Plans for the future could not take priority over the needs of the day. In a desperate attempt to save the Netherlands Indies and Singapore, General Sir Archibald P. Wavell, in late December 1941, was sent to Java from India to become the first Allied commander in chief.22 The directive for his organization was laboriously written in Washington by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, in the hope that out of unified effort might spring a miracle. Wavell never had a chance.
Yet the Washington effort itself was a valuable lesson. For the first time we had the concrete task of writing a charter for a supreme commander, a charter that would insure his authority in the field but still protect the fundamental interests of each participating nation. We found it necessary to go painstakingly into rights of appeal and scope of authority in operations and service organizations. Procedures to be followed if major differences should be encountered were a matter of concern. We had not yet come to appreciate fully the nature of an allied command.
No written agreement for the establishment of an allied command can hold up against nationalistic considerations should any of the contracting powers face disaster through support of the supreme commander’s decisions. Every commander in the field possesses direct disciplinary power over all subordinates of his own nationality and of his own service; any disobedience or other offense is punishable by such measures as the commander believes appropriate, including the court-martial of the offender. But such authority and power cannot be given by any country to an individual of another nation. Only trust and confidence can establish the authority of an allied commander in chief so firmly that he need never fear the absence of this legal power.
Success in such organizations rests ultimately upon personalities; statesmen, generals, admirals, and air marshals—even populations—must develop confidence in the concept of single command and in the organization and the leader by which the single command is exercised. No binding regulation, law, or custom can apply to all its parts—only a highly developed sense of mutual confidence can solve the problem. Possibly this truth has equal applicability in peace.
Throughout the first winter of war the news from the East Indian region was increasingly bad and the Navy did not have sufficient strength to undertake major operations far from a friendly base. Every troop and cargo ship upon which we could lay our hands was dispatched hurriedly to the Southwest Pacific. But we had so little!
The transport of personnel without heavy equipment did not involve elaborate arrangements when fast ships were available. These vessels depended solely on their speed for safety against the submarine. The British gave us the use of some of the fastest and largest passenger ships afloat. Among these was the Queen Mary.
One day we dispatched her, without escort, from an Eastern port in the United States to Australia, loaded with 14,000 American troops. It would have been only bad luck of the worst kind if a submarine had got close enough to attack her successfully. Moreover, we believed that even if one torpedo should strike her she would probably have enough remaining speed to escape from any submarine of the type then possessed by the Germans. However, such probabilities could provide no assurance that she would get through.
On that trip the Queen Mary had to put into a Brazilian port for fuel. We were horrified to intercept a radio from an Italian in Rio who reported her presence to the Italian Government and upon her departure actually gave the direction upon which she set out to sea. For the next week we lived in terror, fearing that the Axis might be able to plant across her path such a nest of submarines in the South Atlantic as to make it almost impossible for her to evade them completely. I do not remember whether General Marshall knew of this incident at the time, but it was the type of thing that we kept from him when possible. There was no use burdening his mind with the worries that we were forced to carry to bed with us. He had enough of his own.
Chapter 3
COMMAND POST
FOR MARSHALL
EARLY IN JANUARY 1942 THE CHIEF OF STAFF had announced a determination to reorganize the War Department for the efficient waging of war. Foreseeing that the War Department as set up under peacetime laws could not stand the strain of a long and bitter conflict, he had a year before assigned Colonel William K. Harrison to investigate its organizational weaknesses and search out a remedy for them. Although the studies were completed by early winter and a corrective plan tentatively adopted, the attack on Pearl Harbor delayed its execution. The task of actual reorganization was now placed in the hands of Major General Joseph T. McNarney, possessed of an analytical mind and a certain ruthlessness in execution which was absolutely necessary to uproot entrenched bureaucracy and streamline and simplify procedures.
At the same time it was evident that somewhere on the War Department level there would have to be an agency which could assemble and concentrate the sum total of strategic information for General Marshall’s attention and through which, after he had reached a decision, his commands could be implemented. This agency, in other words, would be the Chief of Staff’s personal command post. The creation of the Operations Division of the War Department General Staff was the answer to this need; it replaced the War Plans Division, where I had succeeded General Gerow as assistant chief of staff on February 16. On March 9, I became the first chief of OPD.1 Almost simultaneously I was promoted to a temporary major generalcy.
As I remember it, I was far too busy then to take the time to thank General Marshall for advancement to the grade which, in our prewar Army, represented the virtual apex of a professional military career.
Within the War Department a shocking deficiency that impeded all constructive planning existed in the field of Intelligence. The fault was partly within and partly without the Army. The American public has always viewed with repugnance everything that smacks of the spy: during the years between the two World Wars no funds were provided with which to establish the basic requirement of an Intelligence system—a far-flung organization of fact finders.
