LS indefatigable in his technical study of the American army as he was in courting its favor, Friedrich von Boetticher compiled a cumulative and accurate commentary on the abiding issues affecting that army in the decade before World War II. He filled the diplomatic pouch from Washington in the early years of his service there with exhaustive analyses of everything from aerial signal flares and cavalry horses being readied for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games to national defense strategy and industrial mobilization plans.
The U. S. Army reflected the American temperament in those years. Though maintaining a penchant for participation in international humanitarian endeavors, Americans retreated behind a "high wall of neutrality."1 Enthusiastically if innocently supporting worldwide disarmament and such declarations as the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war, a nation in the throes of depression with twelve million unemployed naturally gave more attention to domestic affairs than to foreign crises. Accordingly, the U. S. Army was a minuscule force of active regular soldiers with a complicated reserve structure unable to support any forceful foreign policy. Without the capability of exercising any strategic influence in world affairs, its entire importance in 1933 lay in its potential as an expansible base. Von Boetticher's evaluations of the proficiency of this cadre, its supporting reserves, its associated industrial capacity, and the evolving master plans for realizing its potential also began with his cultivation of Douglas MacArthur.
The first concern of American chiefs of staff from 1920 to 1940 was manpower to fill the units to be formed in any mobilization.
This issue was correspondingly among the earliest and most often discussed element in the German attache reports going to Berlin. The National Defense Act of 1920 had specified a standing military strength for the country at 280,000 men and 18,000 officers. The American army fell below these levels by 1922, and at von Boet-ticher's arrival in Washington, the figures stood at 121,788 enlisted men and 12,314 officers.2 The secretary of war and chief of staff reports published warnings each year on the long-term implications of continued shortages, especially among officers. In 1934, the army had only 3,000 officers and 50,000 troops assigned to tactical units that would defend the entire continental United States and its outlying territories.3 The forces in the country, spread among nine skeletonized army divisions, "were better deployed to fight Indians than to repel invaders," as one often repeated assessment put it.4 External dangers to the country were admittedly nonexistent at this stage of things, but any future mobilization would have to start from an adequate troop base. MacArthur and the War Department General Staff placed that minimum at about 165,000 men and
14.000 officers. On May 12, 1933, von Boetticher began his cumulative analyses of American military manpower problems by recounting MacArthur's testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. The chief of staff argued against acting on the Roosevelt program for reducing military budgets by 25 percent, portending another reduction of two to four thousand officers and
12.000 men. The report to Berlin emphasized MacArthur's testimony that he could not guarantee the defense of the country if the cuts occurred. In June, von Boetticher further underscored the issue by noting that the army had even employed the aged but popular General Pershing in radio addresses to urge restoration of the Army's strength to the limits set in 1920.5
MacArthur was especially reticent over the use of military talent in one of Roosevelt's great New Deal ventures, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). At the time of von Boetticher's first analysis of American military manpower, the civilian conservation program had much the same effect on the army as the threatened fiscal reductions. Officers, limited in numbers, could not devote much time to troop training if assigned to duty in the woodlands. Their own professional training could only suffer if they were preoccupied with rehabilitating American forests and unemployed urban youth.
But with congressional sanction on March 28, 1933, the program's first recruits, predominantly from the larger eastern cities, began funneling through War Department supply and physical training centers on April 7. By May 12, with various aspects of the program proceeding too slowly, the army assumed control of the camps after a conference with Labor and Agriculture Department officials. Under army Col. Duncan Major, the military mobilized nearly 275,000 men into 1,300 camps, the majority of them in the western half of the country.6
Von Boetticher, answering frequent inquiries from home, included his own evaluations of the camps and their effect on the army. After reviewing the program's legislative origins, he declared that, as far as he could see, military officers, though complaining, had taken up the job with "great energy and skill."7 Successive reports developed his observations on the military potential of the training and the organization of the CCC. His visits to the camps and private talks with American officers kept him well informed on the subject, and he never ceased reporting on it in favorable terms. The men were first physically hardened according to military form but engaged in no rifle drill or shooting. As comparisons between the CCC and the German Labor Front became inevitable in the world press, von Boetticher noted early that the absence of rifle training in the American program was to forestall having it said in the Geneva talks that the United States was constructing a reserve army in this manner. Work parties did find themselves organized along military lines, and von Boetticher cited with approval the mandatory divine service attendance in the camps as one of the features that tended to make the CCC a means of reclaiming youth morally as well as physically and financially.
