CHAPTER VI
Organizing the High Command for World War II
The limitations of the Army high command were sharply revealed by the failure
to follow up the warning issued to the Hawaiian Department before the attack on
Pearl Harbor. Two days after the attack General Marshall announced to his
senior staff officers that he wanted the War Department to get away from the "routine
of feeding out information without checking" even to see that it had been
received where it was needed. It was necessary, he said, to "fight the
fact that the War Department is a poor command post." 1 For the time being
the Chief of Staff and his immediate subordinates in Washington were reluctant
to take anything for granted. They personally directed defensive movements of
troops and equipment, checking on every move that was made. But this kind of
individual exertion could not indefinitely take the place of an effective staff
system. At some time during the first few weeks of hostilities General Marshall
reached the decision to proceed with the reorganization of the Army's high
command. In March 1942 the reorganization was carried out in accordance with
plans on which staff officers in the War Department had already begun working
months before the Pearl Harbor attack. At the same time a new Army-Navy-Air
(Army) staff system and a parallel British-American organization were taking
definite shape. The U. S. Army made its strategic plans and conducted its
operations during the rest of World War II on the basis of staff work done and
decisions reached within the intricate structure of the national and international
high command established in the first few months of 1942.
Reorganization of the War Department
Just before the Pearl Harbor attack, after General Marshall had stated that
he was favorably impressed with the War Department reorganization plan which
General Arnold had sent to him, WPD set to work to make a detailed study of
the project. Colonel Harrison, whose own earlier plan was very similar to that
proposed by the Air Forces, took charge of the reorganization study on behalf
of WPD. He worked closely with Maj. Laurence S. Kuter, an Air Corps officer
assigned to the task from the Office of the Chief of Staff.2
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GEN. GEORGE C. MARSHALL AND LT. GEN. JOSEPH T. McNARNEY.
General McNarney was Deputy Chief of Staff, 9 March 1942-21 October 1944
The third and senior member of the team eventually selected to take active
measures in developing the organization outlined by General Arnold was General
McNarney, whom the Chief of Staff had ordered home from England a few days before
the beginning of hostilities.3
General McNarney was an appropriate selection, because of his known abilities
and experience and because he was familiar with and trusted by officers of both
agencies sponsoring the reorganization scheme. A seasoned Air Corps officer,
he had long served in WPD and was still officially assigned to duty with the
Division.4 General
McNarney arrived in Washington about a week after American entry into the war,
but for over a month he was busy as a member of the Roberts Commission, the
first Pearl Harbor investigating board. He joined Colonels Hamson and Kuter
in a study of the reorganization project about 25 January 1942, and they set
to work with such speed that General McNarney was able to submit the final version
of the reorganization plan to the Chief of Staff on 31 January.5
The recommendations submitted by General McNarney were as follows: (1) to free
the General Staff from all activities except strategic direction and control of
operations, determination of over-all military requirements, and determination
of basic policies affecting the zone of interior; (2) creation of three
commands, Army Air Forces, Army Ground Forces, and Services of Supply, to which
the General Staff could delegate operating duties connected with administration,
supply, organization, and training; (3) elimination of GHQ, the Air Force
Combat Command, and the offices of the chiefs of Air Corps, Infantry, Field
Artillery, Coast Artillery, and Cavalry as "unnecessary or obsolete
headquarters"; and (4) creation of an "executive committee
responsible only to the Chief of Staff" to put the reorganization into
effect without giving "interested parties" a chance to record
nonconcurrences and cause "interminable delay."
The fact that the first function of the General Staff, "strategic
direction and control of operations," was to be performed by WPD was made
plain in Tab 2, which provided: "GHQ will turn over to WPD its functions
and records related to command and planning for theaters of operations, Defense
Commands, Departments, Bases and Task Forces." Of the rest of the General
Staff, G-2 was left to continue the collection and evaluation of information
about 'the enemy. G-1, G-3, and G-4, which according to the memorandum were to
be cut down to only "eight to 10 officers each," would advise the Chief
of Staff of "basic decisions and policies" concerning the zone of
interior activities being conducted by the three major commands and,
presumably, co-operate with WPD in determining overall requirements, which
depended simultaneously on strategy and the Army programs of mobilization,
training, and supply.6 The permanent structure of the War Department was
established by law, and until after Pearl Harbor not even the President had the
authority to redistribute power and responsibility within the War Department in
the manner recommended in both Colonel Harrison's study of August 1941 and the
November memorandum from the
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Army Air Forces. Congress, however, passed the First War Powers Act of 18
December 1941, conferring on the President the power necessary to reorganize
the War Department, or other agencies, in order to "expedite the
prosecution of the war effort." 7 The Chief of Staff thenceforth had an
administrative recourse for solving his command and staff problems without
entering into the long and trying process of getting legislation through
Congress. Thus one important obstacle to a War Department reorganization had already
been eliminated by the time that General McNarney submitted his recommendations
to General Marshall.
