Hugh Drum: Stalwart of the US Army

Drum, Hugh Aloysius

LT GEN USA

Early Career

The son of regular Army officer, Captain John Drum, who was killed-in-action in the battle of San Juan on 1^st July, 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Hugh was born in Fort Brady, Michigan, on 19^th September, 1879.

He graduated from Boston College in 1898 and was made a Second Lieutenant in the Twelfth Infantry Regiment and quickly rose through the ranks.

In 1914, with Lt. Hugh A. Drum as his aide-de camp, General Frederick N. Funston led 5,000 troops into Vera Cruz, Mexico during the Mexican border conflict, was appointed military governor of that city, and promoted to Major General. Funston also supervised Brig. General John J. Pershing’s 1916 “Punitive Expedition” of Francisco “Pancho” Villa.

WWI Service

In 1917 he accompanied General John J. Pershing to France with the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.) as his assistant operations (G-3) section of the GHQ.

On 3rd September Pershing ordered from his own staff a study of strategic fronts for the employment of the AEF. The examination was complete within the month: Lt. Col. Fox Conner, Col. L. R. Eltinge and Maj. H.A. Drum, “A Strategical Study on the Employment of the A.E.F. Against the Imperial German Government,” 25 September 1917, Record Group 120 (American Expeditionary Forces), File 1003, Folder 681, Part 2, G-3, G.H.Q., A.E.F., National Archives; Pershing’s headquarters were at No. 31 Rue Constantine, Paris, until 1 September 1917, when they were moved to Chaumont.

Most of the men who staffed the operations (G-3) section of the GHQ had at least been to the General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The writing of operational plans and orders, the using of proper and consistent formats, and the need to issue coherent and realistic orders in a timely matter were a part of their training. At the AEF General Staff those men became known as the “Leavenworth Clique,” and as one historian has stated, “they spoke the same language; they understood each other.” There were only about two hundred Leavenworth-trained staff officers in 1917, and Pershing had the lion’s share of them.

Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Drum was assigned to observe the 42^nd “The Rainbow” Division (then Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, Commanding Officer) during its initial commitment to combat, he observed:

‘While the office and technical work of the staff is excellent, there is little outside work; that is, the staff does not mingle nor work in person with troops in any great extent.’ Drum to Assistant G-3, A.E.F., March 27, 1918

By mid-1918 Drum had been promoted to full Colonel and was appointed Chief of Staff of the First Army of the American expeditionary Force.

The morning of September 8, four days before the St. Mihiel offensive was to be launched; Colonel George C. Marshall (later the WWII US Army Chief of Staff) was called to see Brigadier General Hugh Drum, Chief of Staff of the First Army. Here, for the first time, he learned of the Meuse-Argonne offensive that would be launched on September 25. Marshall had been designated the miracle worker who would arrange for the movement of the First Army from the St. Mihiel to the Meuse-Argonne front. To get the soldiers, horses, and equipment from the first front to the second by the 25th “would require many of these troops to get under way on the evening of the first day of the St. Mihiel battle, notwithstanding the fact that the advance in that fight was expected to continue for at least two days.” In a classic bit of understatement, Marshall wrote later that this “appalling proposition rather disturbed my equilibrium.” Marshall took stock of the enormously difficult task that lay before him. He searched for an incident in history “where the fighting of one battle had been preceded by the plans for a later battle to be fought by the same army on a different front.” He could find none. In his memoirs Marshall remembered how this ponderous task “was the hardest nut I had to crack in France.”

To accomplish the task, Marshall spread a map out on a table, organized in his head the divisions that needed to be moved, and in less than an hour completed an order. Although unsatisfied with it at first, he submitted it anyway. The next morning he was called into General Drum’s office. Marshall was worried that the Chief of Staff had found something wrong with his plan, but he was relieved to hear that not only did he approve of the plan but so had General Pershing. “That order for the Meuse-Argonne concentration you sent over last night is a dandy,” Marshall recalled Drum as saying, “The General thought it was a fine piece of work.”

