From September 1938 to 7 December 1941 it became increasingly probable that the United States would have to fight in World War II. The central theme of this volume is the decisions and recommendations made by General Marshall as Chief of Staff with a view to preparing the Army for that event. The author explores and presents the successive situations and problems that confronted the Chief of Staff in making these decisions and recommendations, in order to enable the reader to see why and how historic judgments were reached and then to show how and through whom they were translated into action. Since General Marshall and the officers under him were involved in almost every problem confronting the nation in the decisive years covered, this book is a slice of national history.
In 1938-39 the Army was ill prepared even to defend the nation against attack; the public and Congress were determined to avoid war and ignorant of military requirements. The foreign policy of the United States was in debate, and the policies that the President followed in this period of doubt soon raised a conflict between the request for aid and the demands of national rearmament. Amid this confusion the services had to prepare for the worst. The present volume is an account of the methodical and often inspired planning and preparations, repeatedly interrupted and readjusted, but pursued until order emerged from confusion, so that, despite the shock of Pearl Harbor, the nation could within a year pass to the offensive in a two-front war.
Within the scope of the Army's own planning and preparations the book includes subjects that, for the period after Pearl Harbor, will be treated in many separate volumes of the United States Army in World War II- strategy, logistics, the mobilization and organization of men and industrial resources, recruiting and training of troops and officers, the role of air power, and the defense of the Western Hemisphere. The author considers these and other topics in their complex interrelationships during the instructive early period of uncertainty, overstrain, improvisation, trial and error, and radical readjustments. It is a necessary preface to the accounts of the war itself.
This is the history of the agency through which General George C. Marshall exercised his paramount authority over the Army's activities, at home and overseas, from 9 March 1942 to the end of the war. From the Operations Division (OPD) he staffed his relations with the Navy and with other authorities, national and international. The Operations Division was also the source within the War Department on which General Marshall, both as the Army Chief of Staff and as a member of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff, relied for advice and assistance in matters of strategy.
OPD, originally called War Plans Division (WPD), was a division of the General Staff, added to the "Gs" in 1921. The reorganization of the War Department in March 1942 pushed other divisions-G-1, G-3, and G-4- back into a position, then orthodox, that has been described as "thinking about military activities without participating in them." Moving at the same time in the opposite direction, that reorganization converted WPD into a central command post, with the operative functions of a field headquarters. OPD, a whole staff in itself, coordinated the other General Staff divisions, the three continental commands (Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and Army Service Forces), and the Army commands overseas, including the great theaters of operations. OPD prepared General Marshall's orders to overseas commands and represented their views and needs to him. It became in effect his global command post. Through OPD he projected the strategic and operational views of the Army and its requirements in manpower and materiel across the whole field of wartime activities.
OPD was, in short, the organizational solution applied to the knottiest problem of high command, reconciling the requirements of administrative and operational decentralization with the necessity for effective supervision and unified control of worldwide operations. The present volume is an "institutional biography" of this agency, on which General Marshall relied heavily to give effect to his authority as supreme Army commander. Its origins, problems, conflicts, organization, personnel, development, and effectiveness and the methods and influence of its successive chiefs (Maj. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lt. Gen. Thomas T. Handy, and Lt. Gen. John E. Hull) and their principal assistants can here be studied in detail.
The light this study throws on the relations of staff assistance and command gives it a special value for officers preparing for General Staff duty. The precedents it presents and the analogies it suggests make it invaluable as an aid in the recurrent search for effective organization at the center of national military authority.
Strategy means strategic concepts, plans for executing these concepts, and an application of national power designed to bring the enemy to terms. In World War II the production of strategic plans became a major industry in the military establishment. The main theme of this book is the history of that industry, as far as the War Department was concerned, to the end of 1942.
The basic strategic concepts of the Allies were embodied in the decisions reached in 1941 to treat Germany as the number one enemy and to wage unlimited war. This book is focused on the process by which these concepts were translated into strategic plans. It tells how national strategic plans were made, unmade, and remade. More particularly the authors are concerned with the Army's concepts of strategy and its efforts to get them accepted. Their book is therefore indispensable to military planners. But the treatment is so broadly conceived and so thorough that the book brings a wealth of information to bear on the whole picture of Allied strategy. It lights up, on the one hand, the evolution of strategic concepts. It includes the discussions of the Allies in the great conferences where the fate of the Army's plans and proposals was finally decided.
The volume follows, on the other hand, the search for forces, supplies, and ships with which to achieve the strategic objectives decided on as necessary and feasible. Using all the available information on its theme in American records, it is an organized account of what it meant (and may mean again), in terms of American thought and military potentials and the requirements of combined action, to prepare for, plan, and mount a global coalition war.
