14 The strategy of innocence? The United States, 1920-1945 ELIOT A. COHEN INTRODUCTION America's evolution into the first among the great powers culminated between 1920 and 1945.1 Until then, American power had remained largely latent, although the Civil War had revealed the magnitude of U.S. potential strength. By the turn of the century, the United States had become a respected sea power, but the European powers doubted that it possessed the constancy of purpose and the political skill to play a major role in world politics. The abrupt withdrawal of the United States into isolation after World War I only confirmed that skepticism. By 1945, however, no one could doubt the reality of American power or the ability of American democracy to handle extraordinary tests. American national security policy still bears the imprint of the 192.0-45 period. The experience and memories of those years help account for the otherwise inexplicable willingness of the American people to tolerate during the Cold War what were, by historical standards, vast peacetime military establishments; the premium on readiness and avoidance of surprise attack; the willingness to conceive of national security in global rather than local terms; and the American military's persistent preference for excessively neat patterns of civilian-military relations. The period under discussion poses particular historical problems. Many issues demand consideration in a single essay: isolation on the one hand, and involvement in literally every corner of the globe on the other; a peacetime 1 For useful surveys of American strategy from 1910 to 1945, see Allan R. Millen and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States (New York, 1984), pp. 361-470; Ronald Spector, "The Military Effectiveness of the U.S. Armed Forces, 1919-1959," and Allan R. Millen, "The United States Armed Forces in the Second World War," in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, (Boston, 1988), Vol. 1, pp. 70-97 and Vol. }, pp. 45-89. 428 Strategy of innocence? fessional army two-thirds the size of the marine corps of the early 1990s, a wartime conscript army more than three times the size of the U.S. led forces at the end of the Cold War. But although this periodization kes for difficulties, it has important benefits. First, it reveals underlying itinuities in a strategic culture that historians all too often treat as begin-g in 1941 or 1945. Second, it forces attention on the transition between ice and war and leads to a better comprehension of wartime achievements, r instance, only an understanding of the painful evolution of military jduction from 1939 to 1942 can make plain the magnitude of the achieve-;nts of 1943-44. This essay will deal, however, more with American par-ipation in World War II than with American strategy in the interwar riod. Wars, particularly great wars, reveal national character as it is being rged, and there are few better ways of understanding the strengths and eaknesses of American strategic culture than by examining it through the ns of the greatest war in history. LEGACIES 3 the 1910s and 1930s, most Americans viewed World War I as a grievous xception to a long-standing policy of noninvolvement in European affairs. .0 most the war represented a terrible mistake. A happy reversion to an ante jellum strategic outlook seemed the logical outcome. In some respects this reversal occurred, although the armed forces renamed considerably larger by American standards than before the outbreak of war in 1914.2 By 1910, the U.S. army had declined to 200,000 men from nearly two and a half million in 1918. Within a few years it reached a postwar nadir of 13 2,000. Yet even this was one-third larger than the prewar army of fewer than 100,000. The U.S. navy also failed to shrink to prewar levels; at its postwar nadir of 91,000 men in 1933 it was over two-thirds larger than the navy of 1914. Despite the Hoover administration's economy drive, the United States retained fifteen battleships, three aircraft carriers, eighteen cruisers, seventy-eight destroyers, and fifty-five submarines in 19 31. This fleet was numerically superior to Japan's and was on a par with the Royal Navy. The marine corps, 10,000 strong in the prewar period, declined to an interwar low of 16,000 men in 1933; it too had emerged from World War I with permanent gains. Strategy is not only a matter of choice about when and where to fight, but of the organizations and institutions that prepare for it. American involvement in World War I transformed the army and navy. The army reverted to its prewar constabulary duties, garrisoning the Philippines and protecting American interests in China. And some lessons of World War I were inapplicable to the challenges of the next war - for example, the preference for a 1 Numbers: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, p. 1141. Map 14.i. World War II: Defeat of Germany, 1941-1945. Source. Adapted from Knox et al. The Mainstream of Civilization Since ijoo, 5th Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 961. H 432. Cohen strong field commander over a powerful chief of staff in Washington.3 N0„ theless, for the first time since the Civil War the army had fought a first-rate foe; it had also experienced the frustrations of coalition warfare. It had recognized the need for industrial mobilization to support a mass army It could not devise solutions to all these challenges in the interwar period and some paper solutions (for industrial mobilization, for example) proved un workable. But at least it recognized the problems. World War 1 likewise profoundly affected the navy. The Naval Act of itjjg promised the creation of a "navy second to none," and although many of the resulting ships bore no relevance to the impending struggle against Germany they did lay the basis for a permanent commitment to naval power. After World War I, the navy conceived itself as the equal of the Royal Navy, and secured the resources to achieve that equality.4 World War I, in which a large, albeit foreign-equipped air force had deployed in France, made the army receptive to the development of a semi-independent aviation arm, even if not swiftly enough for the impatient aviators of the army air corps. The establishment in 1934 of the GHQ Air Force -the immediate predecessor of the Army Air Forces - underlined the army's commitment to air power.3 The world war also invigorated the American system of high command. On 24 July 1919, by joint order, the Secretaries of War and Navy revived the Joint Board, an organization that had proved less than efficient in the preceding decade and a half and that had exercised little control over American forces during World War I.* The Joint Board consisted of the head of each service (the chief of staff of the army and chief of naval operations), the assistant chief of each service, and the directors of the war plans divisions. In July 1941 the deputy chiefs for aviation also joined. The Joint Board established a Joint Planning Committee (1919), a Joint Economic Board (1933), and a Joint Intelligence Committee (1941). In addition to its other functions, the Board formulated and debated joint war plans. The regular meetings of the Board and its subcommittees created a forum for comprehensive strategic reviews such as the January 192.9 assessment of U.S. prospects in a war with Japan. The Board fell short of the integrated mechanisms of military plan- 3 See iMark S. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations (Washi ngton, 1950), pp. 1-3- . 4 By 1918, the U.S. Navy still had only sixteen battleships to Britain's thirty-three and nine battle cruisers, but the U.S. had thirteen more battleships and six battle cruisers under construction compared with Britain's three battleships and one battle cruiser under construction. On the Navy's condition during this period, see Thomas C. Hone, "The Effectiveness of the 'Washington Treaty' Navy," Naval War College Review 32:6 (November-December 1979), pp. J S—S9- s See John F. Shiner, "Birth of GHQ Air Force," Military Affairs .12:3 (October 1978). PP-113-20. * The records of the Joint Board (henceforth cited as }B) cover this matter. (National Archives, Microfilm Publications, Records of the Join: Board 1903-1947 (Washington, D.C., 1986}, Microfilm Publication M-I42i>- On the history of the Joint Board see/B 301. Strategy of innocence? 