During the heavy fighting in the St. Mihiel salient and in the Meuse-Argonne Brigadier General Billy Mitchell was difficult to deal with on questions of air reconnaissance missions for the intelligence (G-2) section of the First Army run by Colonel Wiley Howell who complained to Colonel Dennis E. Nolan intelligence (G-2) section of GHQ A.E.F. during a visit. Nolan past this onto First Army Chief of Staff Hugh Drum, who certainly never had liked Mitchell. Drum ordered Mitchell to cooperate with the G-2. In the long run, Mitchell had made two very powerful enemies in Drum and Nolan. This was also the start of Hugh Drum’s long-standing disputation/vilification with/by the ‘aeromaniacs’ of the Army Air Corps.

The relationship is important, as hard feelings which developed in France came to shape the politics of the US Army between the two World Wars. Only Fox Conner and Hugh Drum seem to have managed to rise above the fray, avoiding being dragged back into the personality conflicts of Autumn, 1918.

The Inter-War Period

From 1919 to 1926 Hugh Drum served in various army schools.

In the United States, a similar debate ensued over the development of aviation, its relationship to the Army and Navy, and the ability of antiaircraft artillery to defend against it. On one side of the debate were elements calling for military aviation to remain integrated within the Army and Navy. On the other side of the issue were those supporting the unification of all air services and their separation from the Army and Navy. A key point in the debate concerned the utility of aircraft in military operations. Part of the Army’s position to Congress against separating the Air Service from the Army rested on the argument that airpower alone could not win wars and that antiaircraft artillery was a viable means to defend against air attack. At one point the Army Assistant Chief of Staff, Brigadier General Hugh Drum, testified before the House Select Committee of Inquiry on the Operations of the United States Air Services that with 12 three-inch antiaircraft artillery guns he could stop “any bomber from doing serious destruction.”

Conversely, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, testifying before the same committee, stated that with respect to stopping incoming aircraft “the problem of antiaircraft . . . is almost an impossible one to solve.” He commented that the United States had lost only “one-tenth of one percent of all missions” flown during World War I to German antiaircraft fire and that the “method of firing [had] not improved perceptibly” since then.

Fiorello H. LaGuardia, then a congressional representative from New York, captured the tenor of this ideological struggle. In testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Military Affairs in 1926, LaGuardia charged the Army General Staff with being “either hopelessly stupid or unpardonably guilty” in refusing to recognize the need for a separate air service. During his testimony, LaGuardia singled out the Coast Artillery Corps as an illustration of what he called “standpatism” or the failure to yield to the logic of airpower. He rebuked military authorities for having the “audacity” to ask Congress to fund coast defenses at a time when he believed coastal surface guns were outranged by their naval counterparts and antiaircraft batteries were capable of hitting attacking aircraft only during rigged firing tests.

By 1931 Hug Drum was promoted to Major General and was sent to Honolulu as Commander.

The leading hurdle in his new command, of course, was the large population of Japanese who were widely believed to be subversive. The previous Commander, General Briant Wells, who retired to become head of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, scoffed at the wild tales of possible treachery by kitchen maids and gardeners which made the rounds of the service clubs. Drum had another view. Drum wrote:

“After a visit to each of these islands and several conferences with leading American residents thereof, I am convinced that few of the Orientals will be loyal in case of war.”

Drum organized a ‘Service Command’ to rally loyal Hawaiians. He told the visiting House Military Affairs Subcommittee: “It is the experience of all nations, including the United States, that mixtures of widely dissimilar racial elements constitute a serious problem in time of emergency. The history of our own revolution, of the war of 1812, of the War Between the States, and of the World War, shows that during an emergency armed forces are often necessary to protect loyal citizens as against disaffected and rebellious ones. Since this has been true on the mainland where the racial makeup is far more homogeneous, certainly we must be prepared to meet such a situation in the Hawaiian Islands where the population is conglomerate.”

In an Armistice Day speech, Drum had come out for martial law in case of war.

The president’s defense advisers were considerably more low-keyed. Assistant Secretary of the Army Harry Woodring reported on the Army’s current plans. He told the president that the Hawaiian command envisioned ‘controlling’ the Japanese during an emergency, that it was even setting up a Service Command for this purpose. General Drum’s idea. Woodring didn’t even mention concentration camps.

