Keep From All Thoughtful Men

by James G. Lacey

  The Vice President pointed out that to accomplish a 115 billion dollar production program next year, it would be necessary to have a national product of 183 billion dollars and to cut consumers’ expenditures progressively so that by the end of 1943 they will be at a rate 60 percent below the 1932 level. He asked if Mr. Jones thought that the public could be brought to accept such a reduction in consumer expenditures in any one year. Mr. Jones replied that in his opinion, the largest cut that could be imposed in one year is 25 percent.

  Mr. Jones observed that if the munitions program were properly balanced, it would be more advisable to be two or three months behind schedule than to cut the program. Mr. May stated that the program could be met if it is redesigned to produce in 15 months what is now scheduled for 12 months. The Vice President and Mr. Patterson pointed out that it is most important that the President be informed of any rescheduling that deferred accomplishment of presently stated objective.

  Notes

  Chapter 1. Economics and War

  1 In recent years there have even been a number of excellent works that focus primarily on the logistical aspects of war: see Ian Malcolm Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front: 1914–1919 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998); Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Donald W. Engels,Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and John A. Lynn, Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).

  2 The term “dismal science” itself originated in Thomas Carlyle’s essay “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, vol. XL, February 1849, 531. It states, “It is not a gay science like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite distressing one; what we might call the dismal science.” http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/texts/carlyle/carlodnq.htm (accessed July 2008).

  3 Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Free Press, 1996), 415.

  4 Glyn Davies, A History of Money From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 68.

  5 T. A. Rickard, “The Mining of the Romans in Spain,” The Journal of Roman Studies 18 (1928): 129–43.

  6 G. Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xxi.

  7 Tenny Frank, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, vol. I (Paterson, NJ: Pageant Books, 1959), 320–45. According to Frank, during the Civil War Caesar raised approximately HS600 million from requisitions of silver and gold from Spain. For perspective, the HS600 million revenue in 50 BC was equal to about 600 million grams of silver or some 6.4 million troy ounces of silver. This would be equivalent to about twenty-three thousand Athenian talents (829.5 ounces per talent). In other words, Caesar collected from Spain roughly twelve times the peak revenues of the Athenian Empire.

  8 Frank,An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, 355.

  9 There have been several first-rate histories of the financial revolution that allowed the Pitts to finance both the wars against Napoleon and the previous Seven Years War, most notably John Brewer,The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, “Taxation in Britain and France: 1715–1810: A Comparison of the Social and Economic Consequences of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments,” Journal of European Economic History 5, no. 3 (1976): 601–50; Patrick O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation 1660–1815,” Economic History Review 41, no. 1 (February 1998): 1–32; J. M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France, 1793–1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); and J. F. Wright, “British Government Borrowing in Wartime, 1750–1815,” Economic History Review 52, no. 2 (1999): 355–61. However, while all of these works shed important historical light on the economics of a state at war, they do little to illuminate how economics influenced military strategy and operations.

  10 Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction (London: Viking Press, 2006) is an important first step in telling this story.

  11 This is a statement that Churchill made in his memoirs but that was probably stolen from Lord George Curzon, who reportedly used it in a cabinet meeting during World War I, according to R. L. Welch, “The Necessity for an Economic Basis of International Peace,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 108 (1923): 82–84.

  12 Interest on consols, the primary British debt instrument of the Napoleonic Wars, continues to be paid by the U.K. government on a regular basis.

  13 This fortress is also known as Juliustrum.

  14 Benjamin M. Anderson, Effects of the War on Money, Credit and Banking in France and the United States (Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1919; and Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1919): 6. The Germans began storing additional gold in the Reichsbank in 1912, but ceased collecting reserves at about $360 million when they apparently considered they had enough to finance a major war. In reality it was enough to pay for at best a single month of fighting in 1915. See also J. Laughlin, Credit of Nations: A Study of the European War (New York: Scribners, 1918), 202–5. Laughlin places the total of Spandau gold at $51 million and goes into great detail on Germany’s (and other European nations’) financial preparation for war, noting, “The high regards for the efficacy of gold to be kept in a ‘war chest,’ although rather medieval and contrary to modern ideas of keeping money in productive uses, persisted in Germany.”

  15 According to Niall Ferguson, “The British revenue side was exceptionally robust: as a consequence of the reforming budgets of 1907 and 1909/10—which had a far more decisive fiscal outcome than the comparable German finance bill of 1913.” See Ferguson, “Public Finance and National Security: The Domestic Origins of the First World War Revisited,” Past and Present 142 (1994). For an excellent study of Allied finance during World War I, see Martin Horn, Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War (Montreal: School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, 1993).

