THE LAST WEEK - THE ROAD TO WAR
Chapter 9 - Part 1
August 30, 1939

Hitler also tells his colleagues, "In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly into their minds, they will still doubt and waver and still continue to think that there may be some other explanation."

The speeches and lies work. Audience members emerge from his mesmerizing oratory ready to march. "His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth," one writer says.

Another German who attends a 1922 Hitler speech is a University of Munich history student, war veteran, barnstormer, and occasional aviation business representative named Hermann Goering. Disgusted by seeing his fellow former officers hungry and homeless, Goering attends a political meeting at the Koniggplatz. The various parties take turns trying out their rhetoric, but Goering is not impressed. When the trench-coated Hitler takes the stand, he rages against the French and urges Germans use bayonets to overturn Versailles.

"That´s the party for me!" Goering shouts. "Down with the Treaty of Versailles, damn it! That´s my meat!" Goering hustles over to the Nazi Party offices to fill out a membership application. When the clerks see it, the forms rocket up to Hitler, and so does Goering.

"The war ace with the Pour le Merite! Excellent propaganda!" Hitler howls, and invites Goering in for a private chat. Hitler tells Goering that he seeks to eliminate the "November criminals" from German life, build a new and proud Germany, and tear up Versailles to regain the Reich´s place in the world.

Goering is delighted. "I told him that I myself to the fullest extent, and all I was and possessed, were completely at his disposal," Goering says later.

Hitler puts Goering in charge of military training for the SA. Goering turns to the task with relish, turning the clumps of farm workers, dockworkers, thugs, and laborers into a disciplined force. He puts them on parade, makes them march in step, and when the Brownshirts stamp through the streets of Munich, everyone from the lowest street sweeper to the highest officials are impressed with their tight discipline. So is Hitler. So is Rohm. And so is Mathilde Kemnitz, mistress to Ludendorff himself, who convinces the First Quartermaster-General that the Nazis are the wave of the future, fostering his anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.

Goering reminds his stormtroopers that they are all brothers. They swear an oath, "I promise that I will see in every member of the Sturmabteilung without thought of class, occupation, wealth, or poverty, only my brother and true comrade, with whom I feel myself bound in joy and sorrow."

Goering also shows no compunction about selling the Nazi line to his well-connected industrial pals or about beating Nazi enemies in Munich streets.

Next up to join the Nazis is a colorless, black-browed, Egyptian-born wholesaler´s son, also attending the University of Munich. Rudolf Hess is a former Freikorps member, a Thule Society member, and has won a prize for his essay, "How must the man be constituted who will lead Germany back to her old heights?" Hess finds the man in Hitler.

Bashful and unambitious, rarely smiling, Hess wins Hitler´s respect at a beerhall fracas, and becomes Hitler´s secretary, putting Hitler´s articles and speeches into some level of coherence. Doglike in his devotion, Hess acts as Hitler´s passive slave. Hess also introduces his master to the theory of "Lebensraum."

Another new follower is the stocky, bullish, Julius Streicher, who roams Munich streets flaunting a dog whip, which he sometimes uses to beat his opponents. When not spewing out pornographic anti-Semitic pamphlets, Streicher spews out vile language at public rallies. In 1922, Streicher forms the Nuremberg branch of the Nazi Party, which doubles the Party´s membership overnight. In 1923, he starts publishing Der StÜrmer, a newspaper dedicated to attacking Jews. It does so in the most vulgar and pornographic terms – sexual innuendo, racist caricatures, accusations of ritual murder, and stories of Jewish men seducing innocent German girls. It´s too much for even many Nazi stalwarts, who avoid reading Der StÜrmer, but Hitler devours it cover to cover. Indeed, Hitler, told about Streicher´s venomous attacks, retorts that Der StÜrmer "idealizes the Jew. The Jew is baser, fiercer, more diabolical than Streicher depicted him."

So do some of Hitler´s followers. Streicher´s material is harsher than Hitler´s speeches. His magazine repeats and expands many lurid anti-Semitic stories that are still used, in recycled form, by anti-Semites to this day.

On October 28, 1922, Benito Mussolini takes power in Italy. Four days later, Hitler is introduced at a speech with the following: "Germany´s Mussolini is called Hitler!"

In November, US Army Captain Truman Smith, the assistant military attaché, journeys to Munich to report to the US State Department on the new party: "A remarkable sight indeed. Twelve hundred of the toughest roughnecks I have ever seen in my life pass in review before Hitler at the goosestep under the old Reichflag wearing red armbands with Swastikas. Hitler, following the review, makes a speech…then shouts ´Death to the Jews.´ There was frantic cheering. I never saw such a sight in my life."

His view of Hitler: "A marvelous demagogue. I have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man. His power over the mob must be immense." Hitler says his party is a "union of Hand and Brain workers to oppose Marxism." The present abuses of capital must be destroyed if Bolshevism is to be defeated, and the parliamentary system must go. "Only a dictatorship can bring Germany to its feet."