For the student of strategy this volume has a special value because it deals with a period of beginnings. It was a time of political indecision, extreme military anxiety, grave disappointments, meager resources, and "cut and try" in an incessant effort to keep strategic plans realistic. Army planners had to resolve continued differences between their views and those of the Navy, and American planners had to learn how to deal with the British, who in this period were urging plans which, although framed within agreements "in principle," were diametrically opposed to those of the Americans. Throughout the period American planners, groping for procedures that would be effective in dealing with these and their other problems, were acting without adequate precedents in American experience and without an organized record of such precedents as existed. The lessons they learned, as these developed from the circumstances of the time, are here set forth for the benefit of their successors.
In this volume Dr. Matloff, co-author of the preceding volume, carries the subject forward from the conference at Casablanca (January 1943) through the second Allied conference at Quebec (September 1944), applying essentially the same methods and approach as in the earlier volume.
During these years General Marshall and his strategic planners had to grapple with the problems of the offensive phase of coalition warfare. The book is a carefully studied and thoroughly documented exposition of the American case for concentration, first against Germany, then against Japan.
While the author looks at the war through the eyes of the Washington high command, he looks at the whole war, in order to explain American thought and the measures that the American war leaders took. The reader will therefore find here a study of the positions of Great Britain, the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and China and of their leaders, Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek, as well as of Roosevelt and the American military chiefs, as they sought to resolve strategic and political problems.
Their proposals were tested in the debates at the great conferences of the coalition, and this volume contains a full account of five of the most important of these: Casablanca, TRIDENT (at Washington, May 1943), Quebec (August 1943), Cairo-Tehran (November-December 1943), and second Quebec. The period covered witnessed the triumph of the proposal for which the Americans most vigorously contended-a massive drive at the heart of Germany at the earliest possible date, finally set for early June 1944. In his exposition, the author gives ample space to the development of a strategy for the defeat of Japan, which was primarily an American responsibility. In accounting for the final adoption of the grand design of Allied strategy, he describes the increasing proficiency of the Americans in the art of military negotiation and diplomacy and the effect on strategy of the growing military weight of the United States and the USSR in the coalition.
As in the first volume, American planning is related at every step to its basis in American resources of industrial capacity and manpower, in the war aims of the government, and in public support of the war. The crisis of adjustment to recognition in the fall of 1942 of the approaching limitations of manpower available for conversion into fighting forces; the increasing investment in air power; and General Marshall's decision to limit American ground combat strength to ninety divisions are described in their relation to strategy. In these critical decisions on military policy, as well as in his role in decisions on strategy under debate with America's allies, General Marshall emerges as the principal American architect of military victory.
This volume covers U. S. Army logistics, primarily of ground forces, in its relation to global strategy during the period of American preparation for World War II and the first eighteen months of participation. It forms the capstone for the structure of histories dealing with logistical activities, of which such theater histories as Logistical Support of the Armies and The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia, the War Department volumes on materiel procurement and industrial relations, and the technical service volumes provide the base. It is a companion piece to Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare: 1941-1942 and Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, since it treats logistics on the same general plane as that on which these volumes treat strategy.
The point of view is that of the central administration in Washington-Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff, the War Department General Staff, and the Services of Supply. The dramatic personae are the officials of these agencies and of their civilian counterparts such as the War Shipping Administration and War Production Board; theater commanders; the U.S. President and British Prime Minister and their advisers; and other officials of the Allied governments. The major areas with which the volume deals are those that most concerned the high command-global aspects of transportation, division of resources among theaters, allocation of materiel to Allied nations, coordination of logistical support of joint Army-Navy operations, development of effective planning techniques for anticipating requirements in both men and materiel, organizational and administrative difficulties in mobilizing and expanding the nation's military power, the delicate relationships between strategy and logistics, and the frictions of interagency and inter-Allied coordination in these fields. The most persistent theme is the chronic, pervasive competition for resources-between theaters, between services, and between nations engaged in a coalition war.
The story of logistical plans and operations is developed concurrently with that of the evolution of the central administration that carried them on. This evolution of administration involved the wartime reshaping of Army organization, the creation of new joint and combined agencies, and the definition of relationships between civilian and military authority in such fields as shipping and war production.
The emphasis is on materiel rather than personnel, though troop shipping and service troops are treated in some detail, and the general problem of military manpower is outlined. Requirements for munitions and their allocation and distribution provide the central thread; industrial mobilization and war production are discussed only insofar as they affected these processes. In the prewar period the focus is on materiel shortages and competing needs of the expanding U.S. Army and those nations to whom American aid was pledged under the Lend-Lease Act. This theme continues into the post-Pearl Harbor period, but the emphasis shifts to the shortage of shipping-the primary factor in shaping all strategic and logistical plans during 1942 and early 1943. The volume describes how the American effort at first centered on strengthening positions in the Pacific, then shifted to preparations for early invasions of Europe, then to invasion of North Africa. Subsidiary efforts were devoted to supporting the British in the Middle East, developing supply routes to the USSR, and securing the Allied base in India for support to China. The result was a dispersion of resources that American strategic planners vainly resisted.
