U.S. Army

The U.S. Army is presented as an institution whose effectiveness depended not only on troops and commanders but also on preparation, equipment, procurement, and civilian oversight. Harry S. Truman encountered it first through National Guard artillery service, later examined its wartime mobilization as a senator, and ultimately had to make decisions about its use as president. Across those settings, the Army’s capacity to fight and the government’s responsibility to direct it remain closely linked.

National Guard Service and Army Formation

Truman’s military career began in the National Guard, where he expected to become a sergeant while helping organize a new artillery battery. Instead, his fellow guardsmen elected him a first lieutenant. The election mattered to him as a personal milestone: he had never been elected to anything before. His battery drilled in Kansas City, first in the streets near Union Station and inside Convention Hall. When the 2nd Missouri Field Artillery became the 129th Field Artillery, part of the 60th Brigade attached to the 35th Division, Truman faced a regular Army physical examination for the first time.

The examination exposed a practical difficulty behind his commission. The record gave his uncorrected vision as 20/50 in the right eye and 20/400 in the left, even though he passed the eye test by memorizing the chart, according to his brother Vivian. He was recorded as 5 feet 8 inches tall and 151 pounds, with the rest of his examination categorized as normal. Later, when another examination threatened to keep him from going to France, a doctor twice declined to pass him because of his eyesight. Truman kept talking until the doctor relented. His determination to remain in service was personal, but it also reflected the Army’s demand for qualified officers as preparations for deployment intensified.

In September 1917, Truman traveled to Camp Doniphan, a newly established tent encampment beside Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The camp stood on an exposed, flat plain, with Lawton twenty miles away. The daily routine began with reveille at 5:45 a.m., breakfast at 6:30, and drill at 7:30. Cold nights, persistent wind, and dust storms made the conditions difficult; Truman described how dust reached his eyes, hair, and clothing and could obscure a tent fifty yards away. Yet his letters home conveyed that he remained busy and in good spirits. The camp’s demanding routine shows the Army turning civilian recruits into a trained force, while its rough conditions formed part of the mobilization experience rather than an interruption to it.

Mobilization, Procurement, and Oversight

As a senator serving on the Military Affairs Committee and the Military Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, Truman examined a much larger Army: one rapidly expanding for a country still officially at peace. He voted for the first peacetime draft in September 1940. By December, more than $10 billion had been awarded in defense contracts, and General George C. Marshall was seeking a force of two million men and additional funding. Truman, then a reserve colonel, went to Marshall’s office hoping to enlist. Marshall told him that he was too old for service and could better serve the country in the Senate.

The Senate committee’s investigation began with senior military and civilian officials, including Marshall and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Truman later traced the beginning of his respect for Marshall to those hearings. The committee then inspected military camps across the country. At Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, construction had cost more than ten times its original estimate; Camp Wallace, budgeted at $480,000, ultimately cost $2,539,000. Poor site selection and renting rather than buying construction equipment also wasted public money. The committee learned that an earlier Army study of camp-building failures had been lost. Truman warned that if military campaign planning resembled the construction record, the country faced a grave problem.

The committee identified cost-plus contracting as a central source of waste. Under that system, contractors could receive large fixed fees without the risks that would ordinarily restrain costs; one architect-engineer increased his income by 1,000 percent through an Army contract. Investigations also uncovered faulty equipment. Curtiss-Wright had manufactured defective airplane engines intended for combat forces, despite assurances that there were no problems. After the inquiry, an Air Corps general involved in the matter was sent to prison. In another case, the Glenn L. Martin Company’s B-26 bomber had wings that were too narrow. When the company’s president argued that the contract was already too advanced for changes, Truman threatened to see it ended; Martin then agreed to correct the wings. The incidents made oversight concrete: examining the Army’s performance could expose failures that jeopardized both public funds and military readiness.