Moreover, Pearl Harbor was already assumed to be where Japan would strike first, even though the Pacific Fleet was permanently stationed at San Diego Naval Yard in California, and not Pearl Harbor. Army General Hugh Drum wrote the War Department that the “vacant sea” through which a Japanese attacking force could approach Hawaii undetected, “had been marked down in our defense studies.”

Drum was proving himself a grand war planner by the work he did on how the US could protect the Territory of Hawaii from foreign assault.

Thus, in a joint military exercise on a Sunday morning in 1932, Navy Admiral Harry Yarnell launched 152 aircraft carrier planes which caught the Army defenders of Pearl Harbor completely by surprise. In a similar training exercise in 1938, Admiral Ernest King launched a second surprise carrier-born air strike against Pearl Harbor, and again, the American military at Pearl Harbor was completely surprised.

***

In 1933, Major General Hugh Drum was seconded to head a board appointed to review and revise the Air Corps’s five-year procurement plan.

In the immediate, practical sphere, the Air Corps Board’s charter was to serve as an antidote to the “divide and conquer” strategy the Army adopted against its ‘aeromaniacs’, particularly after the Drum Board report of 1933.

Explanations and complaints continued well into the 1930s , when an anonymous airman refused to share credit or take comfort in the great strides made by Army aviation : “Although the Air Corps has escaped from its role as [the] Cinderella of the Army, it has done so through its own effort alone and is still subject to the might of its none too appreciative parents.” These “ parents ” were , in Hanson Baldwin’s words, “short-sighted old fogies.” They included the long-suffering Major General Hugh Drum, whom the “dervishes of airpower” attacked repeatedly as a thick-witted Army traditionalist who refused to abandon his early claim that the American doughboy would forever remain the decisive element in war.

As already pointed out, Army traditionalists truly appreciated military aviation. But like the separatists, they too had a creed, and it included the principles of economy of force and unity of command. To Army traditionalists like Drum, the lesson of World War I was that an army must use all available means to work as a single unit towards a single objective in war—victory. In particular, there was only one US Army, and airpower was an indispensable part of that indissoluble whole. Yes, the Air Service/ Air Corps had limited autonomy, the ‘indispensabilists’ admitted, but that was only right. The air arm was not a war-winning weapon in itself; it was unable to occupy territory; it was dependent on fixed bases; and it was unable to conduct continuous and sustained operations. As a result, it had to be in “full sympathy” with the Army’s other arms and subsume itself to the Army’s creed. At the center of that creed was the infantry, which remained the “queen of the battlefield.”

Limited but incremental progress had continued with the Drum Board in 1933, although frustrated airmen now defined a board of inquiry as something “long, narrow, and wooden.” The board’s members—including the commandant of the Army War College, the chief of the coast artillery, and other Army stalwarts—rejected the idea of an independent Air Corps, but they did endorse (yet again) the creation of a semiautonomous GHQ Air Force to conduct independent operations. Conspiracy minded airmen like Haywood Hansell rightfully worried that the proposal was part of a divide-and-conquer strategy by the Army. If the staffs of OCAC and GHQ Air Force became bureaucratic rivals, as Army traditionalists hoped, they would quickly squander their political capital by battling each other rather than their parent service. (The hope was understandable but also unfounded. Air Corps leaders successfully prevented the rivalry from becoming unmanageable.)

Even before assuming command of the Army Air Corps, Major-General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold chaired a committee formed in 1936 to examine how best to create a “Balanced Air Program.” There was nothing unusual in his final report; in fact, it followed very closely the recommendations made previously by the Drum Board. The numbers reflected in each report for personnel and planes were similar. Surprising today but realistic at that time, the forecast for airplanes required was only 1,399 in 1936, increasing to a meager 2,708 in 1941.2 Although Arnold’s report was primarily an attempt to reckon with depression budgets, no mention was made of scientific research or technological development. Rather, the program’s primary concern was to save dollars in all areas except purchasing airplanes.

