’s first Chief of Staff, “put generals to shame.” During the 1914 war he was operations officer under Hugh Drum. It was Marshall who performed one of the most successful pieces of -staff work during the war. He was responsible for conducting the smooth transport, without German knowledge, of 500,000 men and 2700 guns from St. Mihiel to the Argonne in two weeks. After’ the armistice Marshall reverted to his present rank of captain, and served for four years as military aide to General Pershing. MacARTHUR OF BATAN “Son,” said an old regular to a

recruit 35 years ago when Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur strode by, “there goes a soldier.” It has been the habit of that school of writers on world affairs which American journalism and publishers have so conspicuously encouraged to describe General MacArthur as flamboyant. To-day, at 62, the hero of Batan, he is the United States’ outstanding service soldier, and has now become Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the South-West Pacific, with headquarters in Australia.

MacArthur was born in the army. He grew up in it. During his adventurous career he has heard the whirr of Indian Arrows on the Great Plains in the eighties, the whisk of Filipino bolos earlier in this century, the crack of Mexican Mausers in the hills above Vera Cruz in 1914, the thunderous fire of the Western front of Europe in 1918, and the “carrumph” of Japanese bombs in Luzon. He is described as a compound of the Hollywood ideal of a soldier with pure Richard Harding Davis. He has something flamboyant about him, but with it he has brains, ability and courage under the strain and stress of action. Former Chief of Staff of the United States Army, he became a Philippine field-marshal, and, incidentally, the only American ever to assume that exalted rank. He has long believed that the Filipinos, even if absolutely cut off from America, could defend themselves. President Quezon' induced him to go to Manila as his military, adviser and superintendent of the military establishments of the Philippines without any preliminaries. “I want your answer to just one question: Are the islands defensible?” Quezon asked. MacArthur’s reply was in the affirmative, and he offered many technical, reasons for his belief. And he and his army are still holding out.

First in his class at West Point, MacArthur wrapped around himself an atmosphere of glamour. He became the army’s only lieutenant-gen-eral whose father wag a lieutenantgeneral. The youngest divisional commander of the American expeditionary force in France, he was later the youngest Chief of Staff the United States ever had.

After being military aide to Theodore Roosevelt, MacArthur was for a time a spy in Mexico. In the early days of the first world war he expounded military strategy to newspaper correspondents at Washington. As chief of staff of the “Rainbow” Division (which he named), and later as its- commander he undertook patrols in no-man’s land, himself armed only with a riding crop, “to let the boys know that someone from headquarters was with them.”. As superintendent he reorganised West Point studies. While chief of staff at Washington he reorganised the United States Army. As field marshal he then organised the Philippine army. History will record what he is doing against the heaviest odds to disorganise Japanese plans in the Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur is a great soldier. > ARMY’S FIRST FLYER “Happy” Arnold is the sobriquet of Lieutenant-General Henry H. Arnold, commander of the United States Air Forces. Although Lieut.-General Arnold has never fired a shot in anger he commanded an air squadron in Panama during the war of 1914-18. Both in position and experience he is the Army’s first flyer. Learning to fly with the Wright brothers 31 years ago, Lieut. Arnold climbed into an over-sized kite, equipped with an internal combustion engine, and took off on an endurance flight. For 41 minutes he circled over Washington at a top speed of 60 miles an hour, and came down to earth at the point of take-off. He was then only five years out of West Point Military College. Those who first reached the plane reported that the young officer was in a state of “physical exhaustion and nervousness.” But his endurance test of the day had not wiped from his face the typical schoolboy grin which gave him his nickname.

Arnold is the only aviator left on service duty of the Army’s original five-man flying service organised before the first World War. His present command makes him responsible to no other officer but the Chief of Staff, General Marshall.

General Pershing took Hugh Drum to France in 1917 and made him Chief of Staff of the First American Army. • Lieutenant-General Hugh A. Drum, commanding the first army and the northern half of the Atlantic Coast to-day, comes of .a military family. He is strongly air-minded. In 1923 he arrived in New York, a brigadiergeneral, to organise anti-aircraft defence. “Unless,” he said, “we do something positive, two enemy airplane carriers might easily anchor 500 miles off the Atlantic coast and launch their attack upon New York.” But the city received his precautionary advice with indifference. He is saying the same thing in the present crisis.