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, that was General Douglas MacArthur and one Dwight David Eisenhower, a Major. There were, naturally, some delays in getting things organized, not the least of which were caused by the insistence of MacArthur that armored tanks be brought over with the infantry from Fort Myer. The great general proposed to use tanks and bayonets against unemployed veterans, many of whom were camped in shantytown conditions with their children and wives. The only shots fired thus far had been fired by policemen, and the men killed were Bonus marchers. By late in the afternoon of this sweltering July day, MacArthur and Eisenhower were in uniform and the troops were assembling. Among the detachments were troopers from the 3rd Cavalry, under the command of Major George S. Patton. They advanced with sabres drawn, and the column following them included machine guns and elements of the 12th Infantry and the 13th Engineers.
"The operation was the worst-timed in MacArthur's career. Fifteen minutes earlier [ 4:30 PM ], the District's civil service workers had begun pouring into the streets, their day's work done." As Manchester describes it, "twenty thousand of them were massed on the sidewalks across from the bewildered, disorganized veterans. Someone was going to get hurt if the cavalry commander didn't watch out". In an incredible moment of irony, the Bonus marchers first applauded the arrival of Patton's 3rd Cavalry troopers, thinking that the soldiers had been ordered to parade for their benefit. They and the thousands of workers watching were badly disillusioned within minutes.
Without "the slightest warning," as reported by J.F. Essary of the Baltimore Sun, the troopers charged into the crowd, which meant that both men and women were "ridden down indiscriminately". George Patton liked action and he wasn't ashamed to see his troopers ride down the innocent bystanders ... including U.S. Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut. MacArthur was similarly inclined to take drastic measures. Three thousand gas grenades had been provided to the infantrymen and they used them without hesitation or provocation. Within a few hours most of the Bonus marchers had recrossed the bridge to Anacostia and the main encampment. Herbert Hoover then sent a message to Douglas MacArthur instructing, forbidding, the deployment of any troops across the Eleventh Street bridge "into the largest encampment of the veterans". MacArthur chose to ignore this direct order and marched his soldiers, with Dwight Eisenhower by his side, over to Anacostia and into the campgrounds.
"The Anacostia camp was a jumble of packing crates, fruit crates, chicken coops, burlap and tar-paper shacks, tents", writes Manchester. "It didn't seem possible that anyone could have become attached to so preposterous an array of junk, but it was the only home the BEF families had."
By 10:00 PM the infantry was in the camp and they routed the Bonus Army and their children with their tear gas bombs. The vegetable gardens planted by the homeless veterans were trampled and by 10:30 most of the shacks and tents were a-blaze. The bravado of MacArthur's troops was considerable. A seven-year old boy was bayonetted in the leg for trying to save his pet rabbit and more than a hundred other casualties were reported. Two infants died of asphyxiation from the irritating gas. The final agonizing irony of this scene from Dante's Inferno came at about 11:15.
"Major George S. Patton, Jr. [led] his cavalrymen in a final destructive charge. Among the ragged bonus marchers routed by their sabers was Joseph T. Angelino," notes Manchester, "who, on September 26, 1918, had won the Distinguished Service Cross in the Argonne Forest for saving the life of a young officer named George S. Patton, Jr."
MacArthur compounded the tragedy in the hours and days after the Bonus Army was routed. He never mentioned Hoover's direct orders not to cross the Eleventh Street bridge and instead, praised the President for reacting to "a very grave situation". Later he said that the Bonus marchers were "insurrectionists". He was quoted as maintaining that ... "if there was one man in ten in that group who is a veteran it would surprise me." Herbert Hoover and his aides made the situation even worse by laying down an official line that the Bonus Expeditionary Force was under the leadership of communists and criminals. And that there were not that many veterans among them.
HOOVER AND ROOSEVELT AND THE PATTERN OF OFFICIAL LIES
"Unfortunately for the Hoover administration's place in history, no one thought to check with the Veterans Administration. Before the BEF attacked law and order by becoming the targets of a gas attack," wrote Manchester in the second editon of his estimable history, "the VA had completed an exhaustive study of its membership. According to the VA figures, 94 percent of the bonus marchers had Army or Navy records, 67 percent had served overseas, and 20 percent had been disabled. Glassford and the ragged men he championed were vindicated. It cannot be said that it did them much good.
"Remarkably few newspapers reprinted the survey, and most of those that did ignored it on their editorial pages. The New York Times described the veterans as 'ordinary trespassers' whose 'insubordination' had 'led to a violent outbreak, almost amounting to insurrection.' " That was not the last time The Old Gray Lady printed outright lies on behalf of the federal government.
Wall Street's main apologist, Fortune was even more despicably inclined, praising MacArthur for using "bayonets and an overwhelming show of strength" as a way of "preventing fatalities." In this way the mass circulation newspapers and magazines of the day persuaded the people at large that the bonus marchers were "bent on violent revolution", as Manchester put it.
The Bonus Army of 1932 was, practically speaking, made up of white enlisted men who had served in Wilson's "war to end all wars," and their families. The few radicals who joined the BEF in the early-going had been expelled by the leadership.
The Bonus Army was not demonstrating a desire to overthrow the federal government in any way, for they first came to the District of Columbia to lay their grievances before Congress. It was their elected leaders who ignored them, and their elected President who ordered them pushed out, but it was General Douglas MacArthur who ignored the President's direct order not to enter the Anacostia campground who betrayed them. It is a mystery of the first order as to why he was never cashiered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was the principal beneficiary of Hoover's pathetic decision-making process. The Bonus marchers shot dead were, unfortunately, in a riot situation. The babies who died and the women and children who were injured when MacArthur's troopers used tear gas, represent casualties inflicted on unarmed Citizens by the U.S. Army, against direct orders. It is nothing less than overt murder and assault with chemical weapons.
Full article by Patriotlad at this link:
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/read/72322