The military attitude toward civilian control changed completely during the war. The plans for postwar organization of the armed services, developed by the military in 1944 and 1945, reflected a new conception of their role in government. One would hardly recognize the cowed and submissive men of the 1930’s in the proud and powerful commanders of the victorious American forces. Civilian control was a relic of the past which had little place in the future. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff at the present time,” Admiral Leahy said quite frankly and truthfully in 1945, “are under no civilian control whatever.” And the Chiefs made it clear that they wanted to perpetuate this situation. “There was one point upon which all of us agreed,” to quote Admiral Leahy again. “We felt the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be a permanent body responsible only to the President and that the JCS should advise the President on the national defense budget.”30 Admiral King attempted to formalize and make permanent his wartime direct access to the President.31 The Army, in its McNarney plan, explicitly proposed to carry over the wartime JCS system into the postwar years. The plan provided for a United States Joint Chiefs of Staff which were to deal directly with the President on military strategy, force levels, war plans, the size of the military budget, the allocation of funds among the services, and virtually all other significant policy matters. There was also to be a civilian Secretary of the Armed Forces, but he was cut strictly along Stimsonian lines. He was to advise the President on “political and administrative matters,” but he was not to participate in the formulation of the military budget. His primary responsibility was to effect “economies and improvements.”32
When the McNarney plan ran into considerable opposition, the military leaders of the Army came up with a revised proposal the following year in the form of the Collins plan. However, it too was based upon the proposition that the Joint Chiefs should continue to function as they had during the war. While the Chiefs of Staff were now placed beneath the Secretary of the Armed Forces on the organizational charts, they still were to deal directly with the President and to have full authority over “military policy, strategy, and budget requirements.” Their budget recommendations were to go to the President through the Secretary, but he was to have no power to change them. In still another plan which received the formal approval of the Joint Chiefs, provision was made for a Commander of the Armed Forces, who would also be Chief of Staff to the President and the head of a central Armed Forces General Staff. The Chiefs of Staff were to be under a civilian Secretary, but the military leaders were to deal directly with the President on matters of strategy and operation. The Secretary was to advise the President on the political, economic, and industrial aspects of military problems, to be responsible for administrative matters, and to participate with the Chiefs of Staff in the formulation of the military budget.33
Prior to 1941 the one recurring element in military organizational prescriptions had been a council of national defense to establish authoritative policy guides for the military. A striking feature of the 1944 and 1945 ideas of Admiral Leahy, the two Army plans, and the JCS plan, was the absence of any such provision for political-military coordination between the services and the State Department. The State Department’s role of bystander during the war and the central importance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the formation of national policy had pushed this to the background. As a result of this sharp break with traditional military thinking, the National Security Council, established in 1947, was not derived from the long strand of military recommendations stretching back to the 1890’s. Instead, its sources were in the plan which Ferdinand Eberstadt drew up for Secretary of the Navy Forrestal in 1945. The Eberstadt proposal in turn was inspired, not by the prewar naval tradition favoring such a body, but by the experience of the British Committee of Imperial Defense. While Eberstadt’s recommendations provided more effectively for civilian control than did the military proposals, they possessed a different weakness in that no provision was made for a Secretary of Defense. Consequently, the Joint Chiefs were left aloof in limbo dealing directly with the President on strategy and the military budget without any central civilian secretarial organization to balance them.34
CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS IN ECONOMIC MOBILIZATION
The distinguishing aspect of civil-military relations in economic mobilization was that eventually all the interests concerned received organizational expression in one form or another. By the middle of 1943 there was in operation a rough but effective balanced system of civil-military relations in which the demands of the military agencies were coordinated with those of a number of other claimant agencies by an umpire — the Office of War Mobilization — with the full backing and support of the President. As a result, like the civilians, the military were left free to be spokesmen for their own peculiar needs and interests. The diversity of interests engaged in the “Battle of the Potomac” is reflected in the historiography of the struggle. In contrast with the memoirs and accounts dealing with grand strategy, which in general do not disagree in their interpretation of significant events, each of the postwar accounts of economic mobilization tends to embody the distinct and limited perspective of one of the participants in the conflict.35
The initial agency in the field of economic mobilization was the Army and Navy Munitions Board composed of the Assistant Secretaries of the Army and Navy. The 1939 version of the Industrial Mobilization Plan drafted by that agency was the final expression of military thinking on economic mobilization during the premobilization period. It proposed an organizational structure similar to that desired by the military in the foreign policy-strategy field at this time in that it, too, prescribed a limited role for the military and an effective system of civilian control. The key agency suggested in the plan was a War Resources Administration staffed by qualified civilians which was to initiate and enforce in the name of the President all economic measures necessary for the prosecution of the war. Various other civilian agencies were to handle special problems — such as war finance, trade, labor, and price control — but these were to be subordinate to the War Resources Administration. The actual procurement of munitions was to be in the hands of the services.36 There was thus a reasonable division of responsibility between civilians and military, and, indeed, although the Industrial Mobilization Plan was ignored in 1940, the system of organization which emerged in 1943 was not unlike that proposed in the plan.