***

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had hedged on naming a new Chief of Staff during October and November 1934, the two months preceding MacArthur’s four year anniversary in the post. On December 12, 1934 FDR decided “General Douglas MacArthur be retained as Chief of Staff until his successor has been appointed.” In reply to questions FDR made it clear that the extension was not an reappointment for four more years. It was understood that the extension was probably for a maximum of one year. On July 17, 1935, Secretary of War Dern recommended December 15, 1935 as the date for MacArthur’s replacement as Chief of Staff. On July 18, 1935 FDR approved Dern’s recommendation. On September 18, 1935, Dern issued Special Orders No. 22 implementing FDR’s approval of his recommendations From October to December15, 1935, when he would step down as Chief of Staff, MacArthur would be in Manilla setting up the office of Military Advisor to the President of the Philippines. The Deputy Chief of Staff, Major General Drum would run the Army on a day-to-day basis. On October 1, 1935, MacArthur, with a small staff departed Washington for the Philippines. On October 2, 1935 FDR appointed Mahlon G. Graig as the next Chief of Staff. In latter explaining his actions to Post Master General Farley on November 16, 1935 FDR is quoted as saying: ‘He (MacArthur) didn’t know about it (MacArthur’s October 2, 1935 replacement).’

General Marshall came to Washington in the summer of 1938 as Assistant Chief of Staff in charge of War Planning. In less than a year’s time, President Roosevelt sent for him to announce that he was to succeed General Craig upon his retirement as Chief of Staff in September. It came as a shock, because the public had expected General Hugh Drum to be appointed. Roosevelt had jumped Marshall over the heads of 20 major-generals and 14 senior brigadiers. The appointment was generally accepted as a personal one. Roosevelt, it was assumed, had followed his own judgment rather than the consensus of high army authorities, active and retired. We know from Robert Sherwood’s book ‘Roosevelt and Hopkins’ that Hopkins favored Marshall’s appointment. It was also favored by Mrs. Roosevelt.

Marshall’s rise to Chief of Staff is most interesting: of the four rivals, Marshall was the least suited to succeed Mahlon G Craig. Hugh Drum had served as a Brigadier General in the First War, when he had been Chief of Staff to the First Army. John DeWitt had been in the Army’s most desirable staff job as Chief of War plans as early as 1922, while Walter Kruger had laid the foundations for the victory in World War II by serving in that same role during the critical period of 1936 to 1938. These were the only four considered and, interestingly, none were graduates of West Point: Kruger was commissioned from the ranks (and an immigrant), while the other three had been commissioned through ROTC, Marshall at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), of course.

At the same time, Marshall liked John DeWitt, an officer of no marked abilities, while disliking one of the Army’s Interwar intellectual aces, Hugh Drum—to be fair, Marshall was turned off by Drum’s pompous nature and insistence on full discussion of all proposals sent before him for consideration, a process Marshall found annoying—he dealt far better with MacArthur’s loaded proposals or Eisenhower’s heated begging for help over tough issues.

Rehearsals for War

Newly promoted, Lieutenant General Hugh Drum was made commanding general of the Eastern Defense Command and First Army in early 1940, with his HQ at Governors Island.

“The volunteer system must be replaced. Let us not be blind to the realities. The day we could put guns into the hands of citizen soldiers, teach the manual of arms and send them to match their spirit and brawn against an enemy has passed. ”

—Hugh Drum,

Army Lt-General

Remark to FDR, Quoted in The New York Times, August 23, 1940

Rehearsal

The New York Times (report)

Monday, September 2, 1940

Last week, in the dairy country of northern New York, in the forests of Washington, along streams and through swamps in Louisiana and Wisconsin, the U. S. Army worked like terriers. In the biggest peacetime maneuvers in history, 300,000 regular, National Guard and reserve troops hiked, fought, slept in the open, while Army umpires with white bands around their campaign hats marked down their scores. Sweaty infantrymen slogged along country roads. Artillery rumbled through peaceful villages, tired gunners asleep in the trucks. Rednecked horse cavalrymen galloped down ravines, and forded creeks behind cased guidons. Cursing engineers built pontoon bridges across rivers while machine guns chattered and infantrymen in trucks shouted for more speed.

