Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,717
By This is the grave of Bonner Fellers.
Born in 1896 in Ridge Farm, Illinois, Fellers ended up at Earlham College in Indiana, which is amusing given his future. Earlham is a Quaker college after all. But where he really wanted to be was at West Point. He managed to get the ultimate power player to recommend him–House Speaker Joe Cannon. This was in 1916 and once the nation entered World War I, his class was rushed through to supply junior officers and they graduated in 1918. But then the war ended a couple weeks later. He was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Army Coast Artillery Corps.
Fellers ended up being an Army lifer and there isn’t that much to say about the next several years. Nothing much happened with the Army. There were a lot of young officers and few people retired. So he was eventually promoted to captain in 1934, served in the Philippines some, and started writing about Japan. He attended the Chemical Warfare Service Field Officers Course and wrote a thesis called “The Psychology of the Japanese Soldier.” At the time, it didn’t get much attention and why would it, but much later it most certainly would. In his time in the Philippines, he helped open the Philippine Military Academy and he was a liaison to the colonial leader there, Manuel Quezon. As the U.S. headed toward war, there still wasn’t a heck of a lot happening here for Fellers. He went to the Army War College and graduated in 1939, then taught English at West Point for a year. He even got promoted to major in 1940. He was then sent to Cairo as a military attaché to the U.S. embassy in Egypt.
Of course as the military started preparing for war, there were lots of opportunities for rapid promotion and Fellers took advantage. He was promoted to lieutenant governor in September 1941 and then full colonel in October 1941. By this time the British and Americans were working closely together and they let Fellers have access to their intelligence. Now, Fellers thought the code the State Department used in transmitting secure information was insecure. He expressed this. He was overruled. So he shrugged and went along. But he was right–the Italians and Germans were reading everything he sent. They had figured out the code from Egypt. The Italians had launched a burglary one night and stole the code. Then the German codebreakers figured out the rest of it. Unfortunately, this continued until July 1942, and the whole time Fellers was just giving all the information using the broken code. Rommel knew everything going on in Africa thanks to this and was able to prepare against British attacks. Historians have debated the real impact here. Fellers certainly sent some inaccurate information that might have hurt the Germans. On the other hand, we know he was often accurate and a lot of Allied soldiers died here. Still, at least according to my understanding, it’s hard to blame Fellers too much here. You all may know more about this than I and feel free to correct me or add context. This is exactly the kind of military history stuff that interests me less than any other topic in American history.
After the leak, no one exactly blamed Fellers but he was transferred out and later attachés used military cipher. Instead, he was given the Distinguished Service Medal and promoted to brigadier general. He was then assigned to the OSS in Washington, where he was known as a massive anglophobe. Evidently all that time working with the British did not improve his feelings about them. But then if Fellers was one thing, it was a huge asshole who lots of people hated. Among those who hated him were George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower. In fact, Marshall intervened with FDR, telling him not to believe much of what Fellers said. Eisenhower would openly talk about how much he despised Fellers.
In 1943, Fellers left the OSS and returned to active work under Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific. Eisenhower named him Chief of Psychological Operations in the Pacific. He was basically MacArthur’s right hand man during the liberation of the Philippines. And Fellers played a really important role in postwar Japan. That long ago thesis became more important now and since he understood Japan more than most Americans (and let’s face, most Americans really didn’t understand Japan at all), he had a lot of influence. He was one of those who saw the advantage to Emperor Hirohito staying on. He convinced MacArthur and other leaders to allow the Emperor and his family to coordinate their lies to keep them in power and in the end, this probably did make sense for reconstructing Japan.
Fellers left the Army in 1946 and this is when he became a real piece of work. He was always a massive jerk but within the Army, that stuff could mostly be kept in house. Outside of the military, he could let his freak flag fly. To say that Fellers was a right-winger underestimates the point. He was a huge Robert Taft supporter in 1952, though Taft might have been a touch too liberal for him. Of course what that meant is that at first, he was considered a completely respectable Republican. In fact, he served as assistant to the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1947 to 1952. Taft’s men had power, still kind of amazing he never got the nomination. Too bad too, since probably Adlai Stevenson beats Taft in 52 based on Taft just being too mean and crazy for that time and place. That’s some fun counterfactual speculation.
Anyway, Fellers and other far-right officers formed the Defenders of the American Constitution in 1953, which proclaimed their opposition to one-world government and all the communists who were threatening to take over the United States, which probably included Eisenhower and Marshall, Fellers’ old nemeses. He also joined the John Birch Society because of course he would find a home there.
But what this also meant is that Fellers really didn’t matter anymore. He was just an old right-wing defense industry crank in the fever swamps of lunacy. Guys like this had a brief return to relevance in the Goldwater campaign, but mostly he was just out there in fascist fantasy land. He was in fact a major promoter of Goldwater, one of the military officers saying this was the only man who could save America from a weak on communism Lyndon Baines Johnson, who we all know would never commit hundreds of thousands of American troops in a pointless war to stop communism from spreading to [checks notes] South Vietnam.
Fellers died of heart failure in 1973. He was 77 years old.
Bonner Fellers is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
If you would like this series to visit other World War II officers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Dwight Eisenhower is in Abilene, Kansas and Mark Clark is in Charleston, South Carolina. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.