Von Boetticher had met Col. Duncan Major in 1922. "One of the best heads of the American Army," in von Boetticher's words, Major gave him an evaluation of the army's role in the project that contrasted strongly with MacArthur's public utterances. Major estimated that 50 to 60 percent of active officers were somehow actively involved in the CCC, but despite this, the army really believed it could handle its training responsibilities for regular troops and reserve units. With the early wave of doubt having subsided, von Boetticher reported that the army considered the whole task a "school for war" and had gone at it with much strength in the conviction that especially younger officers would gain valuable experience in leadership and troop command.8 Indeed, from the inside information he had, von Boetticher even anticipated in his reports the measure of success MacArthur finally claimed in the army's mobilization of the 275,000 by July 1, 1933. It was a performance that MacArthur justly trumpeted in his 1933 annual report, comparing it with the mobilization of 1917 and drawing the inference that the General Staff had justified itself and the stockpiling of reserve materiel from which the army had supplied most of the equipment for the mobilized men.9 More important, the military had moved the masses of men from the East Coast to the western work sites in army-owned or leased motor vehicles and railroads. Though he received later information showing that field-grade officers were performing work usually given to company-level officers and that plans to replace young officers in CCC work with temporarily mobilized reserve officers had come to nothing, von Boetticher remained a thoroughgoing admirer of the program.10 At no point did he attempt to analyze more cynically MacArthur's willingness to enter into Roosevelt's social action program to use the CCC as "a lever for prying funds for the Army from the President and Congress."11
A singular element in American military manpower policy after World War I was the reserve structure from which the regular army would draw experienced soldiers or new cadre in wartime. Its foremost component was the National Guard, formally organized into units of up to divisional size that remained under state control in peacetime. Many officers demobilized after World War I stayed in the Officers' Reserve Corps, looser in structure than the guard, but permitting its 100,000 members to advance in military education and rank through graduated schooling and periodic service with regular forces. The 6,000 annually commissioned graduates of Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in 325 colleges around the country entered the Officers' Reserve Corps instead of the army's active ranks. A reserve corps for enlisted men existed after the war also but declined in popularity and importance. A last source of officer talent was the Civilian Military Training Camps program, which gave candidates military commissions after four years of study and supplementary field training.12
As the chief element in this scheme and the most immediately employable in any national crisis, the guard had found increasing favor with the regular officers in the interwar period. The rivalry between the regulars and the guard officers had subsided with the regulars' recognition of the worth of the guard in the Great War. More important, the National Defense Act of 1920 had made the regular forces dependent on the guard for mobilization of any sizable American armed host and reliant upon the guard in the search for scarce defense funding. Though the regulars doubted that the reserves could be rapidly mobilized for long war service, this element was no longer a misprized militia of unkempt and ill-trained volunteers in the regulars' eyes.13 Scheduled under the National Defense Act to number 486,000 officers and men, all guard units were to undergo sixty drill sessions annually in addition to a two-week summer field exercise. But as the army suffered in the economic squeeze and the antimilitary idealism of the period, the guard suffered also, its numbers amounting to roughly 40 percent of its allotted legal strength from 1933 to 1939.14 In contrast to its uncertain position before World War I, however, the guard had achieved a measure of stability and popularity borne on a local community spirit. It had a presence in small towns and rural areas. It developed ties to "the chambers of commerce, the Rotary and Lions Clubs, the associations of mayor, county treasurers and other local officials."15 In fact, the guard was everything that von Boet-ticher reported it to be in describing it as a vehicle for his mission.
The German staff naturally expected more than encomiums about the reserves' place in American policy. Von Boetticher's first extended report on the subject, aside from his optimistic notes on German heritage and the influence to be found in this reserve force, was on the occasion of one of the more portentous changes in its status. On June l5, 1933, new legislation changed the line of its command and enhanced the power of the president to federalize all or part of the reserve in national emergencies declared by Congress.16 Von Boetticher brought his grasp of American history to the evaluation of this development and remarked on the accretion of presidential power and the corresponding weakening of states' rights but, more to the interest of the German General Staff, stated flatly that it increased the combat readiness of the American army. "[T]he worth of the National Guard is important. You will do well not to underestimate it," he told his readers in Berlin. Though the officers and men drilled only weekly and had an all-too-brief fourteen-day exercise in summer, von Boetticher pronounced the spirit of the various units he had thus far seen as "splendid" (herrvorragend), a phenomenon that permeated the Guard from top to bottom, and "as they are in peace, they will enter a war."17
Von Boetticher had more sober thoughts on the capacity of the guard as state militia forces. When he reached San Francisco after his stay in Utah, a civil crisis had arisen for Maj. Gen. Malin Craig, commanding the IX Corps Area headquartered in San Francisco. Craig was apprehensively watching the development of a dock-workers' strike in the city. Von Boetticher witnessed the mechanics of a partial call-up of the National Guard 40th Division to contain the labor unrest. However highly he regarded the troop training and discipline among the Guard, he was critical of its dual nature as national reserve and state force under a local governor's control. Combating local unrest and subversive political influences goes on at the state level, he reported, and governors must allow a situation to develop before calling in state forces. Because of the nature of provincial politics, a governor had to act not as a military commander in a situation such as the dock strike of 1934, but as a politician whose action would sooner or later be subject to electoral approval. The influence of the commanding general, whose division included troops from as many as three states, was limited, and his area of jurisdiction did not coincide with that of the political authority.18 His generalizations on the effectiveness of Guard formations and the spirit so evident among them remained a constant feature of the military-technical reporting from America, qualified only by von Boetticher's perception of the need of these units to undergo large unit training upon mobilization to be ready for active combat.19
The strength of the regular army and the quality of the National Guard were only two of the yardsticks von Boetticher used to measure American combat abilities. During his first five years in America, the active army and its reserve structure remained fairly static. The German attache in addition exhaustively chronicled the condition of all the military equipment he saw; he interested himself in the development of new weapons, the mechanization plans, and the revisions in the plans for mobilizing the whole establishment for war.
Even with his praise of some specific materiel such as light artillery, von Boetticher could see that American military equipment was at a low pass. Although military investigating boards had written of the deplorable state of American ordnance, especially heavier weaponry, already at the close of World War I, the inventory of modern weapons in the army that von Boetticher observed was still on the drawing boards or barely evident in a few prototypes.20 The development of new arms also fell victim to depression economies and pacifist moods. Ordnance orders and plans were always "shaved down, operations were always restricted, projects were frequently stopped short of completion, all for lack of money."21 Of a total of slightly more than $6 billion expended for the army in the fifteen years from 1925 to 1940, only $21 million went for the modernization of existing equipment and research on new materiel, an average of $1.4 million a year.22 The early war planning of interwar years placed a large trust in the "war stocks" left over from World War I, a supply base that had served the CCC mobilization well, but that was increasingly obsolescent when it was not totally useless or inoperable. National Guard troops were traditionally more poorly equipped, because they were rarely given new gear, instead inheriting the cast-off material of the regular army. Under these constraints, the army developed an apparent reticence toward even asking for more funding; its planners exhibited some caution in depleting funds already committed to existing programs, remaining "habituated to accepting limited funds and conservative in. . . outlook toward new and expensive ideas."23
MacArthur would never admit to this and told his listeners in his annual pilgrimage to Capitol Hill in 1935 that the War Department could be blamed for a variety of things, but never for refusing to ask for money.24 His willingness to seek funds from potentially new sources in 1933 in fact led to one prediction by von Boetticher late in the year that proved premature.
