CHAPTER 2
Unmaking the Victory Program
It has become an article of faith among historians that then–Major Albert Wedemeyer, a junior member of the Army’s War Plans Division, foresaw and laid out America’s mobilization and production effort during World War II. The basis of this claim lies in a nineteen-page document, “The Ultimate Requirements Study: Estimate of Ground Forces,” that Wedemeyer completed in early September of 1941. The histories of World War II, which mention what became known as the “Victory Program,” generally focus on this as a document of remarkable prescience and the basis of most of America’s wartime strategic and mobilization planning. Ironically, such reviewers developed this opinion without ever reading the document. In fact, Wedemeyer’s Victory Program was wrong in nearly every particular.1 Moreover, its effect on mobilization or future war plans appears to have been virtually nil. In fact, one searches in vain for documents, memos, or letters produced during the war that reference Wedemeyer’s program.2 In modern terms, Wedemeyer’s version of the Victory Program is analogous to any one of hundreds of PowerPoint presentations given to Pentagon audiences every month—over in an hour and just as quickly forgotten.
It was not until after the war that historians discovered Wedemeyer’s Victory Program and created the myth of a lone genius who clearly saw the path the United States must follow. In Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, a volume of the Army’s official history of the war, Mark Watson devotes a whole chapter to Wedemeyer’s work.3 In only a single footnote does the reader learn that the chapter rests almost entirely on the author’s conversations with by then–Lieutenant General Wedemeyer.4 In fact, Wedemeyer’s life-long marketing effort to secure his place in history appears behind virtually all of the uncritical acceptances of claims that he was the author of the Victory Program. In his own 1958 book, Wedemeyer Reports!, the general was not shy about claiming credit as the genius behind U.S. planning for the war. He went into great detail about how he formulated the Victory Program and how it influenced later deliberations.5 Throughout his life, Wedemeyer’s various efforts at self-promotion were unceasing. In an extensive oral history recorded by the Center for Military History in 1972, he again put the formulation of the Victory Program at the forefront of Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) planning for the war.6 In the same interview, however, Wedemeyer lamented that he had never received credit for many of the other ideas, which he claimed originated with him, including the plan for Operation Overlord and the postwar Berlin Airlift.7
In 1990 the Center for Military History continued a long tradition of official scholarship crediting the Victory Program to Wedemeyer when it published Charles Kirkpatrick’s An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present: Writing the Victory Plan of 1941, which argued that Wedemeyer’s Victory Program represented the most important strategic document of the war. Only in the preface does the author acknowledge that his entire work rests on extensive interviews with Wedemeyer, who oversaw every aspect of the writing and production of yet another official report glorifying his work.8
Wedemeyer’s greatest postwar public relations coup, however, was to call his study the Victory Program, thereby confusing or conflating it with the actual “Victory Plan,” which industrialists used to conduct their production planning. The actual title of General Wedemeyer’s study was the more prosaic, “The Ultimate Requirements Study: Estimate of the Army Ground Forces,” and the term Victory Plan occurs nowhere in the text.9 The actual Victory Plan was a combination of a strategic policy document written by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark, and a production plan written by Stacy May, an economist in the Office of Production Management (OPM). The contributions of both will be examined in considerable detail later.
Churchill’s comment that “history would be kind to him because he intended to write it”was not lost on Wedemeyer.To a large degree, Wedemeyer patiently wrote himself into the historical narrative step by step over the course of fifty years. As a result, historians have generally accepted the general’s version that his Victory Program was central to America’s planning in World War II. How did he get away with this historical scam? Mostly by focusing attention on the one thing his Victory Program got right. Wedemeyer had predicted that the United States could field a maximum military force of between 12 million and 14 million men, a figure remarkably close to the number finally mobilized—12 million at the peak.10
Late in life Wedemeyer provided an account of how he arrived at this number. He claimed to have inquired from a number of government agencies and Princeton University’s Demographics Center as to the number of people it would take to maintain industry, agriculture, and government.11 Once he had those figures in hand, he deducted the final total from the male population: what was left over was available for mobilization. Such a thoughtful approach would be more believable if any records of such inquiries could be found in the papers Wedemeyer later deposited at the Hoover Institution.12 Moreover, Princeton’s Demographics Center during the prewar period focused its research exclusively on fertility studies and third-world development, and would not have possessed the information Wedemeyer required.13
In most of his interviews, however, and in his own book, Wedemeyer claimed he reached this number by conducting a thorough study of military history to determine that a country could mobilize at most 10 percent of its total population before it would ruin its economic base and no longer be capable of supporting its war effort.14 Given that the United States had a prewar population of approximately 140 million, it was a simple mathematical equation to arrive at the conclusion that it could mobilize only 14 million. Unfortunately, even the most elementary survey of military history fails to support Wedemeyer’s assertions. Prior to the French Revolution and the advent of the levée en masse, it was unheard of for military forces to approach even 3 percent of a nation or region’s population for any prolonged period. Even the highly organized Roman Empire found it impossible to sustain a mobilization level much greater than 2 percent.15 Table 2.1 shows the military participation ratio that nations sustained prior to 1789.16
Even at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the French had only 1.1 million of their population under arms, a bit less than 5 percent. By 1813, however, France could not even sustain that level of mobilization, though Prussia had managed by this time to mobilize 6 percent of its population. Of course, this Prussian achievement was possible only because Britain, through subsidies, was underwriting a substantial portion of Prussia’s economic burden.17 Russia, with a much larger population but an inferior economic base, was able to mobilize only 2 percent of its population for the great effort in 1813 to finish off Napoleon.18
Table 2.1 The Military Participation Ratio: The Principal European Powers, 1789
Source: Strategy World n.d.