A few days after receiving General McNarney's memorandum, the Chief of Staff
held a meeting of the officers he considered to be key personnel to explain the
proposed reorganization. General McNair, General Gerow, General McNarney,
General Eisenhower, and Colonel Harrison were among those present. General
Marshall turned the meeting over to General McNarney, who consulted in turn all
the officers present and found that they unanimously favored the plan. General
McNair "enthusiastically approved" the reorganization proposal.
General Gerow and General Eisenhower "were perfectly satisfied" with
it.8 General Eisenhower summed up the import of the changes involved by noting:
"We are faced with a big reorganization of WD [the War Department]. We
need it! The G. S. [General Staff] is all to be cut down, except WPD—
which now has all Joint and Combined work, all plans and all operations so far
as active theaters are concerned!" 9
On 11 February General McNarney received instructions to form an executive
committee for putting the plan into effect as soon as it had been finally
approved.10 He mobilized his committee for a first meeting on 16 February and
explained to its members that it was "not a voting committee . . . not a
debating society . . . [but] a committee to draft the necessary directives"
to put the new organization
into effect.11 Working out specific measures to be taken and drafting
directives on them occupied the committee members only a few days. The
Secretary of War approved the reorganization plan promptly and forwarded a
draft executive order to the President. On 26 February President Roosevelt
informed Secretary Stimson that he was "sure" the reorganization was
a "good thing to do." Two days later Executive Order 9082 appeared
directing that the reorganization be put into effect 9 March 1942.12 War
Department Circular 59 appeared 2 March 1942, ordering the necessary changes
and presenting
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charts of the new organization.13 On 9 March the reorganization was an official
fact.
The "Streamlined" War Department
The 1942 reorganization of the War Department was designed, as General McNair
had suggested, to streamline the Army for military action. The executive order
from President Roosevelt, as well as subsequent War Department official
circulars and regulations implementing it, clearly affirmed the paramount
authority of the Chief of Staff under the President in the broad sphere of
strategy, tactics, and operations, the most important functions of command. At
the same time they dropped the Chief of Staff's additional title of Commanding
General of the Field Forces. General Marshall lost no authority through the
dropping of this title. Throughout World War II "Chief of Staff, U. S. Army"
was for all practical purposes synonymous with "Commanding General, U. S.
Army."
GHQ went out of existence and was replaced in the command structure by the Army
Ground Forces. Keeping the training duties of GHQ the new organization absorbed
the functions of the ground combat arms and proceeded with what had been the
principal initial task of GHQ, the training of ground combat forces.
The Army Air Forces, though in some ways on a lower level of administrative
authority than previously, had virtually complete control of the development of
its own special weapon, the airplane. Having absorbed the duties of the Air
Corps, the new
Air Forces trained personnel and units to service and use the airplane. It
organized and supported the combat air forces to be employed in theaters of
operations. Finally, by advising the General Staff and participating in
interservice deliberations, General Arnold's headquarters was able materially
to influence, if it could not control, both strategic and operational planning.
The Services of Supply, more aptly named the Army Service Forces about a year
later, assumed responsibility under the forceful leadership of Lt. Gen Brehon
B. Somervell for the performance of administrative and technical services in
the War Department, including the work of the two service arms (Engineers and
Signal Corps). This new agency took over both the technical and administrative
staff function of the services and service arms and their operating functions.
It also assumed some of the procurement activities formerly carried out by the
Under Secretary of War and such former General Staff tasks as handling
personnel assignments (formerly G-1) and managing transportation outside
theaters of operations (formerly G-4). A large, somewhat conglomerate
organization, Services of Supply at least introduced an element of organized
responsibility into what had been an odd assortment of independent agencies,
rendering technical and administrative advice to the Chief of Staff and also
engaging in the procurement and distribution of equipment and supplies,
transporting troops and matériel overseas, and providing essential semimilitary
services in support of the combat forces.
By setting up these zone of interior commands, the Chief of Staff rid
himself of the great burden of dealing
directly with a multitude of separate Army commands and staff
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chiefs.14 An index of the need for consolidating the individual arms and
services was the very fact that it had become necessary in 1940 and 1941 for
the Chief of Staff to employ three deputies, each with itemized duties,
responsibilities, and authority, to handle the ever-increasing press of
business referred for decision to the General Staff.15 After the tightening of
lines of responsibility and the delegation of authority implicit in the
reorganization, a single Deputy Chief of Staff remained, with duties (mainly in
the fields of staff administration, budget, and legislation) and delegated
authority essentially the same as originally had been prescribed for him in the
period between the two world wars.16 Moreover, the Secretary of the General
Staff was able to restrict the range of his duties within much narrower limits
than in the 1940-41 period. Then the secretary, with his several highly
qualified assistants, had acted in a kind of executive capacity to co-ordinate
the work of the General Staff in conformity with General Marshall's ideas. This
function was delegated elsewhere in the reorganization, and the position of
Secretary of the General Staff became practically that of assistant to the
Deputy Chief of Staff.