Conversant with the War Department budgetary processes, subject as they were to the Roosevelt administration's newly founded budget office and the hands of congressional committees, von Boetticher foretold a marked increase in army spending and a far-reaching motorization and mechanization program for the American army if talks in Geneva failed. Warning the German Staff that military budgets in and of themselves would henceforth be misleading, he conceded that publicized cuts in army budgets amounted to $55 million, but that National Recovery Act funds provided nearly $3.5 billion for work on air installations, motorization and mechanization, general construction of camps and stations, and equipment.25 The National Recovery Act's enabling legislation had stipulated that if the nation adhered to an international arms limitation, the funds could be spent elsewhere; von Boetticher inferred from this that if the Geneva talks collapsed, as indeed they did the following autumn, the Americans would rearm heavily. What he could not reckon with immediately was the virulent biases of New Dealer and Public Works Board Administrator Harold Ickes, who almost gleefully chopped the army's requested share of National Recovery Act monies from $300 million to less than a third of that amount, and even that was to be spread over the next two years. Ickes wrung further economies from the army in requiring the closing of some smaller posts in the United States in return for the release of the money.26 The promises of the National Recovery Act funds were thus never fully delivered upon, and though the German attache had adequately forewarned of the use of public works funds for pump-priming military expenditures designed to aid the depression-bound American economy, his later reporting offered no news of improvement in American army paraphernalia until late 1938. Over the next two years, he estimated the current equipment of the army as "of little value"27 despite his simultaneous anticipation of American mechanization and motorization programs for the future. In early 1935, he referred home the figures on modern American equipment: the American army had only twelve modern tanks and eighty prototypes of the new Garand M-1 semiautomatic rifle; its antiaircraft and antitank defenses were lacking, and the mainstay of the artillery was still the outmoded 75-mm piece derived from French design, neither mechanized nor particularly mobile. "As always," he declared in an analysis of the chief of staff report for that year, "the Americans are neglecting their army in peacetime."28
Von Boetticher even found something lurking behind the current administration's approach to military funding. According to him, the thrust of American policy at Geneva, consistent with the language of the National Recovery Act, was only to make a last effort to achieve a balance of arms favorable to the disarmed United States before rearming in earnest. Von Boetticher reduced American policy in this regard to a subtle form of blackmail by Franklin Roosevelt.
This particular interpretation was so one-sided as to be naive, but his strictly technical evaluations of American equipment were entirely accurate and represent the obvious to historians of the American army even decades later.29
To von Boetticher's aptly critical eye there was one major exception to the sorry state of American equipment in the airplane, which underwent considerable advance and experimentation in the ranks of the American army in the interwar period. Though not especially versed in aeronautics, von Boetticher pursued a lively interest in the American air forces, the burgeoning aircraft industry, and the preeminent technology that supported them. He was accredited air attache in addition to his standard duties as military attache, and aviation matters, both military and civilian, took up as much of his time as his reporting on all other facets of American military equipment combined.
The Army Air Corps spent the interwar years in hot pursuit of two main objectives: autonomy and a strategic raison d'etre. The air arm of the American army had a modicum of independence conferred upon it by the defense act of 1920, but various boards and committees only confirmed the then-current command arrangements that made air power within the army a subordinate combat arm of the service with much the same representation as the infantry, the cavalry, the engineers, or the Signal Corps, the original parent of the Air Corps. Each Army Corps Area had its assigned air units directly under the commanding general in the area. Von Boetticher's service in America coincided with the partial realization by the Air Corps of its aspirations for a revision in this structure, which air enthusiasts felt stifled the use of the one weapon that would decide the outcome of the next war. A spectacular revolution in aircraft technology and advances in engine design and power occupied the decade before World War II, a phenomenon whose greatest single impetus was the naval and military aircraft market. Aided also by the romance of the conquest of the air, military fliers constantly carried their case to a fascinated public. They propagandized willing listeners on the decisiveness of the weapon that promised to shorten the next war and therefore make it more humane. American Army Air Corps doctrine in this context was not merely a methodological norm in the use of airplanes; it was also a self-justificatory statement that followed the pioneering theses represented primarily, but not exclusively, by an Italian theorist, Giulio Douhet, who advocated independent air forces administratively equal to traditional armies and navies. The object was the prosecution of war against the productive capacity of a nation far behind the front lines in campaigns designed to break rapidly the stalemate of trench warfare that so haunted the generation that survived it in World War I.30 Air power was to have a strategic role in future war far beyond its largely tactical nature in the Great War. Its proponents agitated for greater emphasis on aerial warfare, and their claims for its future military decisiveness were the fuel of a bureaucratic insurgency against the traditional command structure of the U. S. Army of the time. From a reputedly stodgy ground army, the airmen sought nothing less than complete independence along the lines of air forces in Great Britain and the new Germany.