433 ning that the services required, but it represented a substantial advance over thepre-i9i4- As for the home front, "World War II was largely fought... on the basis of the constitutional law of World War I."7 World War I set the pattern for "the delegation of vast discretionary powers to the President to deal with a broadly defined subject-matter in furtherance of objectives equally broad."8 A brilliantly conceived Selective Service System, for example, reconciled Americans to wide-ranging and nearly unlimited national conscription, a system equally effective in World War II.9 What about the impact of World War I on the American decision to participate in World War II? Some historians have argued that the world wars were a single great conflict, a war broken by a long armistice and turning on the German effort to grasp hegemony in Europe. Many lines of continuity exist between the First and Second World Wars in Europe. But these continuities appear less sharp in the case of the United States. The United States had entered World War I at the end of the conflict. Its productive potential never exercised a decisive influence on the battlefield; only half of the aircraft flown by American pilots were American-made, and barely one in seven artillery pieces were of American manufacture.10 American forces in the field, although large in number (i million men left for France in eighteen months), arrived in strength late, and did not beat the brunt of even the offensives that crushed Wilhelmine Germany. Initially, America's wishes carried great weight at the prolonged negotiations concluding the war. But this influence reflected America's potential as much as its actual strength; it also reflected the financial and agricultural power of the New World. By the end of 1919, the United States clearly had the potential to be a superpower, but it had not yet achieved that status. Only the American navy was a mark of present as opposed to latent strength. But America's participation in World War I was indispensable to Allied success. Without the promise of vast, fresh armies, the Allies could not have hung on in the desperate spring of 1918. The threat and subsequent reality of the American Expeditionary Force eventually convinced the Germans that resistance into the winter of 1918-19 would be hopeless. But although the American intervention was decisive in the last year of the war, it had not shaped the first three quarters of the conflict. The U.S. experience in World War II was quite different. A much earlier mobilization, beginning in 1940, but with origins in 1938 and before, made the United States a major military power by the mid-point of the war. The 7 Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (New York, 1947), p. 17 3 and passim. * Ibid., p. 39. ' See Eliot A. Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (Ithaca, NY, 1985), passim. Leonard P. Ayres, 17« War With Germany: A Statistical Summary (Washington, 1919), p. 434 Cohen United States had matched and was surpassing British war production b 1942. This time, the United States supplied not only men but machines in vast quantities. At the strategic level, the American war effort was also quite different. In World War I, the United States had little opportunity to control the war's shape; the dominant theater remained the Western Front. In World War II, by contrast, the United States set the pace of the Pacific War from the beginning, and by 1943 had achieved at least equality in setting strategy in Europe. Finally, at the deepest psychological level, the American high command appears to have escaped the emotional scars that the World War I slaughter inflicted on Britain. Yet this account fails to acknowledge the lines of continuity between the American experiences in the two world wars. The element of continuity in leadership is critical. Barely twenty-four years separated the end of one conflict and the beginning (from the American point of view) of the second-senior officials and commanders, including Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had participated in the last war, and it had shaped them. Equally important, the experiences of the first war left institutional legacies that persisted into the next conflict. One legacy was a relentless drive for autonomy and independence. The suspicion, occasionally bordering on paranoia, that the American military harbored toward Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff grew in part from the experiences of 1917-18, when the United States was clearly a junior partner at the tactical and operational level. Lieutenant General Stanley Embick, for example, the army's representative on the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, was attached to the American delegation at the Allied War Council during the first war. There he contracted an abiding mistrust of the British, reflected in his caustic comments on the merits of aid to Great Britain in 1940 and of operations in the Mediterranean in 1943.11 The effort of the military intelligence services to deny the forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services access to any information from British intelligence - presumably slanted and hence dangerous - likewise suggests the strength of this feeling.12 World War I experiences also shaped individual conceptions of command. Admiral Ernest J. King acquired much of his willingness to delegate responsibility from his World War I service on the staff of Henry T. Mayo, commander of the Atlantic Fleet.13 General George C. Marshall derived a number of lessons from his experience on Pershing's staff in France, although, interestingly, many of these lessons stemmed from his view that the experience of the American Expeditionary Force had been atypical. In the late 11 See Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall, Vol. 1, Ordeal and Hope 1939-1942 (New York, 1965), pp. 131-33; Ronald Schaffcr, "General Stanley D. Embick: Military Dissenter," Military Affairs 37 (October 1973), pp. 89-95. 12 See "Report to the Joint Board on 'Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Information,'" JB 319, Serial 699. 15 Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York, 1951)1 PP- '44-45- Strategy of innocence? 435 1910s he argued that World War I, with its methodical attacks supported by detailed intelligence, could mislead the army about future challenges.14 Moreover, Marshall had a keen sense that training methods and operational principles of a small, professional peacetime army were radically unsuited to creation of a massive, draftee wartime force, a view that his subsequent work as a National Guard adviser reinforced.15 To oversimplify, then, American military leaders approached World War II mindful of their 1917-18 experiences and with a desire to "this time, do it right." They intended to fight a mobile, aggressive war on fronts of their own choosing, to draw more thoroughly on the vast industrial productive capacities of the nation, and not to fall prey to the duplicity of wily European allies. Finally, American policy remains incomprehensible without reference to Wilsonian ideals and to a mistrust of colonialism dating back considerably further than 1914. Otherwise, it is hard to understand such episodes as FDR's persistent, condescending, and - to Churchill - infuriating pressure for Indian independence in the midst of the war.16 THE AMERICAN REGIME, 1920-1945 The U.S. Constitution was a prime force in shaping American strategic culture between 1910 and 1945. Laid down in the last decades of the eighteenth century, it had shown remarkable resilience even in the face of extreme stress during the Civil War, chiefly, though not exclusively, through its delegation of vast powers to the president in wartime. "Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of government," Alexander Hamilton had written. "It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks."17 Abraham Lincoln found the vague and flexible "war power" in the Constitution, and his successors continued to exploit it, none more skillfully than Franklin D. Roosevelt. In time of war Roosevelt became a virtual though benign dictator. Unlike Churchill he was commander in chief as well as head of state and head of government, an enormous concentration of power. The judicial and legislative branches of government hardly suspended operation, but they did not intervene in the making of strategy. "The grand strategy of the war, to take one example, was almost totally executive in concept, and even the execution of the war strategy was not seriously attacked in Congress."18 Roosevelt did not consult Congress about war aims, refused the legislators either a major presence or influence at the great war- M Lecture at Fort Bcnning, n.d. (1917-1933), in Larry I. Bland, Sharon R. Ritcnour, and Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr., eds. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, Vol. 1, 'The Soldierly Spirit' December 1880-June 1939 (Baltimore, 1981), pp. 334-338. 1J Ibid, p. 708. 16 For Roosevelt's desire to achieve Wilson's goals without making Wilson's mistakes, see James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York, 1970)1 passim. 17 The Federalist Papers, No. 70. 18 Roland Young, Congressional Politics in the Second World War (New York, 1956), p. 5. 436 Cohen time conferences that forged strategy, and even failed to provide Congress with much more information than it could glean from newspapers. From time to time - as with Pearl Harbor, procurement scandals, or relations with Admiral Darlan in 1941 - Congress investigated aspects of the war effort, but it had little impact on the direction of the conflict. Although by today's standards this state of affairs was extraordinary, it was fortunate for the conduct of strategy. Under the first War Power's Act, passed days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequently renewed, Congress granted Roosevelt virtual carte blanche to reorganize the federal government as he saw fit. Given his mistrust of established bureaucracies, he exploited this power to its fullest, creating by executive order new agencies such as the War Production Board reporting directly to him rather than to established cabinet departments. But this extraordinary concentration of power in the executive branch represented an artifact of war rather than a condition of peace. Throughout the interwar years, Congress had taken an active role in shaping American strategy by its control of the budget and by passing so-called neutrality legislation designed to keep the United States out of war.19 Yet Congressional suspicion of foreign entanglements simply reflected a broad stream in American opinion. In September 1939, one poll asked Americans whether "there are any international questions affecting the United States so important to us in the long run that our government should take a stand on them now, even at the risk of our getting into war?" Almost 5 5 percent said no, barely zo percent said yes, and the remainder either said they did not know or that it would depend on the circumstances.20 Yet even in peace a President had discretionary power to shape American strategy. FDR's use of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to break up pro-Nazi activities, and his cooperation with British secret service agencies, revealed a great deal of flexibility in the covert side of peacetime strategy-making. As early as 1940 the FBI, without the State Department's knowledge, had begun quietly cooperating with representatives of what became a large British intelligence establishment in the United States.21 Roosevelt's use of the navy to prosecute an undeclared war in the North Atlantic in 1941 is even more suggestive. Neither the pluralism of the American political system nor the system of checks and balances designed to prevent tyranny hampered the war effort. Like Churchill, Roosevelt had enormous powers at his disposal, although constraints of legislative and collegial opinion bound both to some extent. Yet in one key respect American politics did shape strategy: through the 19 Sec Robert A. Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality (Chicago, and Robert Dallck, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1931-194$ (New Yotk, 1979). 20 Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk.eds., Public Opinion 1935-1946 (Princeton, 1951), p. 949- 21 See H. Montgomery Hyde, Room }6o} (New York, 1963). Strategy of innocence? 437 system of regular elections for the Congress and Presidency. The negative aspect of this system was obvious - for example, in the election year of 1940 FDR hesitated to take open measures that might involve the United States in the war. But there was a positive side as well. Unlike Churchill, Roosevelt never feared a vote of no confidence. Electoral victory guaranteed presidential power for four years. How did Americans approach the formulation of strategy? A long postwar tradition suggests that Americans approached such matters with a double-edged naivete. Isolated by the oceans, cocooned in a political system devoted to preservation of liberty rather than exercise of state power, Americans were innocents in making strategy. "This unearned security during a long century had the effect upon our national habits of mind which the lazy enjoyment of unearned income so often has upon the descendants of a hard-working grandfather."22 In peace they had failed to see the German and Japanese challenges to the balance of power or the need for engagement in European affairs. In the midst of war, which Americans invariably viewed as a crusade, they adopted an unreasonable doctrine of unconditional surrender. They failed to foresee the necessity of balancing Soviet encroachments in Europe until it was too late because they could only conceive of other nations as friends or foes. The complaint is similar to one made in an official history: In their preliminaries, developments, and immediate sequels World War I and World War II followed a cycle whose phases are well marked: (1) prior to the war, insufficient military expenditures, based on the public's prewar conviction that war could not come to America; (1) discovery that war could come after all; (3) a belated rush for arms, men, ships, and planes to overcome the nation's demonstrated military weakness; (4) advance of the producing and training program, attended by misunderstandings, delays, and costly outlay, but gradual creation of a large and powerful army; (5) mounting successes in the field, and eventual victory; (6) immediately thereafter, rapid demobilization and dissolution of the army as a powerful fighting force; (7) sharp reduction of appropriations sought by the military establishment, dictated by concern over its high cost and for a time by the revived hope that, again, war would not come to America.25 The gravamen of the charge, then, is that American democracy in the twentieth century has proven itself ill-suited to steady and sound strategy. This indictment has some merit. America's unwillingness to participate in the League of Nations surely deprived that organization of what little vitality it might have developed. Without an American willingness to keep the balance in both Europe and Asia favorable to the Western democracies, the dictatorships could and did gamble on expansion. It was folly, but not groundless folly, for Hitler and the Japanese militarists to believe that the " Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston, 1943). P- 49- Set-also his U.S. War Aims (Boston, 1944). « Watson, Chief of Staff, p. 13. 