Civilian Direction of the War Effort

For Truman, oversight was not a claim that legislators should direct battlefield operations. The committee’s findings were to be reported collectively, and it had no authority over military strategy, personnel, or the size or disposal of the defense effort. At the same time, Truman believed that the war effort had to remain under civilian control. He supported the appointment of a single head for the procurement program rather than a divided structure, arguing that unified administration should be judged by its overall results.

That principle shaped the committee’s scrutiny of ambitious military projects. The Canol pipeline proposal, initiated with little consultation and limited assessment of terrain, materials, manpower, or cost, called for a four-inch pipeline extending 1,200 miles from Canada to Alaska. The War Department budget included $25 million for military facilities in Canada and Alaska without a detailed description. The project illustrated Truman’s concern that military authority could bypass other civilian agencies and commit resources without adequate examination. In his view, generals and admirals had the professional role of fighting battles and identifying what they needed to fight them; decisions about the structure and direction of the national effort remained a civilian responsibility.

The same distinction informed his later decisions about atomic weapons. Stimson’s committee was advisory, and Stimson emphasized that the responsibility for recommending a course to the president rested with him. A technical demonstration of the bomb had been considered and rejected: the scientific panel believed it could not devise a demonstration likely to produce the shock needed to end the war, while there was concern that a failed test or advance warning could strengthen Japanese resistance. Truman later recalled that senior advisers at Potsdam agreed the weapon should be used and that Marshall had stressed the lives an invasion might cost. He also said he disliked the weapon. His account presents the decision as a grave judgment about military necessity and expected casualties, made by civilian leadership rather than delegated to the Army.

The Army in Korea

In the Korean War, the Army’s condition at the outset exposed the consequences of inadequate preparation. The first American ground troops committed near Osan on July 5, 1950, numbered only 256 men from the 24th Infantry Division. They had been brought from Japan without sufficient preparation; many were young draftees with no combat experience, and the force was poorly equipped against a disciplined advance supported by Russian T-34 tanks. American and South Korean troops were often outnumbered by three to one or more. Their World War II bazookas could not stop the tanks, and they lacked effective tank, artillery, and other weapons to slow the attack.

The retreat brought further hardships. In the Korean monsoon season, intense heat and rain damaged clothing and weapons; muddy roads clogged with refugees and disrupted communications. Unfamiliar with the terrain, people, and language, American troops repeatedly fought and withdrew, while illness and exhaustion compounded the danger. Casualties in some units reached 30 percent. These early reverses stood in sharp contrast to the rapid expansion of defense spending a decade earlier and underscored that resources alone did not guarantee a force ready for combat.

Command and reliable information became crucial as the situation changed. After Walton Walker was killed in a road collision shortly before Christmas 1950, Truman approved Matthew Ridgway as his replacement. Ridgway reached the front and was given authority to use his own judgment. He focused on basic troop needs, including better food, warmer winter clothing, and improved Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals. He also strengthened communications, emphasized high ground, and sought more effective use of airpower and artillery. His conspicuous presence near the front and confidence in the Eighth Army helped restore its fighting spirit. By January 25, 1951, less than a month after his arrival, the Eighth Army had begun advancing again.

Command, Accountability, and Significance

The Korean War also made the boundary between military command and presidential authority a direct constitutional conflict. Truman considered General Douglas MacArthur’s public challenge to administration policy an act of insubordination that disregarded presidential orders and the policy of the United Nations. MacArthur’s letter, made public by House Minority Leader Joe Martin, called for a broader war against Communist forces in Asia and insisted that victory had no substitute. Truman had already been considering the command problem, but proceeded cautiously, aware of MacArthur’s public standing and the political risks of an immediate confrontation.

Taken together, the episodes portray the U.S. Army neither as a single battlefield actor nor as an institution beyond civilian scrutiny. Its training camps, contracts, equipment, officers, and field commands all shaped what it could do. Truman’s experience moved from an elected National Guard commission to congressional investigations and presidential decisions, but the recurring question remained the same: how could the country build and use military power effectively while keeping authority, responsibility, and accountability in civilian hands?