The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History: 1865 to the Present 2012045268, 9780415888479, 9781135070991

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN MILITARY AND DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

1865 to the Present

The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History, 1865 to the Present provides a comprehensive analysis of the major events, conflicts, and personalities that have defined the military and diplomatic history of the United States in the modern period. Starting after the Civil War, the chapters, written by an array of expert historians, chronicle America’s wars and interactions with the world up to the present day. From the emergence of American imperialism in the late nineteenth century to September 11, 2001 and the War on Terror, the Handbook illuminates how America has been shaped by its military and foreign affairs. Topics covered include Western expansion, the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars, U.S. expansion in the Pacific and Latin America, American involvement in the First and Second World Wars, the interwar period, Cold War diplomacy, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, U.S. clandestine operations, and “peripheral” conflicts during the Cold War, humanitarian intervention, the Gulf War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Each section also highlights some of the scholarly debates and interpretive schools of thought in the period’s historiography. With authoritative and vividly written chapters by both established and up-and-coming scholars, this state-of-the-field handbook will be a go-to reference for every American history scholar’s bookshelf. Contributors: Alexander Alderson, Emerald M. Archer, Günter Bischof, Laszlo Borhi, Thomas A. Britten, Robert Buzzanco, James M. Carter, K.A. Cuordileone, Gregory A. Daddis, James F. Dobbins, Justus D. Doenecke, Kevin W. Farrell, Christos G. Frentzos, Jeffrey Grey, George C. Herring, Sean N. Kalic, Ross A. Kennedy, Martin Loicano, Kyle Longley, James I. Matray, Stephen McCullough, Ron Milam, Barry Mowell, Brian Neumann, Anne Paulet, James D. Perry, Keith Pomakoy, Lubna Z. Qureshi, Joe Renouard, Benjamin D. Rhodes, Thomas Schoonover, Frank Schumacher, Brian G. Shellum, Lon Strauss, Michael J. Sullivan III, Antonio S. Thompson, Cyrus Veeser, Kara Dixon Vuic, Gerhard L. Weinberg, and Kenneth Weisbrode. Antonio S. Thompson is Associate Professor of History at Austin Peay State University. Christos G. Frentzos is Associate Professor of History at Austin Peay State University.

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN MILITARY AND DIPLOMATIC HISTORY 1865 to the Present

Edited by Antonio S. Thompson and Christos G. Frentzos

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Routledge handbook of American military and diplomatic history 1865 to the present edited by Antonio S. Thompson and Christos Frentzos.—1st edition. pages cm 1. United States—History, Military—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Thompson, Antonio S. (Antonio Scott), 1975- II. Frentzos, Christos. E181.R69 2013 355.00973—dc23 2012045268 ISBN: 978-0-415-88847-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-135-07099-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

“This book is dedicated to my wife, Amy, and my children, Madeline, Julian, and Sophia. Thanks for being patient and loving me during the rough spots.” Antonio Thompson “This book is dedicated to my grandfather, Timothy Dominic Bucci, who helped instill in me a love and passion for American history.” Christos Frentzos

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CONTENTS

List of Maps Acknowledgments

xii xiii

Introduction Antonio S. Thompson and Christos G. Frentzos

1

PART I

Post-Civil War American Expansion at Home and Abroad

9

1 Westward Expansion and U.S. Overseas Empire: 1865–1898 Anne Paulet

11

2 Buffalo Soldiers on the Western Frontier: 1866–1890 Brian G. Shellum

18

3 U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Post-Civil War Era Stephen McCullough

27

PART II

The Spanish–American War and U.S. Overseas Expansion 4 The Spanish–American War and the Development of U.S. Imperialism: 1898–1933 Thomas Schoonover 5 The Philippine–American War and the Birth of U.S. Colonialism in Asia Frank Schumacher

vii

35

37

45

Contents

6 The Platt Amendment and U.S. Occupation Policies in Latin America Cyrus Veeser

53

PART III

The First World War and its Aftermath

63

7 The United States in the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles: 1914–1919 Justus D. Doenecke

65

8 Allied Coalition Warfare During the First World War Brian Neumann

73

9 Native American Soldiers in World War I Thomas A. Britten

82

10 Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations Ross A. Kennedy

91

PART IV

America Between the World Wars

99

11 The United States During the Interwar Years: 1919–1941 Kenneth Weisbrode

101

12 The Age of Disengagement and Disarmament Benjamin D. Rhodes

108

13 U.S. Military Planning During the Interwar Period Lon Strauss

117

PART V

America and the Second World War

125

14 The United States in the Second World War: 1941–1945 Gerhard L. Weinberg

127

15 Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Second Front James D. Perry

134

16 The Atomic Bombing of Japan: Was It Necessary? Robert Buzzanco

143

viii

Contents

17 American Women in World War II Kara Dixon Vuic

150

18 The Housing of Axis Prisoners of War in the U.S. During World War II Antonio S. Thompson

158

PART VI

The United States and the Early Cold War

167

19 The Origins of the Cold War at Home and Abroad: 1945–1950 Günter Bischof

169

20 The Soviet Union, the United States and Eastern Europe: 1941–1953 Laszlo Borhi

177

21 U.S. Occupation Policy and Nation Building in Germany and Japan James F. Dobbins

186

22 The Cold War at Home K.A. Cuordileone

197

PART VII

The Korean War and its Aftermath

207

23 The Korean War, 1950–1953: A Historiographical Summary James I. Matray

209

24 UN Coalition Warfare During the Korean War Jeffrey Grey

217

25 Warfare and Nation Building in the Republic of Korea: 1953–1973 Christos G. Frentzos

225

PART VIII

The Vietnam War

233

26 The Vietnam War, 1945–1975: A Historiography George C. Herring

235

27 The Myth of an American Attrition Strategy in the Vietnam War Gregory A. Daddis

242

ix

Contents

28 “Shaky as all Hell”: The U.S. and Nation Building in Southern Vietnam James M. Carter

252

29 The Soldier’s Experience in Vietnam Ron Milam

261

PART IX

U.S. Clandestine Operations and the Cold War on the Periphery

269

30 The Cold War on the Periphery: 1953–1989 Michael J. Sullivan III

271

31 Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the CIA: Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs Joe Renouard

279

32 U.S. Clandestine Operations in Chile: 1970–1973 Lubna Z. Qureshi

288

33 U.S. Troops as an Instrument in Foreign Policy: The Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983 Kyle Longley

297

PART X

America and Post Cold War Interventions

305

34 Post Cold War Conflicts Sean N. Kalic

307

35 Operation Just Cause: The U.S. Invasion of Panama Barry Mowell

315

36 The Participation of American Servicewomen in Operation Desert Storm Emerald M. Archer

324

37 U.S. Troops in Non-Traditional Roles: Humanitarian and Peacekeeping Operations Keith Pomakoy

333

PART XI

September 11, 2001 and its Aftermath

343

38 September 11, 2001 and the War on Terror Martin Loicano

345

x

Contents

39 Operation Enduring Freedom: The United States in Afghanistan Kevin W. Farrell

354

40 Operation Iraqi Freedom: 2003–2010 Alexander Alderson

362

Appendices

373

Notes on Contributors Index

381 388

xi

MAPS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

U.S. Expansion in the Pacific World War I Europe World War II Europe and North Africa World War II in the Pacific Theater Cold War in Europe The Korean War The Vietnam War The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380

xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Putting together a work of this magnitude is an immense and time-consuming task. Literally dozens of people have contributed to the completion of this anthology, and for that I am most grateful. First I would like to thank my colleague, friend, and co-editor Dr. Antonio Thompson, as without his knowledge and involvement, this work would not have been completed. I would also like to thank the editorial staff at Routledge, including Kimberly Guinta and Rebecca Novack for all of their patience and support throughout this long process. I am also extremely grateful to all of our contributors, for their hard work and dedication, as this work is a reflection of their expertise in U.S. diplomatic and military history. Finally I have to thank my wife, Jan, and my two sons, Dominic and Vincent, for being understanding and patient for all the times when I was unavailable because I had to sit at the computer and work on “that book again.” Christos Frentzos I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this collection. Each of you gave your time and energy and willingly read the edits and revised at our request. Without your help this work would not be possible. It was my pleasure to work with you and I welcome the opportunity to do so again in the future. To my colleagues from West Point, many of whom offered to write chapters in both volumes of this series, thank you. Particularly I would like to offer gratitude to my friend and colleague Colonel Greg Daddis, who I worked with on the TRADOC War Termination Conference and was the first to send in his chapter. I would also like to personally thank Colonel Gian Gentile for his excellent advice and help in locating contributors for this collection. I offer special thanks to my Ph.D. advisor, Dr. George Herring. It is a very special honor to work with him as a colleague on this project. Dr. Herring, you are a great example of professionalism and I am proud to have you as my mentor and friend. Throughout this project, my co-editor and colleague Dr. Christos Frentzos has been a source of encouragement. His hard work and dedication helped us get through some tough deadlines. Thank you, Christos, for being a great colleague and friend. I also need to thank the Frentzos family and Christos’ wife, Jan, for allowing him to spend so many hours working on this project. xiii

Acknowledgments

Finally, I cannot thank my wife, Dr. Amy Thompson, enough. She has always been a source of courage and inspiration. Amy, I am lucky to have you. I want to thank my children, Madeline, Julian, and Sophia, as they are the reason that I do any of these projects. You are the best family! Despite some close calls, no historians were harmed in the making of this project. Antonio Thompson

xiv

INTRODUCTION Antonio S. Thompson and Christos G. Frentzos

The history of U.S. foreign and military policy since 1865 is rich and varied. This work encapsulates the most current writing, research, and topical arguments to present a comprehensive, yet concise examination of the history and historiography of the last nearly 150 years. Our goal was to provide a historiographical overview from established senior professors, while including important, but often overlooked, chapters on individual topics from some of the best established and up-and-coming historians. Each section is composed of an introductory chapter that is designed to provide a brief overview of a major conflict or critical period in American military or diplomatic history. These opening chapters also serve to introduce the reader to some of the relevant literature on the topic and set the historical context for the more specific topical chapters that follow. The collection presented here is the second volume of a two-volume set. Taken alone or together these works should provide an excellent foundation for further historical inquiry. This volume begins with a study of the period between the American Civil War and the War of 1898. Historian Anne Paulet presents an overview of Part I in “Westward Expansion and U.S. Overseas Empire, 1865–1898.” During this period the U.S. pursued an aggressive policy of conquering the West and beyond. The Homestead Act helped push settlers west, while the U.S. military served to protect and expand American interests, often acting in a traditional role in combat with Native Americans, but also in a less-traditional role as diplomats and administrators. One of the key figures in the first half of this period in U.S. expansion is William H. Seward, Secretary of State for Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. It was under Johnson that Seward’s crowning acquisition achievement came, the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. During the expansion west, the U.S. fought numerous campaigns against the Native Americans. Among those troops employed by the U.S. were the “Buffalo Soldiers.” These were African-American soldiers serving in segregated units. The name was given by the Native Americans and came into common use by U.S. troops. The first group designated this way was the 10th Cavalry Regiment, but others, including the 9th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, were also given this designation. These Buffalo Soldiers would play an important, but sometimes overlooked, role in westward expansion, warfare against the Native Americans, the War of 1898, and the Philippine Insurrection. This is a topic taken up in our volume by Brian Shellum in his chapter, “Buffalo Soldiers on the Western Frontier: 1866–1890.” 1

A.S. Thompson and C.G. Frentzos

During this same period the U.S. also set its sights on an overseas empire that extended into the Pacific and the Caribbean. The Navy played a prominent role in this endeavor and the imperialist urge gained more steam with the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. The acquisition of Midway, the Hawaiian and Samoan Islands, economic interests in the Caribbean and China, set the stage for U.S. expansion. This quest for placement among the global powers led to the expansion of the Monroe Doctrine and nearly pushed the U.S. into military conflict with Germany, which was settled through diplomacy, and on a collision course with Spain, resolved through war. Historian Stephen McCullough addresses these issues in “U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Post-Civil War Era.” Numerous factors led to the U.S. war with Spain in 1898. In his chapter, “The Spanish– American War and the Development of U.S. Imperialism,” historian Thomas Schoonover examines many of them and explains how the phrase Spanish–American War was too small to encompass the entire conflict. While the sinking of the battleship Maine gave Americans a rallying cry, the urge for empire served to divide them into two camps, the Imperialists and the Anti-Imperialists. U.S. victory brought with it territorial acquisitions, including the Philippine Islands. When the Filipinos discovered that the American motives did not include liberation, a long and bloody conflict, the Philippine–American War, followed. Frank Schumacher examines this topic in “The Philippine–American War and the Birth of U.S. Colonialism in Asia.” While the U.S. also gained Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, they did not officially acquire Cuba, although the Platt Amendment gave the U.S. wide latitude there. Historian Cyrus Veeser discusses this in “The Platt Amendment and U.S. Occupation Policies in Latin America.” In the period of U.S. neutrality during World War I, America faced not only German U-boat aggression, but also British trade restrictions, while trying to maintain neutrality. Even when the U.S. entered the war, the decision was not taken lightly. Also, the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the conflict, and the League of Nations, created following the war, led to vigorous debate in the U.S. Historian Justus Doenecke examines the prominent figures and the historical debates that surround this pivotal period in his chapter, “The United States in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, 1914–1919.” One of these key figures is U.S. President Woodrow Wilson who campaigned that he “kept us out of war” when running for re-election in 1916 and then directed the nation’s efforts when the U.S. did enter the conflict in 1917. Historian Ross Kennedy takes a closer look at this in “Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations.” World War I was truly a coalition war and the U.S. entered the war as an Associated Power on the Allied side. This type of arrangement can be fraught with diplomatic and military problems and historian Brian Neumann analyzes these in “Allied Coalition Warfare During the First World War.” An often overlooked group that has contributed to U.S. military history is Native Americans, and historian Thomas Britten gives them the attention that they deserve in his chapter, “Native American Soldiers in World War I.” Following the end of World War I, the U.S. did not join the League of Nations, nor did they sign the Treaty of Versailles. Rather, the interwar period has often been called a time of American “isolation,” where the U.S. refused to get involved in foreign affairs or conduct much in the way of international relations. The three historians in this section demonstrate that, while the U.S. did not engage in any large military activity, they were actively engaged in world affairs. Kenneth Weisbrode presents a historiographical approach to this period with his chapter, “The United States During the Interwar Years, 1919–1941.” Clearly the U.S. remained active in international affairs, as demonstrated by their attempts to address postwar Germany, beginning with President Woodrow Wilson’s failed attempt to secure the Fourteen Points peace agreement and U.S. membership in the League of Nations. The U.S. banker Charles Dawes was later instrumental in creating the Dawes Plan, which helped lower German reparations payments 2

Introduction

in 1924. In 1929, the Young Plan, created by American businessman Owen Young, again revisited German reparations payments. The postwar period was the Age of Rapallo and Locarno, treaties aimed to ensure a peaceful postwar world. In this environment, the U.S. contributed through various methods, including disarmament policies, and outlawing war. Of the most significant were the ones created at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 and 1922. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in 1928, sought to prevent war as a means of solving disagreements. Benjamin D. Rhodes’ chapter, “The Age of Disengagement and Disarmament,” examines the major foreign policies conducted during these years. While the American people might have preferred isolation, and U.S. diplomats engaged in discussion to make the world more peaceful, military officials still engaged in risk assessment and discussions of future war. In his chapter, “U.S. Military Planning During the Interwar Period,” Lon Strauss demonstrates that the U.S. had prepared for numerous military contingencies prior to World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt was unique among U.S. Presidents, having been elected to office for four consecutive terms. During his tenure in office, he presided over the latter end of the Great Depression, instituted a New Deal that met much criticism and not a few failures, and directed U.S. efforts at neutrality and then as a belligerent during World War II. Historian Gerhard Weinberg examines Roosevelt and the U.S. in the years preceding American entry into World War II in his chapter, “The United States in the Second World War: 1941–1945.” The U.S. entry into the war followed the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. Many difficult and world-changing decisions followed. Textbooks often describe American industrial power and often mention the role of women in the work-force. Historian Kara Dixon Vuic closely examines the various roles of women during the war, as mothers, workers, and members of the Armed Forces, in her chapter, “American Women in World War II.” One of the things that the U.S. was not prepared in advance for was the capture and transfer of hundreds of thousands of enemy prisoners of war. Historian Antonio Thompson discusses the difficulties of housing, and exceptional care provided for, the captive German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners of war housed in the U.S. in his chapter, “The Housing of Axis Prisoners of War in the U.S. During World War II.” Ultimate Allied victory forced the U.S. to make difficult compromises with its Allies and difficult decisions with its military. It was understood by the Allies that British and American forces would have to invade Europe in order to win the war against Germany. Yet, the particulars of this invasion, including when, where, and with what amount of force, were debated, while Soviet forces continued to engage the Germans on the Eastern Front. Historian James Perry examines the debates surrounding this pivotal decision in his chapter, “Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Second Front.” The war against the Japanese took its own brutal turn and after island-hopping and incredible loss of life the U.S. was faced with the monumental decision of how best to invade Japan. Under the “Manhattan Project” the U.S. had been secretly preparing atomic weapons and ultimately decided to use this weapon to end the war. Historian Robert Buzzanco analyzes the often criticized use of the atomic bomb in his chapter, “The Atomic Bombing of Japan: Was It Necessary?” From the ashes of World War II, a new “Cold War” developed between the former allies in the East and West. Part VI examines the origins and early expansion of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1950. In the introductory chapter to this section, entitled “The Origins of the Cold War at Home and Abroad: 1945–1950,” historian Günter Bischof discusses the evolution of the conflict as well as some of the major historical arguments put forth to explain its genesis and assess culpability for the tensions which lasted for nearly a half century. Some of the questions Bischof addresses in his discussion of the literature include: What guided Soviet actions in Eastern Europe? Was it pure territorial expansion driven by an aggressive 3

A.S. Thompson and C.G. Frentzos

communist ideology; or was it merely an attempt by the Soviet Union to create “friendly governments” on its borders in an effort to protect itself from future western aggression? By contrast, what drove U.S. policy during this same period? Was it merely a desire to expand American capitalism and economic domination, or a legitimate concern with national security? What role did America’s atomic monopoly and fervent anti-communism play in furthering tensions between the two superpowers? How, if at all, has the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the opening of archives in the former Eastern bloc changed or confirmed early notions about the causes and responsibility for the conflict? Unfortunately, as Bischof explains, the end of the Cold War has not produced any real consensus on all of these hotly debated issues. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that some of the most recent publications dealing with the origins of the Cold War have greatly expanded our knowledge and understanding of the conflict. The topical chapters that follow in this section touch on a number of important points introduced by Günter Bischof. In “The Soviet Union, the United States and Eastern Europe, 1941–1953,” Laszlo Borhi examines the role of Eastern Europe at the dawn of the Cold War. America’s new relationship with the former Axis Powers is the focus of James Dobbins’ chapter, “U.S. Occupation Policy and Nation Building in Germany and Japan.” Finally, K.A. Cuordileone examines some of the social and domestic consequences of the Cold War on the United States in her chapter entitled “The Cold War at Home.” The first major “hot” war of the Cold War era was the Korean conflict, which is the focus of Part VII. The introductory chapter, by historian James I. Matray, analyzes some of the causes and consequences of the war, not only for the United States and the Soviet Union, but also its effect on the nations of East Asia. In “The Korean War, 1950–1953: A Historiographical Summary,” Matray acknowledges that historians continue to passionately debate several important issues, including whether or not the war was an international conflict or a civil war. However, he notes that during the last few years a consensus has developed regarding at least two significant points. First, Matray argues, the Korean War was crucial in militarizing the clash between U.S. and Soviet ideology, and internationally speaking, it globalized the Cold War confrontation. Second, he asserts, most historians now agree that the origins of the conflict can trace their development back at least as far as World War II. Matray closes his chapter by discussing some of the possible future trends in historical research on the Korean conflict. One area that deserves further exploration, he argues, is an analysis of the conflict’s impact on domestic politics within the U.S. and some recent publications have begun to examine this very issue. Additionally, he notes that some of the latest scholarship has once again drawn attention to the continuing debate regarding the origins of the conflict, a topic that will probably remain one of the most hotly debated issues in the historiography of the Korean War for some time. Other chapters in this section include Jeffrey Grey’s “UN Coalition Warfare During the Korean War,” an analysis of the successes and failures of the international alliance that defended South Korea, and “Warfare and Nation Building in the Republic of Korea, 1953–1973,” by Christos Frentzos, which in part examines the relationship between warfare and economic growth and development in East Asia. The Vietnam War is the focus of Part VIII, and the introduction to the literature is provided by George Herring. Herring’s chapter, “The Vietnam War, 1945–1975: A Historiography,” addresses some of the important questions that continue to divide Vietnam War scholars. First, was the conflict primarily a nationalist struggle among Vietnamese to determine their own fate, or was it simply part of the larger international Cold War struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and its allies? Second, what motivated America to intervene in the conflict and 4

Introduction

did Washington have a legitimate moral or national security reason for becoming involved? Finally, and perhaps most controversial of all, why was the United States unsuccessful in Vietnam? Herring concludes his chapter by pointing out that recent works have challenged the oncedominant view that Cold War necessities drove U.S. decisions. Lately, he notes, scholars have begun to internationalize the Vietnam War, as access to Soviet, Chinese, and other former communist nations has yielded valuable new insights and has highlighted the critical role by outside nations. Herring also emphasizes that the most recent scholarship focuses much more on Vietnam, by demonstrating how the war impacted Vietnamese individuals, society, and culture. Rounding out the section are three chapters covering a variety of issues related to the war. Gregory A. Daddis discusses U.S. military strategy in “The Myth of an American Attrition Strategy in the Vietnam War.” Washington’s attempt to construct a viable government south of the seventeenth parallel is the focus of James Carter’s chapter, “ ‘Shaky as all Hell:’ The U.S. and Nation Building in Southern Vietnam.” Finally, Ron Milam gives an intimate look at the everyday life of an American serviceman in “The Soldier’s Experience in Vietnam.” The chapters in Part IX examine the Cold War on the periphery and discuss American overt and covert intervention in the third world. The introduction is provided by Michael J. Sullivan, a longtime specialist in this area. His historiographical chapter, “The Cold War on the Periphery, 1953–1989,” not only discusses the literature, but provides a narrative historical framework that puts into context the topical chapters that follow. Essentially, Sullivan argues that, although the U.S. justified its overseas intervention during the Cold War as a response to Soviet provocations and in the interest of American national security, Washington was actually guided more by its role as leader and protector of the global capitalist system. His revisionist interpretation challenges the old consensus view that pictured American adventurism as a response to Soviet threats to American security. In contrast, he asserts that in areas where the U.S. intervened, evidence of actual Soviet military or political presence was minimal. According to Sullivan, U.S. involvement in the third world was usually carried out to “prevent the success of any socialist alternative to the dominant economic paradigm, even if the sources of this threat were primarily domestic.” Sullivan’s chapter is an excellent reminder that the Cold War was not limited to the core regions of Europe and Asia, as the economic and ideological battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union spilled over into the third world, often with deadly consequences. The other chapters in this section offer a more detailed investigation of some of the more controversial, one might even say notorious, U.S. interventions during the Cold War era. Joe Renouard examines the confluence of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the American presidency in U.S. foreign policy in his chapter entitled “Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the CIA: Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs.” The role of the U.S. in overthrowing the popularly elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile is the focus of Lubna Qureshi’s chapter, “U.S. Clandestine Operations in Chile: 1970–1973.” Kyle Longley takes a look at American military operations in the Caribbean in “U.S. Troops as an Instrument in Foreign Policy: The Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983.” Part X examines the decade or so between the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Sean Kalic, from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, takes a critical look at this transitional period with an eye toward assessing some of the newly emerging security threats of the time and examining how the U.S. military handled the switch from major military engagements to peacekeeping and stability operations. In “Post Cold War Conflicts,” he discusses some of the most important scholarships on these topics as the United States struggled to find its place in the rising “new world order.” 5

A.S. Thompson and C.G. Frentzos

More than anything else, Kalic notes, political instability and sectarian violence would mark the new international military and security environment of the post Cold War era. As he suggests, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States needed to readjust its strategic thinking in the face of changes to its military force structure and foreign policy and national security objectives. One of the most important concerns became transnational terrorism, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles. Kalic asserts that military contingency planning became ever more complicated as leaders needed to prepare not only for conventional operations like Panama (1989) and Iraq (1990–1991) but also for ever-expanding peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, such as those in Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo. Some of the major U.S. military operations of the immediate post Cold War period are the focus of the three topical chapters in Part X. Barry Mowell describes the U.S. military action to remove Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega from power in “Operation Just Cause: The U.S. Invasion of Panama.” The deployment of uniformed U.S. servicewomen in the 1990–1991 Iraq war is the subject of Emerald Archer’s chapter, “The Participation of American Servicewomen in Operation Desert Storm.” New and expanded responsibilities for American troops following the collapse of the Soviet Union is the heart of Keith Pomakoy’s chapter entitled “U.S. Troops in Non-Traditional Roles: Humanitarian and Peacekeeping Operations.” The final part of this volume takes a critical look at the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States and the resulting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Martin Loicano from the Air War College provides the introductory chapter to Part XI. Loicano’s chapter, “September 11, 2001 and the War on Terror,” serves both as a primer for the ensuing topical chapters which cover the Iraq and Afghan wars in more detail, but also as an introduction to the United States’ global “War on Terror” and the literature that has been published over these topics during the last decade. He emphasizes that the September 11 attacks had a profound impact on Washington’s world view and led the U.S. to adopt a much more aggressive foreign and military policy. Ironically, America’s actions and attitudes toward its perceived enemies during this period were strongly reminiscent of the myopic view Washington had of its adversaries through much of the Cold War era. Loicano devotes time to discussing the multinational terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda and the leadership role played by Osama Bin Laden. It was Al Qaeda’s alliance with the Taliban of Afghanistan and Bin Laden’s presence in the region that led directly to U.S. action against that nation. While American military action against Iraq proved to be much more controversial, Loicano discusses both U.S. successes and failures in those theaters and notes the difficulty Washington faced in creating and maintaining an international coalition to defeat insurgents in both countries. In closing, Loicano remarks that, with instability continuing in Southwest Asia for the foreseeable future, the U.S. can only be successful through a long-term commitment to the region. Whether or not the U.S. has the political will and financial resources to carry out this mission has yet to be determined. This concluding section closes with two chapters that take a hard look at the controversial U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kevin Farrell assesses Washington’s military strategy in Central Asia and places American actions in the larger historical context of British and Soviet interventions in the region in “Operation Enduring Freedom: The United States in Afghanistan.” Alexander Alderson provides his evaluation of American successes and failures in the operation to topple Saddam Hussein from power and replace his regime with a stable, democratic government in “Operation Iraqi Freedom: 2003–2010.” This work presents a current examination of the historiography and selected topics from U.S. military and diplomatic history since 1865. This handbook will hopefully form the basis of 6

Introduction

future discussion and inquiry and provide an excellent reference for students and historians alike. All of the contributors are either noteworthy or up-and-coming historians and anyone interested in further information on these topics is encouraged to look up other works by these authors. U.S. diplomatic and military affairs have to a large extent helped determine America’s role in the international arena. Combining the two disciplines provides a unique perspective on how the United States has evolved from a string of small colonies to a global power. This twovolume work traces the ebbs and flows of American interaction on the world stage and highlights important and sometimes overlooked events. Taken as a whole, these chapters should provide a more complete picture of U.S. history, thereby putting American military and diplomatic history in its proper context.

7

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PART I

Post-Civil War American Expansion at Home and Abroad

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1 WESTWARD EXPANSION AND U.S. OVERSEAS EMPIRE: 1865–1898 Anne Paulet

In 1898, the United States declared war on Spain and began a clear imperial adventure with the consequent acquisition of overseas territories. Yet the roots for this imperialism lay with earlier frontier expansion and settlement across the West aided by the U.S. Army and its removal of Native Americans to reservations. At the same time, Americans were conquering the continent in the wake of the Civil War, and growing American industrial might was sending Americans around the world in search of markets, converts, and coaling stations. Backed by an expanding navy, Americans sought to broaden their penetration and control of various Pacific territories, even before the United States explicitly joined the scramble for empire at the turn of the century. In 1862, the United States Congress passed the Homestead Act, opening the vast federal domain and pushing the frontier inexorably westward as thousands of settlers in the next several decades poured onto the Great Plains. In the process, they encountered the Native Americans already living there, establishing the basis for countless dime novel stories of the conflict of “civilization” versus “savagery.” The federal government, attempting to mitigate the ensuing conflicts, sought to move Native Americans onto reservations removed from major settlement areas. To accomplish this, it negotiated a series of treaties with the tribes and deployed the army to enforce their removal, regardless of the desires of the native peoples. Consequently, the primary occupation of the U.S. military in the wake of the Civil War was not, as one might expect, policing the defeated South, but rather the conquest and containment of Native Americans in the trans-Mississippi West. Histories of these military encounters across the moving frontier began even as the conflicts were occurring. These early writers, often succumbing to the more lurid rhetoric found in dime novels, told a story entirely sympathetic to white expansion and critical of Native Americans and their lifestyle. De Bienville Randolph Kiem wrote a journalistic account replete with frenzied savages, for instance.1 Cyrus Brady, a historian writing at the time, though lacking sympathy for Native Americans or their resistance, still tended to treat all participants with respect.2 By midcentury, while the language may have become more toned down and the writing more based on historically verifiable narrative, the approach still tended to celebrate western expansion and military endeavors, without acknowledging Native American rights or culture as valuable.3 A major turning point came with the publication of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which sought to tell the history of western expansion from the Indian view. This is not a history 11

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of justified settlement but one of broken treaties, military massacres, and genocide; it is an indictment of Anglo-American expansion and an effort to rebalance the history of western military encounters.4 In the wake of this transformative approach and in line with changes in the profession in response to the minority rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, later military histories of western expansion took a more balanced approach to the frontier, including both Indian perspectives and military misbehaviors as part of the overall narrative. There were several works which came out in the mid-1990s which sought to retell the histories of major confrontations either with a more balanced view or with a clearly Native American viewpoint.5 Over time, efforts to include and understand Indian views were more common and better handled; although, within the genre, the story continues to favor the military and white expansion.6 Perhaps the best example of the problems are found in the iconic works of Robert Utley, whose books continue to focus on Indian–white relations in ways historians with a more ethnohistorical base find problematic, especially his tendency to apologize for or excuse the action of white policy makers and military men.7 Even in the late 1980s and 1990s, general histories still tended to support western expansion, even if there were now more caveats.8 As well as broad views of military efforts on the Plains, there were also more specific approaches, such as those focused on the military men themselves. A number of generals central to the military campaigns against the Native Americans penned memoirs in which Indians, for the most part, were simply foes to be overcome in the name of necessary white expansion.9 A slightly different view was provided by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, whose memoirs detailed his eight years on the Plains but predominantly concentrated on his efforts to culturally transform the Indians during his roughly quarter-century as head of the Carlisle Indian School.10 On the other hand, accounts that dismiss Indians as savages in need of defeat and with few redeemable qualities can be found in the reminiscences of George Armstrong Custer. Arguably the most well-known of western military men, Custer was an ardent self-promoter, penning two accounts of his time in the West.11 In the wake of his untimely demise, Custer’s wife, Elizabeth, wrote three books about her time on the Plains with her husband.12 This was simply the beginning of an outpouring of works centering on the famous encounter of Custer and the Lakota at the Battle of Little Big Horn and exploring the myth of Custer and often of those around him.13 It should also be noted that Custer is not the only military figure to warrant further attention, and biographies on a variety of generals and military leaders have come out over the years, often arguing for the important role their subject had on directing American relations with Native Americans.14 Finally, in 1990, Sherry Smith sought to understand the views of both white military men and their wives toward Native Americans in her book A View from Officers’ Row.15 In addition to tales of white men, and occasionally women, of predominantly military significance on the frontier, new stresses on issues of race resulted in a few studies centered on Indian Scouts and more on the African-American Buffalo Soldiers. The latter were formed as the 10th cavalry in 1866, though the term later applied to the all-black, 9th cavalry and the 24th and 25th infantry as well. Officers were both white and black.16 Buffalo Soldiers served throughout the West and were especially active in the Indian Wars. They later served overseas in the Spanish– American War in Cuba and in the war in the Philippines. As a historical subject, Buffalo Soldiers were largely ignored until the 1960s when the civil rights movement led to reappraisals of race in a number of historical fields. The eponymous pioneering work on the Buffalo Soldiers by William and Shirley Anne Leckie appeared in 1967, but then there was a lull until the last two decades.17 These recent works attempt to portray the lives of African-American soldiers in the West and their efforts to fit in and prove themselves to the whites around them.18 An interesting contribution to the literature which seeks to combine issues of race and gender is Phillip Thomas 12

Westward Expansion and U.S. Overseas Empire

Tucker’s Cathy William: From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier. It should be noted that the validity of this tale of an African-American woman who supposedly passed as male and served as a Buffalo Soldier has been questioned by some.19 In the end, U.S. military confrontations with American Indians continue to inhabit an ever smaller portion of U.S. military monographs and to be relegated to western history or Native American studies. A few transnational works attempt to place U.S.–Indian relations in a broader perspective; but generally they make almost no appearance in diplomatic histories, whether the recent sweeping survey of U.S. foreign relations penned by George Herring or more textbook oriented works, such as Thomas Paterson’s American Foreign Relations.20 It remains then for U.S.–Native American relations to be fully integrated into the expanse of American imperial experience and especially into the history of American foreign relations. Yet studies of American diplomatic history do not end with the conclusion of the Civil War and resume with the 1898 declaration of war on Spain; instead, a variety of work has been done on American interest in, and spread into, the Pacific during those years. Traditionalist approaches tended to ignore this period between the wars, but revisionists found new reasons to explore it. The seminal work of revisionism was William Appleman William’s 1959 book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Arguing that the vast industrial expansion of the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century necessitated acquiring markets for mass produced goods, Williams and others made economic motivations the center of consideration.21 In addition to, or in conjunction with, economics, a number of historians studied the central role of the navy, drawing on Alfred Thayer Mahan’s contentions that power rested in a large navy. They looked at everything from the growth of the navy and its consequent need for coaling stations to the role of naval personnel as diplomatic envoys, often central to American expansion.22 Other historians looked for broader motivations using a more sociological or intellectual approach and concentrating on what they viewed as either key players, such as Ernest Paolino’s book on William Seward, or key ideas.23 Regarding the latter, in 1975 Robert Beisner proposed, in From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, that the 1890s marked a shift in the American approach to foreign policy from a haphazard one to a more organized and deliberate policy.24 There were also sweeping studies of U.S. movement into the Pacific and interaction with East Asian countries. The classic work is the 1967 Across the Pacific by Akira Iriye, but a more recent study is Arthur Power Dudden’s The American Pacific.25 The 1867 acquisition of Midway tends to remain a minor notation in books on naval expansion or diplomatic history. Surprisingly, the acquisition of Alaska in the same year does not receive much more attention. Ronald Jensen’s 1975 book The Alaska Purchase and Russian–American Relations is the major work.26 Other than a few articles, Alaska is mainly covered in larger general studies or in works on William Seward.27 While the major imperial confrontation over Samoa occurred in 1899, Paul Kennedy looks at Samoa, starting in 1878, as a case study of imperialist conflict with Europeans in the Pacific.28 By the 1980s, the move to shift from social to cultural history started to appear in works on diplomacy, especially with Michael Hunt’s 1987 book, which studied the role of ideology in expansionism.29 By the 2000s, race had come to take center stage in a number of studies, including Eric Love’s Race over Empire and Michael Krenn’s The Color of Empire.30 In addition to broad driving forces, historians also studied specific areas of interaction, most notably Japan, which had been “opened” by the United States in the 1850s, and China.31 As a result of the growth of both women’s history and cultural history, especially the latter’s stress on non-governmental actors, more recent works on American intervention in China have focused on the important role played by missionaries as imperialists, diplomats, and inculcators of American culture, including Jane Hunt’s The Gospel of Gentility and Patricia Hill’s The World Their Household.32 13

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However, perhaps most interesting to historians is the American relationship with Hawaii. An independent kingdom ruled by a native monarchy, the islands of Hawaii had come under increasing American influence during the nineteenth century.33 These Americans, mostly missionaries and former missionaries, had a growing economic stake in the country. When a change in tariff law and an assertive new Hawaiian monarch threatened their position in the early 1890s, Americans overthrew the monarchy and asked for annexation. Denied due to the irregularities of the take-over, these Americans had to await the great imperialist surge of 1898 to become part of the United States. Early works by W.A. Russ Jr. and Helena Allen tend to focus on the Anglo-American perception of events.34 More recent efforts by Noenoe Silva and Stuart Banner look at native Hawaiian resistance or place the encounter within the larger dispossession of natives as Europeans and Americans spread into and settled the Pacific.35 In many ways, the story of Hawaii is the story of burgeoning American imperial expansion in the years before the war with Spain. While the spread of cultural approaches and the inclusion of issues of race and gender have added much to the literature of this time period, historians have yet to really integrate the expansion of the United States across the continent with the expansion of the country across the Pacific. Few historians today would deny that American interaction with Native Americans was imperial; however, fewer still have explored either what that meant to the military and diplomatic history of the United States in the decades immediately after the Civil War or how that serves to fit the country into a transnational vision of imperialism.

Notes 1 De Bienville Randolph Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders: A Winter Campaign on the Plains (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1870); also sympathetic to white actions and with greatest concentration on pre-Civil War encounters, Jacob Piatt Dunn, Massacres of the Mountains: A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West, 1815–1875 (1886; repr., Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2002); and from someone involved in conquest: John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac; or, the Conquest of the Sioux, a Narrative of Stirring Personal Experiences and Adventures in the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition of 1876, and in the Campaign on the British Border in 1879 (1890; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961). A 1930s monograph by a western newspaperman is significant predominantly for its portraits of Indian leaders, rightly doomed to fail perhaps but still somewhat sympathetically portrayed; see Paul I. Wellman, Death on the Prairie: The Thirty Years’ Struggle for the Western Plains (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1934; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). 2 Cyrus Townsend Brady, The Sioux Indian Wars: From the Powder River to the Little Big Horn (1904; repr., New York: Indian Head Books, 1992) and Indian Fights and Fighters of the American Frontier of the 19th Century (1904; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971). 3 See William H. Leckie, The Military Conquest of the Southern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963); Wilbur Sturtevant Nye, Plains Indians Raiders: The Final Phases of Warfare from the Arkansas to the Red River (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968); and Ray Brandes, Troopers West: Military and Indian Affairs on the American Frontier (San Diego: Frontier Heritage Press, 1970). 4 Dee Alexander Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). 5 David Roberts, Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); Jerome A. Greene, ed., Lakota and Cheyenne: Indian Views of the Great Sioux War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Bruce Hampton, Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Charles M. Robinson III, A Good Year to Die: The Story of the Great Sioux War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). 6 Lonnie J. White and Jerry Keenan, Hostiles and Horse Soldiers: Indian Battles and Campaigns in the West (Boulder, CO: Pruett Pub. Co., 1972); and Bruce Reber, The United States Army and the Indian Wars in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1860–1898 (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Military History Institute, 1978).

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7 See Robert Marshall Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (New York: Macmillan, 1974); and The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984). 8 See Robert Wooster, The Military and United States Indian Policy, 1865–1903 (1988; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and Thomas Goodrich, Scalp Dance: Indian Warfare on the High Plains, 1865–1879 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997). 9 General Nelson Miles, for instance, tends to be more disparaging of Mexicans and their lack of culture as he sees it than he is of the Native Americans. See Nelson Appleton Miles, Personal Recollections & Observations of General Nelson A. Miles: Embracing a Brief Overview of the Civil War or from New England to the Golden Gate and the Story of His Indian Campaigns with Comments on the Exploration, Development and Progress of Our Great Western Empire, 2 vols. (1896; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992) and Serving the Republic: Memoirs of the Civil and Military Life of Nelson A. Miles, Lieutenant-General, United States Army (New York: Harper & Bros., 1911); O.O. Howard, My Life and Experiences Among Our Hostile Indians: A Record of Personal Observations, Adventures, and Campaigns Among the Indians of the Great West, With Some Account of their Life, Habits, Traits, Religion, Ceremonies, Dress, Savage Instincts, and Customs in Peace and War (1907; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1972); and George Crook, General George Crook, His Autobiography, ed. Martin Schmitt (1946 and 1960; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986). 10 Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904, ed. Robert Utley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964; repr., with introduction by David Wallace Adams, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). 11 George Armstrong Custer, My Life on the Plains, or, Personal Experiences with Indians (1872; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962) and Wild Life on the Plains and the Horrors of Indian Warfare (1891; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969). 12 Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Boots and Saddles or, Life in Dakota with General Custer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885; repr., with introduction by Louise Barnett, Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2010); Tenting on the Plains; or, General Custer in Kansas and Texas (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895; repr., with introduction by Jane R. Stewart and forward by Shirley A. Leckie, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); and Following the Guidon: The Experiences of General Custer’s Wife with the US 7th Cavalry (1890; repr., UK: Leonaur, 2010). 13 Among the numerous works on Custer, see Edgar Irving Stewart, Custer’s Luck (1955; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980); Stephen E. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (1975; repr., Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1996); Robert Marshall Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier, rev. ed. (1988; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Jim Donovan, Custer and the Little Big Horn: The Man, the Mystery, the Myth (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, 2001); Thom Hatch, The Custer Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Life of George Armstrong Custer and the Plains Indian Wars (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002); and Paul Andrew Hutton, ed., The Custer Reader (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992; repr., with introduction by Robert Utley, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). For a different perspective on events at Little Big Horn, see Charles Albert Varnum, Custer’s Chief of Scouts: The Reminiscences of Charles A. Varnum: Including his Testimony at the Reno Court of Inquiry, ed. John M. Carroll (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); and Charles K. Mills, Harvest of Barren Regrets: The Army Career of Frederick William Benteen, 1834–1898 (Glendale, CA: A.H. Clark Co., 1985). For a modern perspective on Custer’s wife which grounds her within both women’s history and military history, see Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman: Oklahoma Press, 1993). 14 Richard N. Ellis, General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970); Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Charles M. Robinson, Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie (Austin, TX: State House Press, 1993); Arthur J. Amchan, The Most Famous Soldier in America: A Biography of Lt. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, 1839–1925 (Alexandria, VA: Amchan Publications, 1989); and Robert Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 15 Sherry Smith, A View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990). 16 To understand why and how Indians participated on the side of the American military, see Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890

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17 18

19 20

21

22

23

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); and Mark Van de Logt, War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). William Leckie and Shirley Anne Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Cavalry of the West, rev. ed. (1967; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). Monroe Lee Billington, New Mexico’s Buffalo Soldiers, 1866–1900 (Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1991); Arthur T. Burton, Black, Buckskin, and Blue: African American Scouts and Soldiers on the Western Frontier (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1999); Charles L. Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898: Black & White Together (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866–1898 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Elizabeth D. Leonard, Men of Color to Arms!: Black Soldiers, Indian Wars, and the Quest for Equality (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010); and Frank N. Schubert, Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers and the Medal of Honor, 1870–1898 (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1997) and Voices of the Buffalo Soldier: Records, Reports, and Recollections of Military Life and Service in the West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003). Phillip Thomas Tucker, Cathy William: From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002). James O. Gump, The Dust Rose like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Jill St. Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867–1877 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); and Bruce Vandervort, Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States, 1812–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2006). George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Thomas Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, Shane J. Maddock, Deborah Kisatsky, and Kenneth J. Hagan, American Foreign Relations: A History, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2010). William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1959). Because Williams taught at the University of Wisconsin, works from students who adopted his economic approach were known as products of the Wisconsin school. Among these are Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963) and Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967). Additional economic approaches include later works by both Williams and Lafeber; see William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York: Random House, 1969); and Walter LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); as well as others, such as Tom E. Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874–1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic & Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982); and David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Expansion across the Pacific, 1784–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). For criticism of the revisionist approach, see Paul S. Holbo, “Economics, Emotion, and Expansion: An Emerging Foreign Policy,” in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal, rev. ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970). Walter R. Herrick, Jr., The American Naval Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966); John Doughty Alden, American Steel Navy: A Photographic History of the U.S. Navy from the Introduction of the Steel Hull in 1883 to the Cruise of the Great White Fleet (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1972); Peter Karsten, Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism (New York: Free Press, 1972); Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Grey Steel and Blue Water Navy: Formative Years of America’s Military-Industrial Complex, 1881–1917 (UK: Gazelle Book Services, Ltd., 1979); and Mark Russell Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995). For the role of the navy in diplomatic encounters, see Kenneth J. Hagan, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers, 1798–1883 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); Frederick Drake, The Empire of the Seas: A Biography of Rear Admiral Robert Wilson Shufeldt, USN (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), a study of the admiral responsible for the treaty with Korea; and David Foster Long, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers, 1798–1883 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988). For studies of Mahan, see, for instance, Robert Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and his Letters (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977). With his vision of an American empire which stretched from Canada to the tip of South America, William Seward is often studied as a source of expansionism; see Glydon Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); and Ernest N. Paolino, The Foundations of the American Empire: William Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

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24 25

26 27

28 29 30

31

32

33

34

35

1973). Broader approaches include David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); Milton Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust: Approaches to Foreign Affairs, 1865–1900 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971); and Charles S. Campbell, The Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 1865–1900 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). Robert Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 2nd ed. (1975; Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1986). Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); Arthur Power Dudden, The American Pacific: From the Old China Trade to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Ronald J. Jensen, The Alaska Purchase and Russian–American Relations (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975). There is a 100th anniversary study of the purchase: Archie W. Shiels, The Purchase of Alaska (Seattle: University of Washington Press, dist., 1967); there are also two main articles: Howard I. Kushner, “Seward’s Folly? American Commerce in Russian America and the Alaska Purchase,” California Historical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1975): 4–26, America History and Life (45900592); and Richard E. Welch, Jr., “American Public Opinion and the Purchase of Russian America,” American Slavic & Eastern European Review 17, no. 4 (1958): 481–494, America History and Life (46422994). Paul Kennedy, Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German–American Relations, 1878–1900 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974). Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and American Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Michael L. Krenn, The Color of Empire: Race and American Foreign Relations (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006). For the interaction of race, immigration, and foreign policy during this period, see Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). Japan: For a study of the U.S. role in opening Japan, and particular the strong element played by issues of commerce, see Jack L. Hammersmith, Spoilsmen in a “Flowery Fairyland”: The Development of the U.S. Legation in Japan, 1859–1906 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998). For a more general view of U.S.-Japanese relations, see Walter LaFeber, The Clash: US–Japanese Relations throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). For a work which includes the latest approaches from cultural history in its study of diplomatic interaction, see Joseph Henning, Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American–Japanese Relations (New York: NYU Press, 2000). China: Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and David L. Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Gael Graham, Gender, Culture, and Christianity: American Protestant Mission Schools in China, 1880–1930 (New York: Peter Lang Pub., Inc., 1995); and Wayne Flynt and Gerald W. Berkley, Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850–1950 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). For a more general overview of the role of missionaries, see Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). For a general overview of relations, see Merze Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965); and Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1874–1893: The Kalakaua Dynasty (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1967). W.A. Russ, Jr., The Hawaiian Revolution, 1893–94 (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1959); and Helena G. Allen, The Betrayal of Liliuokalani: Last Queen of Hawaii, 1838–1917 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1982) and Sanford Ballard Dole: Hawaii’s Only President, 1844–1926 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1988). Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. chapter 4, 128–162.

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2 BUFFALO SOLDIERS ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER 1866–1890 Brian G. Shellum

Introduction Black Americans have served and sacrificed in U.S. military conflicts from the Revolutionary War onward, but it was during the Civil War that they first fought in large numbers and in organized black regiments. The service of 178,975 black volunteers during the Civil War, comprising about 10 percent of the total Union manpower by the end of the bitter struggle, paid the price for blacks to serve in the Regular Army in the postwar era. These black regiments fought in all the major theaters of combat and suffered 36,847 dead, and individual members received 16 Medals of Honor. As the Union Army demobilized the last of the black volunteer regiments at the end of the war, Congress passed legislation establishing black Regular Army cavalry and infantry regiments. This was the first time the U.S. permitted blacks to enlist as regulars and as soldiers in the nation’s standing army. These black regulars came to be known as the Buffalo Soldiers.1 Nearly everyone today recognizes the term Buffalo Soldier, but in the post-Civil War era the black soldiers would have been known as colored troops who served in Negro regiments. The soubriquet Buffalo Soldier came into popular use in the twentieth century, even though it has its roots in the nineteenth century and was coined by Native Americans. According to various sources, the Cheyenne and Comanche used the expression first in the late 1860s and early 1870s for the members of the black regular regiments. The term was used occasionally by the press and in private letters, but not by the black soldiers themselves. Most agree the name referred to the soldiers’ dark skin and black curly hair, similar in the Indian view to that of the buffalo. There is a great deal of disagreement in any meaning beyond this visual similarity. Certainly there was no empathetic connection between the two groups; the Indians viewed the African-American soldier as a blue-clad enemy bent on destroying their way of life.2 A first-hand account from 1886 illustrates the contemporary Indian view of the Buffalo Soldiers. When Major Frederick W. Benteen arrived with a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry at the future site of Fort Duchesne, Utah, an Indian agent reported that a Ute Indian headman shouted: “Buffalo Soldiers! Buffalo Soldiers! Coming! Maybe so tomorrow! Indians saw them at Burnt Fort yesterday, coming this way. Don’t let them come! We can’t stand it! It’s bad—very bad!” When the agent asked through an interpreter about the Ute’s aversion to the black 18

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troopers of the Ninth, the Indian’s broken English response was “All over black! All over black, buffalo soldiers! Injun heap no like him!” After rubbing his head with his hand, he screamed, “Woolly head! Woolly head! All same as buffalo! What you call him, black white man?” This is one of the earliest documented uses of the term Buffalo Soldier by Native Americans. The epithet evolved and came to embody much more.3

Establishment The Buffalo Soldier regiments were born in the post-Civil War legislation to set the size of the peacetime army and establish black Regular Army units. Congress approved an act on July 28, 1866 that added four cavalry regiments to the six existing and 26 new infantry regiments to the 19 then in service; two of the cavalry and four of the infantry regiments were reserved for black soldiers. This was a significant triumph for blacks who, so recently freed from their slave shackles in the South, sacrificed so much during the Civil War. It was an achievement anticipated when Frederick Douglass predicted: Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has not earned the right to citizenship. By August 1866, the military departments began recruiting black soldiers and white officers from the former Civil War volunteer regiments to fill the ranks of the Ninth and Tenth U.S. Cavalry Regiments and the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-First U.S. Infantry Regiments.4 In 1869 and subsequent years, Congress moved to reduce the size of the peacetime Regular Army by limiting its enlisted strength to less than 30,000, the strength the army maintained throughout the Indian Wars. This mandate forced the army to reduce the number of infantry regiments to 25 but left the number of cavalry regiments at ten. The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments survived intact, but the Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Regiments combined to form the new Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment, and the Thirty-Eighth and Forty-First Regiments formed the new Twenty-Fourth. These four Buffalo Soldier regiments comprised about 10 percent of the post-Civil War Regular Army strength, and played a key role in the Indian Wars on the western frontier in the period 1866 to 1890.5

Ninth and Tenth U.S. Cavalry The newly formed Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments shared essentially the same organization as the white regiments in the Regular Army. A cavalry regiment consisted of 12 companies formed into three battalions (four companies in each battalion). At full strength, a cavalry regiment rode with 43 commissioned officers and 845 enlisted men. Each company had three officers, ten non-commissioned officers, and 60 privates. During this period, cavalry units began to commonly use the term “troop” instead of company and “squadron” instead of battalion, a practice that began during the Civil War. Cavalry units used both terms interchangeably until the army directed regiments to use troop and squadron exclusively in 1883.6 The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry were different from the white cavalry regiments in several important ways. Black enlisted men filled the regimental ranks, though they were led exclusively by white officers, with three exceptions, to be discussed later. Second, the army assigned chaplains to the black regiments. The army assigned chaplains to most military posts, but the 19

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black regiments were the only ones allotted unit chaplains in this period. These chaplains, commissioned as captains, ministered to the black enlisted men and taught them fundamental school subjects. This practice of chaplains educating illiterate black soldiers began during the Civil War and was perhaps as important as their religious role.7 The Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment formed in New Orleans, Louisiana, beginning in August 1866, and was nearly full strength by early 1867 when it was sent to Texas to complete its training. In June the army ordered the regiment to occupy posts in west and south Texas, where it fought the Comanche and Apache and protected pioneers for eight years. In 1875, the regiment transferred to New Mexico and spent the next five years fighting the Apache and securing settlers. The regiment moved north in 1881 to Kansas and Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) where it remained until 1885. Finally, the Ninth moved to Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota from 1885 to 1891, where it fought the closing battles of the Plains Indian Wars against the Sioux and Cheyenne.8 The Tenth U.S. Cavalry Regiment formed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in September 1866 and moved its headquarters to Fort Riley, Kansas the following August. Initially the regiment’s troops were scattered among forts along the line of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, then under construction. By September 1867, the regiment was at full strength and had fought several sharp engagements against large bands of Cheyenne. The Tenth moved in 1869 south to new areas of Kansas and Indian Territory, alternately fighting, containing, and protecting the bands of Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and other tribes within the bounds of the territory. Texas became the home of the regiment in 1875, with troops spread over west Texas performing frontier duties and fighting Apaches. The unit moved to Arizona in 1885, where it participated in General Crook’s campaign against Geronimo, and finally to New Mexico in 1886, where the regiment continued to pacify the region until 1891.9

Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth U.S. Infantry Similar to their cavalry brethren, the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry were organized like the white infantry regiments in the Regular Army. At full strength, an infantry regiment marched with 35 commissioned officers and 505 enlisted men, which was considerably smaller in size than a cavalry regiment. Each of its ten companies was also smaller, with three officers, nine non-commissioned officers, and 39 privates. White officers led the black infantrymen and chaplains ministered the soldiers’ needs as they did in the black cavalry regiments.10 The Thirty-Eighth was operating in New Mexico and the Forty-First in Louisiana and Texas when the merger took place, creating the new Twenty-Fourth U.S. Infantry. Texas served as the first home of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry from 1869 to 1880, where it fought the Comanche and Apache, built roads, and kept the peace. The regiment moved north in 1880 to Indian Territory with its companies spread among various forts and camps in Indian Territory and north Texas. Finally, in 1888, the regiment moved south again to New Mexico and Arizona, where it remained until 1892.11 The new Twenty-Fifth U.S. Infantry was formed through the union of the Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Regiments in Louisiana in 1869 and moved to Texas the following year. For ten years, the regiment remained there, with companies spread throughout Texas and Indian Territory to build military posts, roads, and telegraphs lines, perform escort duty, and skirmish with the Comanche and Apache. The regiment moved north to the Dakotas in 1880 to take part in the final stages of the campaign against the Sioux. Finally, in 1888, the regiment transferred to Montana, where it remained for ten years.12 20

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Enlisted Men Shortly after the legislation creating the Buffalo Soldier regiments passed in 1866, the units dispatched officers to canvass the black members of the former U.S. Colored Troops to find willing candidates to re-enlist into the new regiments. Nearly half of the black soldiers recruited were veterans of the Civil War and most were former slaves, illiterate with few skills beyond those of field hands or farm laborers. Black soldiers earned the same wage as their white counterparts in the Regular Army, a situation unparalleled in the civilian world at the time. It did not take long to fill the ranks and the regiments were soon deployed to the frontier to begin the arduous nation-building tasks of fighting Indians, protecting settlers, guarding strategic points, building roads, stringing telegraph lines, maintaining military posts, securing reservations, and enduring endless tours of escort and guard duty.13 With congressional limits placed on its size after the Civil War, the Regular Army kept the peace in a vast western frontier with 430 companies garrisoning roughly 200 scattered posts across the United States. Forty-four of these companies comprised the Buffalo Soldiers and it was common for black and white units to serve together at the same isolated frontier forts. The official record shows that the picture of race relations on frontier posts was far from equitable. At Fort Robinson, Nebraska, the post commander Lieutenant Colonel J.L. Brisbin noted with alarm in 1887 that black soldiers were court-martialed at a rate more than twice that of whites. Fort Robinson’s mix of large numbers of black cavalry troopers and white infantry soldiers proved a fertile breeding ground for racism. Whites in the military might grudgingly accept that blacks could be molded into capable soldiers, but continued to believe that they were dependent on their white officers for leadership. The Buffalo Soldiers could not escape the ubiquitous racism and stereotypes of the time no matter how well or consistently they performed their duties.14 On the other hand, the bureaucratic machinery of the army housed, uniformed, equipped, and mounted black and white Regular Army troops the same. If a quartermaster issued a black regular unit threadbare uniforms, foul rations, or sway-back horses, it was due to an overburdened procurement system and insufficient congressional appropriations rather than racism. The same treatment might befall a white regiment. The army simply could not afford to cripple one tenth of its combat power by deliberately issuing substandard items to the black regiments. The army bureaucracy was by regulation color-blind when it came to all things official, such as recruiting, medical services, military pay, and pensions. Black and white soldiers received equal treatment when they applied for admission to the government-sponsored Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC.15 Individual Buffalo Soldiers compiled an impressive record during 25 years of campaigning and received a number of Medals of Honor, continuing the record begun during the Civil War and further dispelling the myth that blacks lacked military virtue. Congress awarded 18 black soldiers the Medal of Honor during the period 1870–1890. Six white officers who served with the Buffalo Soldiers also received the coveted award, showing their willingness to risk their lives for the black soldiers they led and respected. Of the 18 awarded to Buffalo Soldiers, ten came in fighting the Apache, four for combat with the Comanche, one each for action against the Ute and Sioux, and two for fending off white bandits. These black regulars personified the best qualities of the American soldier, willing to risk their lives for their brothers in arms.16 By 1890, there was a core of long-service, experienced frontier veterans in the Buffalo Soldiers that gave them a solid cadre of competent soldiers and professional non-commissioned officers. In an era when desertion was a chronic problem for the Regular Army, black soldiers rarely deserted. Secretary of War Redfield Proctor in 1889 suggested raising a black artillery 21

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regiment based solely on their low desertion rate relative to white regiments. Black regulars also had a consistently higher re-enlistment rate than white units. These and other factors helped the Buffalo Soldier regiments develop a high esprit de corps, which in turn helped the black soldiers win the grudging respect of most of their white officers.17

White Officers Congress mandated that all of the lieutenants and two-thirds of the captains and field grades in the new infantry and cavalry regiments created in 1866 be set aside for volunteers who had at least two years of field service during the Civil War. The remaining third comprised Regular Army officers and most of these were graduates of West Point. Though at least 100 black officers served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War, none received commissions in the Buffalo Soldier regiments, most not having the minimum two years of field service. All of the volunteer officers competing for commissions in the new black and white regiments had to pass an examination before a board of officers. Ultimately, the quality of the officers in the black regiments ran the gamut from indifferent and incompetent to the highly capable and was probably no different than the other regiments in the Regular Army.18 A frank letter quoted in the Army and Navy Journal in 1887 by an unidentified white officer serving in a black regiment illustrates his respect for black soldiers as well as his conflicting emotions. The officer emphasized that he was “no admirer of the African, believing he will ultimately destroy the white race,” but confessed that he would have been as prejudiced or perhaps worse than his peers had he not served with black soldiers. He referred to himself as a “colored officer,” or an officer serving in a colored regiment, and admitted that he took the attendant “prejudices, remarks, slurs, etc., good humoredly.” His service in the Buffalo Soldiers caused him to “think the world of the men” in his company. When he looked at them he did “not see their black faces,” but “something beyond.” He considered them “far ahead of white troops” and “more like a lot of devoted servants and retainers, faithful and trustworthy in every respect, and brave and gallant.”19 Louis H. Rucker was among the white officers awarded Regular Army commissions in the Ninth Cavalry when it formed in 1866 and served with the unit until 1897. Rucker began his career as an enlisted volunteer in the Civil War in 1861 and was a first lieutenant by the end of the war. In the Ninth, he proved an able second lieutenant, an efficient first lieutenant regimental quartermaster, and a superb troop commander after promotion to captain in 1879. Rucker served as one of the exemplary unit commanders in the Ninth Cavalry during this period, a low-key officer who treated his enlisted and non-commissioned officers with respect and whose smaller-than-average troop desertion and dishonorable discharge rates reflected his effectiveness. Rucker served as a key mentor to black officers John Alexander and Charles Young during their formative years as second lieutenants with the Ninth.20 Frank B. Taylor was the polar opposite of Rucker. With no Civil War experience, Taylor used political connections to obtain a commission in the Twenty-Fifth Infantry in 1867. He transferred to the white Eighteenth Infantry in 1869, where his regimental commander tried to discharge him, and later moved to the Ninth Cavalry, where in 1881 he was court-martialed for verbally abusing, pistol-whipping, and beating a black trooper with the butt of a carbine. The board recommended he be dismissed, but President Chester Arthur reduced the sentence and he continued to serve. In addition to his contempt for black enlisted men, Taylor avoided service in the same troop with two of the black officers then on active service. Within a week of Lieutenant Charles Young joining his troop at Fort Robinson, Nebraska in 1889, Captain Taylor fell “ill” and remained on the sick list for nine months. Two years earlier, after Lieutenant 22

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John Alexander was assigned to his troop, Taylor found convenient ways to be out on detached service for five months and was then reassigned. For the leadership of the regiment to condone such behavior indicates an unhealthy racial climate that could not have been lost on Young or Alexander.21

Black Officers Only three black Regular Army line officers served in the U.S. Army during the period 1866 to 1890 and all were graduates of West Point. Of the 13 blacks who attended the United States Military Academy in this postwar period, only three graduated: Henry O. Flipper in 1877, John H. Alexander in 1887, and Charles Young in 1889. The War Department assigned these black officers solely to the Buffalo Soldier regiments after graduation from West Point and the three had diverse careers and mixed successes.22 Henry Ossian Flipper, the first black alumnus of the Academy, chose the Tenth U.S. Cavalry after he graduated in 1877. Initially stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Flipper performed his duties admirably. Flipper’s otherwise bright career came to a disastrous end with a court-martial in 1881. As a commissary officer at a new station at Fort Davis, Texas, his commanding officer charged him with embezzling funds. He was cleared of the embezzlement charge but convicted of “conduct unbecoming of an officer” for submitting inaccurate statements concerning the funds to his commanding officer. A court-martial board dismissed Flipper from the service and the charges were approved by President Chester Arthur. (The U.S. Army issued Flipper an honorable discharge posthumously in 1976.)23 John Hanks Alexander, the second black graduate of West Point, joined the Ninth U.S. Cavalry upon graduation in 1887. Initially posted to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, Alexander later served at Fort Duchesne, Utah, both posts occupied by the Ninth Cavalry. He won high praise from his commanders and quickly mastered the challenging duties of a second lieutenant on the frontier. Alexander’s promising career in the army ended when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1894. This left only Young on the active list to carry the torch for his race in the U.S. Army thereafter.24 Charles Young graduated from West Point in 1889 and, like Alexander, selected the Ninth Cavalry. He joined his unit at Fort Robinson, Nebraska and a year later rotated to Fort Duchesne, Utah, just before the Ninth participated in the Pine Ridge Campaign, the end to the wars with the Plains Indians. Young matured and honed his skills as a leader at Fort Duchesne while maintaining the peace with the Ute Indians, serving there until 1894. Unlike the two black Academy graduates preceding him, Young went on to a long and distinguished career and eventually attained the rank of colonel.25

Chaplains The legislation creating the black regular regiments in 1866 mandated the commissioning of chaplains—though not specifically black chaplains—to minister and educate the black enlisted men. It took some years for the army to fill these positions, and even longer to find black chaplains to serve, despite the fact that at least 14 black officers served as chaplains with the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. Ultimately, five black chaplains served in the Buffalo Soldier regiments, but only two served in the period from 1866 to 1890 and will be discussed here.26 The U.S. Army appointed Henry V. Plummer the first black chaplain in the Regular Army in 1884 and assigned him to the Ninth Cavalry. Plummer performed ably his first ten years with 23

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the Ninth, spending his time teaching school, leading Sunday services, counseling soldiers, and visiting men at the stockade. But he ran afoul of the command by objecting to his substandard housing on post, promoting temperance among the soldiers, and protesting the racial injustice the black soldiers faced in frontier towns. While celebrating the promotion of a noncommissioned officer, Plummer consumed alcohol with enlisted men and supplied the troopers with drink, both of which were considered conduct unbecoming of an officer, as well as being inconsistent with his preaching. A court-martial found him guilty and dismissed him from the service in November 1894. (The U.S. Army Board issued Plummer an honorable discharge posthumously in 2005.)27 The second black chaplain to serve with the Buffalo Soldiers, Allen Allensworth, proved an innovative chaplain and avoided the pitfalls that doomed Plummer. Allensworth actively campaigned for a position and became the second black chaplain with his appointment to the Twenty-Fourth Infantry in 1886. Chaplain Allensworth steered clear of the activist role during his service in the army and subscribed to the accommodationist school of Booker T. Washington. He managed to find a non-confrontational approach working for the black soldiers in his regiment and chose not to challenge the white officer corps establishment directly. Allensworth excelled in educating his men, earning accolades and recognition in the army and civilian community. Allensworth ultimately succeeded in creating a school for black soldiers, teaching them the skills they needed in the army and in civilian life. He served his soldiers faithfully until retiring in 1907 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.28

End of the Indian Wars By 1890, the serious troubles with the Plains Indians were over, so the soldiers of the black regular regiments, like white frontier troops, spent much of their time performing routine garrison duties, such as drill, training, target practice, and practice marches. Once the Indians were settled on reservations, the operational role of the army in the West changed, which facilitated improvements in the lives of the soldiers, black and white. General John M. Schofield, the serving Commander in Chief of the Army, declared in 1884: “The period of ‘temporary huts’ for the troops has passed.” In this new role, the army concentrated troops near the reservations where they might be needed, and those posts selected for retention were provided appropriations for permanent, comfortable buildings. The spread of the railroad and telegraph meant these forts were no longer isolated; instead, they were regularly supplied with food and other goods. White settlements sprang up around posts, ending the soldiers’ isolation.29 Perhaps more important to the everyday lives of the Buffalo Soldiers were the creature comforts afforded by the new permanent posts. Congress approved appropriations in 1886 to complete improvements in the barracks and other buildings at various posts, among them Fort Robinson, Nebraska. After the Ninth Cavalry moved its headquarters to Fort Robinson in 1887, the members of the Ninth moved into new barracks with all of the amenities they could ask for. At times in the past two decades, the Ninth Cavalry had spent tours in tents and temporary shelters at various postings in the southwest, so their new living quarters were a welcome change. And it was certainly not lost on the black troopers of the Ninth that they lived in buildings that were identical to those of their counterparts in the all-white Eighth Infantry. The army achieved this equality of housing not by design but by practical circumstance; they had no idea whether a white or black regiment would occupy the barracks they constructed. The army bureaucracy was color-blind at a time when the rest of America was not. 24

Buffalo Soldiers on the Western Frontier

Conclusion The service and sacrifice of black volunteer soldiers during the Civil War paid the price for blacks to enlist as regulars in the postwar standing army. Soon after they arrived on the western plains, the Native American tribes gave the members of these black regiments the nickname Buffalo Soldiers because of their dark skin and black curly hair. Dispersed among several hundred isolated posts across the country, they served and fought side by side with white regiments, though not always in racial harmony. White officers led these regiments, with the exception of three black West Point graduates and two chaplains. Many, but not all, of the black soldiers and white officers developed mutual trust and respect. The four regiments comprising the Buffalo Soldiers played a critical role in the settling of the western frontier during the period 1866 to 1890, proving capable soldiers and establishing a creditable record. Remarkably, they were the only black Americans at the time afforded equal recruitment, pay, housing, and pensions. In all things official, black soldiers were treated as equals, though racial bias persisted in all social or off-duty situations. These black regulars served competently with white regulars in spite of the ubiquitous racial prejudice of the age. What’s more, the service of the Buffalo Soldiers paved the way for future generations and assured these black trailblazers a prominent place in U.S. military history.

Notes 1 Frederick H. Dyer, Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (Des Moines: Dyer Publishing Company, 1908), 11–12. (Of 36,847: 2,894 were killed or mortally wounded, 29,658 died of disease, 98 died as prisoners of war, 576 died in accidents, and 3,621 died of all other non-battle causes.) Frank N. Shubert, Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers and the Medal of Honor, 1870–1898 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 1997), 2–4. Sixteen blacks in the U.S. Navy were awarded the Medal of Honor. 2 William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 25–26. 3 Eugene E. White, Experiences of a Special Indian Agent Little Rock (Arkansas: Diploma Press, 1893), 146–149. 4 General Order No. 56, War Department, Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, August 1, 1866; Speech, “Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army?,” National Hall, Philadelphia, published in Douglass’ Monthly, August 1863; Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army In Peacetime 1784–1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 218–220. 5 Coffman, Old Army, 218–220. 6 Mary L. Stubbs and Stanley R. Connor, Armor-Cavalry, Part I (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969), 20; U.S. Army Register, 1880, 278–279. 7 Stubbs and Connor, Armor-Cavalry, 20. 8 Theodore F. Rodenbough and William L. Haskin, The Army of the United States (New York: Argonaut Press Ltd., 1966), 280–287. 9 Edward L.N. Glass, The History of the Tenth Cavalry (Ft. Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1972), 12–38. 10 U.S. Army Register, 1880, 278–279. 11 Rodenbough and Haskin, Army of the United States, 695–696. 12 Rodenbough and Haskin, Army of the United States, 697–699. 13 U.S. Army Register, 1880, 280–283; William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866–1898 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), xii–xiii. 14 U.S. Army Register, 1880, 267–274; Charles L. Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 27. 15 Dobak and Phillips, Black Regulars, 267–273. 16 Shubert, Black Valor, xi. 17 Dobak and Phillips, Black Regulars, 265–266; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 23–26. 18 General Order No. 56, War Department, Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, August 1, 1866.

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19 Army and Navy Journal, February 19, 1887 (italics in the original); Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 25. 20 Francis B. Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the U.S. Army, Volumes 1 and 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1903), 850; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 26; Shellum, Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 34–47. 21 Ninth Regimental Return, November 1889–September 1890, NARA; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 113–114; Coffman, Old Army, 221. 22 Shellum, Black Cadet in a White Bastion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 42–47. 23 Coffman, Old Army, 228–229; Leckie, Buffalo Soldiers, 238; Darryl W. Jackson, Jeffrey H. Smith and Edward H. Sission, “Bending Toward Justice: The Posthumous Pardon of Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper,” Indiana Law Journal 74, no. 1251 (1999). The U.S. Army Board for the Corrections of Military Records concluded that the conviction and punishment were “unduly harsh and thus unjust” and issued Flipper an honorable discharge posthumously in 1976. 24 Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “John Hanks Alexander of Arkansas: Second Black Graduate of West Point,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XLI (summer 1982): 124–125. 25 Shellum, Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment, 9–47. 26 Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles, eds., Buffalo Soldiers in the West: A Black Soldier’s Anthology (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 68–70. The other three were Theophilus G. Stewart, commissioned in 1891, George W. Prioleau, commissioned in 1895, William T. Anderson, commissioned in 1897. 27 Nellie Plummer, Out of the Depths (New York: G.K. Hall, 1997), 251; Glasrud and Searles, Buffalo Soldiers in the West, 70–72. The U.S. Army Board for the Corrections of Military Records concluded that racial prejudice was involved and issued Plummer an honorable discharge posthumously in 2005. 28 Glasrud and Searles, Buffalo Soldiers in the West, 76–79. 29 Robert Marshall Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 399–400.

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3 U.S. OVERSEAS EXPANSION IN THE POST-CIVIL WAR ERA Stephen McCullough

After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States embarked on low-key expansion until the Spanish–American War in 1898. The main goal of the U.S. government was the acquisition of naval bases in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the spread of U.S. trade and commercial interests. The changes in naval propulsion, from sail to steam, meant that the United States Navy needed coaling stations to project power overseas. As American merchants and companies sought new overseas markets for manufactured goods and foodstuffs, they expected the U.S. flag to follow for protection.1 Along with the economic imperatives driving U.S. expansion, American racism and the Protestant missionary impulse also influenced U.S. policy. The Spanish– American war in 1898 was merely the culmination, not the beginning, of U.S. imperialism.2 Following the cessation of hostilities, the United States faced a lengthy Reconstruction of the former Confederate states with a new president. Republicans hoped Andrew Johnson would favor a harsh Reconstruction, only to be cruelly disappointed as the former senator from Tennessee sought to quickly bring the South back into the Union with no protection of AfricanAmerican rights.3 When Radical Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1866 election and frustrated his domestic policies, Johnson turned to foreign policy to garner popular support. He inherited Secretary of State William Seward, and by 1866 Seward was the dominant cabinet member of the Johnson administration.4 Seward embarked on a territorial expansion campaign that also sought to breathe new life into the Monroe Doctrine. The policy had remained dormant since being issued in 1823 as the United States did not have the military or economic power to enforce it.5 During the Civil War, the United States had been unable to prevent a French intervention in Mexico. At the end of the war, General Ulysses S. Grant dispatched 50,000 men to the Texas border under the command of General Phillip Sheridan to intimidate the French. Seward successfully diplomatically pressured French emperor Napoleon III to announce a French withdrawal.6 Seward pursued an expansion policy that sought to gain new territory for the United States as well as coaling stations in the Caribbean.7 He sought naval bases in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, only to be rebuffed by Haiti and foiled by a Dominican revolution.8 His attempt to buy the Virgin Islands from Denmark failed when a hurricane struck the islands and the Senate refused to ratify the annexation treaty.9 He negotiated a treaty with Columbia to give the United States the right to build a canal across the Panamanian isthmus, but the Columbian Senate rejected it. The United States failed to gain any new Caribbean territory during his tenure. 27

S. McCullough

In the Pacific, however, Seward enjoyed more success as the United States started its path to becoming the dominant Pacific power. In 1867, the Navy claimed Midway Island under an 1850 law encouraging the seizure of uninhabited islands with possible guano deposits.10 The island proved of little value until the 1930s when Pan American airlines used it as a fueling station for its Clipper service, and the Navy developed air bases on the island. The Japanese attempted an invasion in June 1942, only to be defeated in the pivotal naval battle of Midway. If the seizing of Midway attracted little attention, Seward’s purchase of Alaska was hotly debated within the country and the Senate in 1867. The United States had eyed annexing Canada since the American Revolution. The failure of U.S. invasions in both the Revolution and the War of 1812 had not cooled the lust of expansionists like Seward toward Canada. Acquiring Alaska from Russia would create additional pressure on Great Britain to give Canada to the United States. It would have the additional bonus of expelling Russia from North America, leaving Great Britain as the last European imperial power on the continent. Seward negotiated a treaty with Russia that sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million. Critics denounced the treaty as “Seward’s Folly” because Alaska seemingly had little value. The Radical Republicans’ fierce opposition to the Johnson administration seemingly doomed the treaty’s ratification until Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave an impassioned speech that turned around Republican opinion. For less than two cents an acre, the United States received one of the great bargains in history with the addition of a territory that ultimately proved to be rich in gold and oil.11 In 1868, General Ulysses S. Grant easily won the White House and entered office favoring U.S. expansion.12 His selection of Hamilton Fish as secretary of state, however, contradicted this because Fish remained steadfastly opposed to expansion throughout his eight years in office.13 In 1869, Grant’s private secretary, Orville Babcock, and the president of the Dominican Republic concocted a plan to annex that country to the United States. Both men and their cronies would financially benefit from expansion because they bought up prime real estate in the hope that prices would rise once the country was a U.S. territory. The Dominican annexation failed because of the opposition of Sumner in the Senate.14 Fish became the dominant member of the Grant cabinet, and controlled policy on the role of the United States in the Cuban rebellion that had started in 1868.15 Known as the Ten Years’ War, the conflict threatened to drag the United States into a war with Spain. The Cuban rebels used the United States as their base of operations and attempted to buy arms and munitions and enlist American volunteers. The Cuban-American community raised money for the rebellion and attempted to buy influence in Washington by bribing public officials, including Grant’s secretary of war, John Rawlins, and journalists.16 The longer the war dragged on, the greater the chance that the United States would be drawn in. Fish tried twice, in 1869 and then again in 1875, to offer U.S. mediation between the Cuban insurgents and the Spanish government, but both times Madrid refused to consider the offer.17 Fish sought to end the fighting to avert U.S. entry into the war, but his worst fears were almost realized in 1873 with the Virginius affair. The Cuban rebels bought a former Confederate blockade runner, hired an American captain and crew and used the ship to smuggle men and munitions to the island. In November 1873, the Spanish Navy captured the ship while it was flying the American flag and proceeded to execute 42 Americans and Cuban passengers and crew. Newspapers and politicians across the United States demanded either war or Spanish repartitions for the massacre and dishonor to the American flag. War was averted only by a Spanish apology and the discovery that the Virginius was not entitled to fly the American flag.18 The 1873 war scare, though, demonstrated that the United States Navy had become obsolete 28

U.S. Overseas Expansion Post-Civil War Era

and indeed, decrepit. When the fleet gathered off Key West, Florida, many of the ships’ engines broke down under the strain. The Nation mocked the U.S. Navy as “almost useless for military purposes.”19 The pitiful state of the Navy during the crisis helped inspire the naval reforms and renaissance in the 1880s.20 As Great Britain and other leading naval powers experienced a technological revolution, much of the U.S. Navy in the 1870s was either obsolete wooden sailing ships or monitors that could only sail in calm, offshore waters. When war erupted between Chile and her neighbors Peru and Bolivia, the U.S. Pacific squadron dispatched to protect American interests was hopelessly outclassed by the Chilean Navy. In order for the United States to assert itself within the hemisphere and globally, the Navy had to be modernized and enlarged. It also needed to be intellectually reinvigorated to develop new missions and goals. The man who came to dominate U.S. naval policy and strategy well past his death was Captain (later Rear Admiral) Alfred Thayer Mahan.21 With the creation of the Naval War College in Newport, RI to teach midlevel officers strategy, the U.S. entered a new era of strategic thinking.22 Appointed as a professor in 1885, Mahan’s book The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–1783 created modern strategy and tactics.23 Mahan called for the building of a large American fleet, to be dominated by capital ships, whose primary purpose was to seek out and destroy the enemy’s fleet. U.S. naval strategy since the American Revolution had been based on attacking the enemy’s merchant shipping. Mahan called for the concentration of power at sea and defeating the enemy in a decisive battle. His writings and philosophy not only inspired the creation of the modern U.S. Navy, but also deeply influenced Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and his quest for naval parity with Great Britain.24 Beginning in the 1880s, the U.S. Navy underwent a technological revolution.25 The introduction in 1883 of the so-called ABC cruisers (the Atlanta, Boston and Chicago) heralded a new era in U.S. naval construction. These all-steel ships, while small compared to their European counterparts, were the first modern U.S. warships, despite their retention of sails as backup to steam engines. In the Pacific, it would be the Navy that spread U.S. influence and imperialism. Because of the vast nature of the area, oftentimes naval officers created U.S. policy.26 In 1871, a joint effort by the U.S. minister to China, Frederick Low, and Rear Admiral John Rodgers attempted to open Korea to relations and trade with the United States. Though the effort failed, Washington’s interest in Korea remained.27 In 1880, Secretary of State James G. Blaine sent Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt on the USS Ticonderoga to open relations. Shufeldt had extensive service in China, and believed that the Navy’s role was opening up the region to U.S. commerce and influence.28 The mission ultimately failed due to the Korean government not wanting to provoke Japan, which had imperial ambitions for the country. Expanding American trade and interests in China became a dominant theme of U.S. foreign policy from the Civil War to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.29 China was seen as an untapped market but with the establishment of European concessions throughout the country, U.S. business interests needed the American government to keep it open to American goods. U.S. diplomats pursued an “Open Door” policy that would prevent outright annexation of Chinese territory by European countries and Japan and force all nations to treat imports equally in their sphere of influences in China.30 The United States sought to treat China as an equal, but racism often intervened. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 granted the United States most-favored status in China while allowing for Chinese emigration into the United States. While Chinese labor helped build the transcontinental railroad, it also sparked a racial backlash that led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. While Americans at home protested Chinese immigration, they encouraged the Christianization of the country by U.S. missionaries.31 29

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If the United States was interested in economic expansion in China, it desired to annex Samoa and Hawaii. In Samoa, the United States was caught up in a three-power struggle with Great Britain and Germany. In 1885 and 1887, two crises erupted that threatened to create a war in the South Pacific. A timely typhoon in 1889 sunk German and American warships and prevented the outbreak of hostilities. Passions ultimately cooled in part due to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s desire to avoid war. The three nations ultimately negotiated a division of the islands.32 Without a shot, the United States gained the strategic harbor of Pago Pago, foreshadowing later expansion into the Pacific. Hawaii was seen by many Americans as a natural target for expansion. A reciprocity treaty with the United States in 1875 left the island kingdom a U.S. economic satellite. In 1889, U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine negotiated a treaty with the Hawaiian minister to the United States (an American working for U.S. business interests in Hawaii) that would have turned the islands into an American protectorate. The treaty died when the Hawaiian king rejected it, but American interest in the kingdom was hardly at an end.33 Besides economic interests, the United States feared that either Great Britain or Japan would seize control of the islands.34 In January 1893, a coup by U.S. business interests, backed by marines and sailors from USS Boston, overthrew the Hawaiian queen, Liluokalani, and the U.S. consul declared the islands under U.S. protection. The new Grover Cleveland administration refused to consider U.S. annexation, but it was clear that Hawaii’s days as an independent nation were nearing an end. In 1898, the islands would become a U.S. territory. American interest in Hawaii was driven by strategic and economic interests.35 From 1865 to 1897, economic imperialism drove U.S. foreign policy as U.S. businesses desired to open up new markets to American goods. The Gilded Age was a period where business interests came to control American politics, ushering in a period of unprecedented corruption where seemingly every political office was for sale to the highest bidder.36 Business and government worked together to expand U.S. exports.37 Great Britain dominated trade with Latin America, and both Republican and Democratic administrations wanted to open those markets to American goods and crops.38 While the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed that the United States would not tolerate further European expansion in the Americas, U.S. leaders after the Civil War saw it as a justification to remove European influence in the area as well.39 Not until World War I, however, would the United States supplant Great Britain as the leading economic power in the region.40 American companies and investors actively pursued investment in Latin America. U.S. companies would by 1900 control the banana trade from Central America and turn countries like Guatemala and Nicaragua into corporate fiefdoms.41 The United States by 1897 was poised for economic expansion, not only throughout the Americas but into Asia as well. This interest in China motivated in part the decision to keep the Philippines after the Spanish–American War. The United States by 1897 was on the verge of dramatic territorial and economic expansion overseas. If the country was not yet a world power, it was on the verge of being so.