Von Boetticher followed his usual habits in assembling information on the burgeoning American air forces. In mid-1934, the embassy notified the American State Department that he would be the German air attache in addition to his normal duties.31 He subscribed to Aviation, the best of a number of serials on the subject, and his reports on new developments often had articles cut from that magazine appended to them. He pursued his technique of personal contact among leading American air officers, with the result that his analyses were replete with some of the contentions over air power at the time. He also relayed faithfully the financial and political publications of the use of public works funds for aircraft procurement. In his first series of trips across the United States, he stopped at Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, the site of research and testing facilities for military aircraft during that period. Though he claimed he had gained "fundamental technical impressions," he decided to postpone a full report until he had gathered enough insights to enable him to make basic evaluations.32 In the same report, he noted his access to Langley Field (in Virginia), Wright Field and the Wright Aeronautical Company in Dayton, and the Pratt and Whitney Company, engine manufacturers, for Dr. Kurt Schnauffer of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt fur Luftfahrt in Berlin in the month of August 1933. Schnauffer was the first of approximately four hundred German aircraft engineers and designers to visit American plants through von Boetticher's routine requests to the American War Department between 1933 and 1938.33 Von Boetticher also got the feel of American aircraft firsthand. One of the contributing architects of American military aviation remembered years later that he personally piloted the German attache on several occasions. Von Boetticher responded with pleasure to invitations for jaunts in army aircraft and loved especially to add to his appreciation of American Civil War battlefields by viewing them from an aerial vantage.34
The major developments in the Air Corps during von Boet-ticher's first two years in America finally brought it to the measure of autonomy it retained within the army until its complete separation from the ground forces in 1947. In August 1933, Maj. Gen. Hugh A. Drum chaired yet another board to determine the size, the composition, and the status of an air force adequate to the defense of the nation and consistent with the strategic planning of the time. Until this, the boards and congressional committees that had met since 1920 had always recommended 1,800 planes as a number suited to the Air Corps's needs, though figures as high as 2,200 had appeared in discussions.35 The Drum Board, in its secret report of October 1933, abandoned the earlier limit since it correctly assumed that a large proportion of the 1,800 aircraft would always be out of service at any one time, and that 1,800 planes would never cover the Air Corps's responsibilities for the defense of the United States and its overseas possessions. The board eventually raised the recommended aircraft procurement figure to 2,320 and insisted further upon a centralized headquarters to remove all air units from the control of the nine Army Corps Area commanders. Kept under wraps at the moment,36 the Drum Board's recommendations became the unchallenged basis for the most influential decisions taken on American military aviation in the l930s. They appeared publicly for the first time, with new stipulations for special Air Corps promotion and pay and allowances, in a draft bill before Congress in February 1934.
The German attache obtained, for the asking, a copy of a General Staff memorandum sent to House Armed Service Committee Chairman John J. McSwain, a South Carolina Democrat, in which appeared MacArthur's views on an expanded, autonomous air force under circumstances then affecting the army. MacArthur continued to argue against the undue emphasis on the Air Corps as unsound, reported von Boetticher. Airplanes, said MacArthur, constituted one form of weapon among many and required integration into the entire armed forces for success in war. A ruthless expansion of the air arm as the draft bill envisioned would strip badly needed funds from the army as a whole. The memorandum dwelled on the limitations of air power, noting its lack of staying power and its inability to hold the ground attacked solely from the air. This reasoned counterargument prevailed. The next skirmish in the Air Corps battle for recognition had to await the outcome of yet another panel of leading civil and military aviation experts that met in the wake of an Air Corps disaster in the infamous airmail scandals of early 1934.37
One of the first causes celebres in the Roosevelt administration was the cancellation of the allegedly corrupt airmail contracts through which airlines, according to one congressional investigation, had overcharged the government $47 million over four years. In an overoptimistic moment, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Foulois, then chief of the Air Corps, had promised postal directors that the Air Corps would carry on airmail service across the country. Von Boet-ticher kept close watch on the experiment, which killed twelve American military fliers and littered the landscape with the wreckage of forty-six crash landings in two months. From the start of the program, managed by Brig. Gen. Oscar Westover, another longtime friend of von Boetticher's, the German attache reported on the Senate investigations into the irregularities in the contracts, the numbers of planes, and the regional commands involved in the Air Corps's attempt at airmail transport. He also reported, even after the army flights began, the difficulties that were freely, if confidentially, admitted to him: the pilots were not trained in commercial flight, nor was the military command structure suited to commercial purpose. Military aircraft, furthermore, were not meant for cargo handling and possessed no suitable instruments for navigation at night or in bad weather and fog. He also knew that the Air Corps was gambling on success against these odds in hopes of publicizing air power and thereby winning additional funding.38 Within a month of his first intimations of the American army's overreaching itself in flying the mails, von Boetticher filled his reports with details on the political storm that broke on the issue. He roundly seconded Charles Lindbergh's public criticism that Roosevelt had been overly hasty in canceling the contracts and had acted out of political motives.39 He warned the German Staff against negative evaluations of American military aviation in the wake of the many accidents, suggesting instead that the German press releases on the matter stress the heroism of the airmen who flew out of a disciplined sense of duty in spite of such great hazards. This would do much, he insisted, to preserve the cooperation in the German technical visits begun by Dr. Schnauffer the previous year.40
Interpreted by one student of the period as the event that "dented the myth of Roosevelt's invulnerability. . . and uncovered in Charles Lindbergh a man who appealed to more American hearts than anyone save Franklin Roosevelt,"41 the airmail problems also revealed the neglect of army equipment. While the contracts with private carriers were quietly renegotiated and the Air Corps was relieved of its postal duties by May 1, Secretary of War George Dern organized a new investigative board on military aviation chaired by the able and respected Newton D. Baker, who had been the secretary of war during World War I.42