Specific logistical problems in each area growing out of this dispersion are treated in the "operational" chapters (VI, VII, XIV-XXI); concurrent development of policies, procedures, and organization for the long pull in Chapters VIII-XIII. A final section (XXII-XXVI) brings all of these developments into focus in the period of the Casablanca Conference (January 1943) and after. Considerable emphasis is devoted to the complexities of administering military lend-lease aid-the establishment of an Anglo-American common pool of supplies, the machinery for allocating materiel from it in accordance with strategic need, and the peculiar problems arising in the delivery of supplies to the USSR, China, the Middle East, and French North Africa (III, IV, X, XI, XVIII-XXI). A concluding chapter surveys the problems of logistical planning and salient features of the Army's logistical effort through spring 1943.
Like its predecessor, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943, this volume treats U.S. Army logistics from the point of view of the high command and staffs in Washington; it continues the preceding volume's narrative from the spring of 1943, on the eve of the TRIDENT Conference in May, to the surrender of Japan. Space limitations have precluded coverage of the logistical issues involved in repatriation, occupation, and disposal of surplus property in the immediate aftermath of the war. Together the two volumes form the capstone of the logistical histories, of which the War Department volumes on economic mobilization, industrial relations, and aircraft procurement; such theater histories as Logistical Support of the Armies (European theater) and The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia; and the technical service volumes provide the base. Viewing logistics and strategy as parallel and interacting activities, this volume treats logistics on the same plane as the War Department volumes on strategic planning and operational direction treat strategy-for example, from the point of view of the central administration in Washington. The immense cast of characters, not limited to faceless agencies such as the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff, the War Shipping Administration, the War Department General Staff, and OPD (Operations Division of the General Staff), includes such legendary figures as President Roosevelt; British Prime Minister Churchill; "Gissimo" Chiang Kai-shek; Generals Marshall, MacArthur, and Stilwell; Admiral King; and, of course, the Army Service Forces' Commanding General, Lt. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, and his chief subordinate, Maj. Gen. Leroy Lutes.
The book focuses on the myriad problems involved during the last two years of World War II in the division of resources among nations and theaters in a global conflict and on the logistical organization and processes involved in the formation and execution of strategy. This broad approach results in the same omissions that characterized the 1940-43 volume: the book does not cover detailed logistical operations at lower levels; it does not treat internal logistics in overseas theaters except as necessary to establish the context for decisions at the center; and it is primarily concerned with ground force logistics, viewed in its interactions with air (especially strategic air) and naval logistics. The omitted subject areas have been adequately covered in other volumes of the U.S. Army in World War II and in various publications sponsored by the Offices of Air Force History and of Naval History-- upon which the present authors have drawn heavily in preparing this volume.
Unlike the 1940-43 volume, this work employs a topical approach to the extent of treating supply organization and procedures (Part 2) and lend-lease and civilian supply (Part 7) in groups of chapters separate from the mostly chronological, "operational" narratives tracing strategic-logistical planning for the great offensive campaigns of the Western Allies during 1943-45. These operational chapters also treat the war against the European Axis (Parts 1, 3, 4) and the war against Japan (Parts 5, 6) in separate compartments, while still making clear the essential interconnections between the two. A final chapter (XXXII) analyzes, in broad strokes, the evolving relationship between logistics and strategy over the entire span of the war.
Among the distinctive and valuable contributions of these two volumes to the Army's official World War II history, special mention should be given the examination in depth of four major spheres of wartime logistics: foreign aid, assault and cargo shipping, and logistical organization and method. Foreign aid is mainly the story of lend-lease, the system of pooling and allocating munitions among coalition allies, primarily to the British Empire and the Soviet Union (XXV-XXIX); it also includes civilian supply (XXX, XXXI): the responsibility assumed by the Army, from mid-1943 on, for provision of essential services and material needs of civilian populations in liberated and occupied territories. Assault shipping (landing ships and craft and amphibian vehicles) was an indispensable prerequisite, hardly foreseen before the war and tardily and grudgingly recognized after it began, for the numerous over-the-beach landings on hostile shores that spearheaded many offensives in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Pacific, and Far East theaters. The emergence of the problem is treated in the 1940-43 volume; this book describes the "crash" production programs of 1943 and 1944 and the severe limitations that shortages of this critical resource imposed on the scope and range of virtually every amphibious operation from mid-1943 on. Cargo shipping was the basic instrument for carriage of war materiel across seas and oceans, and thus a key element in the coordination of operations in a multi-theater conflict. In a war of many bottlenecks, assault shipping and cargo shipping were the most persistent and salient. Organization and method, probably the most esoteric aspects of logistics, are nevertheless its inescapable essence in what Jomini called a "science of detail" and of course required reading for future planners of big wars.