438 Cohen United States would be unable and unwilling to throw its weight behind Britain. But the critics of American strategy-making often overdraw the charge of strategic fecklessness.24 For example, the funding of the navy during the interwar period was sufficient to maintain a formidable force. The navy may not have reached parity with the Royal Navy until the outbreak of war, but it did receive the resources to build a substantial fleet, and more importantly, to experiment with new forms of naval power such as the aircraft carrier.25 American naval strength reached its low point in the late 1920s when the foreign threat was lowest. Beginning in 1933 with authorization for two aircraft carriers and several dozen smaller vessels, the navy grew steadily through additional appropriations in 1934, 1938, and 1940 that included 10,000 naval aircraft in the last year. Even at its weakest, the navy was the second largest in the world and one of the most efficient. Few countries could lay claim to great statesmanship during the 1930s; yet here too the usual charges against the United States seem excessive. If the European powers, which had the military resources and interests refused to confront Hitler, why should the United States have done so? And in the Pacific, the United States attempted to walk a fine line between condoning Japanese behavior in China and provoking war. Yet, when the leaders of Japan decided to attack a country vastly superior in military potential and their near-equal in current strength, the groundwork already existed for victory. The Two Ocean Navy Act of 1940 had already authorized many of the aircraft carriers that swept Japan from the seas. The modern presidency and modern American government in fact evolved during the 1920-45 period. The Reorganization Act of 1939 played an important role in consolidating presidential power by creating the Executive Office. Even more important were changes in the military command structure after the outbreak of war. At the top, the single most important step occurred with the creation in 1942 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to replace the Joint Army and Navy Board. The Joint Board had been reasonably effective, but it dealt with the intersection of service interests rather than with strategic decisions.26 Army chief of staff Douglas MacArthur summed up the prevailing view in his 1932 report to the Secretary of War: The ultimate mission of the two services is, in a very true sense, the only element in common between fighting on the land and on the sea. The line between the army and navy fields of activity, namely, the coastline, is an insur- 24 For a particularly cogent argument, see John Braeman, "Power and Diplomacy: The 1920's Reappraised," The Review of Politics 44 (July 1982), pp. 342-69. 25 See the discussion of early American carrier aviation in Norman Friedman, U.S. Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis, 1983), pp. 31-78. 26 See the brief discussion in Watson, Chief of Staff, pp. 79-81. Strategy of innocence? 439 mountable geographical obstacle for each.... So the line of demarcation between the army and navy is clear-cut and permanent in character.27 Some modification of this attitude of course occurred. "Joint Action of the Army and the Navy," the official statement of doctrine for control of joint operations, included provisions for unified command under certain circumstances in its 1935 and 'ater versions.28 But until war broke out, agreements between army and navy for command of joint operations resembled carefully negotiated tteaties rather than working organizational links. The JCS soon became a far more effective body than the Joint Board. Created in January 1942,, it included the chief of staff, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), the commander in chief of the United States Fleet (COMINCH), and the commanding general of the Army Air Forces. By summer the organization had evolved further through the consolidation of the positions of CNO and COMINCH in the hands of Admiral Ernest J. King, and the addition of a new member, Admiral William D. Leahy, who became the President's chief of staff. Characteristically, FDR never described the functions and duties of the JCS.29 He did, however, make clear to the chiefs that they worked for him as commander in chief. As the war continued, the service secretaries lost their influence over the formulation of strategy; instead, the JCS alone hammered out strategic decisions under the direction of a President who paid close attention to the day-to-day running of the war. The war also enforced major reforms of the army and navy departments. In both cases, the positions of the chief of staff and CNO gained strength in ways not envisioned until the war. Before the war, for example, the CNO was to control overall war planning and training, while the commander-in-chief U.S. Fleet (COMINCH) was to run operations. This arrangement proved unworkable. With the consolidation of the two offices, King acquired unusual power over the usually independent bureaus of the navy, but the President blocked any formal reorganization of the department. In the army, 17 Report of the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of the Army, in Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 1932 (Washington, 1932.), p. 95. Interestingly enough, MacArthur argued that "The national strategy of any war - that is, the selection of national objectives and the determination of the general means and methods to be applied in attaining them, as well as the development of the broad policies applicable to the prosecution of war • are decisions that must be made by the head of the State, acting in conformity with the expressed will of Congress. . . . The issues involved were so far reaching in their effects, and so vital to the life of the Nation, that this phase of coordinating Army and Nary effort could not be delegated by the Commander in Chief to any subordinate authority." Ibid., p. 97. 28 JB 3 50, Serial 5 14. 19 For a good brief overview of the JCS system, see the summary account in National Archives, Federal Records of World War II, Vol. 1, Military Agencies (Washington, 1951), pp. 6-13; also William D. Leahy, / Was There (New York, 1950), pp. 95-107, and more generally Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants & Their War (New York, 1987). 440 Cohen Marshall overhauled the high command structure when the war began, and assigned most of the general staff's administrative duties to three new commands: army ground forces, army service forces, and army air forces. He slashed the size of the general staff and at the same time created the operations division (OPD) to formulate strategy and control the war.30 THREATS AND CHALLENGES By the 1920s new dimensions of national security not seen in earlier periods of U.S. history had emerged. Some Americans argued that the preservation of the European balance of power was now a national interest, and although this concern had not provided the decisive motivation for intervention in World War I, it did carry weight among a small but influential group.31 A parallel school of thought perceived American colonies in the Pacific as an extension of national interests; naval planning, in particular, took into account the need to defend those colonies. Finally, the American consciousness had absorbed the notion that it might be necessary to fight for democracy as a principle. Whereas traditional American exceptionalism had suggested that the United States could flourish as the sole republican regime in a world of monarchies and tyrannies, Woodrow Wilson had implicitly argued that isolation was no longer possible. When Wilson presented the Versailles Treaty to the Senate he made a different case, telling its members that "America may be said to have just reached her majority as a world power" and that "there can be no question of our ceasing to be a world power."32 Less than six months later he told Congress that "a fundamental change has taken place with reference to the position of America. . . . No policy of isolation will satisfy the growing needs and opportunities of America."33 Yet few people accepted that expansive definition of national security in the 1910s and 1930s. For most, the prospects of a serious war seemed remote; the purpose of the armed forces was to conttol colonies, to preserve military expertise, and to discourage potential aggressors. As the neutrality legislation of the 1930s revealed, many in Congress were willing to contract American rights overseas in order to avoid war. As war clouds gathered in Europe and the Pacific, Americans began to recognize the threat of Nazi Germany and to accept some of the burdens 30 For Marshall's reforms, sec James E. Hewes, Jr., From Root to McNamara: Organization and Administration 1900-196} (Washington, 1975), pp. 57-103. 31 See Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations (Chicago, '953). PP- 307-428. 32 Address to the Senate, 10 July 1919, in Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, eds., The Public Paper; of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace (New York, 192.2.), Vol. t, pp. 550-51. 33 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 430-31. Strategy of innocence? 