Field ArTillery - US Army Center Of Military History

CHAPTER 6
Between the Wars
Following the Armistice, the United States returned to its traditional peacetime
policies, and the Army found it difficult to obtain sufficient funds from a reluctant
Congress to modernize as rapidly as needed based on postwar evaluations. But
Regular Army officers had a much higher regard for research and military theory
and were much better versed in tac tical theory and techniques than most officers
had been before the war. The lessons of war and persistence combined to encourage
two decades of remarkable change and progress in the devel opment of field artillery
despite adverse conditions.
The Postwar Years
Steadily declining personnel authorizations during the inter war years greatly
affected the structure, as well as the number, of field artillery organizations. At the
close of World War I, the branch had 22,393 officers and 429,760 enlisted men,
but by 1 January 1920, the entire Army had only some 130,000 troops performing
the usual peacetime missions at home and abroad in addition to a token occupation
force in Germany. The General Staff had proposed to Congress in early 1919
a permanent Regular Army of 500,000 men organized in an expandable force that
would serve as the half-strength skeleton of a field army of five corps. Col. John
McCauley Palmer, a friend of General Pershing serving as a special emissary to
the General Staff, suggested a much smaller army—an essentially complete one
that would be ready to serve immediately in any emergency short of one requiring
massive mobilization. Colonel Palmer proposed that during peacetime a citizen
army be trained, thereby ensuring the resources were at hand for expanding the
armed forces upon mobilization as complete units and not as fillers to be placed in
units under Regular Army cadres. He did much to shape the National Defense Act
of 1920 but failed to secure one of his main objectives, universal military training
for a citizen army. 1
The National Defense Act of 1920 authorized the largest peacetime army in the
history of the United States, the objective being to form strike forces for immediate
1 Sunderland, Field Artillery School, p. 73; Weigley, History, p. 396; idem, Towards an American
Army (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 226–39; John McAuley Palmer, America in
Arms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1941), pp. 163–79; Act of 4 Jun 1920, ch. 227, 41 Stat.
759–812.