The Baker Board found no irremediable fault with the Air Corps. In fact, it established the basis for future expansion of the arm in its conclusion that American commercial aviation led the world, that its naval aviation was then stronger than that of any other power, and that army aviation needed only the requisite funding to raise it to a world position.43 The board's positive report put a momentary end to the Air Corps drive for autonomy by recommending establishment of a semi-independent command called General Headquarters, Air Forces, which airpower advocates in army uniform decided to accept. GHQ, Air Forces, as the command was known, would centralize control of all army aircraft under a single general officer who was still subordinate to the army chief of staff alone. The board further recommended that the chief of the Air Corps be responsible for developing new model aircraft and for procurement and supply functions, a jurisdictional division that left the chief of the Air Corps and the yet-to-be appointed commander of the GHQ at some odds.44 Consistent with the reflection here of the earlier Drum Board's deliberations, the Baker Board also regarded the Drum proposals for 2,320 planes as the "minimum considered necessary to meet our peacetime army requirements."45
Over the next year, von Boetticher supplied his readers at home with the unfolding story of the Air Corps's evolution into a separate command. He accompanied his dispatch of a copy of the Baker Board Report on July 28, 1934, with his own insights on how deep a quarrel the matter had been, affecting opinion within the Air Corps, Congress, and among the public.46 In November 1934, he reported on the marked advances in restructuring and re-equipping the Air Corps. Reviewing the obsolescent state of the 1,475 planes then on hand in the American air forces, he listed the new contracts outstanding and the plans for building 700 planes a year until the figure of 2,320 was reached. While the fight for the independence of aviation from the army momentarily slackened, von Boetticher noted that the internal organization of the Air Corps under the new GHQ was still cloudy and rife with the same duplication that had plagued the air service in France during World War I, according to his informants among the American General Staff. In the months after the Baker Board Report, Congress had moved to the consideration not only of new aircraft for the regular army Air Corps, but also for the National Guard, to say nothing of a complete overhaul of the antiaircraft weapons in the army.47
With the formal establishment of the much-awaited GHQ, Air Forces, von Boetticher also saw something of a setback to MacArthur, whose arguments had not forestalled the developments at hand. The attache was yet alive to the improvements in tactical control of American air forces. Some two weeks before the actual establishment of the GHQ on March 1, l935, von Boetticher had collected all of the conventional wisdom on it in a seven-page report that summarized the process to that time. He documented every area jurisdiction (including that for National Guard units) in the new Air Corps command pyramid and detailed the training and promotion policies and the administrative principles governing the organization. For the immediate effect on American war-making capacity, von Boetticher advised the German staff that there is "to be created a highly maneuverable, powerful Air Force, which is capable of being assembled at any threatened point of the United States."48
Though its potential remained as high as von Boetticher intimated, the Air Corps never reached the levels of strength recommended in the Baker Board Report until the nation was nearly into war again. By mid-1937, the German attache was still reporting that aviation budgets for that year would allow the Air Corps to reach the projected 2,320-airplane strength only in 1942.49 Though this figure stood until 1939 as the Air Corps goal, argument persisted and contradictory rhetoric abounded as to whether this was a bare minimum to meet defense requirements.50 Concentrating on heavy bomber models to conform to its prevailing doctrine of precision strategic bombardment in daylight, the Air Corps developed the admirable B-17 Flying Fortress by 1935 but neglected, for the moment, the design of a fighter plane capable of escorting the bombers on long-range missions on the theory that such protection would not be needed.51 Von Boetticher, in fact, referred home General Foulois's judgment in late 1933 that bombardment aircraft would soon outperform fighters in speed and range and presumably would reign supreme in the air.52 Four years later, von Boetticher had not changed his basic view of American air power. He held the Air Corps to be very good technically, tactically, and in its training.53
Government support of American civil aviation and the subsidization of the industry underpinning military and commercial aeronautics scarcely escaped von Boetticher. He became thoroughly familiar with the various companies producing engines and airframes, and he explored the detail of each major contract for new aircraft. The Baker Board had underscored its belief that "an adequate aircraft industry... is essential to national defense" and outlined how government should underwrite design and production with liberal contracts for this sector of the American economy.54 But von Boetticher again saw something more insidious in the barely concealed attempts by the American government to use commercial airlines as instruments of foreign policy. The airmail scandals of 1934 were evidence of nearly a decade of federal encouragement of the air industry and even of a conscious government policy of industrial Darwinism among airline contractors. Nowhere was the policy so egregious as in the American expansion into overseas air travel routes and mail service, especially in extending American influence into Latin America and the Pacific islands. Although airline merger fights and empire building were common in the early 1930s under these conditions, one of the more remarkable careers in the business was that of Juan Trippe, who parlayed his early ventures in the field into an officially sponsored flag airline trading as Pan American Airways, Inc., by the time von Boetticher came on the American scene. Not only was Pan American the chosen instrument of the postmaster general for airmail contracts, but it had become, in effect, an official agent of the American government abroad.55
Von Boetticher mapped each overseas expansion of the airline, charting the new areas of American influence. He divined the American policy in one of his first reports on the subject, noting in October l933 that the United States was attempting to erect a worldwide traffic through its flag line and had already "sewn up" the Latin American routes with the service begun to Buenos Aires that year. Without mentioning the War Department backing for the commercial expansion, von Boetticher discussed the sensitive issue of the Panama Canal as "of the greatest military-political significance," a question of life and death for the United States in a war.56 China also figured prominently in the attache reports on what von Boetticher termed American "Luftpolitik." Quoting extensively from Aviation magazine articles, he affirmed that Pan Am had acquired 45 percent of the China National Aviation Company, a child of the Chinese government, and included maps and timetables to illustrate the services offered. Though he downplayed Japanese reports of direct American participation in Chinese air action against Japanese forces, he sketched the training services of American pilots and ground crews in the Nationalist Chinese cause and enumerated the sales of American combat and transport planes to the Chinese.57 The name of Charles Lindbergh again cropped up as the technical advisor to Pan American, and von Boetticher chronicled the exploratory flights Lindbergh made over the next seven years in seeking possible new routes for the line.58 While Lindbergh's flights to Europe led to the conclusion that the routes were then not feasible, von Boetticher reported on alternatives for Pan American's surmounting the Atlantic. He cautioned the Air Ministry that the American government was investigating the possibilities of constructing five large artificial islands to accommodate planes between New York and the Azores.59 The idea apparently died, and the attache dropped it from his reports.