Under the plan the Munitions Board was to assist the WRA in getting started and then fade out of existence. Actually, the Board’s career turned out to be somewhat more complex. This was primarily because economic mobilization was spread over three years and because there was lacking in this period a strong, central, civilian agency such as proposed in the Industrial Mobilization Plan. Consequently, as the civilian side of mobilization evolved through a series of short-lived agencies — the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management, and the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board — the ANMB began to accumulate more power, particularly with respect to priorities, than was, strictly speaking, within its contemplated purview. The Board was further strengthened at the end of 1941 by the appointment of Ferdinand Eberstadt as chairman. However, in January 1942, the President established the War Production Board under Donald Nelson and ordered the ANMB, which since 1939, like the Joint Board, had been directly under the President, to report to him through the WPB. The month after that, moreover, the Army Services of Supply under General Somervell were established to integrate all Army procurement activities and to act as the principal spokesman for the Army with respect to mobilization matters. The ANMB was thus caught in a squeeze play. Its ambiguous status as a semimilitary agency — a creature of the service departments, but headed by three civilians — caused it to be viewed within the services as an instrument of civilian control and outside of the services as a spokesman for military interests. The net result was that it lost stature and functions to both sides. The Army and Navy procurement offices preferred to present their claims
directly to the WPB and, when the priorities system broke down, the War Production Board took over the administration of the succeeding Production Requirements Plan and Controlled Materials Plan. Indeed, Eberstadt went over to the WPB in the fall of 1942 to put the latter into effect. And with this move the ANMB lapsed into the status of a minor agency.37
With the fading away of the ANMB, the key element in civil-military relations on the mobilization front became the relations between the War Production Board and the military procurement agencies: the Army Service Forces and the Office of Procurement and Material in the Navy. The role of the military here was fairly clear and unambiguous. They were responsible for getting the war instruments they needed, and they pursued this goal with a single-minded devotion. They were looking out for military needs and military needs alone. It was the responsibility of someone else to represent the interests of the rest of the economy. The real problem concerned the identity of that someone else. The Presidential directive establishing the WPB had given the chairman of the Board broad, if ill-defined powers over the entire industrial mobilization operation. The Office of Production Management and the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board had been abolished and their powers assigned to the War Production Board along with other grants of authority. The WPB chairman was to “exercise general direction over the war procurement and production program” and to “determine the policies, plans, procedures, and methods of the several Federal departments, establishments, and agencies in respect to war procurement and production.”38 The fairly obvious intent of this order was to make the WPB and its chairman the ultimate arbiters of the war mobilization program. Immediately upon taking office, however, Nelson began to delegate key functions to other agencies. Even more damaging to his powers was the fact that the crucial need in 1942 was not so much for an arbiter of conflicting claims but rather for some agency to represent the needs of the civilian economy. This was a new need. Until the spring of 1942, the civilian supply division within WPB and its predecessors had been primarily concerned with accelerating conversion to war production. However, as the situation began to get tight, and as the statements of military requirements mounted, it became obvious that someone had to defend essential civilian needs. In what was probably poor administrative strategy, the WPB did not expand its civilian supply office nor detach it as a separate agency. Consequently, the WPB itself became the principal spokesman for civilian needs. Instead of being the umpire, it came to be viewed as one of the claimant agencies in the struggle for scarce resources. Less attention and authority were given to the orders of its chairman and more and more frequent appeals were made to the President over his head. Nelson’s staff became convinced that the military were out to take over the entire economy, and the military became equally certain that the WPB was only vaguely aware that there was a war on.
The issue was further complicated by the move of Eberstadt from the ANMB to the WPB in September 1942. In effect, Eberstadt represented the military within the WPB structure. In this sense, if Nelson had been able to balance off Eberstadt against his other vice chairman, Charles E. Wilson, he might have been able to salvage his position. But the military were now completely opposed to him, and, at the beginning of 1943, the service departments urged the President to fire Nelson and reorganize the board under the leadership of Baruch and Eberstadt. Nelson forestalled this move by firing Eberstadt and thereby saved his personal position at the expense of his agency. For, with Eberstadt gone, the services could only view the WPB as an open rival. If, on the other hand, Nelson had lost the battle, Baruch and Eberstadt might well have reestablished WPB’s authority as the general supervisor of war production. It was now clear, however, that the WPB “was a member of a team of agencies and not . . . the dominant agency that was created on paper by the President’s Executive order of January 1942.”39 The creation of a superior agency to coordinate the WPB, the military, and the other civilian agencies was inevitable.