The State Department reads the report and files it away. America and Britain are not concerned with political chaos in Germany. The British are worried about Turkish troops trying to re-claim the Dardanelles. When Secretary of War Winston Churchill writes Canada´s new Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, to ask for Canadian troops, King irritates London (both England and Ontario) by declining. King fears angry reaction in Quebec and the evaporation of his Liberal backers. The only use Canada has for its Army is to break coal strikes in Nova Scotia, mounting machine-guns in front of strikers. One young Canadian soldier misses this action. Harry Foster enters the Royal Military College in Kingston on September 4, 1922, and tells the commandant, Lt. Gen. A.C. Macdonell, that his ambition is to become a general. Macdonell advises Foster: "In that case, young man, make sure that you become a good one! Don´t become an idler. We have quite enough idlers and rascals in the service already. Bear that in mind."

South of the 49th Parallel, other officers are trying to advance their military careers in a U.S. Army and Navy that is shrinking in size. By 1922, the U.S. Army ranks 17th among nations with standing armies. The Tank Corps has been disbanded. In October 1920, Patton leaves his tank brigade, which is being cut down to a company of tanks in mothballs, busted from wartime colonel´s eagles to his peacetime rank of captain, to return to command the 3rd Cavalry Regiment´s 3rd Squadron at Fort Myer. While most of the Army lazes in peacetime routines of polo and politicking for promotions, Patton keeps his cavalrymen in the saddle on field maneuvers or at their desks enduring lectures. In one month alone, he schedules 22 lectures and delivers 16 of them personally.

In March 1921, Patton personally escorts President-Elect Warren G. Harding´s limousine to the inauguration. That November 11, he serves at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington. The ceremony is followed by the opening of the Washington Naval Treaty negotiations, which mark a major step in Japan´s road to Pearl Harbor.

The treaty negotiations are the SALT talks of their day, in an age where battleships and their armament are regarded as the final arbiter of national survival with the same awe and fear generated by nuclear weapons 60 years later. The three chief participants at the conference are Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all naval powers of the first order, all seeking to advance or retain the advantages they have fought to hold or gain in the Great War. Just as importantly, the three major powers seek to restore order to an increasingly fractious Asian continent, where Japan is rapidly turning from ally of democracy to aggressor.

Japan has gained Germany´s Pacific territories from Versailles. Now the Mikado´s dour troops and their long Arisaka rifles are holding China´s Shantung Peninsula, formerly a German colony, and are demanding it as part of their victor´s booty. More Japanese troops have intervened against the Bolsheviks in Siberia, trying to turn the resource-rich province into a Japanese vassal state. And Japan is laying down whole classes of new warships…eight sleek cruisers, equipped with torpedo tubes; immense battleships bearing the proud names Akagi, Amagi, Tosa, and Kaga; and something new in warfare, an aircraft carrier named Hosho, first of its breed built from the keel up.

However, for one brief moment in Japan´s history, liberal democrats control Tokyo´s affairs. In the wake of the Great War, democracy is a popular idea around the world, and Prime Minister Kei Hara´s government is eager to establish Japan as an enlightened nation. More importantly, Japan is still paying off the immense costs of the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. A third of the budget is going to the Navy´s new ships. Cutting that budget may cut debts. His instructions to Navy Minister Tomosaburo Kato are to try and fight for naval equality, but if necessary, accept the 5:5:3 ratio being proposed by the Anglo-Americans. The Navy Minister is happy to support this position, believing that Japan only needs a Navy to protect her possessions. He leads the "Treaty" faction in the Navy, which is opposed by Admiral Kanji Kato, head of the "Fleet" faction, which supports a large Navy.

This faction is in turn supported by nationalist parties and the major business cartels, including Mitsubishi and Matsui, whose shipyards stand to reap great profits from construction and maintenance contracts that would result. It is ironic that the two opponents are both named Kato.

The "Treaty" Kato has its support, and among them is a young Navy Commander attending Harvard University, studying "English E," the class for foreign students, and the petroleum industry, an area that is revolutionizing warfare and economies. Isoroku Yamamoto, when not chasing women, playing bridge, and showing off his acrobatic prowess by standing on his head, is spending two years developing a greater understanding of the United States than most of his contemporaries. He reads and recommends to his pals Carl Sandburg´s biography of Lincoln. He visits Chicago and Detroit, seeing Henry Ford´s assembly lines and the advantages of mass production. He also saves up his gambling winnings and takes a trip down to Mexico to study that nation´s growing oil industry and fields, going across the United States on all these trips by bus, train, or hitchhiking, seeing the limitless nature of America´s resources and the nation´s vast energy.

In Mexico, Yamamoto stays in cheap hotels, stretching out his money by living on bread and bananas, studying the oil fields, while being studied in turn by Mexican police. The Mexicans tell the Japanese Foreign Ministry that one of their citizens is behaving strangely in Mexico. The Japanese Embassy in Washington tells the amazed Mexicans that this tramp is one of the most promising young officers in the Imperial Navy and a top student at Harvard.