  16 Laughlin, Credit of Nations, 133–89.

  17 For an excellent analysis of the scope and consequences of this effort, see Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1985). Some of this analysis is also summarized in her new book, which is easier to obtain: Old World, New World (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 380–460.

  18 N. F. Dreisziger, Mobilization for Total War (Waterloo, CA: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981), 15–45. See also Kevin Stubs, Race to the Front: The Material Foundations of Coalition Strategy in the Great War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

  19 This is obviously not true of the early years of the war when Britain ran down its reserves and liquidated most of its overseas investments to pay for war materiel produced in the United States. Still, it must be noted that England had exhausted its own production capacity long before it had begun to run low on cash. Once Lend-Lease began and then after America entered the war, no Allied nation had to worry about funding—they all only had to worry about production resources.

  20 Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1971), 352.

  21 This claim was repeated in the Twenty-eighth Annual Report of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 1941, 7–8.

  22 John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16253 (accessed 1 October 2007).

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid. See also Donald Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 136.

  25 As shown later, the statistical revolution that made advanced production planning and scheduling on a national scale possible was just a few years old; there might have been fewer than a doze
n Americans who actually understood these tools and their capability for directing a total economic mobilization for war.

  Chapter 2. Unmaking the Victory Program

  1 An early copy of this document can be found in the Wedemeyer Papers, Box 76, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. It has been reprinted: Charles E. Kirkpatrick, An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present: Writing the Victory Plan of 1941 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1990). A copy of Wedemeyer’s paper can be found in Appendix 3.

  2 There is not a single copy to be found in any of the records of the OPM, the War Production Board (WPB), or FDR’s War Files, nor is it mentioned in any of the early histories of these organizations or their successors. In short, there is no evidence that any civilian with a major role to play in military production was even aware it existed. Furthermore, although the Wedemeyer Papers indicate a copy was sent to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, no record of it can be found in any of Stimson’s papers, and his only mention of Wedemeyer in his autobiography is in reference to operations in China. Moreover, there appears to be no copy of the document in General Brehon Somervell’s (head of Army Supply Forces) papers or in the papers of Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, who was responsible for all Army procurement.

  3 Mark Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations (Washington, DC: Army Center for Military History, Department of the Army, 1950), 331. After this it is impossible to trust any of the volumes of the Army’s official histories when they discuss the Victory Program or Wedemeyer because every one of them, including Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Industrial Mobilization for War: History of the War Production Board and Predecessor Agencies: 1940–1945 (Author, 1947), which might have been expected to confirm sources a bit better—reference Watson’s chapter on the Victory Program as their primary and often sole source.

  4 Watson, Chief of Staff, 338.

  5 Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports! (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 63–85.

  6 Colonel Don H. Hampton (Interviewer), “Interview with General Albert C. Wedemeyer” (USAWC/USAMHI Senior Officer Oral History Program, 14 March 1984).

  7 It should be noted that in a page-by-page review of the official minutes of the joint chiefs of Staff (National Archive, RG 218.2) the author did not find a single reference to Wedemeyer’s program, nor did he find any mention of the Wedemeyer plan in any records of the meetings of the service chiefs prior to the establishment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Furthermore, there is no mention of General Wedemeyer in reference to the actual Victory Program in either General Marshall’s papers (stored at the Marshall Research Library adjacent to Virginia Military Institute) or in the papers of his deputy, General Thomas Handy (stored at the Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA).

  8 Kirkpatrick,An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present, 2. In his bibliography, Kirkpatrick states, “few papers in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, NY, relate to mobilization, in part because of President Roosevelt’s habit of conducting business orally. There is little of relevance in his papers, or in those of Harry Hopkins [the president’s chief advisor on war production matters], or Henry Morgenthau [Secretary of the Treasury].” The George C. Marshall Papers in the George C. Marshall Library (Lexington, VA) likewise contain little information pertinent to the Victory Plan. Albert C. Wedemeyer’s personal papers, which focus on the later part of his career, are in the archives of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Documents pertaining to the Victory Plan in that collection also may be found in the records of the War Plans Division. They offer little information that reflects on the day-to-day development of the Victory Plan. It appears that Kirkpatrick’s research clearly shows that the Wedemeyer plan did not make much of an impression on anyone responsible for strategic mobilization; however, he inexplicably refuses to come to that conclusion. Furthermore, a comparison of the Wedemeyer Papers pertaining to the Victory Program with those in the records of the War Plans Division (Record Group 165 in the National Archives) shows they are identical. It is not too much of a speculative leap to assume that Wedemeyer copied them at some point to add to his own files.