The establishment of the three major commands not only enabled the Chief of
Staff to delegate responsibility, it also permitted, in fact required, the
General Staff to restrict its policy control of the zone of interior to those
very general matters affecting all three commands. Within the sphere of their
respective command responsibilities, the commanding generals of the Army Air
Forces, Army Ground Forces, and Services of Supply made policy as well as
carried out programs. Each of them had a sizable staff to assist in acquitting
these responsibilities. The only remaining duties for the War Department G-1,
G-3, and G-4 Divisions were to devise Army-wide policies governing personnel,
unit organization, and supply, respectively.
The final contribution of the reorganization to the effectiveness of the Army's
war-making machinery under the Chief of Staff was the provision for a central
command post staff inside the War Department. The War Plans Division, soon
renamed the Operations Division (OPD) in recognition of its altered status, was
given this role. General McNarney and Colonel Harrison in explaining the
reorganization emphasized the advantage of delegating administrative details to
the three new responsible subordinate commands and restricting the General
Staff to planning and policy making rather than operating.17 They also made it
clear that the Chief of Staff needed a high-level agency to take a positive,
aggressive role in co-ordinating all Army efforts in support of military
operations in the field. Accordingly the reorganization assigned to WPD those
General Staff duties relating both to the "formulation of plans and the
strategic
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direction of military forces in the theater of war." 18 As WPD's own
representative, Colonel Harrison, explained it to the Senate Military Affairs
Committee: "In this war, we are fighting on many fronts . . . we have the
great question of the use of our means in different places. So that right
here—under the Chief of Staff—we have to centralize the direction of operations
so that this War Plans Division now, not only makes war plans, that is, future
plans, but it necessarily must control and direct the operations under the
Chief of Staff." 19
In effect the reorganization gave General Marshall an additional deputy for
planning and controlling military operations, and this deputy, the Assistant
Chief of Staff, OPD, was given an adequate staff to carry out his broad
responsibilities. OPD was WPD plus GHQ (without its training functions) plus
the superior authority GHQ had lacked. Or, to put it another way, OPD was in
itself a virtually complete general staff, tight-knit in a way the old War
Department General Staff had not achieved at the time it was necessary, and
definitely oriented toward operations in the field.
General McNarney carefully summarized the effects the new organization was
designed to create. His statement accurately described the basic principles on
which the U. S. Army and the War Department operated during World War II:
1. The War Department reorganization is intended to streamline the General
Staff and subordinate elements of the Army in order to facilitate speedy and
most effective control of mobilization and operations.
2. The magnitude of the Army and the nature of operations preclude adequate
supervision by the Chief of Staff of the activities
of the Army through the General Staff as now organized.
3. The major functions of the Army are two fold:
a. Mobilization and preparation of the forces for war.
b. Operations in the field.
4. Except for basic decisions which must be made by the Chief of Staff, the
functions of mobilization and preparation of the forces for war are to be
performed by three separate and autonomous commands, the Army Air Forces, the
Army Ground Forces and the Services of Supply. Each of these commands will be
under its own responsible and authoritative commanding general. The three will
be coordinate in all respects. The primary function of the Services of Supply
is to provide services and supplies for the Air and Ground Forces.
5. Control of operations. By the creation of the Air Forces, Ground
Forces and SOS the Chief of Staff gains time to give most of his attention to
war operations. The War Plans Division, WDGS, is the headquarters General Staff
through which the Chief of Staff, plans, supervises and directs operations. His
decisions are implemented by the Air Forces and Ground Forces who provide the
trained forces, by the Service of Supply which provides supplies (except items
peculiar to the Air Forces and provided by them) and moves them to the theaters
of operations, and by the commanders of the various theaters of operations and
task forces who actually control combat operations in their respective areas of
responsibility.20
Thus OPD was provided a legal basis whereby it could exploit the high, central
position of the War Department General Staff and yet be free from its
procedural traditions. From then on it was able to work like a general staff in
a field headquarters, issuing the Chief of Staff's orders and following up
their execution in the theaters of operations.
