Posted on 01/11/2014 5:21:46 PM PST by chicagolady
I'm aware of no such order. MacArthur states that he was in the process of clearing the Anacostia bridge when the order came to conclude the operation at his discretion. He states that upon clearing the bridge, he halted the operation.
But if the press ignored the integration phenomenon, it made much of a small Communist faction within the ranks of the veterans, giving credence to the official line that had been expressed by Theodore Joslin, who was President Hoover’s press secretary: “The marchers,” he asserted, “have rapidly turned from bonus seekers to communists or bums.”
Meanwhile, at the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover, the 37-year-old director of the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI), was coordinating efforts to establish evidence that the Bonus Army had Communist roots—a charge that history does not substantiate.
*snip*
In the days that followed, many bonus marchers returned to their homes. But the fight was not over. Waters declared that he and others intended “to stay here until 1945 if necessary to get our bonus.” More than 20,000 did stay. The hot summer days turned into weeks; Glassford and Waters became concerned about worsening sanitary conditions and the dwindling supply of food in the camps. As June gave way to July, Waters showed up at Evalyn Walsh McLean’s front door. “I’m desperate,” he said. “Unless these men are fed, I can’t say what won’t happen in this town.
*snip*
The scene remained quiet until shortly after 1:45 p.m., when Glassford noticed vets skirmishing among themselves in a building adjacent to the armory. Several policemen went in to break up that fight. Accounts differ as to what happened next, but shots rang out. When the ensuing melee ended, one veteran lay dead, another mortally wounded. Three policemen were injured.
*snip*
Eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, insisted that Secretary of War Hurley, speaking for the president, had forbade any troops to cross the bridge into Anacostia and that at least two high-ranking officers were dispatched by Hurley to convey these orders to MacArthur. The general, Eisenhower later wrote, “said he was too busy and did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.” It would not be the last time that MacArthur would disregard a presidential directive—two decades later President Truman would fire him as commander of U.N. military forces in South Korea for doing just that.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/marching-on-history-75797769/?page=8
Thanks!!
Bfl.
Thank you for starting the discussion. I’ve learned much about our history from this.
In reading your recent posts, I would encourage you to continue researching the subject deeper.
Could you elaborate? Do not know what you are trying to say.
I generally do—I tend to get obsessive. :)
I went to school in "the old California", but may not have been listening.
Nothing wrong with that. If you haven't already done so, read post #154 on this thread.
bfl = bump for later
“have United States troops proceed immediately to the scene of disorder. Cooperate fully with the District of Columbia police force which is now in charge. Surround the affected area and clear it without delay.”
The above quotation is presented out of context. The “scene of disorder” were some limited number of Federal buildings and properties at which a particularly violent and lethal confrontation took place when the District of Columbia police tried to remove the squatters. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur chose to reinterpret the orders to encompass far beyond the immediate area in which the D.C. Police were menaced while removing the squatters from the empty Federal buildings. President Hoover through Secretary of War Hurley dispatched further orders to rein in MacArthur when it became evident MacArthur was exceeding the intent of the original orders. As testified by Eisenhower and others, MacArthur chose to deliberately disregarded these subsequent orders, including the orders to not cross the Anacostia Bridge, and attacked the Bonus Army camp on the other side with non-lethal force.
I'll grant that such directive is vague and subject to varying interpretations.
Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur chose to reinterpret the orders to encompass far beyond the immediate area in which the D.C. Police were menaced while removing the squatters from the empty Federal buildings.
Think about it. If soldiers formed a moving wall, how do you practically clear the scene of disorder without moving the mob across the river and outside of D.C.? If say you were MacArthur and the mob was centered at the capitol steps, does moving them to the Washington Monument accomplish your orders? Unlikely.
Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each service certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment plus compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates.
You evidently have no idea of where in Washington D.C. these buildings were located which were subject to the eviction orders for the demolition contractors to proceed with their work. The Army was supposed to help the D.C. police force to protect the White House and evict the squatters from the abandoned U.S. treasury buildings in a block nearby the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Old National Guard Building. The violent confrontation with the D.C. Police involved only about 50 men throwing brickbats, stones, and threatening shootings. Due to an Army intelligence services report about the Communists using the confrontations as an opportunity to subvert the Bonus Army protests toi foment a national revolutionary uprising, MacArthur chose to use this opportunity to eliminate the presence of the Bonus Expeditionary force before the Communists succeeded in instigating more bloody confrontations in a bid to start an armed revolution.