Notes 1 The best economic history of U.S. expansion in the nineteenth century is David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998). A more dated study from the New Left perspective is William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Random House, 1969).

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2 The best overall study of U.S. foreign policy during this period is Robert L. Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900 (New York: Crowell, 1975). 3 For a complete history of Reconstruction, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–77 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 4 For a complete history of the Johnson presidency, see Albert Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1979). 5 For a complete history of the Monroe Doctrine in the nineteenth century, see Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011). An older but still useful work is Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963). 6 See Alfred J. Hanna and Kathryn Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). Also “ ‘Weakness offers Temptation’: William H. Seward and the Reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine,” Diplomatic History 19 (Fall 1995): 583–599. For U.S.–French relations, see Henry Blumenthal, France and the United States: Their Diplomatic Relations, 1789–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970). And for U.S.– Mexican relations, see Thomas Schoonover, Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican–United States Relations, 1861–67 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). 7 The best treatment of Seward’s policies is Ernest N. Paolino, The Foundations of American Expansionism: William Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). See also Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) and John Taylor, William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, Inc., 1996). For a first-hand account of Seward’s tenure in the State Department, see his son’s (who served as undersecretary of state) memoirs: Frederick Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat,1830–1915 (New York: Putnam Publishers, 1916). 8 For U.S.–Haitian relations, see Rayford W. Logan, Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941). For U.S.–Dominican relations, see Charles Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798–1873: A Chapter in Caribbean Diplomacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938). 9 For a complete history of U.S.–Danish relations that ultimately led to the Virgin Islands being acquired by the United States in 1917, see Charles Tansill, The Purchase of the Danish West Indies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932). 10 The United States would go on to claim numerous islands in the Caribbean and Pacific under this law. See Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). 11 See Ronald J. Jensen, The Alaska Purchase and Russian–American Relations (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975) and Paul Holbo, Tarnished Expansion: The Alaska Scandal, the Press, and Congress, 1867–1877 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1983). For Sumner’s role in securing the ratification of the treaty, see David H. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Random House, 1970). 12 The best one-volume biography of Grant is William McFeely, Grant (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1981), but while strong on his presidency, it is less than satisfactory on his military career. McFeely paints a very unsympathetic portrait of Grant. Also strong on his political career and a more favorable assessment of the man is Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). A popular history that can safely be ignored because of its superficiality is Geoffrey Perret, Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier and President (New York: Random House, 1997). 13 The only biography of Fish is Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1936). There is a pressing need for a modern study of Grant and Fish’s foreign policy. 14 For a complete history of the failed Dominican annexation, see William Javier Nelson, Almost a Territory: America’s Attempt to Annex the Dominican Republic (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990). To place the annexation attempt in an international perspective, see Luis Martínez-Fernández, “Caudillos, Annexationism and the Rivalry between Empires in the Dominican Republic, 1844–1874,” Diplomatic History 17 (Fall 1993): 571–598. To understand the role of Haiti, see Rayford Logan, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). For the treaty’s defeat in the U.S. Senate, see Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man and W. Stull Hull, Treaties Defeated by the Senate: A Study of the Struggle between President and Senate over the Conduct of Foreign Affairs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933).

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15 The best modern study on U.S.–Cuban relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is Jose M. Hernandez, Cuba and the United States: Intervention and Militarism, 1868–1933 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2010). 16 Hamilton Fish diary, November 6, 1875. Library of Congress. For the role of the Cuban-American community during the war, see Gerald E. Poyo, With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989). 17 For the 1875 U.S. mediation offer, see Jay Sexton, “The United States, the Cuban Rebellion, and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875,” Diplomatic History 30 (Summer 2006): 335–365. There is no study of the 1869 offer. 18 The only modern study of the Virginius incident is Richard Bradford, The Virginius Affair (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980). 19 “How should we fight Spain,” The Nation, 4 December, 1873, 864. 20 An older but still useful study on the U.S. Navy during this era is Harold and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944). 21 The only full-length biography of Mahan is William D. Puleston, Mahan: The Life and Work of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939). A joint biography of Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hat and Elihu Root that is quite useful for placing Mahan’s influence on U.S. imperialism is Warren Zimmermann, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made their Country a World Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). For Mahan’s influence on the U.S. Navy, see Mark L. Schulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995). 22 For the Naval War College’s role in U.S. expansion, see Ronald H. Spector, The Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1977). 23 Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1890). 24 For the role of Mahan in the birth of the German Navy, see Robert Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of World War I (New York: Random House, 1991). 25 A good study of the new technological advancements the fleet enjoyed is Stephen K. Stein, From Torpedoes to Aviation: Washington Irving Chambers and Technological Innovation in the New Navy, 1876 to 1913 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). 26 The best overall study of the role of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in spreading U.S. influence prior to the 1890s is David F. Long, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers, 1798–1883 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988). 27 For the role the U.S. Navy played in East Asia, see Robert E. Johnson, Far China Station: The U.S. Navy in Asian Waters, 1800–1898 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1979). 28 A first-rate biography of Shufeldt is Frederick C. Drake, Empire of the Seas: A Biography of Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt USN (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984). 29 For the role of commerce in U.S.–China relations during the era, see Thomas McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967). 30 The best study on the role of U.S. diplomats in China is David L. Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 31 The best works on the activities of U.S. missionaries in China are Wayne Flint and Gerald W. Berkley, Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850–1950 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997) and Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). 32 Paul Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German–American Relations (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974). Older but still useful is George H. Ryden, The Foreign Policy of the United States in Relation to Samoa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1933). A popular history of the U.S.– German showdown in Samoa is Edward P. Hoyt, The Typhoon that Stopped a War (New York: D. McKay Co., 1968). 33 Blaine is one of the more fascinating characters in U.S. diplomatic history. For his influence, see Edward P. Crapol, James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire (Wilmington, DE: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000). 34 For the U.S.–Japanese rivalry over Hawaii, see William M. Morgan, Pacific Gibraltar: U.S.–Japanese Rivalry over the Annexation of Hawaii, 1885–1898 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011).

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35 The classic and essential New Left work that stresses the economic motivation of U.S. imperialism is Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963). See also LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 36 To fully understand the corruption of the Gilded Age, see Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 37 To understand how the two worked together on this one goal, see William H. Becker, The Dynamics of Business–Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 38 The best volume on U.S. trade with its American neighbors during the Gilded Age is David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998). For the Anglo-American economic competition in the Western Hemisphere, see Joseph Smith, Illusions of Conflict: Anglo-American Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1865–1896 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979). To understand how a region was tied to the world economy, see the excellent Bonham Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 39 To better understand the no-transfer clause of the Monroe Doctrine, see John A. Logan, No Transfer: An American Security Principle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961). 40 The best overall study on U.S.–Latin American relations is Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 41 A detailed history of the role of the United States in the banana trade is Lester Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880–1930 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995).

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PART II

The Spanish–American War and U.S. Overseas Expansion

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4 THE SPANISH–AMERICAN WAR AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF U.S. IMPERIALISM 1898–1933 Thomas Schoonover Cannon and rifle shots accented U.S. appearance on the stage of world imperialism in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The maturing of this martial-imperial thrust required about four decades. A conflux of processes of socio-economic reform movements and military activity shaped U.S. expansionism. Three developments in particular marked the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American political economy: a persistent movement west, numerous European immigrants, and the rapid growth of a technological-industrial economy. The United States adapted European liberalism, affirmed a U.S. mission, and gradually adopted materialism as the nation’s measure of success. U.S. society continued to claim that the nation’s bedrock was liberty and freedom, but it responded more effectively to material objectives and it lauded material accumulation. Idealism, generally secondary, served self-deception and image-shaping. Those accumulating wealth fine-tuned the political process around wealth and materialism.1 Technology aided socio-economic changes in various ways. Large-scale production and worldwide distribution facilitated the accumulation of immense wealth. By the late nineteenth century, steamships—fast carriers for bulk freight—had driven sailing vessels off the seas. Increased productive capacity and access to voluminous raw-material sources and extensive consumer markets worked well because the transportation network could handle large volumes speedily and reliably.2 Impatient accumulators of wealth needed deception or bribery to induce people to work after they had earned enough for food and shelter. Coerced labor-slavery, serfdom, peonage, and prison labor had existed for millennia, but it seldom fostered high productivity. Increasing productivity relied upon convincing workers that they benefited from this productivity through an equitable distribution of economic and political power. If challenged abroad persistently, the United States and the North Atlantic states used military technology— smokeless powder, repeating, breech-loading rifles, machine guns, and exploding anti-personnel artillery shells—to resolve the disputes.3 Nineteenth-century industrial development, especially improved communications, facilitated national and international expansion. From the mid-nineteenth century until the Great Depression, the world communicated by surface mail, telegraph, telephone, and radio. In the 1830s, a message and its response between London and India took about two years. In the 1860s, the telegraph reduced the time to about thirteen hours, but disruptions were common. 37

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In the 1890s a message and response between London and New York took less than ten minutes and, with Bombay, less than ninety minutes.4 In the world economy, more competitors accelerated growth. At the end of the nineteenth century, the industrialized and industrializing powers (roughly ten European states, the United States, and Japan) encouraged external expansion to meet the increasing demand for resources and to distribute subsequent higher profits, wages, and standards of living. Well-being and security rested on a rising growth rate. The U.S. government and entrepreneurs complemented cheap labor, business opportunities, abundant raw materials, and military force abroad with inexpensive food and manufactured products at home.5 Some of the shaping events of this era for U.S. foreign relations were a long, worldwide depression (1873–1897) and subsequent economic recessions (1902–1904, 1910–1911, 1913–1914, 1919–1924, and, of course, 1929–1940); in addition, a series of armed crises beginning in the 1890s (Sino-Japanese War, Nicaraguan revolt, Brazilian naval revolt, Boer War, War of 1898, Philippine insurgency, and Boxer uprising), U.S. involvement in Panama’s independence and the extraction of a canal concession, the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, a Russian uprising in 1906, and various Central American wars and revolutions, including the Mexican revolution of 1910. Finally, the latter half of the period saw the Chinese revolution of 1910–1923, two Balkan wars, U.S. interventions in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo, and two world wars. The war between 1898 and at least 1913 in the Philippines (the last large engagement was at Bud Bagsak in 1913), Cuba, and Puerto Rico was an early significant U.S. conflict for expansion. The designator, the Spanish–American War, is misleading—the War of 1898 is more accurate. Following the timeline is instructive: April 21, declaration of war; May 1, U.S. Pacific fleet destroyed Spanish fleet in Manila Bay; May 25, U.S. troops leave San Francisco for the Philippines; June 20, Guam taken; June 23, U.S. troops landed near Santiago de Cuba. During the War of 1898, about 70 percent of the fiscal expenditures and the human casualties (battlefield deaths: 385 in Cuba, 1,108 in the Philippines) occurred in the Pacific and East Asia. It was a Pacific basin war with a secondary field in the Caribbean.6 The War of 1898 integrated most of the continuous themes of U.S. history: westward expansion, discovery and exploration, maritime activity, economic depression, violence, racism, class conflict, idealism, missionary activity, and Manifest Destiny. Nineteenth-century U.S. merchants, missionaries, fur traders, whalers, and other groups had repeatedly claimed a vital role for the Pacific basin in the prosperity of U.S. society. In addition, the War of 1898 reflected U.S. society and pursued, according to Kristin Hoganson: “masculine characteristics. Military action against Native Americans, the Spanish, Filipinos, Chinese, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Dominicans, and Mexicans, over the course of several decades, confirmed late nineteenth century images of masculinity and natural competition.”7 Louis Pérez described a broader range of culture values in U.S.-Cuban perceptions.8 Diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber epitomized 1898 with a cryptic chapter title in The American Age: “Two Crises, One War.” LaFeber noted that, in early 1898, President William McKinley (1897–1901) closely associated the revolution threatening Cuba and the European imperialism endangering China, while the U.S. business community kept Asia in the forefront of the nation’s debate. LaFeber’s chapter title improves descriptively if altered to become “Three Crises [the depression of 1893, Cuba, and China], Three Wars [1898, Philippine Insurgency, and Boxers].”9 The U.S. government faced difficulties in both Cuba and the Philippines because it refused to recognize the local armies which had essentially defeated the Spanish troops before the U.S. military appeared. The Spanish troops had been confined to the large, fortified cities after dark. 38

The Spanish–American War

The Cuban insurgents reluctantly accepted the U.S. terms to end the war. The Philippine insurgents, inspired by Emiliano Aguinaldo, rejected a surrender that allowed the Spanish to participate in the surrender ceremony, but not the Filipinos. The Filipino resistance forces still continued a guerilla war.10 In addition to strategic objectives, U.S. leaders sought increased missionary activity in Asia. President McKinley’s claim that he knelt in prayer while deciding to fight Spain and to acquire the Philippines catered to these sentiments. So did sending 5,000 U.S. troops into China in 1900 to protect missionaries and businessmen. A Philippine historian described the altered perception of missionaries from the “imperialism of righteousness” to the “righteousness of imperialism.” The War of 1898 and its aftermath tie U.S. domestic, circum-Caribbean, and Pacific basin problems to the progressives’ search for order, opportunity, and moral reform.11 U.S. historians have frequently avoided confronting U.S. imperialism. They have used smoke and mirrors to present U.S. policy in the War of 1898 in an attractive manner. A short list of ineffective interpretive viewpoints is instructive. According to Samuel Flagg Bemis, the War of 1898 was an aberration, a phantom event inconsistent with U.S. historical development.12 Richard Hofstadter viewed it as a psychic crisis.13 Robert E. Osgood called it an artifact of historical processes and circumstances.14 Ernest R. May saw it as a mission, a humanitarian and democratic duty, or something thrust upon the U.S. government.15 Intervention abroad has marked U.S. foreign relations since the 1890s. Some U.S. historians have misrepresented the significance of 1898. Historian Richard Welch enthusiastically observed: Although the history of American expansion is as old as the nation, only with 1898 did we seek to establish extra-hemispheric colonies [ignoring the acquisition of Wake Island, Samoa, fifty guano islands, and earlier efforts to acquire Hawaii] and only with 1899 did we seek to impose by force of arms American sovereignty over millions of ethnic aliens [ignoring the Indian wars, the Texas War, and the Mexican War]. Scholars James Thomson, Peter Stanley, and John Perry declared the Philippines the only place outside the Western Hemisphere that the U.S. government ruled as an imperial possession [overlooking Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, Midway, Wake, and the guano islands].16 The nineteenth- and twentieth-century projects to internationalize laissez faire—such as British free trade, the Open Door, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and the Nine-Power Pact of 1922—represented rescue schemes for faltering laissez-faire systems.17 In the twentieth century, many Republican Party leaders wished to bolster U.S. laissez faire. They shifted from tariff protection to tariff reciprocity and the Open Door policy. This shift aimed to turn foreign businesses into sellers in the U.S. market so they could become buyers of U.S. manufactures.18 Metropole leaders (generally of a society that controlled the factors of production—land, labor, capital, and distribution) sought salvation through expanding market competition on a world scale. These leaders were convinced that an “open door” to the land, labor, foodstuffs, and raw materials in other countries was necessary to preserve domestic order, well-being, and security. But U.S. conduct often generated anti-foreignism from the people receiving the order, well-being, and security. At times a response to the anti-foreignism required anti-democratic and violent conduct that contradicted the national self-image of a democratic, liberty-seeking, Christian people.19 The scholars Bernard Semmel, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Thomas McCormick have described social imperialism as a policy that aims to resolve internal social problems through a resort to external programs in the periphery (generally societies that control at most one factor of 39

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production). By the late nineteenth century, however, the United States, a semi-peripheral society (a society that controls two or three factors of production), was maturing into a metropole state, in part by using social-imperialist policies to exploit the opportunities in Europe, the Central American–Caribbean region, and the Pacific basin. McCormick, for example, indicated that social imperialism allowed a metropole’s political economy “to export the social problem” and “to export the unemployment.”20 Social imperialism elevated metropole domestic matters to the realm of international affairs. Exporting U.S. “overproduction” (a misnomer for real under-consumption because millions of citizens lacked adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care) meant boosting domestic employment and production while increasing the unemployment and subsequent problems in areas that accepted the exports. The common argument that foreign trade creates domestic jobs functioned for advanced manufacturing economies, but not necessarily for peripheral societies. For example, Standard Oil sold kerosene in China, but tens of thousands of Chinese farm families that traditionally produced vegetable oils for lighting and cooking lost their livelihood. Thus, U.S. firms exported unemployment, the accompanying social misery, and potential social disorder to China. Some U.S. leaders recognized the quandary that exporting produced unemployment abroad, because social disorder abroad threatened metropole well-being, which rested upon access to periphery resources. A few warned, prophetically, that pursuing the Open Door policy would involve the United States in endless wars and revolutions around the world.21 By the early twentieth century, much of the world had become colonies or protectorates of metropole states or had fallen under the influence of multinational corporations (at one point, United Fruit owned or leased one half of Costa Rica’s territory). The metropole states and the multinational corporations commonly established alliances with compradors—local individuals in the periphery societies. These compradors used their language and reputation to facilitate the entrance of foreign influence. For example, along the north coast of Nicaragua and Honduras the compradors facilitated the use of the English language and U.S. coinage, currency, and judicial customs in official business. The compradors were rewarded for maximizing opportunities and minimizing undesired interference. However, if the periphery developed too effectively, it would retain more of the value produced from its land, labor, and capital. This reduced transfer of value would not serve the well-being of the metropole. Several developments shaped U.S. foreign relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: first, the quest for a westward route to the wealth of Asia. The U.S. government directed considerable attention to the Caribbean, but ultimately aimed at Asia. The U.S. route to the wealth of Asia required management of the Caribbean basin, isthmian transit, and parts of Oceania. The British, German, Dutch, French, and Japanese also recognized that the Caribbean and the isthmus were vital mid-points between the consumption desires of the North Atlantic region and the productive resources of Asia. The Pacific basin’s share of U.S. trade grew about threefold between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. U.S. possessions in the Pacific and the completion of the Panama Canal stimulated the Japanese, who competed for raw materials, markets, and an isthmian canal. After all, products and capital could flow west to east.22 U.S. expansion stimulated Asian powers to join the imperial-colonial search. A second development was the growth of Asian nationalism in face of the sharp rise in western activity in Asia. The conflux of a U.S. search for opportunity and the numerous territorial acquisitions and informal commercial ties made the U.S. government a major imperial and colonial participant around the world. Tension grew in Asia because the War of 1898 and the western activity after completing the Suez and Panama Canals formalized the U.S. assumption of a leadership role in Asia and the Pacific.23 40

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From its birth, the United States had participated widely in merchant, whaling, furgathering, and lumbering activity in the Pacific basin. A major U.S. naval expedition under Charles Wilkes from 1838 to 1842 reported that Pearl Harbor, Pago Pago (Samoa), and Manila were the best harbors in Oceania. By 1899, all three were under U.S. control. The U.S. officials, missionaries, and entrepreneurs enlisted religion, commercial, and security needs to acquire an Open Door to trade and investment. When the imperial powers of Europe and Japan threatened to divide the vast Chinese market among themselves, U.S. officials acted to preserve access to China.24 In the early twentieth century, the Japanese generally pursued collaboration; its principal tool was the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902. Early in World War I, a power vacuum in Asia led Japan to consider a Pan-Asian system, which some Japanese leaders referred to as “our Monroe Doctrine,” to obtain Asian leadership against western expansionists. Many American leaders disliked both alternatives, Anglo-Japanese pact and Pan-Asian system, and during the presidency of Warren Harding (1921–1923), Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes urged a “Pax Americana,” a U.S.-led world order. The Washington Conference of 1921–1922 produced three treaties to mark the new U.S. policy: the Five Power Pact on naval disarmament; the Four Power Pact to replace the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 and to curtail Japanese expansionism; and the Nine Power Pact to internationalize the Open Door in China.25 U.S. interest in Atlantic–Pacific trade required protection of the maritime routes to the isthmian canal. In 1901, the U.S. Congress passed the (Senator Orville) Platt Amendment—it asserted the right of the U.S. government to unilaterally intervene in Cuba and to maintain a naval station on the island. Then U.S. officials pressured Cuba to accept the same wording in its constitution and a treaty with the U.S. government. This pact angered Cubans until it was terminated in 1933, except the United States preserved its right to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay.26 The Platt Amendment disturbed most of Latin America. A Pan-American system grew slowly in a series of conferences: Washington, DC (1889–1890), Mexico City (1901), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1906), Buenos Aires, Argentina (1910), Santiago, Chile (1923), Havana, Cuba (1928), and Montevideo, Uruguay (1933). These conferences elicited little enthusiasm in Latin America. A principal stumbling block was the U.S. unwillingness to forego the right to intervene in Latin America. While the United States proposed mainly commercial programs, especially a customs union, the Latin American states were generally unsympathetic. The Latin American delegates struggled to include political, social, and cultural affairs at Pan-American meetings. Their counter-proposal included formalized respect for sovereignty, a non-intervention agreement, and U.S. acknowledgement of international juridic equality. The meetings exposed fundamental differences between the U.S. and Latin American visions of interactivity.27 Strangely, the War of 1898 gave a boost to an alternative to Pan-Americanism. The overwhelming defeat of Spain generated sympathy for that country among the Latin American states; Spain ceased being a threat to their independence. Shared cultural roots became more important. This decreased threat allowed Spain to push a Hispanic cultural policy—hispanismo— which the Latin American societies generally liked.28 Various corollaries to the Monroe Doctrine outlined the limitations which the U.S. government set to the sovereignty of other New World states. From 1901 to 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt articulated an active U.S. imperial role and revived Latin American suspicions. The Roosevelt Corollary (1906) asserted a U.S. supervisory authority over Latin American international finances, and the (Senator Henry Cabot) Lodge Corollary (1912) limited the territorial sovereignty of Latin American nations. It denied Latin American states the right to lease any of 41

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their national territories if the United States judged that such action would affect its security. Most Latin American states intended to use the Pan-American movement to reign in U.S. exuberance. The specific tools were the Calvo and Drago Doctrines. Carlos Calvo, a midnineteenth century Argentine jurist, asserted that jurisdiction in international investment disputes lies in the country where the investment is located. In 1902, Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs Luis María Drago asserted that no foreign power could use force against an American nation to collect a debt.29 Later, Roosevelt criticized the lack of self-interest in the U.S.-Latin American policy during the Woodrow Wilson administration (1913–1921). However, Wilson strove to compel “moral” governance in Mexico. Wilson objected to many strong Mexican leaders—Victoriano Huerta, Venustiano Carranza, and Pancho Villa. It looked like no Mexican was suited to govern. U.S. authority encouraged economic improvement in Mexico and the other Latin American states and, at the same time, bolstered U.S. wealth accumulation.30 U.S. economic circles expected priority in the transformation of Latin America. For a short time, World War I shifted the bulk of human and property destruction from colonial regions to the European and North Atlantic communities. This war had repercussions, however. Globally, Wilson’s commitment to moral, economic, and social justice strongly influenced his postwar rhetoric. He assumed that his vision was the best way, perhaps the only way, to alter Latin America. U.S. banking, financial, and commercial ties with Latin America became sizeable and intricate. U.S. ability to develop Latin America in the post-World War I era led to rapid growth: investment grew from $1.5 billion (1924) to $3.5 billion (1929) and trade from about $1.4 billion (1922) to $2.1 billion (1929). In the 1920s and 1930s, two significant developments marked U.S.–Latin American relations. First, U.S. leaders pondered Latin America’s lack of support for the U.S. government during World War I. Many Latin American leaders found U.S. prewar conduct disrespectful and interventionist. The State Department’s Good Neighbor policy of the early 1930s aimed to demonstrate U.S. respect and goodwill. In principle, it rejected intervention in the internal affairs of its Latin neighbors. Second, Americans also saw dangers in the Americas from the Axis alliance—Germany, Italy, and Japan.31 Overwhelming U.S. power and the strategic importance of the Panama Canal dominated the twentieth-century Caribbean. After the Panama Canal’s completion, the U.S. government built military bases at the Canal Zone and Cuba. Retaining Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands made them available for U.S. defense while denying them to other powers. Despite U.S. free-trade rhetoric, U.S. businessmen and government officials did not welcome competition in Latin America and most emphatically not in the Caribbean-Central American region; it was too close to the inter-oceanic canal route.32 After 1923, the U.S. government opted for a hands-off policy and tolerated a corrupt, brutal regime in Cuba as long as it only affected Cubans.33 The era from the 1890s to 1933 witnessed similarities in the U.S. domestic and foreign reform agendas. U.S. progressive reform sought to mold the U.S. political economy into a more open, just, and safer wealth producer. It sought to make those governing more democratically responsible and less corrupt. The efforts to export the Open Door and U.S-condoned political and social practices aimed to transfer a reduced form of U.S. domestic reform abroad. But President Herbert Hoover’s administration did not produce successful domestic socio-economic reform. And some dictators linked to the metropole powers—Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), Anastasio Somoza, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, Rafael Trujillo, Gerardo Machado, and Jorge Ubico—showed little interest in reform. The U.S. government seemed unable to export reform or democracy. 42

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Notes 1 Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–10; Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2011), 3–26, 163–227; Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–39. 2 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 165–179; Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 18–48. 3 David J. McCreery, The Sweat of their Brow: A History of Work in Latin America (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 108; Appleby, The Relentless Revolution, 228–264. 4 Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 50–72; Thomas Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003). 5 Lester D. Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Robert E. Hannigan, The New World Power: American Foreign Policy, 1898–1917 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1–50. On the world system, see Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, xvè–xviiiè siècle (3 vols.; Paris: Armand Colin, 1979). 6 Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War; Walther L. Bernecker, ed., 1898: su significado para Centroamérica y el Caribe (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana, 1998), esp. 17–35, 61–75, and 113–129. 7 Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 197–241, 403–417; Thomas McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 52, 177–195; Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War, 9–87; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 200–208; Robert W. Rydell, “The Culture of Imperial Abundance: World’s Fairs in the Making of American Culture,” in Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 191–216. 8 Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 9 Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 184–189; McCormick, China Market, 17–52, 177–195; Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War, 65–120. 10 Glenn A. May, Battle for Batanga: A Philippine Province at War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 11 William R. Hutchison, “Modernism and Missions: The Liberal Search for an Exportable Christianity, 1875–1935,” in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 110–124; Edmundo Eusebio Valera, Jr., “ ‘Imperialism of Righteousness’: The Influence of the American Protestant Social Gospel on Foreign Missions and Expansionism, 1890–1910” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1998), 293–388, 391. 12 Samuel Flagg Bemis, “The Cuban–Spanish–American War and the Great Aberration of 1898,” chapter 14 of A Short History of American Foreign Policy and Diplomacy (New York: Holt, 1959). 13 Richard Hofstadter, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines,” in Daniel Aron, ed., America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 173–203. 14 Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 15 Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961). 16 Richard E. Welch, Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine–American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 150; James C. Thomson, Jr., Peter W. Stanley, and John Curtis Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 106.

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17 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (rev. ed.; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988); Appleby, The Relentless Revolution, 163–199. 18 Thomas McCormick, America’s Half-Century: The United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 19–20. 19 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Aufstieg des amerikanischen Imperialismus (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), 7–73, 190–216, 242–276; William A. Williams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World (New York: Morrow, 1976); Robert Freeman Smith, The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 1916–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). See also Thorsten Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (repr.; Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994). 20 Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, 1885–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und Imperialismus (Cologne, Germany: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1969), 112–155, 434–445; McCormick, China Market, 52, 177–195. 21 Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 1976); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Thomas Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 1860–1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 6–7. 22 Richard W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960); Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.–Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 3–31; Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (updated ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 23 Rebecca E. Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1096–1098, 1102, 1114–1117; Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Akira Iriye, “Japan’s Drive to Great-Power Status,” in Marius B Jansen, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century (6 vols.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988–1992), 733–765. 24 Charles Vevier, “American Continentalism: An Idea of Expansionism, 1845–1910,” American Historical Review 65 (1960): 323–335; Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion (repr. 1955; Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1983), 83–122, 217–228; Seward W. Livermore, “American Naval-Base Policy in the Far East, 1850–1914,” Pacific Historical Review 13, no. 2 (1944): 113–135; Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War, 12–17. 25 LaFeber, The Clash, 57–174; Akira Iriye, “Japan as a Competitor, 1895–1917,” in Akira Iriye, ed., Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 55–77; Frank Gibney, The Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 108–115. 26 Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001); Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). 27 Richard V. Salisbury, “Hispanismo versus Pan Americanism: Spanish Efforts to Counter U.S. Influence in Latin America before 1930,” in David Sheinin, ed., Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in InterAmerican Affairs (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 67–77; Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 46–61, 77–95. 28 Frederick Pike, Hispanismo, 1898–1936: Spanish Conservatives and Liberals and their Relations with Spanish America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971). 29 John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 30 Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2010), 233–237, 358–360; Mark T. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions: Woodrow Wilson in the Western Hemisphere, 1913–1921 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 9–32, 62–91, 124–147. 31 Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 32 Thomas Schoonover, “Metropole Rivalry in Central America, 1820s to 1929,” in Ralph Lee Woodward, ed., Central America: Historical Perspective on the Contemporary Crisis (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 21–46; William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York: Random House, 1969). 33 Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Caribbean to the Present (New York: Plume, 1994).

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5 THE PHILIPPINE–AMERICAN WAR AND THE BIRTH OF U.S. COLONIALISM IN ASIA Frank Schumacher

The American military conquest of the Philippine islands began in Manila in 1898 as an outgrowth of the war against Spain and ended after the battle of Bud Bagsak on the island of Jolo in 1913. While U.S. military operations in the archipelago lasted for almost fifteen years and encompassed four related, successive, and partially overlapping conflicts, the term Philippine– American War is commonly used to describe the largest and most influential of those conflicts, the struggle between the United States and the Philippine Republic from February of 1899 to July of 1902.1 The Philippine–American War was the result of Spanish decline, U.S. imperial ambition, and the Filipino quest for independence. Those conflicting trajectories intersected during the Spanish–American War when the U.S. Navy defeated the Spanish Pacific Fleet at Manila Bay in support of military operations in Cuba. Simultaneously, Emilio Aguinaldo, the prominent leader of the Filipino independence movement, returned from exile to the islands, declared the Philippine Republic in June of 1898, organized an army of 80,000 men, and proceeded to liberate the archipelago from Spanish occupation. Aguinaldo and his provisional government had indication to believe that the United States would support their country’s independence once Spain was defeated. Their hopes were quickly disappointed as neither Spain nor the United States recognized the Philippine Republic and excluded the provisional government from the peace settlement. While Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in the Treaty of Paris of December 1898, the Philippine Republic appointed Aguinaldo its first president and convened a constitutional congress in the provisional capital of Malolos. The independence forces subsequently surrounded Manila, which was now occupied by a growing U.S. military contingent, and the tense stand-off between both sides escalated in February of 1899 with the battle of Manila. The ensuing three-and-a-half-year long war encompassed an initial phase of conventional and a subsequent escalatory phase of unconventional warfare. During the initial phase until November 1899, both sides sought a decision in large-scale field battles. This strategic choice proved disastrous for the Filipino troops, who endured staggering losses in battle after battle. Many of their officers, mostly landowners chosen to command for political rather than military reasons, raised their equally inexperienced and poorly equipped troops on their quasi-feudal estates and sent them into battle on an outdated reading of European military traditions and experiences. Aguinaldo and his commanders insisted on this type of open warfare because it 45

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fulfilled their expectations of nation-state behavior and was intended to demonstrate to the world the legitimacy of the Philippine Republic’s claim to statehood. The American forces of the 8th U.S. Army Corps, on the other hand, were not only wellequipped and technologically advanced but consisted of well-trained and experienced soldiers and officers. Most greeted the war as a logical extension of the Spanish–American War, with much patriotic fervor, and many regarded service in the distant islands as an escape from the rigidity and social control of a society still heavily shaped by small-town cultural values, perceptions, and behavioral standards, or, as Allen Mummery noted in a letter, “to get away from the farm and see some of the world.”2 Soldiers also expressed the hope that their patriotic contribution abroad might address lingering issues at home, such as the perceived pressures of modernization on manhood and masculinity or the still pronounced sectional divisions within the nation.3 The officers who had substantial military experience from the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the recent campaigns in Cuba were not only eager to fight out of a sense of patriotic duty but also interpreted the war as a long-overdue opportunity for professional advancement. As a consequence of the asymmetry between both sides, battles during the conventional phase of the war established a devastating pattern for the Filipino side. Independence army units concentrated their efforts on the creation of defensive strongholds where they would await the American advance, which was often initiated by devastating artillery barrages from land and sometimes from sea. This barrage, which destroyed much of the outdated Filipino artillery and killed many of the troops manning the defensive positions, would be followed by the American attack and the subsequent pursuit of the retreating survivors. After a series of defeats, Aguinaldo reorganized his remaining troops for guerilla warfare by the end of 1899. This approach neutralized some of the advantages enjoyed by U.S. forces, whose troops had increased to 70,000 soldiers. It forced the American side into a campaign in which the opponent avoided direct confrontations, blended in with the local population, utilized his superior knowledge of the terrain, and carried out frequent ambushes designed to undermine American morale at the front and at home. While the Filipino side knew that military victory was unlikely, it expected that the psychological strain of continuous losses of American lives would influence the presidential elections in November of 1900 in favor of the Democratic challenger, William Jennings Bryan, an opponent of colonial empire. Aguinaldo hoped that Bryan’s victory would result in independence and a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the archipelago. While expedient from the Filipino point of view, this strategy also produced severe repercussions as it contributed to a steady escalation and brutalization of warfare. For many Americans, the Filipino guerilla tactics not only confirmed and intensified their racial apprehensions about the colonized “other” but seemed to provide legitimacy to a style of military response in which hitherto occasional transgressions against prisoners and civilians were now encouraged, sanctioned, and systematically applied on a much larger scale. Racial apprehensions had been an integral part of American attitudes from the beginning of the colonization project in the islands.4 The initial surprise at the Filipino’s sophisticated cultural accomplishments soon gave way to a heightened sense of alienation and insecurity, which was further magnified by the unfamiliarity of most soldiers with local languages and cultural traditions. After the stand-off phase gave way to war by early 1899, simplistic racist overtones gained more prominence in the letters and diaries of U.S. soldiers.5 The supremacist rhetoric was not only the result of colonial power differentials but also an indication of how deeply racism was interwoven into the fabric of turn-of-the-century American society. In a cultural context in which racial discrimination was a violent practice in the American South, in which immigration from Asia was contained by exclusion laws, and in 46

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which parts of the American public voiced concerns about the dilution of “national qualities” faced with increased immigration from southern and eastern Europe, in this context a racially charged discourse about the newly colonized subject peoples of the American empire appeared not only appropriate but natural. This tendency was particularly widespread among the supporters of the military conquest of the archipelago. They located the Filipinos as an “inferior race” at the bottom of the imaginary ladder of civilization and projected simultaneous images of savagery and childlike innocence on the peoples of the Philippines. They imagined the new American colonial subjects as a populace which lacked emotional self-restraint, a sound work ethic, and political responsibility with fitness for government. Locals were also described as a treacherous, animal-like, irrational, and merciless opponent. The war in the Philippines was thus discursively legitimized as a campaign against a brutal and treacherous foe within the context of a civilizing and nation-building mission.6 Ironically, racism not only victimized the opponent but also proved divisive among the U.S. forces in the Philippines. Many of the 6,000 African-American soldiers in the islands perceived the war as an opportunity to improve the lot of African-Americans back home through their loyal and patriotic service. But their war experience was often complicated by racism and doubts about the contradictory nature of their mission. While held in high esteem by their commanding officers, many African-Americans stationed in the Philippines experienced frequent racial discrimination by their white comrades, as “. . . the white man’s prejudice followed the Negro to the Philippines, ten thousand miles from where it originated,” according to The Army and Navy Journal.7 In addition, African-American troops frequently witnessed the often virulent racism displayed by white troops toward the local population and connected their own discrimination to that of the Filipinos. Some concluded that they were little more than pawns in a colonial regime of apartheid and racial discrimination. In a letter to the Cleveland Gazette, Sergeant Patrick Mason explained in September of 1900: I have no fighting to do since I have been here and don’t care to do any. I feel sorry for these people and all that have come under the control of the US. I don’t believe they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the morning is nigger and the last thing at night is nigger.... I must not say much as I am a soldier. The natives are a patient, burden-bearing people.8 The independence forces tried to capitalize on such potentially volatile sympathy and frequently reported on the murderous practice of lynching in the American South, thus inferring a commonality of interests between Filipinos and African-Americans as colonized peoples in their respective struggles for liberation. But the number of deserters in the African-American regiments remained negligible as the majority of soldiers separated their personal sympathies for the colonized from their overall official task as guardians of the American empire in the Philippines. They excluded the political context of their service and shared the conclusions which Commissary Sergeant Middleton W. Saddler reached when he wrote: “Whether it is right to reduce these people to submission is not a question for the soldier to decide. Our oaths of allegiance know neither race, color, nor nation.”9 Despite such loyalty, suspicions about the reliability of the African-American regiments lingered on in high-level colonial civilian and military circles and the regiments were withdrawn before the end of their tours and excluded from colonial service until 1907. Similar suspicions of disloyalty also surrounded the formation of native support troops.10 While used by most colonial armies, Americans initially feared that indigenous support troops 47

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might turn on their colonial masters. Republican critics worried, in addition, that the establishment of native regiments might be interpreted as consent to the opposition’s demand for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the archipelago and the Filipinization of the war. But as hope for a quick victory faded, native troops became an important logistical asset and compensated for the large percentage of American troops incapacitated by the environmental and medical challenges of warfare in the tropics. They also offered an economic alternative to costly deployment and frequent troop rotations between the United States and the islands. Finally, they also served as a public relations initiative to symbolize the civilizational reform potential of the archipelago’s population and the perceived transformative success of U.S. social engineering in the Philippines. Because of their intimate knowledge of local conditions, indigenous support troops played an important role during the second phase of the Philippine–American War, characterized mostly by unconventional warfare. After the Filipino hope for a presidential change in the White House had proven elusive with the re-election of William McKinley, the U.S. drive to victory over the independence forces accelerated. The islands, now under the military command of General Arthur MacArthur, who had succeeded the hapless Major General Elwell S. Otis in the spring of 1900, were placed under martial law by December. The U.S. forces now relied on a dual approach of accommodation and punishment. The creation of a civilian colonial administration was accelerated for the northern parts of the archipelago and local elites co-opted for the U.S. colonial project. In addition, large-scale social engineering programs which encompassed infrastructure improvements such as new roads, canals, telegraph lines, the set-up of a public health care and hygiene system, and the construction of more than 1,000 public schools improved not only the conditions of U.S. forces in the Philippines but were intended to further erode public support for the independence cause.11 At the same time, the army increased its troop deployments and expanded its garrison system from fifty-three to more than 600 between November 1899 and December 1901. Many garrisons were small outposts designed to project military force in local communities and provide intelligence about Filipino troop movements. The army also escalated its retaliatory measures against the independence forces and its suspected sympathizers. Such measures were first tested on the island of Marinduque between spring of 1900 and April of 1901, and then applied in other parts of the Philippines, most infamously in Samar and Batangas.12 This new strategic approach relied primarily on escalation and collective punishment to sever the links between the independence forces and its support base. It drew on the experiences of other colonial powers with unconventional warfare, ironically and most notably that of the Spanish Empire. In an early version of the strategic hamlet program used during the Vietnam War, civilians were forced to relocate to so-called concentration zones, while anybody found outside during the strict military curfew would be killed. Crops, food supplies, animals, and shelters were destroyed as entire provinces were devastated with a scorched-earth strategy. In addition, Filipino prisoners chosen by lot were executed in retribution for the killing of U.S. soldiers, while suspected sympathizers of the independence forces were often tortured and their villages collectively punished.13 Such practice not only continued but intensified even after Aguinaldo’s spectacular arrest in April of 1901. Massacres on both sides and a steady brutalization of warfare particularly characterized the campaigns in Samar and Batangas. After the 9th Regiment had sustained heavy losses at Balangiga, Brigadier General Jacob Smith responded in the fall of 1901 with a punitive campaign to turn the interior of the island into “a howling wilderness.” In his instructions to Major Littleton Waller of the Marine Corps, he demanded: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and 48

The Philippine–American War

burn. The more you kill and burn, the better you will please me.”14 Asked for clarification, he responded that everyone over the age of ten who was capable of carrying a gun was to be killed. At the same time, General Franklin Bell devastated the province of Batangas in similar fashion. An estimated 60,000 civilians died as starvation and epidemics raged through the cramped concentration zones.15 Despite rigid military censorship, news about such campaigns and the mistreatment of Filipino civilians and prisoners spread quickly on the home front. The Philadelphia Ledger, for example, reprinted a letter from an American officer who reported in November of 1901: “Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog.”16 As newspapers reprinted letters from soldiers, a stunned public learned of atrocities, the shooting of prisoners, the widespread and systematic use of torture, and other abuses of the civilian population. The letters from soldiers were now replete with descriptions in which the killing of Filipinos was often discursively equated to animal hunts. The killing of the enemy was described as “. . . more fun than a turkey shoot.”17 Another soldier wrote to his family: our fighting blood was up and we wanted to kill “niggers.” This shooting human beings is a “hot game” and beats rabbit hunting to pieces. We charged them and such a slaughter you never saw. We killed them like rabbits. ... Everyone was crazy.... No more prisoners.18 By early 1902, the steadily mounting public criticism of the war’s conduct now prompted a congressional investigation into army operations. Such reports of misconduct re-invigorated the empire critics, a diverse group of social reformers, labor leaders, educators, businessmen, writers, and politicians who had formed an influential yet ultimately ineffective alliance with the Anti-Imperialist League. They argued that the colonial project poisoned the democratic foundations of the nation, deviated from the intentions from the founding fathers, and pushed the country to the brink of ruin. They interpreted the excessive colonial violence as an indication of the degenerative, corrupting, and destructive impact of imperial power on the republic’s civic culture.19 The Roosevelt administration, however, was able to contain the contentious debate of 1902 and dispersed allegations of systematic transgressions and violations of internationally accepted standards of warfare. The government admitted that wrongdoing had occurred in individual cases but rejected any notion of a systematic breakdown of discipline and military order. On Independence Day, 1902, the president officially declared American victory in the Philippines and announced the transfer of political power for the northern islands to a civilian colonial government. The war had been costly and caused substantial suffering and destruction in the Philippine islands. Of the roughly 130,000 U.S. soldiers who saw service in the archipelago until the summer of 1902, 4,200 were killed and more than 3,500 wounded. The Filipino side lost approximately 20,000 soldiers, or roughly one-quarter of the Independence Army. Because of the war’s specific inclusion of non-combatants as targets of combat operations, civilian losses were very high. Conservative estimates assess the number of Filipino casualties as 250,000; some studies suggest that losses may have been as high as 750,000, or 10 percent of the pre-war population.20 The revelations about the brutality of warfare in the colonies had exhausted the American public and the Philippine–American War quickly faded from collective memories. Its cultural impact was marginal and mostly limited to a few novels, children’s stories, silent movies, and 49

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songs. War memorials exclusively devoted to the Philippine campaigns were rare and resembled a shameful addendum to the more popular Spanish–American War memorials. The continued military censorship, government propaganda, the geographic distance of the islands, social pressures of patriotic conformity, and a general enthusiasm for America’s ascendancy to world power status all contributed to an at-best benign retrospective of this long and bloody conflict.21 While colonial amnesia dominated the politics of memory, war raged on in the Philippines during this second stage of conquest for at least another decade. The U.S. Army fought in various parts of the islands, in particular Luzon, Samar, Leyte, and Mindanao, against the dispersed remnants of the independence forces under self-declared president Macario Sakay, the religious movement of the Pulahanes, and the Muslim population in the southern Philippines.22 While the colonial government established its rule in the so-called pacified areas, America’s military strategy continued its dual approach, which oscillated between social engineering, the co-optation of local political elites, the criminalization of the enemy, and the punishment of suspected sympathizers of the opposition against U.S. rule. While Sakay’s forces surrendered in 1905 and the Pulahanes gave up in 1907 after intense fighting, the struggle for control of the southern Philippines continued. Initially, Washington had granted the local population, referred to as “Moros” by Spanish and later American colonizers, relative independence in the Bates-Treaty of 1899. After the American victory in the north, however, Washington retracted from the status quo, declared the Bates-Treaty void, placed the southern Philippines under military rule, and began its military conquest.23 With special reference to the strategic and tactical insights from the Indian Wars, U.S. forces, supported by large numbers of colonial support troops, waged a relentless pacification strategy in which civilians were often declared legitimate targets of military operation.24 The widespread complacency on the home front was occasionally, if inconsequentially, punctured by the news of massacres from remote islands, but public outcries quickly died down as empire became a widely accepted way of life.25 The battle of Bud Bagsak in 1913 ended the last large-scale military resistance by the “Moros,” whose leadership ceded control to the United States in the Carpenter Treaty of 1915. Over the years, interest in the Philippines and the war waned and the colony only re-entered public consciousness as a battlefield in World War II. The harsh and brutal realities of Japanese occupation helped to mitigate many negative memories of the American colonial regime held by Filipinos. The liberation of the Philippines by U.S. troops, as well as the country’s independence in 1946, opened a period of close bi-lateral relations, characterized by the security dependence of the islands on the U.S., the stationing of large American troop contingents on the islands, and a high degree of Filipino cultural identification with the icons of American pop culture. The Philippine war experience resurfaced again during the height of the Vietnam War in support of, or opposition to, America’s engagement in Southeast Asia. A similar relegation of the Philippine–American War to the flexible toolkit of historical analogies has permeated the discussions about U.S. foreign and security policies since the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 and America’s subsequent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. While some of the advocates of empire interpreted the war as “. . . one of the most successful counterinsurgencies waged by a Western army in modern times,” critics warned of the use of any premature, complacent, or overly optimistic lesson-learning and focused their attention instead on the dark side of the “savage wars of peace.”26 More than a century after the American victory in the archipelago, the history of the Philippine–American War remains a highly charged and contested terrain. 50

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Notes 1 David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine–American War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press, 2000); Glenn A. May, Battle for Batangas. A Philippine Province at War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); John M. Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags. The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). 2 May, Battle for Batangas, 141. 3 Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 4 Paul A. Kramer, “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine–American War as Race War,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (April 2006): 169–210. 5 Ibid. 6 Servando D. Halili Jr., Iconography of the New Empire. Race and Gender Images and the American Colonization of the Philippines (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2006). 7 Michael C. Robinson and Frank N. Schubert, “David Fagen: An Afro-American Rebel in the Philippines, 1899–1901,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (1975): 71. 8 Rene G. Ontal, “Fagen and Other Ghosts: African-Americans and the Philippine–American War,” in Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War. The Philippine–American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 124. 9 Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro-Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 249. 10 Frank Schumacher, “Wars for Empire: The United States and the Conquest of the Philippine Islands, 1899–1913,” in Georg Schild, ed., The American Experience of War (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2010), 160–161. 11 Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1860–1940 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1998), 119–135; Michael Adas, Dominance by Design. Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 129–182; Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims and Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, 128–155. 12 Andrew J. Birtle, “The U.S. Army’s Pacification of Marinduque, Philippine Islands, April 1900–April 1901,” Journal of Military History 61 (April 1997): 252–282. 13 Frank Schumacher, “ ‘Marked Severities’: The Debate over Torture during America’s Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1902,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 51, no. 4 (2006): 475–498. 14 Glenn Anthony May, “Was the Philippine–American War a ‘Total War?’ ” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Foerster, eds., Anticipating Total War. The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 445. 15 Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas. A Philippine Province at War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 16 Peter Maguire, Law and War. An American Story (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 60. 17 Stuart Creighton Miller, “The American Soldier and the Conquest of the Philippines,” in Peter W. Stanley, ed., Reappraising an Empire. New Perspectives on Philippine–American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 13–34. 18 Ibid. 19 Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism. The United States and the Philippine–American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 20 Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire. America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 58. 21 Schumacher, “Wars for Empire,” 173–174. 22 Brian McAllister Linn, “The Pulahan Campaign: A Study in US Pacification,” War in History 6, no. 1 (1999): 45–71. 23 James R. Arnold, The Moro War: How America Battled a Muslim Insurgency in the Philippine Jungle, 1902–1913 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011); Patricio Abinales, “The U.S. Army as an Occupying

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Force in Muslim Mindanao, 1899–1913,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 410–420; Charles Byler, “Pacifying the Moros: American Military Government in the Southern Philippines, 1899–1913,” Military Review (May/June 2005): 41–45; Andrew Bacevich, “Disagreeable Work: Pacifying the Moros, 1903–1906,” Military Review (June 1982): 49–61. 24 Peter G. Gowing, “Moros and Indians: Commonalities of Purpose, Policy and Practice in American Government of Two Hostile Subject Peoples,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 8 (1980): 125–149. 25 Michael C. Hawkins, “Managing a Massacre: Savagery, Civility and Gender in Moro Province in the Wake of Bud Dajo,” Philippine Studies 59, no. 1 (2011): 83–105. 26 Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace. Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 128.

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6 THE PLATT AMENDMENT AND U.S. OCCUPATION POLICIES IN LATIN AMERICA Cyrus Veeser

The years around the turn of the twentieth century saw a fundamental change in the global role of the United States. In just over seven years, from 1898 through 1905, the United States acquired authority of one kind or another over Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. The abrupt appropriation of dependencies stretching from East Asia to the Caribbean did not come about in “a fit of absence of mind,” as had been said of the British Empire. Instead, it reflected the steady, systematic construction of the United States as a Great Power. As different as they were in personality and politics, Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson each did his part to make the United States a significant new player on the world stage, backed by a fractious but ultimately supportive Congress and public. The extension of American power over these far-flung, tropical lands was part of a global trend in which industrialized nations took control of less-developed territories, from the division of sub-Saharan Africa among the powers of Europe to Japan’s takeover of Taiwan and Korea. Many factors contributed to this trend, including the rapid industrialization of a handful of nations, vastly improved means of transportation on land and at sea, expanding global markets, and the stark differential in military power between the developed and less-developed world. It is no coincidence that Theodore Roosevelt, symbol in his own time and today of the new American imperialism, also championed making the U.S. Navy a war machine second only to Britain’s hegemonic fleet. By the time he left the presidency in March 1909, Roosevelt could boast that “the navy had become in every respect as fit a fighting instrument as any other navy in the world.”1 Global reach and military power went hand in hand. Acquiring territory was nothing new for the United States, of course. After independence, the young nation had steadily absorbed lands to the West until the United States spread “from sea to shining sea.” In time all those new territories became states, however, whereas only one of the acquisitions after 1898, Hawaii, would do so. “For the first time,” in the words of George Kennan, “territories were acquired which were not expected to gain statehood at all . . . but rather to remain indefinitely in a status of colonial subordination.”2 The issue of “colonial subordination” did not sit well with many Americans. Was it justifiable, or even possible, for a democracy to rule over alien people without giving them a voice in government? A small but vocal minority of anti-imperialists answered with a resounding No. “Imperialism is not a question of crowns and scepters,” a coalition that included Mark Twain and William Dean Howells 53

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declared on July 4, 1901. “Where . . . a President, a Congress or a nation claims the absolute right to rule a people . . . that is imperialism.”3 American imperialism differed, of course, from the classic European variety. Not all the territories dominated by the United States became outright colonies. Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines did, but Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic had a more ambiguous status, falling somewhere between full independence and outright U.S. control. Washington experimented with different ways to dominate each of these unstable but strategically important states. People at the time, and historians since, coined a number of terms for these varieties of indirect rule, including dollar diplomacy, informal empire, a protectorate system, or more recently a “nation-based empire.”4 In each case, the United States preserved the smaller nation’s independence, yet limited its control over foreign affairs and finances—and reserved itself the right to intervene whenever necessary. After 1898, Cuba became the first laboratory for indirect American rule. When Congress authorized U.S. intervention in April 1898, it also passed the Teller Amendment, renouncing the “intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof.” That sounded like an ironclad promise of independence for Cuba, but events proved otherwise. Once in possession of the island, American leaders began to express doubt about the capacity of Cubans to rule themselves. In a statement typical of the time, one U.S. congressman said that Cubans “are children, and I am afraid they are pretty bad children, just as little qualified to govern themselves as so many youngsters.”5 As the American view of Cubans deteriorated, the phrase “except for pacification” in the Teller Amendment took on great significance. Pacification no longer simply meant a halt to the fighting, but rather stability as defined by the United States. Uncertainty over how to ensure “stability” in Cuba caused the U.S. occupation of the island to drag on until May 1902. Washington could not annex Cuba outright, yet refused to grant the island full self-rule. “The consent of the governed must be an intelligent consent,” Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut warned. “Where a majority of voters neither understand nor respect the true principles of government, there may be a republic in name, but in fact it will only be a dictatorship.”6 To guarantee that only the “best” Cubans would rule the new nation, the U.S. occupiers limited voting rights along the lines of Jim Crow laws in the American South. Literacy and property requirements disfranchised two-thirds of adult males, leaving only about 5 percent of Cuba’s total population able to actually vote.7 In the end, the Teller Amendment’s promise of independence was negated by the infamous Platt Amendment, which Washington required Cuba to accept as a condition for ending the U.S. military occupation. The amendment, eventually made part of Cuba’s constitution, spelled out what the “independent” nation could and could not do. It limited Cuba’s sovereignty by restricting the country’s right to borrow money abroad or enter into treaties with other nations. The amendment required Cuba to grant the United States “the right to intervene” to maintain “a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” In practice this meant that any disorder that damaged foreign property—such as American-owned sugar plantations—could trigger U.S. military intervention. In addition, the Platt Amendment gave the United States the right to lease a naval station in order to “maintain the independence of Cuba.” In short order, that clause took concrete form in the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. Roosevelt and other American leaders did not see the limits on Cuban independence as imperialistic. Instead, they framed American control over Cuba as protective and paternalistic, a policy they believed was appropriate for the whole Caribbean region. The attitude of Roosevelt and his peers had strong racial and gender undertones. “There are nationalities and tribes wholly unfit for self-government,” Roosevelt stated privately. “There are others singularly fitted for it; 54

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there are many between the two extremes.”8 Historian Emily Rosenberg has shown that American policy makers at the time—all white men—viewed tropical peoples as suffering from a “female” inability to make rational decisions about government or the economy. “Just as manhood implied restraint, self-mastery, and supervision over dependents, uncivilized peoples were marked by feminine attributes, especially lack of planning and weak self-discipline.”9 The Platt Amendment guaranteed that the “manly” United States would supervise Cuba’s finances as well as its government. Roosevelt vehemently denied that he was an imperialist, yet the president clearly saw Cuba, along with Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as part of a new “system” that was at once political and economic. Cuba joined “our international political system . . . when it accepted the Platt amendment.”10 Having bound Cuba to the United States politically, Roosevelt urged Congress to draw Cuba closer economically through a reciprocal trade treaty. “It is for our interests to control the Cuban market,” he noted, “because we are bound to place the Cubans on a peculiar standing economically when they consent . . . to assume a peculiar status internationally.”11 The reciprocity treaty of 1902 gave Cuban sugar and tobacco privileged access to the U.S. market, but in return reduced tariffs from 20 to 40 percent on a long list of American goods entering Cuba, including “the immense majority of manufactured or processed consumer goods, including many that Cuba produced or could produce,” as Cuban historian Oscar Zanetti notes. Soon the United States took over 90 percent of Cuba’s exports and supplied most of the island’s imports, undermining local industry and locking in place an economy based on the export of raw materials. Because Americans invested large amounts of capital in Cuba after 1898, they became direct beneficiaries of the treaty between the two nations.12 The “peculiar standing” of Cuba toward the United States was not so different from European imperialism after all. As a group of Cubans put it in 1902, “in the sight of the entire world, before all nations, the Island of Cuba is an American colony.”13 In the years that followed, Roosevelt extended the concept of indirect rule from Cuba to apply, in principle at least, to all of Latin America. The trigger for the enlarged policy was a failed attempt by an American investment firm headquartered on Wall Street to control the economy of the Dominican Republic. At first strongly supported by the State Department, by 1904 the company’s actions had become an embarrassment to Washington and a source of conflict with several European powers whose citizens had loaned money to the Caribbean republic. Reports reached Roosevelt that at least one European foreign office was prepared to send gunboats to Santo Domingo for their “moral effect” on the delinquent debtor. Previously, the United States had allowed Europeans to use force to collect debts in the Western Hemisphere. Now, however, Roosevelt concluded that even this “normal” violence threatened the Monroe Doctrine. Rather than permit Europeans to demand repayment at gunpoint, Roosevelt decided to take on the task for them. He sent a naval officer to negotiate an agreement with Carlos Morales, the precariously seated president of the Dominican Republic. The agreement allowed American officials to take over the country’s custom houses—as in the rest of Latin America, the source of nearly all government revenue. The customs receivership, as it was called, turned over 45 percent of the receipts to the Dominicans and paid the rest to foreign creditors, including the Americans. The Dominican receivership could have been an ad hoc arrangement, but the president chose to expound a broad new policy, soon known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Poor, weak, but independent nations in the Western Hemisphere often failed to live up to the standards of “civilization,” Roosevelt said, in particular the payment of their foreign debts. Such cases of “wrongdoing” or “impotence” would “ultimately require intervention by 55

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some civilized nation.” If the Monroe Doctrine, as Roosevelt now interpreted it, precluded European intervention, that meant the United States would be “forced . . . to the exercise of an international police power.”14 Newspapers worldwide reprinted Roosevelt’s declaration as a major new American foreign policy. Underlying the corollary was Roosevelt’s belief that the chronic rebellions that plagued many Latin American democracies were nothing more than fights over the money in government treasuries. If those turbulent nations turned their finances over to “neutral” American receivers, the essential cause of disorder would end, ushering in an era of peace, stability, and growth. To help the Dominican Republic along the road to fiscal salvation, Roosevelt sent an economist from Johns Hopkins University, Jacob Hollander, to the island to investigate and scale down the Dominican debt. Hollander also helped negotiate a loan of $20 million from New York banks, allowing the refunding of the Dominican debt at better rates of interest and not incidentally substituting American for European capital. How did Roosevelt’s new policy look from the receiving end? The correspondence of Carlos Morales shows a president eager to convince his country’s political elite to embrace American control of their nation’s finances. First, Morales emphasized that the “economic situation is desperate.” The customs receivership was the only way “to attend to all the demands of its public services,” he explained, by transferring to Washington the responsibility for paying the nation’s inflated debt. Morales also saw American power as a guarantor of his mandate. “I have no fear of political disturbances,” he declared after agreeing to the receivership. “President Roosevelt is disposed to help us to suffocate any revolutionary movement.” Finally, Morales repeated Roosevelt’s discourse about progress and civilization. With the receivership “we have saved the republic from anarchy,” he affirmed. “We have arrived at the gates of progress . . . We will live civilized lives.” At last Dominicans have “the capacity to be a nation.”15 Good reasons, perhaps, but not enough to keep Morales from being overthrown a year later. The Dominican customs receivership, which lasted from 1905 until 1940, was a variant on the Cuban model of indirect U.S. control. As Roosevelt declared in his 1905 annual message, the receivership “will give the people of Santo Domingo the same chance to move onward and upward which we have already given to the people of Cuba.”16 Financial rather than political, the arrangement seemed well defined and sharply delimited. Once American officials took control of the Dominican government’s main source of revenue, however, mission creep was inevitable. The small U.S. gunboats that collected money at the country’s various ports came to serve as an auxiliary navy, transporting troops and weapons to help put down rebellions. American officials persuaded the Dominican government to revise the country’s tariff system and pass a new law governing foreign investment.17 “The Dominican Government has acted wisely,” the director of the receivership noted in 1911, “in encouraging the investment of foreign capital, absolutely necessary for the development of the country.” As in Cuba, oversight by the U.S. government encouraged American investment.18 What Roosevelt had sold to the American people and Congress as a limited use of “police power” was in fact a larger strategy to stabilize the Dominican state and rationalize the economy, an early version of what today is called nation building. Ensuring stability became even more important to Washington after 1903, with the creation of the new nation of Panama, bisected by the American-controlled Canal Zone. Frustrated when Colombia stalled negotiations over what was then its northernmost province, Roosevelt sent a naval vessel to support Panama’s secession from the mother country in November 1903. Soon thereafter, Panama signed a treaty ceding the Canal Zone to the United States. The new country’s constitution borrowed from the Platt Amendment to grant the United States the right to intervene at its discretion, a power which American presidents did not hesitate to use.19 Work on the canal began the following year and ended in 1914, just as war broke out in Europe. 56

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Washington now had a new reason to be skittish about the stability of Caribbean and Central American nations. The Panama Canal would be a major thoroughfare for commerce, but it also had military significance, allowing Washington to move warships rapidly from the Atlantic to Pacific oceans. American planners fretted most of all that Germany might ignore the Monroe Doctrine and seek coaling stations for its own powerful navy. In the words of naval historian George W. Baer, “the worst that could happen was for a European power to establish a naval base in the Caribbean.” Revolution or bankruptcy in the nations near the canal could provide an opening for Germany to get a toehold in the region, and the German government was eager to do just that.20 In this context, the success of indirect rule over Cuba and the Dominican Republic mattered more than ever, yet as early as 1906 the policy began to fail. Electoral fraud by Cuba’s ruling party led to a broadly based popular uprising against President Tomás Estrada Palma. Roosevelt sent William Howard Taft to negotiate a settlement among the armed and feuding parties, but even the threat of U.S. intervention failed to bring about compromise. “After all we did for them,” the powerful Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge fumed, “. . . to find them fighting and brawling at the end of four years furnishes a miserable picture of folly and incompetency.”21 In 1906, a furious Roosevelt ordered U.S. troops back to Cuba. The second occupation, which lasted three long years, suggested that indirect rule through the Platt Amendment was not enough to accomplish the American goal of stability. More disappointment was in store for American policymakers. Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, tried to apply the Dominican model of American financial control, underwritten by loans from U.S. banks, to other wayward states in the greater Caribbean. The policy, by then known as Dollar Diplomacy, promised to rescue the Central American nation of Honduras from financial and political turmoil. Presented with a customs receivership treaty, Honduran President Miguel Dávila hesitated to sign, fearful of the reaction of his countrymen. Sure enough, soon after Dávila accepted the U.S. plan in 1911, irate Hondurans drove him from office. A similar tale unfolded in neighboring Nicaragua. After President Adolfo Díaz agreed to a U.S. receivership for his country, Washington had to land over 2,000 marines to keep the friendly president in power. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Nicaraguan treaty, but the marines stayed on for many years. Roosevelt had justified receiverships as a way to bring stability to Latin America, but in these cases the effect was precisely the opposite. From 1896 through 1912, Republicans held the White House, and aggressive American policies in the hemisphere were identified with the GOP. Democrats in Congress had denounced Dollar Diplomacy as the unholy offspring of excessive presidential power and Wall Street greed. When Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the presidency in 1912 and chose William Jennings Bryan to be his secretary of state, many Americans expected a sharp change in U.S. relations with Latin America. Wilson had condemned the foreign policy of Roosevelt, while Bryan was a leading spokesman for anti-imperialism during his long political career. Yet Wilson, in office from 1913 to 1921, ordered full-scale military occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic and sent U.S. troops into Mexico in an attempt to direct the course of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1911. How to explain the aggressive policies of Wilson, the “anti-imperialist”? As a progressive, Wilson wanted Latin Americans to enjoy good government and elect decent rulers. Despite rhetorical differences with the pugnacious Roosevelt, he largely accepted the need for American intervention if good government broke down in the hemisphere. Wilson also agreed with the underlying premise of Roosevelt’s receivership model—that revolutions in Latin America were battles over money and nothing more. Faced during his first term with unrest in Haiti, Wilson snapped: “The ‘revolutions’ of Haiti have no political object and no popular aims: they are for plunder purely.”22 57

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From the moment he took office, Wilson confronted slow-burning crises in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola. Wilson sent commissions to both nations in an effort to negotiate American control of customs in the Haitian case and increased powers of supervision for the receivership already in place in Santo Domingo. In Haitian President Vibrun Guillaume Sam, Wilson seemed to have found a leader pliable enough to accept a U.S. receivership, but the arrangement could not be finalized “because of his fears that the populace would rise against him if he signed the convention.”23 In July 1915, after Sam ordered the execution of 167 political prisoners, a furious mob murdered the Haitian president. Wilson seized the moment to send a first contingent of marines into Port-au-Prince. Many more would follow. Wilson encouraged his new secretary of state, Robert Lansing, to make sure that Haitians chose a leader who would agree to a receivership and to American wishes more generally. When a new president, Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, emerged in August 1915, Wilson welcomed him as “a man chosen with our approval and therefore in a sense our man.”24 The marine landing that Wilson ordered grew into full-scale American control of the nation that would last until 1934. In the neighboring Dominican Republic, it had become painfully clear by 1916 that the customs receivership alone did not give the United States enough leverage to impose stability on the country. “Notwithstanding the country’s being ‘under the American wing,’ ” a former director of the receivership explained, “the politicians continue to play upon the people . . . and presto, another revolution is on. . . . The only solution is American control.”25 Full control did come in June 1916, when Wilson ordered the marines into the Dominican Republic, the start of an occupation that lasted until 1924. With Haiti and the Dominican Republic now under direct military rule, Washington attempted to fundamentally remake both societies. On the assumption that poverty underlay political instability, both occupations focused on improving infrastructure in order to accelerate economic growth. In Haiti, the Americans directed the building of over 1,000 miles of roads and more than 200 bridges, constructed lighthouses and wharves, improved irrigation, and expanded the telephone and telegraph network, all in the hope of enticing American investment. Little, however, materialized. The occupation also built schools and hospitals and focused much energy on creating a professional police force, the Garde d’Haiti.26 The Dominican occupation likewise emphasized material improvements. Bruce Calder details the many public works launched during the occupation, including roads and bridges, wharves, schools, and hospitals. Both occupations improved public health through general sanitation, free inoculations, and improved medical care.27 Yet the simple fact of foreign occupation largely undercut these material gains. Americans brought racial attitudes that saw people of color as inferior, period, fanning hatred of the occupation among both elites and ordinary people. The policy of disarming civilians put the marines in direct conflict with the public, and in both countries land tenure laws were changed to make it easier for foreign companies to invest in plantations. Even the accomplishments looked better on paper than in reality. The occupations built schools but trained few teachers and paid them a pittance. In Haiti, the roads that Washington boasted of had been built with forced labor. Press censorship meant grievances went unaired. Guerrilla movements took up arms against the occupiers in both countries. As in later guerrilla wars, rooting out fighters who lived among the people led to atrocities and turned the public against the Americans. At the Versailles conference in 1919, critics embarrassed President Wilson by pointing out that the Caribbean occupations contradicted the principle of self-determination for all people, which Wilson himself had set forth in the Fourteen Points.28 By the 1920s, direct rule through military occupation had proven no more successful than indirect rule under the receivership model. Haitians declared a “passive war” against the 58

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occupation, drawing on the lessons of Gandhi in India. “You may take our land, . . . destroy our liberty and reduce us to peonage as farm laborers, but it shall profit you nothing. We shall defy you.”29 Beginning in 1921, the U.S. Senate heard testimony of atrocities by marines in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The exposés stoked consternation at home and antiAmericanism across the hemisphere. “ ‘You ask how American marines can be so cruel?’ ” isolationist Senator William Borah boomed to a mass meeting of anti-imperialists at New York’s Carnegie Hall. “ ‘That is the story of imperialism the world over.’ ”30 In 1924, the marines left the Dominican Republic. A final unintended legacy was that, by disarming the civilian population, centralizing power in a new police force, and improving roads and telephone systems, the occupation facilitated the rise of a dictator who achieved nearly absolute power, in contrast to earlier, less-organized dictatorships. Rafael Trujillo, one of the first graduates of the new U.S.-officered military academy in the Dominican Republic, seized power in 1930 and ruled with legendary brutality and megalomania until his assassination in 1961. The hard lessons of the occupations led J. Reuben Clark, a State Department official, to repostulate the Monroe Doctrine as a policy to keep European powers out of the Western Hemisphere and not as a justification for intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American states, as the Roosevelt Corollary had prescribed. The Clark Memorandum, prepared in 1928, provided an intellectual justification for the Good Neighbor Policy embraced by Franklin Roosevelt, who ended the Haitian occupation in 1934, soon after becoming president.31 As in the Dominican Republic, infrastructure improvements and the creation of the Garde d’Haiti helped stop the revolving door of revolution but only by allowing the advent of unassailable dictators, “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc, who ruled from 1957 until 1986. The U.S. receiverships and occupations of the years from 1898 to 1934 have long been seen as critical events in American diplomatic and military history. Earlier historians tended to accept official explanations for the interventions, emphasizing that the vast asymmetries of wealth and power between the United States and the countries of the greater Caribbean made some form of American domination inevitable. Beginning in the late 1950s, “revisionist” historians led by William Appleman Williams argued that the United States had in fact purposefully created an empire for the same reason European powers had done so—perceived economic gain. A successor of Williams, Walter LaFeber, finds the disorder that triggered American intervention in the greater Caribbean resulted from wrenching economic changes promoted by the rapid industrialization of the United States—in other words, Americans created the disorder that they then tried to suppress.32 In the past two decades, “postrevisionist” works have tended to use different sources and emphasize other processes, often looking beyond state-to-state relations to explore the impact of gender, culture, and nonstate actors.33 Where earlier works tended to see Caribbean people as passive victims of American policy, newer works have restored their agency.34 Current events have also focused attention on the earlier period of intervention. In many ways the “savage wars of peace” that developed in the Caribbean foreshadowed modern U.S. foreign policy dilemmas more accurately than did American involvement in the two world wars.35 Highly controversial at the time, the occupations raised issues such as the limits of executive power in the absence of a congressional declaration of war; the capacity of military units to create stability, encourage democracy, and promote economic growth; and the unforeseen consequences of “humanitarian” interventions. In Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, American policymakers and troops on the ground have faced issues similar to those first encountered in the greater Caribbean 100 years ago. 59

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Notes 1 Roosevelt, An Autobiography, vol. 20 in Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 261. 2 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 15. 3 “Anti-Imperialists’ July 4 Manifesto,” New York Times, July 4, 1901, 3. 4 For the latter term, see Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (Dec. 2011): 1369–1373. 5 “The Cuba of the Future,” New York Times, June 14, 1901, 1. 6 “The Conditions in Cuba,” New York Times, April 14, 1901, 5. 7 U.S. machinations in the period are brilliantly analyzed by Louis Perez, Jr., in Cuba Under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), 29–55. 8 Theodore Roosevelt to Charles William Eliot, April 4, 1904, in Louis Auchincloss, ed., Theodore Roosevelt: Letters and Speeches (New York: Library of America, 2004), 328. 9 Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 33. 10 Roosevelt speech at Detroit, Michigan, September 22, 1902, in Alfred Henry Lewis, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901–1905, Volume 1, (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906), 56. 11 “The President Speaks for Cuban Reciprocity,” New York Times, September 23, 1902, 3. 12 Oscar Zanetti Lecuona, Comercio y Poder: Relaciones Cubano-Hispano-Norteamericanas en Torno a 1898 (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1998), 279–294. 13 “Cuban Delegation’s Appeal,” New York Times, March 25, 1902, 9. 14 Presidential Addresses and State Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, Part Three (New York: Krause Reprint, 1970), 175–177. 15 Carlos Morales to: Jesús Céspedes, January 16, 1905, vol. 13; Augusto Franco Bidó, January 25, 1905, vol. 13; General Epifanis Rodríguez, March 31, 1905, vol. 16; José Bordas, January 24, 1905, vol. 13; F. Leonte Vásquez, February 1, 1905, vol. 14; José D. Pérez Roman, February 24, 1905, vol. 15; Emilio C. Joubert, March 27, 1905, vol. 13; all in Presidencia de la República, Copiadores de Carlos Morales Languasco, Archivo General de la Nación, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 16 Theodore Roosevelt, “Fifth Annual Message,” White House, December 5, 1905, in Lewis, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. II, 1182–1183. 17 On the revised tariff, see Third Annual Report, Dominican Customs Receivership, August 1, 1909–July 31, 1910, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department (Washington, DC, 1901), 9–14. A later report noted that during two attempted revolutions “the cutters were of inestimable value to the government as transport boats.” Seventh Annual Report, Dominican Customs Receivership, August 1, 1913–July 31, 1914, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department (Washington, DC, 1914), 16. Melvin Knight’s classic account, The Americans in Santo Domingo (New York: Vanguard, 1928), discusses the investment law on 47–48. 18 Fourth Annual Report, Dominican Customs Receivership, August 1, 1910–July 31, 1911, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department (Washington, DC, 1911), 22–23. 19 See, for example, Brian Loveman, No Higher Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 183–186 and chronology of interventions, 200–205. 20 George Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 25, 37. 21 Henry Cabot Lodge to Theodore Roosevelt, September 29, 1906, in Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, Vol. II (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 237. 22 Woodrow Wilson to Edith Bolling Galt, August 15, 1915, in Arthur Link, ed., Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 34 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 209. 23 “May Mean Complications,” New York Times, July 29, 1915, 1. 24 Woodrow Wilson to Edith Bolling Galt, August 19, 1915, in Link, ed. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 34, 256. 25 “Sees Us at Fault in Santo Domingo,” New York Times, June 10, 1916, 1. 26 See Hans Schmidt, The United States and the Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 174–188. 27 See Bruce Calder, The Impact of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), especially chapters 2 and 3 on political economy. 28 “Council Has Long Debate,” New York Times, January 31, 1919, 1. 29 Quoted in “A ‘Passive War’ in Haiti,” New York Times, May 22, 1922, 11.