Most importantly, Yamamoto develops a keen understanding of the correlation of resources. Yamamoto has grown up in the Niigata district, one of the regions that produce Japan´s tiny supply of domestic oil. In Niigata, hundreds of tiny factories produce oil for lamps. In the United States and Mexico, Yamamoto sees scores of vast refineries, fleets of mass-produced cars, and the first of 12,000 "filling stations" that open in the United States that year. Possibly Yamamoto sees a major new gas station being opened in Fort Worth, offering motorists eight pumps and three different approaches from the street. And Shell of California is providing its attendants with free uniforms, paying for three launderings a week, while banning the acceptance of tips for providing air and water.

Yamamoto notes all these things, and concludes that Japan´s desperate shortage of oil, her lack of mass production facilities, and paucity of resources mean that a Japanese war with America can have only one outcome – utter defeat for Japan.

Whether these concerns fill the minds of the Japanese delegation to Washington is uncertain, but Japan´s diplomats put on their top hats and game faces to negotiate the best deal they can. Unfortunately for them, Oriental inscrutability is not enough. The Japanese face the impressive beard and formal bluntness of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. More importantly, the Japanese poker face is useless…the Americans can read their cards.

Since July 1919, Herbert O. Yardley and his State Department "Black Chamber," operating out of New York City, have been working on cracking Japan´s diplomatic codes. Success is achieved on January 12, 1920. When President Warren G. Harding delivers his opening address at the conference on November 12, 1921, the Americans have full possession of all of Japan´s plans. The Americans simply refuse all Japanese requests and hold out until the Japanese give up on December 11.

The treaty is a towering yet Pyrrhic victory for the British and Americans. The 5:5:3 ratio on capital ships is put in place. The major powers agree to a 10-year-holiday on the construction of new capital ships. Cruisers are limited to 10,000 tons and 8-inch guns. The Japanese extract a promise of no new American fortifications west of Pearl Harbor and no British fortifications at Singapore, promising to pull out of the Shantung Province. Also ended is the Anglo-Japanese alliance, once the core of Japan´s foreign policy, replaced by a Four-Power Pact that promises consultation instead of alliance.

The Americans and British are limited to 525,000 tons of capital ships each, Japan to 315,000, France and Italy to 175,000 apiece.

Hughes wins the public acclaim and credit for his firm stand. The Times of London writes, "Secretary Hughes sank in 35 minutes more ships than all of the admirals in the world have sunk in cycle of centuries."

Yardley is more acidic, saying, "Stud poker is not a very difficult game after you see your opponent´s card."

Nevertheless, the quick-drying ink on the Treaty of Washington sends scores of dreadnoughts to scrapyards. Akagi and Amagi are spared to be converted as aircraft carriers, but Kaga and Tosa are discarded, the latter being used as a target. Britain sends ships that fought at Jutland, with proud names like Ajax, Dreadnought, and Thunderer, to scrapheaps as well. Even HMS New Zealand, veteran of Jutland and pride of that nation, barely 10 years old, is sent to the breakers. The Royal Navy´s New Zealand Squadron hangs on to the battle-cruiser´s 5-inch guns, while Masonic lodges and Returned Servicemen´s Association posts across New Zealand gain fragments of the rest to decorate their dining halls. The Americans – Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt Jr. preparing the actual policies and orders – cancel battleships on the drawing boards and convert the battle-cruisers Lexington and Saratoga into aircraft carriers.

But in the long run, the victory for disarmament is only a cause of conflict. The Japanese "Fleet" faction is furious over their diplomats´ meek surrender. Nationalists rage that the government has surrendered honor to expediency. Prime Minister Hara doesn´t get a chance to regroup and explain his politics to his people: an angry trade unionist assassinates Hara.

The treaty is hard followed by the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which addresses China and Japan´s "21 Demands." This treaty declares that China must retain her territorial integrity and the principle of equal commercial opportunity for all nations, legally ending Japan´s dreams of conquering China.

The Americans add further insult in 1922, when the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Japanese immigrants to America cannot become American citizens by naturalization, and again in 1924, when Congress, in a wave of anti-immigration legislation, passes the Japanese Exclusion Bill, which slams the immigration door on Japan as hard as it does on Eastern and Southern Europe.

Japan´s economy takes a battering equal to the blows on her national morale: the price of rice is cut, so tenant farmers lose their income, adding poverty to the loss of prestige. Angry army officers complain in their messes and geisha houses about the politicians, and start talking of assassinating the lot and restoring order and achieving the goal of "Hakko Isshiu," all four corners of the world under the one roof of the Emperor.

Another Japanese visitor to America during the Washington Naval Conference is Imperial Naval Cadet Tameichi Hara, who graduated from the Eta Jima Academy 40th out of 150 students. He is assigned to one of Japan´s oldest warships, the cruiser Yagumo, a survivor of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. Jammed with young cadets on their first sea voyage, the ancient cruiser sets off on a round-the-world voyage. Within two days after leaving Yokosuka, the cadets are all seasick. The cruiser sails through the Panama Canal and reaches New York on October 29, 1921, four days after legendary American gunslinger and sportswriter Bat Masterson dies in The Bronx, suffering a heart attack at his typewriter.