Just a year after the Lindbergh flights, von Boetticher found further confirmation for his analysis of American commercial aviation policy in the report of the new Federal Aviation Commission. Formed as a regulatory agency in the wake of the airmail scandals, the commission concluded, in a report issued in January 1935, that American competition with European luxury steamships was useless, and that American efforts would center on air travel, with a program of protection to keep American carriers solvent and competitive. The commission further declared that development of overseas airlines took priority over continued domestic expan-sion.60 Von Boetticher deemed this of such weight that he sent home five copies of the report with his elaboration on its intent and the direction of future American development.61 In isolating the spread of American overseas commercial aviation as a strategic issue, the German attache showed some prescience and a real appreciation of the viability of the American air industry. The air networks were visible if tenuous links to areas of American interest abroad and, especially in the South Pacific island chains, came to form a vital connection with the Philippine Islands garrison.62 His evaluation of American use of aviation as a political device was wholly accurate. Though von Boetticher seemed somewhat incensed at American expansion, all the powers involved in the rush for aerial franchises gave a fair imitation of the territorial hunger that characterized a bygone imperial era.63
As topical as aviation developments in von Boetticher's work was the subject of American military mobilization plans. Until 1938, he developed little on the economic aspects of a mobilization though he did explore the effects of neutrality legislation on American willingness to send armaments and troops to overseas wars. He reflected primarily the concern of American planners with more purely military than industrial readiness for war.
The War Department was riveted on the issue of manpower. Military mobilization planning throughout Douglas MacArthur's tenure as chief of staff centered on expanding the military's tactical units into a mass army whenever an international crisis directly threatened American security. In mobilizing, the army thus committed itself to a laborious process in which all its units would be formed and filled out at much the same rate; the army would not be ready for action until all, or nearly all, of its units were up to strength and fully equipped. Then, various newly formed headquarters were supposed to take over troop elements that they had never seen and whose military value was unknown. MacArthur, late in 1931, opted for a two-phased alternative, eventually known as the Protective Mobilization Plan, or PMP in the professional jargon. It called for a ready and mobile ground force of regulars that could concentrate wholly or partially at any point in the nation to repulse or at least contain an invasion. Rapidly mobilized regulars and those National Guard forces deemed most fit would hold the enemy at bay until a larger, conscripted army formed behind this protective shield. A problematic exercise among army planners of the time because of the complexities of command and the various priorities necessary for the two separate reserve and regular forces, MacArthur's plan also shared the logistical weaknesses of earlier mobilization schemes.64 The PMP in its eventual variations through 1938 relied on the hasty call-up of ill-prepared forces, many of them existing only on paper. With no real hope of equipping either the first defensive army or the second, more numerous one, it seemed to one critic to be "little more than a plan to mobilize all the regulars and National Guard in sight."65
For von Boetticher to have criticized the plan in these terms during his earlier tenure would have made him a very perceptive man. In fact, he consistently defended MacArthur's conception. Relying on the chief of staff's reports, he accurately delineated the plan's basis, the four field armies that were to guarantee an efficient mobilization and a structure that could be manageable by the General Headquarters to be activated in national emergencies.66 He went into detail about the system by which each American officer, regardless of his peacetime assignment, would have a specific wartime staff or field position to fill in the great expansion of forces. In principle, the German system of expansion was to follow much the same course. The American plan would generate at least twenty-four ready divisions in the initial force and another twenty-seven infantry and six cavalry divisions in the secondary force, mobilized later.67 While he kept a close eye on American army equipment during the various maneuvers he attended across the country, he also acquired a positive attitude on the mobilization plan. The 1935 maneuver at Pine Camp, New York, run specifically as the first major test case for the PMP, 68 convinced him that the American army could mobilize and concentrate troops in assigned areas with precision. In spite of the age and the variety of motor equipment that he noted in his report, "the approach march was, so far as my own impressions and judgments go, an unqualified success."69
The exercise, involving 36,000 men, two opposing corps headquarters, and five infantry divisions (one regular army and four
National Guard) from the First Army area,70 revealed the usual weaknesses in equipment and further pointed up to the observer the "noticeable lack of initiative"71 shown by the National Guard units. Von Boetticher nevertheless repeated his earlier judgment that the Guard was fine material, though still raw, a force that would need a moderate training and grace period in any mobilization to become proficient in war.72
A month after the Pine Camp maneuvers, von Boetticher summarized his observations on military readiness across the country through the past summer. Despite the economic difficulties and the clamor of church or political pacifist theorists and noisy antiadministration opinion, he had no doubts about American abilities to gather forces for defense:
You may not take the struggles over President Roosevelt and his economic experiments and the social tensions of the United States or the problems which face various areas as appearances of weakness. In time of great political tension, the little recognized work of the Army in peacetime will move to the fore. In a surprisingly short time the United States will undergo a very strong mobilization on land and in the air. They will become a united nation, which on the basis of its riches in men and material is capable of all manner of deployments of great strength.73
No political dislocations would seriously disrupt the mobilization process, in von Boetticher's opinion. American officers, like their counterparts in Europe, maintained a conservative outlook and a wary eye for radical influences in the economically hobbled country, though not out of any sympathy for a business revival.74 General MacArthur in the year before von Boetticher's arrival in America had at least two clashes with "communistic elements,"75 and his onetime vice chief of staff, Maj. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, had in 1930 advocated the immediate deportation of this vague but dangerous societal stratum to a semitropical island in the Hawaiian chain.76
Von Boetticher was less inclined to take American communism seriously. He regarded the army as the "ultima ratio" in matters in which communists were supposedly active, such as in the San Francisco dock strike of 1934.77 Communism was everywhere in the as-
Cendant, he noted at the time, and it was attempting to undermine the army's influence, especially in the universities where the ROTC programs were active. He blamed Jewish intellectuals for the antimilitary and pacifistic feeling in schools, but while this and the labor unrest he saw had some communist backing as long as bad economic conditions persisted, the army combated it steadily. Against its influence the communist party could make little headway. He reported that many officers had told him that they saw no real dan-ger.78 Von Boetticher himself remained unshaken in his conviction that "communist philosophy is foreign to the American."79