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30 Quoted in “Borah Sees Haiti Prey of Our Greed,” New York Times, May 2, 1922, 2. 31 J. Reuben Clark, Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1930). 32 See Walter LaFeber, Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Vol. II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 183–209. 33 See Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World; and G. Joseph, C. Legrand, and R. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 34 See, for example, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992) and Cyrus Veeser, A World Safe for Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 35 See Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

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PART III

The First World War and its Aftermath

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7 THE UNITED STATES IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES: 1914–1919 Justus D. Doenecke1 Few debates have created as much controversy as those concerning American participation in the First World War and the peace that resulted from the conflict. It is, therefore, little wonder that bibliographies must be continually updated.2 When the First World War started in August 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed U.S. neutrality and asked Americans to be “neutral in fact as well as in deed.” During American neutrality, the British interfered with a thriving American war trade. They added to the list of contraband goods that might be seized on their way to the enemy and ignored the rules of blockade, seizing American ships on the high seas and taking them to British ports. They commandeered vessels bound for some neutral nations, arguing that their cargoes were being resold to Germany. Wilson continually protested against this “indefensible and intolerable conduct” but ended up acquiescing in the Allied blockade. Reasons included American cultural ties to Britain, the prosperity engendered by U.S. commerce with Britain, and Britain’s willingness to pay for all seized goods. To stop this trade, on February 4, 1915, Germany proclaimed that waters surrounding the British Isles were a war zone and that merchant ships entering this zone were legitimate submarine targets. Though international law stipulated that passengers and crew of merchant ships had to be placed in a position of safety, submarines were too small to honor such requirements. The sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania off the Irish coast on May 7, 1915, led to the deaths of 124 Americans and created widespread outrage and a series of protest notes. The loss of another British liner, the Arabic, on August 19 caused Wilson to threaten a break in diplomatic relations. Fearing war, Germany agreed to make reparation and stop sinking unarmed and unresisting passenger ships, but on March 24, 1916, it sank an unarmed French ship, the Sussex, when it was crossing the English Channel. Only an American ultimatum forced Germany to promise that it would not sink any ships, passenger liners, or merchant vessels, without warning, though it added that its pledge was contingent on Britain’s accepting the “rules of international law.” After being re-elected in November 1916, Wilson called for a “peace without victory,” telling Congress on January 22, 1917 that he also favored limitation of armaments, freedom of the seas, security of weak nations, and government by consent of the governed. Within two weeks, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare, thereby permitting attacks on neutral ships, leading the U.S. to break relations with the German Empire. Additionally, it had become public knowledge, through the release of a cable from Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann, 65

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that Germany sought to entice Mexico as an ally by monetary and territorial rewards. Hence, on April 2, Wilson asked Congress to recognize that a state of war existed with Germany, a measure that passed the Senate 86 to 2 and the House 373 to 50. During the 1930s, the wisdom of American entry into the conflict was debated. Such writers as Charles Seymour, a member of the American peace commission at Paris in 1919, defended Wilson. In American Diplomacy during the World War and American Neutrality, 1914–1917, Seymour maintained that the U.S. entered the war solely because the American people were appalled by submarine warfare. Newton D. Baker, Wilson’s secretary of war, wrote Why We Went to War, in which he argued that the president had no choice: “No government which conceded the right of a foreign state to kill its citizens in response to some exigency of its own . . . would be intrinsically respectable or able to hold the confidence of its people.”3 Yet during this decade, Wilson’s critics, aptly called “revisionists,” were more influential. In his Road to War, 1914–1917, editorial writer Walter Millis found the U.S. stumbling into the conflict.4 Charles A. Beard’s The Devil Theory of War blamed an export-conscious American public for making intervention inevitable.5 Charles Callan Tansill’s America Goes to War portrayed a peace-loving Wilson, whose administration, nevertheless, was far too pro-Entente.6 The “realist” school of diplomatic history, flourishing during the early Cold War, failed to offer a more positive appraisal of Wilson. Diplomat George F. Kennan’s often-cited American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 challenged the Wilsonian premise that national honor lay at stake in 1917, though he conceded that the U.S. could legitimately have entered the war to save Britain from defeat.7 More recently, Lloyd E. Ambrosius’s Wilsonian Statecraft asserted that Wilson lacked a coherent policy toward European conflicts.8 Already, however, more sympathetic portrayals of Wilson and of his decision for direct intervention were emerging. Ernest R. May’s classic The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 maintained that, had Wilson retreated in 1917, “he would, in effect, prove America incapable of exercising influence compatible with her population, resources, and ideals.”9 Daniel M. Smith, in The Great Departure, emphasized that the president perceived no immediate threat to the U.S. but legitimately feared a German victory and the destruction of the world’s balance of power.10 In Power and Principle, Frederick S. Calhoun posited that Wilson was fully aware of strategic and political limitations.11 During the 1960s, America’s preeminent Wilson scholar, Arthur S. Link, published his three volumes of the president’s life that covered 1914–1917. In these works, as well as in his Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era and The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, Link claimed that in April 1917 Wilson believed that the conflict was in its final stages. Hence, full-scale participation would enable America to help terminate the conflict quickly, assume a place at the peace conference, and advance the cause of an international league. Even more important, such a great power as the U.S. could not tolerate any outright attack on American sovereignty without yielding its honor or destroying the possibility of constructive work.12 His Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace included the claim that an inert U.S. would confront “a militaristic and imperialistic Germany—triumphant, strident, and in effective control of Europe from the English Channel to the Urals.”13 Subsequent interpretations offered varied perspectives. British jurist Patrick Devlin argued in Too Proud to Fight that Wilson’s new international order necessitated Germany’s defeat.14 In his The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War, Ross Gregory favorably compared Wilson’s acquiescing in the British blockade to the foolish opposition of William Jennings Bryan, for the pacifist-minded secretary of state could have inadvertently ensured that Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and William II dominated Europe.15 John Milton Cooper, Jr.’s Woodrow Wilson noted the lack of popular support for entering the war in April 1917; neither Congress 66

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nor the public effectively pressured the president. At that time, Cooper implied, Wilson could have kept out of the conflict.16 In his Nothing Less Than War, Justus D. Doenecke criticized the president on a number of matters, including choosing poor advisors, invoking obsolete maritime rules, and sending the wily Colonel Edward M. House on diplomatic missions. Yet Doenecke asserted that ultimately German submarine policy forced Wilson’s hand.17 Some historians still attacked the chief executive. In The End of Neutrality, John W. Coogan accused Wilson of abandoning international law created before 1914 and encouraging British violation of American neutral rights.18 Ross Kennedy’s The Will to Believe claimed that Wilson engaged in a blundering diplomacy that did little to advance his nation’s security.19 Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan’s The Lusitania Disaster indicted the president for claiming immunity on belligerent ships for his countrymen. Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing opposed Hague arbitration, possibly fearing that the international court might rule that a U-boat could legally sink ships carrying munitions, running a blockade, and possessing orders to ram.20 Most histories of American participation in the First World War stress combat engagements, often in vivid prose, although several deal with wider issues of leadership and strategy. Edward M. Coffman’s The War to End All Wars and John S.D. Eisenhower’s Yanks found the Belleau Wood engagement fatally flawed, certainly not worth the cost paid by the Marines.21 In The Last Days of Innocence, Meirion and Susie Harries indicted the Cantigny operation for needless loss of life.22 Russell F. Weigley’s The American Way of War and David M. Kennedy’s Over Here: The First World War and American Society perceived sheer folly in the Meuse–Argonne offensive. Kennedy called it “a military atrocity of the first order,” although he maintained that American efforts in 1918 possibly shortened the war as much as a year.23 However, Robert H. Zieger, in America’s Great War, argued that the “man-killing straight-ahead assaults on entrenched positions” provided “the key to ending the bloody, stalemated conflict.”24 General John J. Pershing, commander of the American expeditionary forces, is subject to increasing criticism. Unlike biographer Frank E. Vandiver, who usually limited himself to sheer narrative, Donald Smythe mused in Pershing that had the Germans not retreated in the MeuseArgonne offensive, the general might have been sacked for ordering futile attacks.25 In Warmaking and American Democracy, Michael D. Pearlman asked why Pershing used green troops in open warfare.26 David F. Trask’s The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918 was even more critical. He described Pershing as “a flawed commander,” for stressing the supremacy of the rifle over artillery and machine guns, withholding essential American forces to achieve his dream of an independent army, and ignoring Allied warnings that his troops were unprepared.27 Conversely, in his Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, Robert H. Ferrell praised the general for balking at Allied demands, writing that he was “not about to make the U.S. Army a recruiting agency for the Anglo-French” or “allow them to turn his army into cannon fodder.”28 In describing Wilson’s decision to deploy U.S. troops to Russia in 1918 following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, a host of writers emphasized his desire to promote liberalism, counter the Japanese presence, aid the Czech Legion, and most important of all, prevent German troops from being shifted to the Western Front. Major works espousing these views include Betty Miller Unterberger’s America’s Siberian Expedition, 1718–1920 and her The United States, Revolutionary Russia, and the Rise of Czechoslovakia; George F. Kennan’s The Decision to Intervene and his Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin; John M. Thompson’s Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace; Robert James Maddox, The Unknown War with Russia; and Frederick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle.29 William Appleman Williams’s American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947 discerned anti-Communism at the core of the president’s move. In his America’s Secret War against Bolshevism, David S. Foglesong posited American policy as both anti-German and anti-Bolshevik.30 67

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Arno J. Mayer’s Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 interpreted the Fourteen Points in terms of “Wilson versus Lenin.”31 In his Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking, Mayer traced in detail the entire variety of Allied responses to Soviet power, implying that containment of Russia was a central core of the conference’s efforts.32 N. Gordon Levin’s Woodrow Wilson and World Politics portrayed Wilson deftly maneuvering between outdated imperialism and revolutionary socialism in order to foster a world favorable to liberal international capitalism.33 After the defeat of the Central Powers in November 1918, the peace conference met in Paris, holding sessions from January 18 through June 28. Though twenty-eight nations took part, major decisions were made by the Big Four—President Wilson, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy. The 80,000-word document imposed a number of terms on the newly created Weimar Republic: (1) surrender of all colonies, which would become “mandates” given in trusteeship to Great Britain, the Dominions, and Japan; (2) restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France; (3) certain areas ceded to Denmark, Belgium, and Poland, the last receiving a “corridor” between Germany and East Prussia; (4) incorporation of Saarbrücken into the French customs union for fifteen years, after which a plebiscite would determine its fate; (5) abolishing all submarines and limiting the army to 100,000 men; (6) fifteen years demilitarization of the Rhineland; (7) ceding of all economic rights in Shantung peninsula to Japan, who promised to return that province to China; (8) a bill of damages of twenty billion gold marks in “goods, gold, ships and other specific forms of payment” within two years; (9) acceptance of whatever total damages a Reparations Committee would later present; (10) acknowledgment that Germany bore sole responsibility for the war, popularly known as the “war guilt clause.” To assuage French fears of a future invasion, Wilson agreed to a treaty binding the United States and Britain to defend France against an unprovoked German attack. The Senate soon pigeonholed those agreements. The accompanying Treaty of St. Germain, signed by Austria on September 10, 1919, recognized the breakup of the Hapsburg Empire. South Tryol, the Trentino, Istria, and Trieste were among the territories ceded to Italy. In addition to experiencing limitations on its army and the obligation to pay reparations, Austria was forbidden to unite with Germany. The victors levied similar terms on Bulgaria (the Treaty of Neuilly, November 1919), Hungary (Treaty of Trianon, June 4, 1920), and Turkey (August 20, 1920). The Paris conference established a League of Nations as an integral part of the treaty. Consisting of twenty-six articles, the League Covenant provisioned for armament reduction, the arbitration of disputes, and punishment, in the form of “sanctions,” against nations resorting to war in violation of its stipulations. Crucial agencies included the Assembly, composed of delegates from all member states, and a small executive Council of nine members, five of whom would always be representatives of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. According to Article X, which Wilson labeled “the heart of the Covenant,” member states undertook to “respect and preserve as against all external aggression the territorial integrity of and existing political independence of all the members of the League.” The League Council would advise on “the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.” The treaty, signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919 and ratified by Germany on July 7, engendered tremendous controversy, and came under almost immediate attack. In 1920, John Maynard Keynes, representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference, published The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He argued that the agreement levied such heavy reparations upon Germany that Europe’s entire economy would be ruined. All the while Wilson remained a “blind and deaf Don Quixote,” “bamboozled” by wily Old World diplomats.34 Thirteen years later, in Peacemaking 1919, British diplomat Harold Nicolson portrayed Wilson as an arrogant 68

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leader who surrendered one principle after another, including the seizure of German territory, war pensions, general disarmament, and the war-guilt clause.35 By 1941, more scholarly appraisals of both the treaty and the president appeared. In Versailles Twenty Years After, Paul Birdsall described one case after another (colonies, Poland, the Saar, the Rhineland) in which the president maintained his integrity, only yielding on such matters as reparations when he had little choice.36 Arthur S. Link offered greater praise. In such works as Wilson the Diplomatist and Woodrow Wilson, Link stressed that Wilson foiled efforts at large-scale military intervention in Russia and French efforts to occupy the Rhineland permanently. The president was instrumental in establishing the League of Nations, the mandate system, the restoration of Belgium, the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, and the creation of an independent Poland with access to the sea. Indeed, the Paris agreement was “a very good treaty.”37 John Milton Cooper, Jr.’s Woodrow Wilson: A Biography concurred with much of Link’s defense, praising Wilson for standing firm against military intervention in Bolshevik Russia and a food blockade proposed by Herbert Hoover, American Relief Administrator in Europe. While the cession of South Tirol was a mistake and the Shantung settlement a calculated risk, establishing a reparations board was a reasonable approach.38 In her book Paris 1919, Margaret Macmillan denied that Versailles ensured a second global conflict; Hitler’s aims were insatiable.39 Some writers remained negative. Thomas A. Bailey’s Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace found Wilson making major errors, including the abortive security treaty with France, opposing the unconditional surrender of Germany, creating a League that was essentially a victor’s alliance, and unleashing the Greeks against the recently defeated Turks. Yet Bailey praised the president for advancing self-determination, thereby righting centuries of wrong.40 Four decades later, in his Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger maintained that Wilson operated on a false assumption, namely that “the nations of the world would unite against aggression, injustice, and, presumably, excessive selfishness.”41 Robert H. Ferrell catalogued many errors in Wilson’s approach: going to the conference himself, permitting Paris to be the site, appointing weak commissioners, ignoring his staff, and acquiescing in a reparation clause that made no sense. Ferrell did suggest that the conference failed not because of personalities but because of a war psychosis and inability to control economic forces.42 Certain aspects of the peace conference have received special attention. Seth P. Tillman’s Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 found American–British collaboration responsible for the most progressive features of the settlement, among them European boundaries and the League Covenant.43 Conversely, Lloyd C. Gardner’s Safe for Democracy highlighted the tension between Wilson and Lloyd George over reparations and Bolshevism.44 Inga Floto’s Colonel House in Paris condemned her subject for continually betraying the president.45 In Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919, Klaus Schwabe described Wilson’s insensitivity to the Weimar Republic; the president yielded to Entente demands concerning eastern borders, the war-guilt clause, exorbitant reparations, and refusing immediate German membership in the League.46 When Wilson returned from Paris, he requested Senate ratification of the treaty, focusing upon the necessity to join the League of Nations. Some opponents were “irreconcilables,” led by Senators William E. Borah, Hiram Johnson, and James A. Reed, and dedicated to defeating the treaty under any conditions. More important were the “reservationists,” spearheaded by Senator Lodge, who conditionally accepted the League but without any binding obligation to uphold Article X. The president remained inflexible on the matter, touring the nation in September. After covering 8,000 miles and giving fifty-seven lengthy speeches within three weeks, he suffered a paralyzing stroke. On November 19, 1919 and March 20, 1920, the Senate turned down the treaty. 69

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For the past half-century, there is hardly a Wilson scholar who has not criticized his role in the League fight. In Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace, Thomas A. Bailey offered numerous Wilson blunders that have been picked up, not without some argument, by many other historians. Offenses included calling in 1918 for a Democratic Congress, failing to choose any Republican internationalists as peace commissioners, grafting the League Covenant on to the Versailles Treaty, refusing to compromise with Republican moderates over League membership, denying knowledge of the secret treaties, engaging in a Western tour to draw popular support, making his 1920 appeal for a “solemn referendum,” and flirting with a third term.47 Link asserted that Wilson would have been well advised to accept the reservations drafted by Lodge.48 John Milton Cooper, Jr. denied that Wilson surrendered too much at Paris to secure the League, but Cooper noted that Wilson unwisely failed to take counsel with congressional leaders or develop a base of popular support. Cooper viewed the president’s stroke as having a devastating psychological impact on his decisions concerning the League.49 Some historians have attempted to recover the reputation of Wilson’s foes. In his Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy, William C. Widenor argued that the Massachusetts senator offered a realistic alternative to Wilsonianism and genuinely wanted the U.S. to become a responsible world power.50 Ralph Stone’s The Irreconcilables found his subjects offering viable alternatives. Robert David Johnson’s The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations emphasized an anti-imperialist vision.51 Herbert F. Margulies’s The Mild Reservationists and the League of Nations Controversy in the Senate showed how the mild reservationists sought to promote approval of the treaty.52 Lloyd E. Ambrosius’s Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition described how Wilson’s rigidity forced Republicans into playing a negative role.53 Conversely, in To End All War, Thomas J. Knock traced how Wilson ignored a major element of his constituency, left-leaning internationalists.54 In the past forty years, the writing of history has centered on social forces, not the role of national leaders. Even diplomatic history has not been immune to this trend. Yet the historiography concerning the causes, nature, and results of American participation in the First World War still focuses on one individual, Woodrow Wilson. Though historians still differ about the wisdom of his policies, it is his actions, for good or ill, that remain dominant. Although all crises tend to enhance the power of the chief executive, Wilson was particularly aggressive in exercising presidential authority in the passionate pursuit of his goals. For the foreseeable future, one expects fresh accounts of the nation’s role in this conflict to be “Wilson-centered,” though hopefully continued attention will be devoted to his critics. Certainly contemporary crises will keep debates over Wilsonianism relevant for the indefinite future.

Notes 1 The author is thankful to John Milton Cooper, Jr., Thomas J. Knock, and Lloyd Ambrosius for a careful reading of this chapter. 2 For bibliographies within the past decade, see Thomas J. Knock, “The United States, World War I, and the Peace Settlement, 1914–1920,” in Robert L. Beisner, ed., American Foreign Relations since 1600, Vol. 1 (2nd ed.; Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2003), 665–735; Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson and World War I,” in Robert D. Schulzinger, ed., A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 149–167; Justus D. Doenecke, “Neutrality Policy and the Decision for War,” in Ross Kennedy, ed., A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013) and John Milton Cooper, Jr., “The League Fight,” ibid., 518–527. 3 Charles Seymour, American Diplomacy during the World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934); Seymour, American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935); Newton D. Baker, Why We Went to War (New York: Harpers, 1936), 162. 4 Walter Millis, Road to War, 1914–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29

Charles A. Beard, The Devil Theory of War (New York: Vanguard, 1936). Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938). George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1991). Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). Daniel M. Smith, The Great Departure: The United States and World War I (New York: John Wiley, 1965). Frederick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986). Arthur S. Link, Wilson, Vol. 3, The Search for Neutrality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Vol. 4, Confusions and Crises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); Vol. 5, Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (New York: Harper, 1964); The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971). Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1979), 36. Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Ross Gregory, The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971). John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009). Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Ross A. Kennedy, “Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and an American Conception of National Security,” Diplomatic History 25 (Winter 2001): 1–31; The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009). Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, The Lusitania Disaster: An Episode in Modern Warfare and Diplomacy (New York: Free Press, 1975). Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1968), 20, 255; John S.D. Eisenhower, Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 144. T. Harry Williams, The History of American Wars: From 1745 to 1918 (New York: Knopf, 1981); Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917–1918 (New York: Random House, 1997). Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 203; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 201, 205. Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 101, 114. Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Michael D. Pearlman, Warmaking and American Democracy: The Struggle over Military Strategy, 1700 to the Present (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 205. David F. Trask, The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993). Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). Betty Miller Unterberger, America’s Siberian Expedition, 1918–1920: A Study of National Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1956); Unterberger, The United States, Revolutionary Russia, and the Rise of Czechoslovakia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); George F. Kennan, Soviet– American Relations, 1917–1920: Vol. 2, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958); Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961); John M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Robert James Maddox, The Unknown War with Russia: Wilson’s Siberian Intervention (San Rafael, CA: Presidio, 1977); Calhoun, Power and Principle.

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30 William Appleman Williams, American–Russian Relations, 1781–1947 (New York: Rinehart, 1952); David S. Foglesong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 31 Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). 32 Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967). 33 N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 34 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), 41, 55. 35 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 52. 36 Paul Birdsall, Versailles Twenty Years After (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941). 37 Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Major Foreign Policies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957); Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace, 103; interview in John A. Garraty, Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians (2 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1970), 2: 139. 38 John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson, 497–498. 39 Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001). 40 Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 232, 50, 314–315, 265–266. 41 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 227. 42 Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 138–139, 153–154. 43 Seth P. Tillman, Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 404–405. 44 Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 45 Inga Floto, Colonel House in Paris: A Study of American Policy at the Paris Peace Conference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 46 Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985). 47 Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace; Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (New York: Macmillan, 1945). 48 Link in Garraty, Interpreting American History, 2: 140. 49 John Milton Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 50 William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 51 Ralph Stone, The Irreconcilables: The Fight Against the League of Nations (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Robert David Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 52 Herbert F. Margulies, The Mild Reservationists and the League of Nations Controversy in the Senate (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989). 53 Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 54 Thomas J. Knock, To End All War: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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8 ALLIED COALITION WARFARE DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR Brian Neumann

The First World War demonstrated that only coalitions possessed the resources and staying power to withstand the enormous toll that industrialized warfare elicited. Historian David Trask surmised that “coalition warfare is a most difficult enterprise. Victory comes to allies who persevere in the trying but essential effort to cooperate effectively in the common cause despite inevitable conflicts of interest and outlook.”1 The American experience in the war supports Trask’s analysis. When the United States joined the war in April 1917, it entered into a complex and dysfunctional coalition that prevented the efficient utilization of its combined resources. The issues that the Americans faced in dealing with their European allies were not new to the coalition. Major General Tasker H. Bliss wrote in 1922 that the greatest difficulty the Americans faced was the manifest absence of a unity of purpose on the part of the Entente Powers.They were allied little more than in the sense that each found itself fighting, at the same time with the others, its own war against one enemy, and too largely for separate ends.2 Thus the Americans faced the critical paradox of the war: only through combining resources into a coalition could the Allies defeat the Central Powers, yet the nature of that coalition prevented the effective use of those resources, which prolonged the war and made Allied defeat possible. Despite variations, there are two basic types of coalitions. The first is a combination of unequal partners in which the coalition’s junior members are subordinate to the senior member, with the status of the senior partner relying on such factors as manpower, resources, and prestige. The senior partner is able to focus the resources of the entire coalition relatively efficiently. The Central Powers represented this type of coalition, with Germany taking the senior position over Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. The second type of coalition, characterized by the Entente Powers, is one between theoretically equal partners. No single nation is able to exert its will over the other members. For the same reasons—manpower, resources, and prestige—the coalition members operate as equals. Though this oversimplifies the war’s complex relationships, the dual model of unequal versus equal coalitions helps explain a critical factor in the war. The Germans were able to provide a level of strategic direction to the Central Powers that eluded the Entente. The British and French coexisted on the Western Front, but 73

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their level of cooperation fluctuated over the course of the war. At the same time, the Russians, Italians, and Romanians operated relatively independently on their respective fronts, coordinating with the other fronts when it was to their advantage.3 The United States faced the dilemma of not only waging war against Germany, but also competing with its own allies in the process. Though the competition varied, there were three primary areas that continually plagued the Allied coalition: strategic unity, resource utilization, and operational coordination. The first of these emerged as the core problem within the Entente. Each ally essentially fought its own war for its own ends. While they shared an ultimate goal, the defeat of the Central Powers, they held conflicting views on how to achieve that and different ideas as to what that defeat would ultimately provide. The British fought to protect their global imperial hegemony and to maintain a balance of power. The French sought to avenge their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and cripple the threat posed by Imperial Germany. The Russians sought territorial gains, as did the Italians, and the cementing of their own sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. These competing goals prevented the Allies from developing a coherent strategy. The lack of strategic unity amongst the Allies resulted in a continuing dispute over where to direct the main thrust of the war effort. By 1915, the British, seeking to avoid the costly trenches in France and Belgium, pushed for a peripheral strategy arguing that defeating the lesser members of the Central Powers would isolate the Germans and force them to negotiate a peace. Unfortunately, these efforts had mixed results, with the success of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks contrasting the disastrous defeat at Gallipoli. The French, meanwhile, generally opposed British efforts to shift the war’s focus away from the Western Front, advocating instead the destruction of the German army in the West as the Entente’s primary goal. These conflicting strategic objectives and operational efforts led to accusations from both the French and the British that the other was diverting necessary resources from what should be the primary battlefront. The United States entered the war in response to Germany’s use of unrestricted submarine warfare, its violations of American rights of neutrality, and its attempt to bring about a war between the United States and Mexico. More fundamentally, however, the United States went to war, as President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed, “for democracy” and “for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”4 This reflected Wilson’s call for a “peace without victory,” for as he saw it, “[v]ictory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. . . . Only a peace between equals can last.”5 Once at war Wilson sought the overthrow of the German autocracy and the establishment of a representative government. With this accomplished, he stated, “We shall be free to base peace on generosity and justice, to the exclusions of all selfish claims to advantage even on the part of the victors.”6 Wilson elaborated further on his vision of a just and equitable system of international diplomacy in his “Fourteen Points Address” in January 1918. Wilson argued for, amongst other things, the rights of self-determination for subjugated peoples, freedom of the seas, and the creation of a global organization that could arbitrate international disputes and prevent the outbreak of war.7 Though the British and French opposed the application of such principles to their multi-ethnic colonial empires and (in the British case) their dominance of global maritime trade, they humored the American president out of necessity.8 While the fight over the Fourteen Points would play out in the peace negotiations of 1919, Wilson’s goals set the tone for the United States’ relationship with the Allies. As an associated rather than an allied power, the United States stood apart from the coalition, pursuing its own goals and objectives. So long as those of the Allies aligned with American aims, then the United States would cooperate, but it would not sacrifice its goals for victory and it would not abandon the principles for which it fought. 74

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The question of strategic objectives had a profound impact on resource utilization within the Entente. No issue presented more challenges for the Americans than how to effectively use their manpower. Almost from the moment the U.S. joined the war, both the British and the French advocated amalgamation (the incorporation of American soldiers into the Allied armies) on the Western Front. From a purely military standpoint, it made sense. The Allies had formed units, organizational and administrative structures, training facilities, well-developed officer corps, and the supply systems to sustain their armies. What they desperately lacked were men. The U.S. had this in abundance, but it would take time for the Americans to develop the administrative and logistical systems to effectively bring its soldiers to the battlefield. From the Allied perspective, the solution appeared simple: integrate American manpower into the existing military structure. Once the Americans developed the necessary capabilities, they could reclaim their manpower and fight as an independent army. Until that time the most effective way to maximize the strengths of each coalition member would be through amalgamation. This was not a new or unique situation. From the war’s beginning, different proposals arose regarding the amalgamation of various groups. Both the French and the British had a long tradition of utilizing manpower from throughout their respective empires for their armies. Soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Indochina, and Africa all fought under British and French flags. In September 1914, the French and British separately began calling for the amalgamation of Belgian forces. Albert I, the Belgian monarch and supreme military commander, flatly refused this and all subsequent proposals, stating that he would not “deliver the fate of his soldiers to decisions of foreign authorities beyond his control.”9 Some French politicians and the French press even discussed amalgamating British forces into their ranks in 1916. With French manpower declining and the British increasing their mobilization, some believed that combining the two armies could provide the mass and centralization of command necessary to defeat the Germans on the Western Front. Though logistical, cultural, and political barriers made the proposal impossible, the fact remains that amalgamating foreign soldiers was a standard policy option for the Allies throughout the war.10 Regardless of Allied wishes, the Americans refused to act as a “recruiting agency” for the coalition armies.11 Though the Allies repeatedly stated the temporary nature of amalgamation and a desire to return American troops to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF ) once it could fight as an independent force, the Americans did not believe that the French or the British would give up control of American troops once they were infused into the European armies. General Bliss expressed the American fear that When the war is over it may be a literal fact that the American flag may not have appeared anywhere on the line because our organizations will simply be parts of battalions and regiments of the Entente Allies. We might have a million men there and yet no American army and no American commander.12 National pride and soldiers’ morale demanded that the United States fight as an independent force, and American strategic objectives necessitated rejecting amalgamation. If President Wilson wanted to use the peace negotiations as a means to remake international relations, he needed an independent AEF to play a significant role in defeating the Germans. If the Americans simply provided men for the Allied armies then Wilson would not command the authority necessary to do battle at the negotiation table with the British and French. Consequently, Wilson gave the AEF commander, General John J. Pershing, the authority to block all Allied efforts at amalgamation. Pershing held supreme authority over American forces in Europe, with orders stating that “the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the 75

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identity of which must be observed [emphasis added].”13 So long as Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and President Wilson supported him, the orders acted as “the wall against which General Pershing braced his back for the long months of struggle to keep his men under his own flag.”14 Despite Pershing’s general opposition to the idea, he accepted the limited amalgamation of American units under certain conditions. Delays in training American soldiers and securing shipping resulted in only four American divisions arriving in France by the beginning of 1918. Pershing agreed in January to allow six complete American divisions to serve with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF ), with the British providing shipping.15 At the same time, Pershing allowed regiments from the 92nd and 93rd Divisions, two African-American units, to serve with the French Army. Pershing also allowed American divisions to serve within British and French corps, particularly after the Germans launched a massive offensive in March 1918. The American commander, however, continued his firm refusal to accept amalgamation at the battalion or brigade level, damaging his relationship with the Allies.16 As illustrated in the six-division agreement to exchange British shipping for American units to serve with the BEF, the competition between the Allies spilled over into the use of other resources as well. The Americans not only possessed men, but could provide credit for the Allies to purchase war materiel. These ties predated America’s entry into the war, as the Allies, particularly the British, became increasingly indebted to the Americans. Between 1914 and 1917, the British provided roughly $800 million in loans to the Allies each year, in addition to covering their own war costs. While the British often grumbled that their allies seemed more willing to borrow funds than raise taxes on their people, the credit flowed, if only to keep the Allies in the fight. Despite its centuries-long role as financier of European wars, however, there were limits to the funds available to London banks and this new war consumed money as voraciously as it did lives. By the spring of 1917, British finances were at the point of exhaustion. Not only did the Allies need American manpower for the trenches, but they also required American financial assistance. When the United States finally declared war, it became the Allies’ primary financier, as they requested loans almost as quickly as they did men.17 A final resource utilization conflict arose between the Americans and the Allies over training. For three years, the French and British had bloodied themselves in the trenches, slogging through mud, rain, and gas, and incurring heavy casualties. The Americans would not follow the same course if Pershing had his way. He believed that “To bring about a decision, [the enemy’s] army must be driven from the trenches and the fighting carried into the open.”18 A member of the AEF senior staff reflected after the war that, “Some day someone somewhere would come out of his trenches and start forward and thus a stalemate would be broken and the War would eventually be won.”19 Such views were not simple bravado: Pershing and his staff knew that too often gains achieved in attacks were soon lost because the soldiers were not trained to exploit success and carry the fight into the interior.20 To ensure that the AEF did not adopt such traits, Pershing pushed to have American soldiers trained in open warfare tactics that emphasized rifle-fire and maneuver over machine-guns or artillery. Whether the American views were justified or naïve is a debate for another place. Whatever the case, they marked another point of departure between the Americans and the Allies. Both the British and French had spent the previous three years searching for a means to overcome the bloody stalemate of the trenches. They were not unsympathetic to Pershing’s desire to push beyond the lines and fight in the open, but the means to achieve this goal eluded them. They analyzed any number of topics: attacking on a wide versus a narrow front; the amount, emphasis, and proper use of artillery; the role of machine guns; the scale of offensive, etc.21 Thus by the time American soldiers arrived in Europe both the British and French had come to their 76

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own conclusions regarding these issues, based upon years of experience. To Pershing’s chagrin, a lack of sufficient instructors meant that he needed to rely upon the French and British to help train the Americans. The advice they offered often conflicted with Pershing’s desired emphasis on open warfare tactics. As one American officer stated, “An American army cannot be made by Frenchmen or Englishmen.”22 The Americans, therefore, limited the Allies’ influence on AEF training as much as possible. The Americans were determined to learn firsthand the lessons of the trenches, rather than rely upon the experience of others. But how and where to engage the enemy brings to light the third major area of contention between the Americans and the Allies: operational coordination. From the beginning, the French and British struggled over how best to align their efforts, with limited success. France’s commanding general, Joseph Joffre, spent much of 1914 and 1915 trying to assert his supreme authority on the Western Front, to no avail. The British would serve alongside, but not under, the French. Multiple conferences called for improvements in coordinating Allied military efforts but still each side pursued separate goals in the field. In 1916, the Allies made progress, timing the Brusilov Offensive on the Eastern Front to support a combined French and British attack at the Somme in the West. Unfortunately, the German attack at Verdun sapped much of the French strength and the British were not yet ready to carry the full load on their own. There was more hardship for the Allies in 1917 as the French nearly destroyed their army in the disastrous Nivelle Offensive and the British wasted countless lives attacking Passchendaele. It took the combined German–Austro-Hungarian rout of the Italians at Caporetto in October 1917 before the Allies agreed to unify their efforts, to a limited degree. On November 7, the Allies formed a Supreme War Council (SWC), headed by the British, French, and Italian prime ministers (the United States had a temporary representative due to President Wilson’s inability to attend the meetings), with the mission “to watch over the general conduct of the war.”23 Unfortunately, the council was a political, not a military body. It was an effort to create a unified strategy, but its directives were not binding on the national commanders-inchief. Unified command, such as was possible on the Western Front, would have to wait for another disaster.24 The calamity that finally drove the Allies to appoint a general-in-chief came in March of 1918. Russia’s exit from the war at the end of 1917 enabled the Germans to shift forces from the east to the west for a major offensive. When the German Spring Offensive smashed through the Allied lines on March 21, 1918, it created the greatest crisis on the Western Front since the initial German invasion in 1914. The Allies immediately met to address the situation and formulate a response. On March 26, the Allied leaders directed French General Ferdinand Foch to coordinate the British and French response to the German offensive.25 This limited authority proved unworkable, especially to Foch, and his powers were expanded in early April. Foch became the generalissimo of all Allied forces on the Western Front, charged with coordinating Allied armies in that theater. To achieve their goal, the Allies conferred upon Foch “all powers necessary to secure effective realization” of his objectives. This seemingly settled the issue of unified command, but the agreement also gave the national commanders-in-chief the right to appeal to their home governments if any of Foch’s decisions appeared to threaten the safety of their armies.26 Foch gained considerable power, but he did not possess command authority over Pershing, British Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, or General H. Philippe Petain (commander of the French Army). Pershing, like the others, supported Foch so long as he maintained command over his forces. While the German offensive prompted new and more urgent calls for amalgamation, Pershing refused to relent. He agreed to support the Allies in any way he could, but he would not sacrifice his goal of an independent American army.27 Pershing, however, needed to compromise, 77

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and on March 28 the SWC agreed to Joint Note #18, advising that the United States give preferential transportation to infantry and machine-gun units in the present emergency. This meant that the AEF would continue to rely upon Allied artillery and support units, delaying the formation of an independent army. Secretary Baker and General Bliss, the American representative on the SWC, supported the measure, “keeping in mind always the determination of this government to have its various military forces collected, as speedily as their training and the military situation will permit, into an independent American army.”28 In April, Pershing agreed to modify the six-division plan with the British to give transport priority to 120,000 infantry and machine-gun units in May. At an SWC conference in early May, Pershing fought off relentless calls for amalgamation, but he and the Allies finally agreed to the shipment of 130,000 machinegun and infantry units in that month and 150,000 in June.29 For the next three months, American units served ably within the European armies to halt the German offensives and reclaim lost territory. By July, the tide began turning and Pershing set about forming his army. After a discussion between Pershing, Petain, and Foch on July 21, the latter agreed that Pershing should begin forming an American army.30 The First American Army, officially formed on August 10, would be located in the Lorraine sector of the front. The British objected to the plan, preferring that the Americans be placed between the British and French Armies in a position of support. However, the French and the Americans had decided upon Lorraine for some time and the British found themselves with no recourse but to agree.31 The British also objected to releasing the American units that had been serving with them under the six-division plan. Haig complained in his diary, “What will History say regarding this action of the Americans leaving the British zone of operations when the decisive battle of the war is at its height, and the decision still in doubt!” To resolve the dispute, Foch convinced Pershing to leave two divisions with the British (27th and 30th), and Haig had to accept the loss of the others.32 The selection of Lorraine as the American operational sector brought the natural objective of reducing the large German salient at St. Mihiel. The operation was scheduled for late September, but was almost canceled when Foch looked to go on the offensive across the entire Western Front at the end of the month. Pershing wanted St. Mihiel to be a stepping-stone to a much larger attack toward Metz, capturing vital iron and coal mines and severing rail lines supporting the rest of the German forces to the west. Foch initially supported the plan, but with the German lines starting to crack he wanted to strike a series of hammer blows and batter the Germans into submission. The general-in-chief planned to reduce the size of the St. Mihiel attack and then have American units serve in two separate French attacks. Pershing refused to break up his army, citing his authority over American forces. At a meeting on September 2, Pershing, Foch, and Petain worked out a compromise. The Americans would conduct their operations at St. Mihiel, though on a reduced scale. The AEF would then take part in a larger offensive on the Meuse-Argonne line within a fortnight of concluding its operations at St. Mihiel.33 The movement presented tremendous logistical difficulties, but Pershing and the AEF would have to endure them to keep the army together and independent. Pershing’s difficulties with Foch were not unique, as the general-in-chief squabbled with Petain and Haig as well. Each commander-in-chief complained for one reason or another, but in the end Foch eventually carried the day, achieving his series of battles and pummeling the Germans across the Western Front. While Foch did not have command authority, he did have powerful tools of persuasion and coordination, which he used to achieve his ends. Whatever Pershing’s specific complaints, he and the AEF were members of a coalition and it was the weight of that coalition, not any of its individual parts, which eventually broke the German line and forced the Armistice in November 1918. 78

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The Entente victory did not come easily. The war consumed the great nations of Europe and left their empires in tatters. The war was not won through the bravery of soldiers nor the brilliance of generals but rather through attrition, with the United States providing the final weight to tip the scale in the Allies’ favor. Yet given the resources the Allies brought to the conflict, the outcome should never have been in doubt, nor as costly. Unfortunately the Americans joined a coalition held together more through a mutual foe than any sense of unity. The old enmities arose again at the peace table at Versailles, where national competition overwhelmed cooperation, just as it often did during the war itself. The only thing that held the coalition together during the war was the threat of defeat. With that specter removed, the Allies went their separate ways. From the initial fractures between the British and French during the German offensive of 1914 to squabbles concerning the final offensive of 1918, the Allies cooperated in a disjointed manner. Improvements in cooperation did occur, but when the Allies managed to take positive steps toward a centralized effort, it always proved reactive rather than proactive. Without any true desire for unity, the bonds had to be held together through circumstances and continuous effort, resulting in inefficient and tenuous agreements. Once the circumstances passed, the natural divisions strained the cooperative nature of the agreements. Consequently, the Allies had to revisit the same arguments repeatedly, frustrating all involved and resulting in a near paralysis that plagued planning and coordination efforts. This lack of unity enabled the Germans to shift their forces between the Eastern and Western Fronts depending on which presented the most serious threat. Thus the Allies, through their own lack of coordination, allowed the Central Powers to utilize their central position to maximum advantage. When the United States joined the war, it became a member of the same dysfunctional coalition that had struggled against the Central Powers for three years. The challenges the Americans faced were not unique, nor were their responses. Encased in concerns over national sovereignty and self-interest, and leery of their allies’ intentions, the Americans professed an equality that their soldiers did not yet deserve and a moral superiority that provoked resentment. However, the United States also possessed the resources that would carry the Entente to victory, and it relied upon this trump card to push its own agenda. Victory enabled the Americans to promote their own merits while downplaying their failings. Whether or not they or the Allies would admit it, while the coalition provided the combined resources to prevail, the nature of the coalition prolonged the war and brought defeat closer to reality than it ever should have been.

Notes 1 David F. Trask, The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 176–177. 2 Tasker H. Bliss, “The Evolution of the Unified Command,” Foreign Affairs, 1, no. 2 (December, 1922): 2. 3 Jahuda Wallach, Uneasy Coalition: The Entente Experience in World War I (London: Greenwood Press, 1993), 1–5. 4 Woodrow Wilson, “An Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany,” April 2, 1917, available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366#axzz 1nSWKY9Ot, accessed June 29, 2012. 5 Woodrow Wilson, “An Address to the U.S. Senate,” January 22, 1917, available at www.firstworldwar.com/source/peacewithoutvictory.htm, accessed June 29, 2012. 6 Woodrow Wilson, “State of the Union Address,” December 4, 1917, available at http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/texts/19171204.html, accessed June 29, 2012. 7 Woodrow Wilson, “Fourteen Points Address,” January 8, 1918, available at www.ourdocuments.gov/ doc.php?doc=62&page=transcript, accessed June 29, 2012.

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8 David R. Woodward, Trial by Friendship: Anglo-American Relations 1917–1918 (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1993), 216–218; Frederick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986), 37, 65. 9 Albert I and Raoul Francois Casimir van Overstraeten, The War Diaries of Albert I, King of the Belgians, (London: William Kimber Publishers, 1954), 25–28; Wallach, Uneasy Coalition, 120–121. 10 Edward L. Spears, Prelude to Victory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 110–111, 540; Robert Blake, ed. The Private Papers of Douglas Haig: Being Selections from the Private Diary and Correspondence of Field Marshal the Earl Haig of Bemersyde (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952), 156, 304; Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (London: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 73. 11 John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War, 2 vols. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1931), 1: 33 (2nd edition, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). 12 Frederick Palmer, Bliss Peacemaker: The Life and Letters of General Tasker Howard Bliss (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1934), 153–154. 13 Newton D. Baker to John J. Pershing, May 26, 1918, Entry 268, RG120, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, DC. 14 James G. Harbord, The Preservation of American Identity in the World War, April 11, 1932, Army War College Curricular Archives, U.S. Army Military History Institute (MHI), Carlisle, PA. 15 “Agreement between the Commanders-in-Chief of the American and British Forces in France regarding the Training of the American Troops with British Troops,” January 31, 1918, File #284, Entry 267, RG 120, NARA; John J. Pershing to Sir Douglas Haig, “Papers Relating to American Troops Serving with the British,” February 12, 1918, File #284, Entry 267, RG 120, NARA; Woodward, Trial By Friendship, 135–137. 16 Diary Entry, June 8, 1918, John J. Pershing Diary, Pershing Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Mitchell A. Yockelson, Borrowed Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 68–69; Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operation in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 493–495. 17 Robert B. Bruce, A Fraternity at Arms: America and France in the Great War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 105–106; Private Papers of Douglas Haig, 38–39, 174; Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926–1928), 3: 4. 18 Pershing, My Experiences in the World War, 1: 12. 19 James G. Harbord, The American Army in France, 1917–1919 (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1936), 150. 20 Cable P-952-S, October 20, 1917, U.S. Army Center of Military History, United States Army in the World War, 17 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), 14: 306 (USAWW, second edition published 1989). 21 For a discussion of tactical developments and debates, see Jay Winter, ed., The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On (Columbia: The University of Missouri Press, 2009); Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack 1916–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); William Philpott, Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2010); and Doughty’s Pyrrhic Victory. 22 Col. Harold B. Fiske quoted in “Memorandum for the Chief of Staff, Subject: Training,” July 4, 1918, USAWW, 14: 303–304. 23 Rapallo Agreement, November 7, 1917, Entry 1562, Box # 23, RG 120, NARA. 24 Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition, 172–173. 25 “General Foch Designated to Coordinate Allied Operations,” SWC: Fldr. 3 Doullens: Minutes, USAWW, 2: 253–254. 26 “Authority of General Foch Extended,” SWC: 376–1: Agreement, April 3, 1918, USAWW, 2: 274–277. 27 Pershing, My Experiences in the World War, 1: 363–376. 28 “Joint Note 18 with Recommendations of Secretary of War,” C-in-C: Fldr. 20: Cablegram, March 28, 1918, USAWW, 2: 261–262. 29 For a discussion of the exchange, see Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 113–115; “Employment of American Troops,” Supreme War Council 2/3, Folder 5th Session: Record of Proceedings, May 1–2, 1918, USAWW, 2: 360–371; “Transportation for Six Divisions,” Relations with Allies: C-in-C Rept. File: Fldr. 20: Cablegram, May 3, 1918, Ibid., 2: 373–374.

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30 “Creation of American Army Discussed,” HS Fr. File: Allied GHQ: 420–30.1: Letter, July 22, 1918, USAWW, 2: 543. 31 Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 82; Pershing, My Experiences in the World War, 1: 84–86; Smythe, Pershing, 171; Bruce, A Fraternity at Arms, 108. 32 The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, 323, 325; Pershing, My Experiences in the World War, 2: 230; “Marshal Foch Proposes to General Pershing the Commitment of Certain American Divisions,” G-3, GHQ, AEF: Fldr 658: Letter, USAWW, 2: 583. 33 “Present Situation and Future Operations,” G-3, GHQ, AEF: Fldr. 667: Letter, July 24, 1918, USAWW, 2: 551–553; Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 474–487; Bruce, A Fraternity of Arms, 259; Ferdinand Foch to John J. Pershing, September 1, 1918, Box #59, John J. Pershing Papers, Library of Congress; “Discussion of Abandonment of St. Mihiel in Favor of Other Operations,” HS Secret Documents: Vol. F-2: Notes, September 2, 1918, USAWW, 2: 589–592.

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9 NATIVE AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN WORLD WAR I Thomas A. Britten

Native Americans have played a prominent role in virtually every war in U.S. history. Although numerically small in comparison to other minority groups, American Indians have contributed a disproportionately large number of troops, often serving in some of the most dangerous military occupations. Influenced largely by popular stereotypes of Indians as “instinctive warriors,” military commanders assigned their Native American soldiers hazardous duties as scouts, messengers, and patrol leaders. Indian casualty rates, consequently, were often significantly higher than that of non-Indians. Government and military officials agreed that American Indians were a unique tactical asset, but also encouraged military service as a means of expediting their assimilation into the majority society. Much of the history of American Indians in the armed forces, therefore, reveals the paradox of a people recruited for their alleged “warrior ethic,” but for the purpose of extinguishing the very traits for which they were employed. During the antebellum period, the U.S. Army, in its efforts to concentrate Indian peoples onto reservations in the West, employed hundreds of Native Americans as scouts and auxiliary troops who provided their commanders with crucial intelligence and insight on Native tactics and strategies. After the Civil War, the 1866 Army Reorganization Act authorized the enlistment of up to 1,000 Indian scouts for six-month periods. Generals George Crook and Nelson A. Miles, for example, employed Apache scouts in campaigns against Chiricahua Apache leaders Geronimo and Nana, while Lipan Apache and Tonkawa scouts aided Colonel Randall Mackenzie in the Red River War of 1874 and Crow scouts served alongside George Custer in his disastrous “last stand” against the Northern Cheyenne and Sioux in 1876. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, efforts to regularize the enlistment of Native American soldiers gained strength. A heretofore-unusual alliance of military officials and humanitarian reformers concluded that enlisting Indian soldiers would both expedite assimilation and serve the interests of the army. They reasoned that military service would provide work for reservation Indians and that rations and pay for Indian recruits would supplement government issues of food and clothing made on reservations, relieving some of the poverty and misery associated with reservation life. Advocates of Indian enlistment also maintained that military service would weaken tribal ties and foster individualism. Indian recruits would live on military posts and receive their own monthly salaries, thereby aiding in the “individualization” of Native American soldiers. Finally, military officials believed that the enlistment of Native Americans might improve AngloIndian relations by conveying the army’s trust and respect for native peoples.1 82

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In the spring of 1890, General John M. Schofield authorized the establishment of two experimental Indian companies of 100 men each, one based on the northern plains and one on the southern plains. By the end of June 1891, over 400 Native Americans, the majority of whom came from the Department of Dakota and the Department of the Platte, had enlisted. Thirty-year-old John J. Pershing, the future commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, commanded a company of Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge reservation. His experience was quite positive and he commended the military’s decision to enlist Native American soldiers.2 Despite its promising beginning, acute problems undermined the experiment’s success. Communication problems, the Indians’ apparent disregard for military etiquette, homesickness, and racism (e.g., some white enlisted men refused to take orders from Indian non-commissioned officers) contributed to the failure. By the end of 1893, less than three years into the program, the adjutant general’s office declared the use of Indians as soldiers a disaster and within five years military officials scrapped the plan altogether.3 Despite its short duration, the venture of using all-Indian units in the regular army was not a complete disappointment. Over 1,000 Native Americans had participated and gained useful knowledge and experiences. Military service provided hundreds of Native American men with an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the Anglo society and culture that had done so much to destroy their own. In historian Thomas Dunlay’s words, “the army gave many Indian men their first real introduction to the culture that would soon dominate their lives.” Thus, military service equipped Indian veterans with certain advantages over other reservation Indians. Through their newly acquired knowledge and experience of the “white man’s world,” Native American veterans could more effectively resist further Anglo encroachments on their lands, cultures, and liberties. The failure in using American Indians in segregated units also ensured that military planners would not repeat the experiment. Consequently, after 1897, military officials treated Native American soldiers as individuals rather than as a racial group and integrated them into white units, where they served beside Anglo soldiers—a practice that continued through World War I and that exerted a strong influence on men of both races.4 Efforts to establish segregated “all-Indian” units in the army resurfaced briefly during the second decade of the twentieth century. The most enthusiastic advocate for the endeavor was a former Baptist minister, photographer, filmmaker, and self-proclaimed Indian expert named Joseph Kossuth Dixon. Contrary to earlier efforts to encourage military service as a means of assimilating Native Americans, Dixon’s crusade in the 1910s was to create segregated units as a means of preserving particular aspects of Indian cultures and lifestyles. Convinced that Indians were a “Vanishing Race” due to alcohol use, disease, interracial and intra-racial warfare, and land loss, Dixon lobbied Congress to authorize the creation of segregated Indian units in order to preserve the “Indian spirit” and to help resurrect what he believed was their inherent martial qualities. He was apparently able to convince at least a few Congressmen to back his plan and in late April 1917 (just a few weeks after the U.S. declaration of war), Representative Julius Kahn of California introduced a bill (authored by Dixon) calling for the creation of a ten-regimentstrong North American Indian Cavalry. Three months later, Dixon testified before the House Committee on Military Affairs in support of the bill. In dramatic fashion, he complimented Indians for their “spirit of intrepidity, their unwearying fidelity, their unswerving integrity, their unstained honor, their unimpeachable veracity, their undaunted bravery, their loyal friendship,” and “their glad spirit of service.” Unmoved, committee members rejected the bill, citing the failed experiment in the 1890s as the final word on the matter. A determined Dixon persisted in his effort to create all-Indian units for another three years, without success.5 83

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The entry of the United States into World War I in April 1917 was a watershed moment in the history of Native American participation in the military. First, it confirmed settlement of the issue of whether Indian soldiers should be integrated into regular units or, like African-Americans, be segregated into race-specific regiments. Although military and government officials eventually ruled against the creation of all-Indian units, the army inadvertently established a few nearly all-Indian units during World War I. Indian soldiers in the Arizona National Guard received assignments to a predominantly Indian Company in the 158th Infantry Regiment, while an estimated 600 Native Americans (mostly from the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Oklahoma) served in the 142nd Regiment. A second important issue settled during World War I concerned the draft and enlistment of American Indians. The Selective Service Act of May 1917 required all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one to register for the draft. This included American Indians who were citizens, as well as the roughly one-third of Indian men that were not citizens. While citizen and non-citizen Indians could enlist for service, only citizens could be drafted. Local draft boards struggled in their determination of citizenship status, however, and there were numerous cases of draft boards calling up non-citizen Indians. An additional problem occurred with tribes that maintained that their members were immune from the draft as they were citizens of sovereign Indian nations. While the majority of Indians accepted conscription as their duty and served without complaint, many were reluctant to participate in a war taking place halfway around the world. Others questioned whether the federal government had any right to draft their young men into a conflict to “make the world safe for democracy” when they faced discrimination and disenfranchisement at home. That being the case, sporadic episodes of Indian draft resistance arose among the Iroquois of New York, Cherokees in North Carolina, and Goshutes in Nevada and Utah. The Iroquois, who sought to advance their claims of self-determination and sovereignty, overcame their dilemma by unilaterally declaring war on Germany and then permitting their men to serve in the U.S. military as “allies.” In the summer of 1918, a small number of Creeks in eastern Oklahoma staged a short-lived “draft rebellion” after a Creek woman named Ellen Perryman challenged the draft’s applicability given her peoples’ uncertain citizenship status and the government’s historic mistreatment of native peoples.6 Native Americans chose to enlist for duty in World War I for several reasons. Like other Americans, Indian soldiers served to protect their homeland and demonstrate their patriotism and devotion to their country; others saw military service as a means of social and economic mobility, and perhaps as an escape from the unemployment and poverty associated with reservation life. The lure of travel and excitement and an opportunity to gain prestige and status in the eyes of their people attracted young men from around the country to serve—both Indian and non-Indian. Historian Russell L. Barsh cites the influence of federal Indian boarding schools (such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania or the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma), which emphasized patriotism and military training. Graduates made ideal recruits given the structured environment of the schools. In addition, officials working in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the agency charged with implementing and administering federal Indian policy, endorsed military service. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells saw America’s entry into World War I as an opportunity to accelerate assimilation, and he encouraged Indian men to do their share. Some Native Americans no doubt hoped that their contributions in the war and on the home front would bring about greater justice for their people and greater tolerance and respect for Indian rights and traditions.7 Native American service in World War I was, in many respects, similar to that of other Americans. The federal government drafted over 6,500 Indian men for duty during the war, and thousands more enlisted. Like other soldiers, Native American inductees experienced the rigors 84

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and harsh discipline of military training camps and suffered from homesickness and initial anxiety in their new surroundings. The voyage to Europe was exciting for some, a misery for others. For virtually all the Indian “doughboys,” the war provided their first chance to visit Europe. For many it was their first opportunity to venture outside their home state.8 Native American troops were among the first to reach France, arriving the last week of June 1917. During the Bastille Day celebration on July 14, General John J. Pershing marched his excited troops through the streets of Paris in a parade honoring the Allied powers. Among the American soldiers who marched that day were seven Native Americans representing seven different Indian nations. For the next six months, members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF ) trained and prepared for deployment on the Western Front.9 American Indians fought in every major engagement that involved U.S. troops—from Chateau-Thierry in May 1918 to the Meuse–Argonne offensive four months later. Early in 1918, German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Eric Ludendorff planned a major offensive to win the war before substantial numbers of American troops arrived. Codenamed “Operation Michael,” the offensive began on March 21, and within two months, the Germans had broken through the French and British lines. Responding to French commander Ferdinand Foch’s urgent appeals for reinforcements, Pershing dispatched two American divisions to help guard the bridges across the Marne River at Chateau-Thierry. Between May 31 and June 4, 1918, the Americans played a key role in stopping the German advance. Native Americans serving in the effort included Private William Stoneburner, Company F, 166th Infantry Regiment, who carried messages during heavy combat. Corporal John Victor Adams, a Siletz Indian from Oregon and member of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division, commanded by Colonel Douglas MacArthur, received wounds in the leg and eye at Chateau-Thierry, as well as burns from a poison-gas attack. Sam Thundercloud, a Winnebago, went “over the top” (climbing out of the trenches to go on the attack) three times at the Battle of Chateau-Thierry. On one occasion, he engaged in a vicious bayonet standoff with a German soldier and received a gash to his hand before killing the man. Thundercloud was later gassed twice and wounded in the arm by an enemy sniper.10 The primary task facing the Allied forces in mid-July 1918 was to destroy three German strongholds that threatened Allied positions in France: the Amiens salient north of Paris, in the British sector of operations; the Marne position, in the French sector; and the St. Mihiel salient about twenty-five miles south of Verdun, in the American sector. Although the AEF participated in operations in all three sectors, the majority of American troops fought in the Marne and St. Mihiel campaigns. One of the first battles of the Aisne–Marne Offensive—the Allied attempt to force the Germans out of their Marne stronghold from July 18 to August 1918—occurred at Soissons. For four days, July 18 to July 21, American troops of the First and Second Divisions attacked German trenches and fortifications south of the city before forcing the enemy to retreat. Among the Native American participants at the Battle of Soissons was Sergeant Otis W. Leader, a Choctaw/Chickasaw, who had enlisted in the army and served as a machine gunner. In addition to the Battle of Soissons, Leader saw action at Chateau-Thierry, at St. Mihiel, and in the Argonne Forest. During his tour of duty, Leader suffered two wounds and was twice gassed. The French government later selected him as a model Native American soldier, and the Frenchman De Warreux reportedly painted Leader’s portrait for a display in the French War Museum.11 Sergeant Thomas E. Rogers (Charges Alone), an Arikara, and Joe Young Hawk, a Sioux army scout, also participated in the Battle of Soissons. Army officials cited Rogers for bravery and for “capturing at night barehanded and alone, many sentinels who were taken back to the American camp for questioning.” The Germans captured and briefly detained Joe Young Hawk 85

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while he was on patrol duty at Soissons. Awaiting a favorable moment, Young Hawk “turned on his captors, slew three with his hands,” and captured the other two. Although he was himself shot through both legs in the fight, Young Hawk endured the pain and somehow marched his prisoners into camp.12 In mid-August 1918, General Pershing began preparations for an offensive against the St. Mihiel stronghold. Early on September 12, 1918, nearly 3,000 American artillery guns opened fire on German positions near St. Mihiel. Four hours after the artillery began its bombardment, the American ground assault began, and for the next five days American and French troops swarmed through the forests and villages near St. Mihiel. Major Frank Knox, recalling the St. Mihiel Offensive, noted that the Indians “made a splendid record for bravery and resoluteness under fire.” Private Ernest Spencer, a Yakima from Company D, Sixth Machine-Gunners Battalion, received the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism near Thiercourt, a town on the southeastern edge of the St. Mihiel position. Sam Lanier, a Cherokee, won praise for his performance as a truck driver. His commander reported that Lanier was “an expert wagoner and truck driver. He has operated habitually on roads exposed to severe shelling and has never abandoned his truck.” In addition, the officer stated, for a stretch of six days during the St. Mihiel drive, Lanier worked “frantically without any sleep. He is a faithful, obedient, and loyal soldier.”13 Following the destruction of the St. Mihiel salient, the AEF participated in a final offensive against Germany, the Meuse–Argonne campaign. The American objective was to overwhelm the Germans and penetrate the formidable trench network known as the “Hindenburg Line.” The terrain, marked by heavy growth and steep ravines, was ideal for German defensive purposes, but problematic for attackers. For most of the American soldiers who participated in World War I, the Meuse–Argonne Offensive provided their first taste of battle. After the attack began on September 26, Americans fought their way through the Argonne Forest. Major Tom Reilley commander of the Third Battalion, 165th Infantry Regiment, estimated that he started out with 876 men and returned from the battle with only 400. “The Indians in the front ranks were thoroughly swept away,” he reported grimly. “When an Indian went down, another Indian stepped immediately to the front.” Reilley also commended Native American soldiers for their bravery. “They were always at the front,” he stated, “if a battle was on, and you wanted to find the Indians, you would always find them at the front.” Captain Wendell Westover echoed such sentiments. His unit, which included a squad of Native Americans, also participated in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. After the war, Westover wrote that his Indian soldiers “were courageous, steady, skillful, [and] reliable. They could be counted upon to do the thing required under any circumstances, only death bringing a cessation to their performance of duty. No finer group of Americans,” he maintained, “served on the Western Front.”14 Perhaps the most famous Native American hero in World War I was Private Joseph Oklahombi, a Choctaw from McCurtain County in southeastern Oklahoma, who served with Company D, 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Division. While on duty in the St. Etienne sector, Oklahombi (whom the press treated as the Indian equivalent to the famous Tennessean Alvin York) won international recognition for extraordinary service. “Under a violent barrage, [Oklahombi] dashed to the attack of an enemy position, covering about 200 yards through barbed wire entanglements. He rushed on Machine Gun nests, capturing 171 prisoners.” Oklahombi reportedly stormed a strongly held position containing more than fifty machine guns and a number of trench mortars, and turned the captured guns on the enemy, holding the position for four days. Marshal Pétain, commander of French armies in the east, awarded Oklahombi the French Croix de Guerre.15 By the middle of October, the AEF had secured the Argonne Forest, and on November 5 American units crossed the Meuse River. During the movement, Walter G. Sevalier, a Chippewa 86

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from Wisconsin serving near the town of Brieulles with Company F, Seventh Engineers, swam the Meuse under terrific enemy fire with a cable for a pontoon bridge and later carried another cable over the Est Canal and across an open field covered by enemy machine guns. James M. Elson, a Snohomish Indian from the Tulalip reservation in Washington State, also received citations from his commanding officer for showing “exceptional skill, courage, and coolness under fire” while guiding sentry squads through No Man’s Land and guiding patrols to the outskirts of Brieulles.16 Approximately 1,000 Native Americans served in the United States Navy during World War I. Most served on escort or transport duty, but some Native American sailors saw action on battleships. Wesley Youngbird, an Eastern Cherokee from North Carolina, served on the battleship Wyoming, and William Leon Wolfe, a Cree, manned the massive twelve-inch gun on the forward deck of the Utah. Captain H. H. Hough, commander of the Utah, commented, “I know little of the individual cases in the 1,200 men on board the Utah, but the Indian, Wolfe, has forced his character upon my attention by his stalwart service and ability.” Of the twelve Indian navy recruits from the Chemawa Indian School in Oregon, three enlisted as firemen and the other nine as musicians. Recruits from the Phoenix Indian School enlisted for naval duty as carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons.17 During the final two months of the war, U.S. military officials experimented with a novel method of battlefield communication involving Native American soldiers as the lead characters. Employing runners to carry messages was slow and hazardous, but the alternatives (carrier pigeons, rocket signals, earth telegraphy, and telephone) each had particular disadvantages as well. Chief among these was security. American military officials suspected that the Germans were “listening in” on Allied communications by tapping the miles of wires traversing the battlefield. It was necessary, therefore, to code every message of importance, but coding and decoding messages took time. In October 1918, military officials hatched on a plan to use Indian soldiers to transmit and receive messages using their native languages. There was hardly any chance of the Germans translating these various dialects, and officers of the 142nd Infantry Regiment called on Choctaw soldiers to implement the plan. A major problem confronting these early “code talkers” was that Indian vocabularies of modern military terms were insufficient. Many Indian languages are holophrastic (expressing a whole phrase or sentence in a single word) or polysynthetic (combining several words of a sentence into one word), which made it difficult for messengers to translate English directly into one of the Indian languages. Native American telephone operators overcame the problems by substituting Indian phrases for military terms. They translated “Third Battalion,” for example, as “Three Grains of Corn” and a company-sized body as a “bow”; they referred to a machine gun as “Little gun shoot fast,” casualties as “scalps,” and a poison-gas attack as “bad air.” The 142nd Infantry Regiment first used the Choctaw code talkers in late October 1918 during the Meuse–Argonne Campaign, and the enemy’s complete surprise seemed to justify the experiment’s continuation. In 2008, Congress passed the Code Talker Recognition Act to recognize the service of Native American code talkers who had served in World Wars I and II.18 While Native American telephone operators perplexed German code breakers, the presence of American Indian troops on the Western Front also had an important psychological impact on the enemy. The German people held a long-standing affinity for Native Americans, influenced in part by the western novels of late nineteenth-century German author Karl May. In Winnetou, a novel about a Mescalero Apache chief, May described the Apaches as noble and honorable people but included a lengthy discussion of Apache torture techniques, scalping, and massacres. German military officials reportedly held great respect for Indian soldiers. An officer captured by units in the 32nd Division during the Battle of Soissons asked his captors if the division 87

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consisted of Indians. He commented on the bravery of Indian soldiers and noted that they were superb fighters. In an example of manic paranoia, a German colonel in the 97th Landwehrs ordered his battalion commanders to detail additional snipers during the St. Mihiel Offensive specifically to kill Indian soldiers. The report of a captured American officer whom the Germans had interrogated provides further evidence of German anxiety about fighting Indian soldiers. The officer stated that the Germans were visibly concerned when learning of the high numbers and disposition of American Indians among AEF units. In response, some American military officials, to demoralize the Germans, suggested that a limited number of night raids be conducted using men camouflaged as Indians in full regalia. There is no evidence that unit commanders carried out this rather questionable recommendation.19 The number of Native American casualties in World War I was high. Historian Russel Barsh has estimated that 5 percent of all Indian servicemen—about 600 men—died in action, compared with 1 percent for the AEF as a whole. Other sources indicate a lower casualty rate, closer to 3 percent but still nearly triple that of other groups. Some Indian people may have suffered significantly higher casualty rates. The Pawnees, for example, lost 14 percent of their soldiers, and the various Sioux people lost an average of 10 percent.20 The impact of racial stereotypes played a critical role in the military’s determination of which jobs to assign its Native American soldiers. The romanticized portrayal of Native Americans as “instinctive” soldiers was the most common preconception. A second popular stereotype purported that Native Americans possessed unique physical and emotional attributes that enhanced their abilities as soldiers. These included superior night vision, sense of direction, aim, speed, and stalking abilities. The stereotypical Indian was also brave, daring, cunning, stoic, and “bloodthirsty” and anxious to fight. Indians were also portrayed as enthusiastic “whoopers” and, if one was to believe half of the media’s assertions about Indian troops, there was not a single Native American in the AEF who did not, at one time or another, let out a blood-curling “war whoop” when in the thick of battle. Because of the Indians’ legendary reputation as guerrilla fighters, plus popular stereotypes that encouraged the notion that Indians were “instinctive” soldiers, military officials assigned disproportionately large numbers of Native Americans to dangerous duties as scouts, patrol leaders, snipers, and messengers.21 World War I provided thousands of Native American men with an opportunity to see the world and escape, temporarily at least, the isolation of reservation life. Their wartime experiences introduced soldiers from provincial backgrounds to new foods, equipment, and modern technology, and taught many the skills necessary to make a living in the postwar world. Service in the war also brought American Indians into close contact with other racial groups and broadened their understanding of, and appreciation for, a larger American society. With the possible exception of those men who had attended government-administered Indian boarding schools that catered to a broad spectrum of Indian peoples (such as the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School), military service brought Native Americans from different parts of the country together for the first time. Prior to the war, for example, a Cherokee farmer from Oklahoma was unlikely to know many Sioux people from the Dakotas, Chippewas from Michigan, or Yakimas from Washington. The war years, consequently, may have fostered a sense of pan-Indianism and solidarity among some Native peoples that did not exist before the war.22 Indian veterans returned home with pride, with self-confidence, and with a greater sense of national belonging and acceptance. Wartime experiences had broadened their outlook on life, and many were able to translate their training and newly acquired skills into better jobs and a more secure future at home. Others struggled to readjust to reservation life—haunted perhaps by the recent atrocities they had witnessed on the Western Front. Just a few decades earlier, 88

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many Americans had accepted the contention that Indians were a “Vanishing Race” and that their “inherent” backwardness and unwillingness to accept assimilation would doom them to inevitable extinction. Service during the war, however, offered convincing proof that Native Americans were vibrant and persevering peoples who had much to offer the majority culture. Viewed in this light, the war years may have helped hasten the evolution of popular misconceptions from the “Vanishing Race” scenario back to other stereotypes that glorified the martial and virile attributes of Indian men—stereotypes that had important consequences for Indian soldiers and the types of duties they performed in World War I and in future wars.23 Native Americans also made substantial contributions on the home front. Reservation families were active in Red Cross work, and several thousand Indian families bought Liberty bonds and war stamps. Indian women knitted socks, mufflers, sweaters, and hospital garments for American soldiers, while Indian farmers stepped up production of agricultural products. For many tribes, the war years brought about a renewal of customs and traditions they had not practiced in a generation. Indian veterans of World War I, for example, returned home to purification rituals, victory dances, feasts, and giveaways. A fortunate few even gained admittance to previously inaccessible warrior societies that required young men to demonstrate bravery on the battlefield. Other veterans returned home bearing deep physical and emotional scars that undermined their reintegration into society. Military service during World War I, therefore, can be seen as a catalyst for cultural renewal among Indian peoples, an irony considering the goals of policymakers who had hoped that military service would encourage assimilation.24 The bulk of archival materials related to Native American military service during World War I is located in the National Archives in Washington, DC, especially in Record Group 120—Records of the Historical Section of the General Staff (American Expeditionary Force). Of particular value are the documents prepared by John R. Eddy, a former Indian office employee who served in the 39th Infantry Regiment. After the war, Eddy sent over 1,500 questionnaires to combat units seeking information about the contributions of Indian servicemen.25 The Records of the Provost Marshal General’s Office, 1917–1919 (Record Group 163) contains valuable information about the draft and enlistment of Indian soldiers. For information about the home front and the contributions of Native American families to the war effort, see Record Group 75—Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A wonderful depository of visual artifacts (100 portraits of Indian soldiers, and hundreds of battlefield photos), as well as the papers of Joseph K. Dixon, are located in the William Hammond Mathers Museum at the University of Indiana. To date, there are two full-length monographs that detail American Indian service in World War I—these include Thomas A. Britten’s American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997) and Susan Applegate Krouse’s North American Indians in the Great War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). For an overview of Native American participation in the military in all wars, see Al Carroll’s Medicine Bags and Dog Tags: American Indian Veterans from Colonial Times to the Second Iraq War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). An excellent documentary video of American Indian contributions in twentieth-century wars is Patty Loew’s Way of the Warrior (PBS, 2007).

Notes 1 Thomas A. Britten, American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 13–14. 2 Michael L. Tate, “From Scout to Doughboy: The National Debate over Integrating American Indians into the Military, 1891–1918,” Western Historical Quarterly 17 (October 1986): 417–437; Britten, American Indians in World War I, 17–22. 3 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 22–24.

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4 Tate, “From Scout to Doughboy,” 419–420; Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 198; Lonnie White, “Indian Soldiers of the 36th Division,” Military History of Texas and the Southwest 15 (1979): 55. 5 For a more complete discussion of Dixon’s efforts prior to World War I, see chapter 2 of Britten, American Indians in World War I, 28–50. 6 Jennings C. Wise, The Red Man in the New World Drama (Washington, DC: W.F. Roberts Co., 1931), 524–525; Russell L. Barsh, “American Indians in the Great War,” Ethnohistory 38 (Summer 1991): 277–278; Thomas A. Britten, “The Creek Draft Rebellion of 1918: Wartime Hysteria and IndianBaiting in WWI Oklahoma,” The Chronicles of Oklahoma (Summer 2001): 200–215. 7 Barsh, “American Indians in the Great War,” 278–279; Britten, American Indians in World War I, 61–68; Susan Applegate Krouse, North American Indians in the Great War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 17. 8 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 73; John R. Finger, “Conscription, Citizenship, and Civilization: World War One and the Eastern Band of Cherokee,” North Carolina Historical Review 63 (July 1986): 302. 9 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 75–76. 10 Krouse, North American Indians in the Great War, 73; Britten, American Indians in World War I, 76. 11 Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, Bulletin No. 15, American Indians in the Great War (1922): 2; Britten, American Indians in World War I, 76–77. 12 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 77. 13 Ibid., 78–79. 14 Edward M. Coffman, The War to End all Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 262–283, 299–302, 323–324; Britten, American Indians in World War I, 78–80. 15 “Indian Yank Helped Take 171 Boches,” The Oklahoman (June 29, 1919): 29; Britten, American Indians in World War I, 80–81. 16 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 81; Krouse, North American Indians in the Great War, 195. 17 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 83. 18 Ibid., 106–107. 19 Ibid., 108–109. 20 Ibid., 82; Krouse, North American Indians in the Great War, 80. 21 Britten, American Indians in World War I, 100–102. 22 Ibid., 83–85. 23 Ibid., 85. 24 Ibid., 148–151. 25 Ibid., 109–111.

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10 WOODROW WILSON’S FOURTEEN POINTS AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS Ross A. Kennedy

During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson developed an ambitious program to transform the international system in a way that he believed would end balance-of-power politics forever. Rooted in both national security fears and in a faith in American exceptionalism, Wilson developed his program before the United States entered the war, but it reached its fullest expression in the president’s Fourteen Points Address in January 1918. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Wilson managed to achieve much of his vision, including most notably the creation of a new world peacekeeping organization, the League of Nations. But he failed to convince the United States Senate to ratify his work. On one level, this defeat resulted from Wilson’s refusal to compromise over reservations that Republican leaders wanted to attach to America’s commitment to the League. More basically, however, the Senate’s rejection of the League reflected internal contradictions and ambiguities that had marred Wilson’s peace program from its inception. Regardless of Wilson’s good intentions, he failed to find a way to escape from the same power politics he sought to reform, thus making it relatively easy for liberal and conservative critics to block the creation of a Wilsonian world order.1 President Wilson’s determination to reform international politics derived in large part from his analysis of the nature of the existing international system. In common with many progressives, Wilson thought that endless “competitions for power” characterized the interactions between the great nations of Europe and Asia. This competition featured imperialism, alliances, and arms races. Anti-democratic groups within states, such as professional military men, munitions makers, and privileged financial interests all benefited from these policies and promoted them, in Wilson’s view. More fundamentally, however, power politics occurred because of the lack of any real structure of organized security in the world. Despite the existence of international law, anarchy prevailed in world affairs, which meant that nations had no choice but to engage in power politics to preserve their security. Unfortunately, their efforts were futile in Wilson’s view because the balance of power was inherently unstable. The intrigue, fears, and arms races bound up with power politics made the peaceful settlement of disputes almost impossible, as the events of 1914 clearly showed; “everything in general,” Wilson asserted in 1916, everything in the existing order of power politics, caused the war between the Central Powers and the Allies. If power politics persisted after the current conflict ended, Wilson predicted, “sooner or later, you will have just such another war.”2 91

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Wilson also believed that the United States could no longer isolate itself from the tensions and upheavals inherent in power politics. The war that broke out in Europe in 1914 had an immediate impact on the U.S. economy, as it disrupted financial markets and temporarily brought America’s trade with Europe to a halt. By late 1914, U.S. trade with the Allies resumed in earnest due to large-scale British and French purchases of American supplies. This led to other problems, however. As they bought U.S. goods, the British also blockaded the coastline of northwest Europe to prevent the Germans from accessing the U.S. market, which led to violations of American neutral rights. The Germans, for their part, unleashed submarine warfare against Allied shipping to cut off Britain’s overseas trade. The Germans sunk both merchant and passenger ships, such as the Lusitania, killing over 1,000 civilians, including many Americans. At times in 1915 and 1916, the submarine campaign brought Germany and the United States to the brink of war. As he struggled to deal with these crises, Wilson perceived that the way the war ended could have important implications for U.S. security. If Germany won, it might pursue ambitions in the Western Hemisphere. To guard against this potential threat, the president feared, Americans would have “to take such measures of defence here as would be fatal to our form of Government and American ideals.”3 An Allied victory would not pose any immediate threat to the United States, as Wilson thought that neither Britain nor its partners wanted to extend their empires into the Americas. But the president still worried about the long-term consequences of a crushing Allied defeat of the Germans. In the wake of a decisive victory, the Allies might be tempted to enhance their own power by imposing a humiliating, severe peace upon Germany, an “unjust peace . . . sure to invite further calamities.”4 Sooner or later, the bitter and enraged Germans would try to overturn the settlement, provoking a new round of arms races and, eventually, a second global war. Wilson doubted that the United States could stay out of another world conflict; one way or another, it would be drawn into the conflagration. This logic implied that the existing system of international politics itself was a threat to the United States. Unless it changed, U.S. security could not be assured. Wilson’s sense of American identity and destiny reinforced his conclusion that power politics needed to be banished from world affairs. He deeply believed that the United States had a unique character among nations and a duty “to do mankind service.” America’s exceptionalism, he claimed, lay in its political system of democratic federalism; its belief in equality of opportunity for its citizens; its diverse population; and, finally, its lack of territorial ambition and its detachment from the immediate causes and issues involved in the war. These peculiarities suggested to Wilson that the United States had a special mission to perform for others, “a mission of peace and good will.” As “the champions of humanity and of the rights of man,” Americans had a moral obligation to lead the world out of the balance-of-power politics that had produced the war and into a new era of peace.5 Wilson developed his ideas about how to reform power politics over the course of 1914 to 1917. International reform was possible, he asserted, because “the world is no longer divided into little circles of interest. . . . The world is linked together in a common life and interest such as humanity never saw before.”6 The unprecedented interdependency of the modern world meant that wars were difficult to contain; war anywhere affected everyone, or at least had the potential to do so. All nations, therefore, had a vital stake in deterring or suppressing conflict anywhere it occurred. Recognizing this reality, Wilson wanted nations to pledge that whenever disputes arose between them, they would not resort to war to settle the issue, but instead would submit it to a public hearing. They should also guarantee each other’s territorial integrity and political independence. Any nation violating these pledges would face economic and military sanctions imposed by the rest of the world. This new system of collective security, Wilson 92

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suggested, would also uphold the principles of equal rights for large and small states, government by consent of the governed, and non-discrimination in international trade. Finally, all nations should commit themselves to negotiations aimed at reducing armaments. With all these measures in place and institutionalized in a global peace league, Wilson believed, power politics would end; international relations would be structured not by a balance of power, but by “a community of power, . . . an organized common peace.”7 The conditions under which the world war ended would heavily affect whether or not a peace league got off the ground at all, however. Wilson spelled out his views on this crucial issue in a major speech to the United States Senate on January 22, 1917. A new world order based upon collective security, the president argued, required that the war end in a “peace without victory.” A peace “imposed upon the vanquished” would never last, according to Wilson. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. The principles underlying the peace settlement, he argued, had to be the same ones that guided a peace league—the principles of equality of rights, self-government, an open door for trade, and disarmament. Aside from a suggestion that an independent Poland be created, Wilson’s discussion of peace terms also implied that neither group of belligerents should gain any territory from the war. “Peace without victory,” in short, meant a peace based upon “the principles of mankind” and a repudiation of territorial conquest.8 Prior to April 1917, President Wilson believed that he could best promote his peace program by keeping the United States neutral in the war and trying to mediate an end to the conflict. Because of his fear that a German victory in the war would pose immediate dangers to the United States and his view that Germany’s submarine attacks were inhumane, however, Wilson found it impossible to be truly impartial toward the belligerents. Over the course of late 1914 to mid-1916, the president acquiesced in Britain’s illegal blockade practices, threatened Berlin over its U-boat campaign, and insisted that any peace settlement be based in part upon Germany giving up all of the territorial gains it had made in the war. The task of ending power politics evidently had to begin by shifting the balance of power against the Germans. To be certain, Wilson tried to maintain the appearance of impartiality by issuing mild protests to London over British violations of American neutral rights and by claiming that American exceptionalism made it “a true friend to all the nations of the world,” including Germany.9 These efforts failed to persuade German leaders, however. By early 1917, they considered Wilson less of a neutral advocate of international reform than a de facto ally of Great Britain. Seeing little to lose by going to war against the United States, they ordered their submarines to commence an all-out campaign to blockade the British, which led to the sinking of several American merchant ships in March 1917. These attacks, along with German intrigue with Mexico against the United States, led Wilson to conclude that his effort to achieve international reform through mediation of the war had failed. Persisting along that path, he decided, would just invite further German attacks and destroy his influence with the Allies; only by entering the war could he now hope to attain his goals.10 The chain of events that produced America’s intervention into the war, as well as Germany’s victory over revolutionary Russia in early 1918, led Wilson to reformulate his peace program. Most importantly, the president perceived that a stable peace required greater weakening of Germany than he had anticipated prior to April 1917. Announced on January 8, 1918, in his famous Fourteen Points Address to the Senate, Wilson’s revised war aims implied that Germany 93

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might lose its overseas colonies and some of its pre-war territory in the west and the east; that the Central Powers would have to “restore” Belgium and northern France, which suggested they would have to pay war reparations; and that Austria-Hungary and Turkey, Germany’s allies, might lose territory or lose central authority over some of the nationalities in their empires.11 The specifics of these various points were vague, but their basic thrust was clear: at war with a powerful, aggressive Germany, the peace settlement Wilson now envisioned included both indemnities and territorial annexations of one kind or another at the expense of the Central Powers. The president did not view his tougher stance toward Germany as inconsistent with his quest for international reform, however. Indeed, his Fourteen Points elaborated on the principles of a new world order. These included “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”; free seas; the removal as far as possible of economic barriers between nations and the establishment of equality in trade conditions; armament reduction; and the formation of a league of nations to uphold peace. No less than before 1917, Wilson still wanted Germany included in this new international system; excluding Germany, he thought, risked turning the peace league into an alliance and thus perpetuating power politics. Since Wilson did not trust the existing autocratic government of Germany, he hoped—and publicly stated—that as Germany’s armies were defeated, its people would turn against their government, democratize it, and accept the Fourteen Points as the basis for peace negotiations. Peace talks with a democratized Germany would facilitate Germany’s reconciliation with its enemies and allow for its integration into the new world system. If Germany did not democratize, Wilson would not negotiate with it over the meaning of the Fourteen Points. Even in that event, however, Wilson still hoped to advance the aim of reconciliation by blocking Allied territorial and economic demands upon Germany that Wilson thought were sure to embitter the Germans. The United States had “no jealousy of German greatness,” Wilson declared, and the German people should trust that his interpretation of the Fourteen Points would not in any way harm Germany’s “legitimate influence or power.” With America’s seal of approval upon the peace settlement, hopefully the German people would embrace it, regardless of the penalties it imposed upon them.12 As it turned out, the peace process ending the war proceeded along lines that largely met with Wilson’s approval. In October 1918, with their army in retreat in northern France, the Germans installed a new, more democratically representative government, and appealed to Wilson for an armistice and peace negotiations based on the Fourteen Points. Suspicious of German motives, doubting the genuineness of Germany’s democratic reforms, and under domestic pressure to secure an outright surrender from Berlin, Wilson insisted that the armistice terms leave Germany militarily prostrate on the Western Front. To leave the door open for reconciliation, however, the president supported only a limited occupation of German territory. Similarly, at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson excluded the Germans from the draft treaty negotiations and agreed to terms that weakened and punished Germany. These included, among other things, extensive limits on German armaments; the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland; France’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine; the creation of a Polish corridor to the sea that cut through German territory; and Germany’s obligation, based on its responsibility for the war, to pay reparations to the Allies. At the same time, however, Wilson successfully opposed provisions he thought unfair or unduly provocative to the Germans. For example, France had to settle for a fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland rather than separate it from German sovereignty, and the League of Nations, rather than the Allies, enforced or administered various provisions of the treaty. Wilson did agree to buttress the Rhineland occupation with a U.S. pledge to aid France in case of German aggression, but this security treaty would come into effect only with the approval of the League. Finally, although the 94

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Germans did not immediately gain entrance into the League of Nations, they would get admitted once they demonstrated they were carrying out the provisions of the peace treaty. To Wilson, the Versailles Treaty might not have been ideal, but in simultaneously controlling, punishing, and conciliating the Germans, it still provided a sound basis for creating a new world order free from power politics. The structure of the new system was established in the first section of the treaty, in the constitution or “covenant” of the League of Nations. It had twenty-six articles, including one, added at Wilson’s request, which stated that the covenant did not affect the “validity” of the Monroe Doctrine (Article 21). In its crucial provisions, the members of the League pledged to “respect and preserve” each other’s “territorial integrity and political independence” (Article 10) and to follow a conflict resolution procedure prior to going to war (Articles 12, 13, and 15). If a member resorted to hostilities in disregard of this procedure, all the other League members would immediately boycott and isolate the offender (Article 16). The covenant also declared that “any war or threat of war” was “a matter of concern to the whole League” (Article 11). Organizationally, the League was divided into an Executive Council, consisting of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, plus four smaller powers, and an Assembly. Either body could discuss matters affecting world peace; the Council specifically would “advise” members how to uphold Article 10. The Assembly could also urge the League to reconsider any treaties “whose continuance might endanger the peace of the world” (Article 19).13 Paradoxically, Wilson considered the covenant both a “living thing,” capable of being adapted to changing circumstances, and “a definite guarantee of peace.”14 The covenant’s revolutionary character, in Wilson’s view, chiefly derived from America’s commitment to its precepts of collective security, even if that commitment was only general in nature. Under Article 10 in particular, the United States pledged itself to the principle that settling disputes by force, without a hearing, was wrong and that aggression—the strong preying on the weak—was wrong too. This meant that in each case where violations of the covenant appeared to occur, the United States was required to take notice and to assess the situation in question, in consultation with other members of the League Council. The covenant thus created, in Wilson’s words, “an attitude of comradeship and protection among the members of the League, which in its very nature is moral and not legal.” Although no automatic sanctions were triggered by apparent violations of Article 10, Wilson was confident that America’s adoption of this “attitude” gave the League the ability to deter aggressors. Any potential wrongdoer would know that its actions would be judged by the United States. If the U.S. decided that a breach of Article 10 had occurred, it would then bring its moral, economic, and, if necessary, military power to bear upon the aggressor. The rest of the world, Wilson believed, would undoubtedly follow America’s lead. If Germany “had known that there was a possibility of that sort of concurrence,” Wilson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “she never would have dared to do what she did.” A future potential aggressor would never dare to act either.15 Both products of President Wilson’s negotiations at Paris—the treaty terms dealing with Germany and the covenant of the League of Nations—provoked intense controversy in the United States. On one side, many liberal peace progressives, such as the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard and Senator Robert La Follette (R-WI), charged that the treaty provisions aimed at weakening and punishing Germany contradicted the goal of ending power politics. The settlement, they argued, was a peace of “undisguised vengeance” against the Germans. It was shaped not by the Fourteen Points but by the secret treaties of the Allies, and so it aimed to advance Allied imperialism while permanently destroying Germany as a great power. Given the 95

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character of the peace treaty and Germany’s exclusion from the League of Nations, the League could not be an agency of international reform. It was simply part of the “old, old scheme” of power politics, scorned La Follette. It was an armed alliance designed to uphold an unjust status quo. Rather than advance international reform, by joining the League, the United States would just become a pawn in the strategic machinations of Britain and France.16 Conservatives centered in the Republican Party attacked the Versailles Treaty from a different direction. Led by former Secretary of War Elihu Root and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, conservatives had little problem with the peace terms imposed upon Germany, applauding them for weakening the Germans and strengthening the Allies. But they doubted the practicality and wisdom of the League of Nations. Most importantly, they questioned the premise of collective security that nations were so interdependent that they each had a vital interest in stopping conflict anywhere in the world it occurred. “The people of the United States have no direct interest in the distribution of territory in the Balkans or the control of Morocco,” Root asserted, “and the peoples of Europe have no direct interest in questions between Chile and Peru, or between the United States and Columbia.” If, as Wilson suggested, the covenant was so flexible that nations could opt not to uphold Article 10 and still not be in breach of the covenant, then conservatives doubted that most League members would intervene against aggression that did not threaten their immediate interests. On the other hand, if the covenant’s obligation to uphold Article 10 was ironclad, then the United States could find itself wasting treasure and lives in armed conflicts around the world that were really none of its concern. Collective security, in sum, was either “a pipe dream” sure to fail in a dispute of any importance or a dangerous, limitless alliance.17 Critics of the president adopted various positions regarding the Senate’s disposition of the treaty. “Irreconcilables” opposed the treaty completely and worked for its defeat. Peace progressives within this group called for the United States to reduce its own armaments as an example to others, oppose imperialism and counter-revolutionary interventions, and work on perfecting democracy at home. Conservative irreconcilables saw French independence as important to U.S. security and wanted to establish a specific American commitment to consult with the Allies in the event of a future threat to Europe’s peace. Lodge and Root agreed with this outlook. Perceiving that most Americans wanted to join the League, however, they focused their attention on attaching “reservations” to the Senate’s ratification of the treaty. In their final form, the reservations, among other things, declared that the United States would not submit any question related to the Monroe Doctrine to the League’s conflict resolution procedures and that it assumed “no obligation to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country . . . under the provisions of Article 10.”18 The United States would join the League, in other words, but only if it exempted itself from key parts of the covenant. Wilson did not appreciate his critics, calling them “contemptible” people with “poor little minds.”19 Since the Senate had to ratify the treaty, however, he could not afford to ignore them. In defense of the terms imposed upon Germany, Wilson emphasized that the German people had committed a crime against humanity in starting the war and had to be punished; the terms imposed on them were properly “severe,” he explained, but “not unjust.”20 With regard to the League, in the spring and summer of 1919, the president met with senators at the White House to dissuade them of attaching any substantive reservations to the covenant, arguing that American rights were already sufficiently protected. Determined to whip up public opinion against his opponents, Wilson then set out in early September on a grueling national speaking tour to defend his views. His health rapidly deteriorated under the stress of the tour and he collapsed on September 26. A few days later, after his return to Washington, 96

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Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him totally incapacitated for more than a month. By this point, he hoped some Republicans would negotiate with his supporters on a Democratic version of reservations. But it was too late—Lodge had already largely unified Senate Republicans behind his own program. Interpreting Lodge’s reservation to Article 10 as a nullification of the treaty, Wilson ordered Senate Democrats to oppose it. They obeyed; the treaty with Lodge’s reservations consequently failed to get the two-thirds majority necessary to pass, as did the treaty with no reservations at all. Negotiations to reach a compromise failed; the treaty again fell short of a two-thirds majority in March 1920. The Senate had spoken: the United States had rejected the Versailles Treaty and would not join the League of Nations. With this outcome, President Wilson’s quest to reform international politics essentially came to an end, although he did try, unsuccessfully, to turn the 1920 presidential election into a referendum on the League. Wilson’s efforts to change the international system had been bold and innovative. His peace program was also problematic, however. According to the premises of collective security, the world was so interdependent that any war, anywhere, threatened everyone. “War” was the enemy, not any specific state. Yet Wilson demanded that international reform begin with the retraction of Germany’s power. Indeed, after 1917, Wilson wanted Germany’s power reduced to a level below what it possessed at the start of the war. To make sure that Germany carried out the peace terms designed to weaken it, Wilson also wanted it kept out of the League for the foreseeable future. For all appearances, then, war was not the main threat to civilization in the modern world. Germany was the true danger, and the League, supposedly the vehicle for ending power politics, looked a lot like an alliance to marshal the power of the victors against their defeated foe. In addition to this glaring inconsistency in his approach to international reform, Wilson also contradicted collective security theory by agreeing to exempt the Monroe Doctrine from the League’s authority. His interpretation of Article 10 appeared to betray a lack of commitment to collective security as well, as it suggested that a nation could refuse to respond to the League’s call for action against an aggressor and still be in compliance with the covenant. As conservative internationalists suggested, this position seriously undermined the credibility of the League’s collective security regime. Despite its shortcomings, President Wilson’s approach to international relations cast a long shadow over the interwar period and beyond. He refused to allow the security treaty with France to move forward in the Senate if, as Lodge wanted, it was detached from the League. Along with the defeat of the League, this meant that the U.S. had no security commitment to the French as they faced the task of enforcing the Versailles Treaty against the Germans. In the 1920s, U.S. leaders focused not on specific security issues in Europe but on the question of how best to pursue international reform while avoiding entanglement in European political matters. Few questioned the Wilsonian axioms that the balance of power inevitably led to war, that power politics could and should somehow be ended, and that active involvement in power politics by the United States would ruin its democracy. In the 1930s, as Germany and other nations violently challenged the international order established at Versailles, Americans divided into camps favoring either economic cooperation with collective security efforts overseas or a policy of armed isolationism. Only after World War II began did Franklin Roosevelt begin to articulate America’s interest in a balance of power in Europe. Like Wilson, however, he also emphasized that any war, anywhere, could threaten everyone. He also vaguely spoke of creating a new collective security system once Germany was defeated. As the United States entered a new era of war and Cold War, then, it did so guided by strategic conceptions associated more with Woodrow Wilson than anyone else. Whether or not Wilsonianism would serve America’s interests, however, remained to be seen. 97

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Notes 1 The historiography on Wilson’s statecraft during World War I is rich and varied. For works that emphasize the role of missionary exceptionalism in Wilson’s peace program from a sympathetic point of view, see Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1979). For a scholar with a more critical perspective, see Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For an interesting work stressing both missionary exceptionalism and trade concerns, see N. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). For an interpretation emphasizing concerns about militarism and national power in Wilson’s diplomacy, see Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009). 2 Wilson quotes in Kennedy, Will to Believe, 11. 3 Sir Cecil Arthur Spring Rice to Sir Edward Grey, September 3, 1914, in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1994), 30: 472. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson will hereafter be abbreviated PWW. 4 “A Memorandum by Herbert Bruce Brougham,” December 14, 1914, PWW 31: 459. 5 Wilson, “Address in Pittsburgh on Preparedness,” January 29, 1916, PWW 36: 34; Wilson, “An Address on Preparedness to the Manhattan Club,” November 4, 1915, PWW 35: 169; Wilson, “An Address in Cleveland on Preparedness,” January 29, 1916, PWW 36: 48. 6 Wilson, “An Address in Omaha,” October 5, 1916, PWW 38: 348. 7 Wilson, “An Address to the Senate,” January 22, 1917, PWW 40: 536. 8 Wilson, “An Address to the Senate,” January 22, 1917, PWW 40: 536, 539, and see 536–539, passim. 9 Wilson, “An Annual Message to Congress,” December 8, 1914, PWW 31: 424. On the British blockade, see John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). On Wilson’s peace proposals, see Kennedy, Will to Believe, chapters 4–5. 10 For the war decision, see Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson, 5 volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947–1965), 5: 290–531. 11 Wilson, “An Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” January 8, 1918, PWW 45: 537 and see 537–538, passim. 12 Wilson, “An Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” January 8, 1918, PWW 45: 536, 538, and see 536–539, passim. 13 “The Covenant of the League of Nations,” April 28, 1919, PWW 58: 195, 191, 195, and see 188–198, passim. 14 Wilson, “An Address to the Third Plenary Session of the Peace Conference,” February 14, 1919, PWW 55: 175. 15 “A Conversation with Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” August 19, 1919, PWW 62: 354, 389. 16 Villard and La Follette quotes in Kennedy, Will to Believe, 203–204. 17 Elihu Root in Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott, eds., Men and Policies: Addresses by Elihu Root (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926), 264 and see 262–265, passim; Senator Frank Brandegee, Congressional Record, 66th Congress, 1st session, November 19, 1919, 8776. 18 Lodge reservation in Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), 388–389. 19 Wilson, “Remarks to Members of the Democratic National Committee,” February 28, 1919, PWW 55: 323. 20 Wilson, “Address to the Columbus Chamber of Commerce,” September 4, 1919, PWW 63: 7.