Hara later wonders if the old ship´s highly public appearance in America is designed to convince the Yanks that the Imperial Japanese Navy is no threat. After all, the ship is a junkpile manned by cadets.

After touring New York and getting his picture taken at Wanamaker´s Department Store on East 9th Street, Hara heads back to sea, bound for England and France. There is no record of Hara attending the nationwide premiere at New York´s Rivoli Theater of Rudolph Valentino´s "The Sheik." However, the film is a smash hit, especially with women.

At sea, Hara´s shipmates suffer far less from seasickness, and Yagumo sails through the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans, returning to Japan on March 9, 1922. Hara returns to find all of Japan furious over the Washington Naval Treaty. The cadets are given their commissions as ensigns, and now told to think of the United States as their primary enemy. Hara himself is assigned to a slightly newer cruiser, the Kasuga, a veteran of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, and sails off in it to Vladivostok to support the Japanese intervention in Siberia. Hara finds Vladivostok, with its poverty, a miserable place. On March 30, 1923, while French troops guard seized coal bricks in the occupied Ruhr, Hara reports to the Yokosuka Naval Base to attend the fleet´s gunnery and torpedo school.

At the same time Yamamoto and Hara are taking their world tours, another Japanese officer is getting a good look at the West. Five-foot-four inches tall, and looking scrawny in his uniform, Hikeki Tojo is serving as Japan´s military attaché to Germany. Pushing 40, Tojo is impressed by how the Germans show fortitude and toughness in the face of humiliation and suffering. Above all, he admires the German officer corps, which is still standing tall in the face of defeat and Bolshevism.

After completing his tour in Germany, Tojo heads home in 1922 by way of the United States, seeing it mostly through the glass window of a railway train. His uncritical admiration of Germany is followed by a disdain for the United States, based on his superficial contact with them. Tojo finds the Americans undignified, unmilitary, and obsessed with material prosperity. He believes they lack the spiritual strength of the Japanese. The American betrayal of Japan in the negotiations that ended the Russo-Japanese War, their restriction on Japanese immigration to the United States, and the Washington Naval Treaty convince Tojo that America is now Japan´s prime enemy.

When he comes home, Tojo returns to serving as an instructor at the Military Staff College, working late in his office, or bringing the paperwork home at night. His only entertainment is his family, his only hobby work, his only weakness rice-cakes, his only habit compulsive smoking, going through 60 cigarettes a day, but only a few puffs on each, irritating his wife.

Another young Japanese man is undertaking a world voyage. Crown Prince Hirohito, heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne, newly betrothed to Princess Nagako, sails from Yokosuka on March 3, 1921, the first member of the Imperial Family to go abroad, on a six-month European tour. He later calls the English portion of the trip the happiest time of his life.

Sailing on the 12,000-ton battleship Katori, Hirohito finds a sense of release as he heads to Hong Kong. He spends his mornings studying French and English, his afternoons playing deck golf. When three stokers die at their posts in an accidental explosion, Hirohito attends the burial-at-sea ceremonies. Then he puts on his boiler suit and climbs down ladders to the engine room, covered in oil and perspiration in the 130F heat, to see the spot where the stokers were scalded to death, and give a pep talk to the crewmen.

In Cairo, Field Marshal Allenby´s garden party for Hirohito is wiped out by a sandstorm. At Malta, Hirohito attends the theater for the first time in his life, watching a touring Italian opera company perform Othello. At Gibraltar, Hirohito goes to the racetrack.

Despite the coal and rail strikes, Britain puts on the ceremonial for Hirohito. The Prince of Wales greets Hirohito at the pier and the Atlantic Fleet put on a Spithead Review. They attend banquets together, ride through London, and even play golf, getting along famously – even though Hirohito is too shy to try out his English on the Prince, and the Prince doesn´t even try to learn Japanese.

Hirohito is amazed that the heir to the throne of the greatest Empire in the world can go to nightclubs, drink champagne, play golf, wear civilian clothes, dance with pretty girls, and make jokes, without being surrounded by obsequious flunkies. Hirohito meets and impresses King George V and Lloyd George.

Hirohito´s visit to Britain is a success. He sees the Tower of London, the British Museum, and Oxford, and visits the Duke of Atholl in Scotland, whose bagpipers play Japanese music.

From Britain, Hirohito goes to France, where Marshal Petain shows the prince the Great War battlefields, including Verdun´s "Trench of Bayonets." Hirohito also watches an American theater company perform MacBeth at a benefit for war widows, visits Versailles, and even buys a ticket to take a ride on the Paris Metro.

From there it´s on to Amsterdam and its museums, then Rome to meet King Vittorio Emannuele, Pope Benedict XV, and even Czechoslovakian President Thomas Masaryk, who happens to be in town.

