THE JOINT CHIEFS AND THE PRESIDENT. The close identification of the JCS with the President rested upon both formal legal position and informal personal relationships. Prior to 1939, the military chiefs collectively had no legal right of direct access to the President. The Joint Board was merely an interdepartmental committee established by agreement between the two service secretaries. All its actions had to be approved by the secretaries. On July 5, 1939, however, the President ordered that the Joint Board and the Joint Army-Navy Munitions Board should thereafter function directly under him as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. This action removed the collective military organ from departmental control. When the Joint Chiefs superseded the Joint Board, they too, operated immediately under the President as his military advisers. Although the JCS never, until 1947, had any firmer legal basis than an exchange of letters between General Marshall and Admiral King, there was never any doubt as to its position with respect to the President. In addition, both King and Marshall were, in their individual capacities as service chiefs, authorized to deal directly with the President on matters pertaining to the strategy, tactics, and operations of their respective services.2
The formal position of the Joint Chiefs was reinforced by their personal relations with the President. Roosevelt viewed himself as a master strategist and relished the title of Commander in Chief. He liked to consort with the military leaders, and he liked to think that he could consort with them on equal terms. Leahy and Roosevelt were old associates from World War I years when the latter was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and from the late thirties when the former was Chief of Naval Operations. After his appointment as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief in July 1942, Leahy was probably more closely and continuously connected with the President in the conduct of the war than any other individual except Harry Hopkins. At the minimum, he had a daily conference with the President, and he was, of course, the principal liaison between the President and the other Joint Chiefs. General Marshall was first called to Roosevelt’s attention by Hopkins, who recommended his appointment as Chief of Staff in 1939. For three years thereafter, Hopkins was Marshall’s principal contact with the White House. After Pearl Harbor, Marshall acquired Roosevelt’s complete confidence, and by 1943 there was no need for any intermediary between them.3
THE EXCLUSION OF CIVILIAN ADVICE. The mere fact of direct access to the President did not account for the authority of the Joint Chiefs in the conduct of the war. Their power was rather a product of their direct access combined with the exclusion of civilian advice. During war the Chief Executive necessarily deals directly with his military advisers. As military issues become more important, the level of decision-making rises, and the head of the government devotes more time to military matters. If civilian control is to be maintained, however, a balance must exist between the military viewpoint and the relevant political viewpoints at whatever level decisions are made. An equilibrium at the Presidential level could have been achieved through a political-military council or staff including the Secretaries of State, War, and the Navy, the directors of economic mobilization, and the military chiefs. The British Prime Minister in both wars had such an instrument in the War Cabinet and its secretariat. The American attitude toward war and the military, however, coupled with Roosevelt’s opposition to any device which might take policy out of his own hands, prevented the creation of such an agency. Each of the committees which conceivably might have evolved into a war council withered on the vine after Pearl Harbor.* The civilians ceased to consider grand strategy. Ironic as it was, Roosevelt, who normally skillfully played subordinates off against each other in order to maximize his own authority, allowed one set of advisers to preempt the field with respect to his most important decisions. This strange departure from his usual pattern reflected self-confidence, confidence in his Chiefs, and the presence in the President’s mind of the prevailing American ideas as to the nature of war and the manner in which it should be conducted. As a result, instead of presenting their advice within the framework of a civil-military war council, the Joint Chiefs themselves substituted for such a council.
Throughout Roosevelt’s third administration, the Secretaries of War and of the Navy were excluded from matters of grand strategy. Roosevelt’s selection of Stimson and Knox in 1940 was undoubtedly in part motivated by the feeling that he would direct the services himself and that two elderly Republicans would tend to be administratively passive and politically neutralized. The secretaries did not meet with the President and the Joint Chiefs. They did not, with one or two exceptions, attend the wartime allied conferences. They were not on the routine distribution list for JCS papers. They tended to be excluded from contacts between the military and civilian agencies, since the latter preferred to deal with the Joint Chiefs as the single unified spokesman for the military viewpoint. While at times the secretaries were consulted on specific points, they still had “no formal responsibilitity in matters of military strategy.”4 Even procurement and logistics were primarily in the hands of Under Secretaries Patterson and Forrestal. The service secretaries performed two functions. Within their departments, they directed the administrative, housekeeping, and more narrowly civilian matters. Externally, they defended the interests of their services before President, Congress, and the public.