The Office of War Mobilization, established in May 1943 under the leadership of James F. Byrnes, exercised in fact the authority which the WPB had possessed on paper. This office was the outgrowth of the Office of Economic Stabilization established the previous fall under Byrnes’ direction. Although the OES theoretically had no responsibilities for production, nonetheless it, too, had gradually encroached upon the authority of the WPB, because no sharp line could be drawn between production and stabilization and because Byrnes had set himself up in the White House which gave him a prestige and influence not possessed by the chairman of the WPB. With the establishment of OWM, this tendency was formalized, WPB was downgraded, and Byrnes emerged as “Assistant President” in charge of economic mobilization. Subsequently, in the fall of 1944, Congress placed OWM, rechristened the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, on a statutory basis. Throughout its existence, this agency was to be able to maintain itself as the umpire primarily as the result of two facts. By the time of its creation, all the major interests involved in the mobilization program had achieved agency representation in one form or another. Thus, it was impossible for OWM to be drawn down into the position of spokesmen for one claimant against another. Instead, the great need was to reconcile and coordinate conflicting claims and requirements. Secondly, while keeping his staff small, Byrnes himself, like the JCS, kept close to the source of authority, the President, so that for all intents and purposes an order from Byrnes was an order from the President. While agencies occasionally appealed over the head of the OWM director, they met with little success. The record indicates that in the last two years of the war OWM was able to play the balancer and umpire role among the conflicting civilian and military agencies. The military were kept in their proper sphere, yet their essential demands were met.40
THE FRUITS OF HARMONY AND ACRIMONY
The differing patterns of civil-military relations in foreign policy and strategy, on the one hand, and economic mobilization, on the other, offer considerable food for thought. On the one side, there was cooperation and harmony; on the other, conflict and acrimony. Which pattern was the more successful? Certainly, on the domestic front, much of the sanguinary “battle of Washington” might have been avoided if an agency similar to the OWM had been created earlier in the process. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to conclude that, with all the infighting, hostility, name calling, and maneuvering, the domestic system of acrimony was far more successful than the foreign system of harmony. By any standard, relative or absolute, American economic mobilization was an outstanding success. Starting considerably later than any of the major participants in the struggle, it soon overtook and exceeded them. And this was not due simply to superior resources. It also reflected superior planning and organization. By comparison with the economic mobilization of Germany and Japan, the American effort was conducted with realism and foresight.41
The contrast between the formulation of American external and internal war policies was heightened by the differing roles of civilians and military in each. With respect to foreign affairs, the role of the military was essentially instrumental. As the WPD said in 1940, the function of the political leaders was to determine the “what” and that of the military to decide on the “how.” On the domestic side, this was reversed. It was the function of the military to determine the broad policies — the military requirements, the “what” — and up to the civilian agencies to determine “how” the military end items were to be produced. In each, the instrumental “how” side had the important function of representing capabilities and the continuing prospect of providing those capabilities. The instrumental side could either act as a restraint or a goad with respect to the mobilization of capabilities for the fulfillment of policy objectives, whether those were the defense of a particular piece of territory or the production of a certain number of tanks. In World War II, the civilian agencies on the mobilization side played this role perfectly. Before the entry of the United States into the war, they urged the military to raise their production goals: at some point
s in 1940 and 1941, the civilian mobilization agencies were advocating production objectives two or three times those submitted by the military whose thinking was still dominated by the short rations of the thirties. But, once the war was under way, the policies of the two were reversed. The military agencies set their production goals sky high, and the civilian agencies, particularly in the famous “feasibility dispute” of 1942–1943, usefully reminded them of the needs of the nation’s civilians, the desirability of preserving capital resources, and the limits on the nation’s economic capabilities. Similarly, toward the end of the war, it was Nelson in the WPB who began preparation for reconversion at a time when the military were still demanding all-out war production. Thus, the instrumental agencies, civilian in this case, served to remind the military policy agencies of the temporary nature of their immediate goals. They were always looking toward the capabilities required for the future. The interaction between the military concern for the immediate policy goal and the civilian concern for the development and preservation of the economic instrument resulted in a generally wise mobilization policy.
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