For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  Japan’s simultaneous attacks on other Allied targets proceeded with shocking speed, especially since uninformed Americans thought the Japanese armed forces were inferior copies of their European models. Strategic and tactical skill, significant advantages in both the numbers and quality of aircraft and warships, and eleven divisions of hardened soldiers gave the Japanese offensive the appearance of invincibility. British Commonwealth forces lost Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma, while outmatched Allied naval forces could only delay the conquest of the Netherlands East Indies. Fanning out from military bases in the central Pacific, the Japanese seized Guam and Wake Island and moved south toward Australia through New Britain and New Guinea and the Solomons to the east. For the United States the fall of the Philippines produced special agonies, for, in the face of disheartening odds, the Filipino-American forces actually resisted until early May 1942, but they could be neither withdrawn nor reinforced.

  The defense of the Philippines depended upon the Asiatic Fleet, the Far East Air Force (FEAF) of about 140 aircraft, 31,000 American and Filipino regulars, 100,000 Filipino levies, and the fertile brain of Douglas MacArthur. None proved adequate to meet the Japanese invasion. Through command lapses that still defy explanation, the majority of the FEAF bomber and fighter force burned to junk on the ground from a bombing attack on December 8. The remaining planes and the Asiatic Fleet could not stop invasions throughout December in both northern and southern Luzon, and the Navy fell back to join the Anglo-Dutch squadron defending the Malay Barrier. MacArthur himself did not enjoy one of his finest hours in command, for, alternating between romanticism and despair, he threw his feeble ground forces against the Japanese army rather than retreat immediately to the Bataan peninsula according to plan. By the time his battered forces eventually reached Bataan, they had already suffered serious losses; more important, they had abandoned the food, supplies, and munitions that might have prolonged their resistance or at least reduced their subsequent suffering. Under field conditions that beggar the mind, the Philippine army fought until early April 1942. Disease, malnutrition, and ammunition shortages doomed Bataan’s staunch defenders. Their comrades on Corregidor Island resisted an additional month, and then General Jonathan Wainwright, who assumed command after FDR ordered MacArthur to Australia, surrendered the remaining forces throughout the Philippines. Thousands of American and Filipino servicemen and civilians faded into the mountains to form guerrilla units that harassed the Japanese for four years. Wainwright cabled Washington: “With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops, I go to meet the Japanese commander. Good-bye, Mr. President.”

  As the Philippines fell, the Japanese and the Allies raced toward the last unconquered outposts along the periphery of the eastern line the Japanese intended to defend. The U.S. Army had already dispatched over 100,000 ground and air troops to the island line from Hawaii to Australia, and its planners foresaw using Australia as the base for an advance against the islands of the Malay Barrier, the “soft underbelly” of the Japanese Empire. Having promised “I shall return,” MacArthur had begun to organize the counteroffensive, but his forces and those of his Australian counterparts needed time, and only the Navy could buy it. After Pearl Harbor, FDR changed the Navy’s leadership, appointing Admiral King to the dual position of fleet commander and chief of naval operations. FDR sent Chester W. Nimitz to Pearl Harbor to command the Pacific Fleet and all other naval activities in the Pacific. Nimitz’s ability to stop the Japanese centered on only four carriers and their escorts. This force raided Japanese islands in the central Pacific, and two carriers delivered a squadron of AAF B-25 medium bombers close enough to Japan to stage a dramatic raid on Tokyo on April 18. The initiative, however, remained with the Japanese. The Navy had one closely guarded advantage: its radio interception, decoding, and radio traffic analysis skills gave it special insights into Japanese plans and deployments.

  In the spring of 1942 the Japanese moved simultaneously in three directions—toward the Aleutians in the northern Pacific, across the central Pacific, and against the remaining Allied outposts on New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands. The grand design was to cut the supply line to Australia and engage the U.S. fleet in decisive battle. (The Aleutian attack was a ruse.) At the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 3–8, 1942) a U.S. Navy task force with two carriers fought a confused battle with a Japanese invasion force in the first major sea engagement in which airplanes bore the offensive burden and the fleets never saw one another. The Americans lost one carrier, but the Japanese called off their fleet. A month later Admiral Yamamoto sortied with the Combined Fleet to capture Midway and draw Nimitz’s three remaining carriers into a decisive battle. Forewarned by his intelligence experts, Nimitz committed his naval aviation against the Japanese carrier force on June 4. The Japanese fleet proved difficult to locate, and the squadrons arrived over their targets at varied times and already low on gas. Three torpedo squadrons attacked without fighter cover and perished, but their attack diverted the Japanese fighters, which did not intercept three following divebomber squadrons. The Americans caught the Japanese carriers in the process of refueling and rearming their planes and turned three of them into exploding, sinking pyres. The battle later cost each fleet another carrier. Japanese losses in pilots, planes, and carriers meant that the Combined Fleet no longer had any appreciable offensive edge over the Pacific Fleet, however reduced. For the moment the Pacific war hung in the balance.

