ARMY: Soldier in Armor

In Room 605 of Phillips House, the private wing of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, a soldier lay dying. He was just able to hear, just able to smile when they gave him the prized Oak Leaf Cluster for his Distinguished Service Medal, with this citation from the Secretary of War: “Adna R. Chaffee, Major General, United States Army. For exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services . . . outstanding foresight, judgment and leadership in organizing and commanding the Armored Force of the Army….”

Two days later, when the Senate in Washington confirmed his permanent cormmission as a major general, Adna Chaffee was in a coma. Occasionally, his wife and doctors heard him murmur something about the U.S. flag, saw his body stiffen to attention in the bed. He had hoped to die on active service, with his tanks and troops at Fort Knox, Ky. Sick since last year, beaten by pain, he gave up his command three weeks ago and went to Boston, where he could be with his friend and physician, Dr. Edward Delos Churchill.

Horses to Tanks. Adna Romanza Chaffee began Army life as a cavalryman. He had a good reason: his father was a famous cavalryman who distinguished himself in the Spanish-American War, was Chief of Staff in 1904-06. Adna too loved horses and got to be a top Army poloist before World War I. On staff duty in France, he saw that the intense fire of machine guns and artillery had outmoded cavalry in battle zones. Unlike some cavalrymen, he took the lesson to heart, looked around for some substitute for the mobile striking power which cavalry once provided. His answer: the tank.

In post-World War I years, when he was considered a ranting radical, he used to tell his fellow officers: “Mobility is needed to carry the war home, to reach the decision, to conquer. Mobility means live men arriving and establishing themselves in possession of the military objectives. To live and move quickly against the gun requires protection. Armor gives protection in movement. The gasoline engine moves armor. And so we come to what is called mechanization.” He also said: “. . . The tank is not a new weapon; the Roman legionnaire with his shield, the armored elephants of Hannibal . . . were in reality tanks using the best motive power then available.”

Like the French and the British, the U.S. Army was a long time coming to real mechanization. In 1928 a one-sentence memorandum from Chief of Staff Charles P. Summerall gave Adna Chaffee authority to organize the Army’s first, feeble Experimental Mechanized Force. Congress was even slower: funds for anything like effective experiment were not available until 1930. Then, despite the pleas of Adna Chaffee and a few like-minded pioneers, the Army split tanks between Cavalry and Infantry. Even so, German observers got some valuable pointers from the Army’s single Mechanized Brigade, put many of Adna Chaffee’s ideas into use in the Nazis’ first Panzer divisions.

Aging, thinning but undaunted, Adna Chaffee continued to bore his superiors with designs of tanks and motor-drawn artillery. His often ignored ideas for artillery development made an associate exclaim last week: “He could have written the book the Germans used!” Nearest he ever came to public complaint was to say that “lack of understanding and funds” had slowed U.S. tank development. In bitter private moments he used to say that what the Army needed was more tanks in the field, fewer office tanks in which to stuff new theories.

When Hitler knocked the stuffing out of the French and British in the Lowlands, Adna Chaffee was suddenly summoned to Washington, told to organize and command the Armored Force. By last October he had two partially equipped divisions, a supplementary tank battalion. He seized the chance as if it were his last, forgot sleep, food, himself. It was his last chance, and he knew it. He fell ill, confided to friends that he did not have long to live. Returned from sick leave last spring, he found two more armored divisions and the first of 15 additional tank battalions being organized. Two more divisions will also be organized this fall and winter.

Last May a subordinate read to a House subcommittee General Chaffee’s recommendations for an even further expansion of the Armored Force. He again preached his doctrine of “combined arms”: that tanks alone are not enough; that armored forces must also include adequate infantry, artillery, aviation under one command. He advocated entire, “armored armies” for the U.S. And he permitted himself a quiet, soldierly word which would do well for his epitaph: “It is true that . . . our armored division is very similar in principle to that of the German Panzer division, but it is not a question of us blindly following. . . . Rather it proves the soundness of our own development, since the Germans in general followed the principles of our own mechanized cavalry organizations which existed prior to … the present German organization.”