On the way out, he gives an interview to Wilfred Fleisher, a United Press newsman, expressing his regret that he can´t visit the United States on this trip. "I hope it will only be a deferred pleasure," he tells the American. "I know to what point justice and freedom are valued in America and that no efforts are ever spared by her people in the cause of humanity. I hope that America and Japan may always be found working hand in hand not only to our mutual benefit but to ensure lasting peace throughout the world."

Then back to Japan, where he convinces the Imperial Household staff to put a nine-hole golf course on the Imperial Palace grounds, which sets off a national craze for golfing in Japan that has continued to the present day.

He also tries to emulate the British and Westernize his style as Japan´s heir. He throws a party for his friends, in Western dress, that offers the Duke of Atholl´s Scotch, and jazz music on the record players. The attendees, mostly schoolmates, have a good time. The Imperial Household Ministry is infuriated, and the Crown Prince is warned: don´t do it again. He cuts his adoption of Western behavior down to golf and bacon-and-eggs breakfasts.

While the diplomats argue and offer fulsome toasts at Washington dinners, one of the American staff officers at the event is a busy fellow: Maj. Robert Eichelberger, a military intelligence officer, is aide to the Chinese delegation. He has to attend a formal ball almost every night. Eichelberger´s qualifications for this assignment are considerable: he has served in Siberia as operations officer for the ill-fated American adventure there, and seen the 120,000-Japanese Siberian force up close, and has also served as head of military intelligence for the Orient, setting up offices at Tientsin and Manila. At a White House party, Eichelberger feels doubts about the treaties, but is very relieved when the Japanese promise – and keep that promise – to withdraw their troops from Siberia.

Maj. George S. Patton plays a ferocious game of polo, learns to fly, steeplechases, writes poetry, and above all, reads books on war, scribbling marginal notes. While he studies wars of all sorts, recent or ancient, famous or obscure, he carefully studies the works of German generals, particularly form the Great War. He dislikes his former enemy, but admires the professionalism of their general staff.

In January 1923, Patton´s studying pays off. He is accepted to the Advanced Officers´ Course at the Cavalry School at Fort Riley.

Another American major is having a hard time in the 1920s. On January 2, 1921, Doud Dwight Eisenhower, barely three years old, dies of scarlet fever and meningitis, devastating his parents. Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower gloomily stares at the small red tricycle belonging to "Ikky" still sitting under the family Christmas tree. The body goes back to Denver, and neither Ike nor his wife Mamie can sleep. Both are scarred for life, concealing the edge of a nervous breakdown with public silence.

That summer, things get worse for Eisenhower. He is charged with defrauding the government by claiming a quarters allowance at Camp Meade for Ikky while the child was actually living with a spinster aunt in Iowa from May to September 1920. The money received totals $250.67.

Eisenhower insists that any wrongdoing is inadvertent, and testifies that he thought he was entitled to the allowance, and that it was an honest mistake. The Inspector General´s office is unimpressed and unforgiving, and the case drags through offices, with 26 separate endorsements. In December 1921, when Ike´s boss, Col. Samuel Rockenbach, writes an endorsement, saying that while Eisenhower broke the rules, "there was no intent to defraud the government." He verbally reprimands Ike, orders him to refund the money, and suggests the matter be dropped.

Not good enough for the Inspector General, Brig. Gen. Eli A. Helmick, demanding a reprimand from Washington and further action. The fact that Ike is a bereaved father cuts no ice with the IG. He repays the money, which is a strain on his finances, but his career seems doomed.

Ike doesn´t know it, but his career has already been strengthened by a 1919 meeting with Gen. Fox Conner, who was Pershing´s top operations officer in the Great War. Conner, impressed by Eisenhower´s abilities, wants Ike on his staff in Panama. Eisenhower and Mamie ride the Army transport St. Mihiel – which will serve in the Aleutian campaign 20 years later – to the Canal Zone, enduring a cramped cabin and double-decker bunk, displaced by generals on a junket. Eisenhower develops from that experience a lifetime loathing of officers who misuse their position.

In Panama, Ike comes under Conner´s command, friendship, and tutelage. On paper, the two have light duties…maintaining a network of jungle trails to enable the Puerto Rican enlisted men of the 42nd Infantry Regiment and their mules to move to defend the Culebra Cut against unspecified enemies. However, there are few threats to the Panama Canal in 1922, so Conner and Ike have plenty of time to ride horses around the jungle and talk about warfare.

The Eisenhowers have to put up with tropical heat, bats, immense cockroaches, mud slides, and endless rain. Mamie heads home in August 1922 to give birth to the family´s next child, John S. D. Eisenhower.

Conner discovers that Ike has little interest in military history. Conner remedies that. He insists that Eisenhower stop reading Western novels and pulp fiction and instead tackle some harder stuff, first historical novels about the Civil War, then more serious works: Clausewitz and the memoirs of Grant and Sherman. Ike, eager to please, wades through Clausewitz´s On War three times, and endures Conner´s grilling on Clausewitz´s theories.

Conner asks Ike tough questions about Gettysburg: what was on Lee´s mind? What did he know? What did he think he had to do? Why did he invade the North a second time? Why was Meade successful? Why did Lee choose to fight at Gettysburg? Soon Eisenhower is fascinated with military history, and studies the battles of Napoleon and Frederick the Great. For the first time, Eisenhower drops the rote-learning of West Point and contemplates the high level of strategy and tactics.