Pacifism, if wrongly and solely associated with a native communist movement by some American military officers, contributed also to the passage of the legislation that not only limited American participation in foreign conflicts, but also prevented American commercial profit from the sale of munitions to belligerents the world over.80 American disillusion with the result of World War I, the deep aversion to involvement in new foreign conflicts, and the popular disgust with the "munitions lobby," so luridly overplayed by the Nye Committee in 1934,81 produced a series of neutrality laws designed to obviate future American entanglement in foreign wars by a mandatory executive fiat prohibiting exports to belligerents once a war had begun. Franklin Roosevelt, himself of isolationist persuasion during his first term in office,82 signed the first act on August 31, 1935, some five months after the reintroduction of German military conscription and in the middle of Italian preparations for aggressive war in Africa.
The German attache made frequent reports on the significance of the first, interim Neutrality Law of August 1935 and on its extension six months later.83 He followed the creation of the National Munitions Control Board, established to supervise and later to license industrial exports, and listed the firms being prosecuted for not complying with its regulations. He pointed out also that the neutrality law had left a loophole because it had not specified the types of contraband goods that in World War I had been a sore issue when Great Britain had halted traffic in foodstuffs, textiles, and other raw materials as strategically important.84 But he was also careful to note that the military circles in the United States welcomed the apparent freedom of action that the legislation gave them. Most of his American military associates reflected the civilian isolationist stance on the "Italian business" that he recorded after several trips in late summer 1935. They found in the stated policy considerable freedom to avoid the "great mistake" of 1917. American officers were against the Italians, because they did not want a war, but they would not duplicate the errors of the days before the last war, "when they were in the tow (Schleppiau) of England."85 The neutrality act, in von Boetticher's view, implied, first of all, that American military policy would not have to follow the initiatives of Great Britain.
American commercial interests interpreted their freedoms even more broadly after Mussolini's troops invaded Ethiopia on October 3, 1935. Roosevelt promptly imposed the required embargo on arms and the implements of war, but as von Boetticher earlier intimated in his references to the definition of contraband, other strategic and finished goods, but chiefly oil and bauxite (the aluminum ore that Italy possessed in quantity), flowed freely and in increasing quantity to the Italian war machine from American companies. Secretary of State Cordell Hull failed in attempts to align American export policy with League sanctions, and his so-called moral embargo of strategic materials did little to slow the Italian aggression.86 The League powers, reluctant to risk war over Italian depredations in Africa, artfully based their own willingness to ship oil to Mussolini partly on American behavior.87 The American army, for its part, sent technical observers to both belligerents in a show of impartiality, von Boetticher typically praising the caliber of both men.88 American trade with Ethiopia being nonexistent, the victim of Italian aggression was also the victim of the American arms embargo. By the time the neutrality law expired in February 1936 and an extension of it took effect, von Boetticher reported that the War Department felt constrained to stay out of foreign wars, but Ethiopia's fate, still being played out, had induced some second thoughts on the effect of a military or moral embargo on weaker states, especially those in the American hemisphere that might find themselves at war with a European or an Asian power. The neutrality extension, said the attache, therefore included a provision that arms embargoes against Latin American nations would be inconsistent with the Monroe Doctrine, but that in future wars affecting territories outside the Americas, the United States would still shut off arms, credit, and strategic materials and refuse to allow American ships to transport materials to foreign war zones.89 Von Boetticher took some personal satisfaction in the American refusal to stand with Britain against Italy in late 1935, but the situation was more complex. Tacit American acquiescence in an inevitable if delayed defeat for Ethiopia was one of the by-products of grave American inhibitions on involvements in Europe. At the same time, the American government accepted on exalted moral grounds a responsibility for events in Asian politics.90
Japan, and not any European power, was the overriding concern of the moment for American military and naval authorities. Relations declined further on such long-standing and heated issues of Chinese and Japanese immigration to the United States before 1920. In its annexation of Manchuria in 1931, Japan ignored American attempts at moral suasion91 and disdained the League of Nations, in fact abandoning membership in that body two years later. Acting from motives of "poverty and pride," Japan sought to avoid the effects of overpopulation and the economic factors threatening to drive it back to the ranks of the second-rate powers. At the same time, Japan strove to have recognized the principle that it should have rights to dominate its immediate global neighborhood.92 Japanese aspirations ran fully counter to the perceptions that American professional officers had of their national policy in the Far East, namely, a maintenance of the status quo in the western Pacific and of the integrity of China consistent with the old Open Door Policy.93 Von Boetticher understood also the greater American attention to events in the Far East than to those in Africa: "It is significant [he wrote with the invasion of Ethiopia one month old] that in confidential conversations with the men of the General Staff, it is not the map of Abyssinia or the Mediterranean that comes out, but the map of the Chinese empire."94
Von Boetticher repeated in various detail the elements of the contradiction in American opposition to Japanese ambitions and the neutrality policy. Isolationist sentiment kept the United States even from arrangements with the enemy of its enemy in the Far East. The Roosevelt administration gently refused involvement in a proffered Russian nonaggression pact after the recognition of the
Soviet Union in November 1933, and it turned a deaf ear to Ambassador Litvinov's entreaties for just the semblance of an understanding intended to produce a Japanese belief that the United States was ready to cooperate with the Soviet Union.95 When the American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union was still under wraps, von Boetticher downplayed the possibility of any such cooperation against Japan: "The present power and military policy of the United States is based on the maintenance of peace. From the standpoint of the economy as well as in view of the long-standing insufficient equipping of the United States, any other policy is impossible."96
Even after bloody border incidents between Japanese and Russian troops in Manchuria and Mongolia, von Boetticher correctly related that neither side was interested in an open conflict. The American role would be passive, to the extent of acting as a referee.97 Under the influence of Colonel Burnett in his evaluations, he regarded Japanese arms as poor, even below the Russian,98 but until a real national emergency was at hand, American military force was powerless to thwart even the flawed Japanese machine.
