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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 40, 5 October 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Editor:
When Congress passed the Draft Law, I began to take a very personal interest in the army, it looked as though I’d be one of the sheep, so I wanted to get a preliminary idea of what army life would be like. Here is what I have found out so far.
The daily newspapers discuss army life in one way. They describe the physical benefits of military training – guaranteed to build good, strong Americans. They always speak in generalities calculated to take the sting out of life.
Newspapers have to hold on to their readers and therefore give us such hypocritical sugar coating. Generals don’t. General O’Ryan, writing on the same subject in Life many years before the present war crisis, said this among other things:
“We must get our men so that they are machines, and this can be done only as a process of training. We have to have our men trained so that the influence of fear is overpowered by the peril of an uncompromising military system, often backed up by a pistol in the hands of an officer ... The recruits have to put their heads into a military noose”.
A private in the American Army hasn’t the right of appeal. If his superiors make a decision, that’s that. The private must address his officer in the third person. When an officer commands him to do something, he does not ask, “What do you want?” but “The officer commanded me to do this?” Even in these everyday forms, the private is made to feel the tremendous gap that exists between himself and his officers. The private may not sit down or relax in his officer’s presence unless he is permitted to.
A buck private has to carry out all orders without question no matter how degrading he may think they are. In peacetime, a private may be tried for insubordination before a military court-martial. One officer prefers the charges against him; another officer acts as “defense attorney.”
The private may even be punished without cause. In peacetime or wartime, a soldier may be selected for punishment as an example to the rest. When the French troops were retreating in droves during the World War, a certain number in each division were executed in order to terrify the remainder of the troops into submission. While such extreme measures have not, as yet, been resorted to in the American Army, the principle upon which they were based is present in the American Army.
The officer regulates the private’s reading material and determines the way in which the private may use his leisure time. In France, at the very time that Leon Blum was premier, the French soldiers were forbidden to read the paper published by Blum’s party. The army officers, having seen the word “socialism” on its masthead, were probably taken in by appearances. They should have known better.
In wartime, a private may be transferred from one section to another, regardless of his wishes. It was a common practice during the World War to send radicals into dangerous sectors to isolate them from the other soldiers ... permanently.
It seems to me that Army regulations can be explained in three ways. First, the nature of war itself demands a very high degree of discipline. It would be suicidal, for example, to have an army pause to discuss its strategy in the heat of battle. But not all the regulations are designed to promote military efficiency. Some are expressions of the vast social differences that separate the rank-and-file soldier from the officer caste. In Trotsky’s Red Army, an officer was addressed as “Comrade Lieutenant,” “Comrade Sergeant,” etc.; that was because the officer was a comrade, a fellow worker who had risen from the ranks. In the American Army, however, it is the favored sons of West Point, the specially trained Plattsburg business men, who command. These have nothing in common with the buck private.
A third explanation for Army regulations is that the war which the American government is preparing will not represent the interests of the American people who will do the fighting and the dying. That is why the army forbids the soldiers to read those revolutionary and labor newspapers which expose Roosevelt’s fraudulent “anti-fascist” pretenses.
The very nature of war, I have said, makes, it necessary for armies to be keyed to a high pitch of discipline. There must be people who command and people who obey. But this is posing the question too abstractly. Who commands and Who obeys? That is what we want to know, and that depends on what class is in control.
If the American workers want to fight a genuine war against fascism, then, of course, they must have arms and the ability to use them. Of course, they must have an army united by discipline. But this army will be an anti-fascist army only if it is an army controlled by the main enemy of the fascists, the workers themselves and not by the best friend of fascism, the reactionary militarists now in command. To prepare the way for the creation of such an army, the workers must demand that military training be placed under trade union control.
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