Under Conner, Eisenhower gets high marks on evaluations, but loses 15 pounds, as he starts suffering the abdominal pains that will be a lifetime´s struggle against Crohn´s Disease.

When not discussing the past, Conner and Eisenhower ponder the future of war. Conner argues successfully to Ike that the Treaty of Versailles is a disaster that will lead to a new war, and in that war, America will be fighting alongside allies, so they must learn to cooperate and work together. Conner also gives Ike an important piece of advice: "Take your job seriously, but not yourself," and that he should try for an assignment under Col. George Catlett Marshall.

Marshall himself is a busy man, serving Pershing. In 1920, the Iron Commander flirts with a presidential run, and Marshall begs his boss to stay out of partisan politics, citing the example of Grant. Pershing lets himself be open to a draft, but the Republican politicos pick Harding instead.

Meanwhile, Marshall, chain-smoking Chesterfields (Advertisements proclaim: "Not a cough in a carload!"), works on a major project: cutting infantry divisions from 28,000 men in two brigades of four regiments into a 17,000-man formation with three regiments and no brigade structures. Marshall believes that a triangular formation will be more flexible in battle and easier to supply…one regiment fixes the enemy in place with a "holding attack," the second attacks the enemy on the flank, while the reserve regiment pours through the created gap. This technique, the "holding attack," will become the key to American offensive planning.

On July 1, 1921, Pershing becomes Chief of Staff, wearing four stars, Marshall as his deputy chief of staff. Pershing wisely dumps much of his work on Marshall, heading off to Paris to visit his mistress. Marshall watches with annoyance as Congress cuts the Army. He has to study personnel files to see who will get demoted, cashiered, and promoted, and in doing so, develops his lists of officers that bear watching.

Marshall himself is stuck at the rank of major, promotion doomed by busted generals ahead of him, on a staff of 75. To avoid too many uniforms being seen in Washington, Pershing orders his men to wear civilian clothes while on duty.

In 1924, with Pershing facing retirement, Marshall finally makes lieutenant colonel, and asks for a troop command. He gets one: the 15th Infantry Regiment in Tientsin. On July 12, Marshall, his wife Lily, and Lily´s mother board the seemingly ubiquitous Army transport St. Mihiel in New York, headed for China.

Another U.S. Army officer is already there: Capt. Joseph Stilwell, also reduced in rank from his wartime role. Having asked for a job as far away from the War Department as possible, Stilwell has been ordered there, following a year of study in Chinese at the University of Berkeley. Promoted major in July 1920, he and his family sail for China on August 5, 1920, arriving in the Treaty Port of Chinwangtao, the point where the Great Wall meets the sea, on September 18. A 250-mile train ride brings the Stilwell family to Beijing, then still called Peking. His base is the American Legation in that city´s Legation Quarter, a small western enclave amid Peking´s Tartar City, where he and his three children (the fourth is born in 1921), live in a Chinese-style house with seven servants. Stilwell enjoys the flying kites and the story tellers entertaining children, the public executions – decapitations by a heavy sword – less so.

The latter are more common than he would like. China is in the middle of a battle between three warlords for power, which rages from 1920 to 1923. The Stilwell family has grandstand seats for night artillery duels, often only 10 miles from the capital. As America´s military attaché, Stilwell spends a lot of time observing the various Chinese forces on the move. Some of the Chinese soldiers are as young as 14, loaded down with all kinds of gear, including oiled papered umbrellas, alarm clocks, and hot water bottles. The Chinese troops all wear gray cotton uniforms…to tell their faction, one checks the colored armband fastened with a safety pin – for ease in changing sides.

Stilwell soon learns that battles in this civil war consist of soldiers standing around for a few moments, firing a few haphazard and unaimed shots, and then sitting down underneath the umbrellas. Victory is determined by pre-battle agreement or treachery. Alliances change with bewildering speed and regularity. Sun Yat-sen, the President of China, wants to unite China under the three principles of the Kuomintang program: Nationalism, Democracy, and the People´s Livelihood. The idea impresses American diplomats, but nobody else, inside or outside of China. So Sun signs a treaty with the Soviet Union in 1923, in which the Soviets give up all of Russia´s Tsarist-era claims and concessions in China, agrees to aid the government, which admits the Chinese Communist Party as collaborators.

Most of this has little impact on Stilwell. The Red Cross borrows him in 1921 to serve as Chief Engineer for a road-building project in Shansi, a Red Cross plan to provide local residents with work after a devastating famine in 1920. He spends four months building roads. He lives out in the field, working with village magistrates, contractors, bosses, and laborers, learning Chinese habits and characteristics. Stilwell´s background in engineering consists of his West Point classes, but he makes up for his lack of experience with determination. His men hack out an 82-mile road, miles of irrigation ditches, bridges, finishing the project by August. The job is so successful, the governor of Shensi, Feng Yu-hsiang, asks Stilwell to build roads in his province. This project falls on its face when Feng gets into a war with other warlords. Stilwell glumly heads back to Peking, suffering from a scorpion bite.