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PART IV

America Between the World Wars

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11 THE UNITED STATES DURING THE INTERWAR YEARS 1919–1941 Kenneth Weisbrode

Over 100,000 Americans died in the Great War. The figure is a fraction of the number of British, French, German, Russian and other victims. However, to many Americans, it was large enough. The country entered the war late and with less conviction than it had in other wars before and after. It was not long before public opinion turned against it. That was not surprising with so many veterans—many of whom had never before left home—returning with, among other things, the deadly Spanish influenza. Americans quickly put the collective memory of the war behind them, or so it seemed. Posterity has recalled the decade of the 1920s almost as a long, escapist holiday.1 Following recovery from postwar recession, the economy boomed, apparently faster and further than at any point in recent memory. The decade was a golden age for the American consumer, especially, as middle-class households acquired multiple appliances, found more time and opportunities for leisure and invested in the stock market. President Warren G. Harding invented a name for the country’s postwar condition: “normalcy.” It does not seem normal at all in retrospect. Americans had long been accustomed to booms and busts, but the boom of the 1920s was larger and more widespread than most had ever experienced. The subsequent bust was so severe that it became known by a superlative: “the Great Depression.” How was this condition reflected in the country’s diplomatic and military history? The interwar years, as they later came to be known, have been characterized as the age of isolationism.2 Americans turned their backs on the world—especially Europe. According to them, entering the last war had been a mistake and European power politics had been responsible. Woodrow Wilson’s idealism had been an even bigger mistake in seeking to revolutionize them. Many people pretended that it was better just to forget about it all and return, as Harding had put it, to a splendid, even superior, condition antebellum. Yet the country was not isolated, at least not in any literal sense, during these years. Its growing economy had become tied closely to others. Its products spread around the world. Its cultural exports—notably Hollywood films—rose to a global position which they never yielded.3 And, as most historians will agree, its stock market crash of 1929 was a major factor in causing the global economic depression. Nor was the U.S. government as isolated as the rhetoric of the time made it seem. The United States had rejected membership in the League of Nations, yet Americans served in its secretariat, on its various committees, and as observers at its Geneva headquarters.4 The U.S. 101

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Foreign Service was created in 1924 through a merger of the consular and diplomatic corps in an effort to raise the professional standards of the country’s foreign representation. This step was not matched in the War or the Navy departments, which would not unify until after the Second World War. Nevertheless, the military services, especially the Army, oversaw important innovations during these years, including the reforms of the National Defense Act of 1920 and the establishment of the Army Industrial College four years later. While it is possible to claim that no single government department during these years reoriented itself in such a way as to presume the kind of American hegemony that would emerge by mid-century, neither can one demonstrate an official apparatus in stasis, or one that was blind to major important international developments. Several of the institutions that would play a major role during the second half of the century began to prosper during these years. The League fight brought the old Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the lead of foreign policy. The war and the accompanying Red Scare led to the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under a young and enthusiastic chief, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI would extend its remit beyond the country’s borders, namely to Latin America, and would lay a foundation for foreign intelligence activity.5 Even the small Department of Commerce, under another Hoover—Herbert (no relation)—promoted America’s official presence overseas. In most of these organizations, there was the quiet, earnest incubation of a generation of public servants who became determined, after the Second World War, to succeed with the policies and initiatives they had begun before the war, namely with the combination of collective security, trade promotion and humanitarianism that later came to define the nominal American Century. In this one respect, the interwar period was critical. It did not represent the pinnacle of American statesmanship, however. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge have appeared, respectively, as a do-nothing hedonist and as just a do-nothing. Herbert Hoover, whose remarkable political rise after heading Belgian and later Russian wartime food relief was ultimately eclipsed by the blame he got for the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt’s days as a world statesman were ahead of him. For now he was “Dr. New Deal.” The Secretaries of State—Charles Evans Hughes, Henry Stimson and Cordell Hull— were capable, serious men.6 But none has stood in the eyes of posterity as equal to their postwar successors: George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, or even with important predecessors from the previous generation, such as Elihu Root and John Hay. Recall also that few Americans knew the names of the Secretaries of State or War during this time, whereas many knew the names of the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture. The national mind was focused inward. The interwar period, therefore, saw little in the way of statesmanship, and for this reason most surveys of the twentieth century, like George Kennan’s classic book of essays on American diplomacy and Warren Cohen’s short summary of this period, depict it as something akin to a minor, even unfortunate, interregnum.7 Against this view are more recent attempts by Patrick Cohrs and, to a less pronounced extent, by Zara Steiner in her two-volume Oxford History, to situate the American contribution in an international context.8 Here one finds a more sophisticated, albeit incomplete, effort by the era’s statesmen and diplomats at devising a pattern of multilateral diplomacy and a strong American role in it. The period divides into three parts. There were the immediate interwar years that featured the so-called spirit of Locarno—a false optimism that the Great War really could become the war to end all wars, at least in Europe. To the extent similar views were held in America, they resembled more a sense of relief, and renunciation, of any responsibility the United States may have had for underwriting a new security order. This was followed across the Atlantic by the crisis of the early 1930s, culminating in the fall of the Weimar Republic and “revisionism” in Germany, Italy and Japan. The third period came with the onset of war. The reaction of the 102

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United States to these challenges continued to be one of self-imposed distance, with three important exceptions: diplomatic normalization with the Soviet Union; financial assistance to Europe; and disarmament. The first of these took place in 1933 after prolonged negotiations and resulted in the establishment of an embassy in Moscow and rudimentary bilateral relations. The second involved a mechanism which became increasingly common in the twentieth century: the public-private “plan.” In this instance, there was the Dawes Plan—named for its head, the politician Charles Dawes—which restructured German reparations in 1924, followed, in 1929, by the Young Plan—named for its head, the industrialist Owen Young. Neither plan worked, at least not entirely, because the balance-of-payments problem continued to worsen. It was this problem and the associated co-dependency between the American speculative boom and European finances which, according to Herbert Hoover, at least, was primarily responsible for the crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression. Hoover never relented in his view that the crisis was rooted in Europe, and therefore had to be solved multilaterally. Roosevelt saw the matter differently and, when he sabotaged the London Economic Conference of 1933 by refusing to set the value of the dollar, he buried whatever longer term gains that might have been had with the Dawes and Young plans. Both nevertheless set a precedent for what would later be called American “engagement” in European, and later international, affairs: functional, circumstantial and semi-official.9 How much of it was by choice and how much was by necessity is open to question. It was neither fully retail nor wholesale but was, on balance, a deliberate effort to extend some relief to the German and other European economies and, in the process, tie them closer to America. The third exception to isolationism was perhaps less exceptional than emblematic. This was the further shift in tone of American diplomacy toward a moralistic extreme with the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, which called for war itself to be made illegal. The Pact was dismissed with several insults—for example, “an international kiss”—so it is difficult for later generations to appreciate how earnestly it was promoted at the time or how popular it was, notably among isolationists.10 Better known to posterity is Kennan’s denunciation of “the red skein” of legalismmoralism that it came to symbolize. The skein did not start with Woodrow Wilson, nor did it end with Wilson’s failure to persuade his country to join the League of Nations. It was more complex than its rhetoric suggests. It did fail to prevent another, even bigger war. This verdict assumes, however, that anything could have prevented one, for even if the collective security provisions of the League had performed perfectly during these years, it is not certain that they, or any other combination of power, would have swayed the passions of the revisionist powers or deterred them from their course of action. On the other hand, the rhetoric of multilateralism, including collective security, inspired—or, put more accurately, its rejection in 1919–1920 inspired—a lasting effort to change the rules of world order, today called global governance, which then prevailed. That this effort took place behind what some may have regarded as the mask of moralism does not diminish its significance. The abovementioned financial diplomacy was one manifestation of it. Another was the great cause of the interwar period: disarmament. Public opinion saw militarism and the arms race at the root of the disaster of the Great War. It was not sufficient to outlaw war; its principal causes also had to be removed. Like that of collective security, the record of disarmament during the interwar period was negative. The revisionists went on rearming. However, if one considers these early multilateral steps as having set a precedent for conference diplomacy, then they were partial successes. There were earlier precedents, of course: but unlike the Congress of Vienna or similar gatherings, the negotiations now centered upon functional, rather than territorial, questions. In fact, the latter were subordinated to the former, whereas in the past it had been the other way around when nation-states 103

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sought to arm (or fight) in order to achieve maximum gains, usually colored on a map. Now there was a new map where adjusting borders became less important than solving common problems. “Questions” (e.g., the German or Eastern question) lost their primary territorial vocation. Also, conference diplomacy, for better or worse, had to withstand public scrutiny. At the Washington Naval Conference in 1921, the United States government dictated to the Europeans and the Japanese the amount of destroyers and other naval armaments they were meant to have. According to this arrangement, there would be a 5–5–3 ratio among the United States, Britain and Japan for warships. This was followed by another conference in London in 1930 and by the general disarmament conferences from 1932 to 1937 under the League’s auspices.11 The United States, though still not a member of the League, took an active part in these conferences and its diplomats played important roles in reconciling the positions of other members. The significance of conference diplomacy at this time came less from its tangible achievements—most of which were eclipsed by the political crises of the mid-late 1930s—than by their having taken place alongside the professionalization of American diplomacy and the self-conscious recalibration, or, as some would argue, the substitution, of its global power for a European-dominated world. This was accompanied in turn by a rise in the prestige of public service, notably in international affairs, and that would play an important role in shaping policy continuity through patterns of mentorship, professional patronage and “like-mindedness” among the small but growing network of opinion leaders and officials that later became known as the American Establishment.12 This is another way of saying that the post-Second World War system of global and regional institutions, norms and assumptions, much of which was crafted by the United States and its allies, actually began well before that war. It had as much to do with the perceived failures of Wilsonianism and the “New Diplomacy” it touted as with the inherent nature of the efforts to devise a viable alternative. These efforts and the new institutions that housed them—on subjects from labor to health to narcotics to culture—joined with the establishment of conference diplomacy as an innovative, powerful and especially transatlantic method of international relations that proved to be rather durable and one in which Americans were enthusiastic participants. Alongside moralism and legalism, therefore, was a strong and growing strain of what social scientists later called functionalism.13 For one reason or another, internationally minded Americans—from the missionaries and their expatriate offspring who had long conducted what today one might call retail diplomacy in remote areas, to bankers and financial advisors, to the new and self-consciously melioristic breed of public servants—appeared to think that they were particularly good at it. To the extent that American military officers were also sent as advisors, governors, instructors and attachés abroad, a similar, “can-do” attitude was also prevalent. The principal ‘isms of the interwar years, however, are generally recalled as being of a different nature: fascism, communism, imperialism, socialism, liberalism. With the exception of the final ‘ism, many Americans also preferred to keep their distance from them. As the political crises in Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain and Central Europe worsened in the 1930s, the position of the United States—notably the United States Congress—was one of vocal and doctrinaire neutrality. That neutrality policy had failed so badly during the previous war was not considered by most in Congress to have been a liability. Instead isolationists insisted that Wilson had not done enough to enforce it. With a series of neutrality acts from 1935 to 1939, Congress made it difficult to undertake foreign trade and travel. Like the Kellogg–Briand Pact, these acts may be seen as misguided attempts to order the world by fiat—“peace by incantation,” as it was known, and consistent with the American tendency, as Prohibition showed, to legislate away the world’s ills. But there was something more to it. America was never “isolationist” in the literal sense. A better, though less euphonious term was the one used by the then-isolationist 104

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Senator Arthur Vandenberg: “insulationism.” Where two large oceans did not serve to keep the country safe from political crises, ideology and policy would step in. As Manfred Jonas has demonstrated, isolationism meant many things to many different people; and for all the distinct schools and wings of isolationists that may be identified, they were often rather fluid.14 The larger problem that such slogans obscured—and still do—was the ambivalence many Americans felt about their country’s relationship to the rest of the world. The immigrants and their progeny who populated the United States spread many myths, among which was the notion of the “New World’s” invulnerability, separateness and distinctiveness. Known otherwise as exceptionalism, it was probably expressed no more blatantly than during the interwar years when the American people, reeling from the Great Depression and desperate to avoid entering another European war, hid behind cultural separatism and moral rectitude. It is certainly possible that the failure of the United States to play its proper role in world affairs made things worse. The larger point is that the American people, right up to the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor and, arguably, even for some time thereafter, were undecided about their country’s stake in the coming conflict and unclear about what their government was meant to do about it. There was not much the United States could do, however, to remove itself totally from politics overseas. Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, groups of American volunteers—known presently as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—traveled to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans. Other groups—notably American Catholics—supported the Nationalists and urged the Roosevelt administration to do more for their side.15 The administration did little, however, except to acquiesce to the general wishes of the Congress to keep out, just as it did when pressured to intervene elsewhere, at least officially. Apart from taking in larger numbers of refugees—which for various reasons the Roosevelt administration was opposed to doing—it was unclear what most interventionists sought.16 In a similar way the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 had earlier led the Hoover administration to speak loudly—with Secretary of State Henry Stimson issuing a “doctrine” calling for a moral embargo on such aggression—but Hoover and his successor otherwise did very little, even after the Japanese attack on the American ship Panay in December 1937.17 One of the few celebrated results of the ideology of non-intervention was the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America. Begun under Hoover and christened by Roosevelt, the policy sought to undo the stains of a half-century of military intervention in the Western Hemisphere by the United States.18 United States troops were withdrawn from Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, and the Platt Amendment with regard to Cuba was annulled. The Buenos Aires conference of 1936 proclaimed hemispheric solidarity and security on a collective basis. The policy, not surprisingly, was popular throughout Latin America, where anti-Americanism receded for the first time in a generation. It was also popular in the United States, where it came to be seen as a corollary to isolationism. Thus the Western Hemisphere gave another layer of insulation against contagion from foreign crises—a view that would culminate after the war in the Rio Treaty of 1947 and the Pact of Bogota the following year. An alternative way to understand the vogue of hemispherism in the interwar years is less as a half-hearted repudiation of internationalism than as its partial catalyst, and as a continuation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century conception of the Western Hemisphere as a laboratory for multilateral innovation. Much of the human rights and international law agenda that the United States would promote in the second half of the twentieth century took root, as already noted, during an earlier period in Europe, but also, even earlier, at the various Pan American conferences and with particular reference to the Americas.19 The Good Neighbor Policy, therefore, may be seen as the culmination of this policy trend rather than as a rejection 105

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of it, or parts of it. This was consistent with the movement of the three main tenets of hemispheric ideology—peaceful settlement of disputes, non-intervention and economic interdependence, first to what came to be called the Atlantic, and later to the Global, Community. This process, at least seen with some American eyes, took root briefly at the turn of the century, was given a loud boost by Wilsonianism, returned more modestly during the interwar years and then came into full flower after 1945.20 A Whig interpretation of the interwar period will not be shared universally, to be sure, but it helps to counter the usual view of these decades as a period of naïve idealism followed by predictable tragedy. That view has a strong basis in reality, although it was more prevalent among successor generations than among contemporaries. Many of the latter experienced the 1920s with hopeful cynicism and the 1930s with bewilderment mixed with fear. Yet their country’s diplomatic innovations during this period, however timid, planted an important seed. The generation of Americans that led the country to victory in the Second World War and presided over a postwar dominion learned their lessons during this period. Many of them took seriously Wilson’s desire to transform alliances and power balances into security communities, yet they seemed determined to do so from the bottom up while remaining mindful of the world crisis from which their own country seemed to benefit disproportionately, yet from whose liabilities they had failed to escape. In spite of the seriousness with which its political class took the ideology of isolationism, and the many mixed signals its official, semi-official and non-official actors sent to non-Americans during this period, the United States emerged from it a more important, more vulnerable and more responsible, global power.

Notes 1 Standard portraits are Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper & Row, 1931) and Isabel Leighton, The Aspirin Age 1919–1941 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949). 2 Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction (Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1957). 3 See John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 For example, Harriet Ide Eager Davis, ed., Pioneers in World Order; an American Appraisal of the League of Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944). 5 Raymond J. Batvinis, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). See also Ernest R. May, Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6 Useful conventional biographies and memoirs are Betty Glad, Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence: A Study in American Diplomacy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966); Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948); Julius W. Pratt, Cordell Hull (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964). 7 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Warren I. Cohen, Empire Without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations, 1921–1933 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 8 Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace After World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9 Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 10 Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg–Briand Pact (New York: Yale University Press, 1952).

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11 Emily O. Goldman, Sunken Treaties: Naval Arms Control Between the Wars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 12 Two good portraits of this evolution within the Department of State are found in Waldo Heinrichs, American Ambassador: Joseph Grew and the Development of the American Diplomacy Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1966) and Martin Weil, A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978). 13 For reference, David Mitrany, The Functional Theory of Politics (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975). 14 Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America. 15 Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle that Divided America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 16 David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968). See also Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and J. Simon Rofe, Franklin Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy and the Welles Mission (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 17 For background, see Akira Iriye, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). 18 The classic account is Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961). 19 Gregory Grandin, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 1171 (February 2012): 68–91. See also Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Joseph S. Tulchin, The Aftermath of War: World War I and U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 1971). 20 Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967).

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12 THE AGE OF DISENGAGEMENT AND DISARMAMENT Benjamin D. Rhodes

All-wise historians are very proficient at finding fault with statesmen who, in the eyes of historians, did things they ought not to have done and who left undone things they ought to have done. The history of American foreign policy between the two world wars is a case in point. The standard interpretation of the interwar era, written after the rise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and before the advent of modern bombers and missiles, has been uniformly critical of American leaders, both Republican and Democratic, for their lack of vision and for their failure to see that the nation was about to face unprecedented economic, military, and diplomatic challenges. However, many policies that appeared naïve or shortsighted in retrospect seemed perfectly logical enough at the time. Prior to the Great Depression, neither the tottering Weimar Republic of Germany or the Japan that was renowned for its gift to America of cherry trees in 1912 seemed a threat. After Pearl Harbor, but not before, it seemed foolish to have refused to join the League of Nations and to have sought peace through naval limitation treaties and by signing a pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Almost as naïve, it seemed, was the determined effort by Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin D. Roosevelt to promote the cause of arbitration through membership in the World Court. In retrospect it appeared shortsighted for Congress to have poisoned relations with the nation’s World War I associates by demanding the repayment of $10.3 billion in war debts with compound interest. Perfect hindsight enabled historians to see clearly many things that eluded contemporaries.1 The era of American complacent, self-centered foreign policy disengagement commenced in earnest on March 19, 1920, when the United States Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson’s Versailles Treaty together with fifteen reservations attached by Wilson’s nemesis, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. It is true that pride combined with personal and political partisanship contributed to the acrimonious atmosphere in which the treaty was defeated. However, Wilson’s opponents were not simply diehard isolationists; as a matter of principle they objected to Wilson’s uncompromising insistence upon a league of nations dedicated to enforcing peace through collective security. Wilson, who was still partially incapacitated by a stroke, stubbornly objected to any alteration of his work. The most recent scholarship suggests that Wilson’s bullheadedness was attributable to his impaired emotional balance caused by the stroke and by his wife’s well-meaning determination to isolate him. Thus, because of his physical isolation in the White House and his cardiovascular condition, Wilson was unable to appreciate the political 108

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situation he faced. His judgment was so badly affected that had the Senate ratified the treaty with the insulting but innocuous Lodge reservations, Wilson intended to withdraw the treaty from Senate consideration.2 Three Republican presidents followed Wilson: Warren G. Harding (elected in 1920), Calvin Coolidge (who became president following Harding’s death in August, 1923, and who was elected to a full term in 1924), and Herbert Hoover (elected in 1928). None belonged to the isolationist wing of the Republican Party and all selected excellent secretaries of state. Charles Evans Hughes, a former governor of New York and the Republican presidential candidate in 1916, was Harding’s selection to head the Department of State. Frank B. Kellogg, a former Minnesota senator and former ambassador to Britain, was Coolidge’s choice to succeed Hughes, who was surprised to learn he was being replaced. Hoover picked Henry L. Stimson, a former secretary of war, to head the State Department. He was candid enough to admit that his knowledge of foreign policy in 1929 was no more detailed than the average citizen who read the major newspapers. Under Harding and his bearded secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, an imaginative and popular foreign policy initiative was undertaken. Wilson’s policy was to achieve peace through world government. The Republican alternative was to seek peace through naval disarmament. It was a strategy that appealed to economy-minded Americans and to the British cabinet, which came to the realization that Britain could not afford a costly naval race. Naval limitation would also make it feasible for the British to withdraw from the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. The alliance was now inconvenient since it was unlikely the Americans would accept naval reductions with the theoretical possibility of facing a Japanese–British naval combination in the Pacific. The result was the “Miracle at Washington,” the international disarmament conference of nine nations that met at Washington in the fall and early winter of 1921–1922. Besides the United States, four major naval powers were invited: Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. Four smaller naval powers with Far Eastern interests completed the assembly: Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, and China. Hughes’ preparations for the conference were clever. He appointed two prominent Republicans as delegates: Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root. On the third anniversary of the Armistice (November 11, 1921), he invited the delegates to witness the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Ceremony, and Hughes then delivered a famous opening address to the delegates, spelling out in detail the sacrifices he expected from each nation. With an assist from American cryptographers, who were reading the instructions to the Japanese delegation, Hughes was able to conclude three epic treaties. First came the Five Power Treaty, limiting battleships to a ratio of 5 : 5 : 3 : 1.75 : 1.75 for the United States, Britain, Japan, France and Italy, respectively. Battleships were limited to 35,000 tons and forbidden to carry guns larger than sixteen inches. The treaty was to be in effect for ten years and during that period there was to be a “holiday” on new capital ship construction. Since there was no agreement as to whether aircraft carriers were battleships, the solution was to create a new category based on the 5 : 5 : 3 ratio in the Five Power Treaty. Thus the United States and Britain could construct 135,000 tons of aircraft carriers and Japan 81,000; the vessels were restricted to guns no larger than eight inches. But the concept of massing aircraft carriers for offensive operations remained to be developed. Naval thinking of the day envisioned using carrier-based planes for reconnaissance and for directing the gunfire of the battleships. It was the battleship, firing lethal explosive shells, that was the basic offensive weapon in all navies of the day. Defenders of the battleship dismissed the sinking of an anchored German battleship during the Washington Conference by the Army Air Service as a mere stunt against a sitting duck.3 109

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Two final treaties with Far Eastern implications completed the work of the conference. In the Four Power Treaty, signed by the United States, Britain, Japan, and France, the AngloJapanese Alliance was expanded into a four-power arrangement. The document guaranteed the status quo in the Pacific “with regard to fortifications and naval bases.” Its practical effect was to ban the United States and Britain from fortifying Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Guam. Japan was forbidden to construct defenses at Taiwan, Okinawa, or at the islands, such as the Marianas and the Carolines, received as League of Nations mandates from Germany. The final major treaty, the Nine Power Treaty, was signed by all the Washington participants. Principally composed by Elihu Root, the treaty guaranteed the independence and territorial integrity of China and proclaimed the principle of equal commercial opportunity for all in China. At the time Hughes was hailed as the greatest secretary of state and he was credited with single-handedly ending the costly naval race. The reservations of professional navy officers were brushed aside in the general euphoria over the apparent achievement of a new era of peace and disarmament. A decade later, as tensions with Japan intensified, it dawned on Americans that a high price had been paid for the Washington treaties. The United States Navy alone scrapped capital ships, whereas the other signatories only tore up blueprints. The concessions accepted by Hughes, including the scrapping of six half-built South Dakota battleships and the forced sinking of the new 32,500-ton battleship Washington in 1925, left the United States Navy ill equipped to implement its “Orange Plan” for the defense of the Philippines in a Pacific war with Japan. Reputations are inherently fragile and by the end of the interwar era Hughes’ reputation as a miracle worker had faded. However, American naval weakness was also attributable to depression era retrenchment endorsed by both political parties.4 After Washington, the movement to achieve peace through naval disarmament faltered. The three-power Geneva Conference of 1927 between the United States, Britain, and Japan (France and Italy declined to attend) failed to reach agreement on extending the Washington battleship ratio to cruisers. Naval officers of the United States and Royal Navies, who distrusted each other and who viewed each other as potential opponents, were responsible for the debacle. The British desired more light cruisers to establish blockades; the Americans wanted more heavy cruisers to challenge blockades. Since neither side would give way, the conference ended in a stalemate.5 President Herbert Hoover, who took office in 1929, saw that the solution to the impasse was to exclude the naval officers from the next disarmament conference, which was held at London in 1930. Attended by the United States, Britain, and Japan, the conference agreed that Britain might possess more light cruisers and that the United States would have the advantage in heavy cruisers. Japan was assigned a lower cruiser quota, but agreed to accept a lesser number of cruisers in return for assurances that the United States would not build to its limit during the life of the treaty. Another provision extended the holiday on further battleship construction for five years. The weakest feature of the agreement was the inclusion of an “escalator” clause that permitted the parties to disregard the agreement if they felt “materially affected” by naval construction by a power that had not signed the treaty.6 President Hoover shrewdly called a special session of the Senate to consider the treaty. He rebuffed a fishing expedition by Senate irreconcilables who demanded all records relating to the negotiations by asserting executive privilege. The final vote in favor of the treaty was fifty-eight to nine. Likewise, the British Cabinet promptly approved the agreement. Meanwhile in Japan a bitter debate occurred between those (the treaty faction) who held that a naval race with America would be ruinous and those (the army/fleet) faction who regarded the treaty as an insult to the rightful ambitions of the Japanese nation. Over the objections of the army/fleet faction, the Diet ratified the document, although the Cabinet resigned and the prime minister was assassinated in 110

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broad daylight (November 14, 1930) at the Tokyo railroad station by an angry militarist. Efforts to extend the treaty structure beyond its expiration date of 1936 ended fruitlessly. The disarmament effort launched by Hughes in 1921, with an assist from the Great Depression, had slowed down the naval race for fifteen years, but ended in 1936 with a renewed naval race that led relentlessly toward Pearl Harbor.7 If membership in the League was impossible it appeared, briefly, that an alternative path to peace could be found through membership in the World Court, an international tribunal established under the auspices of the League in 1922. Joining the World Court was espoused by Hughes, Harding, and later Coolidge. Isolationist senators, led by Republicans Hiram Johnson of California and William E. Borah of Idaho, ambushed the World Court supporters by characterizing membership in the Court as the first step toward joining the League itself. By 1926 Borah prevailed by attaching to the treaty an amendment preventing American members of the Court from rendering advisory opinions to the League of Nations (a minor function). The strategy worked; even though the Senate approved membership with reservations, it proved impossible to gain approval of the conditions by all forty-seven World Court members. A determined minority had thwarted majority opinion. A similar script played out in 1935 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported out a “Resolution of Adherence” to the World Court. Since there were sixty-eight Democratic senators and only fifty-nine votes were required for the two-thirds vote needed for ratification, it appeared that approval was merely a foregone conclusion. Once again senators Borah and Johnson prevailed by warning of the danger of joining the “League of Nations Court”; the final Senate vote fell seven votes short of the required two-thirds majority.8 In contrast to the reticence of the Senate to endorse peace through world government or a world court, that August body stampeded in 1929 to approve almost unanimously a treaty banning war as an instrument of national policy. To later generations, the Pact of Paris appeared hopelessly childish and naïve. To pacifists, renouncing war by treaty was an overdue response to the hopes of all humanity. The psychology of the day contended that abhorrence of war and respect for the rule of law would prevail. Among the leaders were Nicholas Murray Butler and James T. Shotwell of Columbia University, Chicago attorney Salmon O. Levinson, the publisher Edward Bok, Jane Addams, the prominent Chicago social worker, and Carrie Chapman Catt, a well-known feminist. Much of the financial support for the peace movement came from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The project began as a Franco-American treaty sponsored by French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. Frank B. Kellogg, Coolidge’s secretary of state, after initial skepticism, became an enthusiastic advocate, probably because he saw that he was likely to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The Kellogg–Briand Pact originally was signed by fifteen nations, who pledged “that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” In the debate, senators, notwithstanding private reservations, praised the “international kiss” as a farsighted step toward peace based upon the solemn, trustworthy pledges of the signatories. Just as few senators had dared vote against prohibition in 1919, only one (Senator John Blaine of Wisconsin) dared vote against peace in 1929. Sixty-four nations endorsed the renunciatory pact and the Senate approved the Pact of Paris eighty-five to one. Even today it remains harmlessly in force.9 From the European point of view, the most unpopular American foreign policy was one set by Congress and not the Treasury Department: the payment of the $10.3 billion loaned by the United States to twenty-two nations during and after World War I. The loans had come from Liberty Bonds purchased by the American public and thus contained a hidden trap: if the debtors did not pay then the American taxpayer was stuck with the bill. From the debtor point 111

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of view, the debts were political not commercial in nature because all the money had been spent in America at high wartime prices for the defeat of a common enemy; and the debtors pointed to their devastating losses in man power. They had paid in blood, America should pay in dollars, said the debtors. Furthermore, the debtors maintained that the payment of war debts was contingent upon Germany’s payment of reparations. Washington’s position was that there was no legal connection between the two subjects. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon requested permission to negotiate individually with each debtor. But in February 1922 Congress created a five-man collection agency known as the World War Foreign Debt Commission. The law assumed the loans were valid commercial debts and stipulated that the interest rate was to be no lower than 4.25 percent and the commissioners were forbidden to agree to “cancellation of any part of such indebtedness except through payment thereof.” In practice the commissioners, who included Hughes, Mellon, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, were more flexible. The standard debt settlement model was signed by Finland and Britain in 1923. They agreed to pay the accrued principal and back interest over a sixty-two year period at an interest rate of 3.3 percent. France and Italy, on the basis of “capacity to pay,” received a reduction in the interest rate to 1.6 and 0.4 percent respectively. From the perspective of the commission, the settlements were fair and businesslike. Besides, as the world economy expanded, it was assumed the payments would fade into insignificance. Had the world remained prosperous, the Treasury would have received $22 billion in principal and interest. By the time all the debtors, Finland excepted, defaulted in 1934 the Treasury collected only $2.7 billion, most of which ($2,024,000,000) was paid by Britain. “Uncle Sam,” hailed as a generous Santa Claus in granting loans, was transformed into a penurious “Uncle Shylock” who poisoned international relations and then failed to collect legally binding debts, much less a pound of flesh.10 After 1929 American foreign policy under Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt had one primary theme: damage control. For Hoover, who had a record as a problemsolver prior to his presidency, it was just one crisis after another. To avert an immediate breakdown of the system of war debt and reparation payments, Hoover was forced by the German and Austrian financial crisis to propose on June 20, 1931, a one-year moratorium on the payment of war debts and reparations. He also recommended that Congress recreate the World War Foreign Debt Commission, a proposal that was unceremoniously rejected. Then in September Britain was forced to abandon the gold standard and Japan thumbed its nose at the Kellogg– Briand Treaty and the Nine Power Treaty of the Washington Conference by invading and annexing Northeast China and installing a puppet emperor. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, with the approval of Hoover, announced a weak non-recognition doctrine (the Hoover–Stimson Doctrine), which received only lukewarm support from the League of Nations. Japan ignored the American protest, which contained no threat of force or economic sanctions, because they knew Hoover and Stimson were bluffing. The peace structure so confidently erected by Secretaries of State Hughes and Kellogg was visibly crumbling.11 Had Hoover been re-elected he intended to send delegates to a world economic conference promoted by the League of Nations. His defeat in November, 1932, by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt meant that all of the remaining problems of damage control belonged to the New Deal. When Roosevelt took office (March 4, 1933), he had few plans either in domestic or in foreign policy. The new president counted on his formidable speaking ability, his self-confidence, and his talent for improvising. But even a man of Roosevelt’s energy and ability as a diplomatic juggler found himself stretched thin. His selection of Tennessee Senator Cordell Hull to the premier position in the Cabinet demonstrated that Roosevelt intended to be his own secretary 112

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of state. Hull was surprised by his selection since he had had little previous connection with foreign policy. He was known as one of Roosevelt’s most reliable southern supporters. Another consideration in Hull’s favor was his possession of ample reserves of dignity and bearing. The handsome six-foot-tall Tennessean looked like a secretary of state. Hull held the office for a record eleven years, eight months, and eleven days, and somehow survived despite being treated cavalierly by Roosevelt, who often kept Hull in the dark while he worked through personal friends such as Sumner Welles, William C. Bullitt, and Raymond Moley. In contrast to the dynamic, frenzied activity of the domestic New Deal during its initial 100 days, diplomacy, with few exceptions, continued the majority of foreign policies favored by Republican presidents of the twenties. The list included snubbing the League of Nations, seeking membership in the World Court, attending disarmament conferences in 1933 and 1935, attempting to collect war debts, and attending the World Economic Conference held in London from June to August, 1933. Roosevelt himself was mainly responsible for the amateurish American performance at London. He waited until the last minute to select a weak, poorly instructed delegation that disagreed among itself. Furthermore, Roosevelt, who had advocated currency stabilization, changed his mind after the conference began. Hull, who headed the delegation, was mortified when Roosevelt sent Assistant Secretary of State Raymond Moley to London in the middle of the conference. Thinking he was following Roosevelt’s wishes, Moley agreed to a face-saving stabilization agreement, only to have Roosevelt emphatically reject it (apparently without reading it) in his “bombshell message.”12 The embarrassing debacle was attributable to Roosevelt’s lack of preparation and unsuccessful improvisation. Roosevelt’s penchant for improvising was displayed again in the fall of 1933 when Roosevelt made the decision to recognize the existence of the Soviet Union after a sixteen-year diplomatic blackout. For public consumption, Roosevelt stressed that recognition would bolster trade; a more important consideration, Roosevelt told Hull, was his conviction that it was unnatural for the two nations to be unable to communicate. Roosevelt personally negotiated the recognition document with Soviet Commissar for Foreign Relations Maxim Litvinov. The most contentious issue was the status of a $193 million loan made during World War I by the Treasury to the Provisional Government and repudiated by the Soviets. Roosevelt glibly dictated a seemingly clever solution: he agreed to accept a minimum settlement of $150 million, while Litvinov said he would advise his government to accept as much as $100 million; he added that, when the president studied the question, he would conclude that $75 million was appropriate. The Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreement had the advantage of establishing diplomatic relations. The disadvantage was that, after a brief honeymoon, there was little they could agree upon and the debt repayment provision was simply ignored by Moscow.13 In handling the collapse of the system of war debt payments, Roosevelt was outmaneuvered by the British and by Senator Hiram Johnson of California. In December, 1932, France, joined by Austria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, and Poland, defaulted. Britain and Italy paid in full but stressed that they expected a revision before the next semiannual payments were due on June 15, 1933. As the deadline approached, Roosevelt took a hard line; he refused to be swayed by the British ambassador’s allusions to the “we forgive our debtors” phrase of the Lord’s Prayer. And he rejected the offer of a token payment of $5 million, noting that in America a token was regarded as a small worthless coin. London then agreed to a $10 million payment. Six months later, Roosevelt, who liked to pride himself on his ability as a horse trader, was outsmarted by British officials when the subject of another token payment arose. Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain authorized another $10 million payment, but British officials in Washington concealed that from the president and offered only $7.5 million, which Roosevelt readily accepted. 113

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Privately Roosevelt was more flexible in seeking a debt solution than he was in public. He offered to reduce Britain’s debt to annual payments of $40 million spread over fifty years without interest. In addition, Roosevelt directed the Treasury to draw up a new payment schedule for Finland, the only debtor paying in full, which reduced Finland’s principal to the terms granted Italy in 1925 and spread the payments over thirty years without interest. Senator Johnson then trumped the president by introducing the Johnson Act, which forbade loans to any nation in default on its debts; violators were subject to a fine of $10,000 or five years imprisonment, or both. The purpose, the senator explained, was to compel America’s wayward debtors to pay. In reality, the Johnson Act, which sailed through Congress in April, 1934, made it easier for the debtors to default. An opinion by Attorney General Homer Cummings held that full, not token, payments were necessary to avoid the penalties of the Johnson Act. On June 15, 1934, the dreary process ended as all the debtors, with the exception of Finland, defaulted. Roosevelt concluded that it was futile to challenge the “Iron Chancellor,” given the mood of Congress.14 As long as the act remained in existence, loans to Britain were effectively banned. In 1934, that hardly mattered, but as the Nazi threat emerged, loans for rearmament were badly needed. As an alternative to loans, Roosevelt found it necessary to improvise such expedients as the trading of destroyers to Britain for bases, and the Lend-Lease program of providing military equipment without the encumbrance of a dollar sign or repayment schedule. Not until 1946 was the Johnson Act quietly repealed to permit a $2 billion loan to Britain. Curiously, at the same time the New Deal triumphed at the polls and secured the passage of such major legislation as Social Security and the Wagner Act (giving industrial labor the right to bargain collectively), Roosevelt and Hull were consistently on the defensive in the area of national security policy. A bipartisan bloc of isolationist/pacifist congressmen had thwarted Roosevelt’s effort to join the World Court in 1935. Fearful of the power of isolationists, the president made a pragmatic decision not to mount a challenge until the very eve of World War II. In the interim, Roosevelt did very little to fight isolationism/pacifism. Roosevelt’s foreign policy opponents repeatedly demonstrated their political strength through the medium of neutrality legislation. Just as admirals and generals often planned to fight the last war, so too did isolationists and pacifists plan to protect the nation from involvement in another world war. The impetus for neutrality legislation lay in a sensational investigation of the armament industry launched by a special Senate committee chaired by North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye. With the assistance of an excellent staff, Nye slanted the hearings to prove the debatable conclusion that arms sales and loans to the Allies had sucked the Wilson administration into World War I. The solution, according to the committee, was to prohibit arms sales and loans (even though they were already banned to most European nations by the Johnson Act). Recalling the crisis created by the sinking of British liners by submarines, it was recommended that neutrality legislation should ban travel by Americans on belligerent ships. In a White House meeting with the committee (March 19, 1935), Roosevelt, who could have been better prepared, inexplicably capitulated and endorsed the concept of neutrality legislation. The resulting Neutrality Act of 1935, which had only a one-year time limit, required the president in the event of war to ban the export of arms to belligerents and gave him discretionary authority to warn Americans not to travel on belligerent liners. “So today is the triumph of the so-called isolationists and today marks the downfall, although we may not know it, of the internationalist,” stated Senator Hiram Johnson.15 Through mutual agreement the consideration of a permanent neutrality law was postponed until after the 1936 presidential election by simply extending the 1935 law by one year until 1937. As a result of his landslide margin of re-election in November, 1936 over Kansas Governor Alf Landon, Roosevelt appeared to have acquired new leverage to expand the domestic New 114

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Deal. Even though foreign policy played little role in the campaign, Roosevelt’s stunning margin of approval presumably could have encouraged him to lead the nation away from its mood of isolationism and pacifism. In reality, Roosevelt’s popular support had just been severely eroded by a self-inflicted wound. In February, 1937, the president announced a divisive proposal to “pack” the Supreme Court by expanding that body from nine justices to fifteen. In both political parties the Court Packing Plan met with outspoken disapproval before it finally died a few months later in the Senate. With a politically weakened Roosevelt watching from the sidelines, the House and Senate Foreign Affairs Committees hastily drafted the “permanent” Neutrality Act of 1937. Illustrating the rushed nature of the enterprise, the final copy of the bill had to be flown by seaplane, just hours before the old law expired, to the Gulf of Mexico, where Roosevelt was vacationing and fishing. The law, signed by Roosevelt on May 1, 1937, now required that when the president determined that a state of war existed, including a civil war, he must ban the sale of arms, loans, and travel to either side. For a two-year trial period, the president had discretionary authority to place trade in civilian goods on a cash-and-carry basis— an idea that was suggested by the financier Bernard Baruch.16 In practice, the entire movement to guarantee peace through disarmament, the renunciation of war, and neutrality legislation created a false sense of security. No sooner had the Neutrality Act of 1937 been passed than it proved worthless in isolating America from the threat of fascism either in Europe or in Asia. Belatedly Roosevelt backtracked and, over bitter isolationist opposition, adopted a policy of aiding Britain short of war. And, as Imperial Japan embraced the concept of a Southeast Asia empire, Roosevelt and Hull took steps to contain Japan through trade sanctions and by moving the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii. Viewed from the present, the faith of statesmen between the two world wars in the rule of law and in America’s invulnerability due to the nation’s isolated location in the Western Hemisphere seems incomprehensible. But the organizers of disarmament conferences, the Kellogg–Briand renunciatory pact, and adherence to the World Court functioned in a relatively peaceful world not threatened by nuclear submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction. Within the context of the era, it made sense to demand the repayment of loans made by the American taxpayer because, as President Coolidge supposedly said, “They hired the money, didn’t they?” Had there been no Third Reich or Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, America’s isolationist/pacifist politicians would not have looked so myopic. As it was, they had plenty of company in shortsightedness, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, notwithstanding his ability to lead, was amazingly slow to challenge the psychology of the age.

Notes 1 Brian McKercher, “Reaching for the Brass Ring: The Recent Historiography of Interwar American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 15 (Fall, 1991): 565–598. 2 John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight Over the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 199, and Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 533–534. 3 George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 107. 4 Robert W. Love, Jr., History of the U.S. Navy, 1775–1941 (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1991), 530–537. 5 B.J.C. McKercher, The Second Baldwin Government and the United States, 1924–1929: Attitudes and Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 55–104, and “Wealth, Power and the New International Order: Britain and the American Challenge in the 1920s,” Diplomatic History 12 (Fall,1988): 411–441. 6 Raymond G. O’Connor, Perilous Equilibrium: The United States and the London Naval Conference of 1930 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1962), 114–118.

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7 Stephen Pelz, Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Naval Conference and the Onset of World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 193–194. 8 William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1933–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 216–217. 9 Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 251–269. 10 Benjamin D. Rhodes, United States Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1941: The Golden Age of American Diplomatic and Military Complacency (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 49–52, 65–68. 11 Robert H. Ferrell, Henry L. Stimson (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), 239–260, and American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover–Stimson Foreign Policy, 1929–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 120–193. 12 Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1973), 478–479. 13 Robert P. Browder, The Origins of Soviet–American Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 116–143; Donald G. Bishop, The Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements: The American View (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1965), chapter 5. 14 Rhodes, United States Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 105–109. 15 Robert A. Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Struggle Over the Arms Embargo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 115. 16 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 187; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 391–392.

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13 U.S. MILITARY PLANNING DURING THE INTERWAR PERIOD Lon Strauss

On December 8, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed Congress with the statement “a day that would live in infamy.” The day before, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. The same day the President asked Congress for a declaration of war, the Japanese also attacked Americans on Wake Island and Guam. What would have surprised most Americans was that everything was going according to plan. Not for the Japanese, though they did not know it yet, or any conspiracy attributed to FDR, but for the American military. Since 1907, the U.S. Army and Navy had been expecting and strategizing for the eventuality of a Japanese attack. Though Americans were not prepared for a world war in 1941 and there was no true blueprint for victory that American leadership could follow, military thinkers were not altogether caught off guard. Coordinated war planning between the Army and Navy did not officially occur until after the Spanish–American War. In 1903, the Joint Army and Navy Board came into existence. The Board was comprised of eight officers, four from the Army’s General Staff and four from the Navy’s General Board. The Joint Board was only an advisory committee, decision making rested with the Secretary of War and the President, and the Board did not have a staff of its own. Instead, the staffs from both services’ war planning divisions would assist the Joint Planning Committee (JCP), headed by the chiefs of war planning for the Army and Navy. For the Army, after the First World War, planning would shift from the Army War College to the War Department’s new War Plans Division as part of the General Staff.1 Although most Americans shrank into a protective cover of isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s, the American military did not have such a luxury. It was their job to protect the nation. To do so, they needed to plan for possible future wars. However, American officers were hampered by their civilian leadership, as well as their world view. For instance, although there was a war plan on the books for a possible conflict with Germany, no one seriously updated it from its earlier versions to account for drastic changes that occurred in that nation throughout the 1930s. Americans began contemplating a German threat around the turn of the century, after the acquisition of the Philippines in the Spanish–American War. The Navy created the first War Plan Black in 1910 under the assumption that Germany would intervene in South America. To do so, naval officers feared they might construct a naval base off the coast of Venezuela and begin undermining American power with raids on commerce. The Joint Board endorsed War Plan Black. A German military presence in South America would threaten 117

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American hegemony of the Western Hemisphere as established in the Monroe Doctrine. The German Navy had limited success with raiders in the Pacific and southern Atlantic after the First World War erupted in 1914, but the German High Seas Fleet would remain holed up in Kiel during the majority of the war. Even so, the U.S. Navy adhered to the plan, fearing that the German fleet would find a way to slip into South America and gain the foothold there that they had always sought. Even after the German fleet was bloodied at Jutland in 1916, the Joint Board adhered to War Plan Black with only minor alterations. In addition, planners were more worried about the state of affairs after the Great War ended. It was not altogether unlikely that one or more of the belligerents, vanquished or victor, would seek to lessen their war deficits by extending their influence in South America. U.S. planners could not rule out the possibility that one of their former allies, such as Britain, would do just that. Some historians have offered this as an explanation for the lack of contingencies when the U.S. allied with other nations. During American participation in the war, however, the Navy spent more time searching for U-boats, supply depots, and protecting convoys than guarding against a large, German naval incursion. After the war, the Joint Board did not perceive Germany as a future threat. This remained the case throughout the 1930s with little to no revisiting of War Plan Black.2 War Plan White, on the other hand, concerned domestic unrest. Military intelligence officers drafted the first version of this plan in 1920. The U.S. military had a long history of intervening in domestic labor unrest, most notably in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and Pullman Strike of 1894. Throughout the Great War, intelligence officers worked under the Espionage Act of 1917 to suppress dissent on the home front by investigating labor radicals and pacifists, supposedly under enemy influence, more so than actual German agents. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, socialist uprisings in Germany in 1918–1919, and the fear of similar occurrences, not only in the U.S. but in Britain and France, as well, military officers thought it prudent to plan for the worst-case scenario at home. Intelligence officers estimated that “about 25,000” anarchists, the Communist Party in America of “about 100,000,” the Communist Labor Party with approximately “60,000 members,” and the Socialist Party of about 80,000 represented the radical, political threat to the United States. In addition, about 100,000 Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World or IWW) comprised the majority of the industrial threat. Not only did they think that there were already 340,000 angry radicals in the U.S., but another “200,000 aliens entered this country during the month of August, and that the bulk of these . . . are the hardest material to assimilate, due to their intense desire (sic) to remain a unit, and to their ingrained ideas that all governments are oppressive.” By May 1921, intelligence officers estimated that there were about 322,000 “red radicals,” another 915,000 untrained socialists, and about 2.5 million untrained blacks. Their estimates equaled the amount of men in uniform during American participation in the Great War. Untrained or not, four million radicals was a major threat to the existing government; especially considering the current size of the Army in 1921 was less than 200,000.3 Several other colored plans concerned South America. After the First World War, the Joint Board generated Plan Green in the event that “the President of the United States has decided that the conditions justify and demand intervention . . . for the purpose of establishing order and a stable, responsible government throughout Mexico.” The Joint Board assumed that “chaotic conditions existing in Mexico [would be] such as to endanger the lives and property of American citizens.”4 Similar to the Punitive Expedition of 1916, soldiers would protect America’s southern border while Marines would replicate their capture of Vera Cruz of April 1914. Afterward, U.S. forces would move onto Mexico City, reminiscent of General Winfield Scott’s successful maneuver in the Mexican–American War. Soldiers would also occupy and protect Tampico and the surrounding oil fields. American forces would remain on Mexican territory, 118

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“establishing a military government” until a “responsible Mexican civil government” with a “native force suitable and adequate” was ready to uphold local laws. War Plan Green remained on the books until 1946.5 The Joint Board approved War Plan Violet, a contingency for involvement in Latin America in 1924, as well as Plan Purple in 1928 for intervention in the majority of South America. Plan Violet assumed that unrest in Latin America would require American action to forestall other foreign powers or the League of Nations from infringing upon the Monroe Doctrine. Purple, on the other hand, concerned a threat to the Monroe Doctrine from within South America. The Joint Board observed that South Americans resented the Monroe Doctrine and American interference in their affairs. Plan Purple would take effect if local populations became violent toward Americans or their property. In this scenario, the U.S. Navy would blockade the troublesome nation, perhaps even occupying a major port. The United States had a long history of involvement in the Caribbean, as well, and concern with this region was represented in Plan Gray, which the Secretary of War confirmed in 1931. Cuba, however, received its own plan with Plan Tan in 1922. The Joint Board continued to update the plan until retiring it in 1945.6 Besides the Western Hemisphere, war planners were quite concerned about Asia. Ever since the United States acquired the Philippines in the Spanish–American War, the military anticipated trouble in this region. Americans thought of themselves as the protectors of China, upholding the Open Door Policy with the dual interest of gaining economic benefits there as late-comers to the imperial game; as well as guardians of the Chinese people whom Americans feared Europeans and Japanese would abuse. In 1900, Americans participated as part of an international force to subdue the Boxer Rebellion in Peking. The Joint Board drafted Plan Yellow off that earlier intervention. Their assumption was that a similar uprising against foreigners in China would necessitate the deployment of an American force to safeguard U.S. citizens and property. Unlike American involvement in the Boxer Rebellion, Plan Yellow did not assume a multi-lateral effort, though planners did account for protecting the property of other Westerners.7 The largest two plans, however, that the Army and Navy were most infatuated with were War Plans Red and Orange. The former was a strategy for the unlikely event of a war with Britain (Red). Historically, the British posed the largest possible threat to the United States until Spain topped the list in 1898. Relations between the U.S. and United Kingdom, however, were generally quite good. Planning for an improbable war then served at least two purposes. First, though it was highly unlikely that their relations would erupt into hostilities, if a war did develop it was best to be prepared. Second, planning for a war against Britain provided military staff the only real opportunity to flex their intellectual muscles against the single most powerful threat to the United States. No other nation had the naval capabilities that Britain had while also menacing the U.S. from multiple directions around the globe. Red could threaten American trade with Latin America due to its bases in the Caribbean, as well as threaten the east and west coast from either end of Canada. In addition, the Philippines and Guam were within British reach due to their proximity to Australia. Since the U.S. Navy would need to concentrate in the Atlantic, Hawaii would also be open to attack. In some earlier scenarios of Plan Red, Canada (Crimson) did not factor in as much of a threat, thus the strategy mirrored Plan Black in that U.S. forces would concentrate on protecting Caribbean commerce and intercepting the British Navy in transit across the Atlantic. Unlike other colored plans, there was no real diplomatic guiding mission. Military strategists might assume there would be a conflict over trade routes or some commercial affair, but without civilian guidance they were unable to set any politically motivated military objectives to end this fictitious war.8 119

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Regardless, a war with Red would stretch the resources and public support of both nations to breaking point. Officers assumed that Canada would pose the more immediate threat if they joined Britain in the war. British strategy would probably include utilizing Halifax for air and naval operations. They estimated that Canada had about 74,000 soldiers available, mostly militia, while Britain would send a ground force of about 100,000 approximately ten days from the start of hostilities. Thus, it was essential for American forces to capture Halifax, not only to mitigate Canadian involvement, but also to block reinforcements from across the Atlantic, enabling the U.S. Navy to better intercept British ships en route. A 1932 version of the plan also targeted Quebec, Ontario, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. Army planners believed they would raise less than half a million soldiers in the first month, but would have over three million soldiers by the sixteenth month. Their goal was to obtain 4.6 million men distributed into nine field armies that would expel the British from the Western Hemisphere and isolate Canada. The Navy would raid British commerce and engage their Navy in a decisive battle, then transport soldiers to take the British territories in the Caribbean, such as Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Bermuda. Work on Plan Red continued throughout the 1930s, finally ending in June 1939.9 The most influential planning for future events, however, was War Plan Orange, a war with Japan. In 1898, when the United States acquired the Philippines, the nation’s place in the world changed. Once Congress decided to retain the archipelago, Japan became a possible threat. The Philippines lay about 7,000 miles from the continental United States, while Japan was less than 2,000 miles away. For the first time, Americans laid claim to a territory that projected their influence into the Far East. American relations with the Japanese could be traced back to 1853 when Commodore Matthew Perry famously interrupted two centuries of self-imposed isolation and “opened” Japan to the world. During the 1890s, Americans worried that Japan had its eyes on Hawaii, which the U.S. did not annex until 1898. Plus, Japanese immigration to the West Coast caused racial tensions that on several occasions raised fears of war. In 1906, the U.S. and Japan made the “Gentleman’s Agreement” that limited Japanese immigration, but fear of the “yellow peril” persisted. Just a year after the agreement, the U.S. Navy began hastily planning for the scenario of war with Japan. Still, the Joint Board did not adopt a Plan Orange until 1919 and it was not an official plan until 1924.10 A war with Japan was the Navy’s obsession. This war would rely heavily upon the Navy, whereas the Army would play a larger role in a war with Britain, Germany, or any nation in the Americas. Planners always assumed that Japan would strike without warning and quickly overrun American territories in the Pacific, with the exception of Hawaii. They referred to Japan’s opening moves as Phase I. When first devised, planners thought that Guam and most of the Philippines would fall to the Japanese. However, forts at Manila Bay would remain in American hands while the Navy advanced from Hawaii to take Eniwetek in the Marshall Islands by the sixteenth day with the start of Phase II. Afterward, they would overrun the rest of the Marshalls and then the Carolines to set up a forward base at Truk. From here, Americans could retake Guam and sail forward to Anami Island, a part of the Ryukyus. Unable to use Manila as a base, since Japanese forces would retain control of the harbor even while the forts remained in American hands, U.S. forces would whittle other portions of the Philippines away from the Japanese. Meanwhile, a blockade of the home islands would be in place. If the Japanese did not surrender, then Americans would invade Formosa, Korea, and possibly some of the home islands. With hopes of ensuring a war with Japan would be short, the Joint Board recommended that facilities for a large number of destroyers and submarines be built at Guam, as well as a larger garrison with defenses estimated at $43 million. Until the Washington Conference of 1922 precluded building any fortifications in the Pacific, naval planners usually supported this option. Americans did not want to spend the vast sums of money required to build military facilities regardless; thus, this was always too elusive an option.11 120

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The next evolution of Phase II was what planners referred to as “the Through Ticket to Manila.” In this scenario, the U.S. fleet would drive as swiftly as possible to the Philippines in order to relieve the besieged soldiers there. The Army lobbied for this option, which also had the added benefit of offering a quick war solution. For the Navy, however, rushing to the Philippines would gamble the Pacific fleet in one move. Though risky, the latter two arguments prevailed through the 1920s and this version of Plan Orange reigned until 1934. That year another version of Phase II triumphed: a gradual advance. Planners argued that important islands could be identified, captured, and turned into forward bases. A slow and steady offensive might take longer, but would ensure secure lines of supply, offer the most support for advancing units, and were most likely the best recipe for fewer casualties. It also would not gamble the entire fleet in search for one swift, decisive battle. In the latter half of the 1930s, the higher echelon of naval command began to doubt the validity of such an intricate, costly, and offensive plan; but middle-echelon staffers, tasked with developing and revising Plan Orange, prevailed in keeping the strategy alive, even if it was overshadowed by events in Europe. This was the plan that prevailed after 1934 and it was the one that had the most influence during the Second World War.12 One last area of strategic planning from the interwar period that influenced American thinking in the Second World War was a worst-case scenario where the United States, probably standing alone, fought multiple enemies on multiple fronts. In this study, the obvious enemies were Britain and Japan. The Red–Orange Plan was more of a mental exercise than a true reflection of military paranoia. However, it foreshadowed a Europe-first policy, since that was exactly what strategists adopted in this scenario. Military planners perceived Britain as the greater threat due to its proximity to the U.S. and its strength as an empire. In this scenario, Americans would first initiate War Plan Red, with the Pacific fleet transferring ships to the Atlantic while going on the defensive; the Atlantic fleet would raid British commerce and whittle down the British Navy. The Army would still invade Canada and attempt to occupy British Caribbean territories. After the British Navy was worn down, the U.S. Navy would seek a decisive battle. Planners assumed that Britain would sue for peace once Canada was overrun and their Caribbean bases were in American hands. Afterward, the initiative would shift to the Pacific where the Philippines and Guam would have held out for an extended period before the Japanese overran them. Hawaii would remain in American hands when War Plan Orange went into effect. Planners also presumed that all other nations would maintain neutrality, with the possible exception of Mexico.13 Mental exercises aside, there was trouble on the horizon as both Europe and Asia became hotbeds for conflict. Thus, in May 1939, military planners agreed that the services needed to devise strategies in case the United States found itself at war with the Axis powers, either alone or with allies. Therefore, the Joint Planning Committee produced the Rainbow Plans. Some friction existed between the Army and Navy over whether the strategies should be defensive or offensive in nature. Army planners believed the U.S. should concentrate on a defensive strategy in the Western Hemisphere, protecting Americans and upholding the Monroe Doctrine. The Planning Committee developed Rainbow Plans One and Four for this purpose. Rainbow One assumed that both Britain and France would be neutral or already defeated. The Navy would patrol the Atlantic and Pacific up to 2,000 miles out and as far south as where Brazil and Africa were closest. Americans would abandon her soldiers on Guam and the Philippines to their fate, while retaining control of the Eastern Pacific and Western Atlantic. Planners also included scenarios for Marines and Army personnel to take and fortify islands in Latin America, as well as Natal, a part of the coast of Brazil, to help ensure an American Hemispheric defense. However, nothing was included about Latin American reactions to such seizures, only that the State 121

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Department should ensure foreign cooperation. In August, just a couple of weeks before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, the Joint Board approved Rainbow One. The President would verbally follow suit a couple of months later.14 Rainbow Four portrayed the height of pessimism concerning the situation in Europe. Planners rushed to create a strategy during the summer of 1940, after German forces began rolling over the French in May. The Joint Planning Committee worked under the assumption that the worst had occurred: Britain and France would fall in defeat and both their navies would be in German hands. They believed that Germany would send its vast new fleet to South America in order to gain a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. Therefore, they extended America’s defense to Cape Horn. The majority of the Pacific fleet would move to the Atlantic, thereby granting Japan more freedom, but hopefully restricting German and Italian movement. Similar to Rainbow One, soldiers would fortify Puerto Rico and Panama. In addition, U.S. forces would occupy British territory in the Caribbean, work with the Canadians in Newfoundland and Greenland, and support Argentinian extension into the Falklands. The Joint Board approved Rainbow Four in June 1940, followed by President Roosevelt in August. In both Rainbow One and Four can be traced the focus on the north Atlantic and Caribbean that originated in War Plan Black and Red. However, as events unfolded and with the President’s unwavering support of the British during the Battle of Britain, Rainbow One and Four were disavowed as too pessimistic and contrary to the American fighting tradition in 1941.15 The first offensive strategy was Rainbow Two, which planners began in August 1939 and finished in May 1940. The Joint Planning Committee assumed that Britain and France would continue fighting Germany and Italy, along with the Dutch, and retain control of the Atlantic. However, Japan would see European preoccupation as a way to expand in the Pacific. Unlike the previous Orange Plans, American planners supposed that Americans would become involved through agreements with the Allies, not by a Japanese attack on U.S. territories. Since British strategy designated Singapore as the focal point of their Pacific operations, that was where the American fleet would base itself. With American involvement, the Japanese would attack the Philippines. However, in this scenario, air and naval power from Wake and Guam would support U.S. forces at Manila, who then would be able to repel the Japanese. The Philippines, then, would become a central position from which Americans could thwart Japanese expansion. Even if the forces on the Philippines had a more difficult time, Allied forces based in Singapore would make their way northeast to relieve them. The timetable that accompanied the plan was similar to that of the War Plan Orange from 1929 and the concept of the “Through Ticket to Manila.”16 Rainbow Three, on the other hand, mixed a blend of Rainbow Two with the gradual advance approach. Work on this plan began in April 1940 as it became clear that the U.S. would probably have to deal with a Pacific crisis on its own. Rainbow Three did not make it through the planning stage, however. After Germany defeated France, and Britain was hurriedly withdrawing from the continent, work on Rainbow Three came to a crashing halt. American perspectives changed after President Roosevelt’s re-election in November 1940. Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark wrote his influential “Plan Dog.” Stark was frustrated by world events throughout 1940 and his naval colleagues’ infatuation with War Plan Orange. In his memo, which he submitted to the President in November, he systematically attacked all strategic options except a Europe-first policy. “Plan Dog” would lay the foundation for what became Rainbow Five, which called for a strategic defense in the Pacific and an offense against Germany. A secret American and British conference of military staffs (ABC-1) on January 29, 1941 set similar objectives to those the President approved in the event the U.S. was drawn into the war; as well as an American and Canadian conference known as the Joint Canadian–United States Basic Defense Plan No. 2, or ABC-22 for short, on August 18, 1941.17 122

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However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, even Rainbow Five began to unravel a little. Part of the ABC-1 agreement that comprised a portion of the plan called for a quarter of the Pacific fleet to transfer to the Atlantic, where the British would relocate some of their fleet to Singapore. With the Pacific fleet in shambles at Pearl Harbor, the recently transferred vessels sailed back. In addition, plans for localized raids and minor offensives to rebuff Japanese advances was also discarded. Instead, the American response was to protect the eastern Pacific and retain contact with Australia.18 Once again events superseded Rainbow Five in the Pacific when the U.S. was miraculously able to foil a second Japanese incursion into the eastern Pacific at Midway in 1942. Americans thwarted another Japanese attempt to threaten and cut off Australia at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May. In an attempt to keep the Japanese from regrouping, Americans went on their first offensive at Guadalcanal, which was not in the intended mid-Pacific as War Plan Orange suggested. Whether Phase II, the shift from defensive posturing to offensive operations, began in August 1942 or, as Admiral Ernest King indicated, later in 1943, the Pacific offensives took a two-pronged approach. The southern approach was slow going, but continued, while another operational theater began in the mid-Pacific at the Marshalls, in accordance with Plan Orange. In addition, opening another theater of operations in China, via India–Burma once Chinese airfields were overrun, was not an option that planners discussed prior to the war.19 For Europe, Americans agreed at ABC-1 that protecting the British home islands and colonies was vital to the defense of the U.S. This included maintaining British security in the Mediterranean and the Nile. Though Americans clamored for a direct assault on “Fortress Europe” as soon as practicable, it should come as no surprise that they agreed to an initial offensive in North Africa in accordance with the mission set out at ABC-1. However, such action had no foundation in pre-war planning, other than Rainbow Five since it was finalized after ABC-1. Pre-war planning also did not contain any attempts to address coalition warfare. In the scenarios imagined by the colored plans, the United States acted unilaterally. Historian Henry Gole, on the other hand, argued that the Army War College instituted planning exercises where students had to envision a war “in participation with Allies” as early as 1934. Although this type of planning did not influence official strategies, Gole makes the case that the officers who developed strategic planning in the latter half of the 1930s onto the eve of the Second World War were quite familiar with the ideas flowing from the War College, many of them as participants. Other than War Plan Orange, pre-war planning did not create any blueprint that American leaders would attempt to explicitly follow during the Second World War. However, Plans Red and Orange did benefit strategic planners since they elevated many of the fundamentals that would influence how those architects for victory approached the world war that confronted them.20

Notes 1 J.A.S. Grenville, “Diplomacy and War Plans in the United States, 1890–1917,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 11 (1961): 9–10; Steven T. Ross, U.S. War Plans 1939–1945 (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, Co, 2000), 6; Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 13; Henry G. Gole, The Road to Rainbow: Army Planning for Global War, 1934–1940 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003), 24–25; Dana Georg Mead, “United States Peacetime Strategic Planning, 1920–1941: The Color Plans to the Victory Program,” Ph.D. Dissertation (MIT, 1967), 37–40. 2 Donald A. Yerxa, “The United States Navy in Caribbean Waters during World War I,” Military Affairs, 51, no. 4 (October, 1987): 182–184; Steven T. Ross, American War Plans 1890–1939 (Portland: Frank Cass, 2002), 121. 3 Clayton D. Laurie and Ronald H. Cole, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders 1877–1945 (Washington, DC: United States Army Center of Military History, 1997), 19–21, 29–33;

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4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

Richard Schneirov, The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 4–8; “Memorandum for the Adjutant General of the Army,” May 24, 1920, In Record Group 165, Box 294, Folder 24213 War Plans (College Park, MD: National Archives and Research Administration II); “Estimate of the Radical Situation,” September 24, 1920, In Record Group 165, Box 294, Folder 24213 Appendix 2 War Plans White (College Park, MD: National Archives and Research Administration II). “AEF Plan Green,” 1926, In Record Group 407, Entry 365, Box 78 (College Park, MD: National Archives and Research Administration II), 1. Ibid.; Ross, U.S. War Plans, 9; Ross, American War Plans, 134–137; John Child, “From ‘Color’ to ‘Rainbow’: U.S. Strategic Planning for Latin America, 1919–1945,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 21, no. 2 (May, 1979): 239–240. Child, “From ‘Color’ to ‘Rainbow,’ ” 242–247; Ross, American War Plans, 131–133. Ross, U.S. War Plans, 9; Keith T. Ressa, “U.S. vs. the World: America’s Color Coded War Plans and the Evolution of Rainbow Five,” MA Thesis (Liberty University, 2010), 65. Gole, The Road to Rainbow, 27–28. Ross, American War Plans, 146–152; Gole, The Road to Rainbow, 22–23. Miller, War Plan Orange, 14, 19–20. Ross, American War Plans, 138; Miller, War Plan Orange, 33–35. Miller, War Plan Orange, 35–36, 215–222. Ross, U.S. War Plans, 13–14; Ross, American War Plans, 152–154. Miller, War Plan Orange, 215, 227, 230–231; Ross, U.S. War Plans, 14–17. Miller, Ibid; Ross, Ibid. Miller, Ibid., 256–257. Ibid., 261, 264, 270–271; Ross, U.S. War Plans, 18–21. Miller, Ibid., 333. Ibid., 318, 334–339. For more on the Battle of Midway, see Walter Lord’s classic Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway (New York: Burford Books, 1998), or Craig L. Symonds’ recent book, The Battle of Midway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully’s Shattered Sword: the Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (New York: Potomac Books, Inc, 1997). For more on the Battle of the Coral Sea, see John D. Lundstrom’s The First South Pacific Campaign: Pacific Fleet Strategy December 1941–June 1942 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1976), and H.P. Wilmot’s The Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies, February to June 1942 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008). Gole, The Road to Rainbow, xii, xvi, 36.

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PART V

America and the Second World War

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14 THE UNITED STATES IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1941–1945 Gerhard L. Weinberg

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as President in March, 1933, the world had changed vastly since his defeat as Democratic Party candidate for Vice-President in 1920 by Calvin Coolidge, who had succeeded to the presidency on Warren Harding’s death. Internally, the United States was in a depression that started with a crash in the stock market, led to extensive unemployment, and spread around the world, with further devastating effects on American foreign trade. The last of these effects was accentuated by a new higher tariff. In 1924, Coolidge signed an immigration bill designed to restrict immigration altogether, but especially from eastern and southern Europe, and that greatly reduced the ability of the United States to accept refugees later when developments led many to try to flee to America. The country had disarmed after what was called “the Great War,” and many regretted its participation. The United States had abandoned the peace treaty it had helped to formulate and the League of Nations the treaty established. It had also refused to ratify the guarantee treaty to France that it had promised at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to obtain French agreement to keeping the Rhineland in Germany. In 1931, Japan had seized Manchuria from China and established a puppet government there. Henry Stimson, Secretary of State in the administration of then-President Herbert Hoover, had announced that the United States refused to recognize the legality of this act, but the country had taken no further steps. At the end of January 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg had appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor, and this new leader was consolidating a dictatorial regime in the early months of Roosevelt’s presidency. While German rearmament was immediately speeded up, its relationship to the United States will be reviewed subsequently. Throughout the world, nations were struggling with the depression and the memory and effects of the war. Roosevelt’s experiences, travels, and education made him widely informed about the world. Years earlier he had been concerned about the threat of Germany to the United States and the Western Hemisphere, would have preferred an unconditional surrender instead of an armistice in 1918, and had come to hate war, as he had seen its impact on France.1 He recognized that foreign policy moves by the President required substantial domestic support, as the repudiation of the peace settlement and his own candidacy in 1920 had demonstrated. A family connection with China contributed to an interest in that country and may have influenced his view of it as a potential great power before others accepted the idea. As was characteristic of the partisan 127

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politics of the time, he favored lower rather than higher tariffs; and his appointment of Cordell Hull, the apostle of reciprocal trade agreements, as Secretary of State fit in with this position. Roosevelt’s advocacy of what he called a “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Central and South America would eventually play a role in practically all there joining the United States in the Second World War. In his first years as President, Roosevelt focused most of his attention on the nation’s domestic problems. In spite of this necessary preoccupation under the circumstances, the President paid careful attention to the world situation. He was increasingly alarmed by developments in Europe as Germany appeared likely to initiate another war. He was also concerned as Japan renounced its naval treaty obligations and was clearly preparing for further expansionist moves. In this context, Roosevelt, always greatly interested in naval affairs, persuaded Congress to finance the beginnings of naval rearmament in 1934–1935. Those in Japan who had objected to the naval limitation treaties never realized that, in view of the industrial potentials of Japan and the United States, those treaties had restricted the United States far more than Japan. Once Tokyo scrapped the treaties, only financial limitations kept the United States from building an enormous fleet— as it eventually did. As Germany rearmed, the British and French still hoped that war could be avoided. Since it looked as if fear of the German air force played a major role in French policy, Roosevelt pushed for assistance to France in the field of air force development.2 It was after the Munich Conference at the end of September 1938, that the President called for the building of a significant American air force.3 With an army that, at mobilization, would be less than one-third the size of Belgium’s, the United States only began to create a real army in the fall of 1940. By then Germany had crushed Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg and had forced France to sign a humiliating armistice. In the years before the war, Congress was busy passing what were called “neutrality laws,” designed to keep the United States out of any new war. If in effect before 1914, they might have kept the country out of the First World War, but by assuring Britain and France that in case of war there would be no assistance from the United States, they now served to restrain them from resisting German moves. As the imminent possibility of war loomed in 1939, Roosevelt tried to have the laws amended to make some aid to Britain and France possible, but Congress refused. Similarly, the President’s urging of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to sign an agreement with the Western Powers lest Germany defeat them and then turn against the Soviet Union and the United States fell on deaf ears in Moscow. Stalin preferred an alignment with Germany and utilized publicized talks with British and French diplomats to encourage greater concessions from Germany in secret negotiations.4 As for Roosevelt’s appeal to the belligerents not to bomb civilians, the Germans, who had opened the war by a terror bombing attack on a Polish city, responded by dropping a bomb on the grounds of the American embassy in Warsaw.5 German long-term plans about the United States must be reviewed because they affected policy in the early stage of the Second World War. While a war with the United States was implicit in Hitler’s concept of a world dominated by Germany and inhabited only by Germanic peoples, it was explicitly mentioned as necessary in the book he dictated in the summer of 1928.6 German rearmament in the 1930s was oriented toward the wars Hitler intended to fight and the needs of those wars as he perceived them. The first war against Czechoslovakia could be waged with the arms produced in the first years of his regime. The next war against France and Britain would require much more preparation because the prior war showed that these were the country’s most dangerous enemies. No new weapons were considered necessary for the subsequent war against the Soviet Union since that country was believed racially weak and, because of the good fortune of the Bolshevik revolution, was now ruled by incompetents, who 128

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had replaced the earlier, partially Germanic, ruling elite.7 The converse of belief in the legend that Germany had not been defeated at the front in the First World War but had been stabbed in the back was that America’s military role in that war was of no significance. Hitler was certain of this and considered the country inherently weak; but the United States was indubitably far away and had a large navy.8 To crush that country, therefore, Germany would need intercontinental bombers and a substantial blue-water navy. These were weapon systems of a kind that took years to design and build, and it is no coincidence that in 1937, as the weapons for war against Britain and France were getting into production, Hitler ordered the design and construction of an intercontinental bomber and of super-battleships.9 Ironically this was the very time that the American Congress was passing the so-called “neutrality laws.” In subsequent years, the “America bomber” only flew as experimental versions of the ME-264, and construction of the first super-battleships began early in 1939, with none ever completed. The intent, however, was clear; but the fact that neither weapons system was available in the early years of the Second World War would be critical for German policy toward the United States and Japan. After the German invasion of Poland started the Second World War, Congress passed amendments to the neutrality laws that allowed the United States to sell weapons to the Allies. When in the winter of 1940–1941, Britain was running out of money to pay for them, Roosevelt devised what was called the Lend-Lease program under which weapons and war materials were shipped to that country as a form of loan that would not necessarily be repaid. By that time, the Germans had overrun Western Europe and an alarmed Congress passed the law for a two-ocean navy and a peacetime draft. It enacted Lend-Lease and appropriated the necessary money. In the emergency, Roosevelt had also in effect created the only coalition government in the country’s modern history. When the Republican candidate whom he had defeated in the 1940 election turned down a request to join the Cabinet, Roosevelt took in the defeated Republican VicePresidential candidate, Frank Knox, as Secretary of the Navy. Simultaneously, the most recent Republican Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, became Secretary of War, while Roosevelt appointed several other publicly identified Republicans to positions in his administration. With this coalition government, the United States faced threats across both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. In the Atlantic, there quickly arose the problem of how to send food and equipment to Britain in the face of danger from German submarines, incursions by German surface warships, and long-range German planes from bases in occupied Norway and France. Relatively quickly, the British success in cracking German codes by exploiting technical details that were provided just before the war by Poland’s cryptographers offered a solution. German submarines operated in groups directed by radio from the mainland and then gathered to attack convoys by radio messages to each submarine from the one in charge. When these messages were intercepted and decoded by the British, there was an opportunity to route individual ships and convoys around the submarine concentrations and avoid incidents.10 Thus, although this information could have been utilized to assure incidents almost daily, it was employed in the opposite manner, something most American diplomatic historians have ignored. The few incidents that did occur were used by President Roosevelt to arouse the American public to the dangers it faced and the need to assist the Allies. From the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941, that meant primarily Great Britain. When the President received information on the German plan to invade the Soviet Union from a German opponent of Hitler, he arranged to have Stalin informed; but the latter— in spite of already having been provided a copy of the German invasion order—preferred not to believe such information. After events in June 1941 proved the President correct, he arranged for the extension of aid to the Soviet Union as well. 129

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The President’s hope clearly was that massive American aid would enable Britain and the Soviet Union to defeat the Axis without active participation by American forces. He knew that the American navy had a major part of its beginnings in the undeclared war with France in 1798–1800, and that Japan and the Soviet Union had in 1938 and 1939 engaged in significant local combat in East Asia without fully going to war with each other. This point between peace and war, a situation of occasional incidents without full hostilities, looked both feasible and desirable. There were incidents involving German submarines and surface warships with American ships and planes, but no formal hostilities grew out of them. In the face of the United States’ policy of avoiding open warfare, why did the Germans also refrain from allowing incidents to lead to general hostilities? The German naval leadership had been urging war with the United States since October 1939, but Hitler restrained them. Because it had not been possible to build a fleet of intercontinental bombers and construction of the huge blue-water navy had been temporarily halted, he saw no point in encouraging the Americans to wake up and mobilize. Hitler preferred to postpone war with the United States until either Germany could complete its preparations, especially in the naval field, or it had acquired an ally who had the navy needed for that war.11 An examination by German naval headquarters at Hitler’s request of the possibility of secretly sending German submarines into American ports to sink large numbers of American warships produced a negative result.12 It was in this context—of feeling it necessary to hold back in the Atlantic without having a completed large-surface navy or a realistic chance of making the odds even by a surprise underwater attack—that Germany envisioned the possibility of Japan entering the conflict. The government in Tokyo viewed with great interest what looked like a marvelous opportunity for seizing colonial possessions of France and the Netherlands after their defeat by Germany and grabbing Britain’s colonies and dominions while that country fought for its life at home. When urged in this direction by the Germans, however, the Japanese pointed to the Americans in the Philippines on the flank of any southward advance. Aware of the United States’ intention to accord full independence to the Philippines in 1946, they told the Germans that this year would be the one for a strike south. The Germans pointed out that the war underway might well be over by then. Hitler and other German officials promised that if this was what was holding Tokyo back, the Japanese should move now because Germany would immediately join Japan in war with the United States.13 From the perspective of Berlin, here was the needed navy, and under circumstances in which the United States could not concentrate on the Atlantic. The authorities in Tokyo debated this possibility at length before they took their critical step: the occupation of the southern part of French Indo-China in July 1941. The Vichy French authorities in control of the colony allowed this without a fight; Vichy’s military would fight only the British, Americans, and Free French, but never the Germans, Italians, or Japanese. While the occupation of the northern portion of the French colony in September 1940 could be seen as a step to close a supply route to Nationalist China, the occupation of the southern portion pointed away from war with China and toward an attack on the Americans, British, and Dutch; and it was so conceived by the Japanese. Having watched the Soviet Union deliver oil and other critical materials to Germany until attacked by that country, President Roosevelt could see no advantage to following a similar policy. Knowing that Nationalist China did not have a navy for the Japanese to deal with, he did not want Japan to stockpile oil for war with the United States and Britain. Oil sales to Japan were suspended, though in the last days of negotiations the possibility of resuming sales was raised if the Japanese evacuated southern Indo-China. The Japanese diplomats in Washington were promptly instructed not to discuss such a concept.14 The negotiations between Japan and the United States ran all through 1941, partly because the Japanese were involved in internal debates about the course to take.15 President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull invested enormous amounts of time into the talks. The Japanese 130

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diplomats in Washington, Nomura Kichisaburo and Kurusu Saburo, were also interested in a peaceful settlement. The Germans watched this process with growing fear that an agreement might be reached. The converse of Roosevelt’s hope that negotiations might continue until the Japanese recognized that Germany and Italy could lose the war, not win it, as Tokyo assumed, was German concern that Japan might abstain from entering the conflict if it developed doubts about an Axis victory. Hitler’s designated official historian, General Walter Scherff, noted during the crisis on the Eastern Front before Moscow in December 1941 that Hitler had the most desperate fear that the Japanese might get scared off.16 Ironically, the Japanese had decided to strike just before the major German defeat in that crisis might have provided a warning. In mid-October 1941, the Japanese naval command gave in to Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku’s threat to resign as Commander of the Combined Fleet unless they accepted his plan to attack Pearl Harbor instead of their prior plan for the opening phase of war with the United States. To make sure that it was safe for Japan to take the plunge, Tokyo checked with Germany and Italy again just before authorizing war, though without informing Berlin and Rome of the precise date, and was promptly reassured. While scholars have at times debated what would have happened after the attack on Pearl Harbor if Germany had not declared war on the United States, the reality was the other way around. The Japanese would not have struck without confidence in the firm assurances that Germany and Italy would join them in war against the United States. There have been and will likely be continued speculations that the President knew of the attack and plotted to bring the United States into war that way. The fact that there is not the slightest evidence for such a scheme by the Democratic President and Republican Secretary of the Navy only proves to the conspiracy theorists that the plotters were extremely careful. Neither the extensive investigations conducted by the Congress and others since have had any effect in either demonstrating that there was some American plot or convincing the believers in a conspiracy that there was none.17 The reality was that, by a combination of mischance and local incompetence, the surprise succeeded.18 The aircraft carriers were not in port, but the battleships in port were sunk or badly damaged, and most of the air force planes were destroyed on the ground. The attack had major policy as well as technical naval effects. The major policy effects were of two kinds. Germany and Italy promptly declared war on the United States. Hitler was so enthusiastic that he would not wait the days needed to summon the German parliament and to hand over a declaration of war but instead ordered the German navy to initiate hostilities against the United States and eight other countries in the Western Hemisphere upon hearing of the attack at his headquarters in East Prussia.19 Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria also declared war on the United States, and the President had the State Department try by diplomacy through Turkey to have them withdraw their declarations of war. He gave up on this effort in June 1942. If this was the policy effect of the attack on Pearl Harbor on the European Axis powers, its impact on the public in the United States was especially dramatic. No one can tell whether the original Japanese naval strategy of seeking an engagement in the Western Pacific might have led to American consideration of a compromise peace, leaving Japan with some of its gains, as many in Tokyo hoped. The Sunday-morning attack in peacetime—just what so enthused Hitler, who had done the same thing in April 1941 to Yugoslavia—had the policy effect of guaranteeing that the American people would support a war effort that crushed Japan, regardless of the cost in lives and treasure and without ever considering a negotiated settlement. The technical naval effects of the attack were of two sorts. Obviously there were the large losses in lives, planes, and ships. At minimal cost, the Japanese had removed the American fleet from the flank of their advance south, while simultaneously obtaining a military alliance with a Germany threatening its enemies on the other side of the globe. There were, however, three technical 131

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disadvantages of the attack for Japan. As mentioned, the aircraft carriers were not in port and hence escaped. Furthermore, because of the shallowness of the water in Pearl Harbor, of which the Japanese were aware, the battleships could not be sunk. They were, with the exception of the Arizona and the Oklahoma, put into the mud from which they were raised, repaired, and returned to service.20 Although not much discussed in the literature, there was another important—and predictable—result of the attack in peacetime on warships at anchor in port on a Sunday. While the majority of the crew of the Arizona was killed, the overwhelming majority of the crew members of all other attacked ships survived. In the rebuilding of the American navy in 1942–1943, these men would utilize their skills in either their repaired ships or other units of the navy. The path from attack on Pearl Harbor to surrender in Tokyo Bay was long and costly, but many of the ships and men who were objects of the attack on December 7, 1941, would take part in it. This leaves the question of whether there was an alternative policy the United States might have pursued, thereby avoiding involvement in the war. One alternative would have been to assist Germany instead of assisting Germany’s enemies. This was the policy Stalin adopted. Had the United States done so, no doubt Germany would have been as pleased to accept American help as it was to welcome the Soviet Union’s provision of a naval base to assist its submarine campaign and the invasion of Norway, helping a German auxiliary cruiser pass via the northern seaway to sink Allied ships in the Pacific, sending vast quantities of materials for the German war effort, and transshipping rubber and soybean products from East Asia.21 Just as these and other efforts of Stalin to appease the Germans did not lead to one day’s postponement of the German invasion of his country, there is no reason to think that helping Germany would have kept the United States out of the war. Hitler had assumed that Germany would fight the United States, had initiated armaments programs for that purpose in 1937, and took major steps to make an attack on America possible in 1940 as soon as he thought that German victories in the West made this look feasible.22 The constant efforts during the war to develop planes to bomb the United States were, in effect, a continuation of a policy decided in Berlin long before 1939.23 If helping Germany defeat Britain, France, and the Soviet Union was unlikely to keep the United States out of a war with the Third Reich, a policy of strict neutrality, as advocated by some in the country, was also not going to improve the chances of keeping out of open warfare. As in the former alternative scenario, it would merely have meant that the country could expect to fight Germany, very likely allied with Japan, under circumstances much worse than those of December 1941. Germany would have greater resources at its disposal, while the United States would have weaker or no allies and miss the stimulus to war production that allied orders had provided in the first years of the war. December 1941 was not a good time for the United States to be drawn into the great conflict, but the circumstances could have been very much worse had the country adopted fundamentally different policies. As the example of unsuccessful American effort to persuade Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania to withdraw their declarations of war shows, if a country is determined on war with the United States, the only alternative to a surrender of the nation’s independence is to fight. With Independence Day, July 4, its national holiday, there was never any chance that the United States would choose to surrender; and its enemies were aware of this, whatever their misjudgments about the country’s capacity and resolve.

