Army Diplomacy

American Military Occupation and Foreign Policy after World War II

Walter M. Hudson

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813160979
• eBook ISBN: 9780813160986
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

1

Military Government Planning prior to 1940

The army’s dominance in the planning and execution of post–World War II governance has its origins in practices dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, including its internal adoption of laws regulating treatment of civilians and its acceptance and application of laws of international conflict, in particular the Geneva and Hague Conventions. The army had gained practical experience throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with occupations in Mexico, the Reconstruction South, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. And while army officers often lauded their own achievements, in reality the long-lasting achievements of American occupations were ambiguous in almost every case. Political scientist David Edelstein has rated the army’s 1898–1902 and 1906–1909 occupations of Cuba as well as the Marine Corps’s 1915–1934 occupation of Haiti and 1916–1924 occupation of the Dominican Republic as failures, since the countries were left in a state of instability and disorder. The army’s Philippines occupation also had mixed results. It prevailed but only after a brutal, controversial counterinsurgent struggle. Military leaders were subject to public criticism for their treatment of civilians, and the US actions there looked to many Asians as no different from European imperialism, contributing to subsequent Japanese claims of “Asia for Asians.”¹ By far, however, the army’s most significant postwar experience was the Rhineland occupation following World War I. That occupation in particular led to the development of occupation methods and concepts at the Army War College in the 1920s and 1930s. Those methods and concepts in turn formed the basis of military government doctrine to be used in World War II.

It is especially important to point out that this methodological and conceptual development occurred within the army itself, with no guidance from other US governmental agencies. Whatever subsequent policy determinations were made by the president and other high-level officials regarding military government during and after World War II, the template for that government had already been developed, a template constructed according to the army’s own culture and its own understanding of how to conduct postwar occupations. The consequences were far-reaching and would culminate in the army administering the post–World War II occupations of liberated and conquered territories around the globe and greatly influencing American foreign policy during the early years of the Cold War.

Legalizing Armed Conflict

The army’s handling of civilian populations dated back to the Mexican War of 1846–1848.² Gen. Winfield Scott, for example, issued a general order throughout conquered Mexican territory that provided for martial law and the establishment of provost courts and military commissions. In order to ensure good order after victory and to minimize the need for large-scale occupation, he was mindful of the need for good civic relations. He directed his soldiers to salute priests and magistrates, and though a Protestant he regularly attended Mass in Vera Cruz and even marched in a religious procession. Scott’s military government rested on two fundamental principles that would ultimately be elaborated and fully developed during World War II. First, the primary function of military government was to ensure the accomplishment of the military mission. Scott had no directive to rebuild or to reorder Mexican society; his fundamental goal was to ensure that that battlefield success was not undermined in the wake of victory. Second, military necessity was nonetheless premised on providing for basic needs of the civilian society. Allowing for wholesale pillaging and devastation only undermined battlefield gains.³

Two decades later, in the middle of the Civil War, the Union army promulgated its famous Lieber Code of 1863, also known as General Orders No. 100. It was arguably the first attempt by a fighting force to encode a set of rules regarding the treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, and the application of “military necessity”—that is, determining when military requirements could overrule otherwise legal restrictions.⁴ German American jurist Francis Lieber had convinced Union general in chief Henry Halleck that because the Civil War was fought largely by relatively inexperienced and amateurish militaries, a code of rules was necessary to control and guide behavior.⁵ The code’s purpose was simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic. Lieber wrote to Halleck on its publication that it was a “contribution by the United States to the stock of common civilization.” At the same time, he saw the code’s need to control the widespread destruction of property in practical terms: “[Such damage] does incalculable injury. It demoralizes our troops; it annihilates wealth irrecoverably, and makes a return to the state of peace more and more difficult.”⁶