Ill-equipped, scantily trained, the U. S. Army had put itself on a stage where its public could see it in all its deficiencies. What the public saw was the inevitable result of 20 years of peacetime apathy toward national defense. What profession al Army officers saw was a job well done, considering the tools and men on hand to date.

Biggest of the maneuvers and typical of the rest was the Battle of Northern New York, where 85,000 troops fought a three-day action while 15,000 more backed them up on the supply lines and in the air. Strategically it was also the most significant. In that area, east of the St. Lawrence River town of Ogdensburg (captured by the British in 1813), Army troops would be gathered for flank assault if the U. S. should be invaded from Canada.

Black & Blue. From New England had come Major General James Albert Woodruff’s Black Army. Spearheaded was the regular Army’s famed First Division, screened by the Army’s historic Third Cavalry. Outnumbered almost 2-to-1 by the defending Blue Army of National Guardsmen, it was ready to attack from the banks of the Grass River (flowing north into the St. Lawrence) when the maneuver began.

Commanding the Blue Army was one of the service’s most noted advocates of defense by attack: hawk-nosed Lieut. General Hugh Aloysius Drum. By mid-morning of the first day, his divisions had made contact with the Blacks. All night there was rifle fire from outposts along the Grass. Next dawn, Hugh Drum started the ball rolling. His first target was the flower of the Black Army: the motorized, mobile, battle-scarred Fighting First. Stationed on the Black Army’s north flank, the First failed to watch the bank of the St. Lawrence, off to their right. There Hugh Drum started a flanking march by Maryland and Virginia infantry units, a company of Pennsylvania tanks. When the First came to, its supply train had been captured by the Maryland 5th Infantry, and Virginians from the Shenandoah Valley were blazing away at its rear. Said a Black artilleryman, hopelessly cut off: “We had one gun firing north, another south, and the third one shooting straight up.”

But Hugh Drum still had something up his sleeve. First day of the maneuvers he had whipped up a German-style motorized attack by putting the Irish 165th Infantry (of New York City) into trucks, backing them up with motorized cavalry, artillery, engineers. While the Blacks tried to fight their way out of the encirclement of their north flank, the motorized column, after riding all night, slammed them from the rear on the other flank. The Black Army’s 26th National Guard division, squeezed front and rear, decided to retire, moved ten miles east to the next river (the Raquette) while the umpires recessed the battle.

When the recess was over, the Blue Army went after the invader like a winning boxer out of his corner. Through the chilly night (the temperature got down to 41°) engineers hurried pontoon bridges across the Raquette. Before dawn, while the bridges were still abuilding, infantrymen paddled across in assault boats, and rifle fire bit the dark. Again Hugh Drum’s fast-moving motorized column, riding a motley assortment of green, red and white trucks, turned up on the Blacks’ south flank. By noon the Blues’ artillery had crossed the Raquette behind the infantry. With pleased but dead-pan faces at the power of tactics which threatened to about-face the invaders and back them against the St. Lawrence, umpires called the war off.

Drain Pipes, Pie Plates. Next night, in the stadium of St. Lawrence University at Canton, N. Y., officers of both armies sat down to hear Hugh Drum. Most glaring deficiency of the maneuvers the First Army commander passed over in one sentence. The point was too well known, even to the watching farmers, to be labored : the U. S. Army was grotesquely short of combat equipment. In both Black and Blue armies there were only four tanks. Like the Germans seven years ago, company commanders whitewashed the sign “TANK” on the sides of trucks, and the umpires counted them as tanks.

And there were no modern anti-tank guns. Soldiers made them from drain pipes, old wheels, set them up on fields and roads and solemnly served them while umpires stretched their imaginations. There were few .50-calibre anti-aircraft guns. The shortage was made up by lettering “.50-calibre” on a pie plate, pasting it on the side of a Springfield rifle. Except for the regular outfits, no regiments had more than a token equipment of the Army’s new Garand semi-automatic rifle. Except for the regulars, no outfit was completely motor-equipped. Hundreds of trucks and sedans were rented by the day from civilians to fill out the National Guard’s complement of rolling stock.