Notes 1 Michaela Hoenicke-Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 21–38. 2 John M. Haight, Jr., American Aid to France, 1938–1940 (New York: Atheneum, 1970).

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3 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 172–173. 4 Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–1939: The Road to World War II (New York: Enigma Books, 2010), chapter 27. 5 Jochen Böhler (ed.), “Grösste Härte . . .”: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht in Polen September/Oktober 1939 (Hamburg: Grindeldruck, 2005), 69–71. 6 Regarding Hitler’s view of a war with the United States and a world dominated by Germany, see Rudolf Hess to Walter Hewel, March 30, 1927, in Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 2. The general views are in Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, trans. Krista Smith (New York: Enigma Books, 2003). 7 Gerhard Meinck, Hitler und die Deutsche Aufrüstung 1933–1937 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1959). 8 Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Hitler’s Image of the United States,” in Weinberg, World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981), 53–74. 9 Jochen Thies, Architekt der Weltherrschaft: Die “Endziele” Hitlers (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1976). There is now an English-language edition, Hitler’s Plans for Global Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). 10 Jürgen Rohwer, “Die USA und die Schlacht im Atlantik,” in Jürgen Rohwer and Eberhard Jäckel, eds., Kriegswende Dezember 1941 (Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe, 1984), 81–103. 11 The arguments between the German navy and Hitler are summarized and documented in Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Germany’s Declarations of War on the United States: A New Look,” in Weinberg, World in the Balance, 79–81. 12 Ibid., 85. The relevant document of March 22, 1941, was published in 1990 in the Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung, Part A, Vol. 19, 309. 13 Weinberg, World in the Balance, 86. 14 The documents were published in USA, Department of Defense, The “Magic” Background of Pearl Harbor (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978). 15 The Japanese discussions are reviewed in James W. Morley, ed., The Fateful Choice: Japan’s Advance into Southeast Asia, 1939–1941; and The Final Confrontations: Japan’s Negotiations with the United States, 1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980 and 1994). The Japanese documents are in Nobutake Ike, Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967). 16 See Marianne Feuersenger, Im Vorzimmer der Macht: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Wehrmachtführungsstab und Führerhauptquartier 1940–1945 (Munich: Herbig, 1999), 110. Translated, the text reads: “The deciding point was that Japan had to be held to its course. At the onset of the crisis, the Führer was absolutely terrified that they might be scared off.” 17 The report of the Congressional investigation and the texts of prior investigations are in 79th Congress, Senate Document 244, 39 volumes (1946), republished with an introduction by Gerhard L. Weinberg (New York: AMS Press, 1973). An influential early presentation of the conspiracy concept is Charles C. Tansill, Backdoor to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy 1933–1941 (Chicago: Regnery, 1952). 18 John W. Lambert and Norman Polmar, Defenseless: Command Failure at Pearl Harbor (St. Paul, MN: MBI Publishing, 2003); Alan D. Zimm, Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions (Havertown PA: Casemate, 2011). 19 Hitler’s December 8, 1941 order cited in Weinberg, World in the Balance, 93, n. 38. The other countries were Uruguay, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. 20 Homer N. Wollin, Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968); Anthony P. Tully, Battle of Surigao Strait (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 21 Details in Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany and the Soviet Union 1939–1941 (Leiden: Brill, 1972), chapter 5. 22 See n. 9, above; and Norman J.W. Goda, Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path toward America (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1998). 23 Manfred Griehl, Luftwaffe over America: The Secret Plans to Bomb the United States in World War II, trans. Geoffrey Brooks (New York: Fall River Press, 2004).

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15 ROOSEVELT, CHURCHILL, STALIN, AND THE SECOND FRONT James D. Perry

The “Second Front” was the Anglo-American military campaign to liberate France and invade Nazi Germany during World War II. The “first” front was the Soviet Union, where the Red Army engaged the bulk of the Wehrmacht after June 1941. The Second Front was politically contentious because the Allies had incompatible visions for postwar Europe. The British wished to project power into Eastern Europe to deny the region to Soviet control. The Americans wanted the Soviets to have “friendly” regimes on their frontiers to induce them to cooperate after the war. American military and economic dominance ensured that her view prevailed. Thus, the Second Front was launched in France in June 1944, and only Soviet armies entered Eastern Europe. Roosevelt wanted to keep the Soviets in the war and to reach a personal agreement with Stalin on postwar U.S.–Soviet cooperation. Roosevelt articulated his vision during wartime meetings with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, with British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and with Stalin. Roosevelt thought that the “Big Four” (America, Russia, Britain and China) should govern the postwar world. He wanted all other powers disarmed, the colonial empires disbanded, pro-Soviet regimes established in Eastern Europe and Germany dismembered.1 Churchill agreed that Germany should be occupied, disarmed and stripped of her conquests, but thought she should be “rehabilitated” quickly. Churchill advocated political federations in Eastern Europe that would not be under Soviet control. Broadly speaking, Churchill wanted America to underwrite a restoration of the pre-1933 European status quo. His proposals during the war to invade the Balkans and Austria originated in this strategy, which the Americans and Soviets rejected at the Moscow and Teheran Conferences.2 Stalin sought territorial security—the restoration of the USSR’s 1941 frontiers and the creation of “friendly” regimes on the Soviet western border. Stalin wanted a Second Front to divert German forces. After mid-1943, he also wanted to exclude Anglo-American power from Eastern Europe.3 At Teheran, Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s recommendation that AngloAmerican forces should not land in the Eastern Mediterranean. This defeated Churchill’s effort to recreate a cordon sanitaire around the USSR. After Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, Stalin immediately demanded a Second Front. Stalin’s demands grew more strident as the Germans approached Moscow, but Britain was militarily incapable of launching a Second Front in 1941.4 Once America entered the war, 134

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she needed to mobilize her forces, deploy them overseas and deal with the Japanese threat. Britain and America had agreed in March 1941 to defeat Germany first, while containing Japan. The case for defeating Germany first was even stronger after Germany attacked the USSR, but Britain and America could not ignore Japan completely. In December 1941, Churchill argued that, in 1942, the Allies should invade French North Africa, hold the Malaysia–Indonesia barrier and prepare to liberate France in 1943. The Americans agreed.5 Meanwhile, Stalin demanded British recognition of the USSR’s 1941 frontiers, and proposed various territorial changes in postwar Eastern Europe. Roosevelt objected because he did not want to satisfy Soviet demands until he met Stalin and secured his agreement on postwar U.S.–Soviet cooperation. Nonetheless, the British informed Washington in March, 1942, that they were willing to accept Soviet demands.6 This prompted Roosevelt to offer Stalin a Second Front in exchange for dropping his territorial demands. On April 1, Roosevelt approved General George Marshall’s plan for invading Europe in April 1943 (Operation Roundup), for which one million U.S. troops would assemble in Britain (Operation Bolero). Marshall also proposed preparing to invade in 1942 if Germany or Russia seemed about to collapse. The British approved Marshall’s proposals on April 14.7 Stalin declined Roosevelt’s request for a personal meeting in 1942. Instead, Molotov went to London and Washington. In London, Molotov dropped the Soviet Union’s territorial demands, but pressed Churchill for a Second Front in 1942. Churchill could not promise a 1942 landing, but said the Anglo-Americans were preparing for a 1943 landing. In Washington, Molotov heard Roosevelt’s proposals for postwar world order. These included disarming all but the “Big Four,” taking colonial possessions away from “weak nations” and giving them to the Soviets as “international trusteeships.”8 Molotov again demanded a Second Front in 1942. Roosevelt “authorized Mr. Molotov to inform Mr. Stalin that we expect the formation of a Second Front this year” (i.e., 1942).9 The British had only agreed to land in 1943, but Roosevelt insisted on “definite action” in 1942.10 The Allies issued a joint communiqué that “full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.”11 The British supported a Second Front in 1943, but Churchill rejected a 1942 operation “that was certain to lead to disaster”—especially because nearly all the casualties would be British. Churchill suggested a landing in French North Africa instead.12 German success in Libya reinforced this argument. Marshall could not convince the British to change their minds, and accepted the North African alternative, Operation Torch. On July 25, Torch was scheduled for October 30.13 American troop movements indicate Roosevelt and Marshall were in fact not serious about the Second Front in 1942. From December 1941 to December 1942, the U.S. Army expanded from 1.7 million men to 5.4 million, but only 1.1 million were sent overseas due to shipping limitations. From December 1941 to April 1942, the Army shipped 21,997 men to Europe and 183,983 men elsewhere (mainly the Pacific). Between the April decision to launch a 1943 Second Front and the July decision to conduct Torch, the Army sent 83,844 men to Europe and 210,022 men elsewhere. In total, between Pearl Harbor and the decision for Torch, the Army sent 105,841 men to Europe and 394,005 men elsewhere, or four to one against the buildup in Britain required for a landing in France.14 Marshall warned the President several times in early 1942 that reinforcing the Pacific would hinder the buildup in Britain and delay any attack on French North Africa. Roosevelt insisted in May that the buildup in Britain was the top priority, yet reinforcement of the Pacific actually accelerated shortly thereafter. In July, Marshall proposed an offensive in the Pacific that competed with both Bolero and Torch. In sum, their actions—reinforcement of the Pacific—were clearly at odds with their stated objective of launching the Second Front in 1942.15 135

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Shipping men to the Pacific took twice as long as shipping them to Britain.16 Consequently, two men could be sent to Britain for every man sent to the Pacific. Simple arithmetic indicates that instead of sending 100,000 men to Europe and 400,000 men to the Pacific, the U.S. could have sent 700,000 men to Britain before August 1942 and still sent 100,000 men to the Pacific. Marshall could then have championed a landing in France in late 1942 using primarily American troops, and Britain could hardly have refused. American shipping was also excessively committed to the Pacific in 1942. During Torch, more shipping was in the Pacific than the Atlantic.17 The concentration of shipping for the Solomons campaign made a 1942 landing in France impossible, and negatively affected Torch. Lack of assault shipping and carrier support meant the Allies could not land a strong force at Bône and rapidly seize Tunis. Consequently, the Germans rushed troops into Tunisia and held out until May 1943. The U.S. could certainly have diverted enough shipping from the Pacific in late 1942 to capture Tunisia rapidly. America sent large forces to the Pacific ostensibly to secure supply lines and defend Australia. Yet ground troops deployed in 1942 did not engage in defensive combat; they assaulted Guadalcanal after the Battle of Midway had shattered Japan’s offensive capabilities. Shipping enough troops to Europe for a landing in France in late 1942 was certainly possible, though not necessarily wise or successful. Why did Roosevelt and Marshall push to invade France in 1942 while simultaneously making this impossible by diverting forces to the Pacific? The answer lies in grand strategy. Roosevelt promised a Second Front in 1942 in order to get the Soviets to drop their territorial demands, but he did not actually want to deliver a Second Front before personally meeting Stalin and securing his agreement on postwar cooperation. Stalin would have no incentive to meet Roosevelt if the main thing Stalin wanted (a Second Front) already existed. Diverting troops to the Pacific ensured Roosevelt could not deliver on his promise and put the onus for breaking the promise on the British. Stalin reacted angrily to the announcement of Torch. Churchill argued that Torch was the most effective diversion Anglo-American forces could mount.18 (This was only true because so much American manpower and shipping was in the Pacific.) Nevertheless, Torch did not delay the Second Front from 1943 to 1944; Roosevelt had abandoned a 1943 Second Front even before Torch, once again for political reasons. In late 1942, Roosevelt repeatedly asked to meet Stalin in early 1943. Stalin, who had sent peace feelers to the Germans, refused to meet because this would have undermined Soviet negotiations with Germany.19 From Roosevelt’s perspective, if he could not meet Stalin, then the Second Front should be postponed until 1944. Many consider that, at Casablanca, the British inveigled the Americans into abandoning a 1943 Second Front. But, before Torch, the Americans reduced their planned 1943 troop levels in Britain to less than half of what was needed for a Second Front.20 In December, Roosevelt deferred a decision on the “next strategic move” until March 1943.21 This ensured that the Second Front could not occur until 1944. Given that the Americans refused to send enough troops to Britain to launch a Second Front in 1943, the claim that this was the “preferred” American strategy is clearly false. From January to June 1943, about 87,000 American troops arrived in Britain. Total U.S. strength in Britain in June was 184,000 men rather than the 1.1 million originally envisaged for April.22 From December 1941 to June 1943, the U.S. sent 386,309 troops to Britain, 407,231 troops to North Africa and 681,200 troops to the Pacific. Even in December 1943, nearly as many ground troops confronted Japan (849,000) as Germany (982,000).23 In July 1943, there were 334 American landing craft in the Pacific and 333 in the Atlantic.24 This deployment was entirely inconsistent with the supposed American preference for an early Second Front. Sending enough troops to Britain to support an invasion in August 1943 was certainly logistically possible; 136

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many of the troops sent to North Africa to prepare for the invasion of Sicily could have gone to Britain instead. Pacific operations in 1943 were relatively trivial and certainly did not compare in importance to the liberation of France. Nor did German defensive power preclude a 1943 Second Front. The U-boat menace was largely conquered by May, and German forces in France in 1943 were weak.25 The real constraint on Allied action was the diversion of U.S. forces to the Pacific. After Casablanca, Britain and America informed Stalin that they would invade Sicily in July, and launch a Second Front “as soon as this operation offers a reasonable prospect of success.”26 Roosevelt announced the “Unconditional Surrender” doctrine in order to discourage Stalin from making a separate peace with Hitler.27 This news caused Stalin to express “grave anxiety” about the “uncertainty” of the Anglo-American commitment to a Second Front. He wrote to Churchill, “I deem it my duty to warn you in the strongest possible manner how dangerous it would be from the view-point of our common cause further delay in the opening of the Second Front in France.”28 In March 1943, Eden conferred with Roosevelt in Washington. Eden believed that the Soviets would demand restoration of their 1941 frontiers, and compensation of Poland with German territory. Roosevelt and Eden agreed these ambitions were reasonable and that Germany should be dismembered after the war. Eden advised conciliating the Soviets during the war in order to pave the way for postwar cooperation.29 Eden also advocated Balkan and Eastern European postwar political federations.30 Roosevelt certainly believed in conciliating the Soviets, but thought that Stalin would trust him and would never trust Churchill. Therefore, Roosevelt sent Joseph E. Davies to the USSR to arrange a meeting (that would exclude Churchill) to obtain Stalin’s views on postwar political matters.31 On May 19, Stalin told Davies that he wanted Germany’s war potential destroyed and “genuinely friendly” regimes created on his western frontiers. Stalin agreed to meet Roosevelt in July in Alaska, and called for a Second Front.32 On his return, Davies asserted that, without a Second Front in 1943, the Soviets might not cooperate after the war, and might stop fighting after driving the Germans out of the USSR.33 While Davies was in Moscow, Churchill urged an invasion of Italy in 1943. He argued that Anglo-American forces could not stand idle after conquering Sicily, and that this would facilitate the invasion of France in 1944. The Americans agreed to invade Italy using the forces in the Mediterranean and to move seven divisions from there to Britain in November.34 When Stalin heard this decision, he reminded his allies that they had, in February, promised him a Second Front in August or September 1943. Churchill responded that the forces in Britain were too weak to land in France in 1943 (and again, this was true because excessive U.S. forces were in the Pacific).35 Stalin again approached the Germans with peace proposals. The negotiations failed, but rumors of them appeared in the European press.36 Stalin also recalled his ambassadors from London and Washington. To pacify Stalin, Churchill suggested a tripartite meeting at Scapa Flow. Roosevelt revealed that he had sought to meet Stalin without Churchill, but represented this as Stalin’s idea (an outright lie). Churchill was dismayed, but Roosevelt’s proposal that the two meet in Quebec placated him.37 After the Red Army won the July 1943 Battle of Kursk, Stalin did not need to beg for a Second Front. Indeed, Britain and America now needed him to keep pressure on the Germans. Stalin exploited this leverage by ignoring Roosevelt’s requests for a meeting, and by demanding that his allies come to the USSR for a summit, which they refused to do. In August 1943, Roosevelt favored conquering Italy up to a line north of Rome. He rejected Balkan operations, which he thought Britain wanted in order to deny the Balkans to the Russians. Marshall noted that moving seven divisions to Britain would ensure that Balkan operations were impossible. Roosevelt wanted enough American troops in Britain to allow him to insist 137

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on an American commander for the invasion of France in 1944.38 This would ensure that the timing and location of the Second Front, and subsequent operations, would unfold in accordance with his plan for postwar U.S.–Soviet cooperation. At the Quebec Conference, the British stated that Operation Overlord should be “the major offensive for 1944,” with Italian operations subsidiary. Overlord required the elimination of German fighter strength and reduction of German ground strength in Western Europe. To achieve the latter, the British advised driving into northern Italy using the divisions earmarked for transfer to Britain.39 The British did not advocate intervention in the Balkans, but success in Italy would strengthen the case for such intervention. This intervention would, in turn, support the British policy of constructing political federations there. American objections to further operations in Italy sought to prevent the realization of these possibilities, which were at odds with Roosevelt’s strategy for cooperation with Stalin. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to put Overlord under American command and to invade the Italian mainland, but Churchill continued to argue against future transfers from the Mediterranean. The invasion of Italy on September 3 changed Stalin’s attitude about a summit. Now Stalin needed to know his allies’ future intentions. To divine British and American political objectives, Stalin insisted that the Foreign Ministers meet before the Heads of State met. Stalin won the diplomatic game of conference venues; his allies came to him in Moscow and Teheran.40 The Moscow Conference was a major defeat for British strategy. As Keith Sainsbury notes, “Soviet and American views coincided to a considerable degree, leaving the British as ‘odd man out.’ ” The Soviets rejected any limitations on their freedom in the region, and rebuffed British proposals for postwar federations. The Allies agreed that Overlord would occur in early 1944, and that Germany would be occupied, dismembered and disarmed. Hull’s support ensured that Soviet views prevailed in accordance with Roosevelt’s strategy.41 Before Teheran, Churchill desperately sought to meet Roosevelt to decide Anglo-American military strategy before meeting Stalin.42 Roosevelt specifically rejected making strategic decisions with the British before meeting Stalin, but agreed to meet Churchill in Cairo.43 There, Churchill recommended capturing Rome, even if this meant delaying Overlord, and then deciding whether to move into southern France or into the Balkans.44 Roosevelt refused to approve Churchill’s requests because he wanted to invite Stalin to decide at Teheran what the British and Americans should do. In 1943 and 1944, the Americans argued that the availability of landing craft restricted operations in the Mediterranean. During this period, roughly 45 percent of all Anglo-American assault shipping was in the Atlantic, 45 percent was in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, and 10 percent was in the Mediterranean. The U.S. controlled 75 percent of this assault shipping.45 Deferring or reducing Pacific operations in 1944 in order to conduct Mediterranean operations would have supported Churchill’s preferred strategy of countering Soviet power in the Balkans. Sending assault shipping to the Pacific and leaving the Mediterranean with little or nothing supported Roosevelt’s strategy of giving Stalin a free hand in the Balkans. Teheran largely confirmed the decisions already reached in Moscow. Again, Britain was the “odd man out.” Roosevelt presented Stalin with the options for Anglo-American action and invited him to choose.46 Roosevelt emphasized that Mediterranean operations would delay Overlord.47 Churchill argued that, after Britain and America captured Rome as planned in January 1944, they could move into southern France or the Eastern Mediterranean.48 Stalin rejected delaying Overlord and recommended landing in southern France.49 Consequently, the Allies agreed to launch Overlord in May 1944, with a supporting operation in southern France.50 Roosevelt suggested dividing Germany into five parts, and placing strategic points under international control. Churchill advised merely detaching Prussia and including southern 138

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Germany in a “Confederation of the Danube.” Stalin endorsed the President’s plan for dismemberment, and deprecated confederations.51 He advocated shooting 50,000 to 100,000 German officers. Churchill reacted with disgust to Stalin’s last proposal, but Roosevelt joked that perhaps only 49,000 officers should be shot instead of 50,000.52 No systematic execution of prisoners took place, but roughly a million German prisoners died in captivity during and after the war. In this way, the Soviets killed far more than 50,000 German officers. Roosevelt and Stalin wanted to punish France after the war. Stalin insisted that “France should be stripped of her colonies and not permitted to retain beyond her borders any strategic points.” This would reduce her to “an insignificant military power,” and she “could not be allowed to play any important role in the immediate post war world.” Roosevelt agreed.53 Finally, Stalin agreed to enter the Pacific War after Germany’s defeat. He gained rights in northern China that were defined precisely at Yalta.54 The “Big Four” would deal with any threats to postwar peace.55 Keith Sainsbury correctly states that, at Teheran, Roosevelt offered Stalin “a world of Soviet– American dictatorship.”56 The Soviets would gain a dismembered Germany, “a weak France, a subservient Poland, and the continued division of the Balkans into small, weak states [and] an effective Russian sphere of influence in Manchuria and part of North China.”57 The British could only lament that “Stalin has got the President in his pocket.”58 Churchill now needed either a rapid advance into northern Italy or Turkish entry into the war. In early December 1943, Churchill urged Roosevelt to abandon an Indian Ocean operation in order to release shipping for the Mediterranean.59 Roosevelt reluctantly agreed.60 Roosevelt denied any additional aid to Turkey. Turkey refused to declare war on Germany until February 1945, after the Soviets had occupied Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary. Turkey thus could not help Britain exclude the Soviets from the Balkans. Churchill’s only remaining option was action in Italy. At Teheran, Churchill stated that an amphibious operation would permit an advance into northern Italy, after which the Allies could move into southern France or into Hungary and Austria.61 After the December Cairo Conference, Churchill took a close interest in this operation.62 The Anzio assault failed to break the stalemate in Italy primarily because there was insufficient amphibious lift to land a large enough force. Lift was insufficient because the Americans had withdrawn assault shipping for Overlord and diverted nearly half of all Anglo-American assault craft to the Pacific. Thus, the Germans contained the Anzio beachhead until May 1944. The Allies lost a second opportunity in June 1944, when American forces permitted the German Army in Italy to escape encirclement, which prevented the Allies from reaching northern Italy until April 1945.63 Failures on the battlefield in Italy frustrated Churchill’s strategy. Churchill’s final card was the effort to divert Operation Anvil from southern France to the Adriatic. Roosevelt denied Churchill’s requests, and Churchill finally yielded.64 Anvil further weakened the Allied armies in Italy and prevented them from reaching Hungary or Austria before the Soviets. Churchill’s only consolation was the occupation of Greece in October 1944. American allocation of assault shipping to the Pacific ensured that Anglo-American military power never entered the Balkans. This was consistent with Roosevelt’s strategy of giving Stalin a free hand in Eastern Europe. In conclusion, American strategy has been historically misrepresented as solely focused on the military consideration of how to win the war most quickly. In fact, American military operations reflected Roosevelt’s political strategy. He sought a lasting postwar peace based on disarmament of all but the Big Four, satisfaction of Stalin’s territorial demands, the creation of pro-Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe and elimination of German and Japanese military power.65 Presumably, if Stalin’s territorial demands were satisfied and he faced no threats, he would not 139

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disturb the postwar peace.66 Roosevelt sought to create a personal relationship with Stalin that would promote postwar cooperation, and to gain Soviet participation in the postwar United Nations organization. Roosevelt’s political strategy profoundly affected military operations, particularly the timing and location of the Second Front, which he delayed until he had secured Stalin’s agreement on the postwar world order and established a personal relationship with him. The mechanism of delay was diversion of ground forces and shipping to the Pacific in 1942 and 1943. He did not want American troops in the Balkans, and prevented the British from getting there before the Soviets.67 At Teheran, Roosevelt allowed Stalin to decide what the Anglo-Americans would do in 1944. Roosevelt’s alignment with Stalin ensured defeat for Churchill’s strategy and prevented Eastern Mediterranean operations. At Teheran and Yalta, Stalin gained the territorial buffer he desired and was offered strategic partnership as the basis for postwar world order. Yet after Roosevelt’s death, the temptation to enlarge the Soviet position in Europe, Iran and the Far East proved too strong. Truman, unlike Roosevelt, was willing to confront Stalin, and thus cooperation collapsed. Despite the failure of Roosevelt’s strategy, the American foreign policy establishment returned to his idea of partnership with the Soviets—also known as détente—many more times during the course of the Cold War.68

Notes 1 The best primary sources on Roosevelt’s concept for postwar world order are the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, Warren F. Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt: Their Complete Correspondence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Susan Butler, My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper, 1948) is a semi-official history written with extraordinary access to official documents. Herbert Feis’s Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957) represents the foreign policy establishment’s view of wartime diplomacy. The best secondary sources on Roosevelt’s strategy are Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) 7–19 and 83–105, Keith Eubank, Summit at Teheran (New York: Morrow, 1985) 72–76, 296–301 and 356–373, and Keith Sainsbury, The Turning Point (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 12–21, 137–141, and 217–280. 2 The FRUS series is the most readily accessible primary source on British strategy in World War II. For British views on the postwar world, see FRUS, 1943, Volume III, 13–24 and 28–41, The Conferences at Washington and Quebec, 1943, 167–172, and The Conference at Quebec 1944, 324–328. Good secondary sources on British strategy include Keith Sainsbury, The Turning Point and Tuvia Ben-Moshe, Churchill: Strategy and History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 167–316. 3 See the sources cited in note 1, as well as Kimball, The Juggler, 89–90 and 94–95, and Sainsbury, The Turning Point, 225–280. 4 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Grand Alliance (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 341–343, 405–410. 5 FRUS, The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), 69–80. 6 FRUS, 1942, Volume III, Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 499–500, 505–512, 521 and 537–538. 7 Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941–1942 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1953), 183–188. 8 FRUS, 1942, Volume III, 578–581. 9 Ibid., 577. 10 Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt: Their Complete Correspondence, Volume I, 503–504. 11 FRUS, 1942, Volume III, 577. 12 FRUS, The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943, 461–462. 13 Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, 1941–1942, 266–267 and 279–284.

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14 Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955), 732. 15 Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, 1941–1942, 117–119, 175–177, 210–222 and 258–260. 16 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 390 and 725. 17 Ibid., 421. Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, 1941–1942, 396. 18 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 440–442. 19 Eubank, Summit at Teheran, 60–61. 20 Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, 1941–1942, 322–327. 21 Ibid., 363–364. 22 Roland G. Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies, Volume I: May 1941 – September 1944 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1995), 129. 23 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 732. Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943–1944 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), 398. 24 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 75. 25 Walter Scott Dunn, Second Front Now – 1943 (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 229–265. 26 FRUS, The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943, 782–784. 27 Kimball, The Juggler, 76. 28 Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, 671–672. 29 FRUS, 1943, Volume III, The British Commonwealth, Eastern Europe, The Far East (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 22. 30 Ibid., 24. 31 Eubank, Summit at Teheran, 71–78. 32 Ibid., 79–86. 33 Ibid., 87–88. 34 Matloff, Strategic Planning, 1943–1944, 126–135. 35 Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, Volume II, 246–247. 36 Eubank, Summit at Teheran, 96–97. 37 Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, Volume II, 247, 268, 278–279 and 283–284. 38 FRUS, The Conferences at Washington and Quebec, 1943 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1970), 483 and 499–502. 39 FRUS, The Conferences at Washington and Quebec, 1943, 864–865. 40 Eubank, Summit at Teheran, 136–137. 41 Sainsbury, The Turning Point, 53–109. 42 Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt, Volume II, 555–557. 43 Kimball, The Juggler, 90–91, and Eubank, Summit at Teheran, 135. 44 FRUS, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 1943 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 330–334. 45 Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 349. 46 Sainsbury aptly entitles his chapter on Teheran, “Stalin Decides Allied Strategy.” 47 FRUS, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 489, 499, 506 and 546. 48 Ibid., 492, 502 and 504. 49 Ibid., 494, 495, 505 and 506. 50 Ibid., 652. 51 Ibid., 600–602. 52 Ibid., 553–554. At Yalta, Roosevelt, during a private meeting with Stalin, suggested that Stalin should again propose the mass execution of German officers (FRUS, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 571). Perhaps recalling Churchill’s indignation at Teheran, Stalin did not offer this gratuitous affront. 53 FRUS, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 484, 514 and 847. Churchill wanted a strong France as a continental counterweight to Russia (FRUS, The Conferences at Washington and Quebec, 1943, 168). He could not say this at tripartite meetings, where he described France as a counter to Germany (for example, FRUS, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 618). 54 FRUS, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 378–379, 768–770, 894–897 and 984. 55 Roosevelt and Stalin discussed these issues at their second private meeting at Teheran on November 29 (FRUS, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 529–533). On Soviet acquisition of ports and other rights in China, see FRUS, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 567, and also The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 378–379.

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68

Sainsbury, The Turning Point, 227. Ibid., 296–297. Kimball, The Juggler, 100. FRUS, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 675–681. Ibid., 725–726. Ibid., 502 and 504. See chapter 6 of Carlo D’Este, Fatal Decision: Anzio and the Battle for Rome (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). D’Este, Fatal Decision, chapters 21 and 22. Martin Blumenson, ed., Command Decisions (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 383–400. He sought “a peace which would last 25 years . . . his aim was thus peace in our time.” FRUS, 1942, Volume III, 569. His use of the infamous Chamberlain phrase “peace in our time” was not ironic. This logic opened Roosevelt to the postwar charge that he appeased Stalin in the same way that Chamberlain appeased Hitler. See William C. Bullitt, “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” Life, August 30, 1948, 82–97, and September 6, 1948, 86–103. FRUS, The Conferences at Washington and Quebec, 1943, 483 and 499. See “A Short History of American Strategy,” in Richard C. Thornton, The Reagan Revolution I: The Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy (Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing, 2003), 5–48.

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16 THE ATOMIC BOMBING OF JAPAN Was It Necessary? Robert Buzzanco

On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Bomber piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped the first of two atomic bombs against Japan, hitting Hiroshima and killing perhaps 150,000 people and destroying the city. Three days later, U.S. planes dropped another bomb on Nagasaki, and Japan sued for peace days later, thus ending the war in the Pacific Theater, and hence World War II. Historians and policymakers often refer to August 6 as “Day One” because a new era in mankind, and warfare, was born; cities, perhaps nations, could now be destroyed with a single weapon, in a single day. The atomic era ushered in a spiraling arms race between the United States and Soviet Union, and eventually other Western European and Asian nations, and it exacerbated the Cold War. At home, it contributed to the development of the National Security State, increased weapons spending, and domestic anti-communist political movements (such as the Rosenberg’s case, and enhancing the reach and influence of McCarthyism and the Red Scare). The American decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan remains one of the more controversial historical issues as well. While even today most public polling shows that large majorities of Americans believe it was justifiably used to end World War II in the Pacific, there has been and remains division and diversity in opinions on the use of the bomb among scholarly experts and military officials. Since the late 1940s, the way we look at the use of the bomb has undergone several transformations, but still remains an intensely debated topic.1

Postwar Justifications In February 1947, Secretary of War Henry Stimson published “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” in Harper’s Magazine.2 Stimson’s article established the conventional narrative on the use of the bomb, one which is still widely held today. To simplify, Stimson argued that dropping the atomic bomb was militarily necessary to defeat a desperate Japan, a nation which had shown in battles such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa that it was committed to all-out war to the last man and which was still deploying mass numbers of soldiers for a final battle which would inevitably lead to massive American losses. An invasion, Stimson asserted, “might be expected to cost over a million casualties to American forces alone.”3 For a generation which had already endured almost four years of total war on two continents, using the bomb was the quickest way to end the war and bring American servicemen home 143

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safely. As one eminent historian of American liberalism, Alonzo Hamby, argued, “one consideration weighed most heavily on Truman. The longer the war lasted, the more Americans killed.”4 This remains the majority view today, with about 60 percent of Americans arguing the necessity of the bomb (down from about 85 percent in the immediate aftermath of the bombings in 1945). “Thank God,” the essayist Paul Fussell exclaimed, surely echoing millions of others, “for the Atom Bomb.”5 Others, such as then-Senator Harry S. Truman and the lead physicist on the atomic bomb project, Robert Oppenheimer, earlier supported the use of the bomb based on what is often termed the “momentum argument.”6 The Manhattan Project had already lasted several years and the government had appropriated about $2 billion to developing the atomic bomb, a massive expenditure in that era, so it only made sense to use a weapon that had been given so much emphasis and (as with the Stimson argument) eliminated the need for a bloody land invasion of Japan.7 Indeed, U.S. air forces had already been waging a destructive war against Japan (and Germany) for months prior to the use of the atom bomb. In March 1945, for instance, 300 American bombers struck Tokyo in one night, killing about 100,000 people with 1,700 tons of bombs, while also destroying huge sections of the city and leaving up to a million residents without homes. On May 23, U.S. bombers unleashed the largest air strikes of the war, dropping 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo and, two days later, hitting the Japanese capital with another 4,000 tons of bombs. To American policymakers, using an atom bomb—especially one that had attained such a priority, mystique, and momentum—was not a difficult decision given the nature of the war up to that point anyway. In fact, in May 1945, now-President Truman established an “Interim Committee” to consider the implications of the bomb as a military weapon and a postwar issue. That committee did not debate whether the bomb should be used; it simply assumed that once it was developed it would be used, that the momentum to go nuclear was self-evident.8

The Critics Weigh In So great was the consensus on the necessity of using the bomb against Japan in August 1945 that few western authors challenged it for another generation. In 1949, however, the first significant critique of the bomb, one that would remain the standard revisionist interpretation until the mid-1960s, emerged, as the British Nobel Prize-winning physicist P.M.S. Blackett published Fear, War, and the Bomb, which argued that atomic weapons were not militarily needed to win the war against Japan. Instead, Blackett merged the question of using the bomb with the intensifying U.S.–Soviet Cold War and saw the events of August 1945 “not so much the last military act of the Second World War as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.”9 The bomb, as Blackett saw it, was not a military weapon aimed at Japan so much as a political weapon designed to keep the Soviet Union from entering the war against Tokyo and becoming too adventurous after the war. Few scholars would back up Blackett’s argument for some time, as even appearing to be “soft” on the Soviet Union amid an escalating Cold War and arms race could destroy one’s reputation and career. By the 1960s, however, especially as the United States became more deeply involved in an unpopular war in Vietnam, the use of the bomb became a more fertile, and controversial, area of study. And no one, for over three decades, did more to dominate that discussion than Gar Alperovitz, an economist by training but destined to become perhaps the global authority on the American decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan.10 In the aftermath of the war, and especially since Alperovitz and others first called the decision to use nuclear weapons into question, various scholars have conducted significant and impressive 144

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research on the use of the atomic bomb and have compellingly called into question the rationale behind its use. Now, almost 70 years after the bomb was used, it remains a source of oftenvirulent historical debate, but the revisionist arguments of Alperovitz and others are still powerful and well-regarded among those who study this topic closely. To Alperovitz and others who accepted his view, often termed “revisionists,” the use of the bomb was an act of “Atomic Diplomacy,” an effort to use the new, and awesome, weapon to achieve American goals after World War II ended by threatening massive destruction, and by sending a message to the main U.S. rival, the Soviet Union, that America had a nuclear monopoly and was willing to use the bomb.

Atomic Diplomacy: The Bomb, Japan, and the Soviet Union To analyze the decision to use the atomic bomb, it is useful to look at the context and chronology of the development and decision-making process from the onset of the bomb project until it was dropped, and then discuss the manner in which policymakers constructed the narrative of the necessity of dropping the bomb, which gained popular acceptance. The United States had begun the Manhattan Project to develop atomic weapons at the outset of World War II, eventually bringing its ally Britain in on the project, but not its other ally, the Soviet Union. Germany too had been trying to develop a bomb, but many of its scientists, several of whom were Jewish, had fled the Nazi state, with several emigrating to the United States or the Soviet Union and working on weapons projects there. By 1945, it was clear that Germany was not close to developing nuclear capabilities, while the Manhattan Project was on the verge of creating an atomic bomb. At that point, American decision-makers in the Roosevelt and then the Truman administration began to plan to end World War II and for the potential use of the atomic bomb (this would be one of the primary contentions of those arguing the “momentum” view). Often, historians and history buffs get bogged down in the precise dates at which events occur and lose sight of the bigger picture. But when discussing the atomic bomb, the timeline is critical.11 In February 1945, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin met at Yalta to discuss the postwar world. At that time, the Soviet Union was fighting a declared war in Europe, but not against Japan. At Yalta, Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan precisely three months after the European phase of the war was over, in exchange for territorial concessions in Japan. The role of and relevance of the Soviet Union has received a great emphasis in the past decade, largely due to the work of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who in 2005 published a book that more comprehensively than previous works (a point that even Alperovitz emphasized) interrelated the politics and decision-making processes of the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union. One of Hasegawa’s principal arguments was that Japan was more concerned with, indeed fearful of, Soviet intervention against it than it was with continuing to fight against the United States. Should the Soviet Union intervene, Japan could expect even more fearsome and bloody battles, and the potential loss of greater territory. While they might have surmised that the United States would choose to help Japan rebuild along capitalist lines to become an ally in Asia, Tokyo’s leaders could expect the Soviet Union to focus on conquest rather than constructing a global Open Door trade system. This belief would be conclusive, Hasegawa asserts, in Japan’s summer 1945 decisions.12 At this same time, early 1945, American war planners were busy preparing for a military conquest of Japan, and, while taking account of the Japanese tenacity at Iwo Jima, they had two 145

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important assumptions in their planning. First, they believed that Japan was already devastated from the grind of war and unremitting air attacks, including incendiary bombing (see above) from American air forces. Second, they contended that a Soviet declaration of war by itself— perhaps even prior to an attack—would almost surely force Japan to surrender, a point that Hasegawa would confirm over a half-century later. Many high-ranking Japanese officials, throughout the spring of 1945, had begun an agonizing examination of the war and concluded that transportation, shipping, communications, and industry had been so badly damaged that it would soon be impossible to continue the war. In the spring of 1945, American officials, via MAGIC intercepts of Japanese messages, also learned that Japan was making overtures for, and had a delegation working with, the Soviet Union to develop a settlement or surrender, with the major conditions being a loosening of the American demand for “Unconditional Surrender,” which would enable the retention of Emperor Hirohito; but the U.S. did not pick up on the Japanese entreaties. In the United States, however, there was a strong media push to end the war promptly, even if this meant keeping the emperor in place. In the first half of 1945, U.S. military planners, unquestionably aware, and assuming, that Japan was desperate, began planning for an invasion of Japan. They assumed that the earliest date for a limited invasion, of the Ryuku Islands, was November 1, 1945, while the earliest date for an invasion of the Japanese mainland was January 1, 1946—both dates were significantly later than the early August Soviet promise of intervention, which planners maintained would force a Japanese surrender by itself. Military analysts, led by General George Marshall, also assumed that the U.S. could expect about 46,000 casualties as the result of a land invasion.13 On May 8, the war in Europe ended, meaning that the Soviet pledge to attack Japan would be effective in early August. On July 17, President Truman met with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Stalin at Potsdam. The United States delegation had delayed the meeting for a couple of weeks, claiming pressing budget matters. More likely, Truman was buying time to allow for a test of the atomic bomb scheduled for Alamogordo, New Mexico. At Potsdam, Stalin reaffirmed Soviet intentions to enter the war, but the U.S. was now not eager for Soviet help. While at Potsdam, Truman received word that the atomic bomb test had been a success. He then began, as his aide James Byrnes described it, to “carry the bomb around on his hip.” His previously diplomatic and conciliatory tone gave way to an aggressive bluster and he began to issue ultimatums to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyasheslev Molotov. On August 6, just days before the Soviet Union was to enter the war, and months before any U.S. invasion, limited or full, was possible, and aware that Japan was prostrate and desperate, Truman ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. Japan surrendered within the week. Hirohito was retained as emperor.

Aftermath: A Military or Political Necessity? The immediate public reaction to the use of the bomb was not as overwhelmingly positive as one might think. The country was split about evenly on its use. Many Americans, including the National Council of Bishops and conservatives like William Buckley Sr., criticized Truman’s decision on moral and practical grounds. More surprisingly, perhaps, a significant number of the most influential foreign policy and military officials of the period weighed in against the bomb— both at the time and later. Curtis LeMay, the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, believed in April 1945 that the continued pummeling of Japan from the air would force Tokyo to surrender within six months, making both an invasion and the use of the atomic bomb unnecessary.14 146

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The Commander of European Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, observed later that in 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.15 Indeed, as Alperovitz wrote, “before the atomic bomb was dropped each of Joint Chiefs of Staff advised that it was highly likely that Japan could be forced to surrender ‘unconditionally,’ without use of the bomb and without an invasion.”16 According to the physicist Leo Szilard, a member of the Manhattan Project, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes was a major force behind Atomic Diplomacy. Byrnes met with scientists in June 1945 and expressed his concern about the imposition of Soviet rule in the countries of Eastern Europe, where the Red Army remained as an occupation force after it liberated countries from Nazi control. Byrnes did not, according to Szilard, argue that the bomb was needed to defeat Japan, but rather that it should be dropped to “make Russia more manageable in Europe.”17 Similarly, Navy Secretary James Forrestal reported that, in a July 28 meeting, “Byrnes said he was most anxious to get the Japanese affair over before the Russians got in, with particular reference to Dairen and Port Arthur. Once in there, he felt, it would not be easy to get them out.”18 Joseph Davies, who had been the American ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936–1938 and served as an envoy to Stalin after that, also cited Byrnes’s role in the decision to drop the bomb. The Secretary of State told Davies that the bomb “would have some effect [on the Soviets] and induce them to yield and agree to our position.” “The New Mexico situation [the successful atomic bomb test at Alamogordo] had given us great power,” he added, “and that in the last analysis it would control [diplomacy].” In his diary, Davies observed that “Byrnes’ attitude that the atomic bomb assured ultimate success in negotiations disturbed me . . . I told him the threat wouldn’t work and might do irreparable harm.”19 Byrnes was not alone in citing the fear of Soviet expansion. Joseph Grew, a longtime diplomat and Acting Secretary of State in early 1945, was wary of Soviet involvement in the war against Japan. Already Russia is showing us—in Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia—the future world pattern that she envisions and aims to create.... Once Russia is in the war against Japan, then Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea will eventually slip into Russia’s orbit, to be followed in due course by China and eventually Japan.20 Views such as those of Byrnes and Grew, and many others in the Truman administration, added evidence to those arguing that the bomb was being used not to end the war against Japan as much as to send a diplomatic signal to Stalin that Soviet expansion would be thwarted and the U.S. pursuit of global economic power would not be impeded. While there are still diverse opinions on the use of the bomb, most of the scholars and policymakers who study it closely have accepted the idea that the bomb was not militarily necessary to end the war. Even U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission historian J. Samuel Walker, who 147

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has studied the history of research on the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan as closely as anyone except perhaps Alperovitz, concludes that the consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisors knew it.21

Public Perceptions: “One Million Lives Saved” In 1947, however, public perceptions on the bomb began to change. Truman published an article, ghost written by Henry Stimson, in which he claimed he dropped the bomb to prevent an invasion of Japan that would have cost one million American lives, even though the military estimate was 46,000. With the horror of that scenario in their minds, Americans began to change their opinions on the use of the bomb and have consistently supported it since then. The “one million lives” argument was particularly potent on many fronts. It made Truman (who was facing re-election in 1948) appear to be a strong and brave leader, willing to make the most difficult decisions and save American lives, and be responsible for the aftermath. It added to the mystique of American power, having a weapon of mass destruction that no other nation possessed. It enhanced the U.S. image as protector of what would be known as the “Free World,” able to defend allies against the vicious onslaught of communist expansion if needed (and in both the Korean and the Vietnam conflicts, as well as during crises over the Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the specter of American nuclear weapons was dynamic). Finally, by framing the decision to use the bomb within the context of saving a huge number of American lives, it gave a moral purpose to a horrific act. As an example of the political uses of history, the ability of Truman and his associates to create the “one million lives” scenario worked just as they had hoped. The decision to use the bomb is still emotional and controversial, as evidenced by the mid1990s controversy at the Smithsonian Museum over the bomb. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, the Smithsonian planned an exhibit on the decision to drop the bomb, which included a script which simply stated that some scholars have suggested that it was used as a diplomatic and political weapon against the Soviet Union more than a necessary military weapon against Japan. At that point, veterans’ groups and pro-military politicians entered the fray and set off a national debate on the bomb. Eventually, the Smithsonian scrapped the exhibit altogether. The idea that Truman might have dropped the bomb for some reason other than the noble purpose to save lives was considered too controversial to even suggest.22 The use of the bomb still resonates. In the twenty-first century, the United States has taken the lead in making sure two nations, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic Republic of (North) Korea, do not possess nuclear weapons. While the American use of atomic weapons in August 1945 is scarcely mentioned in the United States, it is often stressed elsewhere, especially in non-nuclear countries who feel threatened by the arsenals of powerful western nations or China. So, it is certain that the reality of nuclear weapons, and the only time they were used in warfare, in August 1945 against Japan, will remain a contentious and critical public and political issue.

Notes 1 For an excellent collection of documents on the use of the bomb, see The National Security Archive’s “The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II: A Collection of Primary Sources,” National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 162, available at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB162/index.htm, accessed August 24, 2012.

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2 Henry Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1947, 97–107. 3 Ibid. Another influential defender of the use of the atom bomb was Herbert Feis, a well-known government official and scholar. While his main arguments were presented in The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, published by Princeton University Press in 1966, his support of Truman’s atomic decisions had been expressed frequently in the decades before then. 4 Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 336. 5 Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and other Essays (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990). 6 Although Truman did not officially learn of the Manhattan Project until after he became President, as Senator he was aware that something of extreme importance was taking place at a number of war plants across the country. Truman was Chairman of the Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. In an effort to determine the purpose of the huge expenses and construction taking place in war factories around the country, Truman sent investigators to Tennessee and Washington State. Before the matter could be explored in any detail, Secretary of War Stimson intervened and informed Truman that this was a top-secret program, “the greatest project in the history of the world.” As a result of this conversation, Truman agreed to stop the investigations into those plants without learning about the true nature of the program. See Harry Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Volume I, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955), 10–11. 7 The “momentum” argument has been put forth with concision and nuance by Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). In 2005, as the sixtieth anniversary of the use of the bomb approached, Walter Isaacson, an influential author and policy analyst, wrote an essay in Time titled “Why Did We Drop the Bomb?” (April 18, 2005) in which he, too, asserts that the momentum argument makes the most sense, available at www.time.com/time/ printout/0,8816,1050507,00.html, accessed August 24, 2012. 8 J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 14–15. 9 P.M.S. Blackett, Fear, War, and the Bomb (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949), 139. 10 Alperovitz first put forth his argument against using the bomb in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965) and refined it over the years, until publishing his most developed work yet, over 30 years later, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996). 11 While this analysis of the revisionist argument takes account of many of the historians who have written on the topic, it relies most heavily on the career work of Alperovitz, and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb in particular. 12 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 13 See Barton J. Bernstein, “A Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (June/July 1986): 38–40. 14 Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction, 39–40. 15 Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years; Mandate For Change: 1953–1956 (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1963), 312–313. 16 Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Penguin, 1985), 285, emphasis in original. For a series of quotes from military leaders questioning or criticizing the use of the bomb against Japan, see www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/atomicdec.htm, accessed August 24, 2012. 17 Leo Szilard, “A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb,” University of Chicago Roundtable 610 (September 25, 1949): 14–15. 18 James Forrestal, The Forrestal Diaries, eds. Walter Millis and E.S. Duffield (New York: Viking, 1951), 74–81. 19 Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction, 64; Davies in Gar Alperovitz, “Hiroshima: Historians Reassess,” Foreign Policy 99 (Summer, 1995): 32–33. 20 In Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction, 42. 21 J. Samuel Walker, “The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update,” Diplomatic History (Winter 1990): 110. 22 “Letter to the Smithsonian from the Historians’ Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima,” July 31, 1995, available at www.doug-long.com/letter.htm, accessed August 24, 2012.

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17 AMERICAN WOMEN IN WORLD WAR II Kara Dixon Vuic

Before Norman Rockwell gave Rosie the Riveter a face on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, a hit 1942 song told Americans who she was. Wielding her riveting machine and keeping “a sharp look out for sabotage,” Rosie proved that she could “do more than a male could do,” even if she was “smeared full of oil and grease.” “That little girl” who was “making history, working for victory” quickly became the most popular symbol of women during World War II.1 Not all women riveted as Rosie did, of course, and indeed not all women worked in defense industries. Many volunteered their efforts in civic organizations, while others performed a variety of functions that were less frequently the subject of wartime media. Hundreds of thousands of women left home to join the military’s new women’s corps or the well-established nursing corps. Whatever their wartime experience, women everywhere found their lives radically changed.

Military Women When the United States entered World War II, the armed forces contained only a few thousand women, most of them army nurses. Women had served in the military in previous wars, but most Americans regarded military service to be the purview of men and considered masculine traits essential to soldiering. However, as wartime needs exhausted the eligible male population, military leaders turned to women to “free a man to fight” by filling noncombat roles. While women who joined the armed forces often faced suspicion about their motives, popular opinion gradually began to embrace women’s service as essential to the war effort. Less than one year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 81 percent of respondents to a Gallup Poll preferred the army to draft single women instead of married men with families for noncombat positions.2 By the war’s end, even previously resistant military commanders praised women’s wartime service. Approximately 350,000 women had enlisted in all branches of the military, and more than 500 died in service. On the morning of December 7, 1941 fewer than 7,000 nurses were serving in the army.3 Stationed across the United States and in overseas assignments in places such as Hawaii and the Philippines, these nurses became some of the first American women to have their lives uprooted and transformed by the war. Not long after army and navy nurses scrambled to care for those wounded in the Pearl Harbor bombings, nurses in the Philippines also found themselves under 150

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attack and were eventually captured by the Japanese. Held prisoner for the next three years, these women endured the horrors and trials of life with limited rations and constant fear, even as they continued to nurse their fellow prisoners.4 Before the women were liberated in 1945, more than 57,000 women had joined the Army Nurse Corps while 11,000 enlisted in the Navy Nurse Corps. Although this increase was short of the military’s goal, it did reflect the concerted effort of government and military officials to bring women into the corps. Recruitment efforts mirrored most Americans’ belief that nursing was an inherently feminine act, rooted in women’s supposed innate nurturing and self-sacrificial traits. Likening nurses to angelic figures and wartime nursing to a romantic pursuit, recruitment materials characterized nursing as patriotic service, even as they lured women with promises that they could “save his life . . . and find your own.”5 In June 1943, Congress established the Cadet Nurse Corps to subsidize nurses’ educational costs in exchange for their wartime service in either a military or a civilian assignment. More than 124,000 nurses took advantage of the program. Despite such alluring messages and programs, the military faced an uphill battle throughout the war to recruit enough nurses. And yet, while personnel needs pushed the military to allow married women to serve, the military cost itself the services of several thousand qualified nurses by refusing to use male nurses and upholding racial segregation.6 Viewing military service as a way to demonstrate civic equality, African-American nurses pressured the military to integrate even before the war began. The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lobbied the President and Congress to allow African-American women to serve as military nurses. Their efforts convinced the Surgeon General to accept a quota of forty-eight black nurses, all of whom were assigned to segregated hospitals in Fort Bragg, North Carolina and Camp Livingston, Louisiana. Although the miniscule quota was increased after U.S. entry into the war, even amidst increasing calls for nurses, the army limited the number of black nurses and assigned them only to segregated and prisoner of war hospitals. Continued pressure finally resulted in the removal of the army’s quota—and the navy’s outright ban—in early 1945. By the war’s end, approximately 500 black women were on duty as army and navy nurses around the world.7 Army nurses served in all theaters of the war, in many kinds of hospitals, on trains, ships, and transport planes. In Britain and Italy, Burma and China, as well as Iceland, Panama, Australia, and India, nurses endured a host of living conditions, illnesses, shortages of medical supplies, and the attentions of the men with whom they served. Five hundred women trained to become the army’s first flight nurses, while others made advancements in the fields of psychiatric nursing and anesthesia. Navy nurses worked primarily in the United States, though some served on hospital ships.8 Throughout most of the war, nurses’ military status remained ambiguous. Since World War I, nurses had held relative rank, a designation that granted them limited authority and military privilege. They continued to hold this status until June 1944 when Congress granted temporary commissions with equal pay for the war’s duration plus an additional six months. Only after the war, through the Army-Navy Nurses’ Act of 1947, did nurses receive permanent commissions that conferred equal pay, dependency allowances, and retirement benefits.9 On January 6, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that the army was several thousand nurses short of its requirement and, as a consequence, had been forced to send eleven hospitals overseas without any nurses. Lamenting that the care of soldiers might suffer as a consequence, Roosevelt urged that the Selective Service Act be amended to draft nurses. Three days later, the proposed Nurses Selective Service Act called for the registration, selection, and induction of every nurse between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Although several nursing officials pointed out that the army was partially to blame for the shortage because of its sex and 151

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race exclusion policies, the bill overwhelmingly passed the House in early March. Polls suggested that 73 percent of the public approved of the draft, and the American Nurses’ Association endorsed the bill. Well on its way to approval in the Senate, though, the end of war in Europe drastically reduced the need for nurses, and the nurses’ draft never came to pass.10 Although Americans had little trouble embracing the notion of women serving as nurses in the war, many resisted the idea of women soldiers. In May 1941, Representative Edith Nourse Rogers introduced a bill to establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) as a corps of civilian women working with the army, not a corps of women organized within the army.11 The bill received little attention and stalled in committee until the declaration of war later that year convinced military leaders that women would be essential to an effective military campaign. Despite women’s value to the military, detractors maintained not only that female soldiers would disrupt their maternal and domestic roles, but also that they would undermine American manhood. “Who then will maintain the home fires?,” Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan asked. “Who will do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble, homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself; who will rear and nurture the children?”12 His colleague, Andrew Somers of New York, urged Congress to “think of the humiliation” that female soldiers would present. “What has become of the manhood of America,” he asked, “that we have to call on our women to do what has ever been the duty of men?”13 Although opposition such as theirs was not enough to stall the creation of a women’s corps (Congress passed the bill, and President Roosevelt signed the WAAC into creation on May 15, 1942), their criticism revealed the ways that female soldiers challenged Americans’ conceptions of soldiering, gender, and wartime obligation. Wacs found that gender shaped the military’s expectations of them, the tasks it assigned them, and the benefits they received for their service.14 Military officials explained, for example, that women were assigned to clerical and repetitive tasks because of their feminine aptitude for menial work. Additionally, when Wacs deployed overseas in late 1942, their auxiliary status meant that they did not receive overseas pay, nor were they afforded any protection under international agreements in the event of capture. To rectify these discrepancies and in anticipation of an increased need for women as the Allied effort expanded in Europe, on July 1, 1943 Congress approved the army’s request to establish a formally integrated Women’s Army Corps (WAC) that granted women pay, privileges, and protection equal to those provided to male soldiers.15 Having witnessed the problems that auxiliary status caused for women in the army, both the Marine Corps and the navy established their women’s corps as fully integrated units. Established on July 30, 1942, the navy’s Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES) ultimately enlisted approximately 86,000 women, while 11,000 women joined the Coast Guard’s SPARS (“Semper Paratus, Always Ready”), established on November 22, 1942. The Marine Corps, resisting the trend of creating catchy names for its female corps, established its Women’s Reserve in January 1943 and enlisted approximately 23,000 women. But even as women became a more integral part of the army and as military commanders praised their performance, they struggled to legitimize their roles amidst public suspicion about their motives and their sexuality. Faced with popular notions of soldiering as a masculine activity, corps leaders sought to assure the public both that women were capable of performing their new roles and that they would remain feminine in doing so. To that end, WAC recruitment posters featured well-manicured and coiffed women performing critical military functions. Similarly, the navy and Marine Corps devoted considerable energies to ensuring that the women who were transforming society’s gender ideologies continued to look feminine. Enlisting the services of haute couture fashion designer Mainbocher to design WAVE uniforms, the navy prided itself on the women’s feminine appearance, while the Marine Corps dictated that women 152

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wear lipstick and nail polish that matched their red uniform cords. Elizabeth Arden even designed a color in their honor, Montezuma Red.16 And yet, military officials had to be careful not to extend feminine images so far that they implied women were only interested in frivolity or romantic pursuits. As WAC Director Olveta Culp Hobby explained, the corps needed to assure the public that female soldiers “will neither be Amazons rushing to battle, nor butterflies fluttering about.”17 And yet, rumors that the army provided prophylactic devices to Wacs (as it did to men), combined with an old stereotype of military women being “mannish,” complicated matters even more. Wacs endured a sustained slander campaign that charged they functioned as prostitutes for soldiers and that they were a band of lesbians. Such allegations made army life difficult for women, who struggled to balance intense investigation into their personal lives with their desire to perform their duties admirably.18 The 150,000 women who joined the army during the war indeed performed many roles. Although the armed forces most often assigned them to “women’s” tasks, such as filing, typing, and operating telephone switchboards, Wacs, Waves, and Marines also proved their worth as motor pool drivers, cryptologists, parachute riggers, photograph analysts, radio and control tower operators, and map analysts, as well as through work in communications, intelligence, and the Judge Advocate General Corps. Whatever their assigned role, many women actively sought overseas service in stations across North Africa, Europe, the Mediterranean, Southwest Pacific, and the China-Burma-India Theater, even as the navy and Marine Corps forbid women from serving overseas and only allowed them to serve in the territories of Hawaii and Alaska in late 1944. Military women expressed general satisfaction with their wartime experiences. Joining the WAC “was a liberation for me,” Margaret Porter Polsky noted. Reflecting on the ways the war expanded her experiences and allowed her to meet new people, she also expressed pride in what her work meant for the war effort. “I felt I was accomplishing something, and contributing something,” she explained.19 Black women sought service in the WAC for similar reasons but were limited to 10 percent of the corps and were segregated in their assignments and living quarters. Raised in New Jersey, Marjorie Randolph had never experienced segregation before she joined the WAAC in February 1943. Yet she quickly learned during her training in Fort Des Moines, Iowa that she would have to fight “three wars at the same time”: one against the Axis powers, one against gender discrimination, and another against racism.20 Racism also limited women in other branches. The Marine Corps forbid black women during the war, while the navy only opened its doors to AfricanAmericans after being ordered to do so in October 1944 by President Roosevelt. Then, fewer than 100 black women enlisted, though they were integrated into existing units and not segregated. Only a few black women enlisted in the SPARS after the Coast Guard opened to AfricanAmericans in October 1944. Although never a formal part of the military, the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) operated from 1942 to 1944. Designed to free male pilots for combat duty and to train women who could fly missions if the United States was attacked, the program employed more than 1,000 women to operate military aircraft. The women flew planes between bases, towed targets for gunnery practice, simulated combat situations to train male pilots, but could not fly with a man in the cockpit or transport male passengers. Women pilots were even initially grounded during menstruation for fear that their ovulation cycle could harm their flying abilities. Women found the work exciting, but as civilians were ineligible for insurance and military or veteran benefits, and they had to purchase their own uniforms, pay for their board, and even finance the funerals of the thirty-eight women who died in service. Wasps fought for public recognition of their service for many years after the program ended and were finally awarded veteran status in 1977.21 153

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War Production As war production boomed and Selective Service depleted factories of men, owners turned to women already in the labor force, who shifted from traditionally female work to higher-paying industrial jobs. When war needs created even more demand for women workers, owners turned to single women, then to middle-class wives and mothers who had traditionally not worked outside the home. While almost half of all adult women were employed during the height of war production in 1943 and early 1944, less than five million of the nineteen million women who worked outside the home were new workers. What constituted a profound change in the nature of women’s work was not so much that the female labor force grew by nearly a third during the war, but that married women workers outnumbered single women workers for the first time.22 The Office of War Information (OWI) and the War Manpower Commission coordinated efforts to recruit women into the workforce. Blending appeals to women’s desires to help end the war quickly with images of attractive women performing industrial tasks, recruitment materials asserted that women’s work was a patriotic contribution to the war effort and that working women would retain their femininity.23 “Instead of cutting the lines of a dress,” the OWI film Glamour Girls of 1943 assured, “this woman cuts the pattern of airplane parts.”24 But even as wartime posters reasoned that “the more women at work, the sooner we win” and that “we can’t win without them,” they also cast women’s work as a temporary venture, one that would not disrupt society’s gender norms after the war’s end.25 Working women struggled to balance their forty-eight-hour work week with an increase in housework. Rationing made food preparation, clothing production, and travel more difficult, and daily tasks became much more time-consuming.26 Mothers in the labor force struggled perhaps more than most to balance their work schedules with their domestic responsibilities. With two children at home, LoRay Tewalt worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift at a Douglas Aircraft plant. Although the nighttime shift allowed her to be at home with her children in the afternoon, she had to fit sleep into short naps between meals. “I never got enough sleep when I was working,” she remembered.27 Facing the unprecedented number of working mothers, Congress provided $52 million to establish childcare centers in areas with significant war production industries. Although never sufficient to address the needs of mothers everywhere, the program established more than 3,000 facilities in the hopes of boosting wartime production by freeing mothers to work.28 Industry and government officials sought to make work compatible with women’s needs simply because their defense work was so vital to the war effort. In fact, women employed in defense or federal jobs could not join the military without a release from their employer.29 The positions women filled varied widely. As Allied efforts relied heavily on airpower, the aircraft industry employed large numbers of women to rivet, inspect planes, and make repairs. Women also worked in the heavy industry of shipbuilding, while women working for the Ordnance Department loaded and fired weapons to test equipment and ammunition. Others worked in dangerous munitions factories, often located in rural areas, where they produced bombs and ammunition.30 Despite their necessity to war production efforts, women often endured taunts and hostility from male coworkers who feared that women’s entrance to skilled work would provoke wage cuts. Contrary to men’s fears, employers rarely paid women and men equal wages for equal work and often divided men and women into different job categories or shops to avoid paying them the same salaries. But for most women, even those wages were higher than what they had earned before the war or what they could earn in other capacities. In fact, although 154

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wartime images of women workers suggested that patriotism alone motivated their efforts, most women who entered the industrial labor force did so primarily for economic reasons. The prospect of such an increase in wages led to a significant shift in the female labor force from domestic, sales, and service positions to industry. In Detroit, for example, a woman working in war industry took home on average $40.35 a week, while women working in laundries, hotels, retail, and restaurants averaged between $24.10 and $29.75.31 Black women in particular found the high wages of industrial work appealing and fled farm and domestic work for factories, even though they were often hired for the lowest paying, menial, and most dangerous positions.32 As one woman shipbuilder explained, “Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.”33 Although the image of Rosie the Riveter symbolized women workers during the war, most women never saw the inside of a war industry factory. More than five times as many women worked in non-industrial jobs, where, because of the labor shortage, positions as buyers and clerks in food and drug stores, movie theater ushers, cashiers, elevator operators, meter readers, mail carriers, and cab drivers opened to women. Women even took new positions on the baseball diamond as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League took the field in the absence of major league players. At least two million women worked in clerical jobs, many in the federal government. Popularly called “government girls,” 3,000 women came to Washington, DC every month after the declaration of war in search of employment. Women working for the OWI produced radio propaganda, newsreels, films, and various publications. In the Office of Strategic Services, more than 4,000 women performed clerical work, deciphered radio traffic, translated documents, debriefed agents, and engaged in espionage work overseas.34 Outside the paid work force, women volunteered their efforts for relief programs and civil defense. Approximately 3.5 million Red Cross volunteers participated in blood donation drives, assembled food parcels for prisoners of war, and worked as Gray Ladies and Nurses’ Aides in military hospitals. Other women worked for Red Cross divisions that coordinated communications between military members and their families. Throughout the war, the United Service Organizations (USO) staffed more than 3,000 clubs in towns and cities to provide recreation, while its Camp Shows sent popular female entertainers to military posts around the world. Volunteers in the Office of Civilian Defense engaged in many kinds of work designed to protect the United States in the event of an attack. Women directed salvage projects and blood drives, publicized victory gardens, and trained as ambulance drivers and nurses’ aides. Similarly, the American Women’s Voluntary Services trained more than 325,000 women to drive ambulances, give first-aid, and establish mobile kitchens and field hospitals in the event of an aerial bombing.35 In a government effort to aid agricultural production, the Women’s Land Army brought more than three million women to farms, fields, dairies, and canneries during their spare time and summer school vacations. A comparable program, the Victory Farm Volunteers, recruited high-school girls for similar work.36 For women workers, the reduction of production quotas brought profound changes in their lives long before the assembly lines stopped moving. Although balancing the demands of their jobs with their increased domestic chores had not been easy, many women found their work broadened their perspectives and gave them a sense of pride and self-worth. “Sweetie,” Edith Sokol wrote her husband in 1945, “I want to make sure I make myself clear about how I’ve changed.” After describing her wartime personal transformation, she warned her husband that she intended to continue working and that he would have to help around the house. “I get emotional satisfaction out of working,” she cautioned, “and I don’t doubt that many a night you will cook the supper.”37 A 1944 Women’s Bureau survey found that 75 percent of women like Sokol—including more than half of former housewives and married women—wanted to continue working after the war.38 155

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Nonetheless, the return of servicemen from the war prompted industries to begin replacing women workers with men. The most extensive cutbacks occurred in heavy industry, where one in four women lost her job between June and September 1945. But, even as women’s employment rate dropped to a postwar low in 1947, the number of women workers was higher than it had been in 1940. No longer employed in the well-paying positions they had enjoyed during the war, women who worked outside the home found their employment options limited to traditionally female jobs in light industry, service, sales, and clerical positions.39 The war’s end brought profound change for women. Most military women found themselves, willingly or unwillingly, demobilized at the war’s end. Working women shifted from “men’s” jobs back into work deemed more suitable for women. Thus, in some ways, the war’s end seemed to bring a return to pre-war gender relations. And yet, even as their lives changed at the war’s end, women’s wartime experiences had already planted the seeds for later transformations. Women who entered factories and new jobs while balancing home life and children created a new model of working women and pushed many Americans to accept the idea that women could successfully combine home and career. Military women proved their worth to the war effort and helped pave the way for increased integration of women in the armed forces. Even Rosie the Riveter went on to become a symbol of women’s power. In the private and public ways women experienced the war, women planted the seeds of change that would come to fruition in later years.40

Notes 1 Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, “Rosie the Riveter,” Paramount Music Corporation, 1942. 2 Cited in Doris Weatherford, American Women and World War II, History of Women in America (New York: Facts on File, 1990), 36. 3 Mary T. Sarnecky, A History of the US Army Nurse Corps, Studies in Health, Illness, and Caregiving (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 175. 4 Elizabeth M. Norman, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese (New York: Random House, 1999). 5 “Save his life . . . and find your own” (Washington, DC: Office of War Information, 1943), available at www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90712793/, accessed August 1, 2011. 6 Sarnecky, A History of the US Army Nurse Corps, 177; Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front during World War II (New York: Free Press, 2004), 182, 185; Barbara Brooks Tomblin, G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 190–191, 209; Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 17. The ANC began accepting married women for active duty in late 1942, while the NNC upheld its restriction until 1944. Both corps resisted pressure from male nurses to enlist them as nurses. See Tomblin, G.I. Nightingales, 210; Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 21. 7 Sarnecky, A History of the US Army Nurse Corps, 209, 213–214, 233–34, 271; Tomblin, G.I. Nightingales, 11, 123–125, 191–193, 197, 201, 210; Doris Sterner, In and Out of Harm’s Way: A Navy Nurse Corps History (Seattle: Peanut Butter Publishing, 1996). 8 Sarnecky, A History of the US Army Nurse Corps, chapters 5–8; Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 11. 9 Army-Navy Nurses’ Act, ch. 38, United States Statutes at Large 61 Stat. 41; Tomblin, G.I. Nightingales, 187–188. See also Janann Sherman, “ ‘They Either Need These Women or They Do Not’: Margaret Chase Smith and the Fight for Regular Status for Women in the Military,” Journal of Military History 54, no. 1 (January 1990): 66–67. 10 Tomblin, G.I. Nightingales, 198–203; Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 19–20. 11 Mattie E. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, The United States Army in World War II, Special Studies (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1991), available at www.history. army.mil/books/wwii/wac/index.htm, accessed July 29, 2011, 12–45; Leisa D. Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 11–32.

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12 Quoted in Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane, 20. 13 Quoted in Ibid., 13. 14 Following Lisa D. Meyer, I use the lower-case term “Wacs” to refer to women in the corps, whether in the WAAC or the WAC. I will employ the same technique when referring to women in the other military units. 15 Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps, 96–122, 219–233; Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 28–32; Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 112–115. 16 Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 31–32, 53, 80; Mary V. Stremlow, Free a Marine to Fight: Women Marines in World War II (Washington, DC: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1994); John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture in World War II (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1976), 20; Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 146; Sterner, In and Out of Harm’s Way. 17 Quoted in Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 115. 18 Meyer, Creating G.I. Jane, 33–50. 19 Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 119. 20 Ibid., 211. 21 Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 45–47; Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 41–44, 82–85. 22 Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond; Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 47; Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 75; Mari Jo Buhle, Teresa Murphy, and Jane Gerhard, Women and the Making of America (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009), 580. 23 Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987), 90–99, 137–166; Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982); Melissa A. McEuen, Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941–1945 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 24 Glamour Girls of 1943, Office of War Information (September 1943). 25 Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, 24–28; Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited, 138; Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond, 23. 26 Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 128, 200–216. 27 Quoted in Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 50. 28 Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 169–174; Sonya Michel, “American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family in World War II,” in Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 154–167; Community Facilities Act (42 USCS Sec. 15311534, 1941). 29 Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 37. 30 Ibid., 128–134; Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 39–67. 31 Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, 22. 32 Karen Tucker Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women Workers during World War II,” The Journal of American History 69, no. 1 (June 1982): 82–97; Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 201–202; Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, 22–23. 33 Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited, 23. 34 Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond, 194–195; Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 193–195; Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 227–246. 35 Meghan K. Winchell, Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War II, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 230–234; Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 167–172. 36 Stephanie A. Carpenter, On the Farm Front: The Women’s Land Army in World War II (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Weatherford, American Women and World War II, 220–227. 37 Quoted in Yellin, Our Mothers’ War, 70. 38 Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited, 16. 39 Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond, 24. 40 Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); Hartmann, The Homefront and Beyond; Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited.