By 1914 the spread of the Industrial Revolution had made it possible for Western nations to support far larger forces than ever before. One would expect that it was this conflict, which ended at the start of Wedemeyer’s military career, that most influenced his conclusions. Once again, however, the actual mobilization numbers do not justify his maximum numbers of 10 percent.
As Table 2.2 indicates, France and Britain mobilized more than double the numbers of men that Wedemeyer argued was the maximum possible. In fact, France suffered casualties that exceeded Wedemeyer’s maximum limit for total mobilization, while Germany and England were not far behind. If Wedemeyer had focused his studies on only American wars, he would have found some support for his 10 percent number during the Civil War, but in no other American conflict (see Table 2.3).19
So where did Wedemeyer’s 10 percent figure come from? With no evidence of serious analysis on his part, one can only assume that he made up his estimates out of whole cloth.20 Wherever it came from, Wedemeyer used that calculation as the basis of the rest of his strategic plan for the conduct of World War II. Rather than attempting to design military forces based on national objectives and what the military required to achieve them
, Wedemeyer designed a force based entirely on what his fabrications suggested the country could support—in other words, the exact opposite of how one should make strategic plans.
Table 2.2 National Mobilization for World War I
Source: Spencer C. Tucker, The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996); Philip J. Haythornthwaite, The World War One Source Book (London: Diane Publishing, 1993); and Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures (Jefferson,
Table 2.3 American Mobilization Levels
Wedemeyer’s papers do contain detailed handwritten and printed copies of what he titled “The Army Troop Basis.” None of these troop basis studies appear to have been completed prior to May 1942, however (and all were radically revised in December 1942). These “Troop Basis Estimates” appear to be just a detailed breakdown of the subunits of the divisions that the Wedemeyer study stated the Army should build, with a unit strength placed beside them. There are no tables of allowances included with the troop estimates, nor any details on production requirements or schedules of when the Army would require the materiel to equip these units.21
Is there a possible explanation for this? Yes. In a nutshell, determining a troop basis was Wedemeyer’s assignment. Contrary to the picture the general painted for historians, he never had a role or responsibility in determining the materiel or production requirements for equipping such a force. It would have been strange if he had been given such an assignment, since the head of the War Plans Division, General Leonard T. Gerow, who assigned Wedemeyer his tasks, certainly knew he had no experience or expertise in the area. All of the consultations in the world would not have made Wedemeyer an expert logistician in just ninety days, and it would have been absurd for Gerow to assume he could undertake such a task.
Due to Wedemeyer’s postwar influence and dedication to writing an oversized role for himself into the historical record, however, the Army’s official history, which credits Wedemeyer’s recollections as its source, recounts an untrue account.22 According to Mark Watson, in May 1941 General Marshall asked then–Major Wedemeyer to undertake an assignment whose “immense reach, complexity, and importance were not surmised by the Staff itself until the ultimate product, ‘the Victory Program’ of 10 September 1941, was completed.”23
In a recently discovered and never published history of the JCS, written immediately after the war by an officer who was serving on the JCS and whose account Wedemeyer did not influence, a very different picture emerges.24 On 27 May 1941 General Marshall held a conference with his immediate assistants to consider the problems involved in the build-up of Army ground and air forces to the strengths required for the successful execution of the Army tasks under the new war plan—Rainbow 5. During the meeting Deputy Chief of Staff (Major) General R. C. Moore pointed out that the General Staff was “receiving pressure from newspapers and otherwise to go above the present supply objectives and to procure a war reserve. Moore then forcefully made the case that the only way to procure this reserve was by making a strategic estimate of the situation, based on the capabilities of Germany, Japan, Italy, and Great Britain. Marshall agreed, and ordered the General Staff and Air Corps to begin immediate preparation of estimates. In the War Plans Division, Major Wedemeyer was charged with preparation of estimates of the necessary ultimate strength of the Army, while Colonel Henry Aurand (acting, assistant chief of staff, G-4) began preparation of estimates on materiel requirements. In Guyer’s version of events, on 31 May Colonel Aurand submitted a preliminary estimate of the time required for the build-up of Army ground and air forces. In a cover letter, Aurand explained: “From the information available to G-4, it will not be until after 1 July 1942 that the production of anti-aircraft and anti-tank equipment will be sufficient to supply all of the requirements so far set up. It will probably not be until 1 July 1943 that the ground Army, complete in all of its estimates, will be able to conduct extensive operations.”25
After receiving this report, on 3 June the War Plans Division, with General Marshall’s approval, informed the other General Staff Divisions and production agencies that the strategic estimate under preparation would assume 1 July 1943 to be “the earliest date when the United States armed forces can be mobilized, trained, and equipped for offensive operations.”26 This estimate became the basis for the Army proposals then incorporated into the “Victory Requirements Program.”