This, too, was correct. So powerless was the American military establishment that the Army at that very moment was planning withdrawal from the citadel of American influence in the western Pacific. The original Plan Orange, the American war contingency plan for hostilities against Japan dating from the turn of the century, underwent continual change and updating between the two world wars. From 1928 on, an increasingly vocal faction in the army favored a drastic revision in its basic element, the ground defense of the Philippines. In late 1935, as Mussolini pushed into Ethiopia, the American War and Navy Departments appealed to Cordell Hull for help in a reappraisal of the weakened American defense position in the Far East that offered not even a scant hope of success in a war against Japan.99
A new army plan attempted to take the reality of the power balances into account. According to the earlier plans, the army garrison in the Philippines was to hold at least the Bay of Manila and the island of Corregidor at its mouth until the arrival of a powerful naval squadron that would fight its way across 5,000 miles of ocean and land reinforcements to oust the "Orange" (Japanese) forces from the islands. In the repeated revisions in the Orange plan before 1935, the estimates of the length of time it would take before the American navy could achieve control of the sea lanes necessary to guarantee the undertaking extended to as much as three years, which meant that the American garrison in the Philippines was, in effect, to be sacrificed.100 The Army General Staff's War Plans Division, then under Maj. Gen. Stanley D. Embick, in 1935 insisted on abandoning the defense of the islands, especially since their independence had already been legislated in 1934, in favor of a more realistic strategic defense in the eastern Pacific. Von Boetticher, privy to none of the alterations in the plans, judging from his lack of discussion of them in his reports, nevertheless appreciated the strategic value placed on the Philippines by the United States. He wrote a very positive summation on MacArthur's departure from the chief of staff's post in October 1935 and emphasized the importance of MacArthur's appointment, with a field marshal's rank, as advisor to the president of the new Philippine Republic, still under American colonial rule.101 If von Boetticher did not have all of the details of General Embick's proposals for a completely new defense plan in the Pacific, he yet grasped the realities facing the understrength American army and navy forces in far-flung garrisons. On the occasion of a much touted flight of ten American army bombers to Alaska in August 1934, a year before the State, War, and Navy Department conferences on Plan Orange, von Boetticher's musings over the map of the area moved him to the conclusion that Alaska was of equally critical importance to American defense. He delineated a strategic zone, which the Americans would have to command, running from Panama to Hawaii in the south and in the north out along the arm of the Aleutian Island chain.102 Thus, he identified the fundamental basis of the new Embick Plan, which embraced a strategy relying on a naval and military defense of a massive triangle with its legs running from Panama to Hawaii, from Hawaii to Alaska, and from there back to Panama. The garrisons in the Philippines, on Wake Island, and on Guam fell outside this area, though no one would act as if that mattered.
Friedrich von Boetticher's technical military reporting from the United States had the breadth and scope evident only in a keen and dedicated observer of events. His research and his ability to confirm many of his conclusions with members of the American General Staff were the basis of sound evaluations of American defense capacities in the mid-1930s. He was under no illusions about the current weaknesses of the U. S. Army, but contrary to his prevailing image in historical literature, he was never prone to demean the potential of that force; in fact, he was more optimistic about its abilities than some of the American officers responsible for its efficiency and potential. He was consistently positive, especially about the quality of the army's leadership, and remained convinced that in an emergency it would meet any test. The cumulative picture that he provided the German staff was accurate in detail, and even in reflecting the grand hopes for airpower, he echoed assumptions that were common in other countries in the same period, most notably Great Britain.
By late 1936, von Boetticher had also a second line of communication open to the German staff at home. Then-Col. Kurt von Tip-pelskirch, who ran the German Army Staff's Attacheabteilung from 1936 to 1939, initiated the exchange by summarizing for von Boetticher the minutes of a ten-day attache conference of December 1936 that the latter could not attend. This "backchannel," in bureaucratic jargon, allowed him even more personal observations on individual American officers and a semiprivate means of appealing to his support network for what he needed to help influence the American military opinion that he continually sought to shape to his own liking. Amounting to a private correspondence between the attache and the head of the attache group at home, the arrangement did not violate the strict precedence in the embassy according to which all military reports had to be submitted to the ambassador. This demonstrates that von Boetticher never pursued one line of reporting in the private backchannels while maintaining another, contradictory one in his official submissions.103 In the course of events, the contents of his correspondence also shed some light on the extent and character of von Boetticher's anti-Semitism.
World History
