Allies and Adversaries

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II

Mark A. Stoler

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780807862308
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

During World War II the uniformed heads of the U.S. armed services assumed a pivotal and unprecedented role in the formulation of the nation's foreign policies. Organized soon after Pearl Harbor as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these individuals were officially responsible only for the nation's military forces. During the war their functions came to encompass a host of foreign policy concerns, however, and so powerful did the military voice become on those issues that only the president exercised a more decisive role in their outcome. Drawing on sources that include the unpublished records of the Joint Chiefs as well as the War, Navy, and State Departments, Mark Stoler analyzes the wartime rise of military influence in U.S. foreign policy. He focuses on the evolution of and debates over U.S. and Allied global strategy. In the process, he examines military fears regarding America's major allies--Great Britain and the Soviet Union--and how those fears affected President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies, interservice and civil-military relations, military-academic relations, and postwar national security policy as well as wartime strategy. Reviews in American History "A matchless insight into the nature of policymaking, as fresh as it is thorough.... Indispensable for understanding the way the war was conducted at the highest levels.... Stoler's work is seminal, forcing us to rethink radically much about the war we thought we knew so well.-- Intelligence & National Security "A prodigious work of research and analysis on US foreign and military policy, and on strategic planning for World War II. It is a gold mine of information.-- Parameters "A lucid, logical examination of US military thinking about the world from the late 1930s through to the end of the Second World War.-- Times Literary Supplement Formed soon after Pearl Harbor, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were officially responsible only for the nation's military forces. Their functions grew to encompass a host of foreign policy concerns during World War II, however, when the military voice assumed an unprecedented importance. Analyzing the wartime rise of military influence in U.S. foreign policy, Mark Stoler focuses on the evolution of and debates over U.S. and Allied global strategy. In the process, he examines military fears regarding America's major allies--Great Britain and the Soviet Union--and how those fears affected President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies, interservice and civil-military relations, military-academic relations, and postwar national security policy.
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1 The Armed Forces and National Policy before World War II

Military interest in U.S. foreign policy first emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While clearly linked to America’s growing power and international involvements during those years, it also resulted from a simultaneous “managerial revolution” in warfare whereby the principles of large-scale corporate organization and expertise were applied to the rapidly expanding armed forces of the industrialized powers. The United States lagged far behind its European counterparts in this development, but by World War I it did possess, albeit in skeleton form and with very limited powers, the key components associated with the managerial revolution: army and navy general staffs headed by service chiefs, advanced educational systems to train officers for staff work, and a Joint Army-Navy Board (JB) composed of those chiefs and their key strategists.¹

Foreign policy quickly became a concern of these organizations because of its integral relationship to their planning responsibilities. If war was indeed an instrument of policy as Carl von Clausewitz had emphasized, then strategic planning could proceed only if the armed forces understood clearly the objectives and priorities of the policies they were supposed to defend and promote and if military means were properly matched with political ends. Consequently, military planners began to request guidance from and consultation with the State Department regarding the formulation, prioritization, and implementation of what they referred to as “national policies.”² Only such guidance and consultation, they maintained, could insure effective politico-military coordination.

Not all officers were comfortable with such requests. “Policy belongs to the Cabinet,” Admiral George Dewey asserted in rejecting an early call for coordination. Similarly, the Army General Staff maintained in 1915 that statesmen shaped policy, whereas the armed forces executed it, and where the duty of the “first leaves off the other takes hold”—a judgment the army field manual of the 1930s reiterated in its assertion that politics and strategy “are radically and fundamentally things apart.... Strategy begins where politics end.”³

The State Department forcefully concurred, and throughout the early decades of the twentieth century it ignored or rejected most requests for guidance and coordination on the grounds that they challenged civilian prerogatives in the policymaking process and thus civilian supremacy over the armed forces.⁴ That these prerogatives had traditionally belonged to the State Department was probably an additional reason for its refusal to respond positively. But beyond the issues of civilian supremacy and bureaucratic politics, State’s position reflected a view of the nature of war and its relationship to diplomacy that differed sharply from the one held by the armed forces.

