Vic Socotra

19 November 2008

Ribbons

(MacArthur with ribbons, Dwight without)

It is winter in Washington, and the first flurries blew through town yesterday, more than a week before Thanksgiving. The Folks back home in Michigan said they got socked with a real snowfall, nearly six weeks earlier than they did last year.

If this is global warming, it is a curious way to go about it. It seems to be a return to other weather patterns, like the ones I remember from my youth, when the snow came in November, became gray and soiled, and stayed, with brief interruptions, until late April.

There has been a lot of water over the bridge since then, and it is apparent that no one completely understands what is going on. Some say that carbon has nothing to do with what is going on; it is sunspots. Others say that even if that is true, we must take swift and dramatic action to curb our excesses. I expect the new Administration to do precisely that, or else it will be both hot and cold simultaneously.

I have believed two completely contradictory things before, so this is not a big challenge. I spent twenty-seven years wearing the uniform of my country, most of them as a regular officer, which is not quite as long as I could have, but in the end was precisely long enough.

It suited me just fine. It was an honorable profession, with defined good and clear enemies.

We got shiny medals for staff officer things which have more in common with the merit badges of the Boy Scouts than decorations earned in combat. In times like we have now, with desperate violence all around the world, I am just as happy to have my collection in a shadow box with a folded flag.

I would not want anyone to confuse me with a hero, since there are real ones, though only someone who is in on the secret hierarchy of the ribbons can tell who has done something really dangerous, and who has been at risk of papercuts, or injury from scalding coffee.

Doug MacArthur had a bunch of real medals from World War I. He led by example then, even refusing to wear a gas mask when he ordered his troops to don the awkward things. He suffered from that decision all his days. The day he ordered his regular troops to clear the rear-guard of the Bonus Army form the capital he was wearing them all.

His second-in-command, Dwight Eisenhower, had no decorations for heroism, just the ones that are awarded for being in uniform in time of war, and for achievement in the art of staffwork. He chose to wear nothing on his uniform that day.

For the purposes of this tale, we are going to put Grandpa with the rump of the BEF who stayed in the capital after Congress adjourned and fled the humid city. The Police were ordered to clear the hangers-on out of the abandoned Federal buildings. Rocks and bottles flew. Two Vets had been shot dead by the Police, and word spread across the tense city.

When told of the killings, President Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to effect the evacuation of the Bonus Army. Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley ordered General MacArthur to  "Proceed immediately to the scene of disorder.... Surround the affected area and clear it without delay." Dwight Eisenhower was ordered to accompany MacArthur at the head of the troops.

As Ike noted later, he thought it was ill-advised. "I told him that the matter could easily become a riot and I thought it highly inappropriate for the Chief of Staff of the Army to be involved in anything like a local or street-corner embroilment." MacArthur ignored him. There was incipient revolution in the air, and he was going to do something about it.

The word was passed to the barracks at Ft. Myer, high on the bluff on the Virginia side of the Potomac. The horses of the Third Cavalry were saddled up, the infantry drew arms, and preparations were made to move out.

At 4:45 p.m., commanded personally by the Army Chief of Staff, the 12th US Infantry Regiment, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported with six battle tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton, formed on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It was the end of the working day, and thousands of civil servants were filing out of the federal office buildings. They lined the streets to see the formation. Some of the Bonus Marchers were delusional, and apparently, believed the display was in their honor.

It was, in a way, and the misconception was cleared up when General MacArthur ordered George Patton to use the cavalry to ride them down.
The spectators were appalled- the regular Army was riding down their own former comrades. “Shame!” they yelled from the sidewalk. “Shame!”

After the cavalry charge, the infantry moved forward with fixed bayonets. They pressed the Vets back to the Anacostia Bridge near the Navy yard. Tear gas made it a rout.

President Hoover was concerned about the level of force that would be used, and specifically directed that the Army assault be limited to clearing the Federal part of the city.

Doug MacArthur was of a different mind, not for the first or last time in his career. He ignored Mr. Hoover and pressed on to Camp Marks, and ordered the troops to burn it to the ground. In the ensuing melee, more than 100 veterans were injured and a three-month-old baby died from tear gas inhalation.

Eisenhower was horrified by MacArthur's actions, but he was a consummate staff officer and wrote the official after-action report that exonerated all concerned. Privately, Eisenhower was enraged by MacArthur's actions.

Late in life, and retired from Washington, he was down on the farm at Gettysburg, not far from the camp where he instructed the first tankers of the Army. He had a candid interview with historian Stephen Ambrose, and recalled that, "I told that dumb son of a bitch not to go up there."

Mom does not remember when Grandpa came home, or what he said about what he saw when he was in Washington. The assault on the Vets was not essential to the election of Franklin Roosevelt in this chilly month of November so long ago, regardless of what some might say.

Herbert Hoover was doomed, and there was nothing in the world that could have saved him.

But FDR did not want to pay the bonus, either. It took another, more peaceful encampment in 1933, and special jobs projects to defuse the anger. His wife Eleanor poured coffee for the Vets. Many of them took positions in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and hundreds  were employed in the construction of an elevated roadway to the Florida Keys, one of the great public works of the time.

When over two hundred Vets were killed in the great Labor Day hurricane of 1935, public sentiment, and the reality of the impending election in 1936 made the decision inevitable in Congress. Over FDR’s veto, the bonus became a reality.

It was a good thing for Grandpa. He needed the money. He went back to the railroad, but he died in 1941, before the next war started. If the Congress had not overturned the President’s veto, the Bonus pay-out would not have come until 1945, four years after he was dead.

Of course, George Patton went on to make full General, and scared the hell out of the Soviets. He died in a car crash in occupied Germany in 1945. Doug MacArthur’s partisans got him the Congressional Medal of Honor for liberating the Philippines, an act of heroism in which he had some help, and he got to be Shogum of Japan. His supporters lobbied for him to get a sixth star to put him with George Washington and Black Jack Pershing right up to the Kennedy Assassination.

Dwight Eisenhower turned out to be one of our better Presidents. There is a lot of to be said of regular officers and their ribbons.

Walter Waters, the charismatic Mussolini of the Anacostia who made it all happen  did not die until 1959. He was sixty-nine, and as far as I know, has no monument at all.

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