Marshall arrives in Chinwangtao on September 7, 1924, and has to serve as acting CO for two-and-a-half months, guarding the international concession against invasion by any of the many rival forces fighting China’s continuing civil war. Given that the various factions mass 12,000-man armies, this duty requires the American, British, French, and Italian forces in China to rely on diplomacy and bluff. Marshall also relies on a young captain named Matthew B. Ridgway to fend off the Chinese hordes and to get the regiment out of the bordellos and back into training. Ridgway does both, getting the troops out of their downtown barracks and into the rice paddy fields to train hard. Marshall sees Ridgway’s talent. Ridgway, in turn, writes that Marshall will someday “occupy a place second only to George Washington in the military history of the United States.”
Also back in the States from China is Maj. Joseph Stilwell, rocketing through the Infantry course at Fort Benning. Maj. Omar N. Bradley is also en route to Fort Benning, but he takes his 10 weeks leave, and uses it to work in a summer job on the construction of the Bear Mountain Bridge, at $10 a day, a badly-needed sum. During the work, a cable comes loose, and hits Bradley, ripping off his wristwatch. Realizing the consequences if the cable had hit him and sent him spiraling into the Hudson River, Bradley spends the rest of the summer fishing and reading about Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. Bradley is impressed at Sherman’s use of rapid, sweeping movement, finding it superior to the Great War’s trenchlines.
Major Jonathan Wainwright, on the other hand, takes a two-year break from developing the Army general staff’s “War Plan Orange” for the defense of the Philippines by commanding the 3rd Cavalry Regiment at Fort Myer, providing glittering horsemen for funerals and President Harding’s funeral in 1923.
In the Philippines, Brig. Gen. Douglas MacArthur frets over not having gained his second star, having heard that the Secretary of War regards him as being too young. “Too young!” MacArthur explodes. “Why, Genghis Khan commanded the union of his class at 13 and at 48 commanded the largest army in the world. Napoleon was only 25 when he was the world’s most celebrated military leader. Mustafa Kemal Pasha was 38 when he commanded his country’s armies!” So MacArthur’s mother, widow of Gen. Arthur MacArthur, hero of Missionary Ridge and the Philippine Insurrection, takes up her son’s cause, writing everyone in Washington, demanding that second star. Ten days before stepping down as Army Chief of Staff, Gen. John J. Pershing grants that second star, making MacArthur the youngest major general in the U.S. Army. MacArthur pins on the second star on January 17, 1925, and is transferred stateside, first to Atlanta where he visits his father’s old Civil War battlefields.
In San Antonio, Texas, Elwood “Pete” Quesada is training to fly in America’s air arm, which is down from its Great War peaks to a mere 396 serviceable aircraft, its leaders locked in arguments with each other on the proper use of aircraft in a future war. Nevertheless, Brooks Field in San Antonio, as the Air Service’s top flight school, has the money: and 16 hangars prove it. After three days of physicals and paperwork, Quesada learns drill and plays football, winning one game and breaking his leg for his trouble. Seven weeks after his cast comes off, Quesada’s classmates have finished half their training. Quesada looks like a washout.
Luckily for him, First Lt. Nathan Twining, a former West Point football star, helps Quesada make up the work, spending two days at Brooks over the Christmas holiday flying in Jenny trainers. Quesada’s heart quickens as the engine sputters to life, and he picks up the pace: in 10 minutes he manages straight and level flight; in 30 minutes he is doing constant-altitude turns; 60 minutes after take-off, his first assisted landing. In 14 days with Twining, Quesada becomes proficient. He solos six hours after instruction. Twining is impressed, and the two form a deep friendship. In February 1925, Quesada graduates from flight school, moving up to Kelly Field and its pursuit course.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr., working hard as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Washington, finds himself atop the exploding Teapot Dome scandal. The chaos begins when Congress investigates ridiculous spending in the new Veterans Bureau. Pressmen and politicians are alike are astounded that the bureau is paying 98 cents a gallon for floor wax when it can be bought in stores at four cents a gallon. Worse, the bureau has purchased $70,000 worth of 98-cent gallon, enough to wax its floors for decades. Towels that sell in Woolworth’s for four cents apiece are being purchased at 19 cents each. Meanwhile, surplus goods are being sold at shockingly low prices: bedsheets that cost the taxpayer $1.37 each are going for 27 cents a piece, while 25,000 new sheets are being bought at $1.03 each. The head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Charles R. Forbes, goes to Leavenworth. The Bureau’s attorney, rather than face a Congressional committee, commits suicide. So does a key Harding crony, Jesse Smith. The veteran scandal leads investigators to the questionable leases of the Navy’s Teapot Dome oil reserves, but Roosevelt, having done nothing illegal, ignores the growing scandal.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt, having pushed the Navy into developing aircraft carriers, now decides to follow in his father’s footsteps again, and run for governor of New York State in 1924. The Republicans tell him he won’t get their backing: Roosevelt voted to allow the sale of 2.75 percent beer as a State Assemblyman in 1920. Worse, Roosevelt considers Prohibition an “iniquitous law.” And Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor takes home bottles of booze from foreign embassy parties for her parties. But Roosevelt’s opponent has his own two weaknesses: Manhattan’s Alfred E. Smith is an Irish Catholic, two objects of massive Anglo-Saxon Protestant prejudice, and is, more importantly, seeking the White House, leaving open a possible gap for Ted to exploit.
