At the level of operational culture, the development of the armies of the United States can be described under the concepts of mobility and firepower. Following victory in the War of Independence, the U.S. went many years without facing an enemy that fielded a mass army. The 1812 War, the so-called Second War of Independence, was conducted by Great Britain with limited resources because that country was involved in Napoleon’s European wars, at least at the beginning.62 After the War of 1812, the duties of the Regular Army were reduced all the way down to carrying out expeditions in the territories of the indigenous inhabitants of the U.S. and patrolling the borders, especially the Mexican border. With respect to these duties as well as the Army’s composition, the American military historian Russell F. Weigley comments:
Historically, the American army was not an army in the European fashion, but a border constabulary for policing unruly Indians and Mexicans.63
Applying the premise form follows function to the design and architecture of armies, the primary demand on the U.S. Armed Forces was for mobility. In order to patrol the vast border areas with limited manpower and to be able to prevail against the mounted irregular forces of American Indians, the Army rebuilt itself around a lightly armed, highly mobile cavalry.
61 Ibid., p. 189.
62 Robert P. Wettemann, Jr., The War of 1812, in: Peter Karsten (Ed.), Encyclopedia of War and American Society (New York 2005), p. 904 ff.
63 Weigley, Lieutenants, p. 2.
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This mobility doctrine reached its limits in the 1861-65 Civil War. The war was fought by both sides with mass armies arrayed in line formation on a European model. The Union owed its victory over the Confederacy of the Southern states, in the last analysis, to the strategy and application of sheer force and firepower. Ulysses S.
Grant, a Union Army commander, after 1864 its commanding general and later President of the United States, took advantage of the superior industrial capacity of the Union states to create an army of immense size and firepower. Russell F.
Weigley explains:
Both the trading of casualty for casualty to bleed the enemy white and the simultaneous offensives on every part of the front were applications of the superior raw power of the United States. General Grant and his lieutenants defeated the Confederacy by drowning its armies in a flood of overwhelming power.64
Against an operationally superior opponent like General Robert E. Lee, General-in-Chief of the Confederate forces, Grant’s overwhelming force strategy proved correct.
Thereafter, American strategists were prone to view the concept of overwhelming power as a suitable way to approach every major American conflict.
U.S. involvement in World War I was of too short a duration to produce a significant change in strategic thinking. While Grant’s concept of overwhelming force was implemented in 1917/18, the Regular Army returned to the tried-and-true mobility approach following demobilization in 1918 in viewing its traditional border security role. When the German Wehrmacht rolled across France in 1940 with close to 100 infantry and 10 tank divisions, two active Regular Army divisions were listed in the roster of land forces in the continental United States: the 1st Cavalry Division on horse patrol along the Mexican border and the 2nd Infantry Division, likewise based in Texas.65
64 Ibid., p. 3.
65 Ibid., p. 2.
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3 Between the wars: demobilization, isolationism and reactions to the crisis in Europe
To us there has come a time, in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock – to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of isolation, the real peril of inaction.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 20, 194166
Shortly after the ceasefire in Europe in November 1918, the War Department approached the U.S. Congress to request authorization for a regular peacetime army of approximately 500,000 men and a three-month general military service requirement. Unsupported by public opinion, this proposal was consequently rejected by the legislature.67 Europe had emerged from the Great War so weakened than no one could imagine the country being pulled into another armed conflict. A coming war with Japan was, to be sure, conceivable for the political and military elites, but it would have maritime characteristics. As a result, for the next two decades the focal point of American military policy would be the U.S. Navy. The tasks of the land forces included defending the continental United States, should the need arise, performing occupation duties in Germany, and training volunteer reserve elements.68
It was the War Department’s responsibility to demobilize the 3.5 million-man wartime army as rapidly and harmoniously as possible without creating turbulence for the American economy. For this purpose, 30 demobilization centers were set up across the United States, deactivating approximately 650,000 officers and enlisted men in the first full month of their existence. After nine months, 3.25 million soldiers had been demobilized without causing serious difficulties for the national economy. By the
66 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Third Inaugural Address (January 20, 1941), http://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/speeches/speech-3321 (most recent access: June 10, 2015).
67 Erik Riker-Coleman, Selective Service System, in: Peter Karsten (Ed.), Encyclopedia of War and American Society (New York 2005), p. 774.