The State Department played a minor role in the direction of the war for political, personal, and organizational reasons. Ideologically, the State Department was peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with the problems of either the war or the immediate postwar periods. During the 1930’s, the Department had been largely occupied with Latin American affairs — the good neighbor policy — on the one hand, and economic matters — the reciprocal trade agreements program — on the other. During the war, the State Department continued to believe that its function was diplomacy and that diplomacy was distinct from force. As a result, it devoted itself to relations with neutrals and minor allies and to the development of plans for the United Nations organization. The bitter antagonism between Secretary Hull and Under Secretary Welles also weakened the Department. The President tended to play off one against the other until Hull insisted upon the resignation of Welles in 1943. Throughout, however, Roosevelt did not wish Hull to participate in the major decisions of the war.* Unlike his successors, Stettinius and Byrnes, Hull did not attend the principal wartime conferences. State Department organization during the war also suffered from the confusion of purpose and role. Stettinius attempted to reorganize the Department after his appointment as Under Secretary in 1943 but he was not notably successful. Symbolic of the peripheral role of the Department was the fact that General Clay, prior to his departure to become military governor in Germany in 1945, consulted with the President, Stimson, McCloy, Byrnes, Marshall, and Somervell, but never visited the State Department. As he subsequently remarked, it never occurred to him that this might be a wise thing to do.5
The preëminence of the Joint Chiefs in advising the President was reflected in the infrequency with which Roosevelt rejected their recommendations. Apparently, this occurred only twice in the course of the conflict: the decision in the summer of 1942 to invade North Africa and the abandonment of an Indian Ocean offensive at the Cairo conference in December 1943.6 In both cases, the President initially accepted the view of his Chiefs and then reversed his decision, not as a result of conflicting advice from civilian American sources, but rather due to pressure from the British. On one or two other occasions, Roosevelt may have gone ahead without consulting with the Chiefs, but with these exceptions, harmony reigned between the President and his military advisers.
THE SCOPE OF MILITARY AUTHORITY. As the substitute for a war council, the Joint Chiefs extended their activities and interests far beyond the normal military confines and into the areas of diplomacy, politics, and economics. From the initial great decision to defeat Germany first to the last complex series of decisions on the end of the war with Japan, the major strategic and policy issues of the war were resolved by the Presi
dent, the Chiefs, and Harry Hopkins. The absence of a formal charter for the JCS facilitated the expansion of its functions since it was impossible for any rival agency to argue that it was exceeding its authority. Tied in close to the President, the interests and power of the Chiefs tended to expand and become coextensive with his. The formulation of the American position preparatory to the great interallied war conferences was normally done by the military and the President. The Chiefs themselves attended virtually all these conferences while the civilian secretaries were left at home. The military carried out diplomatic negotiations for the government, as well as being in constant communication with the British service chiefs. In the field, theater commanders such as MacArthur and Eisenhower functioned in political and diplomatic roles. Civil affairs and military government, at least with respect to overseas operations, were largely areas of military responsibility.