Our one feeble gesture in this direction was the maintenance of military attachés in most foreign capitals, and since public funds were not available to meet the unusual expenses of this type of duty, only officers with independent means could normally be detailed to these posts. Usually they were estimable, socially acceptable gentlemen; few knew the essentials of Intelligence work. Results were almost completely negative and the situation was not helped by the custom of making long service as a military attaché, rather than ability, the essential qualification for appointment as head of the Intelligence Division in the War Department.
The stepchild position of G-2 in our General Staff system was emphasized in many ways. For example the number of general officers within the War Department was so limited by peacetime law that one of the principal divisions had to be headed by a colonel. Almost without exception the G-2 Division got the colonel. This in itself would not necessarily have been serious, since it would have been far preferable to assign to the post a highly qualified colonel than a mediocre general, but the practice clearly indicated the Army’s failure to emphasize the Intelligence function. This was reflected also in our schools, where, despite some technical training in battlefield reconnaissance and Intelligence, the broader phases of the work were almost completely ignored. We had few men capable of analyzing intelligently such information as did come to the notice of the War Department, and this applied particularly to what has become the very core of Intelligence research and analysis—namely, industry.
In the first winter of the war these accumulated and glaring deficiencies were serious handicaps. Initially the Intelligence Division could not even develop a clear plan for its own organization nor could it classify the type of information it deemed essential in determining the purposes and capabilities of our enemies.2 The chief of the division could do little more than come to the planning and operating sections of the staff and in a rather pitiful way ask if there was anything he could do for us.
An example of the eagerness with which we seized upon every bit
of seemingly authentic information was provided by the arrival in Washington of Colonel John P. Ratay, who at the beginning of the war had been our military attaché in Rumania. The colonel was an extremely energetic officer, one of our better attachés. After Rumania joined the Axis in November 1940, he had been interned and eventually transferred through a neutral port to the United States.
The Operations Division learned of his arrival and immediately called upon him for such information as he could provide. He was thoroughly convinced that the German military power had not yet been fully exerted and was so great that Russia and Great Britain would most certainly be defeated before the United States could intervene effectively. He believed that the Germans then had 40,000 combat airplanes in reserve, ready with trained crews to operate at any moment. He considered that these were being withheld from immediate employment with the intention of using them to support an invasion of the United Kingdom. He also believed that Germany had sufficient numbers of reserve divisions, still uncommitted to action, to carry out a successful invasion of the British Isles.
In the Operations Division we refused to give credence to Ratay’s information concerning the 40,000 operational airplanes. The German Army had just been halted in front of Moscow and we were convinced that no army possessing a weapon of this overwhelming strength would have withheld it merely because of a future plan for its use, particularly when its employment would have insured the destruction and capture of such an important objective as Moscow. It was obvious, of course, that if the Germans did possess such a tremendous reserve any attempt to invade the European continent by amphibious landings would certainly be abortive.
However, information that reached us only after the war was over did show that Ratay’s information and conclusions concerning the reserve divisions had a reasonable basis. Postwar reports from Germany3 show that, in the summer of 1941, Hitler was planning to employ only sixty divisions as an occupation force for conquered Russia. He planned to use a portion of the large number of divisions, thus freed, for movement into the Middle East. It seems evident that the German high command considered the German ground forces completely adequate for any task.
No one was more keenly aware of our shortcomings in Intelligence than General Marshall. In his search for improvement he assigned, on May 5, 1942, as head of the Intelligence Division Major General George V. Strong, a senior officer possessed of a keen mind, a driving energy, and ruthless determination.
No longer handicapped by lack of money, the Chief of Staff did everything possible to repair the neglect of many years; but no amount of money or emergency effort could rapidly establish throughout the world the essential base of observers and fact finders. However, together with General William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, General Strong gradually began building a system that was eventually to become a vast and effective organization. Fortunately in the early days of the war the British were able to provide us, out of their prior war experience, much vital information concerning the enemy.
The nature of the work in the War Department threw all of us in constant contact with other American services and with Washington representatives of other members of the Allied nations. The necessity for co-ordination in production and in operations, and the realization that all theaters were interrelated, at least in so far as their demands upon the industrial capacity of the country were involved, were obvious. Meetings between the Chief of Staff and Admiral Harold R. Stark, and later Admiral Ernest J. King, were frequent.
The Chief of Staff’s assistants, among whom the principal members were General Somervell, Lieutenant General, later General of the Army, Henry H. Arnold, General McNarney, and the chief of his planning and operations staff, met almost daily with their opposite numbers in the Navy Department in an effort to achieve balanced objectives, in keeping with the output of training organizations and American industry. Thus service in the War Department inevitably produced a complete picture of the global war.