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18 THE HOUSING OF AXIS PRISONERS OF WAR IN THE U.S. DURING WORLD WAR II Antonio S. Thompson

During World War II, the U.S. housed more than 425,000 enemy prisoners of war (POWs) from Germany (371,000), Italy (51,000), and Japan (5,500).1 The U.S. was a relative latecomer to the war, entering the conflict in December 1941. The U.S. surmounted numerous difficulties, setting high international standards, to have arguably the best record of handling and treatment of POWs of any nation during World War II.2 The U.S. was initially unprepared for the intake of large numbers of Axis POWs abroad or the housing of hundreds of thousands in the continental U.S. Historically, little precedent existed for World War II POW planners. In World War I, only 1,346 POWs resided within the U.S. Most POWs remained in France.3 The War of 1898 lasted only six months and many of the Spanish prisoners of war transferred to Spain relatively quickly. The Philippine Insurrection that followed had mixed results in prisoner treatment, and neither conflict was of a scale that could match what the U.S. faced in World War II. The U.S. Civil War was the largest scale POW operation for the U.S. prior to World War II, with approximately 420,000 prisoners taken. It also saw incredible cruelty at camps like Andersonville in Georgia, Point Lookout, Maryland, and Elmira Prison, in New York.4 The lessons learned included the need for a Provost Marshal General’s Office (PMGO, reactivated in 1941), to oversee POW operations, and a Military Police Corps (MPC, reactivated in 1924), to provide escorts and guards. A 1937 Manual recommend the reinstitution of the PMGO and provided instructions for their role in prisoner handling. The Geneva Conventions of 1929 became the international law regarding POW treatment. The U.S. ratified this in 1932 and adhered to it throughout World War II. The Conventions provided basic, but often vague, guidelines. The U.S. government, largely through the Departments of War and State, created policies, often in haste as need arose, that mostly favored the POWs and exceeded the standards of the Geneva Convention.5 The U.S. took its first POW in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack with the capture of Japanese mini-submarine pilot Kazuo Sakamaki. POWs from Axis nations slowly arrived in 1942 and included a transfer of Italian and German POWs from Great Britain. Italian and German POWs entered American custody more quickly after the launching of Operation Torch, the U.S. invasion of North Africa in November 1942. Prisoners captured in North Africa were disarmed and brought to rear areas, primarily Oran, Algeria and Casablanca, Morocco, to be temporarily detained. 158

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The U.S. brought POWs to America for numerous reasons. The Geneva Convention required that prisoners be kept away from combat zones and safe from harm, that they be housed and cared equivalent to U.S. soldiers serving as guards, and that they be fed the same caloric content and quality. Additionally, the POWs needed to be allowed recreation and down time. The camps in North Africa could scarcely provide these things without a great deal of expense and it would be impossible to ensure security from enemy fire or liberation. POWs housed in the U.S. also had far less an opportunity to escape and rejoin their lines. POWs relocated to the U.S. on relatively empty ships. Once in the U.S., the POWs stayed at existing military facilities, often left by troops deploying overseas, or new sections on existing bases. Active duty U.S. military personnel added a second layer of protection after the MPC and built in security measures. Available space was rapidly exhausted, forcing the conversion of former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps into adequate housing, and sometimes fairgrounds and parks were used. Branch camps temporarily located usually 100 to 1,000 POWs close to an agricultural area that needed labor. Occasionally POWs in these camps lived in tents, but when this happened the guards shared the same accommodation. The U.S. suffered from severe labor shortages, particularly in the agricultural sector. Americans were being recruited into the Armed Forces and civilians ushered into war industries. Attempts to fill the agricultural manpower shortage included migrant and foreign labor. POWs could not be used to work on essential war industries, but cutting tobacco, working corn or pea fields, and cutting down trees was permitted. This aided the U.S. home front economy and the government charged employers a “fair wage.” The POWs were paid in canteen coupons, while the government used some of the extra money to help pay for the POW program. POW camps were found in most states and over 600 base and branch camps were created. The arrival of the POWs in the U.S. generally went smoothly. The Germans and Italians were processed at Camp Shanks, New York, Norfolk, Virginia, and even New Orleans, Louisiana. The Japanese were inducted largely at Angel Island, California and housed at either Fort McDowell on Angel Island or at a handful of other camps in the U.S. Processing included a search and questioning, classifying the POWs and giving them a serial number, delousing, giving them new clothes labeled with PW, and ultimately shipment to their semi-permanent base camps for the duration of the war. The prisoners often commented on being impressed as they passed near New York City toward Camp Shanks along the Hudson River. Some questioned German propaganda that stated that the Luftwaffe had bombed U.S. cities. The long train rides also revealed the size of the U.S., its cities, and the relative wealth and comfort of its people. Further, it demonstrated American security since both trains and cities burned lights at night, unlike the blackouts in Europe where this illumination might have attracted enemy fire. In some cases, like Fort Knox, Kentucky, the train ran into the camp so that the POWs could disembark without the prying eyes of the local population. In other locations, POWs disembarked from the train and were trucked into the camp. Local communities reacted to the enemy presence in different ways. Although the housing of POWs was supposed to be under a media blackout, it was difficult to hide trains filled with foreign soldiers. When the labor program started, POWs worked alongside civilians on farms throughout the U.S. Most Americans were concerned about their own safety with the POWs living and working so close, but the War Department assured the public that security was of paramount concern. Base camps provided maximum security and included guard towers, two twelve-foot-high fences with an additional three feet of barbed-wire over that, and an area between the fences designed for guards and dogs. Additionally, the grounds around the camp were cleared of obstacles, allowing an unobstructed view of the camp and line of fire. Roll-call was conducted daily and POWs were divided into compounds of 1,000 men, with the typical 159

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base camp having three compounds.6 Each nationality was housed separately and enlisted men were split from officers. Later, German naval personnel were given their own camps controlled by the U.S. Department of the Navy. Despite this security, POWs attempted to escape. A total of 2,222 German POWs escaped, including several multiple offenders. The risk was great and dozens were killed in the attempt. Those captured were placed on a bread and water diet, given a period of solitary confinement, and lost privileges. Many escaped from work details where the security was more lax. Often ten POWs per guard worked in the woods and on farm fields. In the mid-south, where POW labor helped save the tobacco crop, these fields also presented good opportunities for escape. Tobacco grew tall and in long rows, often with trees around the field. It was not difficult for POWs accompanied by a less attentive guard to slip down the rows and into the woods. When POWs were assigned to cutting trees in the southern lumber industry, they worked in crews as small as two men with little direct supervision. Most POWs escaped in their uniforms with PW stenciled in large letters on the back and lacked money, food, and a good sense of geography. Few spoke English and most were recaptured quickly, with few exceptions. Reinhold Pabel left Camp Grant, Illinois, for Chicago, where he married, had a child, and operated a book-store before being recaptured. Horst Blumenberg escaped four different times and was still considered a trustee. At Papago Park, twenty-five POWs escaped through a tunnel on December 23, 1944. All of the escapees were recaptured, but not before two made it to Mexico, in what became the greatest escape of POWs in the U.S. Georg Gaertner was the most successful. He escaped from Camp Deming, New Mexico, and changed his name, worked, and married. It was not until 1985 that he turned himself in.7 Escaped POWs gathered media attention as the FBI and state and local police began a manhunt. None of them committed the sabotage or wanton murder and destruction that many feared and J. Edgar Hoover cautioned.8 President Franklin D. Roosevelt voiced his own concerns in a June 15, 1943 letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson when he worried that “the enemy would deliberately arrange to have some of their trained saboteurs captured by us with the hope that they might later escape while in this country.”9 In fact, most escapees surrendered without incident, happy to return to regular meals and clean clothes after a brief experience of freedom. Americans also worried over the good treatment that POWs received. They were allowed sporting equipment and organized competitions, often with guard help, including soccer and boxing. Organizations such as the Red Cross and the YMCA donated musical equipment, allowing the POWs to form bands. They used scrap wood and materials to conduct plays. They purchased seeds or had them donated by guards to plant gardens. They used canteen coupons, earned from labor, and also a base pay equivalent to U.S. soldiers of the same rank to purchase magazines, books, and beer at the POW-operated canteen. The POWs even enjoyed, at one time, a caloric content as high as 3,000 calories per day. While this was happening, the U.S. was rationing, American servicemen were being killed fighting the Axis, and the horrors of the Holocaust and murdering of U.S. personnel at the hands of the Nazis were being discovered. Americans worried that the U.S. was “coddling” the Germans and voiced their opinions through letters to government agencies and newspapers. While the food content was eventually cut, the government felt that its actions were justified considering its obligations under the Geneva Convention and that large numbers of Americans were still in enemy hands. The use of POW workers prompted U.S. labor unions to argue that prisoners took American jobs and worked at such a low wage that some employers only used POWs. The War Department worked with the War Manpower Commission and state and local labor organizations, like the Farm Bureau, to assess local needs, the availability of civilian labor, and a fair 160

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wage. While working POWs earned eighty cents per day, the U.S. charged employers an agreed-upon fair market value. In some places, like Kentucky, there were not enough civilian workers and POWs helped save the crops of 1944 and 1945 that would likely have been lost. German POWs entered the country in large waves. The first were those captured in North Africa and Sicily. Many of these Germans, and their Italian counterparts, were proud nationalists and fascists. The Germans lived through, and often served in, the successes of Poland, the Low Countries, France, Denmark, and Norway. They witnessed the triumphs, and first failures, in North Africa. Some served with General Erwin Rommel, the vaunted “Desert Fox” and in the Afrika Korps. These men entered POW camps with a strong sense of duty and honor, and often with the thought that Germany would win the war. By virtue of being the first to arrive, they dominated the camps, physically and politically, including having their highest-ranking officers as POW commander within the camp (not the commander of the camp, which was a U.S. officer), and appointed the POW spokesperson. The second wave, coming after the invasion of France (beginning with D-Day on June 6, 1944) and the aftermath of the Ardennes Offensive (December 16, 1944–January 25, 1945), and the third wave beginning with the invasion of Germany itself, was a less homogenous group. The Germans lost such considerable manpower, with many of its resources dissipated on the Eastern Front, that it was forced to recruit from its own prisons, POW camps, those normally considered physically and mentally unfit, and large numbers conscripted from territory occupied by or allied to Germany. These men in German uniform may not have been German, fascist, or even willing, but they served, were captured, and entered the POW camps. Their differences of nationality, politics, language, and often defeatist attitude led to immediate problems with the hardcore element in the camps and violence occasionally erupted. Hardcore and Nazi elements in the camps, considered to be no more than 5 to 10 percent of the population, controlled the camps and policed the POWs by monitoring conversations, mail, and meetings with American guards. Reading an account of a German defeat from an American newspaper aloud to other POWs could get one labeled a defeatist or traitor. Retaliation included reprimands, threats, beatings, and ultimately murder or forced suicides. The dominant group convinced the “criminals” that their families in Germany would suffer if they did not cease or commit suicide. Occasionally, mock court-martials were conducted and those found guilty were visited by the “Holy Ghost.” Usually two POWs entered the offender’s barracks at night and threw a sheet over the victim, beating him to death with bed slats. To resolve this problem, the U.S. began the expensive, difficult, and often inaccurate task of segregating fascist POWs, who would be housed at Camp Alva, Oklahoma, and anti-Nazi POWs, who would be housed at Camp Campbell, Kentucky and Fort Devens, Massachusetts, from the general population. The process included looking at a prisoner’s military records, interviews with other POWs, and any physical signs, such as the swastika tattoo that many Nazis had under their arms. Often the Nazis learned about the anti-Nazi camps, and then feigned allegiance to infiltrate them and compile a list of inmates. With some failures, however, the U.S. eventually segregated the camps and resolved many of the immediate internal problems of the German POW population.10 Some prisoners within the anti-Nazi camps became willing to share intelligence on Germany, including things like the morale among the people and the difficulties of recruitment and manpower within the Third Reich. The U.S. realized that problems with the Communist Soviet Union loomed in the upcoming postwar period and saw these POWs as being a tool in helping to quickly rebuild and create a U.S.-friendly Germany. A re-education program was designed to teach history, democracy, and de-Nazify the POWs. The Geneva Convention stipulated that a power could not denationalize its POWs; therefore, those who underwent the re-education 161

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program at Fort Philip Kearney, Fort Getty or Fort Wetherill, Rhode Island, or Fort Eustis, Virginia did so voluntarily. Most were German socialists, communists, or democrats, the least Nazified elements of the German military. The re-education program did not begin until 1944 and produced the national re-education newspaper Der Ruf, but only about 28,000 POWs completed the program. A benefit that re-educated POWs received, that they were unaware of at the outset, was an early and direct repatriation to Germany beginning in late 1945, where many assisted the occupation government. Conversely, other German POWs went to Europe beginning in late 1945 and were sent to Allied nations where they remained POWs ranging from 1947 to 1949 and helped rebuild those nations before finally going home to Germany by 1949.11 The housing of Italian prisoners followed much the same pattern as that of German POWs. The U.S. housed 51,000 Italians, who generally occupied their own camps, including places like Fort Knox, Kentucky and Fort Benning, Georgia, before vacating for the more numerous German POWs. A few places like Crossville, Tennessee housed German and Italian POWs at the same time. The most significant and unique event affecting Italian POWs occurred when Italy surrendered in September of 1943. Following this and the defection of Italy to the Allies, with Italy declaring war on Germany in October, Italian POWs technically could be re-classified. The U.S. and British created the Italian Service Units (ISU) for those Italian POWs who declared loyalty to the new government. This allowed the U.S. to employ Italians on work directly related to the war effort, forbidden by the Geneva Convention for POWs. This led to major difficulties in the lives of active duty and captured Italians. Now they had to decide if they were loyal to the Mussolini regime, which still held power in the north and influence with Germany, or King Victor Emmanuel III and his Prime Minister, Pietro Badoglio, whose strength was largely based in the southern half of Italy and buoyed by Allied forces. While some American officials felt that the decision was simply a fact of following their government, for the Italians it was not only about being fascist and nationalist, or loyal to their country, but also about familial and regional ties. It had consequences in the camps as well. Those who declared allegiance to the new government faced the ire of the Italians who chose not to join, but also the Germans, as both groups saw them as traitors.12 The conflict that spread across Italy entered the Italian POW camps too from newspaper reports. A pro-fascist newspaper urged Italians to “refuse work” and have “a general strike if they want to get back to Italy.”13 The American stance was those who remained loyal to the Italian Social Republic were “in effect, traitors.”14 Those who refused to take the new loyalty oath remained as POWs and were placed in separate camps from the ISU and troublemakers were punished in accordance with standard policies. Eventually, approximately 32,500 of the 51,000 held in the U.S. joined.15 The Italians also suffered from some hard truths and stereotypes. Like the Germans, they took classes toward high-school diplomas and college degrees, but fewer Italians achieved advanced degrees. According to one historian, the Italians suffered from “a high illiteracy rate” and focused their studies on “the three R’s.”16 The Italians also seemed to have a much higher proliferation of sexual activity with American girls. At Camp McKay in Boston, the Italian POWs housed near the beach fraternized with the girls outside and often kicked soccer balls over the fence to attract their attention. When the police attempted to stop this, several Italians actually climbed the fence and began brawling with them.17 ISU men had guests and got base passes and limited off-base passes. These extra privileges gave them greater opportunities to get into trouble. Women’s groups organized events to support the military and it was not uncommon for them to be attended by ISU men. Some Americans objected to this, including returning servicemen who disliked American women dancing with and dating Italian men. In one 162

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instance, five ISU men visited a girl off-base and were accused of having an “illicit relationship.” All parties were punished. Some American women, often Italian-American, and their families, even petitioned the War Department requesting permission to marry ISU men.18 These types of behaviors concerned the American public at large, who knew that their sons were dying in Italy. If these ISU men were helping us, if they really were our allies, why didn’t they go home and fight? If they were prisoners why didn’t they stay behind barbed wire where they belonged?19 African-American GIs were among those concerned with the good treatment of POWs. These soldiers often accompanied their Axis charges on work details and suffered the indignity of sending prisoners into southern establishments to purchase lunch since the black soldiers themselves were not allowed to enter.20 Frustration boiled over at Fort Lawton, Washington, when a riot between African-American soldiers and Italian POWs broke out, leaving many injured and one Italian, Guglielmo Olivotto, hanging dead from a tree.21 Conversely, American Colonel George Chescheir, who commanded the POW camp at Fort Benning, Georgia, demonstrated firmness and fairness. In preparation for the housing of Italian POWs who arrived in September 1943, the guards learned Italian and he assured that “these prisoners . . . are not going to be lions or animals in a cage . . .”22 Andre Vulliet, the inspector for the War Prisoners Aid Division of the Young Men’s Christian Association, discovered that “Chescheir had created a bond of firmness, compassion, and cooperation with the Italians.”23 Chescheir received praise from government agencies, Americans, and former German and Italian POWs long after his tenure as camp commander. The Japanese held in the United States only totaled about 5,500. Fewer Japanese were brought to the U.S. because of a 1942 agreement that Australia would house most of the Japanese prisoners of war captured by the U.S. as long as the U.S. helped defray the cost of their upkeep.24 The number of Japanese captured was also smaller because of cultural and situational factors. The Japanese were taught to prefer death over the dishonor of becoming a prisoner of war, a notion given administrative approval with their 1941 Military Field Code, and practiced by suicidal banzai charges or kamikaze attacks. Some wounded or surrendering Japanese even turned on the approaching Americans. There was also the tendency on the part of Americans to not take Japanese POWs in retaliation for the hardships endured in combat and the cruelty that the Japanese imparted upon American and other prisoners.25 In addition to the culture, the Japanese combatants, particularly of lower ranks, were not schooled in the provisions granted to POWs under the Geneva Convention of 1929. From the liberation of the Philippines to the surrender of Japan, the U.S. took more prisoners, but there was little need to transfer them out of the Pacific Theater. Some exceptions regarding which POWs were brought to the U.S. included factors such as those POWs taken in closer proximity to the U.S. These included prisoners like Kazuo Sakamaki, the first POW of the war, taken in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor; it also included those taken before the Australian agreement, or those that the U.S. felt had vital information. The Japanese POWs arrived in the United States at the Angel Island facility at Fort McDowell in California. Many were interrogated at Camp Tracy, California, where American officials found them “far more willing to talk” than their Italian and German counterparts.26 Once they were processed, they were shipped to one of only a handful of camps in the U.S. These camps included the Angel Island camps, Clarinda, Iowa, Camp Meade, Maryland, and Camp Hearne, Texas.27 Former CCC camp Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, was unique, housing approximately 3,000 Japanese POWs, including Kazuo Sakamaki, as well as 1,000 Germans, about 500 Koreans, and a smattering of enemy-alien civilians.28 163

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The Pearl Harbor attack, propaganda, and the brutal war in the Pacific fed into an American culture that also saw the relocation of Japanese-Americans and held long-standing pre-conceived notions of Asians and Asian immigration. This caused concerns over the housing and working of Japanese POWs. Events at the POW camps at Featherston, New Zealand and Cowra, Australia, including mass Japanese breakouts resulting in violence, murder, and deaths, did little to allay fears.29 There were problems within the Japanese POW camps, particularly at the largest one, Camp McCoy. Like the Germans, the Japanese had a number of individuals wearing their uniform that were not Japanese, including Formosans, Marshall Islanders, and Koreans. These groups did not get along well in captivity, and segregation was suggested in October 1944, followed by a letter from PMGO Archer L. Lerch stating “segregation is considered to be a necessary step in preventing violence and possible bloodshed.”30 Segregation moved rapidly, partly because of the small numbers of prisoners involved, and was completed by November 18, 1944.31 When the Japanese felt that their rights were violated, they complained to the protecting power, Spain, although some of the complaints were dismissed as “of a minor nature.”32 The inspectors investigating the camp, however, found the Japanese officers “apathetic and uncooperative.”33 At Camp McCoy, this seemed to have been a reoccurring problem as other reports indicate similar sentiments and refusals on the part of some of the Japanese prisoners to work. In one unique case, after the Japanese officers told their men not to work in May 1944 and then staged a sit-down strike, the American Colonel made them take a forced “march at the double five miles to a place of work.” The report further stated that “the prisoners of course became exhausted and about 12 stragglers received minor bayonet wounds. A few were so overcome that they had to be picked up by a truck which was ordered along for the purpose.”34 The inspector reported that the atmosphere was one in which “a serious incident” could occur and did not rule out suicide or a mass breakout attempt.35 Although this did not happen, some Japanese prisoners were killed, including three who were shot when they “rushed their guards” at a hospital, and a handful of others escaped. Fewer Japanese wrote home than their Axis counterparts; many preferred to let their loved ones think them dead or missing than to acknowledge the shame of being a POW.36 A re-education program was also started for the Japanese, beginning on July 18, 1945. Three Texas camps housed the program: Hearne, Huntsville, and Camp Kenedy. Despite this, however, only 205 men were selected for reeducation.37 The POW program began swiftly. The first POW arrived in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. Over the next few years, the U.S. took in more than 425,000 POWs, while fulfilling the needs of a two-front global war. The difficulties were tremendous, and some mistakes were made, but the U.S. adhered to, and in most cases exceeded, the standards of the Geneva Convention. Many of the POWs remember their time as U.S. captives fondly, especially considering the alternatives of remaining in the war and facing hardships or death, or being held by the Soviet Union. In the years since World War II, many have visited their former sites of captivity, attended reunions at these camps, or relocated to the U.S. The U.S. handling of these men is a bright spot in a war that had few.

Notes 1 “Historical Monograph,” Prisoner of War Operations Division, Office of the Provost Marshal General: with appendices and supplement, 1945–1946. Record Group 389, National Archives II, Modern Military Branch, College Park, Maryland. Hereafter RG 389, NAII, MMB.

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2 A growing body of literature examines specific aspects of the World War II POW program, but the historiography examining the housing of POWs overall in the U.S. is rather narrow. Only three monographs look at the U.S. role in housing Germans. These are Arnold Krammer, Nazi Prisoners of War in America (New York: Scarborough House, 1979); Antonio Thompson, Men in German Uniform: POWs in America during World War II. (Knoxvillle, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2010); and Judith M. Gansberg, Stalag: U.S.A.: The Remarkable Story of German POWs in America (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1977). Only one monograph exists that treats the overall U.S. handling of Italians: Louis Keefer, Italian Prisoners of War in America, 1942–1946: Captives or Allies? (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1992). No monographs exist that study only the U.S. role in handling Japanese POWs. 3 George G. Lewis and John Mewha, History of Prisoner of War Utilization by the United States Army, 1776–1945 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army Pamphlet 20–213, 1955), 54–58. 4 William Best Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, Co., 1930), 2. 5 Lewis and Mewha, History of Prisoner of War Utilization, 67–74. 6 “Operation of An Eight Compound Prisoner of War Enclosure,” RG 389, Entry 439A, Box 29. NAII, MMB. 7 Reinhold Pabel, Enemies are Human (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1955); Horst Blumenberg interview by Antonio Thompson: “Escape in Arizona,” Time, January 8, 1945, 16; John Hammond Moore, The Faustball Tunnel: German POWs and Their Great Escape (New York: Random House, 1978); and Georg Gaertner and Arnold Krammer, Hitler’s Last Soldier in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1985). 8 J. Edgar Hoover, “Alien Enemy Control,” Iowa Law Review 29 (March 1944): 396–408: J. Edgar Hoover, “Enemies at Large,” The American Magazine (April 1944): 17, 97–99; and J. Edgar Hoover, “Recaptured Prisoners,” The American Magazine (May 1944): 4. 9 Letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Henry L. Stimson (June 15, 1943). Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. 10 See Antonio Thompson, German Jackboots on Kentucky Bluegrass: Housing German POWs in Kentucky, 1942–1946 (Tennessee: Diversion Press, 2008). 11 See Ron Robin, The Barbed-Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States During World War II (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995). 12 Keefer, Italian Prisoners of War in America, 78. The surrender of Italy led to friction as the Germans disarmed or fought some of their former allies. 13 “Weekly Report of Important Activities,” Memorandum for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Service Commands, ASF, (June 13, 1945). RG 389, Entry 464, Box 1484, Folder 322/000 ISU General. NAII, MMB. 14 “Letter to the Secretary of State from the Secretary of War,” (May 4, 1945). RG 389, Entry 464, Box 1484, Folder 322/000 ISU General. NAII, MMB. 15 “Investigations of the National War Effort,” Report Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, Seventy-ninth Congress, H. Res. 20, House Report No. 728 (U.S. GPO, June 12, 1945), 2. 16 Gansberg, Stalag, 29. 17 “Investigations of the National War Effort,” Report Committee on Military Affairs, House Representatives, Seventy-eighth Congress, H. Res. 30, House Report No. 1992 (U.S. GOP, November 30, 1944), 21–22. An Army investigation found the details to be somewhat different, but the result was still a fight between Italian POWs who climbed the fence and fought the police; see RG 389, Entry 464, Box 1484, Folder Italian Service Units 322/000 ISU General. NAII, MMB. 18 “Incident Involving ISUs,” Thru: Commanding General, Second Service Command (14 May 1945). RG 389, Entry 464, Box 1484, Folder 322/000 ISU General. NAII, MMB. 19 Herston Cooper, Crossville (Miami, FL: Adams Press, 1965), 77. 20 See Phillip McGuire, ed., Taps for a Jim Crow Army: Letters from Black Soldiers in World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993); and Mary Penick Motley, ed., The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1975). 21 Jack Hamann, On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005). 22 Charles Sloan, “War Department Establishes Prisoner of War Camp at Fort Benning,” The Bayonet, July 8, 1943, 1–9.

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23 Antonio Thompson, “Winning the War Behind the Lines,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 105, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 427. 24 Lewis and Mewha, History of Prisoner of War Utilization, 247. 25 See John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 26 Arnold Krammer, “Japanese Prisoners of War in America,” Pacific Historical Review 52 (February 1983): 73. 27 Michael R. Waters, Lone Star Stalag: German Prisoners of War at Camp Hearne (College Station, Texas A & M University Press, 2004), 18. 28 Betty Cowley, Stalag Wisconsin: Inside WWII Prisoner-of-War Camps (Oregon, Wisconsin: Badger Books, Inc., 2002), 14; and Kazuo Sakamaki, I Attacked Pearl Harbor (New York: Association Press, 1949). 29 Charlotte Carr-Gregg, Japanese Prisoners of War in Revolt: The Outbreaks at Featherston and Cowra (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978). 30 “Segregation of Korean and Formosan Prisoners of War,” Archer L. Lerch, Major General, The Provost Marshal (November 4, 1944). RG 389, Entry 461, Box 2704, Folder “Segregation of Japanese Prisoners of War”; see also the numerous transfer orders in “Camp McCoy, Wisconsin,” RG 389, Entry 461, NAII, MMB. 31 “For the Provost Marshal,” B.M. Bryan, Brigadier General, Assistant Provost Marshal General (November 17, 1944). RG 389, Entry 461, Box 2704, Folder “Segregation of Japanese Prisoners of War.” 32 “Visit to Prisoner of War Camp, Camp McCoy, Wisconsin,” by Mr. Goyeneche of the Spanish Embassy in Washington, Mr. Gonzales of the Spanish Consul at Chicago, and Mr. B.R. Johanson, of the Division of Japanese Affairs, Department of State (January 25–27, 1945): 1. Department of the Army, Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. 33 Ibid. 34 “Visit to Camp McCoy,” on July 10–11, 1944: 1–2. Department of the Army, Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. 35 Ibid., 6. 36 Krammer, “Japanese Prisoners of War in America,” 71. 37 Ibid., 88.

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PART VI

The United States and the Early Cold War

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19 THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR AT HOME AND ABROAD 1945–1950 Günter Bischof

Who is responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War after the end of World War II—the Soviet Union or the United States, or both? Few questions in modern historiography were argued more passionately by American historians than this one; few produced more moralistic righteousness in the “objective” historical profession. Was it Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s intransigence and territorial expansionism and aggressive ideology, or America’s refusal to grant the Soviets security spheres in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, or were both sides guilty of failing to make concessions to the erstwhile allies of World War II? Was it the advent of the American nuclear monopoly that forced Stalin’s hand? Or was it hysterical American anticommunism that did not allow Washington to approach postwar relations with Moscow in a more concessionary mode?1 As early as 1946, the American diplomat George F. Kennan set the parameters of the debate with both his “long telegram” from Moscow and “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs. Given their traditional Russian xenophobia and exaggerated security demands and their intransigence in dominating Eastern Europe, gaining an outlet to the Mediterranean through the Turkish Straits, and refusal to leave northern Iran, Kennan advocated a tougher U.S. bargaining position vis-àvis Stalin and the future containment of the Soviet Union until their position in the occupied territories would collapse. He advocated strength and “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” His friend and colleague in the British Embassy in Moscow, Frank Roberts, recommended very similar “getting-tough” recommendations to Whitehall and the British government.2 Even though Kennan later disclaimed paternity for President Harry S. Truman’s containment doctrine, his positions toward the Soviet Union gelled into a theory of international relations that became known as realism. In 1950, Kennan published a series of lectures he had delivered at the University of Chicago entitled American Diplomacy (1951). He castigated American international relations for its moralism and legalism. He wanted U.S. foreign policy to apply limited power to achieve limited goals essential to America’s security, rather than proclaiming open-ended doctrines like “making the world safe for democracy.” Kennan’s became a foundational text of realism, as did Politics among Nations (1948) by the refugee from Nazi Germany Hans Morgenthau, who also made the case for an American foreign policy based on national interest and power, rather than ideals and values. These basic realist principles were applied to different epochs of American diplomacy by 169

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Kennan’s colleague in the State Department, Louis J. Halle, and young diplomatic historians like Norman Graebner, John D. Spanier and John Lukacs, and became enshrined in academic discourse. Truman replaced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime cooperation with the Soviets with conflict and tensions with Stalin’s empire. These historians welcomed Truman’s tough stance.3 By the early 1960s, the hard-nosed realist discourse in political science had transmuted into what became known as the “traditionalist school” of the origins of the Cold War. President Truman’s resistance to the spread of international communism was a reasonable response since the fall-out between the wartime allies was inevitable given the deep ideological divide, noted William H. McNeill in his America, Britain and Russia (1950). The Hungarian refugee John Lukacs asserted that Stalin was the principal architect of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War and that the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan stopped the spread of Russian Communist tyranny. A long line of anti-Russian refugees from Eastern Europe, such as Lukacs, Zbigniew Brezinski and Richard Pipes, became the principal advocates of a tough response to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. These views soon became the message of the principal textbooks on American diplomatic history written by leading practitioners in the field, such as Samuel Flagg Bemis, Thomas Bailey and Richard Leopold.4 With the publication of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s massive sixvolume World War II memoirs, criticism of President Roosevelt’s wartime decision making and cooperative policies with Stalin gained ground.5 This heated up the debate about the wartime origins of the Cold War. Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” doctrine and the place and timing of the opening of a “second front” on the European mainland came in for particularly vigorous discourses. The prolific State Department diplomat Herbert Feis scrutinized Roosevelt’s wartime decisions with particular vigor and charged the President with raising false hopes for the postwar era. Military historians such as Forrest Pogue and Maurice Matloff came to Roosevelt’s rescue in his strategic decision making but chimed in with Churchill on the attacks that the President’s military decisions were made without desired political outcomes in mind. One of Churchill’s principal charges had been Roosevelt’s denial of the Anglo-American power’s advance through the so-called “Ljubljana Gap” to contest the Red Army presence in Central Europe (“Balkans strategy”). Here the military historians came to Roosevelt’s defense but agreed that the American President had neglected the political outcome of military decisions and actions.6 It was the United States’ deepening involvement in the Vietnam War that produced the first serious challenge to the “traditionalist” paradigm. Both Wilsonian and Marxist internationalists questioned how the containment doctrine, now applied to third world conflicts, had got the U.S. involved in the deepening mess of the “Vietnam quagmire.” As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., remarked in a vigorous critique of Cold War revisionism, every war in American history had produced a revisionist backlash. Given this pattern, he welcomed Cold War revisionism: “For revisionism is an essential part of the process by which history, through the posing of new problems and the investigation of new possibilities, enlarges its perspectives and enriches insights.”7 In his book The Cold War and Its Origins (1961), the Wilsonian Denna R. Fleming was the first scholar to question the traditionalists. He noted that Roosevelt’s policy of cooperation with the Soviets had been right and argued that Stalin’s demands in Eastern Europe were understandable. The Western powers were equally guilty in establishing reactionary regimes in Greece and Italy as the Soviets were in forcing police states on the Eastern European nations. The principle revisionist onslaught, however, came from the “Wisconsin School” on the left. In his instant classic The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), William Appleman Williams charged that the U.S. had been practicing “open door imperialism.” America’s vigorous drive 170

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for overseas markets since the beginning of its national trajectory also led it to push for an Open Door for American exports in Eastern Europe after the war, thus denying Stalin the security sphere he deserved. Roosevelt was equally guilty as Truman for demanding an Open Door in Eastern Europe. Williams and his colleague Fred Harvey Harrington trained a number of highly talented graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, all of whom bought into the imperialistic U.S. Open Door paradigm, Gar Alperovitz and Lloyd Gardner among them. Alperovitz charged Truman with dropping the bomb to show its power to the Soviets, a view not widely shared among revisionists. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary, he argued, given that the Japanese were ready to surrender. Gardner applied the U.S. search for overseas markets to Roosevelt’s New Deal era and wrote the influential Architects of Illusion (1970) on Truman’s anti-Soviet advisors; he savaged both Roosevelt and Truman. Mild critics such as Bradford Perkins argued that Williams’ one-dimensional and deterministic “schema” was uncritically adopted by his pupils and applied to other periods of American foreign relations.8 The influential Wisconsin School was not the only strain of Cold War revisionism. The Marxist-inspired revisionism of Gabriel and Joyce Kolko was more radical. According to these historians, American foreign policy had always been imperialistic and aggressive. Roosevelt simply followed in this long tradition. Roosevelt was never naïve or conciliatory when it came to Stalin. Turning the traditionalists on their head, the Kolkos argued that the President never lost sight of his postwar political goals, as he pursued his wartime strategies. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, consistently sought free trade and open capitalistic societies as a means to American economic dominance of the world. Roosevelt was uncooperative at the Yalta Conference on issues such as Poland, which was crucial to Stalin, and his anti-Soviet advisors never granted Stalin the German reparations he needed to rebuild the war-torn Soviet Union. Roosevelt refused to grant Moscow a sphere of influence after the war and Truman continued these policies. For the radical revisionists, economics was more important than the atomic bomb. The U.S. also profited from the stress of its ally Great Britain and wanted to reduce their closest allies to dependency, like American hegemonic schemes ultimately wanted Russian dependency. The U.S. acted both as a neo-colonial power and as a counter-revolutionary power, particularly in third world nations such as Vietnam. The core of the revisionist argument, then, was that the Soviets were mainly concerned with reconstructing their economy and improving their security, while American officials were driven by a “visceral anti-communism.” Americans escalated international tensions by not accepting the inevitability of a Soviet security zone in Eastern Europe.9 Charles S. Maier’s subtle criticism of the revisionists argued that they situated U.S. foreign policy too much in the domestic context and saw harmony in the international arena as a normal state where there was none. He concluded: “the neo-Marxians overestimate the fragility of its capitalist order, and overvalue the American contribution to counter-revolution as well as the will to impose it.”10 Even though the revisionists were never more than “a minority voice in the historical community,” the Vietnam War “generated much sympathy for it among students and younger university faculty, and it could be ignored no longer by leading diplomatic historians,” Jerald Combs, who wrote an influential text on the historiography of American diplomatic history, argued convincingly.11 As there had been an overlap in the transition from the “traditionalist” to the “revisionist” paradigm in the 1960s, there was a similar transition over time in the 1970s from revisionism to “post-revisionism.” Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy appeared in 1959 when Cold War traditionalism was firmly ensconced in the academic community. At the height of revisionism in the early 1970s, John Lewis Gaddis first made his soon-to-be-influential voice heard with his 171

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The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972). Based on the opening of the American diplomatic record, Gaddis and others like Daniel Yergin, Bruce R. Kuniholm and the Norwegian Cold War scholar Geir Lundestad saw a more even-handed U.S. role in the transition from World War II to the Cold War than the revisionists had recognized. The traditionalists had seen Stalin as too expansionist and aggressive, while the revisionists saw the U.S. as too imperialist. Post-revisionism split the difference. Post-revisionists agreed with revisionists that Stalin had been cautious and pragmatic rather than a fanatical ideologue as traditionalists had maintained. Even though much of his argument had a revisionist edge, Gaddis followed the critique first laid out by the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averill Harriman, and his deputy, George Kennan, that the U.S. should have pressured the Soviets earlier. Withholding the bomb from them and not extending them a reconstruction loan did not soften Moscow’s negotiating position. Stalin elected to extract reparations from the countries occupied by the Soviets rather than make concessions to secure Western credits. Gaddis and the post-revisionists saw no alternative to abandoning Eastern Europe to Stalin as his exclusive sphere of influence (one that Churchill had granted in the “percentage agreement” of October 1944, when during a Moscow meeting Churchill and Stalin divided up their respective control of Eastern and Southeastern European countries along lines of “percentages” of influence). They saw Roosevelt’s wartime policy as a blend of cooperativeness and firmness, which threw the onus for starting the Cold War on Stalin. This sparked a new chronology of the Cold War. Containment of the Soviet Union did not start in 1945, as the revisionists had charged; neither did it start in 1947, as the traditionalists had maintained. The newly opened State Department records revealed Secretary of State James Byrnes beginning to take a harder line toward the Soviets in the spring of 1946, following Stalin’s aggressive election speech and Kennan’s “long telegram” of February 1946 and Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech in March 1946. Even though Truman’s globalist containment doctrine of March 1947 exaggerated the Soviet threat, it needed to do so to win over the American public to support his new policy. From his first book on the origins of the Cold War to his recent biography of George Kennan, Gaddis has defined and elaborated on Kennan’s influential world view.12 John Lewis Gaddis summarized the essence of the post-revisionist synthesis. Quoting J. Samuel Walker, who coined the term, this “new consensus [. . .] draws from both traditional and revisionist interpretations to present a more balanced explanation of the beginning of the Cold War.”13 Summarizing the principle revisionist propositions, Gaddis proceeded to counter or refine them. Rather than being an imperialist empire in search of markets and investment opportunities to salvage vulnerable American capitalism, there is no archival evidence that U.S. policymakers ever saw a crisis of capitalism. Instead of fretting over the vulnerability of American capitalism, U.S. elites were preoccupied with U.S. “national security.” While revisionists saw the American drive for empire denying the Soviets their legitimate security interests and thereby breaking down wartime cooperation, the post-revisionists argued that Stalin’s security needs were unlimited and could never have been accommodated. Given that Stalin saw no limits to his security demands, the West was rather too passive to rein in Stalin’s ambitions.14 While revisionists saw the U.S. imposing its hegemonic empire and economic dependency on an unwilling world, post-revisionists, inspired by Lundestad, argued that countries in Europe and the New East desired to align themselves with the strong and benevolent United States. American spheres of influence evolved “as much by invitation as by imposition.”15 By propagating the myth of monolithic communism, the post-revisionists’ work implied that Congressional leadership and public opinion were ahead of their leaders when it came to pushing containment to stop communism. Post-revisionism amounted to “traditionalism plus archives,” as some critics quipped. Indeed, Gaddis summed up the essence of the consensus revisionism: “What the 172

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post-revisionists have done is to confirm, on the basis of the documents, several of the key documents of the old orthodox position, and that in itself is a significant development.”16 When the Cold War came to a surprising end with the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991, the rapid opening of archives in Russia and the former Soviet satellite nations allowed scholars to finally assess Stalin’s goals and the Kremlin’s policies after World War II. No unifying paradigm has emerged that might capture the post-post-revisionist multiplicity of refinements of the literature on a vast variety of issues. Overall the new findings from Eastern European archives tended to confirm traditionalist and postrevisionist positions. Russian historian Vladislav Zubok stresses the importance of Communist ideology in Stalin’s foreign policy and sums up Stalin’s behavior as “cautious expansionism”; he adds: “he suspected the worst, tried unilaterally to grab what he could, and did not resist temptation to test the will of Western countries either by the crude projection of Soviet strength or by crude diplomatic devices.” Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov did not react to Western moves, as revisionists had maintained, but pursued aggressive policies. They presented a unilateral ultimatum to Turkey after the war, demanding territorial concessions; they refused to withdraw from northern Iran and produced a war scare in the spring of 1946; they pursued an expansionist posture at the Potsdam conference in July 1945; they preempted Byrnes’ “atomic diplomacy” with a non-concessionary hardline diplomatic position in the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in 1945–1947. They responded to the Marshall Plan with the “Sovietization” of their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe through the establishment of the “Cominform” Bureau and gave up all attempts to reach diplomatic settlements with the West. Evidence from Soviet archives proves that the Marshall Plan became “the watershed” for Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. Stalin concluded that “it was an American master plan directed at economic and military integration of Europe against the USSR.” Stalin had no plans to attack the West, however, as many traditionalists had speculated. Stalin and Molotov simply followed the bottom line of Marxist thought and hoped that the “contradictions” between the U.S. and Great Britain and the imminent “crisis of capitalism” would defuse American determination to fight a war.17 The Kremlin tended to grossly underestimate the power of the U.S. during the Korean War. Stalin ridiculed the U.S. for not being able to defeat “tiny Korea” and joked that “stockings, cigarettes and other merchandise” were America’s primary weapons.18 Ironically, recent scholarship has shown that American consumer products and its attractive popular culture (Hollywood films, jazz, jeans and Coca-Cola) as much as its military strength became principle weapons in the “Americanization” of the world. The attractiveness and worldwide popularity of American merchandise and cultural icons became a much more powerful weapon than the Kremlin’s stale “revolutionary-imperialist paradigm” in the transformation of the postwar world.19 In fact, Stalin’s gross underestimation of the global power of the U.S. consumerist paradise may have been one of his worst miscalculations of American power projection in the postwar world. Although scholars have tried to find a new conceptual synthesis from the jumble of scholarly discourses surfacing after the end of the Cold War, none has emerged. With the publication of Melvyn P. Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992), Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods thought the common denominator might be the “deep sense of East-West search for security.”20 In his fundamental critique of post-revisionism and Leffler’s national security paradigm, the arch-revisionist Bruce Cumings argued that the orthodox school would “find little comfort in Leffler’s account,” since he averred that “the Truman administration officials consistently distorted Soviet behavior, refused to negotiate, ignored Stalin’s conservatism, and deployed an inflated Soviet threat” to get what they wanted. Cumings concluded, “revisionists will be happy with many of Leffler’s substantive points.”21 Meanwhile, Gaddis reaffirmed his position as the leading American Cold War scholar 173

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with his We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, his quasi-post-revisionist summa—juxtaposing the American “consensual” vis-à-vis the Soviet “coercive” empire; he re-affirmed many of the traditionalist positions with the new evidence from Soviet archives.22 The cubby-holing of American scholarship along the lines of the principle paradigms thus continues in spite of and sometimes against the new evidence from Soviet archives. While the U.S. contained communism abroad, Truman’s Republican critics such as Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin felt that he was not doing enough to contain communist subversion at home. While traditionalists and even more so revisionists condemned the excesses of the politics of hysterical anti-communism at home, revisionists insisted that President Truman started a fierce loyalty program in search of communists in the government, long before McCarthy discovered the “communists-in-government” issue. McCarthy’s crusade against the Truman administration, harboring communists in the State Department and “losing China” suited the Republican election campaign strategies of 1952. As a result, they allowed McCarthy to roam freely in search of subversive demons in Washington government agencies. McCarthy’s “witch hunt” pulled the politics of anti-communism into the gutter and gave it a bad name. More recently post-revisionist scholarship has confirmed serious Soviet spying successes in North America during and after World War II. Roosevelt’s and Truman’s administrations were compromised by the success of Soviet spying, particularly of the “Manhattan Project.” The extent of Soviet subversive efforts in the U.S. has rehabilitated McCarthy’s efforts (not though his “big lie” methods) to a degree.23 Both Soviet efforts at subversion and American vigilance at home, then, also were factors in the early development of the Cold War. There is a multitude of new monographic studies of contested themes dealing with the origins of the Cold War that greatly deepen our understanding of the era but are not calling for a new consensual paradigm. Take S.M. Plokhy’s superb study of the Yalta conference of February 1945. Based on the in-depth study of both Western and Soviet archives, Plokhy comes to the conclusion that the conference was a success because the “Big Three,” sitting around the table at Yalta during an intense week of negotiations, got most of what they had wanted. Roosevelt achieved his main goals of Soviet participation in both the war against Japan and the United Nations. Churchill achieved the building up of France as a great power and its representation in the Allied Control Commission of Germany. Stalin was pleased with the Soviet Union being recognized as a great power after many years of isolation. The Western powers conceded him the lion’s share of German reparations as well as Soviet control of Eastern Europe, with the notable exception of Poland. Plokhy’s nuanced assessment of the Yalta conference is a far cry from the old charge of an American “sell-out” of Eastern Europe at Yalta advocated by Republican hardliners and McCarthy after the war (and in a milder version embraced by some traditionalists), or the assault by the revisionists, who blamed Roosevelt’s accommodation of the Soviets at Yalta as untypical of his policies.24 The best recent texts on U.S. foreign relations, such as George C. Herring’s monumental From Colony to Superpower, have embraced this complex and nuanced recent scholarship and thus have taken some of the passion out of the old vituperative debates.25

Notes 1 I will cite important historiographical works and discourses throughout the endnotes. For a solid introduction to the historiographical debates and the principal schools on the origins of the Cold War, see Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6–35; see also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 445–457, and the essays in Melyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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2 Kennan’s and Roberts’ “long telegrams” are conveniently reprinted in: Kenneth M. Jensen, ed., Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts ‘Long Telegrams’ of 1946, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 17–67; quotation from Mr. X [Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” repr. in George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 98–106 (here, 98f.); the most persuasive interpretation of Kennan’s mind-set and mood at the end of World War II, caved up in the U.S. Moscow Embassy, is John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 201–222, 249–275. 3 I am following here the summary of Jerald D. Combs, American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries of Changing Interpretations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 223–228. 4 Ibid., 225–225. 5 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 6 Combs, American Diplomatic History, 228–234. 7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Origins of the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 46 (October 1967), repr. in Thomas G. Paterson and Robert J. McMahon, eds., The Origins of Cold War, 3rd ed. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1991), 24. 8 “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty-Five Years Later” was first published in Reviews in American History 12 (March 1984) and is reprinted in the Williams Festschrift; see Lloyd C. Gardner, ed., Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1986), 21–34 (here, 25). 9 Novick, That Noble Dream, 448. 10 Charles S. Maier, “Revisionism and the Interpretation of Cold War Origins,” Perspectives in American History IV (1970): 313–347, repr. in Maier, ed., The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe (New York: Franklin Watts, 1978), 3–34 (citation, 19). For more extensive and vituperative critiques of revisionism, see Robert W. Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), and Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 11 Combs, American Diplomatic History, 333. 12 Ibid., 335–346. 13 J. Samuel Walker, “Historians and the Cold War Origins: The New Consensus,” in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 207–236; John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 7 (Summer 1983): 171–190 (here, 172). 14 This more complex post-revisionist view of Stalin’s ambition was based on the influential study by the multi-lingual (unlike the American Cold War scholars, Mastny could read the open Soviet record) Czech-born scholar Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 15 Gaddis, “Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis,” 177. After first suggesting the theme in his America, Scandinavia and the Cold War 1945–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), Geir Lundestad summed up his theory of the American “empire by invitation” in the iconic article “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research 23 (1986), repr. in Charles S. Maier, ed., The Cold War In Europe: Era of a Divided Continent (New York: Marcus Wiener, 1991), 143–165. 16 Gaddis, “Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis,” 180. 17 Vladislav Zubok, “Stalin’s Plans and Russian Archives,” Diplomatic History 21 (Spring 2011): 295–305, and the other essays in the symposium “Soviet Archives: Recent Revelations and Cold War Historiography” in the same issue, 217–294. On the new findings from Soviet archives, see also Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, “The Soviet Union,” in David Reynolds, ed., The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 53–76; Vladimir O. Pechatnov and C. Earl Edmondson, “The Russian Perspective,” in Ralph B. Levering, Vladmir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe and C. Earl Edmondson, Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 85–151; Vladimir O. Pechatnov, “The Soviet Union and the World, 1944–1952,” in Leffler and Westad, eds., Cambridge History of the Cold War, 90–111; Melvyn P. Leffler, “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened,” Foreign Affairs 75 (July/August 1996): 120–135. 18 Zubok, “Stalin’s Plans and Russian Archives,” 302.

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19 The term “revolutionary-imperial paradigm” was coined by Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and may be one of the unifying themes of the post-post-revisionist literature. Vojtech Mastny attaches similar importance to the importance of ideology driving the Kremlin’s foreign policy in the early Cold War: see The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). On the attractiveness of American consumer and popular culture, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through the 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Reinhold Wagnleitner, “The Empire of Fun, or Talkin’ Soviet Union Blues,” Diplomatic History 23 (Spring 1999): 499–524: Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Culture and the Cold War in Europe,” in Leffler and Westad, eds., Cambridge History of the Cold War, 398–419. 20 See the Symposium, “The Origins of the Cold War,” with Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods, “Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East: Recent Historiography and the National Security State,” and the responses in Diplomatic History 17 (Spring 1993): 251–310 (quotation, 268). 21 Bruce Cumings, “ ‘Revising Postrevisionism,’ or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 17 (Fall 1993): 539–569 (citations, 562). 22 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); he confirmed his position as the leading American Cold War scholar with the popular textbook The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), dedicated to “the memory of George F. Kennan,” and his magisterial Kennan biography. 23 M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1994); John E. Haynes, Red Scare and Red Menace: American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). 24 S.M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010), 393; for the principal revisionist text, see Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); for a more balanced post-revisionist perspective, arguing Yalta was the first attempt at détente, see Russell Buhite, Yalta: An Appraisal of Summit Diplomacy (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1986). 25 George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (The Oxford History of the United States) (New York: Oxford University Press, 208), 595–650.

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20 THE SOVIET UNION, THE UNITED STATES AND EASTERN EUROPE: 1941–1953 Laszlo Borhi Introduction The fate of Eastern Europe after the war was decided by the Soviet Union alone. The United States had no influence on the Soviets; Eastern Europe was Soviet military, political and economic space from the outset. Its Sovietization was a foregone conclusion and this was uninfluenced by American actions. There was no timeline for the establishment of Soviet-type regimes; the pace varied country by country. In the former satellites, Stalinization was accelerated after the peace treaties were signed. There was no rush: Marxist thought was teleological, the victory of communism was unavoidable. The question is, why the utter complacency of the United States in allowing the extension of Soviet power into the heart of Europe? I will argue that, until 1948, when the scope of Sovietization became apparent, the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe was not so bad for the United States. Two wars started there in the space of a quarter century and the hegemony of a great power in the lands between Russia and Germany may have seemed more conducive to continental stability and peace than the full restoration of national independence and sovereignty. This also means that the reasons for the U.S.–Soviet stand-off that developed into the Cold War must be sought elsewhere. Soviet motivations were complex. Eastern Europe was of course a “war trophy” and provided security. But the Soviet Union was scrambling for parts of Mitteleuropa even before the war began. The separation of ideology and pragmatism would be artificial. Both were present in Soviet policies and were mutually reinforcing. The Novikov telegram of 1946, a document designed to chart foreign policy challenges penned by the Soviet ambassador in Washington but widely attributed to Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov, was couched in primitive ideological language but revealed the Soviet Union’s imperial motive in the adjacent countries. The function of Eastern Europe in the Soviet empire in the early 1950s helps explain why Stalinist regimes were imposed. The vassal states lost their sovereignty and functioned as client states offering military, economic and political services to the imperial center. The communist leaderships in Eastern Europe performed them out of ideological conviction; it is hard to see how any other type of government would have done so.

Preliminaries: Eastern Europe in International Politics before 1945 On the verge of defeat at the hands of Germany, in December 1941 Soviet leader Iosif V. Stalin received British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to hammer out the details of an Anglo-Soviet 177

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alliance and the outlines of a postwar territorial settlement. After initial hesitation, Eden accepted Stalin’s claims to territory the Soviets received through their arrangement with Hitler in 1939. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull asked Eden not to make territorial commitments and his second-in-command Sumner Welles deplored the proposed deal as “evidencing the worst phase of the spirit of Munich.” British and American leaders were divided over the issue and eventually London failed to undertake formal territorial guarantees. It soon became apparent that the United States would not assume responsibility for postwar security in Europe, which forced Churchill to work out a modus vivendi with Moscow. Surrendering Eastern Europe—which many British officials and diplomats regarded with disdain—to Soviet hegemony was not a large price to pay for primacy in the Mediterranean.1 Already in January 1943 the British indicated that they would be ready to give the adjacent states to the “wolves” in the interest of retaining British-American cooperation after the war.2 When in the fall of 1943 the Allies decided that the Second Front would be opened in France and the Balkan/south-European option was discarded, it was clear that Germany’s minor satellites would end up in the Soviet zone. In order to “spread the Germans thin” in the Western Front prior to the invasion, Britain and the United States decided to force the defection of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania from the Axis to provoke their invasion by Hitler and thus tie down German forces that could be used elsewhere. The State Department informed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) resident in Berne that “JCS have approved specifically effort to detach H[ungary] and other satellites immediately. Adolf [Hitler] aware of this decision and informing his boys.”3 That the German invasion could result in the mass murder of the last intact Jewish community in Europe was not given consideration. Czechoslovakia’s émigré leader, Edvard Beneš, strengthened Stalin’s strategic position by preemptively signing a treaty of friendship and ceding the strategic Carpatho-Ukraine to the Soviets. Simultaneously the Allies accepted Moscow’s proposal for the Polish–Soviet border. Thus the Soviet Union was invited into the center of Europe. In August 1944, Eden listed the countries where “Britain should avoid any challenge to British interests”: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Austria. After a British offer of Romania for Greece, Stalin met Churchill in Moscow in October 1944. Just four years after Molotov’s failed meeting in Berlin, the Soviets got what Hitler had denied them: control of the Balkans. They agreed to dominant Soviet influence in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. Hungary would be the linchpin between Stalin’s gains in the north and the south. While Churchill was signing away most of Eastern Europe, the Soviets were already compiling the new “democratic” Hungarian government. By then the U.S. and Britain had accepted the Lublin government in Poland for Soviet concessions on President Franklin Roosevelt’s pet project, the United Nations. Except for Poland, no East European country was discussed at the conference at Yalta. The Soviet position prevailed in the matter of reparations. Molotov rejected an American proposal to link the payment of reparations to the capacity of the former German satellites to pay. Instead Moscow insisted on a fixed sum. The American ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, presciently predicted that Moscow would exploit this in the Sovietization of these countries.

Soviet Penetration, 1945–1948 The conference in Yalta sanctioned the Molotov–Ribbentrop line and the annexation of the Baltic States on the dubious principle that Soviet security enjoyed primacy over the national self-determination of small states. The Soviets took wartime arrangements seriously. Kliment Voroshilov, head of the Allied Control Commissions (ACC) in Hungary, declared in 1945: 178

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“this [Hungary] is our territory and we shall determine who can enter.”4 In “Vostochnaia Evropa,” Soviet Eastern Europe, all states except Czechoslovakia and after 1947 Bulgaria remained under Soviet military occupation and amalgamated into the Soviet defensive and economic perimeter. Soviet policies after the war aimed to transform Eastern Europe along the political, economic and military interests of the Soviet Union. These policies included fixing new boundaries, ethnic cleansing, extending the Soviet military perimeter to the newly occupied territories, the construction of a Soviet economic empire and, last but not least, the imposition of Stalinist systems. Poland was shifted westward, which entailed the forced removal of over ten million Germans. Czechoslovakia ceded the strategically crucial Carpatho-Ukraine to the Soviet Union and Moscow fixed the Romanian–Hungarian border and seized Bessarabia. Although there is no disagreement that the Soviets sought a unilateral sphere of influence in the “adjacent” countries, a large body of literature maintains that the introduction of Stalinist systems may not have been inevitable and was triggered by assertive U.S. policies such as the Marshall Plan.5 Two simultaneous and interrelated processes must be distinguished here, which are blurred in scholarship. Traditionally, Sovietization has been described and interpreted as the train of events leading to the communist seizure of power and the eventual introduction of Stalinist political systems. However, there was another process unfolding simultaneously with, and not independently of, the gradual Stalinization of Eastern Europe. This was Soviet imperial penetration, the takeover of the economies and defense establishments of Eastern Europe and the creation of Soviet military and economic space. Stalin had a well thought-out strategy for the countries in Eastern Europe, which manifested itself in popular front governments.6 He chose this strategy to minimize Western reaction to the introduction of communist regimes. Stalin wanted communist revolution in Europe without having to forego the advantages of association with the West. In May 1946, the Greek communist Nikos Zachariades expounded the policies prescribed by the Prague meeting of the communist parties that had been held in March. Zachariades declared: “The peoples of Eastern Europe, with the USSR as their beacon, will march forward towards their complete liberation.”7 The same month Stalin instructed Polish communists not to rush but “to move gradually towards socialism by exploiting elements of the bourgeois democratic order.”8 The aim was to lay the groundwork for a “decisive struggle against the reactionaries.” After meeting Stalin, Hungarian communist party leader Mátyás Rákosi was much more explicit. At a secret meeting of the party leadership on May 17, 1946, he revealed that the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship was on the agenda. He told his audience that all earlier caution should be discarded once the peace treaties were signed and the elections in Western Europe were over. “Whenever a country achieves the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat or for socialism this will be carried out, with no regard whether the respective country is in a capitalist environment or not.” The communist leader, who had stood at Stalin’s side on the last November 7 parade before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, also revealed that the communist and social democratic parties of Hungary would be merged and that a new communist international would be established.9 Even though the timing and strategy of Soviet penetration varied from country to country, there were well-discernible patterns. In former German satellites, the Soviets seized crucial segments of the national economies. In the former Axis states, the Allied Control Commissions— the inter-allied organizations in charge of the implementation of the armistice agreements—were conveyor belts of Moscow’s local policies with no effective resistance on the part of the Western members; the ACCs’ Soviet chairmen, rather than the governments, controlled home policies. Occasionally Moscow intervened directly in domestic affairs or worked through the local communist parties. Democratic parties were in Rákosi’s words “salamied” up—that is, carved into 179

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pieces; opposition leaders were arrested, tried and even executed if necessary. Bulgaria’s Nikola Petkov was a case in point. Clandestine communists infiltrated democratic parties and subverted them from within. Communist parties were able to gain all key positions of power: oversight of internal affairs that included the police and secret police; domination of local governments, as well as the army and security services and some of the economic portfolios. When “democratic” procedures did not work, the communists organized mass protests and incited violence assisted by the deliberate recruitment of former members of national socialist parties such as the Romanian Iron Guard or the Hungarian Arrow Cross.10 Simultaneously with the gradual destruction of the democratic parties and introduction of Stalinist methods, the USSR took control of the economies in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. This served a dual purpose: economic and financial gain, as well as furthering political penetration. Romania signed an agreement of economic collaboration with Moscow on Victory Day in Europe. This extended Soviet control to many sectors of the Romanian economy: food processing, the petroleum, timber and coal industries, metallurgy, glass, aviation and navigation. This was followed by a similar agreement with Hungary in August, which involved bauxite, aluminum, coal, manganese, and part of the oil production and refining industry, as well as various branches of industrial production, aviation and navigation. In Romania, Sovroms, Soviet–Romanian joint companies were set up while joint stock or fully Soviet-owned companies were established in Hungary. These companies were controlled by their Soviet managing directors and provided Moscow unlimited access to their produce with guaranteed profits that were transferred annually. The Soviet shares in these companies were held by an agency called Gusimz (State Agency for Soviet Property Abroad), which controlled the Soviet economic empire in Europe and Asia.11 The companies in Eastern Europe were established without time limitation, revealing that Soviet colonization was planned for the long term. Moscow received a blank check at the conference in Potsdam to seize former German, Italian (and in the Far East, Japanese) assets. Moscow used this provision to take even Allied, American, British or French property without compensation.12

The U.S. and Eastern Europe, 1945–1948 Safeguarding stability prevailed over the protection of national independence in American policy toward Eastern Europe from 1944 to 1948.13 President Roosevelt envisioned Great Britain and the Soviet Union securing peace in Europe. Soviet hegemony in the East was no great price to pay for postwar cooperation, even if it involved a violation of national selfdetermination in the lands between the Soviet Union and Germany. Washington missed the opportunity to occupy Prague in 1945 and effectively ceded Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union. After some vacillation, President Harry S. Truman—in spite of sometimes strident anti-Soviet rhetoric—was ready to accept communist-dominated governments. Shortly after the conference in Yalta, the U.S. explored a more assertive line: the U.S. minister in Bucharest tried to persuade the Romanian king to oust the communist fellow traveler Petru Groza, who had been installed in March at Soviet pressure. In November 1945, the President dispatched a fact-finding mission to Romania and Bulgaria, which confirmed that these countries were under Soviet domination. Even so, in February 1946, the Truman administration recognized Romania in return for a pledge to hold elections that everybody knew would never be kept. By fall 1946, several prominent members of the Truman administration concluded that there was no point in supporting the Czechoslovak democrats since they had lost their battle with the communists. After the Hungarian communist putsch on May 31, 1947, executed at Stalin’s written instruction, Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) declared that the Greek and the Hungarian events were “parallel tragedies but cannot have parallel treatment.”14 180

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Although Hungary was not the highest concern, the State Department wanted to take energetic action and to send a fact-finding mission to Budapest. The U.S. sought British support. The Foreign Office believed that Hungary and Romania were countries where decisive Soviet influence should be allowed, even if this meant communization, as they had no bearing on the British position in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus it made no sense to entangle Britain in this affair. The whole exercise seemed pointless, the Americans would only be “making fools of themselves.” Although Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin denounced the Soviet Union for imposing dictatorships, and declared that the policy of “appeasement” was over, he saw no reason to protest either.15 London made it known that Britain would not take part in the tripartite committee of investigation proposed by the Americans. In Poland, the roles were reversed. There, Great Britain encouraged a tougher stance against the Soviets; the U.S. opposed it. The Polish government postponed holding elections in March 1946; therefore, the British proposed joint action against the Polish government and the suspension of loans to Poland. Washington rejected the call for joint action and continued to provide loans for the Poles, while London refused to sign a new Anglo-Polish loan agreement.16 In Central Europe, the dividing line between East and West was Austria. London concluded that Soviet domination of Austria would have disastrous effects on Czechoslovakia, Germany and Italy. The British Defense Department agreed that Austria was strategically vital to Great Britain because of its crucial Central European location on the Danube. The Truman administration regarded Austria as a test case of Anglo-American resolve against Soviet intimidation and was listed as an American priority along with Greece, Turkey, Italy and France, where communist takeover seemed imminent. Hence the United States shored up the struggling Austrian economy, reoriented its trade toward the West and assumed responsibility for Austria’s trade deficit. Russian possession of Austria would have placed the USSR in a position to outflank Central Europe and Italy in a military offensive.17

Empire by Coercion: the USSR and Eastern Europe after 1948 If the American empire in Western Europe, to use the term coined by historian Geir Lundestad, was by invitation, Soviet domination in Eastern Europe was by coercion.18 Eastern Europe was Soviet military and economic space and the formally independent states lost their sovereignty. The hegemonic power regularly intervened in their domestic affairs. In the summer of 1953, both the East German and the Hungarian party leadership were summoned to Moscow and the Kremlin demanded extensive domestic changes to stave off political crisis. Soviet party leader Nikita S. Khrushchev flew to Warsaw to hammer out the details of changes in the Polish leadership during the crisis in October 1956. Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan participated in the Hungarian Workers’ Party Political Committee’s deliberations on removing the party leader and designating his successor, demonstrating that the Kremlin understood the domestic affairs of the satellite countries as the internal affairs of the Soviet bloc as a whole.19 The equation worked both ways. Thus the Hungarian reformer Imre Nagy requested “consultations” with Moscow to iron out his dispute with rival Rákosi. The communist leaderships in Eastern Europe shared Moscow’s revolutionary objectives and accepted its leading role unconditionally. National interest was equated with the interest of the Soviet Union and world revolution. Day-to-day intervention was unnecessary since satellite compliance with Soviet wishes was guaranteed by Soviet occupation forces, Soviet advisors working in government, military and economic establishments and the loyalty of communist leaders. When in doubt about policy, direct lines were available from the satellite capitals to Stalin’s secretariat.20 181

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The depth of Soviet influence was shown by the fact that uniform Stalinist political and economic systems were introduced from Poland to Bulgaria with political committees, Soviet-type political police, central command economies and state terror. Soviet “specialists” cobbled together the master narratives for show trials that were orchestrated from Moscow. Stalin pored over every word of the Rajk trial’s pre-scripted testimonies.21 Moscow’s empire failed to function. In 1953, a member of the Soviet Union’s leading triumvirate, Lavrentii Beria, declared that economic integration was non-operational.22 Only a few years after the final descent of the Iron Curtain, unrest erupted in several satellite states due to the harsh economic conditions caused by the militarization of their economies and transfers to the imperial center, as well as the rapid pace of bolshevization in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and East Berlin. The non-sovereign states in Eastern Europe were Marxist-Leninist client states that performed imperial services to the Soviet Union. The communist regimes served the USSR’s needs to an extent to which no other system would have done, which may explain why Stalinist regimes were imposed in the first place. There is no need to separate ideological and imperial aspects of Soviet expansion. The two were inextricably intertwined. The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was financed by the victims whose territory the Soviet army was allowed to use for military exercises without any constraints. The local authorities were not informed of the size, disposition or movement of the occupation army. Characteristically, Hungarian authorities did not know the address of the commander of Soviet troops stationed in the country. Military and economic services were linked. In 1951, Stalin summoned the satellite leaders and instructed them to prepare for world war in 1953. This meant that the already frantic, ideologically motivated pace of heavy industrialization was ratcheted up, leading to drastic economic decline, hence popular unrest, which in turn destabilized Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.23 It has been estimated that the Soviet Union removed $13 billion from its empire in Europe, but in light of specific calculations based on archival evidence this figure may be far higher.24 Although the final sum is impossible to calculate, removals from Hungary alone may have amounted to $1.5 billion in contemporary currency, which is roughly the amount the Soviets took out from Austria—an estimated $1.4 billion. Romania paid an estimated $1.5 billion, Finland, several hundred million. To this we must add a calculated $10–19 billion from East Germany.25 The multiplier for the contemporary figure is usually taken as ten. Payments included the dismantlement of factories and removal of agricultural and industrial inventories as war trophies, arbitrarily fixed reparations, the maintenance of the Soviet army, compensation for Hungarian debt to Nazi Germany and damages incurred by German assets payable to the USSR, as well as transfers of usually fictitious profits from Sovietized companies. Soviet companies and other arrangements gave the Soviet Union unlimited access to raw materials and energy carriers in Eastern Europe, such as uranium, coal, timber, steel alloys, bauxite, aluminum oxide and crude oil. The assets received free of charge in occupied Europe were resold between 1952 and 1956, adding to the already hefty transfer of funds to the imperial center.

The U.S. and Communist Dictatorships: Destabilization, 1948 The consolidation of communist regimes led to the reversal of the previously docile American attitude toward Soviet expansion into the “heart of Europe.” Henceforth Soviet domination in Eastern Europe was seen as a threat to Western European and, by extension, to American security; the existence of totalitarian communist regimes inimical to American values. The goal now was to restore national self-determination in Eastern Europe in the longer run and to destabilize communist regimes and impede their consolidation in the meantime. National 182

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independence and stability began to be seen as mutually reinforcing principles—the less stable the communist systems were in the Soviet zone, the more secure the Western world became. During its second term, the Truman administration practiced an aggressive policy of rollback rather than the officially announced doctrine of containment.26 Washington’s goal was to overthrow the communist regimes in Eastern Europe by inciting their people to resist them. Efforts to dislodge or at least to weaken communist regimes included economic controls, psychological warfare and covert operations. Economic warfare was meant to diminish the Soviet Union’s capacity to build up military power and to block the economic consolidation of East European regimes. This was not easy, as the European allies had to be brought on board. For them, trade with the East was crucial for their economic recovery. A stringent implementation of controls caused tensions within the Western alliance. Eventually, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided on the gradual relaxation of trade controls in 1953. Although trade restrictions failed to bring the communist regimes to their knees, they caused problems in industrial production and seriously impeded the technological modernization of communist economies. The effectiveness of export controls was diminished by the willingness of Western states to circumvent them and profit from business with the communists.27 Psychological warfare was a controversial aspect of Truman’s program to win the “hearts and minds” of people behind the Iron Curtain. Communist propaganda had a monopoly of information, and foreign radio broadcasts, including U.S. stations Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Voice of America, provided virtually the only contact with the outside world. American propaganda stations intended to keep alive the hope of liberation and to nurture resistance against the communist regimes without promising foreign intervention on their behalf or calling communist subjects to rise up against their masters.28 The fine line was hard to keep as many interpreted strident RFE messages as meaning that external help would come. In 1956, RFE encouraged Hungarians to fight the Soviet army, even though Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thought that the unarmed Hungarians stood no chance of success and the State Department thought that an anti-Soviet uprising could result in the biological annihilation of the people involved.29 Beside radio broadcasts, the U.S. launched a campaign to disseminate millions of leaflets over Soviet-controlled territory.30 The messages were meant to spread information, encourage the spirit of resistance and remind people behind the Iron Curtain that they were not forgotten. Some people were encouraged by them, although the campaign intensified harassment by the political police.31 Psychological warfare agencies hatched ambitious plans to disintegrate the Soviet bloc. U.S. diplomatic missions were supposed to orchestrate non-violent protests against the communist regimes, albeit without putting people’s lives at risk. This would include actions such as flooding government bureaucracies with telephone calls to paralyze the government.32 There were also more ambitious programs. In 1951, the CIA attempted to “detach” Albania, but the scheme was foiled. Some of these were at the cost of others. Agents were parachuted into Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia for the purpose of organizing resistance groups that would be able to fight behind the lines in case a war broke out. People caught up in the plotting were usually apprehended and often executed for their “crimes.” The strident policies were abandoned only after the Hungarian uprising of 1956.33

Conclusion There is no need to separate ideological and imperial aspects of Soviet expansion. The two were intertwined. Soviet colonization of Eastern Europe went simultaneously with the creeping introduction of terroristic Stalinist systems and the liquidation of democratic elements. These 183

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policies had nothing to do with American foreign policy, which was fairly complacent in Eastern Europe until 1948. When the Soviet leadership was faced with the choice of cooperation with the former allies or total domination of the adjacent states, it opted for the latter. East European sources reveal that Soviet policy toward the vassal states was not a response to American actions. The communist tactic of moderation lasted until the peace treaties with the former German satellites were concluded. The introduction of proletarian dictatorships was announced well over a year before the Marshall Plan; economic colonization began when the war in Europe ended. Ironically, for different reasons, both the Soviets and the Americans wanted the same: to isolate Eastern Europe economically. Moscow was determined to keep out the influence of the capitalist world, which involved economic self-reliance. The United States hoped to reduce the military capabilities of Soviet bloc states and to undermine communist regimes. After 1948, the United States implemented strident measures to impede the consolidation of communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain and to roll back the Soviets. When the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe began to fail immediately after Stalin’s death and even more critically in 1956, the U.S. discovered that the aggressive policies of liberation were too dangerous to pursue. However, economic and psychological warfare reduced communist political and economic power in the long run and contributed to the erosion of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.

Notes 1 See Frazer J. Harbutt, Yalta 1945. Europe and America at Crossroads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2 Memorandum, Dewitt C. Poole to James Grafton Rogers, February 15, 1943. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 226 OSS, Entry 210, Box 344. 3 Leahy’s memorandum is cited in Memorandum by Cordell Hull to Admiral William Leahy, March 16, 1944, NARA, RG 218 JCS Geographical Files 42–45, Box 191; Memorandum for Allen Dulles, November 3, 1943, Papers of Allen Dulles, Seely Mudd Library, Princeton, PDF File 1943021100003537; On the military need requiring the German invasion of the named countries, see Overall Deception Policy for War with Germany, undated (December 1943). Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Papers of Averell Harriman, Box 171. 4 Minutes of a normal meeting of the ACC, September 6, 1945, in Gergö Cseh Bendegúz, ed., Documents of the Meetings of the Allied Control Commission in Hungary (Budapest: MTA Jelenkor-Kutató Bizottság, 2000), 78. 5 E.g., Melvyn Leffler, The Specter of Communism. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1947–1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1997). 6 Eduard Mark, “Revolution by Degrees: Stalin’s National Front Strategy for Europe, 1943–1947,” CWIHP Working Paper, no. 31 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2001). 7 Cited in Eduard Mark, “The War Scare of 1946 and Its Consequences,” Diplomatic History 2, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 395. 8 See Mark Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1945–1948,” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Budapest; New York: CEU Press, 2009), 51–102. 9 Rákosi’s report at the meeting of the Political Committee of the HCP, May 17, 1946, Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára (Archive of the Institute of Political History), 274. f., 2 cs., 34. öe, 18. A brief excerpt from the document was published by Csaba Békés, “Soviet Plans to Establish the COMINFORM in Early 1946: New Evidence from Hungarian Archives,” CWIHP Bulletin, no. 10: 135–136. 10 On the recruitment of former fascists, see Robert Levy, The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War 1945–1956— Between the United States and the Soviet Union (Budapest; New York: CEU Press, 2004); Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–1955—The Leverage of the Weak (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1999).

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11 Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War; Walter M. Iber and Peter Ruggenthaler, eds., Stalin’s Wirtschaftspolitik an der sowjetischen Peripherie—Ein Überblick auf der Basis sowjetischer und osteuropäischer Quellen (Innsbruck; Wien; Bosen: Studienverlag, 2011). 12 For nationalization without compensation, see Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, chapter 4. 13 For an overview, see Geir Lundestad, American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943–1947 (Tromsö– Oslo–Bergen: Universitatsforlaget, 1978). 14 Mátyás Rákosi, Visszaemlékezések 1940–1956, Levente Sipos, István Feitl and Márta Gellériné Lázár, eds. (Budapest: Napvilág, 1997), vol. 1, p. 377. Congressional Record, 80th Congress, vol. 93, part 5, 6306–6307. 15 Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War; Stanley M. Max, The Anglo-American Response to the Sovietization of Hungary 1945–1948 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 16 See Marek Kazimierz Kamiński, W obliczu sowieckego ekspansjonizmu—Polityka Stanów Zjednozonych i Wielkiej Brytanii wobee Polski i Czechoslowaceji 1945–1948 (Warszawa: Instytut Historii PAN, Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2005). 17 Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War. 18 Geir Lundestad, The American “Empire” and Other Studies in U.S. Foreign Policy in a Comparative Perspective (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press; Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1990). 19 Mark Kramer, “The Early Post Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal–External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making,” Parts 1–3, Journal of Cold War History I, no. 1–3 (1999). 20 Memorandum by István Friss to Rákosi, March 12, 1949. Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archive), ks, 276. f. 65. cs., 114. öe. 21 On the role of terror in communist statecraft, see Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, eds., Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 22 Cover letter by L. Beria to G. Malenkov, June 1–2, 1953, in Galina P. Murashko, ed., Vostochnaia Evropa v Dokumentakh Rossiskikh Arkhivov, vol. 2 (Novosibirsk: Sibirsku Khronograf, 1998), 918, document 329. 23 For details, see Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, chapter 5. 24 Paul Marer, “Soviet Economic Policy in Eastern Europe,” in Reorientation and Commercial Relations of the Economies of Eastern Europe. A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 145. 25 Walter M. Iber and Peter Ruggenthaler, eds., Stalin’s Wirtschaftspolitik; Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the German Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). 26 Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin. America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2000). 27 Tor Egil Førland, Cold Economic Warfare—The Creation and Prime of CoCom, 1948–1954 (Oslo: University of Oslo Press, 1991). 28 Radio Free Europe Handbook, 1951, November 30. National Security Archives, Washington, DC, Soviet Flashpoints, Record No. 66367. 29 RFE is cited in Simándi Irén, “A magyar forradalom a Szabad Európa Rádió hullámhosszán,” I. rész, Társadalmi Szemle, 2002, 11. szám, 36–61. On Dulles’ view, see Dulles to the American Embassy in Belgrade, October 25, 1956. NARA, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, Decimal Files 764.00/10–2556. State Department officials concluded that any armed uprising on territory controlled by Moscow may result in the “biological annihilation” of the people involved. Memorandum of Conversation with Polish émigrés, March 20, 1953. NSAWDC, SF, Record No. 66171. 30 Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War; Walter Hixson, Parting the Iron Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (London: MacMillan, 1997), 65–66; James Marchio, Rhetoric and Reality: The Eisenhower Administration and Unrest in Eastern Europe 1953–1956 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1990). 31 AmConGen Frankfurt to the State Department, March 4, 1956. NARA, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, 764.00/3–1456; Amembassy Vienna to the State Department, October 3, 1956. Ibid. 764.00/10–356. 32 National Operations Plan—USSR, East European Satellites, OCB-16, November 13, 1953. NARA, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, Records Relating to the Participation of the State Department in the OCB and the NSC 1947–1953, Lot File 62D430, Box 31. 33 See, Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin; Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War; Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000).

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21 U.S. OCCUPATION POLICY AND NATION BUILDING IN GERMANY AND JAPAN James F. Dobbins

The Second World War ended with the unconditional surrender and military occupation of Germany and Japan. Following Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France occupied zones in the west, while the Soviets occupied the east. The capital of Berlin was also partitioned among these four powers. On September 2, 1945, Japan formally surrendered, thereby concluding the war in the Pacific. American intentions in these occupations were initially more punitive than humanitarian, yet relief efforts proved the first order of business. The end result of both occupations was the thoroughgoing transformation of these authoritarian and aggressive societies into two of the world’s most democratic and peaceful states. Both Germany and Japan had been totally devastated. Resistance to the occupations was feared, but never materialized. Instead, the most pressing problems faced by the occupying powers became addressing the basic needs of the subject populations for food, shelter, and public order. The last years of conflict severely damaged Germany’s physical infrastructure, although later analysis suggests that the damage was not as extensive as first thought.1 An immediate problem was the economic collapse in 1945 as central fiscal and monetary management was in abeyance and Germany was awash in refugees. The scope of the refugee crisis in central Europe at the end of the war is hard to overstate. The Inter-Allied Committee reported in mid-1941 that there were 21 million displaced persons in Europe. Millions of non-Germans, for example, had been brought to Germany as forced laborers. This situation worsened during the last years of the war as millions fled from German scorched-earth withdrawals or fear of Soviet military retribution. Moreover, the Soviets and other states were eager to expel ethnic Germans from their countries. Many of these refugees and displaced persons had no homes to which to return and no means of support. Native Germans, meanwhile, faced massive food shortages and deprivations as economic activity ground to a halt after Allied forces invaded Germany. It was a humanitarian and refugee crisis of unprecedented magnitude.2 In Japan, roughly 3 to 4 percent of the pre-war population of 74 million had perished. Onequarter of the country’s wealth was destroyed and the economy was near collapse. With essential imports cut off, food, fuel, clothing, housing, and the necessities of daily life were in short supply. Deprived of their colonies, which had served as both a source of raw materials and markets, Japan’s economic future looked bleak. What remained of Japan’s equipment and 186

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factories was earmarked for reparations. Actions taken by the Japanese leadership at the end of the war compounded these problems. Military stockpiles were hidden or looted, and the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan printed currency to pay off government obligations to workers, soldiers, and contractors, setting the stage for rampant inflation.3 Japan had mobilized between 3.6 million and 4.3 million troops to defend against the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands, and these troops were still armed. U.S. Army intelligence estimated that an additional 3.5 million troops were dispersed throughout Japan’s former empire.4 It was not clear whether all would comply with the emperor’s command to surrender. Allied bombings left nearly nine million Japanese, 30 percent of the urban population, homeless. In Tokyo, 65 percent of the homes had been destroyed. The national food distribution system had totally collapsed, and many faced hunger and starvation. Nearly three million Japanese civilians were also stranded overseas.5 Since Japan’s shipping had largely been destroyed, few transports were available. Approximately 123,510 children were orphaned or abandoned.6 Equally abandoned were the other Asian residents of Japan, including 1.3 million Koreans, many of whom had been brought over as conscripts to work in coal mines and other industries. Some 30,000 Allied prisoners of war held in camps in Japan were in need of food, medical attention, and evacuation.

Organizing for Occupation The occupations of Germany and Japan were structured very differently. The former country was divided in four, and nearly all national German institutions were immediately dismantled. Acting by the authority of their respective governments and “in the interest of the United Nations [UN],” the Allies declared their primacy over the conquered nation, “including all the powers possessed by the German Government, the High Command and any state, municipal, or local government or authority.”7 This gave the Allies authority to occupy and completely control German political, economic, and cultural life until they decided when or if Germany would regain national sovereignty. The U.S. sector was organized under the command of the Office of the Military Government, United States (OMGUS). The U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) had promulgated a directive in April of 1945 (JCS directive 1067) which aimed to establish a “stern, all-powerful military administration of a conquered country, based on its unconditional surrender, impressing the Germans with their military defeat and the futility of any further aggression.”8 This entailed the dissolution of the Nazi party; demilitarization; controls over communications, press, propaganda, and education; reparations for countries desiring them; and decentralization of the German government. On the matter of humanitarian assistance, the directive discouraged, but did not prohibit, the importation of relief supplies.9 The four Allies formed a Control Council to ensure “appropriate uniformity of action by the Commanders-in-Chief in their respective zones of occupation and [to] reach agreed decisions on the chief questions affecting Germany as a whole.”10 To the extent that Germany as a whole had a government, this was it. In Japan, there was only one occupying power, the United States, with the other victors confined to advisory roles. The U.S. decided to retain the emperor and most of the Japanese government establishment, although reforming it under American oversight. The final terms of Japan’s surrender had been agreed among the Allies at Potsdam on July 26, 1945: unconditional surrender; a purge of the leadership that had advocated global conquest; an Allied occupation until a new order was established and Japan’s war-making power was destroyed; the disbandment of Japan’s empire; military disarmament; prosecution of war criminals; establishment of 187

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freedom of speech, religion, thought, and respect for basic human rights; and reduction of economic capacity to prevent rearmament.11 Preserving the emperor and the imperial institution were of utmost importance to the Japanese leadership. Their first offer of surrender, communicated through the Swiss, conditioned acceptance of the Potsdam terms on a guarantee of the emperor’s safety. U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes responded by noting that the surrender would be unconditional and that both the emperor and the Japanese government would be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) upon surrender. The ultimate form of government and, by inference, the fate of the emperor would be left up to “the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” Although the sole occupation authority, the U.S. agreed to form two international bodies intended to provide for oversight and consultation. As a practical matter, however, General Douglass MacArthur and his staff acted unilaterally under military orders laid out by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.12 American troops were initially organized into “military government” teams distributed across Japan.13 Each team dealt with government, economics, information and education, and public health, which were parallel to the structure of the local government. Decisions were made in Tokyo and sent to governors and mayors for implementation. It was the job of the local military government teams to observe and report back on how well their decrees were being implemented. These teams were later renamed Civil Affairs teams and were staffed with civilians. The initial U.S. plan for the occupation called for 600,000 troops and anticipated that this would include 315,000 American, 135,000 British Commonwealth, 60,000 Nationalist Chinese, and 175,000 Soviet troops, all under U.S. command.14 In the event, only the countries of the British Commonwealth, however, shared occupation responsibilities. In August 1945, MacArthur instructed the Japanese government to establish a liaison office with his headquarters. This Central Liaison Office was based in Tokyo and staffed by the Foreign Ministry, while local branches served the local military government teams. The Central Liaison Office functioned as the primary channel for communication between the American authorities and the Japanese government until the office was abolished in December 1947. Thereafter, the staff sections of MacArthur’s command communicated directly with the ministries and agencies they oversaw. Germany thus had no government of its own between 1945 and 1949, while Japan was never without one.