But on January 17, 1924, Roosevelt’s world starts exploding when his brother Archie phones from New York to say, “Of course, I may be wrong, but I’m afraid there’s been dirty work at the crossroads with this oil business. I don’t want to talk on the phone. When are you coming to New York?”
Ted heads home that night, and discovers that Archie knows of a $68,000 check given by Sinclair Oil men to Interior Secretary Albert Fall in payment for the lucrative oil leases. Should Archie volunteer his testimony? Thirty years old and war-disabled, Archie is in trouble. So, by family connection, is Ted. But they agree that Archie must tell all that he knows, even though it’s hearsay.
Archie spills the beans, and Congress summons the oil man, G.D. Wahlberg, who vanishes. Ted, remembering that his father set up the Bureau of Investigation, calls their director, which produces Wahlberg. Trembling and shaking, Wahlberg tells the committee that Sinclair Oil did not give Fall $68,000, but “six or eight cows and bulls.” That tale does not survive the national roar of laughter, but the whole sordid Teapot Dome scandal starts unraveling, and among those under the light is Ted himself, for his shares and his wife’s shares in Sinclair Oil. Furious, Ted writes a forthright statement that gives his complete history of his family’s history with the oil company. That ends the investigation of the Roosevelts, and an exonerated Ted launches his gubernatorial bid.
Smith runs for both re-election as governor and president, and has an old friend nominate him at the Democratic National Convention in the old Madison Square Garden: Franklin D. Roosevelt, making his first major political appearance after being stricken with polio.
Roosevelt has spent much of 1923 struggling to cope with his paralysis, teaching his children to swim, working on his stamp collection (mostly inexpensive stamps from Asia), cataloguing his books, and somehow not appearing downcast. He whirls about Hyde Park in a tiny wheelchair, small enough to negotiate the old mansion’s narrow corridors, and uses a pulls a rope on a dumbwaiter converted into an elevator to reach the second floor. His staff servants figure out ways to move him from wheelchair to dinner-table chair and back with great dexterity, and carry him when necessary. FDR’s political adviser, Louis Howe, makes sure nobody outside of the immediate family ever sees Roosevelt being carried.
History is often made through strange connections. In Warm Springs, Georgia, a boy named Louis Joseph, stricken with polio, regains some use of his limbs from swimming in the water of a dilapidated hotel. A New York banker named George Foster Peabody buys the hotel, leases it to a friend, Tom Loyless, a former newspaper editor, to run, and Peabody mentions his acquisition to FDR, who is intrigued by the Joseph case. Told that a year after swimming in the pool’s water, the boy is walking with canes, FDR heads straight to the hotel to see the miracle for himself.
The pool is fed by a subterranean spring, which gives it a constant temperature of 88F, enabling patients to stay in it for vast amounts of time without being exhausted. FDR goes there for the first time in August 1921, and feels life in his toes. He keeps returning, and buys the entire property: hotel, cottages, pools, and all, along with 1,200 acres of land, making it a non-profit corporation where polio victims of all ages, ethnicities, and income levels can get treatment.
Polio has a titanic effect on Roosevelt. All of his wealth and privilege can not help him rise from a chair, squat on the grass, or even climb a stair more than two inches high. He cannot dress or undress himself completely, getting in and out of trains and cars is a massive ordeal, and to walk, he has to wear heavy, painful iron braces, and balance his weight on an aide – and still maintain a smile for the cameras and audience. Standing on lecterns, he has to prop himself up on it perfectly, resulting in the permanent newsreel image of a grim expression for the first few moments, followed by the dazzling smile.