The Lieber Code did not specifically mention military government. However, it did place the actions of the federal troops within the framework of the related legal construct of martial law. The opening paragraph of the code conflated martial law and military government by asserting that “a place, district, or country occupied by an enemy stands, in consequence of the occupation, under the martial law of the invading or occupying army.” The power of martial law was seemingly absolute, since it included “the suspension by the occupying military authority of the criminal and civil law, and of the domestic administration and government in the occupied place or territory.” But the Lieber Code also mitigated the apparent unlimited nature of martial law. It stated that such authority “disclaimed all cruelty and bad faith.” And it had language that stressed that the conquered/occupied populace should attempt to carry on life in as normal a fashion as possible—civilians could not be forced into the service of the victorious army, private property was generally to be respected, and civil servants would continue to be paid.⁷ As noted, the rationale for this was as pragmatic as it was benevolent. In the words of historian Geoffrey Best, the Lieber Code was an example “close to perfection” of the “arch-occupier” model. The arch-occupier model stressed that the population needed to stay at work and to continue life as normally as possible and thereby cause minimal interference with military operations.⁸ As military historian Brian McAllister Linn points out, the code was the legalized manifestation of an American military mindset prevalent in the nineteenth century that arose during the Civil War and the army’s frontier constabulary duties. Specifically, army leaders formed a contractual relationship with conquered populations: on the one hand, military forces would attempt to treat the civilians humanely; for their part, civilians had to abide by rules of good behavior in order to allow those forces to achieve their mission.⁹

The American army inculcated the Lieber Code’s basic principles—and in later wars worked within its ambiguities. Certain of the code’s provisions were open-ended enough to suit whatever requirements were on hand. Its assertions of “military necessity,” for example, were also used as a defense by officers accused of torturing Filipino insurgents during the 1899–1902 Philippine Insurrection.¹⁰ Its vagaries notwithstanding, and partly because the code was internally generated (in the form of a general order, no less) and not imposed by international requirement, it was a source of some pride among the officer corps. It was praised by George B. Davis, judge advocate general of the army and a delegate plenipotentiary to the Geneva and Hague Conferences, for being a generation ahead of its time and for influencing much of the later Geneva and Hague Conventions and Regulations.¹¹

The Lieber Code anticipated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century codifications of what would be known as the law of armed conflict. The Geneva Conventions of 1864 and 1868, the St. Petersburg Conventions of 1868, and the Brussels Convention of 1874 all provided increasing control over what states could and could not do during and after hostilities.¹² Most significantly, the Hague Conventions and Declarations of 1899 and 1907 provided the fullest treatment of military occupation. Prompted by Russian foreign minister Count Mouravieff in 1898 and then later by President Theodore Roosevelt following the Russo-Japanese War, the Hague Conventions not only dealt with rules about weapons and treatment of prisoners and noncombatants, but they also specifically addressed military authority over hostile territory, the military’s responsibilities while conducting an occupation, and civilian rights in occupied territory.

The Hague Conventions’ treatment of occupations was similar in many ways to the Lieber Code’s. Fifteen articles stated the responsibilities of occupying armies. Article 43, for example, required the occupying power to restore public order, and Articles 44 and 45 asserted that inhabitants could not be forced to provide information about their nation’s military or be required to swear allegiance to the occupying power. Article 47 prohibited pillaging, and Article 49 only permitted levying the population for military purposes if military necessity required it. The conventions also implied a contractual relationship between occupier and occupants. Article 55, for example, allowed the occupying force to be a usufructuary for the territory it occupied, and at the same time it required that force to safeguard public buildings and agricultural and real property so that they would be in sufficient working condition when the occupation ended.¹³ Ultimately the Lieber Code’s influence on the law of armed conflict came full circle when the Hague Conventions and other international legal conventions became incorporated into army policy and doctrine. In 1914 the War Department published Rules of Land Warfare, which incorporated “everything vital in [General Orders No.] 100,” noting also that “during the past 50 years, many of these rules have been reduced to writing by means of conventions or treaties.” Accordingly, Rules of Land Warfare referenced the Geneva and Hague Conventions, along with a variety of other works, including opinions of the judge advocate general and United States Supreme Court cases. Rules of Land Warfare would subsequently be updated twice, in 1934 and in 1940, as FM [Field Manual] 27-10, which was even more expansive and included interpretations of post-Hague treaties to which the United States was a signatory.¹⁴

