For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the subsequent declarations of war by Great Britain and France ended the uncertainty about a European war, yet for a year the conflict did not sharply alter American defense policy. Although Roosevelt issued a declaration of national emergency on September 8, 1939, the administration supported programs to improve the readiness of only the regular Army and Navy, for it assumed the public would support no larger mobilization and that the Allies would finally stop Hitler by force and diplomacy, even without Russian assistance.

  The stunning German conquests of Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France in June 1940 brought a dramatic change to American policy. With only a battered Britain still in the war, the United States could no longer count on a balance of power in Europe to protect its own interests. After June 1940 the Roosevelt administration, always aware of the divisions in American public opinion, moved cautiously in the name of hemispheric defense toward policies that assisted Great Britain. The United States agreed to consult with Canada, an active belligerent, on the defense of the hemisphere’s northern frontier. It then wrested an agreement from its Latin American neighbors that a hemispheric coalition should block the transfer of French and British possessions in the Caribbean basin to the Axis, which might convert these colonies into military outposts. Sensitive to Churchill’s pleas for arms, Roosevelt in September 1940—with the reluctant approval of his military advisers—transferred fifty overage destroyers to the Royal Navy in exchange for base rights to eight naval stations from Newfoundland to Trinidad. The agreement increased the Royal Navy’s antisubmarine convoy force and improved the coverage of the U.S. Navy’s air and surface neutrality patrols. Less to the military’s liking was the president’s demand that the British be allowed to purchase scarce military equipment—including aircraft—originally ordered by the Army and Navy.

  The fall of France and the start of the air-naval Battle of Britain brought new urgency to programs to improve America’s military strength, but the emergency actions did not immediately strengthen the nation’s military position or bring much assistance to the embattled British. Inhibited by divided opinion about intervention, Roosevelt, military planners, and Congress took only minimal or clearly popular steps to mobilize. Within a clear tradition of emphasis on hemispheric defense, Congress approved in July 1940 an emergency, expansionist “Two Ocean Navy” act to double the tonnage of the Navy’s combatant fleet. Although none of the new vessels could join the fleet until 1943, the 1940 authorizations included nine battleships, eleven Essex-class carriers, and forty-four heavy and light cruisers. Relying upon the fleet as the bastion against foreign troubles had been American policy since the days of Mahan. The complementary reliance upon air power was newer but no less compelling. In 1940 the Army Air Corps drafted plans to expand to fifty-four groups and 4,000 combat aircraft, then revised its estimates up to eighty-four groups and 7,800 combat aircraft. These plans also received governmental approval.

  The most dramatic and controversial programs of 1940 were designed to enlarge the Army’s ground forces. Initially, the War Department General Staff, dominated by Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, did not favor a major manpower mobilization, since the regulars to train new units and adequate equipment were in short supply. Roosevelt and Congress, however, saw manpower mobilization as an essential act to awaken the public to the possibility of war, even if the immediate results of mobilization would be decreased readiness. Alerted for active duty in June 1940, National Guardsmen began to enter federal service for additional training in September. By June 1941 nearly 300,000 Guardsmen had swelled the ranks of the active Army. In the meantime, over 600,000 draftees joined them, for in September 1940 Congress passed the Selective Service and Training Act, the nation’s first peacetime draft. Supplemented by mobilized reserve officers and other new officers and enlistees, the new Army—the Army of the United States—mustered 1.2 million men by the summer of 1941. It was a force weakened, not strengthened, by manpower expansion and materiel shortages.

  Hectored by strident advocates both for and against intervention in the European war, Roosevelt also found himself at odds with his senior military advisers (Marshall and Chief of Naval Operations Harold R. Stark) over the course of the readiness program. Aware that his own urge to help Britain was stronger than the public’s and deep in his third presidential election campaign, the president searched for acceptable ways to keep Britain in the war against Germany, the only alternative he saw to direct American participation. The consummate politician, FDR realized that military mobilization could not substitute for the possible deterrent effect of other American policies. When he ruled that the Army Air Corps should share new aircraft production on a fifty-fifty basis with the British, the AAC staff protested that this decision endangered the nation. The president replied simply, “Don’t ever let me see those charts again!”

  Confident that his seven years as assistant secretary of the navy had made him a qualified strategist, the president concluded in June 1940 that American interests would be served if he deterred the Japanese from advancing upon the Allies’ colonial empires in Southeast Asia. Correctly guessing that the European war would prove too great a temptation to the Japanese, who coveted Asia’s oil and raw materials, Roosevelt ordered the fleet to the unfinished base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. When the admiral commanding the fleet later protested that permanently basing the fleet at Pearl Harbor actually reduced its readiness, FDR replaced him. Searching for some way to contain Japan—a policy that served the Allied war against Germany and also protected China and the Philippines—the president risked both increased criticism at home and Japanese belligerency abroad. In 1940 there were no good choices.