441 required to stop Hitler. From summer 1940, for example, two-thirds of Americans supported a year's compulsory military service - although in August 1941, Congress came within a vote of denying the administration an extension of compulsory military service.34 How did army and navy planners view the long-term threats to national security?35 Throughout the 1920s, they saw no immediate threat: the armed forces were rather a form of insurance.36 Since "economic and racial struggle" caused wars and since such competition apparently continued, the armed forces must prepare against undefined future emergencies.37 In the meantime, they garrisoned key defensive positions and prepared to aid imperiled American citizens and interests. In general, planners throughout the late 1920s maintained a sanguine view not only of America's economic strength but of its social cohesiveness and its political efficiency. This confidence was evident in the "Blue-Orange Estimate of the Situation" completed in January 1929 and accepted by the Joint Board (although only the navy accepted the implied decisions). The Estimate provided a comprehensive net assessment of the balance between America and Japan, and noted that "The United States is now the richest nation in the world with practically no foreign debt and with almost unlimited credit."38 Noting its near autarky in raw materials and industrial potential, planners calculated that a year after mobilization the United States could produce 1,500 aircraft a month - compared with a Japanese maximum of 700 a year. Confident of the quality of American equipment, the planners were also confident about the resilience of a country they viewed as "mainly Anglo-Saxon in race and institutions. Our government is democratic and the world war showed that a strong President can assume autocratic powers with the consent of the people." That background of confidence inspired war plans even against potential adversaries as powerful as an Anglo-Japanese combination. By the mid-i93os American military planners correctly understood that Japan had embarked on a campaign of expansion in East Asia and that world politics had entered a period of turmoil.39 By the late 1930s, the sense of threat was acute. In his annual report of 1938, the Secretary of War suggested that the danger of a second world war "made essential a reorientation of our military policy." Moreover, he argued, "in the military sense the Americas are no longer continents" and referred to "the simple unadulterated fact that the range and destructive potentialities of weapons of warfare, primarily those whose realm is the skies, have, in recent years, so shortened the elements of distance and time that any hostile air base established anywhere within M See the polling data in Cantril and Strunk, eds., Public Opinion, p. 459. ,5 See Fred Greene, "The Military View of American National Policy, 1904-1940," American Historical Review, 66:2. (January 1961), pp. 554-77. 16 See Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 191} (Washington, 192.3), pp. 6-7. " Ibid., p. 18. « )B 315, Serial 280. 39 See Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 1937 (Washington, 1937), p. 1. 442. Cohen effective striking proximity of the Panama Canal would prove a vital threat to that waterway - and therefore, a threat to the very security of these United States."40 The requirements of hemispheric defense suggested mobile and flexible forces.41 At the same time the navy moved toward a two-ocean standard of naval power. Where it had previously emphasized operations in the Pacific, by 1940 it aimed at having "forces sufficient to enable us to have complete freedom of action in either ocean while retaining forces in the other ocean for effective defense of our vital security."42 The possibility of a Nazi occupation of Britain and of German control of the Royal Navy represented serious threats to the United States. For the navy, particularly after the early 1930s, the likely enemy was Japan. Unlike their army counterparts, navy planners believed that in case of war the navy should mount a serious effort to rescue or recover the Philippines.43 By 1941, the navy had assembled the building blocks for a successful operation against Japan: a long-range and balanced fleet increasingly centered on aircraft carriers; the concepts for seizing, building, and defending island bases; and long-range submarines to attack enemy lines of communications. The navy knew that the coming war would be long and hard and that victory would probably not come through a cataclysmic battle but through a prolonged series of campaigns.44 The army never managed to focus on a clearly defined enemy in the inter-war period. Army planners did not know until the late 1930s that they would have to fight the Germans in Europe; therefore they targeted a generic enemy. The result was a preference for forces designed for the Western Hemisphere; when war came, the army adjusted its organization and equipment slowly. In 1940, for example, Marshall defended a program for modernizing the army's 75mm guns rather than investing more heavily in 105mm howitzers on the grounds that "concrete fortifications and masonry villages of European battlefields may dictate a need for a weapon firing a heavier projectile than... 40 Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 1939 (Washington, 1939), p. 2. See also the annual report of the Chief of Staff for that year, pp. 23ff. 41 General Marshall's biennial report of 30 June 1941, in Waller Millis, ed., The War Reports of General of the Army George C. Marshall, General of the Army H.H. Arnold, Fleet Admiral Ernest]. King, (Philadelphia, 1947), p. 35. 42 Report of the Secretary of the Navy to the President, 1940 (Washington, 1940), p. 2. 43 On interwar planning, see Russell Weigley, "The Role of the War Department and the Army," and Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., "The Role of the United States Navy," in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations 1931-1941 (New York, 1973), pp. 165-88, 197-124. On ORANGE, the plan for war with Japan, see Louis Morton, "War Plan ORANGE: Evolution of a Strategy," WorW Politics, 11 (January 1959), pp. 111-50. 44 See Philip T. Rosen, "The Treaty Navy, 1919-1937," and John Major, "The Navy Plans for War, 1937-1941," in Kenneth J. Hagan, ed., In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History 1775-1978 (Westport, CT, 1978), pp. 2.21-61. Strategy of innocence? 443 the 75-mm gun, but our forces would rarely be confronted with such targets in this hemisphere."45 As a result of this limited strategic vision and a predilection for mobility -misunderstood as a plenitude of motor transport and a dearth of cumbersome equipment (rather than ability to move on the battlefield) - the army created infantry divisions too light for Europe.46 Even the revised tables of organization of 1942 and 1943 did not compare favorably with the firepower of comparable German units at full strength. In tank and anti-tank warfare, the stubborn adherence of the army ground forces to the mobile and reliable but undergunned and under-armored Sherman tank, and their insistence on independent battalions of largely useless tank destroyers, suggests the dominance of the prewar misunderstandings of what mobility required.47 The threats to American security changed as war approached. American decision-makers worried briefly but intensely about defending the Western Hemisphere against direct assault by Germany and by Nazi sympathizers. These fears had real consequences, for in 1939 and 1940 the army and navy prepared for intervention in Brazil to forestall the creation of a Nazi regime there.48 Until summer 1942, the United States stood on the strategic defensive to protect itself against direct attacks, while shoring up the countries fighting Hitler. American strategic decision-makers faced two critical problems during this phase: how to build a domestic consensus to support intervention on the Allied side, and how to expand U.S. military forces while sustaining the Allies and keeping sufficient forces ready to deter enemy aggression. The first problem was less serious than decision-makers thought at the time, although its severity is a matter of dispute. The second involved a series of painful tradeoffs. The barter of fifty American destroyers for British bases in the Western Hemisphere and the shipment of "surplus" army equipment in summer 1940 (including 500,000 rifles, 900 field guns, and 80,000 machine guns) bit deep into the growing armed forces, particularly the army. 45 Quoted in Janice McKenney, "More Bang for the Buck in the Interwar Army: The 10 j -mm Howitzer," Military Affairs, 42 (April 1978), p. 84. 