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National and International Planning
The first three months of American participation in World War II was a
transition period in the sphere of national and international military affairs
as well as in the sphere of U. S. Army organization. The successive slogans
marking stages in American preparedness—"Hemisphere Defense,"
"Arsenal of Democracy," "Short of War"—gave way at once to
"All-Out War Effort." It was in these months that the nation's productive
efforts came under the leadership of Donald Nelson's War Production Board,
which was given every legal and psychological sanction to help carry out its
mission of industrial mobilization. Matters of conscripting, training,
equipping, and employing American troops became merely technical problems
instead of highly debatable national policy issues. Diplomatic and military
relations with Great Britain and other anti-Axis nations, very friendly for
some time, became far less reserved and cautious than had been necessary so
long as Congress had not declared war. By January 1942 twenty-five nations at
war with one or more of the Axis Powers, including the United Kingdom of Great
Britain, the British Dominions, India, the USSR, and China, joined the United
States in pledging to employ their full military and economic strength against
Germany, Italy, and Japan. Thus national war policies had crystallized in more
than a score of sovereign countries, coalitions had been formed, and the great
conflict which had begun in Europe in 1939 had spread to every part of the
globe.
The very fact that at last the U. S. Army could proceed to reach strategic and
operational decisions within the framework of agreed national and international
policy was an embarrassment as well as a liberation. Not all Army officers were ready to
enter wholeheartedly into collaboration either with the Navy or with foreign powers,
and such reluctance was unquestionably reciprocal. Nearly every issue that
arose in regard to the deployment of forces, their command, and strategic plans
for operations required the mutual adjustment of clashing views. The U. S.
Navy, which had always been oriented toward the far reaches of the Pacific, and
the U. S. Army, which had come to see its future mission tied up with the great
land battles of Europe, could scarcely agree on a common course of military
action without accepting compromises on the kind of operations each would like
to conduct, the forces they would use in them, and the subordination of one
component or the other in command. The Army Air Forces, nominally subordinate
to the Army in these matters, actually had its own special strategic and
operational projects that had to be harmonized with both ground and naval
services. Similarly, on the international plane, the United States, Great
Britain, the Soviet Union, and China plainly could not agree on any one way to
conduct the war that would ideally meet the national needs of all four powers.
Compromises had to be hammered out among the Allies as among their military
services.
International collaboration during World War II continued to be achieved in
negotiations between the heads of government and their diplomatic
representatives, although the influence of military considerations and military
advisers became increasingly compelling in the negotiations until victory was
clearly in view. The United States, the strongest economically and the least
threatened by the enemy, played a central role in liaison among the United
Nations and especially among the "Big Four," the United States, Great
Britain, the USSR,
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and China. The British Dominions had access to the U. S. Government through
their diplomatic representatives but also participated indirectly through their
British Empire connections in the more conclusive military co-ordination
achieved between Great Britain and the United States. China, almost isolated
geographically and by far the weakest of the Big Four politically and
economically, depended a great deal on presenting its special needs through
various political channels, including that maintained in Washington by
Ambassador T. V. Soong with President Roosevelt and the State Department.
Nevertheless, Chungking and Washington also exchanged high-ranking military
representatives.
With the Soviet Union, which was geographically remote from the western Allies,
which western minds only recently had transferred from the category of a near
enemy to the category of an associated power, and which was completely
preoccupied with the great land battle of eastern
Europe, the United States maintained only comparatively formal diplomatic
relations. These were conducted during the first part of the war primarily
through the American ambassador in Moscow and the Soviet ambassador in
Washington. Attempts to supplement this arrangement by establishing systematic
military liaison met with indifferent success. The flow of lend-lease was the
principal tie, and officials handling lend-lease aid were the principal agents
that bound the USSR and its two western Allies together until the time when the
armed forces of all three nations met in Germany and Austria.
By the time of Pearl Harbor the military objectives of the United States had
already been co-ordinated with those of Great Britain, so far as was
practicable on a
hypothetical basis, and co-ordination thereafter became much closer and remained
close during the rest of the war. The usual channels of negotiation between the
United States and Great Britain were supplemented and for many purposes
replaced by a military staff system that succeeded in bringing American and
British conduct of the war into extraordinarily close accord. Moreover, the
co-ordination of military plans achieved in the British-American staff system
had two collateral effects of great importance.
First, British-American understandings arrived at for the conduct of the war in
the Pacific (a primary concern of the United States), in the Middle East,
which included part of Asia and Africa, in India and southeast Asia (all
primary concerns of Great Britain), and in western Europe (of common interest)
permitted co-ordinated military activity in most of the theaters of
operations.21 The only battle zones outside these areas were along the
German-Soviet front in Europe and in the unoccupied territory of China.