Stilwell´s next assignment is to report to Washington on the conditions of Manchuria, Siberia, Korea, and Japan. Manchuria is China´s wide frontier: filled with coal, iron, railways, grain, and water power, it´s also squeezed by Russia, China, and Japanese-occupied Korea. As the Japanese Army pulls out of Siberia, the battle-hardened divisions move into Manchuria, forming the Kwantung Army, ostensibly there to protect Japan´s commercial interests, but in reality becoming an autonomous force, a law unto themselves.

Stilwell tours the province and finds the Japanese everywhere. "The arrogant little bastards…all over town this a.m. in American cards, posting MPs and sticking out their guts…They need a kick in the slats in the worst way…They have systematically bothered and annoyed Americans about passports...and seem to go out of their way to make people despise and hate them."

From there, Stilwell goes to Japan and finds the nation beautiful, the people arrogant. He calls them: "Pale imitations of the Germans without the latters´ brains and ability. Patriotic, well-organized, brave, artistic, swellheaded and stupid."

Back in China, Stilwell hits the alleged roads again, hiking as much as 30 miles a day, reporting on the Yangtze provinces, seeing poverty-stricken and illiterate farmers, corrupt warlords, and Hunan´s official opium inspector, who is being paid 40 coppers a day by the 100 opium shops for protection. Roads are merely wheelbarrow tracks, and the various warlord armies seem mostly skilled at raping and robbing villagers. The people, Stilwell notes, "universally consider the U.S. the best friend of China. They nowhere evince the slightest interest in the politics of their own country and ask only to be left alone to make a living as best as they can."

Stilwell finally reaches Shanghai, with its two foreign enclaves, the French Concession and the International Concession, the latter of which is centered on the Yangtze River and the massive banks, hotels, and bars on the Bund. A conservative Protestant from Yonkers, New York, Stilwell finds Shanghai´s bars and prostitutes unpleasant.

A month later, Stilwell is in Outer Mongolia, three days by car from the rail terminus at Kalgan on the Great Wall. He finds Soviet troops dominating the scene, syphilis rampant, and thousands of lamas praying. Then he heads back to Peking. When the Stilwell family heads home on July 9, 1923, the 40-year-old captain is one of America´s most knowledgeable men on the subject of China. Unlike the many other foreigners who have lived and worked in the Middle Kingdom, he has expanded his experience of China far beyond the usual ring of Treaty Ports, Legation Quarters, missionary compounds, and bars and bordellos that are the usual habitat of Westerners in China.

Japan is the destination of another American officer, Capt. Ellis Zacharias, who gets his orders on October 4, 1920, to detach from Naval Intelligence and "proceed to Tokyo, Japan, for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of the Japanese language and the Japanese people." He reaches Japan in November 1920, reports to the Embassy, where he meets Capt. Kichisaburo Nomura, Capt. Osami Nagano, and another Japanese naval officer who is back from studying English at Princeton, Cdr. Tamon Yamaguchi, befriending all, and learning about the Japanese language, Army, and Navy.

Zacharias takes a house in Zushi, near Yokosuka, where he can hear the shellfire of Imperial Navy gunnery exercises, with two servants, and no phone…the only one in town is at the police station. The cops obediently take phone messages from Imperial Navy officers to Zacharias by bicycle.

Zacharias soon learns some of the harsh realities of Japanese politics: the Army and Navy are bitter rivals. The Navy is ocean-minded and internationalist, steeped in traditions learned from the British, but looking towards conquest of territory across distant oceans. On the other hand, the Army is narrow-minded, ignorant of foreign nations except as geographical obstacles, and interested in the conquest of territory across the nearby Asian continent.

But while Zacharias can and does learn about Japanese culture and politics, he is denied access to Japanese military developments. Foreigners are banned from her military bases, shipyards, and most importantly, her conquered islands in the Central Pacific, which are being fortified with bases, coast defense guns, and airfields.

Another young American officer is on the move in hot and distant climes, as Matthew Ridgway gets high-level assignments to Latin America, as one of the few Army officers who speaks Spanish fluently.

Another American officer is on the move, too, Capt. Terry de la Mesa Allen, a highly-decorated cavalryman, who leads the U.S. Army polo team to triumph against British squads in England, and then at the 1920 Olympics in war-battered Antwerp, where the Americans gain the Bronze Medal, Britain earning the Gold Medal and revenge. After that, Allen resumes his duties with the American occupation of Germany. That September, he returns to the United States with the permanent rank of major, and is assigned to the 2nd Cavalry Division, earning high marks for leadership and horsemanship. In 1922, Allen represents the Army in a 300-mile riding contest across Texas against a cowboy, Key Dunne, to settle the big question: who is a better horseman, a cowboy or a cavalryman?