  9 Kirkpatrick,An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present.

  10 “The Ultimate Requirements Study: Estimate of Ground Forces,” Wedemeyer Papers. A full copy of Wedemeyer’s so-called Victory Program can be found as an appendix of Kirkpatrick,An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present: Writing the Victory Plan of 1941. The peak mobilization number can be found in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Series 25, Selected Manpower Statistics, 62–64.

  11 Kirkpatrick,An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present, 78.

  12 A page-by-page search of the boxes relating to the Wedemeyer Plan (Boxes 76 and 77, consisting of twenty folders) did not have a single item detailing how he arrived at the 10 percent figure. Similarly, there was neither evidence of how he arrived at any of his other estimates nor any paper trail to indicate he ever sent inquiries for information to anyone else, as he often claimed.

  13 Author’s conversation with the Princeton Demographics Center’s (now called The Office of Population Research at Princeton University) archivist Chang Y. Chung on 10 October 2007.

  14 Again, there is no evidence in his papers of that research or the ensuing calculations ever being done.

  15 Kurt A. Raaflaub and Nathan Rosenstein, War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Some historians furthering work first done by Gaetano de Sanctis in 1907 have advocated a much higher military participation ratio during the Second Punic War. This is probably true, but the circumstances were extreme and Rome’s economic condition was dire throughout the period (and was saved only by grain from Sicily and silver from Spain after Scipio’s conquests).

  16 Strategy World, “The Military Participation Ratio” (on The Strategy Page), http://www.strategypage.com/cic/docs/cic88b.asp (accessed 1 October 2007).

  17 François Crouzet, “Wars, Blockades, and Economic Change in Europe, 1972–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24, no. 4 (1964): 573–74; Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard, The Cambridge History of Europe, vol. 8, The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 407–64; Larry Neal, “A Tale of Two Revolutions: International Capital Flows 1789–1819,” Bulletin of Economic Research 43, no. 1 (1991): 57–92. On average, British payments to Prussia equalled about 7 percent of Prussian GDP during the period of the Napoleonic Wars and often exceeded 20 percent of Prussian government revenues during the war years.

  18 David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: Scribners, 1973).

  19 Compiled by the Navy War College; data can be found at http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:QXMfpJ9fXeMJ:www.lib.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm+us+wars+military+participation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us (accessed 1 February 2008). These numbers are confirmed in a recent Congressional Research Staff study, “American War and Military Operations Casualties: List of Statistics.”This report can be found at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

  20 An exhaustive search of the Wedemeyer Papers at the Hoover Institution did not turn up a single piece of evidence as to how he made any of his estimates.

  21 There are some tables of allowances in the files, but, as will be seen, they are not Wedemeyer’s work but instead are the work of officers in the Army G-4 (logistics) section, which was begun well before Wedemeyer undertook his study.

  22 Watson, Chief of Staff, 337–40. In a footnote, Watson states that this section is based on his discussion on these points with General Wedemeyer in 1948. See Watson, fn. 33, p. 340.

  23 One reason that the staff did not surmise the “immense reach, complexity, and importance” of Wedemeyer’s work at the time is that it probably was not viewed as a tremendous effort until Wedemeyer announced it as so after the war. Also, it is important to remember that Watson based
his account of this episode and Wedemeyer’s role in the creation of the Victory Plan almost entirely on his personal discussions with Wedemeyer.

  24 Lawrence Guyer, “The Joint Chiefs and the War Against Germany,” unpublished manuscript .

  25 Ibid., Section 2 (n.p.).

  26 Ibid.

  27 See also “The Determination of Army Supply Requirements,” for further confirmation of this position. This report (available in archival material stored at the National Defense University Library) was a restricted study prepared in 1946 by order of General Somervell. This never-published document details the history of military production and supply from the perspective of the Army logistical agencies and is supported by two full volumes of original supporting documents.

  28 As will be seen, the reason the G-4 could deliver estimates so quickly is that they had been preparing just such estimates for months under orders from Colonel James Burns, who was working as a special assistant to Roosevelt’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins. Burns also provided the G-4 with a rough estimate of the eventual size of the force to plan for, which was approved by General Marshall.

  29 These estimates remained woefully short of the information the civilian planning agencies required, but they were the starting point from which the actual Victory Program was built by Stacy May (see Chapter 3).

  30 A case can be made that Wedemeyer’s final presentation was delayed by new requirements established in a 9 July 1941 letter from the president to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (see Chapter 3). However, the author believes the president’s demands were exactly what Wedemeyer and Aurand started out to accomplish in the first place, and Aurand found no reason to update his submission based on the new requirements.