  As the American armed forces and public opinion reeled under the news from the Pacific, the Roosevelt administration rallied to build the diplomatic, political, and strategic foundations for ultimate victory. A cautious Wilsonian, FDR wanted a clear statement of Allied war aims that would appeal to the American people. In August 1941, he negotiated with Churchill an idealistic document, known as the Atlantic Charter, that branded fascism a menace to all mankind. FDR’s own “Four Freedoms” further identified the basic human values for which the Allies were fighting. In January 1942, he persuaded the British, Russians, and Chinese to sign the Declaration of the United Nations, a statement that pledged the Allies to pursue total victory (and no separate peace treaties) to the limits of their means in order “to defend life, liberty, and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.” The foreign signatories viewed the statement as part of the price of American participation, but FDR viewed it as not only an instrument to mobilize home-front support, but a guide for American diplomacy and strategy.

  Translating a policy of total victory into strategic plans proved difficult for the Americans and British and nearly impossible in collaboration with the Russians and Chinese. The ABC-1 statement about defeating “Germany First” seemed sensible, and neither the Americans nor the British ever strayed far from this position. Nevertheless, the orchestration of the war against Germany and Japan in terms of the timing and geographic emphasis of military operations provided ample opportunities for disagreement and strategic negotiations. These opportunities received their first full examination at an Anglo-American conference in Washington in December 1941–January 1942, a conference attended by Roosevelt, Churchill, and their principal military advisers. The British had a far more precise strategic vision than their American counterparts: defeat Germany by bombing, internal subversion, aid to the Russians, and military operations along the vulnerable frontiers of Festung Europa. Reverting to their traditional approach to defeating continental enemies, the British wanted to avoid a direct confrontation with a full-strength Wehrmacht in northern Europe until this confrontation carried little risk of a 1914–1918 stalemate. Instead they urged operations in the Mediterranean theater, where they were already engaged and where their scarce naval, air, and ground forces had shown some ability to check the Germans and Italians. Churchill stressed that the Mediterranean theater offered many strategic opportunities, since the African littoral could be wrested from the Vichy French forces in Morocco and Algeria and the German-Italian army
campaigning in the Libyan-Egyptian area against the British 8th Army. Churchill argued that a 1942 campaign in this area would divert German troops from Russia and strengthen the British war effort. What he did not say was that this campaign would be British-commanded (thus presumably using the greatest Allied expertise in generalship) and help restore the integrity of the British Empire, which Churchill desperately wanted to preserve.

  The American military planners found the British position unappealing and pressured FDR not to accept Churchill’s strategy. The Army representatives, equally knowledgeable about World War I, doubted that the Allies could avoid a major campaign against the Wehrmacht in France, accepting even the most optimistic estimates of the Russian contribution. Strategic bombing, which the Army planners favored, was an unproved war winner, but at least it would support an invasion. The impact of subversion by resistance movements was equally uncertain. And operations in Scandinavia and the Mediterranean seemed unlikely to bleed the Wehrmacht in quantities that justified the commitment. The Army planners, with the notable exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, also warned FDR that British strategy seemed designed more to preserve the empire than to defeat the Germans, and they feared that the British would fight only for narrow national interests. In addition, Admiral King, an Anglophobe, urged that the war against Japan should not be delayed by the “Germany First” strategy.

  The Washington conference produced no firm commitments to future operations other than that the Allies should work together to mount a bombing campaign and antisubmarine effort. In principle the Americans agreed to Churchill’s “tightening the ring” strategy of limited operations, but they approved no specific operations. After the conference, however, the Army’s planners proposed a more detailed strategy for 1942–1943. The U.S. Army ground and air forces would deploy to England (BOLERO) in order to prepare for two possible expeditions to the Continent. An invasion in 1942 (SLEDGEHAMMER) would occur if the Russians appeared to be on the verge of defeat or the Hitler regime was weakened by internal upheaval. More likely was a 1943 invasion (ROUNDUP) that would throw forty-eight divisions (thirty American) onto the Continent for a massive campaign against the Wehrmacht. Examining the implications of these operations, the British responded that they did not think Allied cargo and amphibious assault shipping could meet the demands of this strategy; and, equally perceptive, they did not believe that the U.S. Army could raise and train an air and ground force adequate to give the Allies the necessary edge to guarantee victory without prohibitive losses.

  In deciding where to strike first and in what force, FDR’s viewpoint proved critical. From his perspective, coalition and domestic politics played a larger role than strategic theory. First of all, FDR recognized that his commitment to a “second front” (wherever it might be) would play a role in the Allies’ continued will to fight, and he placed the highest priority on Allied solidarity, both in waging the war and designing the peace. Always the man of action rather than of theory or long-range planning, FDR wanted to commit the American armed forces in 1942 against both Japan and Germany and in ways more dramatic than weak bombing raids and naval warfare. His politico-strategic sense was sound, sounder than his military advisers’, who recognized the role of “politics” but thought it meant elections and party advantage. FDR had no desire for the Democrats to lose the congressional elections of 1942, but his purposes were larger. He feared that inaction in 1942 would produce domestic pressure to abandon the “Germany First” strategy and endanger the administration’s ability to mobilize the home front for total war. Influenced by Churchill’s golden rhetoric and alarmed by his Army planners’ insistence on a real SLEDGEHAMMER, the president in July 1942 made two critical commitments: to send American divisions to French North Africa along with the British and to allow a modest counteroffensive in the south Pacific. In effect, FDR’s decision meant that a major invasion of France would have to wait until 1944. His decision pleased the British, the Navy, and General MacArthur, who had his own strategic designs and his own political base among the Republican Party and the press.