Nor can he be left completely alone – there always has to be a valet or aide close at hand, since Roosevelt cannot even rise from a chair to greet a visitor or from a bed. His childhood fear of fire, brought on by seeing a close relative in flames from an accident, is worsened. And he refuses to even discuss his favorite sport – golf.
Yet amazingly, FDR never complains publicly and rarely privately about his paralysis. He never lets anyone be sorry for him or show pity, snapping “No sob stuff!” to those who do.
Incredibly, despite the continued hostility of vast segments of the media, opposing politicians, and later whole foreign nations, Roosevelt’s paralysis is treated with silence, if not respect. Photographs of FDR usually show him sitting or from the waist up. News stories don’t mention his disability. The only films that show FDR walking are family home movies. Cartoonists don’t stress Roosevelt’s lameness – many depict him standing and walking. Even foreign leaders don’t know that Roosevelt is disabled. While gossip and slander accuses FDR of suffering from all kinds of illnesses, including syphilis, the true nature of his battle with polio and inability to move his legs goes undiscussed, a baffling concept in the prejudice-laden 1930s and in the Internet-dominated 2000s.
Just as importantly, from the ordeal of polio and from mixing with a variety of fellow sufferers, FDR develops something he had lacked before: an empathy for humanity, concern with their condition and pain, replacing his aristocratic hauteur with warmth and compassion.
Also changed by the ordeal is FDR’s wife Eleanor, who is no longer the cuckolded wife of a politician, but the primary care-giver of a disabled person. She has to help heal her husband, care for his basic needs, and battle for him.
The first fight comes with FDR’s powerful and domineering mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, whose response to her son’s condition is the same as most Victorians: to shut the cripple away in the attic. She demands that FDR give up his political ambitions and retire to Hyde Park, simply to live as the estate’s squire. Eleanor is infuriated by this demand. She will absolutely not live under the imperious thumb of her mother-in-law, nor will she let her husband give up his dreams and become a useless appendage. Giving up politics would only kill him more quickly.
Eleanor wins this first battle of wills, and in doing so, discovers a personal fire and power that she never knew she had. As her husband recovers slowly, rebuilding his political career, Eleanor acts as his eyes and ears, encouraged by FDR’s political guru, Louis McHenry Howe. In 1922, when FDR backs Al Smith’s gubernatorial bid against William Randolph Hearst, Eleanor works for Smith in Dutchess County, learning how politics really work. The Republicans carry the county – as usual – but only by 1,000 votes. Eleanor tells her friends that from experience, she sees that the Democratic Party “seems to be more concerned with the welfare and interests of the people at large, and less with the growth of big business interests.” That settles it: she’s now a lifelong liberal. She gets involved with the Trade Union League and FDR’s drive to put Smith in the White House.
FDR’s support of Smith in 1922 is critical: Roosevelt believes that only Smith can keep the volatile and erratic Hearst out of the State House and the White House, and Smith wins easily. Smith asks FDR to run for U.S. Senator, but Roosevelt isn’t ready yet. But both Roosevelts call upon Smith to run for president, and Smith asks FDR to serve as his campaign manager. Roosevelt of Hyde Park accepts, irritating the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay.
On June 26, 1924, FDR, struggling to his feet on his braces, delivers his “Happy Warrior of the political battlefield” speech for Smith at the convention, which blows the lid off the old building, but the nomination deadlocks between Smith and Klan-backed William Gibbs MacAdoo for hundreds of ballots. Among those impressed by Roosevelt’s rhetoric is Missouri political boss and Jackson County delegate Tom Pendergast, who says that had FDR been able to physically run, he would have been the convention’s choice. “He is the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met,” Pendergast says.
William Jennings Bryan tries to speak, and is rudely shouted down. The colorless John W. Davis wins the nomination and loses to the equally colorless Calvin Coolidge, but FDR’s strength makes him again a national figure.