  As 1941 dawned, the fragile anti-Axis coalition, still based on the continued belligerency of Great Britain, received several encouraging developments. In the United States FDR won reelection, and public opinion, however fatalistic, swung toward more active support of Great Britain, even at the risk of war. The Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force had made the invasion of England a risk Hitler would not accept, and the Third Reich had once more turned its attention to Lebensraum in the east and an attack on the Soviet Union, its nominal ally. Despite savage submarine attacks upon its maritime commerce, Great Britain survived and even frustrated Italian designs for African hegemony. The British also destroyed part of the French fleet and ended the French military presence in the Middle East, thus retaining access to the resources of India and the oil-rich Arab lands. American planners watched these developments and soon shared FDR’s assessment that the British Empire had not yet lost the war. With the president’s approval, the time had come to talk with the British about America’s role should it become a belligerent.

  From January to March 1941, the principal planners of the United States Army and Navy met with their British counterparts and hammered out the broad contours of an Allied strategy for victory in a war the United States had not yet entered. The Americans had already examined the relevant issues in drafting the Navy’s Plan DOG, which assumed a war with allies against all the Axis powers. The British planners, reflecting the judgment of Winston Churchill, had made a similar analysis. The major challenge was Hitler’s Germany, for only Germany had the manpower, industrial might, and military capability to ensure an Axis victory. Italy and Japan could not long survive with Nazi Germany destroyed. The defeat of Germany, therefore, received the highest priority. The ABC-1 Staff Agreement (March 1941) represented a military strategy that meshed with the established policies of the United States and Great Britain: i.e., that the course of world politics depended upon the mastery of Western Europe and the northern half of the Western Hemisphere. “Germany First” would be the centerpiece of Allied strategy.

  Although FDR did not formally approve ABC-1, Army and Navy planners worked out the details of a “Germany First” strategy in War Plan RAINBOW 5. Without being precise about the place and timing of specific campaigns, the planners foresaw an offensiv
e war that included naval operations to secure control of all critical seaways and to ruin the enemies’ seaborne commerce, strategic bombardment to destroy their air forces and warmaking capacity, the encouragement of resistance movements to erode their political control, and land campaigns to destroy the Axis ground forces. In its Victory Program plan completed in September, the Army estimated that the United States would require a wartime Army of 8.7 million men, divided into a ground army of 6.7 million capable of fielding 213 divisions (half armored or motorized) and an Army air force of 2 million and 195 air groups. The Army planners believed that three-quarters of this force would be available for overseas service. Planners of the Air Corps (soon to be renamed the U.S. Army Air Forces, or USAAF) drafted their own supplement to RAINBOW 5, known as AWPD-1. The planners listed all the tasks they expected the USAAF to perform but put their emphasis on the strategic bombardment of Germany, mounted from England and the Middle East. To conduct all the air tasks, the planners predicted an air force of 64,000 aircraft and 239 air combat groups, about half of which would be bombers. The highest priority in aircraft development was the creation of a very long-range bomber with a 4,000-mile range, a decision that eventually produced the B-29.

  The war and FDR, however, confounded the buildup of the American armed forces, since the president still hoped he could avoid war by supporting the Allies and deterring Japan. Recognizing that Britain could not pay for American munitions, the administration and its congressional allies, buoyed by polls that the public favored military assistance to the British, won approval of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. Despite repayment provisions, the act further fused the United States to the Allied war effort and gave the British a claim to American war production uninhibited by their inability to pay. In May the administration extended Lend-Lease to the Chinese Nationalists with the faint hope that the Chinese would pin the Japanese army to the mainland of Asia. By November 1941, the cost of Lend-Lease programs had mounted to $13 billion, ten times the amount originally appropriated, and had disrupted delivery schedules to the American armed forces.

  The war’s major development came in June, when Hitler gave the Allies their greatest strategic gift by invading the Soviet Union. Other than extending Lend-Lease aid to the Russians (transporting was quite a different problem), the United States could do little to assist the Soviet armed forces, whose introduction to the Blitzkrieg resulted in one of history’s most dramatic military disasters. Riding its euphoria and panzers as far as the approaches to Leningrad, Moscow, and the Donets river basin, the Wehrmacht had locked itself in battle with a foe of greater numbers and equal tenacity. His mind awash with historical analogies to the war against Napoleon, Churchill lauded the Russians despite their Communism, but Allied military analysts doubted whether the Soviets could stay in the war. They also warned that the Russo-German war removed the last real check upon Japanese expansionism into Southeast Asia. In fact, Japanese military planners were already hard at work on strategic concepts that included the United States’ possessions and forces as objectives.