The Army has some 400 tanks, but the organization of the new Armored Corps kept most of them busy at Ft. Benning and Ft. Knox, far from the maneuvers. The same was true of planes: the Air Corps needed most of its planes for its training program. For reconnaissance, Blue and Black Army commanders had observation planes, but almost no attack planes, which could have played hob with troop movements, especially river crossings. The handful of pursuit and bombardment pilots detailed to the maneuvers spent most of their time dogfighting, testing a telephone warning system for tracing the course of invading enemy aircraft by plotting locations where civilian volunteers reported bombers overhead.

Beyond these obvious lacks, Hugh Drum found others to point at. One of them was a shortage of troops. He turned it into a plug for conscription. Said he: “We are wasting time and ignoring basic lessons of history by months of discussing the volunteer versus the conscription system.” Other faults he blamed on lack of training. He found smaller units (companies, battalions, etc.) weak on the basic mechanics of fighting — patrolling, reconnaissance, communications. He found waste of man power. “Too many commanders,” said he, “expected all officers and all men to be at work or in the fight all the time.” He found poor teamwork between ground and air troops, between ground branches themselves.

Good Beginning. U. S. civilians found Hugh Drum’s criticism more stimulating than disheartening, saw no reason to doubt that the Army already has the start for a first-class fighting force. Working till they were wobbly, sleeping on the ground in cold and rain, the First Army’s sickness rate was about half the rate for regulars in garrison. Its morale was tops; after long hikes, fights through underbrush, soldiers were not too tired to shave, brush their teeth, skylark. The supply system, running in food and ammunition for an army bigger than the population of Schenectady, N. Y., had worked without a major hitch. Staff work was better than it had ever been before, traffic ran without road clogs. Soldiers behaved better. Except for two besotted regulars who went on window-breaking and larceny rampages (and got jail terms from a court martial), the deportment record was near-perfect.

This week, back at their home stations, National Guardsmen waited for the President’s call for a year’s active service, had the prospect of longer and bigger maneuvers to brush up basic combat lessons, develop the kind of teamwork the Germans have. Regulars hoped Congress would soon pass a conscription bill. For—besides men and equipment—what the Army needs is practice, practice, more practice. No Army man forgets that it took the Germans seven years.

***

First Army Nearly Ready for War – Lieut. Gen. Hugh Drum, commanding the U.S. First Army in the Carolina wargames, says that if his troops had ammunition and the guns “they are supposed to have, they could go to war in three or four months.” 28^th November 1940.

***

The Carolina games commenced on 16^th November 1941 and evaluated a battle between an infantry heavy force numbering 195,000 (General Hugh Drum’s First Army) against a smaller mechanized heavy force numbering 100,000 (Major General Oscar W. Griswold’s IV Corps). Assigned to the smaller force, Patton’s Second Armored Division attempted to repeat the stunning successes of the previous wargames. Facing numerical superiority, the IV Corps was unable to exploit its inherent mobile advantage. A shortage of infantry within armored formations was evident as well. During both phases, the armored units were used more as roving “fire brigades” to stem opposing force attacks than in their intended roles. Also evident was the inability of quartermaster units to properly fuel vehicles on the march. Prior to game commencement, the Assistant I Armored Corps G-4 summed up the problem to Patton: “General, in the I Armored Corps, we do not have trucks, tank trucks, cans nor men to move a hundred gallons of gas.” In order to remedy the situation, the assistant G-4 locally contracted railroad tank cars and used gravity to refuel the tanks. Similar to a Confederate cavalry raid, Patton’s armored forces continued to press attacks behind enemy lines though he had to be reminded again of the precarious balance between combat power and sustainment. The 1941 maneuvers showcased Patton’s effective use and movement of mechanized forces; exposure to large-scale logistical requirements during these games combined with his previous experiences from the First World War prepared him for his next assignment, commander of the I Armored Corps and the Desert Training Center.

When the 2nd Armored Division was activated at Fort Benning on 15^th July 1940, less than a month after the fall of France. The 2nd Armored Division was one of the two original armored divisions formed by the United States Army. The division was placed under the command of Brigadier General George S. Scott Jr., General George S. Patton Jr. relieved General Scott in September 1940. The original 2nd Armored Division, created as a miniature army built around a tank brigade, was authorized 754 officers, 69 warrant officers and 13,795 men.