In the early years of the war, the formulation of American policy was handicapped by the absence of any coordinating agency at the top. The military floundered about without any clear notion as to the policy of the government. As a result, they were at a considerable disadvantage in dealing with the British. Eventually, however, when the military realized that they had to furnish themselves with political guidance, the JCS took over the “administrative coordination of national policy decisions.” This created, however, a system far different from that of the British. The range of activities covered by the JCS was truly impressive. Comparing the British and American systems, one American participant pointed out that the British military joint planners had much less to do with “matters of an economic, sociological or administrative nature” than their American opposite numbers. These nonmilitary problems were handled by other British agencies which furnished guidance to the British military. In some cases the British officers “didn’t even know how some of the subjects handled by our [military] planners were dealt with in the U.K.”7
Not only did the Joint Chiefs extend themselves beyond the scope of military competence, but, as the war progressed, the involvement of military organs in political decision-making penetrated to lower levels of the military hierarchy. By 1945 the War Department staff was consciously enmeshed in foreign policy. This involvement had existed almost since the beginning of the war, but, prior to 1944, it had been obscured by the high military content of these political decisions. At the end of the war, the level of military participation remained essentially the same, but the significance of military issues lessened; consequently, with the camouflage being stripped away, the military staffs dealt more and more openly with political questions. Although the military continued to think that it would be “helpful” to get the government’s political position before military matters were discussed, they also had to recognize that this was not likely and that, consequently, the military agencies would have to make their own political decisions. As one officer put it, “The time has come when, whether we like it or not, the War Department must face the fact that it has a real interest in political matters of varying categories.” Originally, the War Department did not like this situation, but by the end of the war, the pressure of events had “overcome all scruples on the part of OPD [Operations Division of the General Staff] about getting into matters that traditionally were none of the Army’s business.” Considerably more than half the papers OPD prepared for the Potsdam conference were devoted to matters other than military operations.8
THE MILITARY AND CONGRESS. The two chief means of congressional control of the military are the power of the purse and the power of investigation. The scarcity of resources during World War II rendered the power of the purse inoperative. Dollar controls were supplanted by administrative priorities and direct allocations. Inevitably, this transferred power from the legislative to the executive branch, and Congress more or less willingly acquiesced in the transfer. The larger the military appropriations, the less information Congress received with respect to them and the less time it spent debating them. As Colonel G. A. Lincoln and his associates have pointed out, the War Department estimates in 1945 occupied 16 pages in a total budget document of 872 pages. In 1950, when the estimates were 5 per cent of those of 1945, the War Department had 90 out of 1,400 pages. While the low Army budgets of the 1930’s were debated for four or five days in the House of Representatives, the high budgets of the early forties were debated for one or two days. The reason for this was not that Congress considered the wartime budgets less important than the peacetime ones: it was rather that it considered them less the concern of Congress. It simply felt that the military must have all that they needed, and that it was beyond the capacity of Congress to inquire into military estimates in any fundamental way. The result was that the services got what they wanted and ended the war with some fifty billion dollars in unused appropriations. To achieve victory, Congress was willing to “trust in God and General Marshall.” As one congressman remarked, “The War Department, or . . . General Marshall . . . virtually dictated the budgets.”9
The other possible instrument of congressional control, the investigative power, was voluntarily restrained by Congress. The ghost of the Committee on the Conduct of the War still haunted Capitol Hill. The fear of involvement in technical military matters expanded into a general willingness to stay clear of the realm of grand strategy. Congress’ principal watchdog of the war effort — the Truman Committee — supported the differing systems of wartime civil-military relations in strategy and policy on the one hand and production and economic mobilization on the other. The “committee never have investigated,” it declared, “and they still believe that they should not investigate, military and naval strategy or tactics.” The Committee also made clear that it would defend the military against efforts by executive officials to intrude into that realm. At the same time that it supported military control of the direction of the war, however, the Committee also supported civilian control of the homefront and economic mobilization. Its activities, the Committee said, were restricted to “the nonmilitary aspects of the defense program, that is to say, with seeing to it that the defense articles which the Army and Navy have determined that they need are produced in a minimum of time at a minimum of cost and with as little disruption of the civilian economy as possible.”10 In this area, the Committee was not only on occasion highly critical of the military, but it also supported the War Production. Board and the Office of War Mobilization in their struggles with the generals.