Meanwhile, Smith and the other Roosevelt face off in the gubernatorial race, and both Roosevelt wives, both named Eleanor, hit the campaign trail. However, Franklin’s wife makes speeches, while Theodore’s wife mostly waves to crowds. But at one appearance on Long Island, Ted’s Eleanor sees that robed Ku Klux Klansmen are handing out leaflets supporting Ted’s election. The Klan opposes the Irish Catholic Smith. Eleanor shows the leaflet to Ted, and he drops his usual stump speech to denounce the Klan, saying, “At this time intolerance in many forms is stirring in this country. The word ‘Americanism’ is soiled when used by a group furthering intolerance. Such a group is the Ku Klux Klan.” Ted proves his point on October 28, when he stumps for votes and commemorates his father’s birthday at Mother Zion Church in Harlem, a Manhattan neighborhood that is rapidly filling up with African-Americans, drawn north by industrial jobs and fewer racial barriers.
Ted carries all but six of New York’s counties, but five of them are in New York City, so Roosevelt loses to Smith by 108,589 votes. (Smith: 1,627,111, Roosevelt: 1,518,522)
Unemployed and beaten, Ted decides to hit the road – he takes his brother Kermit on an expedition to the Himalayan Mountains for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History to find a species of sheep that answers to the Latin name of “Ovis Poli” but less formally as “Marco Polo’s sheep.” The brothers head for Asia in May 1925.
Also facing political defeat in 1924 is Jackson County Presiding Judge Harry S. Truman, who faces re-election. The Jackson County Democratic Party is divided between Joe Shannon’s “Rabbits” and Tom Pendergast’s “Goats.” Shannon allies with the Klan to defeat Truman, even though Shannon is a Catholic. When Truman wins the primary by 1,000 votes, Shannon bolts the Democratic Party and delivers his backers and the Klan to the Republicans. Truman hits the campaign trail, backed by an endorsement from the Kansas City Star, and his record of erasing the county’s deficit and replacing it with a $250,000 budget surplus. When the Klan declares itself “unalterably opposed” to Truman, the candidate sees that as a threat to kill him. Truman drives out to a big outdoor Klan rally at Summit, to confront 1,000 Klansmen, including people he knows.
There, Truman berates the racists (who are not wearing their sheets). He says later that he tells them that “anybody who has to work behind a sheet is off the beam and my partner in the haberdashery business, Eddie Jacobson, told me that the fellow who was organizing the Ku Klux Klan had to be a Jew because nobody but a Jew could sell a $1.95-cent nightgown for $16. That’s what it cost to get into the Klan.” Jacobson is a Jew.
With that, Truman heads back to Independence, and passes by two carloads of fellow Democrats heading out with shotguns and baseball bats, to protect him. Truman tells the men to turn around and go back. “You don’t have to use guns. Those guys are scared when they don’t have their sheets on,” Truman says.
But the Klan is more powerful at the ballot box than at the rally. Truman loses the election. The day after the vote, Truman spots a friend, Henry Chiles, who worked hard with the Rabbits for Rummel. Truman crosses the street to shake hands and say there should be no hard feelings. Chiles expresses regret at helping to defeat Harry, saying he feels ashamed of himself.
Put that out of your mind, Harry says. “You did what your gang told you and I did what my gang told me.” That’s the way it is in politics.
Out of office, Truman sells memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club on commission, at $5 for every new member he signs, clearing $5,000. Meanwhile, Ralph Truman writes his cousin Harry, saying that Harry will be re-elected presiding judge in two years.
Also somewhat out of the public eye is Britain’s Prince Albert, second in line to the throne and overshadowed by his dashing, flamboyant older brother, Prince Edward. Yet Albert and his wife, now Princess Elizabeth, continue to support his favorite charities: his wedding guests include 30 boys from the Industrial Welfare Society and slices of cake identical to his wedding cake go to poor children throughout Britain.
The Duke and Duchess of York move into the White Lodge in Richmond Park after the April 26, 1923, wedding, and ask for furniture as wedding presents. The British Empire responds, with gusto: the Worshipful Company of Patternmakers provides a tallboy in English oak with shelves and drawers packed with rubber boots, shoes, and galoshes, while the Metropolitan Police offers a dinner service. The Prince of Wales gives them a fur wrap and a “luxurious motor car.”
Both Albert and Elizabeth find the wedding an ordeal due to its public nature, aware that they are the “second-best” couple.
Backed by warm letters from King George V – he is pleased with Albert’s sensible nature, splendid wife, and willingness to listen to sensible advice – the Yorks honeymoon in Britain, and settle down to a life of shooting, fishing, and reading. Unlike his brother Edward, Albert is a voracious reader.
Also finding little to do as 1924 opens is Winston Churchill, out of Parliament for the first time in decades. With Ramsay MacDonald and the first Labour government in power, the Liberals move to support the Scot, and Churchill resigns from the Liberal Party. The National Liberal Club reacts by placing his portrait back in the basement.