  Dealing with the British in 1942 forced the Americans to organize themselves for coalition operations and for interservice cooperation, neither skills in which the American armed forces were very advanced. The organizational arrangements they created lasted beyond the war. To advise the president, the senior service commanders created the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which included obvious members like General Marshall and Admiral King. When Admiral Stark lost his post as chief of naval operations to King, the new CNO became the only Navy representative, but FDR soon appointed a personal chief of staff and ad hoc chairman of the JCS, Admiral William D. Leahy, a former CNO and trusted friend. On the Army side, General Marshall urged the equal participation of General H.H. “Hap” Arnold, his deputy chief of staff for air and commanding general, USAAF. Arnold’s participation seemed justified by the assumed role of air power and the independent status of the Royal Air Force. When the American military “big four” met with the British, the JCS became part of the Combined Chiefs of Staff; more important, the CCS created its own Anglo-American staff system to study plans and operations directed by the CCS. For actual management of operations—and for strategic recommendations—the CCS agreed on further integration. The American and British organized their field forces as both combined (all Allied) and joint (all services) in each geographic theater. The commander’s nationality and service would be determined by the nature of the war in the theater and which nation would provide the bulk of the forces.

  In practice, only in the European-Mediterranean theaters did the Allies create a truly cooperative command system, and even there national and civilian-military divisions on strategy surfaced throughout the war. On the mainland of Asia the two principal Allied commanders, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, dominated strategy, with minor (and frustrated) American influence exercised by General Stilwell and the air commander, General Claire Chennault. In the Pacific, where only the Australians and New Zealanders provided significant non-American forces, the CCS accepted two American commanders, MacArthur in the southwest Pacific area and Nimitz in the Pacific Ocean areas, which included the south Pacific, central Pacific, and northern Pacific. Neither MacArthur nor Nimitz proved very ecumenical in their management of the war. Although both commanded joint and combined forces at some point in the war, MacArthur and Nimitz ran their theaters with Army and Navy staffs respectively. Their personal preferences reinforced service predispositions on strategy. Selectively encouraged by Marshall and King, MacArthur and Nimitz both urged additional American commitments to the war upon Japan, but they had different ideas about just what sort of war that should be. MacArthur favored an Army-USAAF advance through the large jungle islands toward the Philippines, in which ground-based air and Army and Australian divisions would carry the war. Nimitz thought in terms of fleet actions and amphibious operations across the central Pacific in the best War Plan ORANGE tradition. By appeasing both MacArthur and Nimitz, the JCS remained decisive in shaping Pacific operations, while FDR ensured that the war on Japan did not jeopardize “Germany First” by holding a veto over JCS plans.

  Mobilization and Opportunity

  America’s entry into World War II meant that the world’s most powerful economy had joined the Allied cause, and from the beginning of the war the Roosevelt administration intended to make the United States the anti-Axis coalition’s “Arsenal of Democracy.” In crude terms the United States preferred to spend dollars, not lives, and to place forces in the field that enjoyed superiority in both the technical quality and quantity of their military equipment and supplies. America’s farms and factories could support not only the nation’s own armed forces but those of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, and any other ally (like the Free French and Free Poles) who wanted to take the field. In the case of the British, the United States also bolstered a domestic economy stretched to poverty levels by the war effort, for B
ritish civilian morale and industrial productivity were important to the Axis defeat. In the broadest national terms the “Arsenal of Democracy” approach was successful, for the United States spent more money on the war ($350 billion in direct expenditures) than the other major belligerents but suffered the fewest war-related military deaths (405,399) among its allies and foes. Removed by distance from the fighting as it was, its civilian casualties were trivial. During the war it placed a smaller proportion of its population in uniform than the other major belligerents, and in 1945 in both absolute and relative terms its economy remained the world’s strongest.

  American strategy for a two-front war, of course, required a manpower mobilization that in absolute numbers exceeded all previous national experience. Between December 1941 and December 1946, more than 16 million Americans wore uniforms, approximately 11 million as members of the Army, 4 million as sailors, 669,000 as Marines, and 350,000 in women’s military units. When the war ended, around 12 million Americans were still serving, of whom 266,000 were women. The major instrument for mobilizing manpower was the Selective Service System; it was already functioning on the day of Pearl Harbor, and a year later all formal volunteering for the armed forces ended by law. The draft legislation by the end of 1942 required that all males ages eighteen to sixty-four register, but in practice the upper age limit for service was set at forty-four, then dropped to thirty-eight. The Selective Service System registered 36 million males but inducted only 10 million members of the military pool. The majority of men rejected (6.4 million) had medical defects that would not have spared them from service in other nations. The draft officers found only 510,000 registrants absolutely disqualified for service. In sum, the United States put about one-sixth of its total male population into uniform.