Relief Although the United States did not regard either occupation as a humanitarian endeavor, relief efforts quickly became the most pressing priority. German refugees were estimated at 15 million at the end of 1945, and by 1947 there were still nine million.15 Refugee aid in the American sector was coordinated and financed by the occupation government. Private relief organizations, such as the International Red Cross and religious organizations, were active in the actual provisioning of food, clothing, and health care, and in providing assistance in finding surviving family and friends. The first priority of the occupation troops in Japan was to aid Allied prisoners of war and foreign internees. On August 25, even before occupation troops arrived, the U.S. began dropping relief supplies of food, medicine, and clothing over the POW camps. In addition, “mercy teams” were organized to accompany the Eighth Army headquarters. By the end of October 1945, 31,617 American prisoners of war had been freed.16 The U.S. then dealt with the nearly seven million Japanese troops, officials, colonists, and merchants who were stranded overseas at the war’s end. The funding and implementation of 188

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this task was left largely up to the Japanese government. Under U.S. naval supervision, the Japanese assembled nearly 400 ships, including 200 liberty ships and landing ship tanks borrowed from the U.S. military, to repatriate these displaced people.17 Japan’s food distribution system had totally collapsed, and many faced hunger and starvation. Furthermore, 1945 witnessed the most disastrous rice harvest since 1910.18 Washington instructed MacArthur to limit Japanese food relief to what was needed to prevent disease and unrest from endangering the occupying force and interfering with military operations. MacArthur, worried that his democratization program would be undermined by hunger, lobbied for more substantial assistance, arguing that the U.S. would have to supply either more food or more forces. Initially he supplemented the meager supplies with 800,000 tons of surplus military food resulting from the rapid drawdown in occupation forces. In his 1946–1947 budget request, MacArthur requested and received $250 million for food, fertilizer, petroleum products, and medicine, an amount exceeding the combined budgets of the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Justice, and Labor that year.19

Security Contrary to expectations, American forces encountered no armed resistance in either country. In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had 1,622,000 men in Germany, which became the occupation force for the U.S. sector. They manned border crossings, maintained checkpoints at road junctions, and conducted patrols. The occupation demonstrated the scope of the German defeat.20 Postwar demobilization and domestic pressures for bringing U.S. soldiers home quickly reduced the number of U.S. forces in Germany. The plan for a nine-division force in Germany was reduced to five divisions. U.S. authorities organized the temporary U.S. constabulary in January 1946. They established a school to train soldiers on law enforcement and military government issues. The constabulary was organized into three brigades, equipped along the lines of mechanized cavalry, possessing jeeps, armored cars, and some light tanks.21 The constabulary peaked at 31,000, while overall troop strength dropped to around 200,000 by the end of 1946.22 Initially, U.S. forces focused on demobilizing the German military and de-Nazifying German society.23 Unlike Germany, the speed of the Japanese surrender caught American authorities by surprise. General MacArthur estimated a need of between 200,000 and 600,000 troops in the first six months of occupation to pacify and patrol Japan. He requested that the troops planned for the two-phased invasion of Japan be made available to him.24 In the two weeks between the Japanese acceptance of surrender terms and the arrival of U.S. forces, a newly constituted cabinet under Prime Minister Naruhiko Higashikuni, the emperor’s uncle, began the process of demobilizing Japan’s army and navy, as stipulated by the Potsdam Conference. Members of the royal family were dispatched to China and elsewhere to oversee the surrender of Japanese troops stationed abroad. The Japanese government also engaged in a public relations campaign to counter pervasive rumors that the U.S. occupying force would be brutal and violent. In late August, an advance party from the 11th Airborne Division landed at Atsugi Airport, near Yokohama, where they received a courteous reception from Japanese officials. Two days later, MacArthur arrived. On September 1, 1945, the main forces of the U.S. Eighth Army took up positions in the northern half of the country, from Nagoya to Hokkaido. At the end of 1945, approximately 354,675 U.S. troops were stationed throughout Japan.25 MacArthur oversaw the demobilization and disarmament of the seven million men in the Japanese armed forces. By the end of 1945, the Japanese military ceased to exist. Subsequently, demilitarization was enshrined in the new Japanese constitution. 189

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Retribution and Reform The U.S. began both occupations with the intention of punishing those responsible for initiating the war and instituting reforms that would ensure against repetition. In August 1945, the Allied occupying powers created the Nuremberg Tribunal. In early October 1945, they issued an indictment against 24 Germans, charging them with the systematic murder of millions of people and with planning and carrying out the war in Europe. Ten Nazi leaders were subsequently sentenced to death by hanging, and all but three of the remaining received lengthy prison terms. The Allies also set up tribunals to punish lower-level offenders. U.S. forces found it impossible to administer the state without interacting with and utilizing competent German bureaucrats and officials, at least some of whom were complicit in the Nazi regime.26 U.S. forces also lacked the trained manpower needed to themselves administer the massive purge initially envisaged. Instead, German officials largely ran the sector-level tribunals. Of the 3,623,112 persons considered chargeable, these tribunals eventually tried 887,252, and convicted 117,523. The Potsdam Conference stipulated that there would be central German administrative departments for finance, transportation, communications, trade, and industry but was silent on the future of a unified German state. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies precluded the establishment of any central German institutions.27 By 1947, the Control Council and the Council of Foreign Ministers had become hopelessly deadlocked. Coordination among the Western allies progressed slowly but steadily. The U.S. and Britain merged their occupation zones in January 1947. The French effectively did the same with the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949. The Potsdam Conference declared that “all democratic political parties with rights of assembly and of public discussion shall be allowed and encouraged throughout Germany.” In its sector, U.S. policy focused on a “grass roots” approach, designed to build a German civil society from the bottom up. By 1947–1948, under military proconsul General Lucius Clay’s leadership, the allies continued to return more authority to the German people.28 They permitted general elections throughout the Western zones in 1949, leading to the selection of Konrad Adenauer as the first chancellor. Adenauer’s government thereafter administered the new West German state, but ultimate sovereignty was vested in the Allied High Commission until 1952.29 In Japan, the status of the emperor and the imperial institution had been the focus of particularly intense debates in Washington. U.S. experts on Japan argued that retaining the emperor, at least during the initial stages, would be a low-cost, low-risk method of governing. Following a meeting with the emperor on September 27, 1945, MacArthur was also persuaded that this would facilitate a smooth and successful occupation. Sentiment in the U.S., however, was heavily against Emperor Hirohito, since most held him responsible for the war. Many in Japan likewise assumed that he would, and should, be forced to abdicate. To counter such views, MacArthur’s staff launched a concerted campaign to change the emperor’s public image, painting him as a democrat and peacemaker who had been duped by the militarists into waging a war he had not desired.30 In January 1946, the emperor issued a statement denying he had divine attributes. Subsequently he began touring the country in an orchestrated effort to boost morale and support the objectives of the occupation. The U.S. lacked personnel with language and other relevant skills and therefore decided to retain the existing government apparatus with oversight from MacArthur’s staff.31 By April 1946, his headquarters employed only 1,550 officers and civilians, giving each staff member vast responsibility and power. In the first months of the occupation, the American authorities communicated with the Japanese government largely via written directives that laid out, in bold and 190

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broad strokes, the tasks they were to accomplish. The details were left to Japanese officials. This indirect American authority masked its true power. Eventually, MacArthur encouraged the Japanese government and agencies to reassume the normal powers of government for all domestic affairs, with the exception of the economy. Following the precedent established at Nuremberg, the occupation authorities rounded up the leading suspected war criminals in preparation for the Tokyo War Crimes Trials.32 Former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and 24 other prominent Japanese men were accused of crimes against peace and humanity. Representatives of all 11 Allied powers who fought against Japan sat in judgment, but the single chief prosecutor was an American. After trials lasting nearly three years (three times longer than Nuremberg), all the accused were found guilty by majority verdict (unlike at Nuremberg, there were no acquittals) and seven were hanged.33 About 5,700 individuals were indicted for lesser war crimes at trials convened by the American, British, and Philippine governments across Asia, and a total of 4,200 Japanese were convicted.34 The U.S. purged from public life politicians, bureaucrats, police, and military officers who had been important proponents of militarism and aggression. The purges, based on wartime position, not actions, affected 210,000 Japanese (0.29 percent of the population). This was much lower than the purges in Germany, which affected 2.5 percent of the German population. The Civil Liberties Directive of October 4, 1945, called for the release of political prisoners, the removal of limits on freedom of speech and assembly and the abolishment of the Home Ministry. These freedoms were enshrined in a revision of the Meiji Constitution of 1889. While the Japanese government wrote the initial draft, MacArthur found the proposed revisions unsatisfactory and prepared an alternative. Acting in haste and secrecy, a complete revision was drafted in two weeks and presented to the Japanese government. In April, 1946, seven months after the beginning of the occupation, national elections were held and some 363 parties participated. Of those elected, 377 were first-time members while 133 were representatives of minor parties or had run as independents. Thirty-nine women were elected.35 Conservative parties retained their control. Another essential component of democratization and demilitarization was educational reform. Early efforts focused on removal of all traces of emperor worship (State Shinto) and militarism from the classrooms and curriculum. Lacking funds and time to replace textbooks, teachers and students were directed to rip out or line through offending language. Saluting the flag, singing the national anthem, and bowing to the emperor’s portrait were prohibited. Direct control of education was stripped from the Ministry of Education and placed in the hands of local school boards. By early March 1947, MacArthur believed that he achieved his objectives and advocated that work begin on a peace treaty. The beginning of the Cold War and Soviet insistence on being given a say in the content of the peace treaty prevented further progress, and the U.S. occupation continued for five more years.

Reconstruction In both Germany and Japan, repair of physical infrastructure was left to the local populace. Germany did not receive significant non-humanitarian economic aid until 1948, when the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction was initiated. Japan never received such assistance. Nevertheless, American occupation policies laid the basis for the re-emergence of both countries as the dominant economies of their respective continents. Originally, the U.S. occupying force was only directed to organize the economy to the extent needed to “meet the needs of the occupying forces and to ensure the production and 191

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maintenance of goods and services required to prevent disease and unrest.”36 Indeed, Washington authorities had briefly planned to reduce Germany to a pastoral society without heavy industry. General Clay ignored Washington’s directive to restrain industrial production, and rather directed the energies of the U.S. military government to reviving German output as quickly as possible. Both Britain and the U.S. wished to reduce the cost of feeding and clothing Germans in their zones. As early as 1946, U.S. economists planned for replacing the debased reichsmark with a new currency, but were unable to do so for two more years. The Allies and the Soviets had joint control over the currency until then. The Western powers feared that the Soviets would print large quantities of any new currency to purchase goods from the Western zones, negating the effects of a currency reform. Only in 1948 were currencies and central banking activities sharply divided between East and West, prefiguring the eventual division of Germany into two states.37 With the reindustrialization of Germany, economic output recovered rapidly. By the end of 1946, industrial output in the U.S. zone had risen to 2.4 times its 1945 level. In the more heavily industrialized British zone, output was up 50 percent. British and U.S. economic planners wanted an economic environment favorable for business, including creating a free-market economy in Germany, expanding international trade, and breaking up many German cartels. The Marshall Plan, approved by Congress on April 3, 1948 contributed to rapid European (and German) economic growth and recovery. Nevertheless, the earlier period from 1946 to early 1948 was critical to Germany’s recovery. During these years, the U.S. provided funding to a number of other European countries, totaling $8 billion. In addition, such international organizations as the International Monetary Fund (IMF ), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration provided an additional $2 billion. This assistance allowed Germany’s neighbors to buy more German goods. Some scholars have thus argued that German economic recovery was well under way by the time the Marshall Plan was passed. Some also consider the 1948 currency and fiscal reforms introduced in the American and British zones to have been more important for subsequent German economic growth than the Marshall Plan was, especially since Germany received much less assistance under that Plan than other countries on a per capita basis.38 Efforts to restructure the Japanese economy were perhaps the single most controversial aspect of the occupation.39 One characteristic of the economic reform program was a purge of those in “positions of important responsibility or influence in industry, commerce, and agriculture.”40 In the end this effort affected only 1,898 members of the business elite and had no discernible effect on industrial production. Washington initially favored “a program for the dissolution of the large industrial and banking combinations which have exercised control over a great part of Japan’s trade and industry.” It was argued that the zaibatsu had suppressed domestic consumption with low wages and, in their search for cheap raw materials and foreign markets, had supported overseas aggression. The continued overconcentration of economic wealth and power in the hands of a few families was perceived to be antidemocratic and dangerous. For the first 18 months of the occupation, Washington regarded the breakup of the zaibatsu holding companies as critical to the reconstruction of Japan. The top four zaibatsu and the Japanese government worked out a deconcentration plan in October 1945 and presented it to MacArthur, who approved it. In the end, 83 zaibatsu were broken up into their component parts, and antimonopoly laws were passed to prevent their re-establishment. But their financial linkages were left intact, and action against 1,200 other companies was abandoned. The breakup of the family-owned zaibatsu helped share the wealth and spur the creation of many new companies, which in turn created 192

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greater wealth and led to a more competitive domestic economy. On the other hand, the process did not eliminate all anticompetitive practices. Private industries seeking to strengthen their positions organized into loose groups known as keiretsu, which were distinguished by ties to a lead bank and the cross-holding of each other’s shares. In an effort to foster rapid industrial development, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry allowed, and in some instances encouraged, such anticompetitive practices as supplier discrimination, industry price-fixing, production limits, and export quotas. The Civil Liberties directives of October 4, 1945, eliminated some of the greatest barriers to organizing unions in Japan. New Japanese laws, encouraged by the U.S., led to an explosion in union membership.41 The Japanese Council of Industrial Unions (Sanbetsu), organized in April 1946 as a federation of 21 national industrial unions and claiming a membership of 1.5 million, had ties to the Japan Communist Party. American officials attempted to rein in the increasingly left-leaning and activist unions. When the well-organized government workers union called for a general strike on February 1, 1947, MacArthur demanded they call it off, beginning the “reverse course,” in which economic growth and political stability took precedence over democratization and demilitarization. The most dramatic and sweeping reform of the economic democratization period was the land reform instituted in 1946–1947. It was designed to undermine the political and economic power of landlords, who were viewed as the bulwark of feudalism and militarism. New measures gave farmers a stake in the preservation of the emerging democratic status quo. Approximately 70 percent of Japan’s farmers rented part of the land they cultivated, and about 50 percent rented more than half.42 An American-sponsored bill, passed in October 1946, became the major land-reform legislation of the occupation. Absentee landlords were required to sell their land to the government. The land could be bought at a fixed price, with tenants allowed to pay in installments over 30 years at a low rate of interest.43 In a program that American officials carefully monitored, redistribution took place in 1947 and 1948 with little incident. The percentage of owner-operated land rose from 54 percent in 1947 to 90 percent in 1950. The share of farmers who owned their own land rose from 38 percent to 70 percent of the total during this period. Economic recovery in Japan had made significant progress by the mid-1950s. But serious problems in the expansion of Japan’s international trade and restriction of its external activities because of the absence of a peace treaty continued to hobble the economy.44 The lack of trade with China was particularly devastating. Ultimately, it was U.S. orders for military supplies to support the Korean War that provided the boost in external demand needed to accelerate economic growth. During 1951 and 1952, U.S. military purchases of Japanese products amounted to nearly $800 million per year. By the end of 1954, these purchases totaled nearly $3 billion.45 This military spending benefited nearly every sector of the economy, from vehicle manufacturing to textiles. Occupation-engineered economic reforms had created the necessary conditions for this stimulus to have its desired effect.

From Enemies to Allies By the late 1940s, American policymakers were becoming increasingly alarmed over Soviet intentions in Europe and the spread of communism in Asia. Washington began to see Germany and Japan as future allies rather than former enemies. With the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty and the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949, the United States wanted to employ West Germany as a bulwark against the perceived Soviet military threat to Central Europe. France and the United Kingdom initially disagreed, 193

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but the Korean War changed that and they acceded to the rearmament of Germany as long as all German forces were under NATO control.46 U.S. officials also pressured Japan to consider rearmament. While the U.S. did not support full-scale remilitarization, it desired increases in civilian and coastal “police” forces to handle domestic security matters. Japanese resistance weakened because of the Korean War and, in July 1950, the Japanese reluctantly agreed to establish a National Police Reserve of up to 75,000 men, a paramilitary force that filled the vacuum left by removing all but one occupying division to Korea. MacArthur had pronounced the aims of the occupation complete as early as 1947 and began advocating a peace treaty before 1950. Washington demanded that Japan accept some rearmament and U.S. bases indefinitely in exchange for a peace treaty. The Japanese government agreed to create a military force of 300,000 to 350,000 men. In April 1952, Japan regained its sovereignty. The treaty did not include Japan’s southernmost prefecture of Okinawa, which was not returned to Japan until 1972.

Conclusion The German and Japanese occupations were similar in intent but differed markedly in execution. American opinion began as deeply hostile to both countries. On the other hand, many influential Americans believed that the punitive peace that concluded the First World War had left Germany both aggrieved and ultimately capable of renewing the conflict, while the rapid American withdrawal from European responsibilities had left it powerless to prevent that development. These considerations tempered the original American inclination toward harsh occupation policies and caused American authorities to punish individuals rather than entire societies. It also led the U.S. to commit itself to a prolonged and substantially resourced effort to fundamentally reform the political and economic systems of both countries. In Germany, this transformation was achieved through a process of deconstruction, in which all national institutions were dismantled, to be replaced only several years later by new structures not rooted in those they replaced. In Japan, the reform process took just the opposite course. Cooption, not deconstruction, became the underlying strategy. The emperor and nearly every other component part of the Japanese state was retained, excepting only the Army and Navy, to be gradually reformed even as they continued to function. These differences in approach were driven by the multilateral nature of the German occupation versus the undivided authority the U.S. enjoyed in Japan. Additionally, German national institutions and officialdom were even more comprehensively compromised by the crimes of the Nazi era than their Japanese counterparts. Thus the purges in Germany went much deeper than in Japan. Finally, Germany was regarded as a recidivist, having started two world wars in little more than a generation, whereas Japan was only responsible for the most recent. Cooption, as effected in Japan, proved both the quicker and the more economical approach. MacArthur considered Japan’s transformation complete by 1947, whereas by then Germany’s had hardly begun. Japan was much bigger and more populous than the American sector of Germany, yet the United States devoted several times the military manpower and economic resources to Germany’s reform and reconstruction than Japan’s. This larger investment made it possible to demolish all the old national institutions and build anew, resulting in the more thoroughgoing transformation. Germans today are consequently reconciled with their history, their responsibility for mankind’s most catastrophic conflict, and with their neighbors in a way in which the Japanese are not. Denazification and re-education went further in Germany than Japan. Germany’s principal neighbors participated in its 194

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transformation and have consequently been more inclined to credit its sincerity and irreversibility than are Japan’s neighbors, who had no role in its occupation. Nevertheless, modern-day observers may well conclude that Japan’s reformation was “good enough,” and that cooption rather than deconstruction offers the better guide for most future cases. In the end, what matters most is not the difference in approach to these two occupations but the similarity of outcomes, by which dictatorships were converted into democracies, enemies into allies, and aggressors into peaceful societies. Both efforts thus remain today the gold standard in post-conflict reform and reconstruction, often emulated but never equaled. The unparalleled success of these two efforts can be attributed to several factors. First, both societies were highly homogenous in ethnic composition, language, and religion. Second, they were both highly developed economically. Third, they were both decisively and catastrophically defeated, as a result of which their populations were exhausted and their elites discredited. Fourth, they were occupied, in whole or in part, by a victor of unsurpassed power, the United States, which in 1945 produced and consumed fully half of the world’s goods and services. This is not to detract from the role played by wise and generous American policy, but rather to explain why subsequent and similar efforts in other regions have never quite yielded comparable results.47

Notes 1 John Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction: 1945–1960 (Edinburgh, UK: Keele University Press, 1997), 61, 88. 2 Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 296–299. 3 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 112–118, 531. 4 Douglas MacArthur, Reports of General MacArthur: Japanese Operations in the Southwest Pacific Area, Vol. II, Pt. II (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 752–753. 5 Douglas MacArthur, Reports of General MacArthur: Japanese Operations in the Southwest Pacific Area, Vol. I (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 459. 6 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 63. 7 U.S. Department of State, Occupation of Japan: Policy and Progress, Far Eastern Series 17 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, Pub 267, 1947), 8, 79–80. 8 Earl F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army In the Occupation of Germany 1944–1946, Army Historical Series (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1975), 104. 9 Ziemke, The U.S. Army. 10 U.S. Department of State, Occupation of Japan, 3–5, 81. See also Edward N. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 36–37. 11 U.S. Department of State, Occupation of Japan, 53–55. 12 Theodore Cohen, Remaking Japan: The American Occupation as New Deal (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 8–10. 13 The nomenclature reflected earlier ideas about their probable function. The eight regions are Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, Tohoku, Kanto, Chubu, Chugoku, and Kinki. Okinawa, Japan’s 47th prefecture, was administered separately (as discussed later). 14 Cohen, Remaking Japan, 60. 15 U.S. Department of State, Occupation of Japan, 24–28. 16 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 54. 17 Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 27, and Dower, Embracing Defeat, 54–58. 18 Dower, Embracing Defeat, 93. 19 Cohen, Remaking Japan, 144. The figure was $330 million in 1947–1948 and $497 million in 1948–1949. 20 The U.S. Army, at first reluctantly, began developing doctrine and training for potential military governments in the early 1940s. As the U.S. military pushed across North Africa and then Europe, the

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21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

military found itself in control of all functions of government; Ziemke, The U.S. Army, 4, 320, and Robert B. Oakley, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Eliot M. Goldberg, eds., Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1998), 27. James J. Carafano, Waltzing into the Cold War; The Struggle for Occupied Austria (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 75. James M. Snyder, The Establishment and Operations of the United States Constabulary, 3 October 1945–30 June 1947, Historical subsection C-3 (United States Constabulary, 1947). See also Oakley et al., Policing the New World Disorder, 27–28, and Ziemke, The U.S. Army, 339–341, 421–424. For a first-hand account, see Ernest N. Harmon, Combat Commander: Autobiography of a Soldier (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), especially 279–294. Harmon, Combat Commander, 289. Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1989), 48. U.S. War Department, Office of the Adjutant General, Machine Records Branch, Strength of the Army (Washington, DC: U.S. War Department), December 1, 1945. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany, chapter 4, and U.S. Department of State, Occupation of Japan, 16–21. U.S. Department of State, Occupation of Japan, 43, 177–178. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany, chapter 5. Robert McGeehan, The German Rearmament Questions: American Diplomacy and European Defense After World War II (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 12–13. Tetsuya Kataoka, The Price of a Constitution: The Origin of Japan’s Postwar Politics (New York: Crane Russak, 1991), 26; Bonner E. Fellers, MacArthur’s military secretary and chief of his psychologicalwarfare operations, was a key proponent of this view. For details on the staffing of SCAP, see Cohen, Remaking Japan, 103–107. Formally known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. For more on comparisons between Tokyo and Nuremberg, see Dower, Embracing Defeat, chapter 15. Jane M. Alden, “Occupation,” in Hugh Borton, ed., Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950), 310. Asahi Shimbun Staff, The Pacific Rivals (New York: Weatherhill, 192), 126. JCS Directive 1067, as quoted in Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, 60. Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, 117. This section draws heavily on Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, 114–117. Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan, 30–41. For an in-depth discussion of the economic purge, see Cohen, Remaking Japan, chapter 9. Schonberger, Aftermath of War, 115. Cohen, Remaking Japan, 65. Cohen, Remaking Japan, 65. Alden, “Occupation,” 311. Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan, 288. On the German rearmament question, see McGeehan, The German Rearmament Questions. For a more complete account of the German and Japanese occupations, and of subsequent efforts to achieve similar results elsewhere, see James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathemell, Rachel Swanger, and Anga Timilsina, America’s Role in Nation Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003).

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22 THE COLD WAR AT HOME K.A. Cuordileone

The onset of the Cold War awakened a long-festering animus against communism in American life and turned it into a national obsession. Troubling postwar developments, including Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe, tensions in Berlin and dread of an apocalyptic nuclear war, certainly encouraged an unparalleled fear and loathing of communism. Yet it was the assumption that communists had infiltrated U.S. government institutions that truly brought the Cold War to the home front. That assumption was not a phantasm, although the facts upon which it was based were misunderstood, distorted and exploited in the overwrought political atmosphere of the time. As concerns about domestic subversion intensified in the early 1950s, few areas of American society were left untouched by the great midcentury Red Scare. The resulting tensions affected American cultural and political life in manifold ways, but they generally shifted ideological currents rightward, reinforcing more conservative, nationalistic and anti-collectivist values as defenses against a godless, monolithic communism spreading throughout the world. Anticommunism had its most profound consequences in the political sphere: it constricted civil liberties, discredited the American Left and narrowed the range of acceptable political options. It also underwrote the establishment of a vast, insufficiently restrained national security apparatus, enabling the excesses and abuses of power that infected government and culminated in the phenomenon known as McCarthyism. The crusade against communism began long before most Americans had ever heard the shrill voice of Joseph McCarthy. Determined to root out communists in American society, government officials cast a wide, indiscriminating net beginning in the late 1940s. By the time the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began holding hearings in 1947 to investigate communist subversion in the U.S., the FBI had amassed voluminous counterintelligence data on American Communist Party (CPUSA) members and others who were deemed threats to national security. Fed information by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, HUAC staged public spectacles in which witnesses from the arts and entertainment industry, the press, labor unions and government were called upon to publicly admit their past or present communist allegiances and name others whom they knew as communists. Facing contempt of Congress charges, witnesses who failed to cooperate with HUAC by citing their First or Fifth Amendment rights were fined, jailed or, if they worked in Hollywood, blacklisted by the major studios.1 197

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Democrats were on the defensive and compelled to demonstrate their anti-communist vigilance at home and abroad. In 1945, the FBI had raided the offices of a left-wing journal Amerasia and found classified government documents.2 Along with tales that Franklin Roosevelt had “sold out” America at Yalta and tolerated red sympathizers in government, the Amerasia case left Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, vulnerable to the accusation that he too was lax on security. Two weeks after his doctrine of global communist “containment” was announced in 1947, Truman established the Federal Loyalty Program by executive order. All federal employees would be screened and investigated for disloyalty. Erasing distinctions between non-conformity or dissent, on the one hand, and disloyalty or subversion on the other, loyalty boards and other governmental investigative bodies, such as the State Department’s Internal Security Division, scrutinized federal employees who might harbor “sympathetic association” with communism or somehow warrant classification as a “security risk.” A past association with a left-wing cause, a critical opinion voiced about U.S. foreign policy, a brother who was a communist or even a suspected homosexual encounter could cast doubt on an individual’s allegiances or fitness to serve government. Those fired or barred from employment had no right to know the source of the allegations against them or contest a Loyalty Board’s decision. State governments emulated the federal Loyalty-Security program. By 1949, 22 states had created programs in which public sector employees were screened and compelled to sign loyalty oaths. Moreover, states and cities passed vaguely worded anti-sedition laws banning “seditious teaching” in educational institutions or mandating the firing of teachers associated with organizations advocating sedition.3 Operating on the assumption that communists did not deserve the constitutional protections guaranteed by a government they ultimately aimed to demolish, the federal government went after the CPUSA. In 1949, the U.S. Justice Department prosecuted 11 communist leaders, including CPUSA General Secretary Eugene Dennis, for violating the Smith Act. Passed in 1940, the Smith Act criminalized the advocacy of overthrowing the U.S. government. Since communism was by definition a revolutionary doctrine, a person who merely advocated communism (as opposed to engaging in actions to overthrow the government) could be indicted. In the early Cold War years, over 140 communist leaders were tried under the Smith Act. The Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act’s constitutionality in Dennis v. United States in 1951.4 Other legislative measures strained First Amendment protections. The McCarren Internal Security Act (1950) required individuals belonging to officially defined “subversive” groups to register with the federal government; it restricted their movement and travel rights and permitted their deportation or detention upon presidential order. (Truman vetoed the act but Congress overrode it.) On a state and local level, over 150 laws and ordinances were implemented across the nation in the name of extinguishing the “red menace.” Some locales barred communists from holding drivers’ or fishing licenses, or required that they leave town or be fined. Suspected communists in some regions were harassed by local police force “red squads.” At the same time the U.S. claimed leadership of the free world, the right to voice dissenting opinions at home was curtailed.5 Few historians would deny that governmental efforts to combat communism came at a cost to civil liberties. But did communists pose a genuine threat to U.S. national security? With roughly 75,000 members in 1947, the CPUSA was small, and influential only in a few labor unions. By the early 1950s, the party’s ranks had dwindled to about 30,000 members thanks in part to the CPUSA’s own Stalinist dogma, which became increasingly hard to swallow in the bitter years of the early Cold War. Those who remained party members, belonging to a cause now largely despised and discredited in the U.S., scarcely posed a threat to national security. As several scholars have stressed, the average American communist was not a party leader or a spy 198

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taking orders from Moscow but rather a dockworker, a schoolteacher or a union member active in local political causes.6 It is true the vast majority of American communists were guilty of nothing except holding unpopular beliefs. But it is also true that they belonged to a highly secretive organization that had maintained an underground cadre serving the USSR since the 1920s.7 The public was not privy to the mounting counterintelligence data on Soviet espionage in the U.S. gathered by the FBI and the National Security Agency in the 1940s. But the testimony of defectors—communists who had broken with the cause—convinced many observers that communists were hardly innocuous in American life. It was the Alger Hiss case that first brought the issue of Soviet espionage to the forefront of the Red Scare. A former State Department official under Roosevelt, Hiss was the personification of the Ivy League-educated eastern establishment liberal. In 1948, ex-communist Whittaker Chambers testified before HUAC that he had known Hiss to be a communist in the 1930s. After Hiss threatened to sue Chambers for slander, Chambers produced microfilm demonstrating that Hiss had given him official U.S. documents that were then sent to the USSR. As evidence mounted, many prominent liberals quietly abandoned Hiss’ cause. Since the statute of limitations precluded an espionage charge, Hiss was tried only for perjury. Found guilty in his second trial, Hiss went to prison in 1950.8 The Hiss case had enormous political implications. It cast suspicions on Democrats that would linger for a decade. In a sense, an entire generation of liberal New Dealers was on trial along with Hiss. The question of Hiss’ guilt or innocence helped to fracture the American Left, accelerating a split between anti-communist liberals who founded the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and those who tended to support Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party agenda and defend Hiss as an innocent victim of politically motivated charges. The case also made a young Republican Congressman, Richard Nixon, famous for his determination to “get” Hiss, and aided his election to the Senate in 1950. Republicans now had potent ammunition against the Democrats. It was no coincidence that, just four weeks after Hiss’ conviction, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Republican Joseph McCarthy, dramatically announced that the State Department was crawling with communists. Uncertainties and arguments lingered in the public sphere, in part because many doubted the accusers’ credibility. Chambers, the odd and disheveled ex-Soviet agent turned devoted Catholic who had hidden evidence in a pumpkin on his farm, seemed rather disreputable next to the polished, immanently respectable Alger Hiss. Moreover, after Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley defected to the FBI and testified before HUAC in 1948, implicating nearly 150 Americans in espionage, her claims seemed so wild that even some anti-communists questioned her veracity. Ready-made for the tabloids, the “Red Spy Queen” was often mocked as an emotionally unstable spinster. In the absence of arrests and prosecutions of the scores of people she identified, skeptics could more readily dismiss Bentley’s claims as the delusions of an attention-seeking liar.9 McCarthy initially claimed to possess a list of 205 State Department employees who were communists, yet the numbers on his list changed daily. The image of the rude, bullying “tailgunner Joe,” repeatedly unable to substantiate his accusations, made many observers wonder if it was all a witch-hunt. Despite his failure to ever turn up any real communists, let alone spies, however, McCarthy remained enormously popular with conservative Americans who bought whole his notion of an “immense conspiracy.”10 Until he self-destructed in 1954, the GOP tolerated—and indeed benefited from—the shadow McCarthy cast on Democrats and those who worked under Democratic administrations. Troubling developments made the “20 years of treason” charge resonant. In 1949, news of the “loss” of China to communist forces, along with the USSR’s explosion of its first atomic 199

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bomb, unsettled many Americans. In June 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. How, McCarthy asked, were communists making such bold advances in the world while the U.S. stood “impotent”? Successive Democratic administrations, he explained, staffed by privileged eastern establishment elites, had betrayed America. In July 1950, the indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage stirred the deepest fears of many Americans: atomic secrets had been passed to the USSR. Amid the feverish atmosphere of the Korean War—a war that the trial judge blamed on the defendants—Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and sent to the electric chair in 1953.11 While arguments about the spy cases and the legitimacy of governmental actions taken in the name of anti-communism have persisted for well over half a century, the Cold War’s end brought some clarity to this tangled history. In the 1990s, after the declassification of U.S. intelligence data as well as the Russian government’s brief opening of Soviet foreign intelligence files to researchers, historians learned much about the covert activities of Americans who had assisted the USSR. Evidence unearthed in post Cold War years made several conclusions inescapable. First, the midcentury Red Scare did have a basis in fact, rooted in a large Soviet espionage operation in the U.S. First revealed to U.S. counterintelligence by three defectors—Chambers, Bentley and Igor Gouzenko (the latter a Soviet cipher clerk in Canada)—Moscow’s espionage networks were then confirmed by the VENONA cables. These were encrypted telegraphic communications between Moscow and its consular offices in the U.S. that had been sent during the Second World War. In a top-secret project code-named VENONA, the Soviet cables were intercepted, and by 1946 deciphered by the Army Signals Intelligence Service. The now declassified cables, as well as recently disclosed KGB/NKVD files, contained the identities or codenames of hundreds of Americans involved in the transmittal of military, technical, political and counterintelligence secrets to the USSR. Many spies worked in the federal government, including the State Department, the Office of Strategic Services, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department and the Manhattan Project. Others infiltrated industry, employed in electronics, aviation, engineering, communication and other fields serving military defense. Legions more were couriers, liaisons, recruiters and talent-spotters who facilitated the espionage. As more VENONA cables were decrypted after 1946, it became clear to U.S. counterintelligence that Hiss, Julius Rosenberg and many others were indeed spies, and that Bentley and other informers had told the truth.12 Second, fresh evidence confirmed that the CPUSA was deeply involved in Soviet intelligence operations. Spies and their accomplices were mostly recruited through the CPUSA, which was subsidized and to a large degree directed by Moscow. CPUSA leaders, including Eugene Dennis and Earl Browder, acted as talent-spotters and network coordinators for Soviet intelligence. The CPUSA’s covert activities also included subterfuge against opponents of the Soviet regime inside and outside the U.S., especially Trotskyites.13 Finally, it is clear that the Soviet espionage networks in the U.S. had been dismantled by Moscow before the Red Scare began. With Bentley’s defection to the FBI in 1945, which the USSR learned about immediately from British mole Kim Philby, the Soviets shut down their spy networks in the U.S. and recalled their controllers back to Moscow. The heyday of Soviet espionage operations in the U.S. was over in 1945.14 There was good reason why McCarthy was so unsuccessful in turning up real spies in government: they were long gone by the 1950s. Fresh sources unearthed in Washington and Moscow in post Cold War years presented a remarkable picture of Soviet intelligence networks in the U.S. that proliferated by the 1930s. After U.S. diplomatic recognition of the USSR in 1934, the Soviets had taken advantage of their newly established embassies and consulates in the U.S., an underdeveloped U.S. counterintelligence force and an eager pool of well-placed Americans eager to serve Moscow for 200

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ideological reasons, not financial rewards. VENONA and KGB/NKVD sources confirmed the espionage of long-suspected officials, including: Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Laurence Duggan and Noel Field, along with Hiss, from the State Department; Lauchlin Currie, a senior advisor to Roosevelt; Duncan Lee and Maurice Halperin of the OSS; and Nathan Silvermaster and Victor Perlo, economists at the War Production Board. Yet many more previously unsuspected individuals were revealed by new sources. In addition to running a spy ring of engineers working in industry and collaborating with his brother-in-law in Manhattan Project espionage, sources also demonstrated that Julius Rosenberg recruited another atomic spy, Russell McNutt, an engineer at the Oak Ridge facility. (Sources showed that Ethel Rosenberg, who was aware of her husband’s and brother’s espionage, was at best a minor accomplice.) The depth and scope of Soviet espionage in the U.S. is striking. According to John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the number of Americans covertly assisting the USSR prior to 1945 exceeds 500.15 The innumerable injustices caused by the midcentury Red Scare remain undeniable, however. Many innocent Americans lost their careers, their reputations and their constitutional rights thanks to public hearings, loyalty investigations and unsubstantiated accusations that surfaced in a myriad of public and private venues. Moreover, as almost all professional historians agree, the post Cold War revelations do not redeem McCarthy. He possessed no legitimate list of communists in government, and clearly misused his power on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to destroy his enemies and frighten critics. His name remains justifiably synonymous with the act of making unfounded accusations, thereby stoking hysteria that serves partisan and personal aims. The notion that McCarthy and his allies were generally right about communists infiltrating government (if wrong about identities) also remains erroneous: the McCarthyites’ claim of an “immense conspiracy” within the federal government was about the present (i.e., the 1950s) and remains false. FBI director Hoover also politicized the hunt for subversives, using it to augment his institutional authority and power. Under the aegis of national security, Hoover amassed personal information on countless individuals whom he regarded as foes, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. The FBI continued to spy on legions of citizens and intimidate public officials into submission for decades thereafter.16 A legitimate concern about national security in the late 1940s turned into a frantic search for subversives. International Cold War developments and the specter of Soviet spies like Hiss “boring from within” certainly nourished the panic. But the dynamics of partisan politics along with governmental secrecy fed the Red Scare’s excesses. The GOP’s unexpected 1948 defeat led Republicans to cast about for damaging information on officials who worked under Democratic administrations, those who could be blamed for communist gains in the world. Democrats, compensating for the “loss” of China and past blunders in national security, responded with an aggressive anti-communism at home and abroad. VENONA data also created a frustrating security dilemma. When U.S. counterintelligence began to decrypt Soviet cables, they were in the position of knowing that scores of Soviet agents had infiltrated U.S. government and industry in the 1930s and 1940s, without knowing the identities behind many cryptonyms and thus how many spies, if any, might still be present in sensitive positions. It was a security nightmare that contributed to the indiscriminate investigations, reckless accusations and widespread rumors and conspiracy theories that plagued the political arena. The hyper secrecy surrounding VENONA added confusion to the question of espionage in the U.S. Only a handful of select military and counterintelligence officials, including Hoover and General Omar Bradley, knew of the VENONA project. Truman was kept in the dark; Congress was not informed; nor was the CIA (until 1952).17 It is unlikely that Truman, known 201

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to distrust the intelligence Hoover peddled, would have called HUAC’s pursuit of Bentley “a red herring” had he been fully briefed on VENONA. Moreover, evidence from decrypted cables could not be used in court without exposing the top-secret VENONA project to the Soviets. U.S. counterintelligence officials refused to pay that price: thus the vast majority of Moscow’s spies in the U.S. escaped prosecution (other evidence against them having been obtained through wiretaps and other illegal means was inadmissible in court). In the absence of large numbers of arrests and prosecutions, many observers assumed that the spy hunt was based on paranoia or opportunism. Others were convinced that a governmental cover-up of a massive conspiracy was shielding America’s communist spies. The failure to alert the President to the existence of VENONA underscores the mistrust and turf-protection at work in U.S. counterintelligence. Such hyper secrecy may have precluded a reasonable, more principled response to national security problems. Had the VENONA project been revealed to Truman, could national security officials have conducted security investigations in a more focused, fair and productive manner? If VENONA had been disclosed publicly (its counterintelligence utility had passed in the late 1940s after the Soviets learned of the decryptions), the political impact would have been immensely painful. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who championed the declassification of VENONA in the 1990s, has argued, however, that had VENONA’s revelations been made public, they could have pre-empted McCarthy and deprived him of the core element of his conspiracy narrative: the cover-up.18 Scholars will continue to debate U.S. governmental actions as they pertain to VENONA’s secrets. It is worth recalling, however, that the identities of the vast majority of Soviet agents were first revealed to U.S. counterintelligence through two means: defections of Soviet agents, and VENONA intelligence—not via HUAC hearings, FBI surveillance of leftist Americans, or loyalty investigations into the backgrounds and daily lives of government employees. The Cold War’s impact on politics was profound. Generally speaking, anti-communism discredited progressive causes. By the late 1940s, any extension of the New Deal agenda faced opponents who often used the specter of the “red menace” to taint social reform initiatives. Certainly Truman’s pursuit of national health care might have been decried as “socialistic” at any other moment. But after Truman’s victory in 1948, the American Medical Association assessed its members an extra $25 solely to defeat Truman’s plan for national health insurance, dubbed “socialized medicine.” The real estate industry opposed initiatives in public housing, denouncing them as “socialized housing” akin to that which existed in the USSR. The 1947 Taft–Hartley Act curtailed bargaining rights and legal protections for unions, and mandated that union officials swear they were not communists. The Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) expelled 11 communist-led unions, some of the most militant unions representing over one million workers. Organized labor dropped its longtime support of national health insurance, labor militancy receded and union leaders endorsed an anti-communist foreign policy.19 In a political culture that blurred dissent and disloyalty, left-wing activism could be readily tainted as communist. Labor organizers, nuclear disarmament activists, social reform advocates and civil rights leaders often found themselves viciously red-baited. Even the ACLU shrunk from defending the constitutional rights of communists. The American Left, so active and vibrant during the heady days of the Popular Front, was beleaguered and fractured by the early 1950s. In electoral contests across the nation, Democrats were at a disadvantage. In his 1950 Senate race, Nixon damaged his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, by claiming that her political 202

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agenda corresponded to the communist party line. Moreover, McCarthyism infected the 1952 presidential election. GOP candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower mostly took the highroad, but his running-mate Nixon descended to calling Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois and the Democratic contender, “a Ph.D. graduate of Dean Acheson’s cowardly college of communist containment,” while McCarthy and his allies cast aspersions on Stevenson’s character through rumors and innuendo. Anti-intellectualism surged alongside anti-communism in 1952, and the Ivy League-educated Stevenson, embraced by the liberal intelligentsia, was dogged by rightwing charges that he was a feckless “egghead” with questionable allegiances. (Stevenson had served as a character witness for Hiss.) In truth, Stevenson’s centrist politics were solidly anticommunist, and moderate by any standard (his running mate, Alabama segregationist Jon Sparkman, showed Stevenson was hardly a supporter of Truman’s civil rights agenda). Yet Stevenson was never able to recover from the charge he was “soft,” and lost spectacularly in both 1952 and 1956 to a war hero with unquestionable anti-communist credentials.20 For right-wing Americans who sought to roll back social change and the liberal ideology they associated with it, anti-communism served as a vehicle for grievances that had been accumulating for decades. Secularism, welfare statism, racial integration, Jewish upward mobility, feminism, homosexuality, modern art, rock-n-roll, juvenile delinquency, sexual promiscuity and other seeming harbingers of modernity were often claimed to be somehow communist in their origins, intents or effects. Right-wing anti-communism was animated by anxieties that had ultimately little to do with the “red menace.”21 Southern segregationists frequently claimed the civil rights cause was communist inspired. In 1954, after the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education case, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi denounced the communist influence on the court responsible for the devastating decision. Civil rights activists were often compelled to dissociate themselves with communism. Harassed by the FBI, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) expelled communists from local branches.22 The Cold War, however, may have ultimately accelerated the national civil rights agenda. As the free world’s leader, the U.S. could no longer afford to let the Soviets denounce America as a racist nation that accepted segregation, lynchings and other injustices. Truman clearly recognized this fact when he desegregated the U.S. military by executive order in 1948. When civil rights activists stepped up demands for an end to institutionalized racism in the 1950s, the whole world watched. Washington was increasingly compelled to respond—sometimes meaningfully, other times superficially—to calls for racial integration. The Cold War was about propaganda and national self-image as well as arms, power and geopolitics. According to Mary Dudziak, civil rights became tacit “Cold War policy” in Washington.23 Eisenhower came to embody the Cold War “consensus” politics of the 1950s. Although he filled his administration with business leaders, he pursued a moderate domestic agenda and did not seek to dismantle the welfare state created under Roosevelt. But there would be no extension of the New Deal. Democrats abandoned the social reform cause that had defined them in earlier years and joined Republicans in advocating an anti-communist foreign policy. On the cultural front, Cold War anxieties also encouraged a celebration of the family, rigid gender roles and sexual restraint. After years of depression and war, Americans rushed into marriage and family life, buoyed by a booming economy and uneasy about an increasingly dangerous world. As Elaine Tyler May’s research suggests, marriage and family life, idealized in Cold War culture, offered a kind of emotional refuge for Americans, mitigating fears of communism and atomic warfare. While apprehensive citizens stocked basement bomb shelters with supplies and instructed children on “duck and cover” drills, they also flocked to movies featuring alien 203

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invaders who penetrated mind and body, demolished the self and thereby conquered civilization. Fictional narratives mirrored the deeper preoccupations of Americans. With men defined as breadwinners and women as housewives, the traditional family could stand as the first line of defense against communist enslavement, nuclear apocalypse and moral degeneration.24 Underlying the promotion of sexual conformity were unresolved anxieties about female power that had become acute during the Second World War. American women had enjoyed unprecedented independence during the war, working en masse in the wartime workforce and achieving some degree of autonomy. By the Cold War’s onset, leading opinion-makers were reminding women that their priorities lay in the home. Here they would raise well-adjusted children who would mature into reliable citizens immune to foreign ideologies. Non-conformist behaviors—female careerism, premarital sex, unwed pregnancy, feminism, divorce, homosexuality—were to be “contained,” just as communism was to be contained. On occasion, political and sexual concerns intersected explicitly: citing “experts,” government officials proclaimed homosexuality a “perversion” that left afflicted government employees prone to communist subversion. In this view, since homosexuals were weak-willed degenerates, they were uniquely vulnerable to espionage and extortion.25 The pressures to conform to prevailing sexual norms were powerful, and inseparable from the political anxieties that plagued Cold War America. It is important to remember, however, that rigid gender roles and sexual ideals were ideological and proscriptive in nature. They did not correspond neatly to reality. That disjuncture explains why attempts to “contain” sexuality were so overwrought, and in the end largely unsuccessful. It is true that midcentury housewifery was venerated, made to seem the proclivity of every normal American female. Yet women continued to enter the workforce in the 1950s, albeit largely in “pink-collar” jobs, while stirrings of female discontent were felt long before Betty Friedan gave voice to them later. Men were pressured to be dutiful husbands, breadwinners and fathers—any other trajectory was deemed the mark of pathological immaturity or arrested sexual development. Yet mounting expressions of male crisis and rebellion surfaced in the 1950s, impulses that inspired the marketing of the Playboy lifestyle and the endorsement of bachelorhood as a realization of male freedom. Divorce was discouraged in the official ideology of the time, but testimony to the many fragile marriages of the 1950s is the divorce revolution of subsequent years. Most gay Americans had little choice but to remain in the closet lest they be subject to oppression and harassment. But the rise of thriving gay urban enclaves in postwar America also rendered homosexuality more visible than ever before. Sexual chastity, monogamy and heterosexuality were the reigning norms of the 1950s, but the Kinsey reports showed that Americans hardly conformed to these norms in their private lives.26 Transferred from foreign policy to cultural life, the containment metaphor is often employed by historians to describe the repressive aspects of Cold War culture. While there was certainly a disquiet that discouraged unorthodox impulses, we must not take this metaphor too literally. Despite the oft-noted conformity of the postwar years, conflicting currents and disruptive trends—in both private and public life—belie the “consensus.” Chafing at the stifling conservatism of the 1950s, discontents and rebels against middle-class conformity, racial segregation, suburban life, sexual repression, the “organization man” role, the “feminine mystique,” the arms race, poverty and the military-industrial complex nourished the discord that erupted in full force the following decade. Concerns about domestic communist subversion receded as the 1950s wore on. Democrats recovered from the traumas of the McCarthy era, proved themselves reliable cold warriors and made a comeback in 1960. If the Cold War’s most enduring legacy at home is the growth of a vast national security bureaucracy shielded from public scrutiny and accountability, its implications 204

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were felt long after the Red Scare ran its course. The FBI remained preoccupied with “subversives,” albeit of a different breed: left-wing and civil rights activists like Martin Luther King whose movements were obsessively documented in Hoover’s overflowing dossiers. In post-Red Scare years, however, Americans were less willing to accept national security as a legitimate pretext for the surveillance and repression of citizens critical of the U.S. government.

Notes 1 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977); Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth Century America (New York: Random House, 2004). 2 Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 3 Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes; Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Caute, The Great Fear; Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the UnAmericans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). 4 Ibid. Also see Scott Martelle, The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 5 Ibid. Schrecker, Many Are The Crimes. 6 Schrecker, Many Are The Crimes; Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); Maurice Isserman and Ellen Schrecker, eds., Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism (New York: New Press, 2006). 7 John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? (New York: Ivan Dee, 1995). 8 Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case (New York: Random House, 1997). 9 Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 10 David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983). 11 Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 12 John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press 2009); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999); Katherine A.S. Sibley, Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War (University of Kansas Press, 2004). 13 Ibid. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 14 Olmsted, Red Spy Queen; Haynes et al., Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, 519–520. 15 Haynes et al., Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. 16 Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counter-Intelligence But Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (New York: Ivan Dee, 2002); Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). 17 Also see Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response (Laguna Hills: Aegean Park Press, 1996). 18 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 69–73; K.A. Cuordileone, “The Torment of Secrecy: Reckoning With American Communism and Anti-Communism After Venona,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 4 (2011): 615–642. 19 Schrecker, Many are the Crimes; Caute, The Great Fear. 20 K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2004). 21 Ibid.

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22 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 23 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 24 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 25 Ibid. On homophobia, see Dean, Imperial Brotherhood and David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 26 JoAnne Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

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PART VII

The Korean War and its Aftermath

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23 THE KOREAN WAR, 1950–1953 A Historiographical Summary James I. Matray

On July 27, 1953, an armistice halted the fighting in Korea. Coincidentally, interpretive peace also was taking hold among historians and political scientists on the causes, course, and meaning of the Korean War. Serious debate did not begin until scholars had rejected the credibility of an orthodox judgment that for almost two decades dominated accounts of the Korean conflict. Prior to the 1970s, few histories challenged President Harry S. Truman’s public declaration on June 27, 1950 that the North Korean attack on South Korea proved that “communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.”1 To date, sharp differences persist on almost every critical issue, but with two notable exceptions. First, Korean War scholars have reached agreement that this conflict marked a watershed in postwar international affairs, militarizing the Soviet-American competition and extending the Cold War to the entire world. Second, a consensus now prevails that the origins of the Korean conflict date from at least World War II. By contrast, the most important question that has constituted for some time the great divide in the literature on the Korean War is whether it was more an international conflict or a civil war. Cold War assumptions influenced the authors of a long list of overviews that presented an orthodox interpretation of the Korean War before the release of archival documents. During the decade after the armistice, Rutherford M. Poats, John Dille, and Robert Leckie published straightforward narrative accounts of the conflict, congratulating the United States for acting to halt Communist expansion. Establishing an early interpretive baseline in 1963, T.R. Fehrenbach, in a full-length study, explained that the United States was not prepared militarily or mentally to fight a limited war in Korea. Preservation of U.S. credibility and prestige, however, demanded military intervention. British historian David Rees relied on research in documents available at the time to publish in 1964 what was for two decades the standard history of the conflict. He praised the United States for waging a limited war that defeated aggression.2 Other surveys confirmed conventional wisdom, as historians apparently thought that they had received the last word on the conflict, as Korea earned its status as the forgotten war during the next decade.3 Historical analysis of the Korean War experienced a fundamental shift after 1970, as scholars examined declassified U.S. documents covering the years before 1950. Rejecting the orthodox characterization of the conflict as the consequence of external aggression, historians acknowledged the centrality of domestic factors. Most importantly, Bruce Cumings insisted that the 209

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Korean conflict was a civil war, rather than an example of Soviet-inspired expansionism. In the first volume of The Origins of the Korean War, he emphasized that a conventional war started in Korea in June 1950 because the United States blocked the triumph of a leftist revolution on the peninsula in 1945 and thereafter imposed a reactionary regime on southern Korea.4 Other writers assessed U.S. foreign policy toward that nation in the same period, referencing documents at the National Archives and presidential libraries. In detailed studies of U.S. involvement in Korea from the start of World War II to the outbreak of hostilities, William W. Stueck, Jr., Charles M. Dobbs, and James I. Matray all challenged the traditional assignment of exclusive blame on Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin for igniting the Korean War on June 25, 1950.5 John Merrill argued that a kind of war was already underway on the peninsula before the conventional phase of the conflict began, citing provocative South Korean assaults northward that ignited a series of major border clashes with North Korean forces in the summer of 1949.6 Fears that President Syngman Rhee of the Republic of Korea (ROK) might stage an offensive to achieve forcible reunification caused the Truman administration to deny requests from the South Koreans for tanks, heavy artillery, and warplanes. Carl Berger, Soon-sung Cho, and Dobbs, among other writers, sharply criticized the United States for not building a stronger ROK military and inviting an attack from North Korea.7 Russell D. Buhite, Ronald L. McGlothlen, and Matray countered that Washington, reflecting its strained resources, in fact was implementing a policy of qualified containment in Korea. Before U.S. occupation forces withdrew in June 1949, Washington had begun to train, equip, and supply a security force in the south that could maintain internal order and deter an attack from the north. It also submitted to Congress a three-year program of economic aid for recovery and self-sufficient growth.8 To build political support for the Korean aid package, Secretary of State Dean Acheson delivered an address before the National Press Club on January 12, 1950 that presented an optimistic assessment of the ROK’s future. Critics later charged that his exclusion of South Korea from the U.S. “defensive perimeter” gave the Communists a “green light” to launch an invasion. But Acheson’s words, as Matray has shown, had almost no effect on Communist plans for an invasion.9 Moreover, by June 1950, U.S. containment in Korea through economic means had begun to succeed, as the ROK acted vigorously to control spiraling inflation. While Washington was willing to wait for what it judged as Moscow’s artificial client state in the north to collapse, Rhee was vocal in calling for military reunification.10 The ROK’s rising strength had a significant impact on Stalin, who was concerned about the military threat that South Korea posed to North Korea’s survival. Before Soviet documents became available, the issue Korean War scholars debated most fiercely was how the conflict began. U.S. officials never doubted for a moment that Stalin ordered the invasion.11 Surprisingly, some writers challenged the Truman administration’s stated position during the war. For example, Wilbur W. Hitchcock claimed that Kim Il Sung “jumped the gun” and attacked South Korea before the Soviet Union was ready for the invasion. According to I.F. Stone, Rhee purposely had initiated the border clashes to provoke a North Korean retaliatory attack.12 Neither the Hitchcock nor Stone interpretation had won many adherents as the fighting in Korea ended. Thereafter, Soviet-American animosity reinforced near universal acceptance of Truman’s description of the war as Soviet-inspired external aggression. Embracing this consensus, Glenn D. Paige instead examined the U.S. decision-making process, praising Truman for being calm and rational in making the right choices. Ernest R. May elaborated on Paige’s claim that avoiding appeasement was Truman’s primary motive.13 Meanwhile, a left revisionist interpretation had emerged to challenge the traditional view that assigned responsibility to the Soviet Union for starting the Cold War. Denna Frank Fleming, for example, asserted that the United States had used superior economic power and an atomic 210

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monopoly to achieve global political dominance in the postwar era. Ironically, Korea otherwise escaped reinterpretation at first. U.S. involvement in Vietnam, however, transformed left revisionism into a plausible and legitimate explanation for the Korean War. Joyce and Gabriel Kolko and Karunakar Gupta boldly charged that South Korea struck first and the North Korean invasion was an act of self-defense.14 During the 1980s, left revisionism peaked in popularity, as most scholars accepted the accuracy of the Cumings interpretation that the Korean conflict was a civil war. Peter Lowe, Burton I. Kaufman, and Callum MacDonald all judged North Korea’s attack as entirely Kim Il Sung’s decision.15 Jon Halliday and Cumings wrote that Rhee had sent his forces across the parallel before dawn on June 25, 1950 to provoke a Communist invasion and prompt American military intervention, thereby setting the stage for the ROK’s conquest of North Korea. In 1990, Cumings would describe this “trap theory” in more detail in the second volume of his The Origins of the Korean War.16 But the rising consensus that Korea was a classic civil war ended abruptly the next year with Russia’s release of Soviet documents following the fall of the Soviet Union. Sergei Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai were among the first scholars to use these sources to eliminate any remaining doubts about Stalin’s direct role in the planning and preparations for the North Korean invasion. Just as important, they demonstrated that in 1949, Stalin consistently refused to approve Kim Il Sung’s persistent requests to authorize an invasion.17 Access to Soviet documents renewed emphasis on international factors as decisive in explaining the origins of the Korean War. Almost immediately, a right revisionist perspective revived central orthodox arguments. Kathryn Weathersby advanced this interpretive approach in a string of important articles that stressed the total dependence of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on the Soviet Union. She assigned responsibility for North Korea’s invasion to Stalin’s obsession with aggressive expansion.18 Stueck, however, would provide the fullest elaboration of right revisionism in his The Korean War: An International History, where he argued that U.S. military intervention in Korea promoted world stability because it deterred Soviet adventurism. One of his other main assertions was that multilateral involvement dictated the origins and nature of the Korean War. Also, the United Nations played a more critical role in restraining the superpowers than in practicing collective security. While Korea expanded U.S. military commitments globally, it militarized the Cold War and undermined bipolarity. Stueck later wrote a synthetic account of the war to popularize right revisionism. Posing questions throughout, he delivered answers closer to orthodoxy than left revisionism.19 Reading the same sources as Weathersby and Stueck, Evgueni Bajanov, Alexandre Y. Mansourov, and Shen Zhihua, among other scholars, disagreed with the right revisionists. They insisted that Kim Il Sung made the decision for war and Stalin agreed with reluctance because he feared U.S. military intervention. Indeed, in January 1950, Stalin discussed Kim Il Sung’s plans with him personally in Moscow, but, despite Acheson’s Press Club speech, he was not ready to give final consent for an invasion. When they met during April, Kim Il Sung persuaded Stalin that a military victory would be quick and easy, because of support from southern guerrillas and an expected popular uprising against Rhee’s regime. But Stalin still feared American military intervention, advising Kim Il Sung that he could stage his invasion only if China’s Mao Zedong approved. During May, Kim went to Beijing to obtain Chinese consent. Significantly, Mao also voiced concern that the United States would act to defend the ROK, but gave his reluctant approval as well.20 In a fruitless attempt to reconcile these conflicting views, Kim Chull Baum and Matray suggested that Korea might be defined best as an “international civil war.”21 Truman and Acheson gave no thought in their memoirs to the domestic origins of the Korean War.22 Neither did early orthodox writers, who heaped praise on the president for his 211

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swift and brave action to halt the Communist invasion, but he in fact would delay for a week before committing U.S. ground forces. Following his meeting with top advisors on June 25, 1950, the president referred the matter instead to the UN Security Council and banked on South Korea’s ability with largely indirect U.S. help to defend itself. Five days later, Truman sent U.S. ground troops to Korea after General Douglas MacArthur advised that, without them, Communist conquest of South Korea was certain.23 Fifteen nations joined the United States in responding to a UN Security Council request for defense of the ROK; a sizeable literature covers their contributions but space limitations prevent discussion here of these works. Many studies have discussed with varying degrees of detail the political and military developments that followed during the Korean War. Joseph C. Goulden, Bevin Alexander, Clay Blair, and British historian Max Hastings present solid narrative descriptions of the same events with differences in emphasis.24 On July 7, 1950, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the creation of the United Nations Command (UNC) and calling on Truman to appoint a commander, who named MacArthur for the job. At first, the UNC suffered a string of defeats as U.S. and allied forces withdrew to the Pusan Perimeter, a rectangular area in the southeast corner of the peninsula.25 Despite the UNC’s seemingly desperate situation in July 1950, MacArthur devised plans for a counteroffensive in coordination with an amphibious landing behind enemy lines that would permit him to “compose and unite” Korea. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was very worried about MacArthur’s intention to land at Inchon, twenty miles west of Seoul, because of its narrow access, high tides, and seawalls. MacArthur justified his optimism when the Inchon Landing on September 15 was a stunning success that reversed the course of the war.26 During the last week of September 1950, UNC forces were poised for an advance across the 38th parallel. U.S. leaders realized that extending hostilities northward risked Soviet or Chinese entry and possibly a global war, and therefore sought and received explicit UN support for reunification. Historians agree that UNC pursuit of reunification was an incredible blunder because it provoked Chinese intervention. Administration officials later tried to deflect blame to MacArthur for the disastrous consequences of invading North Korea. Martin Lichterman, Rees, and General Matthew B. Ridgway endorsed this interpretation. They claimed the U.S. decision to cross the parallel was inadvertent, characterizing it as the product of “military momentum” and “a surge of optimism” after the exhilarating Inchon Landing.27 By contrast, Trumbull Higgins and Ronald J. Caridi assigned blame to Truman for the illconsidered U.S. decision to pursue forcible reunification, arguing that the president was hoping to boost the Democratic Party’s prospects in the November elections.28 Walter LaFeber and Barton J. Bernstein identify the more purposeful goal of scoring a political victory in the Cold War.29 Stueck and Kaufman stressed that maintaining U.S. credibility required pursuing Korea’s reunification.30 Matray, however, has viewed the decision to cross the parallel as a product of Truman’s belief that conquest of North Korea would allow a united Korea to choose freely to follow the U.S. model of economic, social, and political development. By early August, Truman authorized the development of plans to achieve forcible reunification.31 Allen S. Whiting, Russell Spurr, and Hao Yufan and Zhai Zhihai, among others, have contended that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) intervened in the Korean War because the UNC advance to the Yalu constituted a grave threat to its national security.32 Chen Jian, Zhang Shu Guang, and Michael M. Sheng disagree, explaining how Mao’s primary motivation was to restore China’s world status as the “Central Kingdom” in East Asia. He also wanted to repay a debt to North Korea, which had sent thousands of soldiers to fight in the Chinese Civil War.33 China’s decision to intervene in the Korean War has received a thorough re-examination in 212

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recent years as a result of access to new information from the Communist side, but discussion of these works is beyond the scope of this essay.34 In May 1951, the UNC finally established a defensive position just north of the parallel after repulsing two huge Chinese offensives. Stalemate on the battlefield led the belligerents to pursue an armistice. After Soviet UN Ambassador Jacob A. Malik publicly advocated a ceasefire late in June, truce talks opened on July 10 at Kaesong. Washington was determined to limit discussions to military matters, thus preventing the PRC from exploiting the talks to gain admission to the United Nations or control over Taiwan. As a result, both sides appointed military officers, rather than diplomats, as main negotiators, reducing, as Rosemary Foot has emphasized, prospects for flexibility and compromise.35 Donald W. Boose, Jr., Sydney D. Bailey, and Xia Yafeng have attributed the inability to achieve a quick armistice to a lack of direct diplomatic contact between the main belligerents, preconceptions derived from cultural differences, domestic politics on both sides, the isolation and bleak austerity of the conference site, but most important the intensity of clashing national interests.36 In his account of the talks, Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, chief UNC negotiator until May 1952, condemned the Communist side for stalling and stubbornness that prevented a settlement. William H. Vatcher, Jr. seconded this judgment.37 Foot, however, has emphasized concessions the Communists made, depicting the United States as truculent because it did not want to negotiate with an enemy it could not defeat militarily.38 In November 1952, American voters elected Dwight D. Eisenhower as president largely because he promised to end the unpopular war in Korea. Edward C. Keefer and Stueck have shown that the new president thought seriously about using expanded conventional bombing and threats of nuclear attacks on the PRC.39 Eisenhower insisted that the Chinese agree to a ceasefire after Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned India’s prime minister in May 1953 that, absent progress toward a truce, the United States would end existing limitations on its conduct of the war.40 However, Mark A. Ryan has argued that China’s leaders did not judge any nuclear threats as credible, as witnessed by the fact that Chinese forces staged powerful attacks along the battlefront in late May and early June 1953.41 By January 1953, Washington and Beijing in truth welcomed an armistice. Edward Friedman and Foot argued that China, facing immense domestic economic problems and wanting peaceful coexistence with the West, already had decided to make peace once Truman left office. In March, Stalin’s death only elevated China’s sense of vulnerability, persuading Beijing later that month to accept a proposal for exchange of sick and wounded POWs and then recommend turning non-repatriates over to a neutral state.42 Predicting future trends in historical research can be perilous, but recent writings may provide clues about the new directions of Korean War studies. Steven Casey, examining a subject that has escaped extensive scholarly attention, has written a superb account of the conflict’s impact on U.S. domestic affairs. He explains how Korea was difficult for two administrations to “sell” to the public because Americans resist fighting for anything less than total victory.43 Two other new studies have reignited debate over the origins of the Korean War. Allan R. Millett now has completed two-thirds of his unprecedented three-volume study of the conflict. In A House Burning, examining the years 1945 to 1950, he dated the start of Korea’s civil war specifically on April 3, 1948, when Communist-led partisans on Cheju Island staged an uprising. They Came from the North described the first year after North Korea’s attack.44 But Bruce Cumings insisted, in his latest work, that the war began in 1932 when the founders of the DPRK initiated guerrilla attacks on the Japanese army, while future ROK officials collaborated.45 Division in scholarly perspective on the Korean War persists in an ironic replication of Korea’s fate as a nation. 213

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Notes 1 Harry S. Truman, June 27, 1950, “U.S. Air and Sea Forces Ordered into Supporting Action,” U.S. Department of State Bulletin 23 ( July 3, 1950): 5. 2 Rutherford M. Poats, Decision in Korea (New York: McBride, 1954); John Dille, Substitute for Victory (New York: Doubleday, 1954); Robert Leckie, Conflict: The History of the Korean War, 1950–1953 (New York: Putnam, 1962); T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study of Unpreparedness (New York: Macmillan, 1963); David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (New York: Macmillan, 1964). 3 Harry J. Middleton, The Compact History of the Korean War (New York: Hawthorne, 1965); Edgar O’Ballance, Korea 1950–1953 (London: Faber, 1969); James McGovern, To the Yalu: From the Chinese Invasion of Korea to MacArthur’s Dismissal (New York: Morrow, 1972). 4 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War. Vol. I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 5 William W. Stueck, Jr., The Road to Confrontation: American Foreign Policy toward China and Korea, 1947–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Charles M. Dobbs, The Unwanted Symbol: American Foreign Policy, the Cold War, and Korea, 1945–1950 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981); James I. Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985). 6 John Merrill, Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War (Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 1989). 7 Carl Berger, The Korea Knot: A Military-Political History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957); Cho Soon-sung, Korea in World Politics, 1940–1950: An Evaluation of American Responsibility (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967); Dobbs, The Unwanted Symbol. 8 Russell D. Buhite, “ ‘Major Interests’: American Policy Toward China, Taiwan, and Korea, 1945–1950,” Pacific Historical Review 47, no. 3 (August 1978): 425–451; Ronald L. McGlothen, Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Policy in East Asia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993); Matray, The Reluctant Crusade. 9 James I. Matray, “Dean Acheson’s National Press Club Speech Reexamined,” Journal of Conflict Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 28–55. 10 Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 6–7, 37–38. 11 Mark W. Clark, From the Danube to the Yalu (New York: Harper, 1954); Matthew B. Ridgway, The Korean War (New York: Doubleday, 1967); J. Lawton Collins, War in Peacetime: The History and Lessons of the Korean War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969); George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). 12 Wilbur W. Hitchcock, “North Korea Jumps the Gun,” Current History 20, no. 115 (March 20, 1951): 136–144; I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review, 1952). 13 Glenn D. Paige, The Korean Decision, June 24–30, 1950 (New York: Free Press, 1968); Ernest R. May, “Lessons of the Past”: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Also see, Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age, (New York: Wiley, 1963). 14 Denna Frank Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961); Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Karunakar Gupta, “How Did the Korean War Begin?,” China Quarterly 52 (October–December 1972): 699–716. Former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev added impetus to the acceptance of the left revisionist interpretation when he reported that Joseph Stalin approved North Korea’s attack with great reluctance because he feared U.S. intervention. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). 15 Peter Lowe, Origins of the Korean War (New York: Longman, 1986); Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Callum A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1986). 16 Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 17 Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993).

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18 Kathryn Weathersby, “Korea, 1949–50: To Attack or Not to Attack: Stalin, Kim Il Sung, and the Prelude to War,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin [hereafter, CWIHPB] Issue 5 (Spring 1995): 1–9; Kathryn Weathersby, “New Findings on the Korean War: Translation and Commentary,” CWIHPB Issue 3 (Fall 1993): 1, 14–18; Kathryn Weathersby, “The Soviet Role in the Korean War: The State of Historical Knowledge,” in William Stueck, ed., The Korean War in World History (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 61–92. 19 William W. Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); William W. Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 20 Evgueni Bajanov, “Assessing the Politics of the Korean War, 1949–1951,” CWIHPB Issue 6–7 (Winter 1995/1996): 54, 87–91; Alexandre Y. Mansourov, “Enigmas of D-Day,” in Mark F. Wilkinson (ed.), The Korean War at Fifty: International Perspectives (Lexington: Virginia Military Institute, 2004), 40–65; Shen Zhihua, “Sino-Soviet Relations and the Origins of the Korean War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 33, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 44–68. 21 Kim Chull Baum and James I. Matray, eds., Korea and the Cold War: Division, Destruction, and Disarmament (Claremont, CA: Regina, 1993). 22 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. II: Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 463; Dean G. Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969). 23 Matray, The Reluctant Crusade, 242–250. 24 Joseph C. Goulden, Korea: The Untold Story (New York: Times Books, 1982); Bevin Alexander, Korea: The First War We Lost (New York: Hippocrene, 1986); Clay Blair, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953 (New York: Times Books, 1987); Max Hastings, The Korean War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 25 Robert A. Cole, “Leadership in Korea: The War of Movement, 1950–1951” and Uzal W. Ent, “Walton Walker: Defender of the Pusan Perimeter,” The New England Journal of History 60, nos. 1–3 (Fall 2003–Spring 2004): 163–211; Geoffrey Perret, Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur (New York: Random House, 1996); Stanley Weintraub, MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (New York: The Free Press, 2000). 26 Robert D. Heinl, Victory at High Tide: The Inchon-Seoul Campaign (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott 1968); Walt Sheldon, Hell or High Water: MacArthur’s Landing at Inchon (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Michael Langley, Inchon Landing: MacArthur’s Last Triumph (New York: Times Books, 1979). 27 Martin Lichterman, “To the Yalu and Back,” in Harold Stein, ed., American Civil-Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1963): 569–642; Rees, Korea; Ridgway, The Korean War. 28 Ronald J. Caridi, The Korean War and American Politics: The Republican Party as a Case Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Trumbull Higgins, Truman and the Fall of MacArthur: A Precis on Limited War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 29 Walter LaFeber, “Crossing the 38th: The Cold War in Microcosm,” in Lynn H. Miller and Ronald W. Pruessen, eds., Reflections on the Cold War: A Quarter Century of American Foreign Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974); Barton J. Bernstein, “The Policy of Risk: Crossing the 38th Parallel and Marching to the Yalu,” Foreign Service Journal 54 (March 1977): 16–22, 29. 30 Stueck, The Road to Confrontation; Kaufman, The Korean War. 31 James I. Matray, “Truman’s Plan for Victory: National Self-Determination and the Thirty-Eighth Parallel Decision in Korea,” Journal of American History 66, no. 2 (September 1979): 314–333. 32 Allen S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970); Russell Spurr, Enter the Dragon: China’s Undeclared War Against the U.S. In Korea, 1950–1951 (New York: Newmarket Press, 1988); Hao Yufan and Zhai Zhihai, “China’s Decision to Enter the Korean War: History Revisited,” The China Quarterly 121 (March 1990): 94–115. 33 Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Zhang Shu Guang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–53 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995); Michael M. Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 34 Xia Yafeng, “The Study of Cold War International History in China: A Review of the Last Twenty Years,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 105–108. For the most recent article on the topic, see Shen Zhihua, “China and the Dispatch of the Soviet Air Force: The Formation of the Chinese-Soviet-Korean Alliance in the Early Stage of the Korean War,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33, no. 2 (April 2010): 211–230.

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35 Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 36 Donald W. Boose, Jr., “The Korean War Truce Talks: A Study in Conflict Termination,” Parameters 30, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 102–116; Sydney D. Bailey, The Korean Armistice (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992); Xia Yafeng, Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks During the Cold War, 1949–1972 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 37 C. Turner Joy, How Communists Negotiate (New York: Macmillan, 1955); William H. Vatcher, Jr., Panmunjom: The Story of the Korean Military Armistice Negotiations (New York: Praeger, 1958). 38 Foot, A Substitute for Victory; Bailey, The Korean Armistice. 39 Edward C. Keefer, “President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the End of the Korean War,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 267–289; Stueck, The Korean War. 40 Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years. Vol. II: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963). For a similar argument, see Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, Vol. II: The President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984); David Calingaert, “Nuclear Weapons and the Korean War,” Journal of Strategic Studies 11, no. 2 (June 1988): 177–202. 41 Mark A. Ryan, Chinese Attitudes toward Nuclear Weapons: China and the United States During the Korean War (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989). 42 Edward Friedman, “Nuclear Blackmail and the End of the Korean War,” Modern China 1, no. 1 (January 1975): 75–91; Rosemary Foot, “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict,” International Security 13, no. 3 (Winter 1988/1989): 92–112. 43 Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 44 Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1945–1950: A House Burning (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1950–1951: They Came from the North (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010). 45 Bruce Cumings, The Korean War (New York: Modern Library, 2010).

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24 UN COALITION WARFARE DURING THE KOREAN WAR Jeffrey Grey

The Korean War appeared to confirm the fears and apprehensions held in Western capitals concerning the intentions and likely behavior of the Soviet bloc in the early Cold War period. The invasion of the Republic of Korea by the North Korean People’s Army in the early hours of June 25, 1950 seemed the culmination of a series of crises and provocations in both Europe and Asia as the Cold War turned “hot.” While there were certainly elements of coordination between Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang, and while it is clear that the Soviet legation in the North Korean capital played an important role in the planning of the initial offensive, the initiative for war resided firmly with the North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, and fears that a war on the Korean peninsula was designed to distract the West from a threatening move in central Europe proved unfounded.1 The early Cold War climate nonetheless does much to explain the response of the non-Soviet world to the events on the Korean peninsula, beginning with the authorizations provided by the United Nations Security Council and embodied ultimately in the United Nations Command (UNC). The United States dominated the United Nations coalition that fought the Korean War, in a manner, and for reasons, that will be discussed below. In a sense, there were three subsets or groups within this alliance structure: the lesser UN forces (the majority), the forces supplied by the British Commonwealth (from mid-1951, a division-sized formation and with separate air and naval contributions) and the government and forces of the Republic of Korea. The stresses and difficulties in these relationships were least in the first group and greatest in the last, but all three presented particular challenges to Washington. What is also remarkable is how little interaction there was between the three sub-groups. In important senses, all three defined their commitment to the Korean War in terms of their existing and developing relationships with the United States. Within two days of the war’s outbreak, the U.S. Representative to the United Nations, Warren R. Austin, addressed the Security Council seeking stronger measures to counter perceived North Korean aggression. The case for external support for South Korea and United Nations endorsement of such action was bolstered by the report of two Australian observers attached to the UN Commission on Korea (UNCOK) whose fortuitously timed inspection tour of forward positions along the 38th parallel undercut claims from Pyongyang that the South had initiated hostilities. The Security Council’s resolution urged member states to “furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and restore 217

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international peace and security to the area” and enabled and legitimized subsequent military action by UN member states. Air and naval units of General Douglas MacArthur’s Far East Command (FEC), based in Japan, began attacks on North Korean targets on June 29; at the same time, MacArthur appealed publicly for additional forces, including from non-U.S. sources. This reflected attitudes more widely within the Truman administration, which did not want the United States to be seen as acting unilaterally in Korea, and which understandably also wished to spread the costs and responsibilities arising from intervention. Although emphasis was always placed on the multi-national character of the allied force in Korea, the United Nations Command was structured, led and largely resourced by the United States. A further resolution of the Security Council on July 7 endorsed President Truman as the executive agent for the Council in carrying out military action in Korea, and the United Nations Command was established on July 24, in Tokyo, with MacArthur at its head, reporting through the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). In practice, General Headquarters of the UNC was erected on the existing structure of General Headquarters, Far East Command, giving the UN structure an overwhelmingly American stamp and character which did not change during the course of the war. Nor did the UN itself seek to intervene at the operational level at any stage, and relations between the successive UN commanders and the UN itself were nominal.2 Offers of support were received and solicited and this necessitated the creation of machinery for processing and approval, centered in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The driving principle was military effectiveness rather than seeking to engage the greatest number of contributor nations possible. MacArthur further recommended that foreign units should be of a minimum battalion size, preferably with supporting arms. Service and service support components such as ordnance, engineers or medical units should be of a size as would make them immediately usable. Such relatively general prescriptions necessitated a case-by-case approval process conducted through the JCS.3 The multi-national character of the UNC required as well a clearly thought-through and enunciated policy governing integration of often widely disparate forces with very different histories, cultures and assumptions, issues that were never entirely resolved. The biggest potential headache was logistic, responsibility for which in many cases had to be assumed from the outset by the U.S. system. Units and formations contributed from the British Commonwealth were administratively and logistically self-supporting to a considerable extent, but this was not generally the case among the other UN forces, which ultimately totaled sixteen (together with additional contributions from other nations in a purely non-combatant role).4 UN forces arrived in Korea at different times, in different states of readiness and with different problems. All operated within the structures of the Eighth United States Army, Korea (EUSAK). The largest components were provided by the British Commonwealth—ultimately brigaded together in July 1951 to form a separate division, the 1st Commonwealth Division— and the Republic of Turkey, which fielded a brigade attached to the 25th Infantry Division. As a generalization, forces contributed by NATO allies such as France and the Netherlands integrated well with their U.S. parent formations and generally fought effectively. Some other units, such as those from the Philippines, Ethiopia or Thailand, presented greater difficulties which took time to overcome. These were surmounted to some extent through the creation of a UN Reception Center near Taegu, where shortcomings in equipment and training could be addressed before units were deployed forward. To complicate matters still further, although the command language in theater was English, the UN Command spoke at least nine other languages, not including Korean. One American analyst described the UNC as “an international army led by Americans.”5 Notwithstanding that characterization, the UNC was never a homogeneous command and allowances had to be made for some UN units that would not have been countenanced—or necessary—with comparable U.S. units. 218

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There were few arguments or disagreements at the strategic level for much of the war because of the clear subordination of UN forces to the U.S. command structure. The exceptions to this statement were provided by the Commonwealth, principally the United Kingdom, and by the Republic of Korea. Additionally, there were various disagreements within the Commonwealth structure itself, a product of both history and diverging interests as the Dominions developed more mature foreign and strategic policies and recognized increasingly that their interests did not automatically coincide either with each other or with London.6 Individual Commonwealth governments also viewed their relationship with the United States in very different terms. The Australian (and by extension, New Zealand) government used support for U.S. policy in Korea to extract a tripartite security arrangement with the U.S., the Anzus Treaty, signed in 1951 and driven in part by U.S. desire for a “soft” peace treaty with Japan, which Australian sentiment opposed.7 Canada, which would not have become involved in Korea without the UN sanctioning of operations there, used the fact of its involvement to underline its emerging sense of itself as a “middle power” and a strong proponent of multilateral action to attempt to moderate U.S. policy and its exercise of power. Canadian policy sought to keep the U.S. focused on Europe, which Ottawa saw as the more important theater (and, by extension, threat to western interests) and wished to prevent the U.S. from becoming “bogged down” in Asia.8 Australia (and New Zealand) would become involved in Vietnam the following decade in a similar attempt to focus U.S. attention on an area of critical self-interest, while Canada declined absolutely to do so. Relations between London and Washington were generally close though not, perhaps, as close as Churchillian sentimental rhetoric professed to believe. British policy underwent some painful adjustments in the decade after the end of the Second World War, both in recognizing the limitations imposed by its much diminished status in the world, and in coming to terms with U.S. leadership of the western alliance. London had established diplomatic relations with the newly victorious Communist government in Beijing in January 1950, and maintained those relations after the People’s Republic intervened with the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea on behalf of Pyongyang in the last months of that year. (The major Commonwealth governments, more in tune with the view in Washington, also expressed unhappiness with British policy on the issue of diplomatic recognition.)9 London became increasingly vexed with MacArthur’s pronouncements and perceived behavior, fuelled in part by the see-saw nature of the fighting up and down the Korean peninsula in the first year of the war, a condition dubbed “MacArthuritus” by the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Oliver Franks.10 The seeming provocation offered over the status of Taiwan and advocacy of the use of Nationalist forces against mainland China was another goad, as was “resentment of American power and frustration at the decline of British influence within the Atlantic alliance,” at least among some members of the British Cabinet.11 Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s rushed visit to Washington in December 1950 prompted by imprecise talk about the possible use of atomic weapons was designed to assert a British voice in strategic decision-making around Korea and head off considerations of either retaliation against mainland China or a widening of the war, with mixed results.12 The crisis prompted by Chinese incursion and rapid advances in the early weeks of 1951 eased with the appointment to command of the Eighth Army of General Matthew B. Ridgway and the steady, incremental advances that UN forces made at Chinese expense thereafter. Concerns over widening the war—this time through a further advance across the 38th Parallel into North Korea, supported by air strikes further afield—reasserted themselves at this stage. MacArthur’s public statements and other statements made on his behalf in Congress threatened to provoke a major rift between London and Washington and between the United States and other members of the United Nations.13 It did not require British or other external intervention 219

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to lead to MacArthur’s removal by Truman on April 11, however; the President had grown in the conviction that the former should be relieved and his continued insubordination and defiance of constitutional proprieties proved decisive.14 MacArthur’s sacking drew some of the heat from British reactions to U.S. policy, but the truth was that after 1945 London had little real choice but to defer to Washington if it wished to maintain U.S. support in Europe against the Soviet threat. The protracted cease-fire talks that began in July 1951 at Kaesong after the failure of the Chinese Fifth Phase Offensive likewise produced tensions in the Anglo-American relationship, but no rupture. There was no British or other UN representation at the talks, either at Kaesong or subsequent to their move to Panmunjom. The negotiations soon entered an extended stalemate, which did nothing to reassure London; Secretary of State Dean Acheson described British support for the war in September 1951 as having reached “an irreducible minimum.”15 A severe balance-of-payments crisis in the second half of 1951 made an early end to Britain’s commitment even more pressing, but London’s capacity to influence outcomes was minimal. The advent of a Conservative government in October and Churchill’s return to the prime ministership reduced some of the angst that had developed in the relationship under Labour, but did little to reduce the range or intensity of Britain’s diabolical economic position. Conservative rhetoric over China was more robust, but Britain was now unquestionably in the subordinate position to its powerful American ally, as Churchill’s visit to Washington in January 1952 reinforced. The U.S. stance over non-forcible repatriation of prisoners of war, which the Chinese and North Koreans vehemently opposed, also provoked tension with Britain. The bloody POW riots on Koje-do in May 1952 exacerbated British reluctance to breach the Geneva Convention governing repatriation of prisoners and internees, and the Canadian government bought in to the argument when a company of Canadian troops (together with a British one) was ordered to the island to help suppress the disturbances.16 The Koje riots prompted a UN report, which revealed coercive manipulation and indoctrination of prisoners by U.S. camp authorities, aided by Kuomintang officials from Taiwan in the case of Chinese prisoners. The British wanted the war to end in order to reduce their commitment, but recent history tempered reluctance over voluntary repatriation in Whitehall (other than in the Foreign Office); the forced repatriation of Cossack and other former Russian personnel to the Soviets in 1945, resulting in their murder or lengthy periods in the Gulag, still played on official consciences. The British government was in any case unwilling to provoke a break with Washington over the issue, and instead helped broker unofficial and secret negotiations between Washington and the Chinese Foreign Minister, Chou En-lai, through Indian diplomats, to arrive at an acceptable formula that would break the impasse. The repatriation issue proved to be the major obstacle to a cease-fire, but British exasperation with American decision-making was further exacerbated by the “air pressure” campaign launched in June 1952 against the North Korean hydro-electric power generation system. The advent of a Republican administration in November 1952 did not, in practice, produce an ideological bed-fellow for London. Republican rhetoric had embraced “roll-back” as a platform, a position seemingly reinforced by Eisenhower’s selection of John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State. Eisenhower’s ill-defined pledge to resolve the impasse in Korea was a “credibility” issue, and discussions around the possible use of atomic weapons and the imposition of a blockade against the Chinese mainland should be seen in these terms. Fortunately, Stalin’s death in March 1953 created opportunities for a resolution in the truce talks: the British had suggested an initial exchange of sick and wounded POWs in January, to which the Communist side agreed in late March, followed by the release of civilian internees (captured at the first fall of Seoul in June 220

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1950) the following month.17 The South Korean President, Syngman Rhee, attempted to derail these positions and threatened the negotiations with an eleventh-hour intervention (see below), but this was effectively neutralized through U.S. pressure. At the political-strategic level then, British experience in the Korean War demonstrated the finite limits of influence within a coalition structure where one partner was overwhelmingly dominant. It was somewhat different on the ground and in inter-action at the tactical and operational levels. Canada and Britain fielded separate infantry brigade groups with another brigade compiled from British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian contributions, and these were subsequently brought together as the 1st Commonwealth Division in July 1951. The Commonwealth contributions came closest to the stipulated ideal for the United States: complete, combat-ready and largely self-sustaining forces with their own extensive logistical and administrative lines running through Japan (because of the residual Commonwealth presence in the occupation of Japan when the fighting in Korea began), and which was greatly expanded as the Commonwealth presence grew.18 Many of the soldiers and the majority of the officers in these brigades were experienced veterans of the Second World War and provided considerable additional depth to the military capabilities of the U.S. Eighth Army in the fraught early months of fighting and during MacArthur’s advance into North Korea. Largely because they were a known quantity and because many U.S. senior officers had operated alongside these same armies only a few years earlier, the U.S. command structure was generally happy to allow them to operate according to their own doctrinal and tactical conceptions, and to grant them a leeway that would never have been extended to their U.S. counterparts at the equivalent levels. This became especially true during the long period of the static war, from late 1951 until the cease-fire in July 1953, during which there were occasional arguments between successive commanders of the Commonwealth Division and higher U.S. commanders at I U.S. Corps. Mostly this came down to reconciling different national “ways of war” over such matters as persistent pressure from higher command for raids to take prisoners (allegedly for “intelligence purposes”) or the British perception that tactical actions were being ordered to keep the troops “active” in ways that they believed served no useful military purpose. There were sometimes sharp points of disagreement, likewise, within the Commonwealth organization. The Australians held the non-operational and administrative command of Commonwealth forces because of their residual structure in the occupation of Japan and although London, in particular, did not like this, the British authorities were forced to live with it. The individual national interests of Britain, Canada and Australia, in particular, occasionally suggested an individual rather than a collective approach to issues and problems, exacerbated by the fact that Australia and Canada kept their units at full strength (or more), while Britain’s global responsibilities and manpower shortages meant that UK units were always under-strength and filled with National Servicemen. On the whole, the Commonwealth forces successfully reduced or minimized the points of friction and difference between them, though sometimes with difficulty. The largest allied force alongside the Americans, dwarfing those of all other UN-contributing nations, was that of the Republic of Korea (ROK).19 Neither Korean state was, in fact, a member of the United Nations in 1950 (indeed, the Republic of Korea did not seek membership until 1991). The UN had been closely involved in Korean affairs since 1947, and this increased considerably following the North Korean invasion of the South and the passage of successive UN resolutions in June 1950. The southern state was still a relatively fragile entity, and its military was hopelessly outclassed by its northern adversary as a consequence of deliberate U.S. policy to keep it both smaller and more lightly armed and equipped. American attitudes toward the ROK were “ambivalent.”20 On the one hand, U.S. policy wished to keep Rhee on 221

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a tight rein by not providing him with the means to give reality to rhetoric by starting a war; on the other, many members of the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) believed that the ROK Army had the makings of a serious and capable military force if given good equipment, decent leadership and sufficient training: Brigadier General William L. Roberts wrote in May 1950 that the ROK Army “will endure great hardship if properly led,” and KMAG officers were some of the foremost proponents of that process.21 The ROK Army proved no match for the invading Korean People’s Army (KPA), and its near-collapse was compounded by the loss of most of the equipment it did possess on the wrong side of the Han River with the fall of Seoul. The South Koreans had fought hard and lost almost half the army in the first week of fighting. The injection of U.S. forces and the mobilization of UN political and practical support were essential preconditions to the survival of the ROK, but as a result rebuilding the ROK Army necessarily took a secondary place in the prosecution of the war, at least initially. This process also took time since U.S. equipment stocks within the Far East Command were low and were needed by the growing U.S. force fighting against the KPA. The ROK Army was reorganized around a two-corps structure and units and formations were brought up to strength and, where necessary, augmented with new units to round them out. These were shortly after committed to the line to “learn on the job.” As the ROK Army grew, so KMAG grew with it. In August 1950, MacArthur approved a recommendation from the Eighth Army commander, General Walton Walker, for a ten-division structure for the South Koreans, a position confirmed by General Matthew B. Ridgway in the middle of 1951; it was more important for the ROK Army to be an effective force of ten divisions than for the U.S. to enter an armaments race with the Soviets in seeking to build and equip a ROK Army capable of standing on its own.22 The static phase proved a boon to both KMAG and the ROK Army, allowing stable and more developed training programs, enhanced officer production (through reform of the Korean Military Academy along similar lines to West Point) and the development of extensive support capabilities, especially artillery. In the last year of the war, the two ROK Army corps held a significant proportion of the front line in the center and east and fought large-scale Chinese and North Korean offensives to a stand-still, not without heavy casualties themselves. In summarizing the capabilities of the ROK Army at the war’s end, one of its most senior and most able officers noted that: “Coordination between ROK Army units was lousy and we relied too much on U.S. artillery and close air support.”23 The nurturing and tutelage provided by the U.S., however, was the essential element in the improvement and relative success of the ROK forces and the survival of the Republic of Korea itself.24 Handling President Rhee was an even more intractable problem for Washington than the reverses suffered by the former’s army. Determined on re-unification on his terms, Rhee was a vigorous opponent of a cease-fire that left the country divided.25 He had visited captured Pyongyang briefly in October 1950, despite American wishes, maintained a repressive policy against internal dissent that played poorly in the UN and elsewhere and, most notoriously of all, attempted to derail the armistice talks entirely in June 1953 through a unilateral release of North Korean POWs, which infuriated the Americans given the delicacy of the negotiating positions after the death of Stalin. Rhee had made his opposition known during the South Korean political crisis of 1952, which had involved a protracted stand-off between the President and the National Assembly.26 While Rhee succeeded in imposing his will and establishing a virtual presidential dictatorship, the process by which he did so worried Washington sufficiently that it considered his removal, by force if necessary, with serious planning for the eventuality dubbed Operation Everready. Ultimately Washington baulked at the proposition of effectively managing a coup against Rhee, but Eighth Army continued to plan for a range of eventualities involving South Korean sabotage of the truce agreement for some months after the cease-fire came 222

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into force.27 Rhee’s intransigence and volatility, and Washington’s desire to end the war while also subjected to great international pressure to do so, resulted in a mission to Seoul in late June 1953 and in the Rhee-Robertson communiqué of July 11, which laid the ground for subsequent U.S. support. Specifically, it committed the United States to build a greatly expanded ROK Army of twenty divisions and enhanced air and naval forces, and massive economic assistance to reconstruct a devastated economy and country, together with a mutual defense treaty. Rhee was bowing to the inevitable—a cease-fire that left Korea divided and acceptance that he would not disrupt the cease-fire—but he undoubtedly got a good deal. In doing so, he demonstrated that sometimes the most powerful weapon possessed by a smaller member of an alliance is the capacity to say “no,” and bound the United States “to the future survival of the Republic of Korea.”28 The United Nations Command was overwhelmingly American and South Korean, with politically important and some militarily useful contributions from other UN member states that always remained a tiny minority nonetheless (U.S.: 50.3 percent, ROK: 40.1 percent, other UN: 9.6 percent). Some contemporary American observers thought the inter-allied experience in Korea worthy of further consideration; S.L.A. Marshall urged “intensive study” in the interest of smoother performance in the event that the U.S. found itself involved in alliance operations in Europe, but nothing much came of this.29 The UNC, like the war that it fought, was very much a product of the early Cold War, its strengths and weaknesses explained in large part by the contexts in which it emerged and functioned.