Five weeks after MacDonald kisses hands in Buckingham Palace, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, the press barons, offer to back Churchill if he stands for election as the Conservative candidate for the Westminster district, one of London’s poshest neighborhoods. Buildings in this neighborhood include Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament, Pall Mall, and even Covent Garden. The Conservative Party, however, won’t take Churchill back, so he stands (runs in America) for election as an “independent anti-Socialist.” Sir Philip Sassoon writes, “I am so glad you are standing. You are bound to get in.” Leo Amery is harsher: “the menace of Socialism is not to be fought by negatives, however brilliantly phrased.” Labour blasts Churchill for his militarism and anti-Bolshevism.
Nevertheless, Churchill stands – or runs – with his usual energy, delighting large crowds at his speeches. His cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, raps on doors with his gold-headed walking stick in support, young aide Brendan Bracken presses flesh in nightclubs and brokers’ offices, and soon Churchill has support from peers, boxers, courtiers, businessmen, even girl performers at the Gaiety Theater. Churchill polls 8,114 votes on Election Day. His Tory opponent polls 8,187. By 73 votes, Churchill has lost his third straight election. He walks slowly out of the election hall, head down.
Aged 50, Churchill is very much on the outside. Ramsay MacDonald leads the slumping British nation, and the “Dear Vicar,” Stanley Baldwin, leads the Conservative Party. Churchill has no role to play, even though he remains a prominent speaker: assailing the French for occupying the Ruhr, the Harding administration for demanding war debt money, and leading a criminal libel action against Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover. Lord Douglas accuses Churchill of issuing a false communiqué about the Battle of Jutland, so that he could benefit “Jewish financiers.” It takes the jury eight minutes to decide in Churchill’s favor, and Douglas gets six months in jail.
Churchill also has to cope with personal tragedy: the death of his two-year-old daughter Marigold on August 25, 1921. “We have suffered a very heavy and painful loss,” he writes Lord Crewe. “It also seems so pitiful that this little life should have been extinguished just when it was so beautiful and so happy – just when it was beginning.” Churchill regards the loss as a gaping wound. His wife Clementine never speaks of the lost child for the rest of her life. The youngest daughter, Mary, born in autumn of 1922, grows up puzzled by the identity of a little girl in a framed photograph on her mother’s dressing table.
Defeated in politics, wounded in life, Churchill turns to writing to fill the gap, firing off 33 articles for 11 newspapers and magazines in two years, earning £13,200. He even turns a few quid from his artwork, writing an article for Strand magazine on “Painting as a Pastime.” When not batting out articles like “My Dramatic Days with the Kaiser,” “The Danger Ahead in Europe,” “Should Strategists Veto the Channel Tunnel,” and “If We Could Look Into the Future,” Churchill soldiers on with his memoirs of the Great War, pocketing a £9,000 advance for it from his British publisher, and £5,000 from Scribner’s in America. His deadline is December 31, 1922, for the first installment, and the first volume of “The World Crisis” appears on time, and the book is a smash. British editions alone sell 80,551 copies, and Churchill earns 30 percent royalties, £58,846. He uses the money to purchase a new home for his family in Kent, a red brick mansion dating back to Henry VII, named Chartwell, for its view. Finding that the ancient mansion is rotting, he personally goes to work to rebuild the battered, leaking structure, even bringing in his Scotland Yard bodyguard, Detective W.H. Thompson, to lay bricks. Churchill spends days laying bricks and dictating his books, laying 200 bricks and writing 2,000 words a day. James F. Lane, a big wheel in the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, reacts by sending Churchill a union card. The executive committee, remembering Churchill’s role in cops roughing up strikers at Tonypandy in Wales before the Great War, rules that Churchill is ineligible. He frames the certificate anyway.
With Chartwell and Churchill’s finances restored, he has time to play host to his friends, which include a bowler-hatted vegetarian physicist named Frederick Lindemann, known to his pals as “The Prof.”