Military operations in China were subject to considerable influence by the
United States because of the extremity of Chinese dependence on outside
military assistance. Understandings between the United States and Great Britain
concerning the areas which they controlled, reached after a long and careful
interchange of ideas, provided a central point and a kind of arbitrary unity
for less systematic, more formal negotiations with the Soviet Union and China
regarding strategic issues of general concern. The Soviet military leaders
never participated in the staff system set up by the United States and Great
Britain in 1942. Nevertheless, it was possible to maintain the common front
against the Axis
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and, on the basis of diplomatic understandings reached in the Moscow conference
of October 1943, to bring representatives of the Soviet Union and China into
the last international military conference of 1943 (SEXTANT-EUREKA:
Cairo-Tehran). Soviet delegations subsequently participated in the
semipolitical, semimilitary conferences of 1945, and British-American
collaboration continually improved, but SEXTANT-EUREKA marked what probably was
the high point of general co-ordination of Allied military plans during World
War II.22
Development of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff System 23
The second correlative effect of the successful development in 1942 of a device
for co-ordinating American and British military plans was that the U. S. Army,
Navy, and Army Air Forces simultaneously formed an organization to co-ordinate
their own views for presentation to the British military leaders. This
organization sprang up almost accidentally to answer the practical need for a
joint committee system that would fit the pattern of the well-established
British arrangements for interservice collaboration. Thus the United States
found itself with a
more highly developed staff system than ever before for developing military
plans on a level of authority below the President. Like the Joint Board system
it was a committee system and as such worked perfectly only when there was no
irreconcilable disagreement among representatives of the
separate armed services. It was not the unified high command that had long been
discussed inside and outside the army.24 but it did provide a mechanism whereby
the Army, the Navy, and the Army Air Forces could reach clear agreements or
acceptable compromises on nearly all military matters. The pressing problems
raised when the United States entered the war gave a new incentive to
compromise in the common interest. It was patently advisable in the critical
months after Pearl Harbor to avoid referring minor issues to the President and
to present a common recommendation to the President as often as possible on
policies important enough to require his approval as Commander in Chief. In
addition to this incentive to unity, much of the strength of the new
organization, soon known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), lay in the fact
that, in contrast with the Joint Board, it had to present a common front to the
British Chiefs of Staff on military plans affecting both nations.25 In
combination, the fact of war and the presence of Great Britain made this new
staff system work well enough to meet the grave crises of 1942 and thereby to
win the confidence and respect of President
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Roosevelt, who placed great reliance in it thereafter.26 The JCS began holding
formal meetings on 9 February 1942.27 No official charter or directive for the
U. S. JCS committee ever appeared, but its effective authority, and the derived
authority of the joint committees serving it, grew steadily and remained
unchallenged, though undefined, throughout the war.28
The administrative character of the British-American staff system established
in Washington in 1942 reflected in general outline the staff structure which
already existed in Great Britain. Prime Minister Churchill, who was
concurrently Minister of Defence, was the central directing figure in the
British war effort just as President Roosevelt was in that of the United
States. The Prime Minister had a more tightly knit administrative hierarchy to
assist him than the President ever established. The highest executive authority
in the government of the United Kingdom was the War Cabinet, presided over by
the Prime Minister who, by virtue of his office as Minister of Defence, also
presided over a defense committee
which included the Foreign Secretary, the Minister of Production, the three
civilian Cabinet ministers in charge of the War Office, the Admiralty, and the
Air Ministry, and the three military chiefs of the armed services, that is, the
Chief of the Imperial General Staff (Army), the First Sea Lord and Chief of the
Naval Staff, and the Chief of the Air Staff. These last three officers
constituted the Chiefs of Staff Committee, a corporate authority for issuing
unified strategic instructions for military operations in time of war. Thus the
ultimate political responsibility for the conduct of the war in all its aspects
and the senior military advisers and agents of the government were brought
together in one organization under the Prime Minister, who gave unity and
finality to War Cabinet Defence Committee decisions.
The degree of co-ordination achieved in this way depended in great part on the
fact that the military members of the Defence Committee, that is, the Chiefs
of Staff, were acting not only as representatives of independent agencies but
also as a corporate authority with a special staff to assist them in reaching
interservice command decisions just as each had a staff to assist him within
his own organization. This staff was the British Joint Planning Staff. In
addition to a Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, it contained a Strategic
Planning Section and an Executive Planning Section, the latter concerned
primarily with getting prompt action on planned operations. The work of the
Chiefs of Staff Committee and its staff planners was co-ordinated
administratively with other war activities by the secretariat of the War
Cabinet, headed by the Prime Minister's own chief staff officer, who sat as a
secretary and in effect fourth member of
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the Chiefs of Staff Committee.29 It was this system which the British Joint
Staff Mission in Washington represented, and it was the British Chiefs of Staff
themselves who came to Washington with the Prime Minister in December 1941 to
attend the ARCADIA Conference.
At the 10 January 1942 session of the ARCADIA Conference the British Chiefs of
Staff presented a paper which they called "Post-ARCADIA
Collaboration." It stated that the British Chiefs of Staff proposed to
leave representatives in Washington to hold regular meetings with the U. S.