68 Stewart, American Military History II, p. 53.
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end of 1919, the active army had been reduced to around 220,000 men and had once again become a Regular Army made up of volunteers.69
The National Defense Act of 1920 and the measures to reorganize the structure and organization of the Army of the United States shaped the image of the organization that went into action in World War II. Contrary to the classic requirement of a professional military, it was determined that the United States would not maintain a large professional army equipped to address a major conflict. Instead, the law created an army for wartime made up of three subsidiary organizations: the Regular Army, the National Guard and the so-called Organized Reserves. The Regular Army, authorized for a maximum peacetime size of 280,000, was charged with fulfilling the traditional duties of border security and was responsible as well for training the reserve components in peacetime. Other tasks included developing mobilization plans and keeping them up to date in case a major new war might require the formation of an army of citizen soldiers. In the 1920s decade, the U.S. Army founded the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and the Army War College in Washington, where officers were trained to command large troop contingents and to perform general staff functions. However, the largest impact on the American reaction to the imminent crisis in Europe would arise from the creation of the Army Industrial College in Washington, which was made accountable for the supremely important issues of industrial mobilization and logistics in a coming major war.70
The National Guard, the first of the two reserve components, was fixed at a maximum strength of 436,000 men. In reality, its numbers during the interwar period leveled off at 180,000 men, at which strength it was still the largest of the three subsidiary organizations of the Army of the United States.71 Guardsmen received their equipment and training partially paid for by the War Department, although in peacetime such funding was granted to the individual states, amounting to a tenth of
69 Ibid., p. 54 ff.
70 Ibid., p. 57.
71 Although the Regular Army had a maximum authorized strength of 230,000 men, it stabilized after a couple years of steadily shrinking budgets at around 160,000, placing it in 1933 as the seventeenth-largest army in the world, behind Romania.
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the departmental budget, on average. In return, they had to complete 15 days of maneuvers per year as well as participate in various training activities, and they were subject to call-up under national command in the event of a crisis. The third component of the Army of the United States was formed by combining the Enlisted Reserve Corps and the Officers Reserve Corps. Both organizations had been designed for veterans of the First World War whose training in that context qualified them to remain in readiness as Army Reserve personnel. While the Enlisted Reserve Corps generated practically no interest, the Officers Reserve Corps yielded a pool of almost 100,000 reservists. In addition, the Army provided a variety of paramilitary training programs for high schools and colleges and also for civilians during the 1920s and 1930s, further expanding the personnel pool available for possible mobilization.72
In the course of the decade of the 1930s, the War Department commissioned the War Plans Division’s Joint Planning Committee to elaborate a number of theoretical conflict scenarios in the context of military action plans73. Although, from 1933 onward, there was at least a partial awareness of European instability stemming from Hitler’s accession to power, the staff of the War Plans Division nevertheless prioritized plans focused on the Pacific Ocean. The reason for this action, incomprehensible only at first glance, was by no means pure ignorance. It was instead due firstly to Washington’s conviction that, in the event of a European war, France – at that time Europe’s largest army – and Great Britain would be in a position over the long term to act as a buffer between Germany and the United States.
Secondly – and here it is important to reiterate that American war planning was exclusively defensive until the late 1930s and was focused on the defense of the American continent and the Western Hemisphere74 – it was assumed, in a lack of awareness of the coming two-front war, that the U.S Navy would provide an Atlantic shield against aggressors.75
72 Stewart, American Military History II, p. 61.
73 These were known as ῾rainbow plans᾽.
74 Stewart, American Military History II, p. 67.
75 Stetson Conn / Byron Fairchild, United States Army in World War II. The Western Hemisphere. The Framework of Hemisphere Defense (Washington, D.C. 1958), p. 7 ff.
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Although the American public’s strongly isolationist tenor precluded any sudden political changes, U.S. Armed Forces obtained additional resources after 1935.
Respecting the overwhelmingly isolationist tendencies of the U.S. populace, President Roosevelt limited himself to criticizing the military actions taken in Italy’s Ethiopian invasion in 1935 and the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, but took no further political steps. During the Spanish Civil War, he initiated several neutralist laws that made it impossible for the Spanish Republic to purchase arms in the United States. During the Sudeten crisis of 1938, Roosevelt called for a negotiated solution.76 At the same time, however, from the mid-1930s onward, he ordered the formulation of continuously updated Protective Mobilization Plans to prepare the Army’s role in an eventual war as well as Industrial Mobilization Plans for the wartime mobilization of the American economy,77 and he gradually boosted the maximum authorized strength of the Regular Army and the National Guard.78
The German attack on Poland on September 1, 1939 marked not only the end of a period of European ῾peace᾽ that had been no such thing. Across the Atlantic, this event signified the end of a period in which at least optimists believed in the possibility of American domestic unity surrounding the goals of U.S. foreign policy.