THE MILITARY ADJUSTMENT TO WARTIME POWER
HARMONY AND ITS ROOTS. A remarkable harmony prevailed in the high councils of the American government as to the basic strategy of the war. Men with lesser responsibilities — theater commanders, bureau chiefs, and the like — fought for their particular needs as was their interest and their duty. But at the top, with minor exceptions, soldiers and statesmen, diplomats and secretaries, personal advisers and planning staffs, all viewed the war from extraordinarily similar viewpoints. Indicative of the harmony is the fact that with the possible exception of the dismissal of Sumner Welles in 1943 (which was the result of a personal antagonism antedating the war), there were no conflicts, ill-feelings, or clashes of policy or personality serious enough to cause anyone to be fired or to quit in disgust. The same men who began the war finished the war. The area of consensus even included those civilian leaders excluded from the major policy decisions. Although Stimson and Hull may not have had much to do with the making of policy, they nonetheless had little reason to argue with the policies that were made. It was, indeed, only this fact which, as Stimson recognized, made their positions tolerable.11 The record of strategic policy making, enlivened only by interallied differences, was bland and dull in comparison with the opposite extreme which prevailed on the economic mobilization front with its constant organizational shifts, fiery personality clashes, dramatic resignations and firings.
What were the sources of the harmony among soldiers and statesmen? The civilian and military approaches to national policy had been poles apart in the 1930
’s. The unified front achieved during the war meant that either the political leaders abandoned their positions and accepted the military outlook or that the military leaders dropped their professional conservatism and adhered to the prevailing American civilian viewpoint. One widely accepted school of thought argues for the former. Such critics condemn the American military chiefs for thinking purely in military terms and blame the chiefs for American acceptance of the doctrine that military victory had to be pursued to the exclusion of all other goals. The critics contrast the “military” attitudes of American decision makers with the “political” motivations and character of British wartime policy.12
It is impossible to accept the conclusions of this school of thought. The critics are, of course, correct in saying that America’s overriding goal in the war was military victory. They go astray, however, when they say that this goal had its roots in military thinking. They err in assuming that, because military men made the decisions, they must have made them from a strictly military viewpoint, and they are wrong in their assumptions as to the content of the military viewpoint. The professional military mind is concerned with military security not military victory. The very points most emphasized by the critics — unconditional surrender and the rejection of the Balkans in favor of western Europe as a scene of operations — were political decisions supported by almost all the political leaders of the government and virtually required by the prevailing complexion of American public opinion. The difference between British and American policy was not the difference between political thinking and military thinking; it was simply the difference in national political objectives as defined by the people and statesmen of the two countries at the time. If the American policies turned out not to be the wisest ones, it was not because they were products of the military mind; it was rather because they reflected poor political thinking: a failure to appreciate what its long range political goals properly were by a nation immature in the ways of international politics. The argument that our policy was too “military” implies that if the State Department had had more of a say, the policy would have been more realistic and farsighted. Actually, the reverse is true. The State Department was a center of just the type of thinking which the critics deplore. In contrast to American civilian thought, the thinking of the military before the war was, in general, coldly professional and free of illusion. They were, indeed, the only significant group to have such an approach to foreign policy. If they had been able to continue to think in military terms after assuming direction of the war, the policy decisions which their critics mistakenly label the result of the “military mind” might well have been avoided. If their views had not been altered, the military leaders might have warned the country of the permanence of the struggle for power, the improbability of postwar harmony, the weaknesses of international organization, the desirability of preserving a balance of power in Europe and Asia, and the truth of history that today’s allies are frequently tomorrow’s enemies. But, instead, as they achieved power, the military commanders had to abandon their professional conservatism and adopt the prevailing civilian viewpoint. The trouble with American policy making was not too much military thinking but too little. And this was caused directly by American insistence that their professional military servants assume power and responsibility beyond their competence. The fault was not in the military but in America itself. If the military leaders had not adjusted their thinking to civilian lines, they would have been viewed during the war with the same suspicion and castigated for devious intrigue in the same manner in which Churchill was. Five years after the war, of course, they would, like Churchill, have been hailed as prophetic statesmen. But the freedom to choose between current and future glory was not open to them in 1942.
The Soldier and the State Page 39