Although military planners consistently asserted that civil leadership should determine the “what” of national policy, whereas the armed forces should determine the “how,”⁵ they simultaneously viewed international relations through a realist framework in which such distinctions could not be so rigidly maintained. To the contrary, they perceived war to be a standard “phase of international politics” resulting from conflicting national policies, with force and diplomacy as interrelated tools to be used as appropriate for the defense and fulfillment of national policies. Along with such beliefs went the need to coordinate civil and military tasks and to view policy, diplomacy, and force in conjunction rather than separately.⁶

Most State Department officials held very different views. With a few exceptions, they maintained the traditional American beliefs that war was an aberration rather than a normal phase of international relations and that force constituted a separate category and last resort to be used only if diplomacy failed. Along with this went the corollary belief that military officers should have no role whatsoever in policy matters until war actually began. As Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan bluntly stated in rejecting a military proposal to conduct fleet movements during the 1913 crisis with Japan, “army and navy officers could not be trusted to say what we should or should not do, till we actually got into a war.” President Woodrow Wilson carried this logic a step further. Shocked and intensely angered by the military’s efforts to influence his policy and its refusal to accept a contrary cabinet decision in this crisis, he suspended the JB and promised to abolish it and the Navy General Board (GB) entirely if either again attempted to influence policy in any way. Similar anger and threats occurred two years later when the press reported elaborate army plans in progress for war with Germany. By Wilsons standards, the American serviceman should have “nothing to do with the formulation of her policy. He is to support her policy whatever it is.”⁷

Presidential hostility to military planning soon dissipated under the impact of World War I, but the general civilian unwillingness to coordinate with the armed forces or even to inform them of national policies and priorities did not. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, military requests for guidance and coordination thus continued to meet rejection, minimal cooperation, or stony silence. The State Department did occasionally request advice on military issues, such as naval arms limitation, but it usually rejected or modified the advice it received to suit its predetermined conclusions rather than alter policy to meet military objections. The Washington and London arms limitation treaties of 1921–22 and 1930 were thus negotiated and ratified despite strong naval protests as to their contents. Naval warnings were heeded to a greater extent during the Geneva arms limitation discussions in 1927, but the resulting failure to reach an international accord only hardened State Department belief that the military should be bypassed on such issues. The department also consistently refused military requests for high-level consultation and coordination until 1935, when it finally agreed to participate in JB discussions on the Far East. Not until 1938, however, and then only under fear of Axis subversive activities in the Western Hemisphere, did it agree to establish the high-level State-War-Navy Liaison Committee composed of the army and navy chiefs and the undersecretary of state “to perfect the coordination of these three Departments in the execution of national policy.”⁸

Even after the committee’s establishment and the outbreak of World War II, however, policy guidance and politico-military coordination remained minimal. An army member of the committee later complained that it “became but the mechanism through which the State Department bent the military arms to its short range objectives.”⁹ The JB’S Joint Planning Committee (JPC) complained in 1939 that it still “frequently had to work in the dark with respect to what national policy is with respect to a specific problem, or what it may be expected to be.” The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) noted in early 1940 that despite “frequent consultation” with State, “things are not planned in advance, and often we do not receive advance information of State Department action which might well have affected our activities.”¹⁰

Thus military planners during the interwar years were forced to compose their own definitions of U.S. policies to serve as guidelines in their strategic planning. In these efforts they relied on common knowledge, public statements by high government officials, and their own beliefs regarding the nature of international relations and American society. They rated preservation of the territorial and ideological integrity of the continental United States and its overseas possessions the fundamental national policy requiring military force. Behind this they listed control of the Panama Canal and its approaches, defense of the Monroe Doctrine, and preservation of the Open Door in China. Other policies to be defended and promoted included isolation from European political quarrels and avoidance of any alliances; protection of neutral maritime rights and maintenance of freedom of the seas; continuation of an immigration policy based on quotas for Europeans and exclusion of Asians; maintenance and strengthening of the merchant marine; expansion of overseas markets, trade, and investments; and the peaceful settlement of international disputes.¹¹

Despite strong public support for this last policy of peaceful settlement of disputes, military planners warned that the other policies could easily lead to conflict and war. War was endemic to the existing international system (“another method of effective continuance of state policy,” they asserted in one of their paraphrases of Clausewitz),¹² and the economic factors they rated so prominently in U.S. national policies had been and continued to be, in their view, a fundamental cause of international conflict and war. In this conclusion they departed sharply from the traditional U.S. belief that trade provided a peaceful and rational alternative to power politics and war. Furthermore, they noted, the American people had in the past been very willing to go to war for economic reasons—as well as for moral ones, which constituted another fundamental cause of war.

