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1. Dakota Days
- The University Press of Kentucky
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1 Dakota Days He came, he saw, he conquered. —Caption to William E. DePuy’s high school graduation photo “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” were first sung in 1919, the latter in the Ziegfeld Follies of that year. But they were sung without the stimulation of legal booze, for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution began the Prohibition Era that same year. Also in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, reshaping the map of Europe and insuring Germany’s becoming a dissatisfied power; the League of Nations was established without the United States; and Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed’s ecstatic account of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was published . William E. DePuy was born that year, in Jamestown, North Dakota , on 1 October 1919. Later, when he was a teenager, he moved with his family to Brookings, South Dakota, where he was graduated from high school in 1937 and college in 1941. DePuy was probably taking his first steps in 1920 when Japan received the Caroline, Marshall, and Mariana Islands, formerly German colonies, as mandates from the League of Nations. They sat astride the sea route between Hawaii and the Philippines. If fortified and used for sea and air bases, these islands would pose a threat to a fleet steaming from Hawaii or California to relieve or reinforce the U.S. garrison in the Philippines. Between 1919 and 1941, German and Japanese influence in Europe and in the Pacific and Far East grew as the United States learned that it could not remain uninvolved in international politics. The degree to which events in faraway places affected the thinking ofAmerican youth in high schools and colleges on the high plains in the 1930s is difficult to ascertain. We know that American interest in world politics faded after the Great War and President Woodrow General William e. DePuy Wilson’s triumphal trip to Paris. The great adventure “over there” was done. Wilson, the architect of the League of Nations, could not persuade his own countrymen to join it. The critical issue was sovereignty , a concern that League membership might allow foreigners to take Americans to war. To many Americans observing the results of peacemaking in 1919, it seemed that the Europeans were behaving in their bad old grasping ways. They divided the spoils. Realpolitik was alive and well. The general inclination of Americans was to revert to form: to avoid entangling alliances, to live in happy isolation on a continent that was rich, secure, and American. Doubts arose about the wisdom of American involvement in the Great War. Questions regarding war profiteering convinced some that the war had been fought for the profit of munitions makers. The Great War had exhausted Europe. There was a general sense that there would not be another major war for a long time. In any event, there was a tradition in the United States of generally avoiding the maintenance of a large standing army in peacetime. That predisposition, along with the feeling that participation in the Great War might have been a mistake, created a political climate conducive to slashing the military budget. There was another reason as well: no enemy threatened the United States. War Department expenditures from 1922 through 1935 remained below $500 million per year. From 1936, when Bill DePuy was a high school junior and tensions were rising in Europe, to 1940, expenditures climbed from $600 million to about $900 million, reaching almost $4 billion in 1941, the year Bill DePuy graduated from college, and $50 billion in 1945. Army personnel strength paralleled expenditures. From an active duty strength of 2.5 million in 1918, the numbers from the early 1920s to 1935 hovered at about 140,000. From 1936 until 1940, these numbers climbed steadily, from 168,000 to 270,000. War clouds brought peacetime conscription to America for the first time, and the National Guard and Army Reserve were mobilized for a year of training. In 1941, almost 1.5 million men wore army uniforms. The drop in the funding and manning of the Navy and Marine Corps after the Great War roughly paralleled those of the Army. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Navy bottomed out at 80,000 men and the Marine Corps at 17,000. The American military was second- or even third-rate, and its leaders knew it. In 1932, former Army Chief of Staff Peyton C. March [54.165.122.173...