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General MacArthur's first assets in his assault on Capitol Hill were charm and eloquence. He was able to call many members of the House Military Affairs Committee by their first names. Democrats were moved when the Army's No. 1 fighting man, relating his financial woes in Hoover times, declared: "I have humiliated myself seeking allotments to replace leaking, slum-like barracks housing our soldiers. I have almost licked the boots of some gentlemen to get funds for motorization and mechanization of the Army. . . . Unless we move quickly we'll be a beaten nation paying huge indemnities after the next war!''
G. H. Q. If any government department is not run by its politically-appointed Secretary, it is the War Department. George Henry Dern, good Democrat and Utah's onetime Governor, sits in the Secretary's office on the "War side" of the old State, War & Navy rookery on Pennsylvania Avenue. Onetime Secretary of War Jefferson Davis' clock ticks on the mantel behind him. Overhead in a case is the flag which draped Abraham Lincoln's coffin. In an anteroom is a comfortable couch where Secretary Dern refreshes himself with an occasional nap. In an office nearby sits John W. Martyn, the chief civil continuing officer of the War Department. Assistant Martyn's job for years has been to tell succeeding Secretaries what to do next.
Actual operators of the War Department's chief charge* are the General Staff, composed of the Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief and five Assistant Chiefs, professional soldiers all. After that victorious fiasco, the War with Spain, wise Elihu Root perceived that running even a standing army of 25,000 was a task too intricate for the civilian chief of the War Department, of which he was then Secretary. Under his direction the Army's command was radically reorganized in 1903, the General Staff system adapted from the British, French and Germans.
At the top of the military pyramid, Chief of Staff MacArthur has at his right hand a Deputy: Major General George S. Simonds, a brilliant onetime commandant of the War College and former armaments adviser to the Geneva Disarmament Conference.
Each of the five Assistant Chiefs is selected to advise the Chief within a special field. They are picked for intellect rather than exploits. All of the present Assistants (see pp. 16 & 17) are veterans of both the Spanish-American and World Wars, though none has commanded a division in the field. Two out of five are non-West Pointers, a just proportion since the ratio of Military Academy graduates to non-graduates among Army officers is about 1-to-4.
G-I (Personnel) is Brigadier General Andrew Moses, field artilleryman and expert on materiel. Brigadier General Harry Knight, who entered the Army from the New York militia during the Spanish-American War, is G-2 (Intelligence). G-3 (Operations & Training) is Brigadier General John H. Hughes, who got out of West Point in 1897, just in time to be wounded in Cuba. Brigadier General Charles Sherman Lincoln, G-4 (Supply), started out to be a farmer by graduating from the Iowa State College of Agriculture, enlisted in the ranks in 1895, won his commission in 1898.