ARMY & NAVY
As if it were so much raw meat, politicians in & out of Washington last week sank their teeth in the strange case of Major General Johnson Hagood who, for speaking flippantly of WPA, was fortnight ago summarily relieved of his command of the Eighth Corps Area and ordered to his home (TIME, March 2).
A South Carolinian, nephew and reverse-namesake of Brigadier General Hagood Johnson of the Confederacy, Johnson Hagood was graduated from West Point. Later he taught philosophy to the cadets at the Military Academy, where philosophy has mostly to do with mechanics, hydraulics, aerodynamics. From pedagogy he went to the Artillery. In 1917 he was sent to France where his executive abilities were soon recognized. He organized the A. E. F.'s Line of Communications, later did the same for the Service of Supply, saw combat service in the Argonne.
Good soldier though he was, General Hagood had one serious defect as an officer: he did his own thinking. As long as he confined his originality to the Artillery, his superiors had no objections. After the war he wrote a book called The Service of Supply in which he minced no words, spared no names, and failed to ask the War Department's permission to publish it. The Inspector General called the volume "unmilitary in tone and tenor and at times intemperate in both. . . . Among the uninformed it will bring ridicule upon the War Department." Also unmilitary in tone was an annual report General Hagood was once supposed to have written: "Nothing to report."
In late years General Hagood has advocated a number of unorthodox military ideas. By simplification of army training he claimed that in wartime raw recruits, "taught to shoot instead of to salute," could be made into efficient fighting men in three weeks or less. By reducing paper work and simplifying the War Department, he asserted, the U. S. could have a much more efficient army for much less money. In case of war he advocated sending only the National Guard to the front, ordering all regulars to the rear to train recruits—the system practiced by the Confederate Army and advocated by General Grant.
Called before the House Military Affairs Committee three years ago, the tart-tongued General was discreet enough to give no testimony until the Committee assured him that it would "take the blame for anything that might happen." Then he cut loose: "The Army has become so complicated that an archangel right out of Heaven could not operate it. ... The War Department has always collapsed at the outbreak of every war and the present organization will collapse at the outbreak of the next war because it is too topheavy, contains too many conflicting agencies, has too much divided responsibility."
Last December Representative Blanton of Texas wrote Secretary of War Dern asking to have Generals Brown, Drum, Malone and Hagood testify before a House Appropriations subcommittee, and requesting that they be not restrained by the War Department from making full and frank answers. General Malin Craig, Chief of Staff, replied that the officers named "will be instructed by me in person that they are to answer you freely, fully and frankly."