You evidently didn't score well in literature did you? Otherwise you would have recognized from my last sentence that it was an example using points of reference most readers would be likely to recognize.
“You evidently didn’t score well in literature did you? Otherwise you would have recognized from my last sentence that it was an example using points of reference most readers would be likely to recognize.”
What I recognized from your last sentence was that you haven’t a clue of how or where the events unfolded, and you’re just making up your own set of fictional facts, and rather absurd ones at that, as you go along. Your question reveals numerous laughable misconceptions.
“Think about it. If soldiers formed a moving wall, how do you practically clear the scene of disorder without moving the mob across the river and outside of D.C.? If say you were MacArthur and the mob was centered at the capitol steps, does moving them to the Washington Monument accomplish your orders? Unlikely.”
The District of Columbia is far larger than a “moving wall” of four colums of 600 soldiers can remotely encompass. The so-callled “moving wall” was simply a column of a very limited number of soldiers afoot, on horseback, some ancient Renault tanks, and a truckload transporting a machine gun section. This column moved down Pennsylvania Avenue with flankers along the paralleling streets on the flanks of the column on Pennsylvania Avenue and downwards of 11th Street to the 11th Street or Anacostia Bridge. The vast majority of the Distrrict of Columbia aside from Pennsylvania Avenue and the flanking streets were uninvolved in these events.
“If say you were MacArthur and the mob was centered at the capitol steps, does moving them to the Washington Monument accomplish your orders? Unlikely.”
The Washington Monument is located in the opposite direction in which the troops moved towards the site of the lethal confrontation with the District of Columbia Police in the block of buildings between Pennsylvania Avenue, Missouri Avenue, 3rd Street and Fourth Street and the Capitol Building. The Washington monument was already behind the Army troops and the Capitol Building was farther ahead when they arrived at the scene of the rioter’s confrontation with the District of Columbia Police. So your scenario is rather ridiculously the opposite of the real events. All Major General MacArthur was required to do was evict the rioters from that one block of buildings and bolster the cordon around the White House. Any further actions cold easily have limited the advance of the Federal troops to Washington City S.E. along a line along North Carolina Avenue from Garfield Park to Seward Place to Lincoln Square or perhaps South Carolina Avenue.
MacArthur was definitely ordered to not advance across the 11th Street or Anacostia Bridge to Camp Miles on the Anacostia Flats, which is precisely what MacArthur did in flagrant disobediance to the orders relayed from President Hoover by Secretary of War Hurley. There is a relatively tremendous distance between the Capitol building and the bridge, and the area of Washington S.E. had little or nothing to do with the squatters and violent riots located in the U.S. Government buildings of Washington City N.W.
Bottomline, Major General MacArthur’s orders would have been fulfilled without leaving Washington City N.W., particularly had he assited the D.C. Police to quell the armed rioting in just that one block of the city. It is clear from the evidence that MacArthur used his limited orders as an opportunity to breakup and evict the Bonus Expeditionary Force due to the Army intelligence and Secret Service reports about the Communists using the B.E.F. as cover to instigate a lethal incident/s to foment a popular revolution against the Federal and state governments.
As with all MacArthur haters, you never cite prime sources. Rather than claim authority based on a single magazine article from 2006 (that you may have just Googled 5 minutes earlier) why don’t you depart from the norm for MacArthur haters and cite prime sources that refute his actions?
Shove It, I do apologize for my long delay in responding as I was busy with travel for a training rotation in the lovely Mojave..... Anyhow, Soldiers are expected, and instructed to disobey illegal orders: specifically ones which violate the laws of the United States and the laws of land warfare. This has been a part of every pre-deployment briefing I have received through out my career. This is why it has been American Soldiers (not the press or some investigator) who have exposed the major incidents in which units and commanders have failed live up to the expected standards (Mai-Li, and Abu Gharib come to mind) and have prevented commanders and senior NCOs from stepping over the line at other times by simply saying “that is wrong.” Our Soldiers are very well disciplined, but they are not robots. Of the Soldiers I know of who returned fire on Gang-bangers doing drive-bys during the LA riots, most would have refused to fire on innocent and peaceful demonstrators. There will always be some who will follow illegal orders, but many more who will not.
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