While Churchill writes and raises pigs in Chartwell, the Labour-Liberal alliance crumples, and Labour loses a vote of confidence in mid-1924. At issue is a letter allegedly written by Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Third Communist International, calling on British socialists to organize armed rebellion. Labour says the letter is a fake, but in the October General Election, the Conservatives gain 419 seats, Labour 151, and the Liberals a mere 40. Among the winning Conservatives is Churchill, who stands for the seat from Epping, a seat he will hold (through its name and boundary change to Woodford in 1945) for the rest of his public life. On paper, Churchill stands as a “Constitutionalist,” but the Tories adopt him anyway. With 60 percent of the vote, Churchill sails back into Westminster, and more importantly, back into Stanley Baldwin’s Cabinet, appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his father’s old post. Indeed, Churchill still has Lord Randolph Churchill’s robes of office. Churchill pledges loyalty to Baldwin, saying “You have done more for me than Lloyd George ever did.”
Other future British leaders are also hard at work. Major Frederick “Tim” Pile is serving two years as a liaison with the Royal Air Force, enjoying it immensely. Lt. Lord Louis Mountbatten, in charge of the forecastle division, a 15-inch gun, and 160 men on HMS Revenge, is gaining popularity with the lower deck. In August 1924, he moves on to the signals school at Portsmouth and the naval college at Greenwich, zooming around London in his personal Rolls-Royce, which has its back seat fitted with a collapsible seat to enable him to sleep between classes and dancing. Captain Andrew Cunningham has no time for dancing, as he commands the 1st Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean and home waters. In October 1924, he takes command of Port Edgar, the destroyer base on the south side of the Firth of Forth, near his Edinburgh home. Sub-Lieutenant G.W.G. “Shrimp” Simpson serves on L-class submarines in the Fourth Flotilla, based in Hong Kong. James Fownes Somerville is Captain of the battleship HMS Benbow, and wears himself into exhaustion to keep the ship at high efficiency. Even so, he finds time to provide hospitality to Major Harold Alexander, second-in-command of the 1st Irish Guards, whose men are in Constantinople until October 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne confirms Turkey’s independence and neutralizes the Dardanelles. Alexander and the Irish Guards head for Gibraltar for six months, then back to London.
That same month, the strain of commanding Benbow beaches Somerville with malaria, and his life is in danger. After four months, Somerville is able to return to his battleship. Fortunately, he has a superb executive officer in Cdr. Bertram Ramsay. At the end of 1924, Somerville heads home to London to take over as Director of the Signal Division of the Admiralty.
Major Bernard Law Montgomery, on the staff of the 49th West Riding Infantry Division of the Territorial Army, at York, is a busy man in 1923 and 1924, writing new, clear training manuals for his battalions, trading letters with Captain Basil Liddell Hart, the tank theorist, on training manuals. Liddell Hart chides Montgomery for not covering “exploitation” enough. However, Montgomery does write that the proper way to fight a war is with coordinated mobile columns, equipped with radio. Working with the part-time soldiers of the Territorials, Montgomery gains a great deal of respect for their energy and drive. On January 7, 1925, he rejoins the 1st Warwicks as a company commander.
Another officer developing new ideas on warfare is Major Richard O’Connor, serving in the Experimental Brigade from 1921 to 1924. On the Salisbury Plain, the brigade’s tanks, infantry and artillery run exercises, sometimes with aircraft. In 1924, O’Connor becomes second-in-command of the 1st Cameronians, based at Aldershot.
Also at Aldershot is Capt. Brian Horrocks of the 1st Middlesex. In 1924, he is a member of the British Pentathlon team at the Olympic Games in Paris, but does not come near winning a medal. He also finishes dead last a week later in the final of the army mile.
Some of Britain’s future leaders are honing their skills at Camberley Staff College: Arthur Percival, Montague Stopford, Michael Gambier-Parry, Willoughby Norrie, and a quiet Canadian, Harry Crerar. The instructors include Alan Brooke, Ronald Adam, Philip Neame, and “Boney” Fuller.
In Egypt, the RAF’s Keith Park refuses to let physical exhaustion stop him from leading his planes of 47 Squadron on patrols over Egypt after the Egyptian Army’s Sirdar, Sir Lee Stack, is murdered in Cairo on November 19, 1924, as part of uprisings at the time. The British planes’ presence prevents further bloodshed.
In 1924, Canada has a population of 9 million people, and every English school reader in the country contains the motto: “One King, One Country.” Canada might say it has two kings, though, with George VI on the throne and Mackenzie King as Prime Minister, a sort, uninspiring man with a high-pitched voice, obsession with spiritualism and contacting the shade of his dead mother, an ability to rule by consensus, and tightness with the Canadian dollar. As part of his budget cuts, King reduces army pay by 50 cents per day.