On one side was the isolationist majority of the American population, who saw in the United States a regional power that, as such, should protect only regional interests.
European affairs and especially European wars were viewed as something from which America should stay as far away as possible. Confronting this majority pragmatic-isolationist attitude was President Roosevelt, whose views could be characterized as moral internationalism. Roosevelt was convinced that the United States was a world power due to its size and economic-industrial potential and that, as a logical consequence, it needed to assume global responsibility. Moral premises, not just the dictum of its own interests, should shape the direction of the United
76 Kurt Piehler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in: Peter Karsten (Ed.), Encyclopedia of War and American Society (New York 2005) p. 745.
77 The U.S. Army in World War II. The 50th Anniversary, Mobilization (Center of Military History Publication 72-32), p. 6 ff.
78 Cf. Stetson Conn, Highlights of Mobilization, World War II, 1938–1942 (Office of the Chief of Military History 1959).
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States foreign policy.79 Roosevelt thus introduced a reinforcement of American garrisons outside the U.S. and lobbied for a review of the country’s neutrality legislation. After spirited debate, laws were amended under pressure from the President to allow France and Great Britain to buy weapons on a cash-and-carry basis. Specifically, this provision meant that the purchase of armaments did not run counter to the neutrality laws if such weaponry was paid for in cash and transported aboard British and French ships.80
With France’s unexpectedly rapid collapse in May and June 1940, the final spiraling into war began to pick up speed prior to the ultimately unlimited mobilization of the American society and economy in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.81 Although 80 percent of the American population believed at this time that the U.S. would, sooner or later, become involved in the European war, a similar proportion was opposed to an immediate entry into combat operations.82 Roosevelt finally abandoned the path of feigned neutrality and positioned the United States ever more openly on the side of Great Britain.83 With the Selective Service and Training Act of September 18, 1940, a draft was imposed for the first time in American peacetime history84; the President agreed to an exchange arrangement with Great Britain in which 50 American destroyers were traded for use of a number of British naval bases in the Western Hemisphere; and lastly, he staked his entire authority on launching the so-called ῾Lend-Lease Program᾽ that provided first Great Britain and then, after the end of June 1941, the Soviet Union85 with armaments at no cost. In August 1941, having become commander in chief of the
79 Charles E. Kirkpatrick, An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present. Writing the Victory Plan of 1941 (Washington, D.C. 1992), p. 38.
80 Conn, Framework, p. 21 f.
81 Kirkpatrick, Victory Plan, p. 40.
82 Ibid., p. 36.
83 Piehler, Roosevelt, p. 745.
84 Conn, Highlights, p. 2.
85 On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa, the war of aggression and annihilation against the Soviet Union.
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Arsenal of Democracy through this law, Roosevelt formalized the Grand Alliance by signing the Atlantic Charter86 with British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill on a bay in Newfoundland.
86 The Atlantic Charter is a joint statement by the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain that may be seen as a basic document for world order following World War II. The United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the post-war independence of British and French colonies and many other cornerstones of Western post-war policy are derived from these documents.
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4 From defensive to offensive planning
The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes[,] the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.
Emphatically we must get these weapons to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough; so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure. There is no demand for sending an American Expeditionary Force outside our own borders. There is no intention by any member of your Government to send such a force. You can, therefore, nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth. Our national policy is not directed toward war. Its sole purpose is to keep war away from our country and our people.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, December 29, 194087
Between mid-1940 and the end of 1941, a change occurred in U.S. foreign and military policy from an isolationist strategy of defending the American continent and the Western Hemisphere to one of planning an offensive multiple-front coalition war against the Axis powers. The main actors in this strategic change were President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the chief of staff of U.S. land and air forces, General George Catlett Marshall and a U.S. Army major who had been completely unknown up to that time, Albert C. Wedemeyer88. We will now examine the roles of these three players in the prelude and genesis of the Victory Program.