Chiefs of Staff. The British Chiefs of Staff, themselves, would of course
return to their duties in London. This paper recommended the usage, thenceforth
followed, of Joint as a term applying to interservice affairs in either country and Combined as
a term for British-American collaboration. It also suggested that the Combined
Chiefs of Staff committee thus constituted in Washington, with the help of a
planning staff and other subordinate committees, should "settle the broad
programme of requirements based on strategic policy," should "issue
general directives laying down policy to govern the distribution of available
weapons of war," and "settle the broad issues of priority of overseas movement." 30
This British proposal, somewhat revised in form but with basic recommendations
unchanged, received approval by the U. S. as well as
British Chiefs of Staff at the last ARCADIA meeting, 14 January 1942.31
On 23 January 1942 the members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) held their
first meeting in the Public Health Building at Nineteenth Street and
Constitution Avenue in Washington.32 During the next three years they gradually
assumed the greater part of the burden of strategic conduct of the Allied war
effort. The British Chiefs of Staff in London of course kept in close touch
with problems being discussed in Washington and instructed their
representatives on co-ordinated British policy. When the U. S. Chiefs of Staff
went to London or elsewhere for military discussions, as they did occasionally
and somewhat informally in 1942 and were to do regularly in the formal
international conferences of 1943-45, they dealt directly with the British
Chiefs of Staff rather than their Washington counterparts. But the periodic
conferences, especially the formal ones at which the heads of government were
usually present were designed to reach final agreements on issues which had
been thoroughly explored by the CCS. They were more nearly occasions for
politico-military decisions than for the detailed work of military planning.
The day-to-day deliberations of the CCS in Washington supplied the basic
pattern for the strategic direction of American and British armed forces. On
the basis of joint and combined resolutions, approved by the President and the
Prime Minister whenever broad policy was involved, commands were
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established, troops deployed, munitions distributed, and operations undertaken.
The machinery was never expanded to include other national military staffs as
regular members of the combined staff committees, but it became accepted
procedure to arrange for consultation with representatives of all interested
Allied nations in individual military matters under study by the U. S. and
British Chiefs of Staff. Formal meetings of the "Military Representatives
of Associated Powers" were held in Washington from time to time in 1942
and the first half of 1943.33 As a result of this procedure and of the
participation, beginning late in 1943, of China and the USSR in some of the
important international conferences, the CCS system provided a center of
strategic planning for all the United Nations.
This development of the British-American staff system, though it could hardly
have been fully foreseen at the beginning of the ARCADIA Conference, soon
received official approval by the United States. In early meetings the paper on
Post-ARCADIA Collaboration underwent significant revision that made explicit
CCS responsibility for the "formulation of policies and plans"
related to the "strategic conduct of the war" in general as well as
to munitions production, allocation, and priorities of overseas movements. On
21 April 1942 President Roosevelt
approved a charter for the CCS system dedicated to all these broad objectives.34
In March 1942 the United States and Great Britain reached an understanding on
the strategic control of operations through the staff committee system thus
established. This working agreement was based on a
division of the world into three major strategic spheres, marked out in a way
that generally reflected the varying national interests of the two countries.
The United States assumed principal responsibility for conducting military
operations in the entire Pacific area including Australia and, for diplomatic
rather than geographical reasons, China. This responsibility, it was agreed,
would be exercised through the U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, which would make
minor strategic decisions and direct the conduct of all operations in the area
assigned to the United States. The U. S. Navy was given the executive task of
carrying out JCS decisions in most of the Pacific area, which was put under the
unified command of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, while the Army performed a
similar function for the Australian and Southwest Pacific region, where Allied
ground forces were concentrated in some numbers and where General MacArthur was
placed in command. China continued to be treated as a comparatively independent
theater under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his
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American chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell. The British accepted the
same kind of strategic responsibility, to be exercised by the British Chiefs of
Staff in London, for the Middle and Far East areas except China.
The CCS in Washington undertook to exercise general jurisdiction over the grand
strategy developing in both British and American zones and in addition to
exercise direct strategic control of all operations in the Atlantic-European
area. The CCS of course acted directly under and with the military authority of
the President and the Prime Minister.35 As a matter of practical convenience,
the U. S. War Department accepted the task of communicating CCS instructions to
combined headquarters conducting the main offensives in North Africa (1942) and
Europe (1944), the commanding
officer in both cases being General Eisenhower.36
The initial members of the CCS were four British officers, led by Field Marshal
Sir John Dill, and four American officers, General Marshall, Admiral Stark,
Admiral King, and General Arnold. Admiral Stark attended only the first few
meetings, since he left Washington in March, and Admiral King assumed the dual
title and office of Commander in Chief, U. S. Fleet, and Chief of Naval
Operations.37 Within a few months Admiral Leahy, acting as chief of staff for
the President and presiding chairman at JCS meetings, joined the Army, Navy,
and Army Air Forces chiefs to make up the thenceforth unchanging membership of
the wartime JCS as well as of the American component of the CCS.38
In order for the combined system to function effectively, a hierarchy of
subordinate British-American committees had to be established to prepare
studies, render reports, and make investigations. The American members of these
groups constituted the joint committees. At least partly because the British
gave the Royal Air Force separate
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representation, the Army Air Forces always had its own spokesman in these
American staff groups. The American committees studied, reported, and
investigated military matters for the benefit of the U. S. JCS at the same time
that they were representing the United States on the combined committees.