The War Plans Division’s proclamation makes several key points that are important to this study. First, it clearly establishes that Wedemeyer was not the only officer tasked with producing an estimate for what victory required. Colonel Aurand, who as a professional logistician would have possessed the expertise to determine munitions requirements, was assigned a large portion of the task.27 Moreover, contrary to Watson’s account, he was not tasked just to provide information to Major Wedemeyer. In fact, Aurand completed his materiel estimates a full three months before Wedemeyer submitted his study.28 It is also clear that Aurand’s submission became the basis of Army estimates presented to the civilian production authorities.29 A footnote in Guyer’s history states that General Marshall forwarded a memorandum, titled “Ultimate Munitions Production Essential to the Safety of America,” to the chief of naval operations (Admiral Stark) on 7 June 1941 for inclusion in the combined requirements study to be sent to the White House, three months before Wedemeyer submitted his final work.30
More crucially, this production requirement estimate had a major effect on future strategic planning because it placed the idea firmly in Marshall’s and the joint planners’minds that the Army would have all it required for extensive offensive operations (northern Europe) by 1943. Once this date was implanted as a possibility, it proved difficult to get Marshall to move away from it as the point when the United States could begin decisive operations in Europe.31
Since Wedemeyer’s force design had no relation to what the American military would have to accomplish to win the war, it is no wonder his so-called Victory Plan was also wrong in many other respects. Wedemeyer’s Victory Plan called for the creation of 215 combat divisions (actual number built: ninety). Sixty-one of those divisions would be armored (actual number built: sixteen), sixty-one would be motorized (none of these was built), and twenty would be airborne or mountain divisions (six were eventually built).32
His strategic assumptions proved even wider off the mark. Wedemeyer’s study stated that the Germans would quickly defeat Russia and would be able to focus their entire military force in the West; that a 1943 Allied assault on Europe would face four hundred full-strength German divisions; and that Japan was unlikely to enter into a war with the United States because it would be fully occupied with China. This final point was a remarkable statement to make in a report finalized only two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Astonishingly, as late as 2005 the Army Center for Military History published a history of the American Army that claims Wedemeyer foresaw a two-front war with Germany and Japan—a claim that is directly contradicted by his actual so-called Victory Plan.33 Because he did manage to “guess” the approximate number of men mobilized for the conflict, however, many historians have supported claims that Wedemeyer’s program provided the basis for industrial mobilization. With his plan in hand, industrialists for the first time supposedly possessed a document that would guide them in the rearmament of the United States.
Even that claim is false. There is no indication that any of the key individuals involved with industrial planning and rearmament gave Wedemeyer’s plan any consideration at all.34 In fact, except for the military histories of the conflict that were directly influenced by Wedemeyer’s decades-long campaign to enhance his own reputation, there is no evidence that anyone involved in industrial production ever heard of the plan’s existence.35 Furthermore, if the experts who managed the rearmament program had seen Wedemeyer’s plan, they would have found it of little value.36
Althou
gh the nineteen-page Wedemeyer study did not include a listing of munitions or materiel required to equip and maintain this force, Wedemeyer in his autobiography claimed that he consulted at great length with the logistics experts in G-4 and the Army’s Quartermaster and Ordnance branches to get just such estimates.37 Although the Wedemeyer Papers stored at Stanford’s Hoover Institution include numerous munitions spreadsheets, he incorporated none of this information in his study. In fact, almost all the spreadsheets within Wedemeyer’s collected papers are Air Force and British studies of their respective requirements. What spreadsheets do exist detailing Army munitions requirements are dated after Wedemeyer had finished his study and appear to be copies of the refined product of Colonel Aurand and his G-4 staff.
In fact, long before Wedemeyer ever began working on his plan, a few farsighted economists and production experts had begun clamoring for information on military-munitions requirements. For months the production organizations had banged their heads against the military bureaucracy without result. It was not until after the war that General Marshall and other senior officers admitted why the services had remained silent: the Allies did not have an agreed-upon global strategy for the war until after the Trident Conference in May 1943.38 Without answers to key questions such as when or even if America would invade northern Europe or whether there would be a single thrust in the Pacific or two mostly autonomous thrusts, there was no way for JCS planners to provide production experts with reliable estimates of their requirements.
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