46 Kent Roberts Greenfield, Robert R. Palmer, and Bell 1. Wiley, The Organization of Ground Combat Troops (Washington, 1947), pp. 274-75; Robert M. Kennedy, The German Campaign In Poland (1939) (Washington, 1956), pp. 30-31; W.J.K. Davies, German Army Handbook 1939-1945 (New York, 1974), pp. 37,40-41. German light and heavy machine guns were basically the same weapon, the redoubtable MG 34: most of the American machine guns were the less effective but still adequate 30 caliber. German mortars were 50mm and 81mm, American mortars 60mm and 81mm; antitank guns the same; German heavy howitzers were 150mm vs. 155mm for the Americans. 47 See Constance McLaughlin Green, Harry C. Thomson, and Peter C. Roots, The Ordnance Department: Phrming Munitions for War (Washington, 1955), pp. 175-87; Christopher R. Gabel, Seek, Strike, and Destroy: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Doctrine in World War II, Leavenworth Papers #12 (Ft. Leavenworth, KS, 1985). 48 Watson, Chief of Staff, pp. 94-95. 444 Cohen Appropriately, it required presidential decisions to force the services to surrender even obsolescent but nevertheless valuable weapons to countries that seemed on the verge of collapse. After Midway, the United States embarked on a strategic offensive that continued until the end of the war. In this respect, the American strategic experience was unique; where other countries faced mortal perils during periods of strategic defense - the Battle of Britain and the invasion of the Soviet Union, for example - the United States was at no time vulnerable to direct enemy action. In order to avoid defeat, the United States had to sustain its allies on a vast scale; in order to win, it had to embark on the most extensive strategic offensives in history. From mid-i94i the American armed forces confronted the challenge of storming two continent-sized citadels. It would not suffice to blockade the enemy and thus reduce him; both Nazi-occupied Europe and Japan's Asian empire were virtually autarkic. Nor could one hope to cause the enemy's collapse by protracted attrition. Rather, the United States had to pierce a thick crust of defenses and penetrate into the enemy heartlands. The United States had to project its power along extraordinarily long and vulnerable lines of communication - nearly a month's sailing time from San Francisco to Sydney, more than two weeks from New York to Liverpool, and over two months from New York to the Persian Gulf.49 It then required completely new combinations of men and machines that included multidivision amphibious assaults to batter its way into Europe and up the Pacific island chains toward Japan. RESOURCES Peace and war posed radically differing challenges to American strategists. The problem in peace was to balance scanty resources between current requirements and the demands of long-term investment in bases and evolving technologies. In war the problem was vastly different: resources available swelled astonishingly. But it was also similar, for the armed forces likewise confronted difficult tradeoffs between near- and long-term requirements. Throughout the interwar period, peacetime budgets for the services remained comparatively low as a percentage of Gross National Product (Table 14.1). The army reacted by adhering to its traditional preference for a cadre force, along the lines Emory Upton had advocated after the Civil War.50 Rather than forming small full-strength units, it maintained the cadre for much larger forces that would fill out upon mobilization. On the whole, this effort was less than successful, particularly when compared with the immense expansion that turned the Weimar Republic's 100,000-man Reichsivehr into 4* From Marshall's second biennial report, 1941-194}, in Millis, ed., War Reports, p. 77-50 See Russell F. Wcigley, History of the United States Army (New York, 1967), pp. 4°°"- Strategy of innocence? 445 Table 14.i. Interwar army and navy budgets*1 (excluding veterans compensation and pensions) 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 Percent of GNP 2.8 .7 .9 1.2 1.8 Percent of federal outlays 37 24 25 14 20 Hitler's army. Still, the army succeeded in maintaining an elaborate school system that expanded extremely fast in 1940-42 to accommodate the influx of recruits. The navy was altogether luckier; it received authorization in 193 3 and 1934 to build three aircraft carriers, seven battleships, eleven cruisers, over a hundred destroyers, and more than forty submarines. But the navy did not gain real superiority over Japan even after passage of a ten-year $1.1 billion expansion program in 1938. The Japanese had their own expansion program, and the navy lacked adequate overseas bases and manpower. Despite the stringent budgets of the 1930s, all three services developed successful weapons systems at least in prototype form during this period. Perhaps the greatest successes came in the Army Air Forces, which "fought during World War II with aircraft which were all either in production or under development prior to December 7, 1941."52 Similarly, in 1940 the navy ordered the first of its Essex class carriers, and had even earlier developed submarines suitable for long-range operations against Japanese lines of communication.53 Even the army achieved notable successes with its M-i rifle and 105mm howitzer. Scanty as the interwar budgets were, they did not preclude the services from performing two essential tasks: developing the weapons needed and preparing a mobilization base for larger wartime forces. Peacetime thinking about mobilization, particularly in the army, nevertheless had several important flaws.54 It envisioned an orderly process beginning from a definite M-Day.SJ Yet the thinking behind all plans before 1940 flowed from "the assumption that a nation passed from a peace status to a war status as quickly and as decisively as one passes from one room to another. No provision whatsoever had been made for the maze of corridors, blind alleys and series of antechambers - labeled 'Phoney War,' 'cash and 51 Percentages derived from Historical Statistics, pp. 214, 1114. 12 Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Air Forces in World War 11, Vol. 6, Men and Plana (Chicago, 195s), p. 193. 53 See Ernest Andrade, Jr., "Submarine Policy in the United States Navy, 1319-1941," Military Affairs, 35:1 (April 1971), pp. $o-$6. 54 On interwar mobilization planning, see Marvin A. Kreidberg and Merton G. Henry, History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army 177J-194J (Washington, i955)> PP' 377-54°- is See R. Elberton Smith, The Army and Economic Mobilization (Washington, 1959), pp. 73-86. 446 Cohen Table 14.2. Resources and military power, 1940 56 Population (millions) Raw Steel (000s metric tons) Electricity (gigawatt hours) United States Germany Japan Britain Soviet Union 132 70 73+ 46+ 170 60.7 21.5 6.8 13.1 18.3 178 63 9 28 48 carry,' 'more than mere words,' 'Lend Lease,' etc. - which the United States was compelled... to traverse between September 1,1939, and December 7, 1941."57 Moreover, the army's high command was not ready to cope with rapidly changing demands for forces capable of intervening in Latin America, or for large air forces with which to impress the dictators. Once war began the latent power of the United States came into its own. What were its resources? (Table 14.2.)58 The United States was virtually self-sufficient in many important areas: it produced some 1.35 billion barrels of crude petroleum in 1940, for example, and met its needs without importing more than 3 percent of that amount.S9 Yet even in those areas where raw materials fell short (rubber was the critical example), conservation and new technologies remedied shortages. Synthetic rubber production, a negligible source in 1942, reached nearly 800,000 long tons by 1944, or only slightly less than all rubber production in 1940.60 More fortunate than either friends or foes, the United States was the only major participant in the war whose homeland did not become a battleground, and this security was a major help in maximizing production. The United States did not tower over its competitors with respect to population alone; its strength lay rather in the size, versatility, and productivity of its economy. The last point is particularly important; the latent power of the American war machine was vast not merely because of its size, but because of its ability to draw on extraordinary ingenuity and organizational skill. Table 14.3 on motor vehicle production suggests the relative potential of the American economy. The U.S. aircraft industry similarly dwarfed that of every 5* Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States; United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on Japan's War Economy (Washington, 1946); B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, znd rev. ed. (New York, 1980). 