General Marshall gave long and earnest attention to the selection of individuals to occupy key spots in overseas commands and in the reorganized department. In the process he sometimes gave clear indication of the types of men who in his opinion were unsuited for high position. Foremost among these was the one who seemed to be self-seeking in the matter of promotion. Pressure from any source, in favor of any individual in the Army, was more likely than not to boomerang if the Chief of Staff became aware of its existence. I was in his office one day when someone called him on the telephone, apparently to urge the promotion of some friend in the Army. His answer was, “If the man is a friend of yours, the best service you can do him is to avoid mentioning his name to me.”
Another thing that annoyed him was any effort to “pass the buck,” especially to him. Often he remarked that he could get a thousand men to do detailed work but too many were useless in responsible posts because they left to him the necessity of making every decision. He insisted that his principal assistants should think and act on their own conclusions in their own spheres of responsibility, a doctrine emphasized in our Army schools but too little practiced in peacetime.
By the same token he had nothing but scorn for any man who attempted “to do everything himself”—he believed that the man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war. Another type General Marshall disliked was the truculent personality—the man who confused firmness and strength with bad manners and deliberate discourtesy. He also avoided those with too great a love of the limelight. Moreover, he was irritated by those who were often in trouble with others or who were too stupid to see that leadership in conference, even with subordinates, is as important as on the battlefield.
Again, General Marshall could not stand the pessimist—the individual who was always painting difficulties in the darkest colors and was excessively fearful of the means at hand for overcoming them. He would never assign an officer to a responsible position unless he believed that the man was an enthusiastic supporter of the particular project and confident of the outcome. He believed in the offensive.
Sometimes, of course, selections were necessarily made from among officers who did not, in all respects, fully conform to these ideas. But when he made exceptions it was clear that General Marshall always maintained a positive, and permanent, mental reservation.
In the development of strategic, logistic, and operational plans for the Army and its Air Forces, the Operations Division worked closely with the Joint and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. From estimates of the current military situation—our available strength against the enemies’ proved capacity and staggering territorial advances—it was our duty to determine military policy in terms of objectives, requirements in men and materials for the attainment of those objectives, and the most effective means of quickly meeting these requirements.
Behind this technical language was an immense amount of pick-and-shovel activity in the accumulation, study, and co-ordination of data affecting military operations. The preparation of a single directive on a proposed operation might require information that ranged from the projected production rate of a specific item in a particular key factory to an encyclopedic presentation of all factors—military, political, geographical, and climatic—influencing the composition of a major task force. The basic principles of strategy are so simple that a child may understand them. But to determine their proper application to a given situation requires the hardest kind of work from the finest available staff officers. In this particular resource, at least, we were well off. The selected body of officers, which had, between the two world wars, truly absorbed the teachings of our unexcelled system of service schools, was splendidly prepared, except in the field of practical Intelligence training, to carry on the vital task of operational planning. In Operations Division this planning meant the toilsome drudgery of grinding countless unrelated facts into the homogeneous substance of a military policy; everything that remotely concerned the business of war and its co
nduct was grist to our planning mill. But even while we plotted the future and looked toward the day when great offensives could be mounted, the pressure of present demands for action never relaxed and the evidence of our weakness was always with us.
Through the twenty-four hours of each day a steady stream of reports on action taken, appeals for reinforcements and supply, requests for decisions, summaries of intelligence, poured into Operations Division from every continent and from the islands of the Pacific still held by us and our Allies. Occasionally trivial in content, most often far-reaching in strategic import, sometimes inspiring and sometimes calamitous, the decoded messages that crossed my desk during those days were constant reminders that America was engaged in a global war, fighting a desperate delaying battle in some places where heroic men still held out, in others building the bases and extending the air and sea pathways for a counteroffensive, persistently striving to inch forward on a front that circled the earth.
A typical day was April 7—and a tragic one, too, for the surrender of Bataan was becoming hourly more imminent.
The first message to come in that morning was from Fort Mills on Corregidor, announcing that the food situation on Bataan had become desperate. To heartbreaking messages of this sort we had seldom been able to respond with any more than the cold comfort of a promise to do our best. But this time—if Bataan could be held a little while longer—at least a trickle of relief would reach the troops. An answer was immediately sent to Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright that some supplies were on their way by submarine and should arrive within a few days; we asked that he report their arrival as well as information on his further plans and any change in the situation. A request was radioed to General MacArthur in Sydney for a summary of his plans to maintain supply in Manila Bay by submarine from Australia and the probable dates that he could make delivery. Another radio went to Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell in Burma, asking him to investigate the possibility of flying food concentrates from his area to Bataan.
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