Defense of U.S. national policies thus necessitated preparations for armed conflict, even though Americans believed in the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Indeed, some planners argued, this national policy made military preparedness even more mandatory. In an early version of what would later be called “deterrence theory,” they argued that preparation for the “defense of inalienable rights” was “preventative” rather than “provocative of war” and thus the best means to assure success in the policy of peaceful settlement of international disputes.¹³

Military planners saw potential conflicts with numerous foreign powers and developed a series of “color” plans to cover war with each of them. Before 1939 they considered Japan the most likely adversary because of what they labeled the diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive national policies of the two countries, and thus they developed and concentrated on War Plan ORANGE to cover this contingency. Yet the most dangerous potential enemies were Germany (BLACK) and England (RED), who were more powerful, geographically closer, and a threat to the vulnerable Caribbean area and the northeastern U.S. industrial base. In all planning concerning war against a Japan aligned with a major European power, U.S. strategists thus concluded, in a clear precursor to the World War II “Europe-first” approach, that primary emphasis would have to be placed on the Caribbean and Atlantic rather than the Pacific.¹⁴

War with a European power or a European-Japanese coalition seemed a remote possibility during the 1920s and early 1930s, however, especially after the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference resulted in the abrogation of the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance as well as a general decrease in international tensions. But U.S.-Japanese relations began to deteriorate soon thereafter, and the possibility of conflict with Tokyo appeared more likely with each passing year. Consequently, the planners continued until 1939 to devote most of their attention to War Plan ORANGE.

Conflicts over ORANGE

The planners were far from unified in their assessments of ORANGE, and throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century a sharp intra- and interservice debate took place over its viability and effectiveness. Officially it centered on the mismatch between U.S. ends and means in the Pacific, but beneath the surface debate also swirled around the appropriateness of the policy assumptions on which ORANGE was based. Whereas naval planners argued that the armed forces should demand more funds from Congress or adjust war plans to compensate for military weakness in Asia and the Pacific, some army planners insisted that additional money would not be forthcoming, existing war plans were unworkable and could not be adjusted, and national policy should therefore be altered so as to remove the sources of potential conflict with Japan.

Although the United States had long maintained forces in China and the western Pacific, they had never been sufficient to protect American interests in the area or even to defend the Philippines against a Japanese attack. Nor had the planners been able to reach a consensus on an appropriate strategic response to such an attack. Within the navy, a major disagreement had emerged between “thrusters,” who pressed for bases in the western Pacific and a quick confrontation there with Japan, and “cautionaries,” who argued that the thrusters’ response was a recipe for disaster and that the fleet should only proceed westward against the Japanese slowly and gradually from bases in the eastern Pacific. Most army planners tended to agree with the cautionaries. The result was a highly divisive debate that severely embarrassed the armed forces while crippling strategic planning.¹⁵

A host of interwar political decisions exacerbated this ends/means problem and the resulting strategic debate. In the process, they also illustrated the wide gap that separated all military planners from the American government and people on the relationship between force and diplomacy, the danger of conflict inherent in international politics and defense of U.S. interests, and the subsequent need for military preparedness.

At the end of World War I Japan had been granted a League of Nations mandate over Germany’s Pacific island possessions north of the equator. United States military planners had objected on the grounds that the islands lay athwart their lines of communication and thus posed a threat in Japanese hands, but they were overruled by their civilian superiors. Their objections were also overruled at the Washington Conference, when the Harding administration agreed to naval and fortification limits that the navy opposed. From the planners’ viewpoint, these decisions gave Japan a tremendous and perhaps insurmountable advantage should any war break out in the Pacific. Throughout the rest of the 1920s and early 1930s, Congress compounded the problems U.S. strategists now faced by refusing to maintain even allowable force levels in the Pacific. Then in 1934 it exacerbated them further by voting to grant the Philippines independence in ten years but to defend it in the interim.¹⁶

Had these moves been accompanied by a simultaneous change in U.S. Far Eastern policies and improved relations with Japan, the military’s strategic problems might not have been so serious. In 1924, however, Congress had infuriated Tokyo by passing an immigration law that totally excluded Asians, and in the ensuing years Washington insisted on maintaining its Open Door policy in China and protested strongly after 1931 against Japan’s aggression in Manchuria and China. The planners believed that these administration po...