Canada’s Army Permanent Force consists of 3,611 men and 756 horses, and its men will earn $1.20 per day under the cuts (soldiers with six years service earn $1.50 plus uniforms, room, and board). Faced with these reductions, soldiers are given the option: stay in with the cuts or quit the Army. In some outfits, 90 percent of the men below the rank of corporal leave the forces.
Officers, including the newly-commissioned Harry Foster, do little better. Foster, fresh out of the Royal Military College, gets assigned to one of the nation’s oldest regiments, Lord Strathcona’s Horse. Technically, it’s not even a Canadian outfit – it was created in 1900 by Lord Strathcona, who paid to raise, equip, and send a mounted unit from Western Canada to fight in the Boer War, so it was founded as a British army regiment recruited in Canada and paid for by a very generous Canadian citizen.
But in 1924 it is a Canadian Army unit, whose honors include two Victoria Crosses, 15 Distinguished Service Orders, and 21 Military Crosses, earned in Flanders. On July 2, 1924, Foster joins the regiment at its B Squadron base on the Sarcee Plain outside Calgary. The city itself is a clapboard Prairie town of fake storefronts, Chinese laundries, dusty unpaved streets that turn to glue in the rain, home to 66,000 people.
Foster goes there by train and finds the journey “Hour after hour of flat pancake yellow land with afternoon temperatures close to a hundred under the blazing sun.” When he reaches Calgary, he phones the ADC to ask about transport and is told, “Ah, yes, Foster. You’re the RMC chappie, aren’t you. Well we don’t provide transport. If both your legs are functioning I suggest you try using them.” Instead he hails a taxicab for his large kitbag and tin trunk.
The regiment is based in an armory, its horses in a barracks a mile away hard by the city dump, a row of tumbledown sheds roofed with rusty tin. Foster’s new CO, Lt. Col. Lionel Page, DSO and two bars, tells Foster that “Those RMC instructors from the Horse Artillery turn out riders that look like clothespegs instead of cavalrymen. Can’t have that. Cock Roberts will straighten you out.”
Next day, Foster reports to Sergeant-Major “Cock” Roberts, MC, a Great War captain who has accepted a bust down to sergeant-major to stay in uniform. Roberts is a sample of a typical military specimen, the harsh NCO assigned to properly train his boss. He greets Foster by saying, “As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another dumb farm recruit who’ll ride his horse like a jackass until he’s properly trained by me, sir!”
Like most young officers, Foster’s early days with the regiment are spent in considerable discomfort, caring for his horse with curry comb, saddle soap, and harness oil, then training himself and the horse to function under battle conditions.
He also spends considerable time in debt: the army only pays for saddle, harness, and stabling. He has to pay for his own mount, and Target, an enormous black stallion, costs Foster $50, nearly a month’s pay. So do the incredible costs officers must pay in the inter-war British Commonwealth and American armies, for mess, uniforms, and tailoring. A Canadian Army directive reads, “It is preferable that subalterns should have some form of private means upon which to draw as supplement to their army pay.” Most do. Those who don’t struggle to marry money, which only adds to expenses, as married officers are soon expected to entertain, if only to impress their superiors. American officers live in genteel poverty, renting Purdey shotguns for hunting and silver service sets from department stores for dinners – the stores soon stop doing so when the sets come back scratched and damaged.
Worse, despite the regiment’s achievements in France, Lord Strathcona’s Horse and its men are hardly the heroes of Calgary. Residents regard them as being too stupid or lazy to find work in the “real” world. After all, while cavalrymen only spend three hours in the saddle every day, local cowboys are on horse 12 hours a day, maneuvering cattle, and not wearing toy-soldier uniforms.
Foster, however, has little time to entertain, as he has to work to impress “Cock” Roberts, who snarls for weeks: “Bend that back! Not that way! You look like a bullfrog trying to hump a bass drum, sir!” As long as Roberts finishes every sentence with the word “Sir,” neither Foster nor any other officer in the British Empire can accuse the sergeant-major of insolence.
In September, after two hours of hard riding under Roberts’ roaring, Foster rides back to the stables, and Roberts strolls over. Foster stiffens, awaiting another rebuke. Instead, Roberts salutes and smiles. Foster returns the salute, dumbfounded. Roberts says, “You’ll do, Lieutenant. Glad to have you with the regiment.” It’s the first time Roberts has called Foster something other than “sir,” and Foster realizes he’s made it.