  The most immediate strategic challenge, however, was getting Lend-Lease equipment to England across an Atlantic Ocean patrolled by German U-boats (Unterseebooten), commanded by officers determined not to lose another Battle of the Atlantic as they had done in 1918. Although the British had formed convoys from the start of the war, the Royal Navy’s beleaguered escort forces could not stop U-boat “wolfpack” attacks from producing shocking losses of merchantmen. In the ABC-1 talks the Royal Navy asked for help, and, in the guise of defending neutral rights at sea, FDR gave it. Throughout 1941 the president expanded American naval operations in the Atlantic, and by December the United States was in an undeclared naval war with Germany. Roosevelt expanded the Navy’s patrol force to full fleet status, reinforced it from the Pacific Fleet, and gave Admiral Ernest J. King the command. To assist the British, the U.S. Navy began to convoy merchantmen as far east as Iceland and reported U-boat sightings to the Royal Navy; to protect its reconnaissance operations from Iceland, the United States garrisoned the island with a brigade of Marines. Despite Hitler’s demands for caution, German submarines in October hit one American destroyer and sank another.

  The United States’ major strategic concern in November 1941 remained deterring Japan. Roosevelt believed he had warned the Japanese against attacking Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies. His military advisers and critics thought he had done nothing but provoke the war he wished to avoid. America and Japan moved toward war in the summer of 1941 when, against continued American warnings, Japan occupied critical military positions in southern French Indochina. Similar moves in 1940 had brought weak economic sanctions, but this time FDR froze Japanese assets and embargoed oil exports. Negotiations accelerated in activity but declined in hopefulness. American military planners believed the Japanese would strike, and they considered a naval raid on Pearl Harbor a possibility. Polishing their war plans, their Japanese counterparts went further and made the Pearl Harbor strike on the Pacific Fleet an essential part of their opening attacks, which included simultaneous campaigns against Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Malaya. Championed by the brilliant, indomitable commander of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor strike summed up Japan’s basic strategy: a quick, limited war of conquest between India and the International Date Line, followed by a strategic defense and a negotiated peace with the Allies. The Japanese assumed that the Allies would exhaust themselves in the war with Germany and that the anti-imperialist United States would not wage total war to recover Asian colonies when it had not rescued China and had renounced its own claims to the Philippines.

  Assessing FDR’s diplomacy and the mounting fear of a Japanese attack, American strategists in Washington worried most about the Philippines, whose defense rested upon the fragile capabilities of the Asiatic Fleet and an American-Philippine army, commanded by Douglas MacArthur. The planners doubted that the Philippines could be defended, but in July 1941 Roosevelt mobilized the Philippine armed forces and ordered the military chiefs to reinforce MacArthur’s command and the Asiatic Fleet. MacArthur unleashed his own persuasive prose to urge that the Philippines be defended. Despite “Germany First,” the Army and Navy in November 1941 had a reinforcement program underway; B-17s, additional submarines, artillery and antiaircraft units, and munitions were on their way to the Philippines. Japanese domination of the central Pacific highlighted the importance of the Hawaii-Australia-Malay Barrier route south of the equator. British and American planners estimated that any strategic defense of Allied interests in the Pacific would require holding the Malay Barrier-Australia line, although the Americans would not make a firm commitment to defend Singapore. Heated discussion on these matters in Washington, London, Manila, and Hawaii distracted American leaders from the dangers to Pearl Harbor. Faced with ambiguous political reporting and incomplete radio intelligence, the Roosevelt administration foresaw war but not its exact opening acts. Sailing in radio silence along the northern Pacific route, the Japanese navy brought its carrier strike forces undetected into Hawaiian waters.

  Enduring Defeat, Planning for Victory

  After the Allied rout in Burma in May 1942, General Joseph W. Stilwell spoke of the disaster in his theater, but his words applied to the entire American experience in the first six months of World War II: “I claim we got a hell of a beating . . . and it is humiliating as hell.” From the Sunday-morning attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) until the naval victory in the Battle of Midway (June 4–5, 1942), the United States saw its armed forces in the Pacific reel from one defeat to another as the Japanese conducted an Asian version of the Blitzkrieg and seized every one of their planned objectives at minimal cost and almost exactly according to schedule. The attack on Pearl Harbor was so stunning that its impact sent a shudder throughout America, unifying a confused public (“Remember Pearl Harbor!”) and propelling the nation into war with Japan. Germany and Italy then declared war on the United States, convinced
that the new enemy would spend itself in the Pacific.

  Whatever its shortcomings in political acumen and technical execution, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ensured that the Pacific Fleet—the only major threat to Japan’s strategic design—would not interfere with operations in Asia and the western Pacific. Columns of oily smoke and flame rose above the blasted anchorages and air stations of Oahu; in one morning the United States lost 2,500 servicemen, 200 aircraft, five battleships, and three other ships. Eight more vessels suffered battle damage. The only comforts were that American soldiers, sailors, and Marines had fought back with ferocity and that the Japanese had missed three carriers and their escorts, which had been at sea convoying reinforcements to the island outposts around Hawaii; furthermore, the Japanese had not done serious damage to the fleet’s fuel farms and maintenance facilities. But the physical wreckage was bad enough, and the psychological wreckage reached all the way to Washington.