The JCS-CCS machinery became more and more comprehensive and more and more
specialized as the war went on. In time there were combined committees for logistics,
intelligence, transportation, communications, munitions allocation,
meteorology, shipbuilding, and civil affairs (occupation and military
government). From the point of view of Army operations, the most important of
these were the committees dealing with the problem of allocating and moving
munitions, troops, and supplies in conformity with operational plans. In
addition, the joint and combined machinery throughout World War II contained
the committees primarily responsible for assisting the Chiefs of Staff in
planning the strategic conduct of the war-the Joint Staff Planners and Combined
Staff Planners (JPS and CPS), and also, for the United States, a working
subcommittee of the Joint Staff Planners.
The membership of the CPS consisted of three British officers, Army, Navy, and Air, and four American officers, Army,
Navy, Army Air, and Navy Air, who constituted the U. S. JPS. Both the JPS and
the CPS were central co-ordinating groups through which many policy papers
prepared in other committees reached the JCS or the CCS. They received
directives from the JCS and the CCS and often delegated work to other
committees. Particularly during 1942, they were not exclusively strategic
planners but also co-ordinators in all kinds of joint and
combined matters that had a bearing on high policy. The U. S. Army planner on
both the JPS and the CPS committees was originally the WPD chief, General
Gerow. When General Eisenhower succeeded General Gerow as WPD chief in February
1942, he immediately delegated the position of Army planner to the chief of the
Strategy & Policy Group, and thereafter left most of the routine of joint
planning to him.39 While the chief of the Division thus had no formal place in
the JCS and CCS system, he exerted great influence in it through the Army
planner and, indirectly, through the Chief of Staff.
The U. S. JPS drew heavily upon the services of its working war plans
committee, which ranged in number at various times between eight and eighteen
members. This committee originally was called the Joint U. S. Strategic
Committee (JUSSC), and OPD supplied all of the three or four Army (including
Army Air) representatives on it. The JUSSC concerned itself primarily with
broad strategic planning on the joint level and related policy matters such as
mobilization and use of manpower by the three services. The more technical task
of drawing up joint strategic and operational plans and adjusting them in
conformity to theater needs became increasingly important in the latter part of
1942, and the committee was reorganized as the Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC)
early in 1943. The JWPC
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drafted studies and strategic plans covering every major joint or combined
operation in World War II. Three or four OPD officers, constituting an
administrative unit in the OPD organization, made up the Army section (at this
time distinct from both the Navy and the Army Air Forces sections) of the
JWPC.40
The fact that the JCS-JPS-JWPC hierarchy came into being as part of the
Combined Chiefs of Staff system added tremendously to its effectiveness as
interservice coordination machinery. At the same time this fact projected the
whole JCS organization into the international field, where it acted
concurrently as the American agent for British-American military co-operation.
Its personnel, by virtue of their position and special knowledge, had to assume
the responsibility of representing the United States at the international
conferences which capped the United Nations planning with final decisions by
heads of government. Thus from ARCADIA, the first British-American staff
meeting in December 1941 and January 1942, through the British-American-Soviet
meeting at Potsdam (TERMINAL) just before the end of the war, the American
membership of the JCS-CCS system participated in top-level planning.
The conference decisions, like the deliberations of the CCS, JCS,
and other extra-War Department agencies forming
the environment in which OPD worked, were of prime importance in all the work
of the highest staff in the Washington command post of the Army.
Military Planning and National Policy
41
The machinery used by the American military services in co-ordinating their
efforts in World War II, though scarcely all that could have been desired, was
far more fully developed than any comparable system in the sphere of total
national policy. While the President came to rely on the JCS for advice on the
conduct of the war, he established no administrative machinery for integrating
military planning with war production, war manpower control, or foreign policy
objectives. The President himself coordinated these interrelated national
enterprises by working in turn with his personal advisers (among whom Harry
Hopkins continued to have unique influence), the executive agency chiefs, his
cabinet secretaries, and the JCS. In contrast with the British Government, in
which the War Cabinet Defence Committee brought all the major elements of
national policy under the Prime Minister's personal supervision and direction,
the various U. S. Government agencies had difficulty in making a
well-articulated contribution to a balanced national policy or even in finding
out the precise implications of national policy in their respective activities.