17 Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York, 1948), p. 180. 58 In what follows, I have relied heavily on U.S. Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War (Washington, 1946). 59 Historical Statistics, p. 593. 60 The United Slates at War, pp. 193-97. Strategy of innocence? 447 Table 14.3. Production of motor vehicles (ooo's)6i 1929 1937 United States 5,358 4,810 Europe (without Soviet Union) 637 1,109 Germany 105 327 France 224 200 Britain 217 493 Soviet Union 1 200 Japan 0 10+ other country. In 1936, for example, the Americans possessed approximately five times as many civil aircraft as Germany, despite Lufthansa's phenomenal success as an airline; only a few years later American planes were flying almost eight times as many miles.62 Figures such as these reinforced the underlying confidence of American planners as war approached in 1940 and 1941. Wartime productivity of the American economy matched or surpassed that of peacetime. In 1944, it produced four times as much munitions as the British with fewer than twice the workers (13.4 million workers in the U.S. vs. 7.8 million in the U.K. in mid-1944).63 When all is said and done, the effort remains a remarkable testimony to American business organization; the explosion of military production in 1942 and 1943 came as a surprise to Americans and foreigners alike.64 In his pioneering study of the American corporation in its heyday, Peter Drucker has noted that The experience which directly shows the true nature of modern mass production was, of course, the American industrial conversion to war in 1942 and 1943. It has by now become clear that most of the experts in this country, including the majority of industrial engineers and managers, underestimated our productive capacity so completely in 1940 and 1941 precisely because practically all of us failed to understand the concept of human organization 61 League of Nations, Bulletin of Monthly Statistics, 19:6 (June 1938), p. 268. 61 Heinz J. Nowarra and Karlheinz Kens, Die deutsche Flugzeuge 1933-1945, 5th ed. (Munich, 1977), p. 9. " W. K. Hancock and M. M. Cowing, British War Economy (London, 1949), pp. 367-68. One wartime economist has argued that "the munitions production of the major belligerents at full mobilization was roughly proportional to the size of their prewar industrial labor force combined with the prewar level of productivity in industry." Raymond W. Goldsmith, "The Power of Victory, Munitions Output in World War II," Military Affairs, to (Spring 1946), p. 79. 64 For interesting comparisons with the British effort, see M. M. Postan, British War Production (London, 1952), pp. 243-48, and Correlli Burnett, The Pride and the Fall: The Dream and Illusion of Britain as a Great Nation (New York, 1986), passim. 448 Cohen which underlies mass production. We argued in terms of existing raw material supplies and existing plant capacity and failed to realize that we are capable of producing new raw materials, of designing new machines for new purposes, and of building new plants in practically no time provided the human organization is in existence.65 Drucker drives home this point with the story of how, during the war, Cadillac mass-produced bombsights using a labor force of superannuated prostitutes from Detroit's slums - a workforce that intelligent management made effective.66 If bringing hitherto marginal workers into war production represented one kind of managerial success, the mobilization of the nation's scientific capacities was another.67 Roosevelt created the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in summer 1940, and one year later the Office of Scientific Research and Development, of which NDRC became a part. Despite inevitable friction and difficulties, the services worked closely with thousands of civilian scientists. The results included not only such weapons as the atomic bomb, but a stream of innovations such as the DUKW (an amphibious truck), a wide range of tropical medicines and pesticides, and the stunningly lethal proximity fuze. The enemy outmatched the United States in selected weapons, in some cases throughout the war - German tanks were clearly superior, as was the German light machine gun. Yet American forces had an overall edge in the technology of war, an edge that a combination of quality and quantity created and that neither enemies nor allies could match. This advantage was particularly true in the mundane devices that made American forces mobile and sustainable. After the war General Dwight D. Eisenhower singled out five pieces of equipment as vital to success in Europe: the DUKW, bulldozer, jeep, iVi-ton truck, and C-47 transport aircraft. "Curiously enough," he noted, "none of these is designed for combat."68 Some industries grew virtually from scratch during the war; in 1941, for example, U.S. merchant ship construction was some 1.1 million deadweight tons. Shipyards produced over 8 million tons in 1941 and over 19 million tons in 1943; without this construction the U.S. could not have sustained the war in the Pacific or the Normandy invasion. To achieve this growth the U.S. Maritime Commission standardized a particular design - the so-called Liberty Ship-slow, obsolescent, and simple. In 1941 the ship took nearly a year to build; by the end of 1942 less than two months.69 Part of the explanation for " Peter F. Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation (1946; New York, 1983), p. 31. Emphasis in the original. 66 Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander (New York, 1978), pp. 170-71. Postan, British War Production, pp. 394-95, notes the ways in which chronic shortages of skilled managers afflicted British war production. i7 For a good short account, see James Phinney Baxter, Scientists Against Time (1946; Cambridge, MA, 1968). « Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade In Europe (Garden City, NJ, 1948), pp. 163-64. *' The U.S. at War, pp. 135-43. Strategy of innocence? 449 Table 14.4. Relative magnitude of munitions production, 1944 United States 100 Germany 40 USSR 35+ Britain 25 Japan 15 Canada 5- Tablc 14.5. Trend of combat munitions production of the major belligerents (1944 = 100) Country 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 United States 2 2 5 11 47 91 100 Canada 0 2 6 27 73 102 100 Britain 4 10 34 59 83 100 100 USSR 12 20 30 53 71 87 100 Germany 16 20 35 35 51 80 100 Japan 8 10 16 32 49 72 100 these successes stems from increased worker productivity, which rose by 2.5 percent between 1939 and 1944.70 Shortly after the war ended, one economist calculated the relative magnitude of the munitions production of the major belligerents in 1944 (Table 14.4).71 If one factors in nonlethal but nonetheless critical goods (food, merchant ships, trucks, and so forth), the dominance of American war production becomes even more striking. The American productive surge was startling in both scale and rapidity, as Table 14.5 shows.72 The chief shortage throughout the war was manpower. Unlike any other power in the war, the United States committed itself to four efforts: a great army, navy, air force, and productive base. The manpower shortage hurt the army most of all, leading it to take what Maurice Matloff has called the "90 Division Gamble," in effect to settle for a relatively small army.73 The crisis caused by the German offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944 stripped the United States of all strategic reserves. The result was a "photo finish" in 70 Goldsmith, "The Power of Victory," p. 71. 71 Ibid., p. 7Z. 72 Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War: History of the War Production Board and Predecessor Agencies 1940-1^5, Vol. 1, Program and Administration (Washington, 1947), pp. 964-66. 73 Maurice Matloff, "The 90-Division Gamble," in Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions (Washington, 1960), pp. 365-81. 