Allen, an Army brat born in Brooklyn´s Fort Hamilton, picks a tough black horse named Coronado, which is part quarter-horse and part thoroughbred. Allen is to ride from Dallas to Waco to Temple, then Austin, and back to San Antonio. Dunne is to ride from Fort Worth to Waco to Temple, then Austin, and San Antonio. The race creates much interest, and when Allen starts off in his cavalryman´s uniform – stiff-brimmed hat, regulation shirt and breeches, polished leather boots, plain gloves – there is a huge crowd. Dunne, of course, wears a bright plaid shirt and kerchief, a Stetson, fancy boots, and a Western saddle for his small Texas mustang.

Allen racks up 51.9 miles on the first day, battles heavy rain on the third, and wins the race by seven hours. Allen´s ultimate reward is to be assigned to the 61st Cavalry Division, a training outfit in New York City, designed to attract recruits from the city´s upper-crust polo crowd. Allen moves in the Army and Navy Club in Manhattan, and spends his days playing polo and nights partying.

It´s questionable if Allen runs into his future executive officer, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., at these parties. Teddy Jr. has translated his breeding and Great War battle scars into political victory, winning the Second Assembly seat in Long Island´s Nassau County in 1920. However, the younger Roosevelt is modest and unassuming, unlike his colorful father. Ted opposes an Assembly measure to expel five duly elected Socialists from New York City, joining a small minority voting against expulsion. After that, he stumps for Republican Warren Harding, trailing his cousin Franklin, who is running for vice president on the Democratic ticket, as a one-man "truth squad."

The sight of battling Roosevelts amuses the public, who often confuse Franklin with Ted Jr. After the election, Ted Jr. takes the seat both his father and Franklin held – Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and proceeds to discard warships under the Washington Naval Treaty, yielding the government millions from the scrap metal. At the same time, his wife Eleanor Alexander buys and sells some Sinclair oil stock at a loss, which comes back to haunt Ted when the Teapot Dome scandal explodes. Neither Ted nor Eleanor knows about the illegal oil leases.

Ted Jr. also finds himself embroiled in an anti-Semitic scandal. When he sees off the class of 1922 at their graduation ceremonies on June 2, they provide Ted with a copy of their yearbook, "The Lucky Bag," which Ted Jr. flips through and promptly puts up on a bookshelf. Two weeks later, he yanks it down angrily, discovering that it indeed contains an anti-Semitic slur against a Jewish midshipman named Kaplan, written by the editor, J.L. Olmstead. More importantly, Kaplan´s own page is perforated – anti-Semites can remove it from their yearbooks.

Ted Jr. shares a dislike of anti-Semitism with his father, and in a year when Henry Ford is publishing anti-Semitic material in his weekly newspaper and Harvard is weighing quotas on Jewish students, Roosevelt shows courage in ordering an investigation of the incident and a reprimand for Olmstead.

After that, Ted returns to more serious issues: the exploding Teapot Dome scandal, and answering Gen. Billy Mitchell´s demands for an independent air service. Ted Jr. opposes that idea, but having had aviator brothers, thinks the Navy should expand its air arm. He orders the collier Jupiter converted into an "aircraft carrier," calling it the Langley, and to convert the two battle-cruisers Lexington and Saratoga, and decrees they shall operate in the Pacific, concerned about Japanese expansion. And in 1921, Ted Jr. re-deploys the battleship USS Arizona from the Atlantic to the Pacific Fleet, where it will spend the rest of its career.

The Roosevelt that Ted is often mixed up with is also suffering his own ordeal. Having lost the 1920 vice-presidential bid, Franklin D. Roosevelt takes his family to their summer home at Campobello, Maine, in May 1921 to rest and plan a bid for the New York governor´s seat in 1922. On August 10, 1921, Roosevelt takes his family for a sail on their yacht Vireo, stopping off to put out a forest fire they spot. After the sail, Franklin goes swimming, trying to shake off his feeling of fatigue, failing. Too tired to change out of his bathing suit, he reads the mail, complains over dinner of chills and aches, and heads for bed early.

Next morning writer Alex Haley is born in Hennings, Tennessee, and FDR has to drag his left leg to get out of bed. Soon his right leg is immobile. Eleanor sends for Dr. E.H. Bennett in nearby Lubec, who diagnoses a cold. But on August 12, Roosevelt suffers paralysis from the chest down. Dr. William W. Keen of Philadelphia drives up from a nearby resort. He thinks a clot of blood from the lower spinal cord has temporarily paralyzed Roosevelt, and presents a $600 bill to Eleanor. She wires to New York to send a masseuse. Meanwhile, Eleanor and Louis Howe, FDR´s political guru, try to massage the immobile man.

For two weeks, Eleanor sleeps on a couch in Franklin´s room, taking care of him day and night. Keen regards Eleanor later as one of his heroines for her selflessness. Neither display self-pity, FDR taking refuge in humorous banter. After two weeks, Dr. Robert Lovett, an orthopedic specialist vacationing at Newport, comes up, and diagnoses infantile paralysis, known commonly as polio. It is the most dreaded medical scourge of the age. He orders the massages stopped.