Secretary Stimson was conscientious about acting as a link between discussions
on the cabinet level and the workings of the War Department staff. During the
pre-Pearl Harbor and early wartime period he held regular meetings in his
office, at which General Marshall was present, to discuss War Department policy
matters and bring to bear on them governmental as well as service
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considerations.42 Nevertheless the link thus created by Secretary Stimson
could not add any strength to the elements it connected, and the lack of
administrative organization on the cabinet level continued throughout World War
II.43
Late in 1942 General Marshall drafted, though he never dispatched, a memorandum
pointing out the awkwardness for the military leaders of having no systematic
recording of Presidential instructions related to the war effort delivered to
Cabinet members or to the Joint Chiefs of Staff individually or collectively.
He said that "details supposedly decided on" were put into execution
only by "impromptu coordination" and could easily be "left in
the air or subject to varying interpretation." He contrasted this
situation with the results of the "British coordinating system which works
from the top . . . in the Cabinet meeting," and remarked that the JCS members
themselves might "get into very serious difficulties in not knowing the
nature of the President's revisions of the drafts of messages we submit to
him." 44
In 1943 and subsequent war years administrative co-ordination of national
policy decisions improved by virtue of the great prestige of the JCS and the
increasing extent to which Admiral Leahy, the President's chief of staff, was
able to make the President's views a matter for day-to-day consideration by the
JCS and the CCS.
The President's personal participation in the great international military
conferences of the mid war period (Casablanca, January 1943; Washington, May
1943; Quebec, August 1943; Cairo and Teheran, November-December 1943) also
contributed to the increasingly effective integration of national war policy.
Efforts were made comparatively late in the war to widen the area of
administrative co-ordination among the various government agencies engaged in
policy making on behalf of the President. Most important from the Army
planners' point of view was the establishment, at the end of 1944, of a
politico-military staff system patterned after and parallel with the JCS
structure. It was designed to align foreign policy and military policy through
formal staff deliberations among representatives of the State, War, and Navy
Departments.45 Somewhat earlier in mid-1943, the creation of the Office of War
Mobilization under James F. Byrnes superimposed some unity of purpose upon the
activities of the confusing welter of administrative agencies controlling the
mobilization of the civilian economy for war. Mr. Byrnes came to occupy on the
home front something like the position of the JCS in military affairs.46
Despite these advances toward integration in the fields of foreign policy, war
mobilization, and military policy, the final step toward systematization was
never taken. The President in his own person co-ordinated the work of his
senior aides, and no
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staff or secretariat was organized to assist him either in reaching his final
policy decisions or in carrying them out. This situation was one which military
leaders had no authority to remedy, and it frequently hampered their work.
Shortly after the appointment of Mr. Byrnes as Director of War Mobilization,
General Marshall hesitantly described the general problem to him:
The U. S. Chiefs of Staff have been aware for a long time of a serious
disadvantage under which they labor in their dealings with the British Chiefs
of Staff. Superficially, at least, the great advantage on the British side has
been the fact that they are connected up with other branches of their
Government through an elaborate but most closely knit Secretariat. On our side
there is no such animal and we suffer accordingly. The British therefore
present a solid front of all officials and committees. We cannot muster such strength.
More specifically he stated:
On the contrary, not only are our various agencies not carefully correlated but
sometimes a day or more will elapse before the specific agency, the U. S.
Chiefs of Staff, for example, is made aware of the important conclusions
arrived at or the problem which is being considered and which deeply affects
them. Important radios will sometimes be unknown to us for a considerable
period of time because there is not an automatic procedure set up. Discussions
with the British, officials or committees, bearing directly on Chiefs of Staff
business, will take place here and there in Washington without correlation or
later report of commitments.
There is also the continuing danger of misunderstandings. After Cabinet
meetings Mr. Stimson invariably makes some pencil notes and dictates a
memorandum which is circulated over here, with relation to any matters that may
concern the War Department. Possibly Mr. Knox does the same thing in the
Navy Department. However, we have had cases where their impressions varied as
to just what the President desired.
Finally, he observed:
This is a rather delicate matter for me to discuss and to circulate in the form
of a British paper [General Marshall sent Mr. Byrnes a paper on the British Secretariat system], because it could be charged that I
was proposing not only a War Cabinet but a fundamental constitutional
alteration in the matter of Cabinet responsibility to the Congress, etc., which
is remote from my purpose. I am interested solely in some form of a Secretariat
for keeping all these groups in Washington in an automatic relationship one
with the other.47
This expression of criticism was the strongest ever made by General Marshall,
for he was reluctant to step outside his own area of responsibility. The
difficulties in reducing the civilian administrative agencies of the government
to similar order, particularly while the war was going on, were almost
insurmountable. From the Army's point of view, as General Marshall was careful
to point out, no such drastic reorganization was necessary. The essential
minimum objectives sought by the Army to improve the quality of its work in the
highest policy sphere were in fact achieved by the personal abilities and
efforts of the President and his principal advisers, such as General Marshall,
along with extraordinary labors on the part of their individual staffs, such as
OPD. In terms of administrative organization, the military problems confronting
the United States in World War II were met by the national high command as
organized in 1942.
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Endnotes
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