45° Cohen Table 14.6. Mobilization of the labor force of the U.K. and the U.S. ft, war, June 194474 (percentages) United Kingdom United States A. Armed forces 22 18.5 B. Civilian war employment 33 21.5 C. Total A + B 55 40 D. Other employment 45 58 E. Unemployed — 2 F. Total labor force 100 100 which by V-E day every active U.S. division had been deployed overseas and all but two had been in battle. Moreover, the demands on high-quality manpower and the ability of potential soldiers to volunteer for the other services through 1941 degraded the quality of American infantrymen. One 1943 sample of infantrymen was over a half-inch shorter and six pounds lighter than the army average and had a smaller percentage of top-grade scorers on the intelligence tests.75 Such deficiencies had a bearing on the general inferiority of American infantry units vis-a-vis their German counterparts. Yet the American manpower pool was never as strained as that of the British (Table 14.6). The British war mobilization was not necessarily more efficient: "the British people were compelled to undergo, irrespective of the shipping shortage, a sharp decline in their domestic standard of living, their export trade, and their capital inheritance."76 Unlike the reasonably well-fed and clothed American workers, whose productivity actually increased, that of British workers fell in a number of critical sectors. Remarkably, the United States paid for the war with a low level of inflation - barely 30 percent between 1939 and 1945.77 American leaders performed this feat with comprehensive price controls, a less successful effort to stabilize wages, and, with the exception of 1943, heavy taxation. In 1945, for example, roughly 45 percent of governmental funding came from taxes. But taxation covered only one quarter of overall war expenditures, as opposed to more than half in Britain and Canada.78 Price, rent, and to a lesser extent wage controls provided economic stability, but the Chairman of the War Production Board, Donald Nelson, held "that the highest levels of industrial production come only from an economy that is well supplied with 74 Hancock and Cowing, British War Economy, p. 370. 75 Robert R. Palmer, "The Procurement of Enlisted Personnel: The Problem of Quality," in Robert R. Palmer, Bell I. Wiley, and William R. Keast, The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops (Washington, 1949), p. 3. 76 Ibid., p. 373. 77 The U.S. at War, p. 236. 78 Ibid., p. 259. Strategy of innocence? 451 machinery, repair parts, power, and transport facilities, homes for workers, water, sewers, and utilities, and a generous standard of necessities."79 As a result, although production of most consumer durables stopped, food, clothing, and repair items remained at prewar levels or slightly increased. The chief instrument of mobilization was the War Production Board. Although the services controlled procurement, this agency was responsible for overall production. It allocated scarce raw materials through a variety of mechanisms and scheduled production of common items such as valves and engines. The WPB was initially responsible to the President, and it served a particularly important role in balancing the requirements of the services, Allies, and civilian economy - a function in which it met bitter opposition from the services. The WPB contributed substantially to the war effort through its insistence in 1941 on scaling down production goals that would have exceeded the economy's capacity by 20 percent and have led to even worse bottlenecks than actually occurred.80 The WPB's action involved a struggle with the military, since the JCS declared early in the war that "production of war materials should be governed by military requirements and not on the productive capacity of the country."81 But the WPB did not generally base its production decisions in the early part of the war on strategic considerations - of which the military generally failed to inform it. The production effort sustained not only burgeoning American forces but those of the allies as well. Some $48 billion went to lend-lease, two-thirds to the British Empire, over one-fifth to the Soviet Union, and the rest to others.82 Lend-lease to the Soviet Union included no fewer than 430,000 jeeps and trucks by 1944, a transport fleet indispensable to Soviet advances from 1943 on.83 The British Empire and Commonwealth drew close to half of its tanks, nearly one-fifth of its combat aircraft, three-fifths of its transport aircraft, and nearly two-fifths of its landing craft and ships from American sources.84 What of Allied contributions to American resources? Throughout most of the 1920s and 1930s, American planners expected that the Allies would contribute little to an American war effort. This attitude changed in 1938 when American and British planners first discussed operations in the Pacific. But in practical terms, no real benefit from the Allies appeared until 1940, when Roosevelt authorized a clandestine but extensive liaison with the British. With some exceptions - the 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal - the United 7» Ibid., p. 128. 80 See Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (New York, 1946), pp. 368-90; Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization, pp. 273-91. 81 Minutes, 9th Meeting of the JCS, 6 April 1942. In Paul Kesaris, ed., Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Part 1:1942-194; (Frederick, MD, 1980-1983), henceforth JCS. 82 James A. Huston, Sinews of War: Army Logistics 177s-'9SJ (Washington, 1966), p. 454. 33 See John Erickson, The Road to Berlin (Boulder, CO, 1983), p. 81. 84 Postan, British War Production, p. 147. 452. Cohen States gained little quantitative advantage from its allies, at least early in the war. British Empire wartime aid to the United States amounted to between 25 and 30 percent of American lend-lease, according to British sources, although less than 20 percent according to American sources.85 Much of this aid came in the form of direct support to troops in Britain, Australia, and other staging areas. Yet a comparison of relative aid figures does not tell the full story of America's gain from its wartime alliances. The United States could not have successfully fought the war without Britain and the Soviet Union. Soviet forces pinned down two-thirds and sometimes three-quarters of German ground forces on the Eastern Front after June 1941, while the British Empire provided the jumping-off points for successful attacks on the German and Japanese empires. Although the eventual American drive through the Central Pacific owed little to Australian and New Zealand support, that effort would have been far more difficult without the attritional battles of 1942 along the lines of communication to the Antipodes that had worn the Japanese down. The drive from the Southwest Pacific used Australia as its base and involved large Dominion forces. And without the time that British and Soviet resistance to Nazi Germany bought, the United States would not have had the breathing space to arm. Less obvious, perhaps, is the extent to which the American war effort benefited from the pooling of Anglo-American resources. One of the greatest advantages of the Allies throughout the war lay in the area of intelligence, particularly signals intelligence. Even before the war, the Americans and British shared some decrypted messages, and once the United States entered the war, the most remarkable coordination of intelligence efforts in history began. The British code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park absorbed new American recruits, while American signals intelligence dominated the Pacific. Although some overlap occurred, it was far less than if the two nations had not cooperated so closely. In addition, the United States benefited from the use of British designs either adapted to American needs or simply mass-produced in this country. Britain shared its designs for landing craft, merchant ships, and such indispensable devices as the cavity magnetron that made microwave radar possible. The Merlin engine made the American P-51 the best piston engine fighter of the war, and the United States also gained from British experience in operating a wide range of antisubmarine equipment, including sonar. Perhaps most remarkable was the institutionalization of logistical cooperation between the United States and the Empire.86 The first such organization, created in early is Hancock and Gowing, British War Economy, p. J76; Huston, Sinews, p. 454. 8