Building on the solid foundation laid in the predecessor volume, this study devotes three chapters (IV, V, VI) to an exposition of the mature wartime system of 1943-45-organization, requirements/production, and wholesale distribution-including the mysteries of the joint (such as Army-Navy) logistical system and its interaction with the largely civilian machinery for management of the war economy. Three more chapters and parts of another (XVI-XVIII, XX, XXIV) describe the complex variations of the system developed to support the war of vast oceanic distances and primitive infrastructure in the Pacific, including redeployment for the single-front war in 1945. In addition, the evolution of organization and method is a major theme of the foreign aid story in Chapters XXV-XXXI.
No ingredient of the power with which the Allies inflicted defeat on their enemies in World War II is less in dispute than the overwhelming superiority in the materiel of war that they ultimately developed. Equally evident is the fact that the United States took the lead in producing the great variety and huge quantities of munitions, military equipment, supplies, and services that gave them this superiority. The present volume is a description and analysis of the basic problems, policies, and procedures with which the War Department, in cooperation with almost every other agency of government, was concerned in carrying out a nationwide program of economic mobilization.
This work traces the foundations of the achievement in the nation's experience of World War I and the planning for economic mobilization with which the War Department was charged in the period between the two wars. It describes, for each of the major substantive areas of economic mobilization, the nation's transition from a peacetime status through the eighteen-month "defense period" to the achievement of a full-fledged war economy.
Before production for war had reached its peak, planning for a return to a peacetime economy began, and the book in its concluding chapters describes this and the operations by which the vast machine was dismantled and reconverted. An "epilogue" chapter reviews and summarizes the effort of economic mobilization as a whole and presents the author's conclusions.
The volume concentrates on the basic issues as they appeared at the highest policy-making levels of the War Department-the Office of the Under Secretary of War and the staff divisions of the Headquarters of the Army Service Forces. Nevertheless, in order to show the operational effects of the policies adopted, and in turn the reciprocal effects of operations on policy, the study includes many of the activities of the Army's actual procuring arms and services.
These operations are set forth in detail in the volumes of the United States Army in World War II devoted to each of the technical services. The present volume, in addition to forming the capstone of these as far as they relate to economic mobilization and reconversion, is closely related to such others in the series as both Global Logistics and Strategy volumes, The Army and Industrial Manpower, and The Organization and Role of the Army Service Forces. It may also be read to advantage in conjunction with the various histories, official and unofficial, that describe the wartime activities of other governmental agencies on the home front.
The administration and management of industrial labor, except in the Army's arsenals, were until World War I fields remote from the traditional responsibilities of the Army. In World War II the War Department found itself drawn into these areas to an unprecedented extent, not only by its concern for the output of munitions, but also by its new responsibilities regarding industry in such fields as the maintenance of security in war plants, the enforcement of labor laws and policies, and the administration of facilities forcibly seized by the government to avert stoppage of production by labor-management disputes. The present volume is not intended to be a comprehensive treatise; the aim, instead, is to illustrate by discussion of selected topics the nature of the problems the War Department faced in relation to the employment of industrial manpower and the policies and procedures that it developed to deal with them. This discussion is complementary to two other volumes on the subject of procurement, economic mobilization, and supply--The Army and Economic Mobilization and Buying Aircraft: Materiel Procurement for the Army Air Forces--as well as to the histories of the technical services.
Given the experience of World War I, the concern of the War Department with labor problems as an aspect of its broad responsibilities for procurement was recognized and was the subject of planning in the years between the two world wars. The labor planning and the organizational developments that occurred during World War II are described in Chapters I and II, which provide the background for the rest of the volume. Chapters III through V constitute a discussion of the restrictive factors affecting the use of the civilian labor force that either were anticipated or assumed important during the war. The authors next consider the problem of labor supply, which gained momentum toward the end of 1943, and the efforts of the Army to meet it (Chs. VI through IX). They describe the measures taken to recruit additional workers and the successful special project technique that was developed to deal with labor problems. The subject of Chapter X is the role of the Army as an instrument for enforcing the labor policies of the government. The use of Selective Service and the seizure of industrial facilities by the government as measures of enforcement are described. The volume concludes with a discussion of the attempts to obtain the enactment by Congress of some form of national service legislation (Ch. XI) and with a brief chronological survey (Ch. XII).