A Professional Force

Efforts to legalize armed conflict and, as part of that effort, to define responsibilities of an occupation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries paralleled efforts to professionalize the American army. Many officers wanted to turn the army into a more capable organization that could wage wars against more powerful adversaries.¹⁵ These reformers sought to move it from a constabulary force that had largely confined itself to patrolling the frontier and manning coastal defenses to a force capable of asserting American power on a global scale. To do this required making the officer corps more sophisticated and knowledgeable.¹⁶ In particular, the work of military intellectuals such as Emory Upton sought to improve army leadership, especially through education and the creation of military journals to elaborate reformist ideas. At Fort Leavenworth Kansas, for example, the army established schools beginning in 1880. Officers began publishing more widely in journals and forming professional associations.¹⁷ Military reformers such as Upton and Arthur L. Wagner also studied past battles and campaigns as a way to draw lessons from the past.¹⁸

Other officers looked beyond the battlefield. An 1892 work by 1st Lt. William E. Birkhimer titled Military Government and Martial Law focused on the army’s postwar responsibilities. It was a lengthy treatise that fully explored the application of legal concepts of postwar occupation.¹⁹ Birkhimer was a soldier-scholar who had participated in much of the nineteenth-century American military experience. Born in 1848, he entered the Civil War as a private in the Union army and ultimately rose to the rank of brigadier general in 1906. His post–Civil War service began with his graduation from West Point in 1870. He later served as judge advocate for the Department of the Columbia from 1886 to 1890, and he won the Medal of Honor while in the Philippines in 1899 fighting insurgents. His service in constabulary duties formed the basis of his book, which was, in the words of Gen. George B. Davis, “the most complete treatise on the subject in the English language.”²⁰

In his work, Birkhimer asserted that the Lieber Code was the most “successful attempt” to codify law of war principles. Comparing it to the 1880 Brussels Code, he noted that because the Lieber Code was written in the midst of conflict when there was a need for practicality, it was set apart from the more abstract formulations found in the Brussels document. Birkhimer set forth in detail the legal foundations of military government. He cited both legal opinions and historical examples, showing how the various occupations during the Mexican and Civil Wars were justified and ratified by opinions in American common law.²¹ Distinguishing the occupation of foreign nations (military government) from the imposition of military control within one’s own country (martial law), Birkhimer placed the notion of military government within a highly legalistic understanding of both the role of states and the role of contemporary international law.²² States could lawfully engage in war, and military government’s prerogatives and responsibilities came from that lawful right. But Birkhimer further noted that while throughout most of history victory gave a conqueror unlimited authority over a conquered nation and the property therein, the increasing regulation of the nation-state system in the nineteenth century had set limits upon the conqueror’s ability to do as he chose.

Birkhimer also distinguished between the form of a particular military government and the substance of the fundamental laws and principles that military government had to follow. As long as the laws and principles were complied with, the form could be left open to the occupying power. Proclamations, for example, although advisable, were not legally necessary. He barely touched upon specific and practical questions of command and control and the organization of military government itself—for example, whether there needed to be specialized staffs or units devoted exclusively to occupation responsibilities. He left little doubt, however, about the need for an occupation to be completely run by military officers. Military government depended upon “swiftness of action, impartiality in meting out justice . . . and overwhelming force.” Therefore, the qualities of such a government “attach peculiarly to a government of military power conducted alone by military officers.”²³

Birkhimer’s work came out in 1892 and was part of a growing body of professional works by American military officers. The army continued to make efforts at increasing professionalization within its own ranks through the application of scientific and managerial concepts and procedures, through study of past successes and failures, and through broadening the intellectual horizons of the officer corps ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Military Government Planning prior to 1940
• 2. Military Government Doctrine, Training, and Organization, 1940–1941
• 3. FDR, Interagency Conflict, and Military Government, 1941–1942
• 4. North Africa and the Establishment of the Civil Affairs Division, 1943
• 5. Planning and Implementing Military Government in Germany, 1943–1946
• 6. Planning and Implementing Military Government in Austria, 1943–1946
• 7. Planning and Implementing Military Government in Korea, 1943–1946
• Conclusion: The Postwar Occupation Experience and Its Lessons for the Army
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index