The 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, formed from a cadre supplied by the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 11th, 13th, and 14th Cavalry Regiments, was activated as an organic unit. Its first commanding officer was Major, (later Major General) Isaac D. White, who as a Brigadier General, commanded the division from 19^th January 1945 to 8^th June 1945. When the division was reorganized on 8^th January 1942, following the Carolina maneuvers, the 2nd was redesignated the 82nd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. During those maneuvers the battalion made national headlines by its first notable feat of arms-the capture of Lt. General Hugh A. Drum, Commanding General of the First Army in 1941.

I. D. White later recounted this episode in a letter to Wesley W. Yale. He remarked that he only released Drum after checking with Patton. Drum then criticized White in the formal maneuver after action review where he “derided the efforts of ‘a little lieutenant scampering around the trying to find his way back home with his odd collection of ‘farm implements!’”

White was surprised that any of them [early mechanized advocates] had survived and was grateful that “many of them [those behind the times] were too old to do much in WWII.”

WWII Service

The Western Defense Command had been designated a theater of operations on 11^th December 1941, with General DeWitt in command. With its headquarters at San Francisco, the command included an extensive area of nine western states, Alaska, and the Aleutians, and to it three air forces were initially assigned–the Fourth and Second Air Forces along the Pacific coast and, in addition, the Alaskan Air Force. A similar situation existed on the other side of the continent, where on 20^th December the Eastern Theater of Operations was established with headquarters in New York City and with Lt. Gen. Hugh Drum in command of defense units in the eastern seaboard states and in Newfoundland and Bermuda. Two air forces, the First and the Third, were assigned to this theater. Thus all four of the domestic air forces, which had been created early in 1941 and had been operating under the Air Force Combat Command, were removed from AAF control and placed under theater commanders. It is no surprising that this arrangement pleased no one: the defense commands found it confusing to have more than one subordinate air force commander, while the AAF felt that its combat training program would be jeopardized if it had no direct control of any of the continental air forces. A compromise was accordingly worked out and announced on 30^th December 1941. The essential element of the new plan was a provision which called for moving two of the continental air forces to inland stations and assigning them to the AAF as “training Air Forces.” To effect this arrangement, the Second Air Force relinquished its coastal stations in Washington and Oregon and was removed from assignment to the Western Defense Command; air defense duties for the entire Pacific coast were thereupon assigned to the Fourth Air Force. A similar move within the Eastern Defense Command made the Third Air Force a training unit under the AAF.

US war department planned to send General Hugh Drum to China. Drum accepted the China assignment but insisted that it be a combat command with a steady build-up of US forces there, precisely as the Chinese desired. General Drum was summoned to Washington and descended on the Munitions Building with a staff of nearly fifty officers. When asked how he would go about handling the China job, he told Marshall and Secretary of War Stimson he would go to New Delhi, perhaps even as far as Calcutta, to await developments and the clarification of the situation in China since going straight to Chungking might be too risky. He would not budge on this point so Stimson passed him over. Major-General Joseph W. ‘Vinegar’ Stilwell also wanted US combat forces in China but did not make an issue out of this and so got the command. Marshall had originally intended Stilwell to command GYMNAST/TORCH, then a possible but not certain operation, so Stilwell went to China. On 23^rd January 1942 it was announced that Stilwell would go to China in Drum’s stead.

Drum went back to his East Coast command where he was to irritate Roosevelt by reportedly meditating putting millions of people into restricted areas and issuing passes to German and Italian aliens. This was not a politically popular move and the president instructed Stimson to be sure that Drum did nothing more than enforce the blackouts “without checking with me first.”

Lt. Gen. Hugh Drum, commander of the First Army and the Eastern Defense Command, was one of the prime instigators of the tank destroyer concept.

Hugh Drum retired in 1943, aged 64. During his military career he received many awards such as the Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Medal and the Croix de Guerre.

Post War

After retiring, he served as President of the Empire State Building in New York City and died in his office there of a heart attack on 3^rd October, 1951. He is buried in Section 21 of Arlington National Cemetery: Hugh Aloysius Drum (1879 – 1951)