American Rifle - Alexander Rose [160]
At no other time in its history was the U.S. Army less able to fight than during this period. In 1936 the general staff concluded that should war break out, it would be able to feed, clothe, transport, shelter, and issue rifles to 110,000 soldiers within thirty days of initial mobilization. That sounds impressive until one learns what the general staff could not supply: “airplanes, tanks, combat cars, scout cars, antiaircraft guns, searchlights, antiaircraft fire control equipment, .50 caliber machine guns, [and] ponton equipment.”60
For the Ordnance Department, the cutbacks were especially dire. Between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War, the department’s budget as a percentage of total War Department appropriations had hovered at about 8 percent. Between 1920 and 1935 it plummeted to an average of 3.37 percent. Not until 1938, when the Munich Agreement and Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria signaled to perceptive observers that war was increasingly likely, would the Ordnance budget rise above 6 percent (then would quadruple to 24.27 percent in 1939).61
The late 1920s and early 1930s coincided, too, with the zenith of pacifist sentiment in the United States and Europe. In 1928 the international Kellogg-Briand Pact had optimistically “abolished” war between states; its signing had unloosed a torrent of antiwar works (Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front). Despite their contrived plots and anorexically thin characterization, a slew of rather less well-written novels luridly high-lighting the hideousness of future war became best sellers. So many of them focused on the horrors of chemical warfare unleashed by airplanes against an unsuspecting civilian population, or on the perils of Science Gone Mad, that they formed a distinct genre, known as the “Gas Bomb Novel.”62 In Britain alone, between 1930 and 1939, some seventy-five were published. Neil Bell’s The Gas War of 1940 predicted the deaths of 1.5 billion people in the next war (“a youngster had the face wiped off him down to the skull, nothing left in front but his teeth. And he was alive and screaming for several minutes”) and sold 100,000 copies in hardback; in George Godwin’s Empty Victory a nervous French air force preventively bombs Britain with “arsenic gas” and kills 950,000 Londoners in a single hour.63
Partly inspired by these widespread fears of the war to come, the World Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva in February 1932. Attended by 2,500 delegates and 4,500 journalists from sixty-four countries, the conference was an extraordinary affair whose vaulting ambition—the outlawing of “offensive” weapons (tanks, submarines, and military aircraft in particular), the reduction of armies to almost ceremonial status, the “internationalization” of civil aircraft, and even, in one of its sillier moments, a ban on the production of “warlike toys”—proved its undoing.64 Hitler’s withdrawal from the conference in 1933 ensured its descent into irrelevance and extinction.65
Thus, at the exact moment when he forcefully decided to keep the .30 as standard, MacArthur was contending not only with the greatest economic downturn that Americans had ever experienced but also with a powerful wave of public opinion hostile toward the idea of having an army at all, and the opening of an international conference intended to make that wish a reality.
Understandably, then, MacArthur had to make cuts wherever possible, and anyone could see that approving a “militaristic” service rifle with a new caliber when at least a billion perfectly good .30 bullets were piled up at the arsenals might not provide a good “optic” for the national media. So desperate was MacArthur to save money that one of the reasons his letter to the Rifle Board insisted that it make test models of the .30 Garand immediately was that, for the fiscal years 1932