Notes 1 Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1950–1951: They Came from the North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). There is also important work through the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, DC, available: www.wilsoncenter.org/program/cold-war-international-historyproject. 2 James F. Schnabel, Policy and Direction: The First Year (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1972), 73–103. 3 Ibid., 115–117. 4 There is no good scholarly study of the United Nations Command as a whole nor of the functioning of the component parts within the UNC. An older, multi-volume study produced by the Republic of Korea—Yu Man Kap, ed., The History of the United Nations Forces in the Korean War (Seoul: Ministry of Defence, 1972–1977, 6 vols.)—provides a generally uncritical tactical narrative account of each national contribution, together with a lengthy one on the ROK experience as well. In a number of cases, however, it remains the only published source in English. For a good overview drawn from a longer, unpublished study, see B. Franklin Cooling, “Allied Interoperability in the Korean War,” Military Review 63 (June 1983): 26–52. 5 William J. Fox, History of the Korean War: Inter-Allied Cooperation during Combat Operations (Tokyo: Military History Section, Far East Command, 1952), 13. Unpublished staff study. 6 Jeffrey Grey, The Commonwealth Armies and the Korean War: An Alliance Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 7 Robert J. O’Neill, Australia in the Korean War, 1950–1953: volume I: Strategy and Diplomacy (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1981). 8 Denis Stairs, The Diplomacy of Constraint: Canada, the Korean War and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 9 David C. Wolf, “ ‘To Secure a Convenience’: Britain Recognises China—1950,” Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 2 (1983): 299–326. 10 Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War: volume II: An Honourable Discharge (London: HMSO, 1995), 97.

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11 Callum MacDonald, Britain and the Korean War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 46. 12 Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950–1953 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 88–130. 13 Farrar-Hockley, An Honourable Discharge, 98–100. 14 Callum A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 94–98. 15 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), 538. 16 Grey, Commonwealth Armies, 153–156. 17 MacDonald, Britain and the Korean War, 85–89. 18 Jeffrey Grey, Australian Brass: The Career of Lieutenant General Sir Horace Robertson (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 179–192. 19 The best and fairly accessible account of the war from the South Korean point of view is Chae Han Kook, ed., The Korean War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997–2001), a massive threevolume account produced under the auspices of the Korea Institute of Military History. 20 Peter Lowe, The Korean War (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 199. 21 Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea 1945–1950: A House Burning (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 248–253. Old but still serviceable on the role of U.S. advisors is Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: KMAG in Peace and War (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1962). An important new study is Bryan R. Gibby, The Will to Win: American Military Advisors in Korea, 1946–1953 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012). 22 Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 176. 23 Paik Sun Yup, From Pusan to Panmunjom (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1992), 245. 24 Allan R. Millett, “The Forgotten Army in the Misunderstood War: The Hanguk Gun in the Korean War, 1946–1953,” in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, eds., The Korean War 1950–1953: A 50 Year Retrospective (Canberra: Army History Unit, 2000), 24–26. 25 Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, Master of Manipulation: Syngman Rhee and the Seoul-Washington Alliance 1953–1960 (Yonsei: Yonsei University Press, 2001), 65–76. 26 Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 167–168. 27 Kim, Master of Manipulation, 97–117. 28 Allan R. Millett, “The Korean People: Missing in Action in the Misunderstood War,” in William Stueck, ed., The Korean War in World History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 49. 29 S.L.A. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry Operations and Weapons Usage in [the] Korean Winter of 1950–51 (Chevy Chase: Johns Hopkins University, 1952), 136.

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25 WARFARE AND NATION BUILDING IN THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA: 1953–1973 Christos G. Frentzos

One of the ironies of modern warfare is that, in addition to being incredibly destructive, it also has the capacity to be quite profitable financially. This dictum has been especially true in regards to contemporary Asia. Bruce Cumings, one of the leading historians of modern Korea, has aptly pointed out that during the twentieth century “warfare in East Asia was handmaiden to economic growth.”1 A clear example of this is the incredible economic transformation that Japan experienced as a result of the Korean War (1950–1953). In the immediate years following World War II, Japan’s economy was in ruins, despite a great deal of American aid and reconstruction assistance. However, with the outbreak of the Korean War, Japan’s economic fortunes changed dramatically. Because of its close proximity to Korea, the U.S. procured supplies and war-related work orders from Japanese firms. The influx of U.S. dollars and wartime purchases jump-started Japan’s industrial recovery, and set the stage for its future advances in electronic and industrial technology.2 Fifteen years later, this same scenario played itself out once again. This time, however, the Republic of Korea (ROK) was the primary beneficiary. As the U.S. stepped up its military involvement in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged America’s allies to support South Vietnam. One of the few nations to answer the call was the Republic of Korea, who quickly became America’s largest and most important third-country ally in Vietnam, deploying approximately 50,000 troops there by 1968. Altogether, more than 310,000 South Koreans served in Vietnam from 1964 to 1973.3 In return for their participation, Seoul requested and received a plethora of military and economic concessions. First, the U.S. increased its direct economic and military aid packages to South Korea. More importantly from the standpoint of long-term economic growth, the U.S. agreed to procure as much industrial material and human labor as possible from South Korean businesses and firms and promised to provide technology assistance to encourage Korean exports.4 It has been estimated that the Vietnam War accounted for anywhere from 7 to 8 percent of Korea’s annual GDP and for as much as 19 percent of its total foreign earnings during the period 1966 to 1969. Altogether, the U.S. doled out approximately one billion in payments to South Korea between 1965 and 1970. Through these revenues, the U.S. was essentially responsible for underwriting Korea’s capitalistic economic development during the next decade.5 This chapter examines how military conflict in Southeast Asia laid the foundation for the ROK’s future economic and industrial development and helped make South Korea one of the United States’ most successful nation-building projects of the twentieth century. 225

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America’s involvement in Korea began immediately following the end of World War II when the U.S. created a non-communist government below the 38th parallel, headed by Syngman Rhee. Although an autocrat, Washington reluctantly backed Rhee due to his fierce opposition to communism and his willingness to use every means at his disposal to combat leftist influence in the country. With the cessation of hostilities in 1953, the U.S. provided Rhee’s government with a great deal of economic and military support in an attempt to secure and stabilize the nation, which was crippled with economic and social problems as a result of years of warfare. In the years following the Korean War, the ROK regularly topped the list of U.S. aid recipients, receiving more than $360 million alone in 1960. This number represented about 7.6 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget.6 Unfortunately, the U.S. did not receive much of a return on its investment and economic growth remained dismal. Economic turmoil combined with social and political unrest led to a military coup that brought General Park Chung Hee to power in May 1961. Although initially reticent toward the military junta, the new administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy gradually came to accept the regime after Park made it clear that economic development, modernization, and political reform would be major priorities. Within two years, Park restored civilian rule and was elected president in October 1963. On the economic front, U.S. officials identified three areas that were vital for improving South Korea’s economic outlook: increasing agricultural productivity, normalizing relations with Japan, and increasing exports. Toward this end, Park initiated a series of economic reforms but the results were disappointing.7 Seoul’s financial situation would not improve until after the expansion of the American war in Vietnam in 1965. A few months after taking office, President Johnson began encouraging allied participation in Vietnam with the development of the “More Flags” campaign, which initially focused only on securing material, financial, and moral support for Saigon. South Korea was one of the first nations to answer the call, agreeing to send one Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H.) unit and ten Tae Kwon Do instructors to Vietnam in June 1964.8 Six months later, they augmented their forces by deploying a non-combatant engineering unit after Washington agreed to pay the overseas allowances and cover the costs of transporting and sustaining ROK soldiers.9 As a result of this deal, Korean soldiers would now be earning approximately 20 to 30 times their normal base salary.10 As the situation on the ground in Vietnam deteriorated, Johnson made the decision to deploy U.S. ground troops in March 1965 and approved the use of allied forces shortly thereafter. In April, the president dispatched a special envoy to meet with Park, who had expressed his willingness to send combat troops to Vietnam “if their expenses were paid.”11 During the discussions that followed over the next several weeks, South Korean representatives made it perfectly clear to American officials that they wanted the U.S. to agree to a number of conditions before they would authorize the deployment of a combat division to Vietnam. Specifically, the South Koreans requested that the U.S. fully equip three combat-ready ROK reserve divisions to avoid weakening Korean domestic defenses and asked the U.S. to maintain its current troop levels along the Korean demilitarized zone. Seoul also expected Washington to transport ROK forces to Vietnam and offer combat duty pay and death and disability compensation at the same rate as American forces, as well as provide increased military assistance and logistical support for Korean forces in the field. Finally, ROK leaders sought to profit from the war by securing special privileges with regard to providing goods and services to U.S. buyers.12 As one Korean official privately noted, “Vietnam was a battlefield, but it was also a market. Because of that we should use this chance to get everything we can from the United States.”13 Although Washington was initially shocked by South Korea’s demand, they indicated that there was room for negotiation if it led to the deployment of ROK troops to Vietnam. Winthrop 226

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G. Brown, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, met with ROK officials in July and worked out an agreement. In return for deploying one combat division to South Vietnam, the U.S. agreed to fund a pay increase for South Korean soldiers and promised that the ROK would “be given full and equal opportunity to compete for U.S. off-shore procurement whether military or civilian.”14 The U.S. also promised to provide South Korea with an additional seven million in military assistance as well as modernize the fire power, communications, and mobility of ROK forces at home, and provided equipment, logistical support, construction, training, and transportation to South Korean forces serving in Vietnam. Washington vowed to cover all supplemental deployment costs for ROK forces as well as fund their overseas allowances at the same rate as those for the M.A.S.H. and an engineering unit already serving in Vietnam. Finally, Ambassador Brown and the U.S. Commander in Korea prepared a written letter assuring the ROK government that President Johnson would not reduce American or ROK troop levels in Korea without first discussing the matter with the Korean government.15 Although the American press reported that Washington would finance the deployment of ROK troops to Vietnam and provide increased military aid to South Korea along with a promise not to reduce U.S. troop levels on the peninsula, the Johnson administration did not make public the full terms of its agreement with Seoul.16 As the war in Vietnam intensified over the next year, American troop levels skyrocketed. Naturally President Johnson sought to increase allied participation and he once again turned to South Korea. In early January 1966, Ambassador Brown met with top Korean officials and requested another ROK combat division and brigade. Park noted that, although he wanted to help, he would have to consider the matter very carefully, because he had to justify this action to the people and the Korean National Assembly and demonstrate to them that their nation would benefit at least as much as other countries not militarily involved, like Japan, for instance.17 Brown cabled the State Department and informed them that, if the U.S. wanted additional ROK forces, Washington “must be prepared to pay for them,” since Seoul would bargain much harder and expect a good deal in return.18 He noted that, in addition to increased economic and military aid, the South Korean government expected the U.S. to augment its offshore procurement from Korean firms and utilize ROK military suppliers and repair services for use in Vietnam.19 In his telegram, Brown explicitly noted that South Korean leaders expected preferential treatment from America when it came to awarding civilian and military contracts in exchange for deploying additional troops. He explained that, since they would be sacrificing their soldiers—unlike their closest competitor, Japan—this was the least the U.S. could do.20 Although Japan and South Korea had recently established diplomatic relations with one another, most Koreans still harbored a great deal of resentment toward their former colonial master. The last thing South Koreans wanted to see was Japan once again reaping the economic rewards of another East Asian war, especially since they were not contributing to the U.S. military war effort.21 If the United States wanted 40,000 ROK troops in South Vietnam, Seoul felt that it was only natural that they should have an advantage over other nations in providing material, services, and manpower for the Vietnamese war.22 The South Korean government also felt that it needed to seize the opportunity that Vietnam offered to help stimulate domestic economic growth just as Japan had benefited from the Korean War more than a decade earlier. To this end, ROK leaders hoped the war in Vietnam would accelerate foreign exchange earnings and capital goods inflow, and they were determined to press Washington hard on this issue.23 After lengthy discussions, the U.S. and South Korea finally agreed on a quid-pro-quo arrangement that resulted in the ROK deploying another 20,000 combat soldiers to Vietnam. The so-called “Brown Memorandum,” finalized in March 1966, served as the working 227

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agreement between Washington and Seoul for the deployment of all ROK forces to Vietnam, and presented South Korea with an enormous package of military and economic assistance.24 According to the terms of the document, the U.S. agreed to provide new hardware to help modernize Korean military forces at home as well as equip, train, and finance the complete replacement of additional troops deployed to Vietnam. Economically, Washington promised to procure supplies, services and equipment from Korea for American, ROK, and Vietnamese forces whenever practical. The U.S. also agreed to offer expanded opportunities for Korean contractors and skilled civilians to bid on construction projects and find employment in Vietnam. Finally, Seoul would receive increased technical assistance in the field of export promotion and additional Agency for International Development (AID) loans and Stabilization Program loans.25 As it had done following the deployment of the first ROK combat division the year before, Washington assumed financial responsibility for transporting and maintaining South Korean forces in Vietnam.26 In addition, the Johnson administration agreed to increase the daily overseas allowance rates for Korean non-commissioned officers (NCOs) serving in Vietnam.27 Although certain aspects of America’s “agreement” with Seoul did become public knowledge, Washington decided against disclosing the complete terms of the Brown Memorandum for fear of embarrassing the Saigon government and undermining international support for South Vietnam. As far as the American public or Congress knew, in exchange for their participation in Vietnam, the U.S. agreed to keep its two combat divisions in South Korea and provide Seoul with additional military equipment and foreign aid as well as finance the maintenance and transportation of ROK forces to Southeast Asia.28 The Johnson administration kept the Brown Memorandum secret from Congress until February 1970, when it was uncovered during hearings conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.29 By assisting the U.S. in Vietnam, South Korean leaders realized that they had a unique opportunity to stimulate their economy by playing a role similar to Japan during the Korean War. Prior to Seoul’s involvement in Vietnam, South Korea was economically underdeveloped and heavily dependent upon American aid, which had done little to improve the situation.30 One of Korea’s biggest problems was that the country consumed far more than they produced, which meant that they were unable to accumulate capital for investment. Instead of investing American aid into long-term economic development programs, South Korea used the money to support its consumption needs. Seoul also suffered from severe unemployment and an underutilization of human resources. While the population was largely educated and trained, there were very few job opportunities available to them.31 However, the economic concessions bestowed upon Korea by the U.S. reversed this downward economic spiral and jumpstarted Korean industrial production. Washington agreed to give South Korea the full and equal opportunity to compete for U.S. military and civilian off-shore procurement and pledged to purchase certain items, including construction materials, as well as petroleum, oil, and lubricant products from South Korea.32 The U.S. promised to buy from Korea various “supplies, services and equipment” for ROK forces in Vietnam and to direct the Agency for International Development to purchase from Korea items for “rural construction, pacification, relief, [and] logistics” programs in South Vietnam. Finally, Washington contracted to provide “expanded opportunities” to Korean contractors and employment opportunities for “skilled Korean civilians” in the Republic of Vietnam.33 These agreements had a tremendous impact on the South Korean economy during the Vietnam era. Korean exports to Vietnam more than doubled from $14 million in 1965 to $36 million in 1966. After 1965, South Korea’s total exports increased 300 percent to more than half a billion dollars by 1968.34 Between 1965 and 1967, Saigon alone bought $45 million worth of construction materials and military equipment from Korea. In addition, South Korea supplied 228

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large amounts of foodstuffs, cement, lorry tires, spare parts, barbed wire, and iron and zinc sheeting to South Vietnam. Seoul even assisted the Saigon government with various public works and civic action programs, such as dredging ports and constructing roads, bridges, damns, libraries, and schools.35 In 1967, South Korea earned $120 million in war-related income through its involvement in Vietnam. This figure represented close to 20 percent of Seoul’s total foreign exchange earnings.36 Overall, exports of Korean goods and services increased 1,000 percent between 1960 and 1970, from $117 million to $1.37 billion.37 Remittances by Koreans employed in Vietnam also proved extremely important. Even though the Saigon government complained repeatedly about the number of high-paying jobs given to foreign workers at the expense of the Vietnamese, Washington continued to award South Korean firms with a disproportionate number of civilian contracts as part of the terms of the Brown Agreement.38 In early 1965, there were only 93 South Korean civilians employed in Vietnam. By 1970, that number had jumped to approximately 25,120.39 It has been estimated that ROK soldiers and civilians in Vietnam remitted about 80 percent of their total earnings back to Korea. This influx of liquid capital, along with the increased demand for exports, helped stimulate the industrial and economic recovery of South Korea. As a result of the war, Seoul was finally able to accumulate the surplus capital it so desperately needed to stabilize its financial and industrial infrastructure. From 1966 to 1967, the total financial earnings of Korean civilians and military personnel in Vietnam more than doubled to $135 million. In 1968 and 1969, Korean total financial earnings reached $180 million and $200 million, respectively. This capital influx helped boost Seoul’s rate of economic growth from an average of 8.5 percent between 1962 and 1966, to a 12 percent growth rate between 1967 and 1973.40 The total financial gains from South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War during the entire period from 1965 to 1973 have been estimated at over $1 billion.41 No wonder one Washington official called Vietnam the “El Dorado” of Korea.42 To a certain extent, Korea duplicated the Japanese model for economic growth by increasing domestic production and construction while, at the same time, boosting exports abroad.43 The general feeling among Koreans was that “triangular cooperation” between the United States, Korea, and Vietnam should be pursued as a logical and fundamental byproduct of the Korean– American alliance.44 Seoul also reasoned that, since they were sending men in large numbers to fight in Vietnam, it was only right that they be allowed to share in the $100 million-a-year market created by the war.45 ROK leaders were especially sensitive in this regard because they resented the fact that Japan was once again being awarded the vast majority of American military procurement contracts.46 For instance, in 1968, two years after the Brown Agreement, Japan enjoyed a ten-to-one advantage over South Korea in the number of war-related contracts it received from the United States.47 These kinds of figures outraged the Korean public and fueled speculation on their part that the U.S. expected “flesh and blood from Korea while concentrating its purchases of war materials in Japan to the advantage of that economy rather than the ROK.”48 As a result of these sentiments, President Park successfully argued that, for political reasons, the U.S. had to provide some type of economic concessions to Seoul in order to win public support for the deployment of South Korean troops to Vietnam. As we have seen, the Vietnam War provided a huge economic stimulus to the Republic of Korea and helped the nation become one of the four “Asian Tigers” that emerged during the late twentieth century.49 While many critics of the Vietnam War attacked South Korea for being little more than hired American mercenaries, ROK leaders were shrewd and pragmatic. They used the Vietnam War as a means of integrating South Korea into the world economy, which in turn helped lay the foundation for the country’s rapid economic expansion in the years that followed.50 While South Korea genuinely believed that resisting 229

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communist aggression in Asia was critical for their national security, they also understood, from their own painful history, that warfare was big business. The United States and South Vietnam would need a plethora of equipment, material, and labor, and the South Koreans felt that they were in the best position to provide those essential goods and services. America’s decades-long nation-building experiment in South Korea would have been nearly impossible were it not for the financial and industrial stimulation provided by the military conflict in Southeast Asia.

Notes 1 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 322. 2 William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947–1955 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 6; Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 322. 3 Lieutenant General Stanley Robert Larsen and Brigadier General James Lawton Collins, Jr., Allied Participation in Vietnam (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1985); Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 1994). 4 For more on this topic, see Christos G. Frentzos, “From Seoul to Saigon: U.S.–Korean Relations and the Vietnam War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Houston, 2004); Kil J. Yi, “Alliance in the Quagmire: The United States, South Korea, and the Vietnam War, 1964–1968” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1997); Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Republic of Korea: Part 6, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, 91st Cong., 2nd Sess., February 24–26, 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1970) (hereafter cited as Republic of Korea, Hearings). 5 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 321; Yi, “Alliance in the Quagmire,” 203. 6 Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans and the Making of a Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 3. 7 Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea, 127–132. 8 Frentzos, “From Seoul to Saigon,” 108. 9 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, December 30, 1964, U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000), 29, Part I, Korea, Document # 30, 57 (hereafter cited as FRUS, with appropriate year, volume, and document/page number); “New Korean Aid Reported Set,” New York Times, December 30, 1964, sec. 1, 2; The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Historical Division, Joint Secretariat, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1960–1968, Part I (Washington, DC: Joint History Office, 1970), 16–44. 10 George McT. Kahin, Intervention, How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986), 335; Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Korea, January 27, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 76, 158. 11 James L. Morrison and Chin-Ha Suk, “South Korea’s Participation in the Vietnam War: A Historiographical Essay,” Korea Observer 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 278; Yi, “Alliance in the Quagmire,” 41; Letter from the Ambassador in Vietnam (Lodge) to the President, June 5, 1964, FRUS, 1964–1968, 1, Doc. # 200, 459. Frentzos, “From Seoul to Saigon,” 101–119, 143–144. 12 Larsen and Collins, Allied Participation in Vietnam, 124–125; Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, July 10, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 57, 121; Memorandum from the Assistant Director of the United States Operations Mission to Korea (Brown) to the Director of the United States Operation Mission to Korea of the Agency for International Development (Bernstein), September 23, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 59, 126. 13 Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea, 137. 14 Memorandum from the Assistant Director of the United States Operations Mission to Korea (Brown) to the Director of the United States Operation Mission to Korea of the Agency for International Development (Bernstein), September 23, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 59, 126. 15 Republic of Korea, Hearings, 1569; Larsen and Collins, Allied Participation in Vietnam, 126–129.

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16 Neither the American public nor Congress knew the full details of the quid-pro-quo package. “U.S. Will Assist Seoul So It Can Help Saigon,” New York Times, July 11, 1965, sec. 1, 3; “Vote in Seoul Backs Troop Aid to Saigon,” New York Times, August 14, 1965, sec. 1, 2; Tom Wicker, “Humphrey Opens Parleys in Seoul,” New York Times, February 23, 1966, sec. 1, 16. 17 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, January 5, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 69, 144. 18 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, January 21, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 73, 153; Telegram from the American Embassy in Seoul to the State Department, December 24, 1965, NSF, Country File, Asia and the Pacific, Korea, box 255, folder: “Korea Memos Vol. III, 11/65–12/66,” LBJ Library, 1. 19 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, December 22, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 63, 132–134; Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, December 28, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 66, 138–140; Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, January 10, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 71, 147. 20 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, December 28, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 66, 139. 21 Joon-Young Park, “The Political and Economic Implications of South Korea’s Vietnam Involvement, 1964–1973,” Korea and World Affairs 5, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 484. 22 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, January 5, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 69, 144–145. 23 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, January 10, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 71, 148–149. 24 Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Korea, January 27, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 76, 160. 25 Letter from U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Winthrop G. Brown, to the South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lee Tong Won (Yi Tong-won), March 4, 1966, Record Group 472, Records of the United States Forces in Southeast Asia, Headquarters Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), Free World Military Assistance Office, Administrative Office, Security Classified General Records, box 1, folder: “1419–01 General (Korea) 1970,” National Archives 2. 26 Republic of Korea, Hearings, 1569–1570. 27 Ibid., 1569–1570. 28 Tom Wicker, “Humphrey Opens Parleys in Seoul,” New York Times, February 23, 1966, sec. 1, 16; Emerson Chapin, “Seoul to Double Force in Vietnam,” New York Times, March 1, 1966, sec. 1, 7; “Seoul’s Assembly Approves More Troops for Vietnam,” New York Times, March 20, 1966, sec. 1, 9; Emerson Chapin, “Seoul, Citing Troop Aid, Seeks Role at Vietnam Peace Parley,” New York Times, April 27, 1966, sec. 1, 7. 29 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Investigation of Korean–American Relations, Report of the Subcommittee on International Organizations, 95th Cong., 2nd Sess., October 31, 1978, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), 393 (hereafter cited as Investigation of KoreanAmerican Relations, Report). For a complete account of the 1970 investigation, see Republic of Korea, Hearings, 1519–1768. Also see, U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Volume II, Parts 5–11, 91st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1971 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 2423, 1546–1547 (hereafter cited as Republic of Korea, Hearings, Parts 5–11). 30 Kil J. Yi, “The U.S.–Korean Alliance in the Vietnam War: The Years of Escalation, 1964–68,” in Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., International Perspectives on Vietnam (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 156. 31 Ibid., 161–162. 32 Memorandum from the Assistant Director of the United States Operations Mission to Korea (Brown) to the Director of the United States Operation Mission to Korea of the Agency for International Development (Bernstein), September 23, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 59, 126; Yi, “The U.S.–Korean Alliance in the Vietnam War: The Years of Escalation, 1964–68,” 164. 33 Letter from U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Winthrop G. Brown, to the South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lee Tong Won (Yi Tong-won), March 4, 1966, Record Group 472, Records of the United States Forces in Southeast Asia, Headquarters Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), Free World Military Assistance Office, Administrative Office, Security Classified General Records, box 1, folder: “1419–01 General (Korea) 1970,” National Archives 2 [i.e., The Brown Memorandum].

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34 James L. Morrison and Chin-Ha Suk, “South Korea’s Participation in the Vietnam War,” 297–298. 35 T.C. Rhee, “South Korea’s Economic Development and Its Socio-Political Impact,” Asian Survey 13, no. 7 (July 1973): 679; U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Free World Assistance to Vietnam: A Summary (Pamphlet HC Vietnam 198, 1966), 21, 23; Republic of Korea, Ministry of National Defense, Pictorial War History of ROK Forces To Vietnam (Seoul, South Korea: ROK Ministry of National Defense, 1970), 152–159. 36 Charles K. Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (2001), 533; T.C. Rhee, “South Korea’s Economic Development and Its Socio-Political Impact,” Asian Survey 13, no. 7 (July 1973): 679; “Seoul—Saigon Trade Is Up,” New York Times, January 19, 1968, sec. 1, 6. 37 Investigation of Korean–American Relations, Report, 177. 38 Tad Szulc, “U.S. War Outlays Aid Korea and Philippines,” New York Times, January 26, 1970, sec. 1, 3; Kahin, Intervention, How America Became Involved in Vietnam, 335. 39 Yi, “The U.S.-Korean Alliance in the Vietnam War: The Years of Escalation, 1964–68,” 164–165. 40 Joon-Young Park, “The Political and Economic Implications of South Korea’s Vietnam Involvement, 1964–1973,” Korea and World Affairs 5, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 484–485; Morrison and Suk, “South Korea’s Participation in the Vietnam War,” 297–298. 41 Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” 533; Park, “The Political and Economic Implications of South Korea’s Vietnam Involvement, 1964–1973,” 485; Investigation of Korean–American Relations, Report, 393. 42 Investigation of Korean–American Relations, Report, 175. For more on the economic impact of South Korea’s involvement in Vietnam, see Frank Baldwin, “America’s Rented Troops: South Koreans in Vietnam,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 7, no. 4 (October–December 1975), 36–40; Herman M. Schwartz, In the Dominions of Debt: Historical Perspectives on Dependent Development (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 234–268. 43 Sang-Dawn Lee, Big Brother, Little Brother: The American Influence on Korean Culture in the Lyndon B. Johnson Years (Boston and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2002), 116. 44 Princeton N. Lyman, “Korea’s Involvement in Viet Nam,” Orbis 16, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 564. 45 Republic of Korea, Hearings, 1708; Yi, “The U.S.–Korean Alliance in the Vietnam War,” 162. 46 Morrison and Suk, “South Korea’s Participation in the Vietnam War,” 301; Memorandum of Conversation, May 18, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 52, 112. 47 Park, “The Political and Economic Implications of South Korea’s Vietnam Involvement, 1964–1973,” 483–484; Morrison and Suk, “South Korea’s Participation in the Vietnam War,” 301. 48 Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State, July 10, 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, 29, Doc. # 57, 122. 49 The term “Asian Tigers” refers to the capitalist, free-market economies of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. See Eun Mee Kim, ed., The Four Asian Tigers: Economic Development and the Global Political Economy (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1998). 50 Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea, 140–141.

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PART VIII

The Vietnam War

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26 THE VIETNAM WAR, 1945–1975 A Historiography George C. Herring

The writing of the history of American wars has followed a recurrent pattern: a first stage in which official history written during or soon after the event is challenged by revisionist accounts, often partisan in motivation and hypercritical in tone; a second stage of scholarly responses, sometimes incorporating revisionist arguments; followed by a more scholarly form of revisionism, what might be called post-revisionism. Ultimately, after the passions of war have subsided, there may be a third stage of synthesis in which issues lose their immediacy and scholars begin to agree on many major questions.1 The historiography of U.S. involvement in Vietnam follows this pattern—with some unusual twists. In the case of a war discredited before it ended, the orthodox, or generally accepted, position among writers and intellectuals at least was “revisionist,” in that it criticized U.S. intervention in Vietnam as unnecessary or even immoral and charged American leaders with deceiving the nation into an unwanted war. Thus, ironically, the first wave of revisionism that emerged in the 1980s came from the political right, defended the war on legal and moral grounds, and insisted that the United States could have won if it had used its power wisely and decisively and if domestic dissent had not undercut the government’s position.2 The issues on which writers remain divided are those that were debated so heatedly during the conflict itself. First, was this war primarily a nationalist struggle, a civil war among Vietnamese to determine the destiny of their country, or was it an integral part of the larger Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies, as the U.S. government insisted at the time? Did it stem from external “aggression,” a brutal attempt on the part of Communist North Vietnam, backed by the USSR and China, to conquer South Vietnam? Or was it rooted in an indigenous and self-sustaining southern Vietnamese insurgency, supported by North Vietnam, against the America-backed South Vietnamese government? Second, why did the United States make such an enormous commitment of blood and treasure in an area seemingly so remote and insignificant? Was this commitment defensible on grounds of morality or national security? Perhaps the most controversial question has involved the reasons for America’s failure in Vietnam. Did the United States fail to achieve its objective of an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam because it did not use sufficient military power or because it employed that power improperly, as conservative revisionists have argued? Or was the outcome determined more by conditions in Vietnam than by what the United States did? Were these conditions so intractable as to make the war unwinnable? 235

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The orthodox or “dove” position, as the labels suggest, emerged as part of an opposition to the war that started in 1965 and assumed the force of conventional wisdom by its end a decade later. This view emphasized that, for the United States, the war was an avoidable tragedy. Driven by Cold War imperatives and mindless anti-communism and with utter disregard for Vietnamese history, politics, and culture, U.S. policymakers plunged into a conflict of marginal importance to their country’s interests, a war they had little chance of winning at a cost they were prepared to pay. This point of view reached its fullest expression in books published in 1972: journalist David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, a devastating critique of the mindset and alleged arrogance of the advisors of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who took the United States into Vietnam, and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, which, by exploring Vietnamese history and culture, sought to show the pointlessness and even futility of U.S. intervention.3 Building on the pioneering work of anti-war critics and journalists, postwar orthodox scholars filled out and refined the dove argument. They emphasized the indigenous roots of the conflict in the anti-colonial struggle against France and the spontaneous eruption of revolution in South Vietnam in the late 1950s, supported only hesitatingly by North Vietnam. Some even argued that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF ) retained considerable independence from Hanoi throughout the war. They attacked U.S. intervention on moral and strategic grounds. Vietnam was never of more than peripheral importance to the United States, most dove writers contended. The major causes of U.S. intervention were the virulent, unthinking anti-communism that gripped policymakers in the 1950s and 1960s; exaggerated estimates of the nation’s global interests; concern that the “loss” of Vietnam, as with the fall of China to the Communists in 1949, might have disastrous political consequences at home; and a haunting fear among top policymakers of national and personal failure.4 Dove scholars also emphasized that for the United States the war was unwinnable. U.S. efforts to sustain a client regime in South Vietnam ran up against the tidal force of Vietnamese nationalism. History bequeathed the United States a flimsy base upon which to build a government in South Vietnam. During its quarter century in Vietnam, therefore, it could do little more than construct a house of cards, an artificial society totally dependent on the continued presence of its own troops and inflow of its dollars. North Vietnam and the NLF fought well against the United States. They courageously stood up against an unprecedented tonnage of bombs, artillery, and napalm. Greater force would not have ensured victory, merely caused more destruction.5 Not surprisingly, given the passion of the wartime debate, the orthodox view did not go uncontested. A conservative revisionism developed soon after the war that, for a time in the 1980s, struck a responsive chord in American politics and popular culture. What was unique about Vietnam revisionism was that it sought to validate the official rationale for the war and to prove, after the fact, that it should have been fought and could have been won. Vietnam revisionism took many forms. Scholars set forth its arguments in sober tones—and with footnotes.6 Pundits and journalists popularized its themes.7 Participants like General William Westmoreland and former President Richard M. Nixon employed its arguments to vindicate their own roles in the war.8 It also burrowed its way into the popular culture in the films of Sylvester Stallone and the music of Charlie Daniels. It gained credence in some quarters in part because it played to some of the nation’s most cherished myths. Like orthodox writers, conservative revisionists viewed the Vietnam War largely through a Cold War lens. They sought, first, to revalidate U.S. intervention. Vietnam was “in truth a noble war,” presidential candidate Ronald Reagan proclaimed in 1980, an altruistic attempt to help a “small country, newly free from colonial rule” defend itself against a “totalitarian neighbor 236

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bent on conquest.”9 The aftermath of the war indeed confirmed in the eyes of many revisionists the original premises for intervention. The tragic plight of South Vietnamese refugees, the socalled “boat people,” the imprisonment of thousands of South Vietnamese in re-education camps, the imposition of a Stalinist regime on South Vietnam after 1975 all seemed to vindicate the official U.S. position on the war. Revisionists also found in the close postwar ties between the USSR and Hanoi confirmation of their belief that North Vietnam had been an instrument of the Soviet quest for world domination.10 Revisionists generally agreed that the war could and should have been won. Some insisted that the restrictions placed on the military by civilian leaders denied them the means for victory. Others argued that the military itself employed a flawed strategy. Instead of trying to fight a conventional war like World War II, the U.S. should have adapted to the kind of war it found itself in and used appropriate counterinsurgency methods. Or, as Colonel Harry Summers argued in a book that became a sort of Bible for the postwar U.S. Army, American forces should have sealed off South Vietnam from northern penetration and then crushed the insurgency.11 Revisionists further agreed that domestic forces were instrumental in America’s defeat. Antiwar protest encouraged the enemy to reject negotiations in favor of military victory, they argued. It also turned the American people against the war and forced Presidents Johnson and Nixon to curtail U.S. efforts just when victory was within grasp. The media was singled out for special condemnation. Biased, uninformed, and inexperienced journalists relentlessly attacked the U.S. effort in Vietnam and misrepresented enemy defeats as victories, helping to sour public opinion and even top civilian officials on the war. The close-up view of combat portrayed nightly on television allegedly wearied Americans of the war and strengthened their desire to get out of Vietnam.12 U.S. failure in Vietnam had undermined its self-respect and self-confidence and crippled its willingness to play its necessary role in the world at a critical time in history. Like revisionism in past wars, the Vietnam version did not exert great influence on policy or have much staying power. It did play a role in the way the 1991 Persian Gulf War was fought. By applying massive force instead of escalating gradually and by tightly censoring the media, President George H.W. Bush sought to assure that his war would not be another Vietnam. In general, however, Americans were not persuaded by revisionist arguments. They opposed military intervention in Central America during the 1980s and the Balkans in the 1990s. The so-called Vietnam Syndrome thus persisted, despite revisionist efforts to expunge it.13 Nor did revisionism take hold as scholarship. The enthusiasm for the North Vietnamese and NLF manifested in some early dove writing was modified with a more dispassionate and critical view. But orthodox scholars continued to reject revisionist efforts to ennoble the war. Major scholarly works dealing with the air war, ground operations, and pacification programs raised even more fundamental questions about whether the war could have been won. Studies of the antiwar movement concluded that it influenced key policy decisions during the Johnson and Nixon years, but rejected the notion that it was instrumental in America’s failure. Careful analyses of media coverage conceded major flaws in war reporting but denied that the media played a decisive role in the outcome. What was really important in changing American attitudes toward the war was the rising cost in blood and treasure and by 1968 a growing conviction that no progress was being made in Vietnam.14 In the vastly altered political climate of post 9/11 America, Vietnam revisionism enjoyed something of a revival. The most controversial statement came from historian Mark Moyar, whose 2006 book Triumph Forsaken directly challenged orthodox interpretations of Vietnam. Moyar insisted that the much-maligned domino theory had been valid and that U.S. intervention had been essential in containing Chinese/North Vietnamese expansion. He also claimed that the United States had a moral obligation to defend democracy. He praised South Vietnamese 237

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President Ngo Dinh Diem as a strong nationalist leader, and, most provocatively, argued that the Saigon government was winning the war in 1962–1963. The Kennedy administration erred grievously by overthrowing Diem in late 1963. President Johnson further squandered victory by pursuing the war with half measures. Moyar’s book was lavishly praised in conservative organs such as the Wall Street Journal and National Review. Orthodox scholars, with few exceptions, criticized his use of sources and rejected his conclusions.15 Vietnam revisionism also undergirded a growing interest in counterinsurgency among U.S. military theorists after a potent insurgency developed against the American occupation of Iraq during the summer of 2003. Army officer John Nagl anticipated this phenomenon with his 2002 book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Nagl favorably contrasted British counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya in the 1950s–1960s with U.S. failure to deal effectively with NLF guerrillas in Vietnam.16 Retired army officer Lewis Sorley went further, claiming in A Better War that General Creighton Abrams after 1969 had developed a successful strategy combining pacification programs with conventional operations. The United States was in fact winning the war in 1972–1973, Sorley concluded, when Congress foolishly cut aid to South Vietnam, ensuring its demise.17 By suggesting that the United States could and indeed had fought insurgents successfully, Nagl and Sorley provided the intellectual foundation for a new counterinsurgency strategy that was applied in Iraq after 2006 and later in Afghanistan. While the orthodox–revisionist debate continued, Vietnam War scholarship matured and went in new directions. A new generation of scholars used new sources to address old questions, develop new approaches, and offer fresh insights. Most important, they began to shift away from the Cold War as the principal frame of reference and find other motives for actions taken by the various participants. Some saw the conflict in Vietnam as a struggle among competing internal groups and foreign nations to determine how Vietnam should be modernized. The new writing began to lay out “new trajectories” for Vietnam War scholarship.18 Scholars began to develop more nuanced interpretations of U.S. decisions for war. Most orthodox historians had agreed—with varying emphasis—that Cold War exigencies drove U.S. decisions. Indeed, in the eyes of some writers, the Cold War consensus was so powerful that decision makers had little choice but to escalate in Vietnam. Recent works challenged this interpretation. While conceding the importance of the Cold War, they found unique influences in individual decisions: external pressures from Britain and France in the early, critical decisions on Vietnam during Harry Truman’s presidency; religious and cultural factors in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to back Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955; and institutional and bureaucratic factors in Johnson’s 1964–1965 decisions for war.19 Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War further challenged the Cold War consensus argument by affirming that Johnson in 1964–1965 had considerable leeway in Vietnam decision making. Important blocs from both political parties opposed escalation, he claims, as did Britain and France (who, ironically, had pushed the U.S. toward involvement in the late 1940s). The press and public opinion were also divided on escalation; some segments were sharply opposed. Logevall thus concludes that Johnson would have had strong support had he decided to seek a way out of Vietnam. Instead he chose to escalate, largely for reasons of domestic politics and his own credibility.20 Impressively researched new monographs have helped to fill out areas previously understudied. This is especially true of domestic and Congressional politics, until recently a relative wasteland in Vietnam War historiography.21 The Nixon era has been largely under-sourced. As a result of years of litigation and massive declassification, the Nixon tapes and other important documents, as well as National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger’s memoranda of conversations, now provide ample material for a full reassessment. The process is just beginning, and the initial results do not appear favorable to Nixon and Kissinger.22 238

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One of the most important recent trends in the historiography of the Vietnam War has been its internationalization. Access to Soviet and Chinese archives has yielded detailed and perceptive analyses of the interaction of these major Communist nations with each other, the United States, and North Vietnam. These studies give some credence to the notion of a Communist monolith. China and the Soviet Union did assist their Vietnamese ally out of a sense of comradely obligation. Their aid to North Vietnam was greater than previously recognized and was crucial to Hanoi’s ability to resist U.S. power. But the new studies also demonstrate the complexity of the relations of the Communist powers with each other and the United States. Caught up in a fierce ideological and power struggle with China, the Soviets felt compelled to help North Vietnam but sought to do so without jeopardizing a budding detente with the United States. Vividly remembering how their allies betrayed them at Geneva in 1954, North Vietnam sought maximum aid without sacrificing its freedom of action. The interaction of the three Communist nations thus provides a classic case study in traditional great power politics and the ability of weaker nations to exploit rivalries among stronger allies.23 The most important recent development in Vietnam War scholarship is its growing Vietnamization (to borrow a word from the war itself ). The first generation of scholarship, Robert McMahon has aptly observed, was “overwhelmingly produced by Americans asking American centered questions and seeking answers in documents produced by Americans.”24 Scholars trained in the Vietnamese language and history are now producing careful studies of the Vietnamese side of the war based on Vietnamese documents. In this new history, Americans are on the fringes. Vietnamese who were invisible in the early American writing now take center stage. They are independent actors whose deeds have major consequences for themselves and others involved in the war. The new history analyzes the experiences of Vietnamese individuals and groups and the way Vietnamese society was affected by the war. Sometimes, it speaks to issues that have been central to the ongoing debate. But it also goes in other directions and raises new questions.25 Mark Bradley’s Vietnam-centered overview, Vietnam at War, is one of the first products of this historiographical trend. Bradley acknowledges the important role played by outside nations. But he sees the war as fundamentally a struggle among different groups of Vietnamese to determine the shape of their country’s post-colonial society. He skillfully explicates the differences among southern Vietnamese and between North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. He deals with high policy, but he also focuses on how Vietnamese of all types and from all regions responded to and were shaped by the war.26 Scholars are also beginning to provide a fuller, more sophisticated view of South Vietnam, for years one of the most neglected areas in the study of the war. Robert Brigham skillfully uses interviews with South Vietnamese soldiers to correct the often stereotypical, American-crafted image of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) as an army that would not fight.27 David Elliott and David Hunt have exploited a huge cache of captured NLF documents to study the origins, evolution, and outcome of the war in the important Mekong Delta province of My Tho.28 One of the most interesting products of Vietnam-centered scholarship has involved South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, often the whipping boy of U.S. historians. Frequently viewed as a reclusive, backward-looking leader who lacked the vision and political skills to rally his people, Diem is now portrayed as a stubbornly independent individual and skillful politician who refused to bend either to the Communist-led Viet Minh or to Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai. The new scholarship minimizes the U.S. role in Diem’s 1954 ascent to power, instead crediting the tireless plotting of him and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Diem also conceived his 239

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own plan for the modernization of South Vietnam that often clashed with U.S. ideas. He firmly resisted Americanization of the war. His independence sparked a growing conflict with the United States that eventually led to his demise.29 Scholarly analysis of North Vietnam obviously remains much more difficult. The government maintains tight control of its documents. It has jealously guarded its own carefully-crafted history of the war depicting a heroic struggle by the Communist Party and Vietnamese people against rapacious outside imperialists. The first critiques of this official version came from novelists and film makers who showed the horrible impact of the war on individuals and the way party members and government officials sometimes profited from the misery of others.30 Even with the limited sources available, scholars are also now beginning to develop a fuller picture of North Vietnamese decision making, uncovering bitter struggles among top officials over key policy decisions.31 The new Vietnam-centered scholarship has important implications for ongoing debates on the war. Analysis of Vietnamese Communists suggests that some were internationalists as well as nationalists. They were eager to participate in the Cold War as well as fight for Vietnamese independence.32 Orthodox scholars may thus be compelled to re-examine long-standing assumptions about the origins of the war. On the other hand, those writers who have rehabilitated Diem flatly reject Moyar’s claim that South Vietnam was winning the war in 1962–1963. Hunt and especially Elliott’s microscopic examination of the war in My Tho makes abundantly clear the necessity of understanding the war at the local level. Along with earlier province and village studies, they raise major doubts about Sorley’s facile argument that the war was won in 1972–1973 before Congress pulled the plug on South Vietnam. More than three decades after the end of the war, a synthesis seems as elusive as ever. Americans remain deeply and emotionally divided on the war. The ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and the continued threat of terrorism keep alive questions about the need for U.S. involvement in wars of insurgency and how they should be fought. Recent Vietnam scholarship has added a wealth of new information, ideas, and approaches that in time may be part of a new synthesis. On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Johnson’s 1965 decisions to Americanize the war, the scholarship is broadening and deepening and moving in exciting directions, but the Vietnam conflict remains hotly contested historiographical ground.

Notes 1 Warren F. Kimball, “The Cold War Warmed Over,” American Historical Review 79 (October 1974): 1119. 2 Robert J. McMahon, “U.S. Vietnamese Relations: An Historiographical Survey,” in Warren I. Cohen, ed., Pacific Passages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 108–116, and Gary R. Hess, “The Unending War: Historians and the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 18 (Spring 1994): 239–264, and Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009). 3 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972) and Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic, Little Brown, 1972). 4 George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: John Wiley, 1979) and George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How the United States Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1986). 5 William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGrawHill, 1995). 6 Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 7 Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 8 Gen. William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976) and Richard M. Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985).

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9 Speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, August 18, 1980, available at www.reagan.utexas.edu/ archives/reference/8.18.80.html, accessed September 13, 2012. 10 George Will, “No More ‘No More Vietnams,’ ” Newsweek, March 19, 1979, 104. 11 Harry G. Summers, On Strategy (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982). 12 Robert Elegant, “How to Lose a War,” Encounter 57 (August 1981): 73–90. 13 Marvin and Deborah Kalb, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2011). 14 For the air war, see Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power (New York: Free Press, 1991); for ground operations and pacification, see Gregory A. Daddis, No Sure Victory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). The best analysis of the impact of the antiwar movement is Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military in War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998) persuasively refutes the revisionist argument on media impact. 15 Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and “A Roundtable on Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken,” Passport 38 (December 2007): 5–22. 16 John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 17 Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harvest, 2000). 18 Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn Young, eds., Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. 19 Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Seth Jacobs, “ ‘Our System Demands the Supreme Being’: The U.S. Religious Revival and the ‘Diem Experiment,’ 1954–1955,” Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001): 589–624; Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 20 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). 21 Andrew L. Johns, Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), Joseph A. Fry, Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and Their Senate Hearings (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 22 Stephen P. Randolph, Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 23 Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Ang Cheng Guan, Vietnamese Communist Relations with China and the Second Indochina Conflict, 1956–1962 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996) and Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 24 McMahon, “U.S. Vietnamese Relations,” 314. 25 Edward Miller and Tuong Vu, “The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War: Agency and Society in the Study of the Second Indochina War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 1–16. 26 Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 27 Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 28 David W.P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2006) and David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 29 Edward Miller, “Vision, Power, and Agency: The Ascent of Ngo Dinh Diem,” in Bradley and Young, Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars, 135–170, and Philip E. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 30 Bradley, Vietnam at War, 183–191. 31 See, for example, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, “The War Politburo: Ha Noi’s Diplomatic and Political Road to the Tet Offensive,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 (January/February 2006): 4–55, and Sophie Quinn-Judge, “The Ideological Debate in the DRV and the Significance of the Anti-Party Affair, 1967–1968,” Journal of Cold War History 5 (November/December 2005): 479–500. 32 Miller and Tuong, “Vietnamese War,” 3.

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27 THE MYTH OF AN AMERICAN ATTRITION STRATEGY IN THE VIETNAM WAR Gregory A. Daddis

Introduction If there is one word most associated with American strategy in Vietnam, surely it must be attrition. Critics of the war maintain that as the U.S. Army prosecuted its ground campaign in South Vietnam in the 1960s it employed a flawed strategy of attrition, concentrating, at the expense of all other missions, on killing enemy soldiers. Such narratives argue that General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV), focused on the “traditional attack mission of the infantry—to find, fight and destroy enemy forces.”1 Hypnotized by the prospects of high body counts, officers like Westmoreland failed because they “never realized that insurgency warfare required basic changes in Army methods to meet the exigencies of this ‘new’ conflict environment.”2 Thus, instead of correctly employing a counterinsurgency strategy, MACV’s commander opted for attrition and, in the process, squandered his chances for victory. This impression of American strategy under Westmoreland remains deeply entrenched, in large part because it easily explains U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Detractors of Westmoreland’s approach often argue that “if only” he had employed a better strategy, focusing on countering the southern insurgency rather than on the conventional threat from North Vietnam, Americans could have achieved victory. Lewis Sorley, for instance, contends that Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Abrams, immediately moved away from an attrition strategy upon taking command of MACV in mid-1968. Synchronizing conventional operations with an increased emphasis on securing and pacifying the countryside, Abrams’s “one war” concept, according to Sorley, manifested such an enlightened approach to strategy that the Americans actually had achieved victory in South Vietnam by 1970. A better commander, fighting a “better war,” had triumphed.3 In confronting this conventional narrative of American strategy in Vietnam, this chapter contends that William Westmoreland did not countenance an exclusive policy of attrition focused on killing enemy combatants. In fact, the word “attrition” seems as misunderstood by contemporary critics as by current historians. MACV’s commander used the word more to express his belief that victory in Vietnam could not be achieved quickly, rather than to describe a narrow commitment to battle. In fact, Westmoreland’s own “one war” approach was a realistic military strategy that both recognized the complex nature of the threat and effectively 242

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employed U.S. forces to combat a sophisticated enemy in an unconventional environment. Neither counterinsurgency alone nor a singular focus on combat operations could have positioned American forces in reach of victory, a point well understood by the MACV commander. That the United States failed in Vietnam had less to do with commanders choosing an incorrect strategy than it did with the inability to resolve intractable problems within South Vietnam’s government and society.

Westmoreland and the American Approach to War A basic pillar of the conventional narrative on American strategy in Vietnam rests on the contention that U.S. Army officers disregarded counterinsurgency in the early 1960s. Despite the Kennedy administration’s emphasis on political and social reform as key elements in countering insurgencies, a culturally constrained army remained wedded to viewing unconventional warfare through a very conventional lens. As one former American advisor in Vietnam remembered, “many professional officers did not even recognize the term ‘counter-insurgency,’ much less were they prepared to practice it.”4 While such recollections are enticing in that they ostensibly help explain American defeat in Vietnam, they do not acknowledge contemporary writings which defined the insurgent threat in the larger context of Vietnamese society. Nor do they consider Westmoreland’s own views on “the importance of the people deciding which side they wanted to support.” Even in the aftermath of the late-1965 battle of Ia Drang, during which American forces first combated North Vietnamese regulars, MACV’s commander opined that the “most significant development” of the war would be the Vietnamese population supporting the Saigon government.5 In fact, Westmoreland’s intellectual approach to the political–military problem of South Vietnam was shared by many in the U.S. Army’s officer corps. Though grounded in experiences from World War II and the Korean War, Westmoreland, much like the army from which he came, openly accepted the idea that opposing revolutionary wars of national liberation in the late 1950s and early 1960s required a more nuanced approach. As West Point’s superintendent from 1960–1963, Westmoreland instituted mandatory counterinsurgency training for all cadets. The Military Academy’s Counterinsurgency Committee found that the “interdisciplinary nature” of the subject required cadets to study the “political, military, economic, psychological and sociological aspects” of unconventional conflict.6 Cadets studied Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap while exploring revolutionary struggles in the Philippines, Malaya, and Indochina. Westmoreland himself visited Malaya prior to arriving in Vietnam in an effort, he recalled, to “learn from an earlier pacification experience.”7 The intellectual curiosity displayed by West Point faculty and cadets about insurgencies was mirrored in the army’s officer corps at large. Articles in professional journals such as Military Review suggested that many in uniform seriously engaged in thinking about unconventional warfare. Even before President Lyndon B. Johnson committed ground combat troops to South Vietnam, U.S. Army officers reflected on the use of military power in countering insurgencies and how that power, “of necessity,” had to be “tied to the political fortunes of indigenous leadership.” Others, expanding the traditional definitions of battle, argued that “civic action is a form of combat as surely as fire and maneuver.”8 One army major went further. “By contributing to the social and economic development of the people,” he argued, “a nation’s armed forces not only help to strengthen the country, but also create closer ties between civilians and the military, and thus between the people and the government.”9 Surely this was not an organization unfamiliar with the word “counterinsurgency.” If some officers were resistant to changes which departed from conventional operations—and certainly, some were—others realized, as 243

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early as 1955, that “military operations alone are not sufficient for success as there are really two objectives: the destruction of the guerrilla force and the elimination of the Communist influence on the civil population.”10 Upon assumption of command in Vietnam, Westmoreland’s mission from the U.S. Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) followed this broader interpretation of revolutionary warfare’s political–military problems. Certainly the objective of a “stable and independent noncommunist government” in South Vietnam was a daunting one.11 Westmoreland, however, developed an all-encompassing concept of operations that sought not only to destroy enemy forces but to expand the percentage of South Vietnam’s population under the Saigon government’s control. As he directed his commanders in September 1965: The war in Vietnam is a political as well as a military war. It is political because the ultimate goal is to regain the loyalty and cooperation of the people, and to create conditions which permit the people to go about their normal lives in peace and security.12 American forces might struggle in the years that followed to implement such an expansive—and too often ill-understood—strategic concept, but Westmoreland seems to have understood the importance of relating military power to political purpose. American officers, Westmoreland included, certainly believed killing the enemy to be an important aspect of fighting in South Vietnam. Cultural preferences for conventional operations did influence the army’s conceptions of fighting. Westmoreland did eschew an “enclave” concept of committing U.S. troops to securing population centers because he thought it too defensive in nature. The army’s doctrine did speak of wresting the initiative away from the insurgency and avoiding “purely defensive measures [which] only allow the guerrilla force to grow strong.”13 Still, neither Westmoreland nor the American forces he led were blind to the realities of unconventional warfare. The claim that “several years were to pass before the American command began to accept the crucial role of population security” simply does not hold up when one scrutinizes the documentary evidence.14 As MACV’s commander formulated his strategic concept in the spring and summer of 1965, he appreciated fully the complexity of the threat to the South Vietnamese government and population. That threat, rather than an inane commitment to attrition warfare, goes far in explaining American strategy inside South Vietnam.

Termites and Bullyboys Most American estimates of the early-1965 situation inside South Vietnam painted a grim picture. Political instability wracked Saigon. National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgents posed both a political and a military threat in the countryside and increasingly showed a willingness to confront South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) units in battle. Political subversion, assassination of government officials, and attacks on infrastructure continued at alarming rates. Equally grave, American intelligence analysts picked up indications of regular army units from North Vietnam infiltrating into the south.15 Westmoreland, believing the American advisory effort had done all it could to support the teetering Saigon government, recommended the introduction of ground combat troops. On June 26, 1965, Washington officials gave the general permission “to commit U.S. ground forces anywhere in the country when, in his judgment, they were needed to strengthen South Vietnamese forces.” The number of American forces rose precipitously. At the opening of 1965, 23,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam. One year later, the number soared to 184,000 troops.16 244

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The troop escalation mirrored growing concerns of Westmoreland and his staff. Their analysis of the operational environment, and the nature of the threat, led them to believe the enemy was doing all it could “to destroy the [South Vietnamese] government’s troops and eliminate all vestiges of government control.”17 In fact, this assessment struck close to the mark. Responding to U.S. intervention, planners in Hanoi became convinced, albeit not without disagreement, that only by escalating the struggle inside South Vietnam could they eventually defeat the “American aggressors.” In March 1965, Hanoi’s Party Central Committee decided to “mobilize the soldiers and civilians of the entire nation to strengthen our offensive posture and to attack the enemy.” It is important to note, however, that this strategic offensive encompassed more than just military escalation. Communist leaders in South Vietnam spent considerable energy on “a wide-ranging political campaign throughout the armed forces and the civilian population” to minimize the impacts of U.S. intervention.18 This combined political-military campaign aimed at orchestrating the efforts of regular and insurgent forces, as well as coordinating the activities of political cadres and military units. The point was not lost on MACV’s commander. While Westmoreland and Washington officials debated whether the enemy was moving into the third and largely conventional final stage of Maoist revolutionary warfare, the general still appreciated the multi-faceted characteristics of the developing war. A June 1965 cable outlining his operational concept noted that the “insurgency in South Vietnam must eventually be defeated among the people in the hamlets and towns.”19 The population thus had to be secured from both insurgents and regular military formations. Westmoreland likened the political subversives to “termites” unrelentingly eating away at the foundation of the Saigon government. Concomitantly, main force units, or “bully boys,” waited for the opportune moment to strike at the weakened structure with crowbars. As Westmoreland recalled, if the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were to be successful, “neither facet could be ignored.”20 Westmoreland’s analogy of termites and bully boys might easily be dismissed as simplistic, but evidence supports the argument that MACV’s commander realized that attrition of enemy main force units could not be achieved at the expense of pacification or counterinsurgency. The opposite also held true. Westmoreland could not simply operate against insurgents while ignoring the conventional threat. All the while, the Americans needed to aid their South Vietnamese allies in pacifying the countryside and providing security to the rural population. Certainly, Westmoreland used the word “attrition” in his memoirs and in correspondence with senior and subordinate commanders. Such communications, however, suggest the general was focused less on killing the enemy and more on intimating to those directing the war effort that the conflict in Vietnam would not be concluded in a swift manner. Attrition underlined the problem of fighting a protracted war. As Westmoreland wrote to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 1965: the premise behind whatever further actions we may undertake ... must be that we are in for the long pull. This struggle has become a war of attrition. ... I see no likelihood of achieving a quick, favorable end to the war.21 Westmoreland’s sobering appraisal, so early in the war, seems to reveal a commander less worried about destroying enemy forces and more concerned about the staying power of his own armed forces and nation. Surely he appreciated the complexity of his task. As his chief intelligence officer recalled, “Westmoreland had not one battle but three to fight: first, to contain a growing conventional threat; second to develop the Republic of Vietnam’s Armed Forces (RVNAF ); and third, to pacify and protect the peasants in the South Vietnamese countryside.”22 Both the threat and the mission required a broad concept of the operations, one that a simple 245

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word like attrition could not fully characterize. In fact, the complexity of fighting in South Vietnam caused immense problems with strategic articulation. The military lexicon of the day was unsuited to the myriad tasks required of Westmoreland’s command. Lacking precise terminology to describe the three battles MACV simultaneously fought, any broad strategic concept came with the risk of ambiguity. In fact, a postwar survey concluded that 70 percent of army generals managing the war were “uncertain of its objectives.”23 If attrition of enemy forces had been the guiding light of American strategy in Vietnam, one might expect more certainty among the army’s senior leaders. Westmoreland’s panoptic strategy, however, left many American field commanders in doubt about the United States’ main purpose in South Vietnam.

Creating an Integrated Strategy In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) shared this incertitude with commanders in the field. Throughout 1964 and 1965, President Johnson’s key military advisors grappled with the difficulties of formalizing a concept for the future conduct of the war. Expressing concern over a “lack of definition” of U.S. objectives, the Joint Chiefs, themselves split over Vietnam policy, failed to develop a strategic concept in 1964.24 Finally, in August 1965, the Chiefs presented Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara with a “Concept for Vietnam.” Calling for “aggressive and sustained exploitation of superior military force” by the United States, the vague document made little impression with either the president or his advisors.25 McNamara quietly took no action. “And that left Westmoreland in Vietnam,” according to one senior American officer, “to invent his own strategic concept, which he did.”26 This concept grew out of Westmoreland’s fears in early 1965 that South Vietnam stood on the precipice of disaster. Political instability continued to cripple the Saigon government, while officials in Washington came to the growing realization that the American bombing campaign of North Vietnam—Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in March—was failing to weaken Hanoi’s will. In early June, Westmoreland cabled the Pentagon with an urgent appeal “to reinforce our efforts in SVN with additional U.S. or third country forces as rapidly as practical during the critical weeks ahead.” As he bleakly reported on the enemy threat, “The South Vietnamese armed forces cannot stand up to this pressure without substantial U.S. combat support on the ground.”27 Westmoreland’s ensuing request for more than 40,000 additional combat troops dismayed the secretary of defense but apparently left the president and his aides little alternative if the administration remained committed to its goal of a stable, non-communist South Vietnam. In fact, stabilization formed the bedrock of Westmoreland’s “three-phase sustained campaign” plan. Phase I visualized the commitment of U.S. and allied forces “necessary to halt the losing trend by 1965.” Tasks included securing major military bases, defending major political and population centers, and preserving and strengthening the RVNAF. In Phase II, Westmoreland sought to resume the offensive to “destroy enemy forces” and reinstitute “rural construction activities.” In this phase, aimed to begin in 1966, American forces would “participate in clearing, securing, reserve reaction and offensive operations as required to support and sustain the resumption of pacification.” Finally, in Phase III, MACV would oversee the “defeat and destruction of the remaining enemy forces and base areas.” It is important to note that Westmoreland’s official report on the war included the term “sustained campaign.”28 The general had no illusions that U.S. forces were engaged in a war aimed at the rapid destruction of the enemy. Attrition suggested that a stable South Vietnam, capable of resisting the military and political pressures of both internal and external aggressors, would not arise in a matter of months or even a few years. 246

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Nor should Westmoreland’s use of the word attrition validate assertions that the American campaign strategy in Vietnam was singularly focused. In fact, it seems plausible to argue that MACV’s commander formulated a “one war” approach without using the label later popularized by his successor. Abrams understood the political-military interrelationships of war in Vietnam, but so too did Westmoreland. “Probably the fundamental issue is the question of the coordination of mission activities in Saigon,” the general opined in early 1966. It is abundantly clear that all political, military, economic, and security (police) programs must be completely integrated in order to attain any kind of success in a country which has been greatly weakened by prolonged conflict and is under increasing pressure by large military and subversive forces.29 Contrary to the popular narrative of an officer consumed by enemy body counts, Westmoreland thoughtfully considered the issues of land reform, improving the South Vietnamese armed forces, limiting civilian casualties, and facilitating population security in the countryside.30 Arguably, what Westmoreland lacked, as did the entire U.S. Army, was a way to articulate broad military concepts for such a complex environment like South Vietnam. An impoverished strategic language left uniformed officers and their civilian leadership unable to communicate their intentions and the means to achieve their objectives. Westmoreland’s strategy was more nuanced and sophisticated than the language available to describe that strategy. Words like attrition, while useful for critics, remain unsatisfying in expressing the complexity of the tasks facing Americans and their South Vietnamese allies in the 1960s. Westmoreland’s “three-phase sustained campaign,” with its multitude of subordinate political and military tasks, defied easy explication. No less easy was finding a way to implement such an all-encompassing strategy.

The Problems of Implementation In mid-November 1965, American forces from the 1st Cavalry Division, operating in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands, fought North Vietnamese regulars for the first time since President Johnson’s approval of a U.S. troop increase. While the Americans performed well in this first full-fledged battle, few contemporary observers placed much emphasis on the fact that B-52 strategic bombers were needed to keep the enemy at bay. Instead, the Ia Drang campaign captured popular imagination and cemented some officers’ predilections that conventional force applied in the manner of World War II or Korea could produce victory. Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry alone had killed an “estimated” 1,849 enemy soldiers in only a few days of fighting. As one former officer recalled, “MACV hoped that enough military victories of this nature would cause North Vietnam to desist in its war against the South.”31 In fact, success in the Ia Drang Valley not only masked crucial defects in the American approach to war but also the assumptions on which Westmoreland based his strategic concept. Throughout the war, American commanders found it nearly impossible to translate military success into political progress. As one advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) noted, “we never articulated our massive power and abundant resources into conjunction with Vietnamese politics.”32 Westmoreland rightly argued that he ignored the bully boys at his peril but the destruction of North Vietnamese units failed to impair the southern insurgency’s political infrastructure. Worse, military operations often caused depopulation in the countryside, contradicting American goals of developing a sense of political stability among the people. Despite the Americans’ military operations, pacification efforts, and training of the RVNAF, enemy recruitment in the south and 247

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reinforcement from the north continued nearly unabated. Thus, tactical successes oftentimes achieved only temporary results. MACV’s assumption that the enemy “would fight until convinced that military victory was impossible” never bore out.33 These failures in implementing Westmoreland’s strategy hardly resulted from a close-minded conventional approach to the war in Vietnam. Large-scale operations like Cedar Falls and Junction City in 1967 certainly left a wake of destruction in their paths for little political gain. Yet killing enemy forces never served as an end unto itself. Westmoreland always looked to follow combat operations with pacification programs. His official report on the war held that “the pacification effort and the main force war were essentially inseparable—opposite sides of the same coin. . . .”34 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy encapsulated such views to President Johnson in September 1965. Two months before the Ia Drang battles, Bundy summarized Westmoreland’s concept as halting the enemy offensive by destroying southern insurgent units and pacifying “selected high priority areas.” After progressively restoring the country to governmental control, MACV would “support ‘rural reconstruction’ with comprehensive attention to the pacification process.”35 If Westmoreland had been singularly committed to attriting enemy forces, he had duped his civilian leadership. The MACV commander also would have been out of step with counterinsurgency theory, which began with the assumption that security preceded all other military and political operations. Army doctrine advised commanders to establish security measures immediately after performing an intelligence analysis of a unit’s operational area. Only then could commanders establish population control and isolate the guerrilla from its civilian support base. In short, only in a secure environment could pacification flourish.36 Westmoreland’s June 1965 “Concept of Operations” dutifully followed army doctrinal prescriptions. The general noted that to defeat the insurgency, the people “must be provided security of two kinds.” First, MACV needed to secure the country from large, well-equipped units, “including those which may come from outside their country.” Second, the population required security “from the guerrilla, the assassin, the terrorist and the informer.”37 Ultimately, Westmoreland would concentrate American efforts on the former security problem, leaving the more local, insurgent threat to South Vietnamese forces, which he believed were better suited by language and culture to operate among the civilian population. This division of labor hinted at deeper issues with American strategy in Vietnam. Westmoreland might direct his allies to work closely with the population and secure them from the insurgent threat but neither he nor his successor could resolve implacable problems in the South Vietnamese government or armed forces. Political instability in Saigon, desertions and corruption in the armed forces, and an army unsympathetic to the country’s peasantry frustrated American officers and civilian leaders throughout the war. Westmoreland realized early on the tactical weaknesses of his allies which “run the entire gamut” and the problems associated with an ARVN officer corps “absorbed in political activity.”38 American military effectiveness, however, could not impose political constancy in Saigon or force either the South Vietnamese armed forces or the population to view the central government as a legitimate political entity which could better combat the insurgent threat.39 In short, not all problems inside South Vietnam could be solved by American military might.

The Mythology of a Failed Strategy The Tet offensive, which swept across South Vietnam in late January 1968, epitomized for many Americans the unfulfilled expectations of a nation at war for more than two years. In the wake of an attack by some 84,000 insurgent and North Vietnamese troops, Westmoreland 248

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soberly reported that the enemy had dealt the Saigon government a “severe blow.” The coming weeks, however, appeared to offer a rare opportunity to pursue the enemy, drive him from the population centers, and give “breathing room to the process of pacification.”40 Yet questions arising over America’s ability to confront and contain communism in Southeast Asia seemed to override Westmoreland’s instincts for aggressively pursuing the enemy. In mid-February, CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite toured the war-torn country and gathered reports from senior MACV officials. His evening telecast on February 27 detailed how the enemy had mounted its offensive with “complete surprise.” Cronkite concluded his report with a personal analysis that the war was “mired in stalemate.”41 These failed expectations led swiftly to the conviction that Westmoreland had presided over a flawed strategy inside South Vietnam. His focus on attrition had blinded him to the true nature of the war. As Sir Robert Thompson, a veteran of the Malayan conflict, concluded in 1969, the “war has always remained basically an insurgency, boosted by infiltration and aided, to a certain but limited extent, by both invasion and raids. It has not been an invasion aided by an insurgency.”42 Thus, if only Westmoreland had developed and implemented a better strategy focusing more on counterinsurgency techniques and less on attriting enemy forces, the Americans would have been better placed to achieve victory. If only Westmoreland had fought a “better war,” like Creighton Abrams, the United States would not have lost in Vietnam. Such “if only” arguments proliferated after the war—if only the military had been allowed to widen the scope of the war; if only public support had remained strong; if only resolute civilian leaders had been willing to see the war through. Yet among many critics, the notion of a failed strategy remained at the heart of arguments on why the United States lost in Vietnam. Unfortunately, these simplistic and mistaken concepts have dominated most narratives on the Vietnam War. One historian even has described Westmoreland’s “strategic equation” as “mobility + firepower = attrition.”43 The MACV commander, however, never relied on an “attrition strategy” in Vietnam, just as he never employed a “counterinsurgency strategy.” Given the complexities of the conflict waged in South Vietnam, summarizing Westmoreland’s campaign strategy in one word seems fraught with imprecision at best, prevarication at worst. That the United States failed in Vietnam does not prove necessarily that Westmoreland developed a flawed strategy of attrition. His campaign plans, and the overarching military strategy on which they were based, represented an inclusive set of concepts for combating and defeating an enemy which relied on a wide array of political and military instruments of power. As Westmoreland maintained from the start, “The war in Vietnam is a political as well as a military war.”44 Attrition of the enemy certainly ranked as an important element of that war, but never did Westmoreland see it as the sole purpose of his mission. Strategy meant more than a singular commitment of military force, especially if the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were to be successful over the “long pull.” MACV’s inability to remedy ingrained problems, if not inconsistencies, within South Vietnam society demonstrated more the limits of American military power abroad than the defects of William Westmoreland’s strategic concept. In the end, finding the “right” strategy may not have been the key to victory in Vietnam.

Notes 1 Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 46. 2 Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 259. 3 Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), 1, 17–18, 217.

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4 Dave Richard Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.–Vietnam in Perspective (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), 24. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and his Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 460–463. 5 Westmoreland’s History Notes, December 31, 1965, in Robert E. Lester, ed., The War in Vietnam: The Papers of William C. Westmoreland (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1993), text-fiche, Reel 6, Folder 3, 27 December 27, 1965–January 1, 1966. Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 234. 6 Michael S. Davison, “Report of Counterinsurgency Committee,” June 19, 1963, Training Operations Files, West Point Special Collections, Jefferson Library, United States Military Academy, New York. Samuel Zaffiri, Westmoreland: A Biography of General William C. Westmoreland (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 96. 7 William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 82. Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–1976 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2006), 261. 8 William F. Long, “Counterinsurgency: Some Antecedents for Success,” Military Review XLIII, no. 10 (October 1963): 96. Harry F. Walterhouse, “Civic Action: A Counter and Cure for Insurgency,” Military Review XLII, no. 8 (August 1962): 52. 9 Robert L. Burke, “Military Civic Action,” Military Review XLIV, no. 10 (October 1964): 71. 10 Samuel Williams, December 28, 1955, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985), 608. (Hereafter cited as FRUS.) 11 The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking in Vietnam, ed. Senator Gravel, 5 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971–1972), IV: 300. 12 In Michael H. Hunt, A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 89. MACV Concept of Operations in the Republic of Vietnam, August 30, 1965, Historian’s Files, U.S. Strategy, Vietnam, 1965–1975, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort MacNair, Washington, DC, 10–14. (Hereafter cited as CMH.) 13 Department of the Army, Field Manual 31–16, Counterguerrilla Operations, February 1963, 20. W. Scott Thompson and Donaldson D. Frizzell, eds., The Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, 1977), 59–60. 14 Lewy, America in Vietnam, 52. 15 Westmoreland, June 7, 1965, FRUS, January–June 1965, II: 733–734. Graham A. Cosmas, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Escalation, 1962–1967 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2006), 203. 16 Herbert Y Schandler, The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 27. 17 Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 175. 18 Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975, trans. Merle L. Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 154. 19 Westmoreland, “Concept of Operations—Force Requirements and Deployments, South Vietnam,” June 14, 1965, Folder 04, Box 02, Larry Berman Collection, The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. (Hereafter cited as TTUVA.) Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War, The History: 1946–1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988), 320–321. 20 Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 175. 21 Westmoreland to Wheeler, June 24, 1965, Historian’s Files, U.S. Strategy, Vietnam, 1965–1975, CMH. A Soldier Reports, 185. 22 Davidson, Vietnam at War, The History, 354. 23 Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers: American Generals Reflect on Vietnam (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977; DaCapo Press, 1991), 24–25. 24 Quoted in Buzzanco, Masters of War, 166. 25 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Concept for Vietnam,” August 27, 1965, FRUS, June–December 1965, III: 358–362. 26 Palmer in John Schlight, ed., The Second Indochina War: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at Airlie, Virginia, 7–9 November 1984 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1986), 155. 27 Westmoreland in Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), 188. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: The Viking Press, 1983), 422.

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28 U.S.G. Sharp and William C. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 100. Command History, United States Military Assistance Command, 1965, Entry MACJ03, Box 2, RG 472, NARA, College Park, Maryland, 141–143. The Pentagon Papers, IV: 296. 29 Westmoreland to Collins, cable MAC 0117, January 7, 1966, Historian’s Files, Pacification Overview/ Conclusions Folder, CMH. 30 Cosmas, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Escalation, 140. 31 Shelby L. Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965–1973 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985), 57. 32 Stephen Young in Thompson and Frizell, The Lessons of Vietnam, 225. 33 MACV 1965 Command History, 142. McNamara, In Retrospect, 210. George McTurnan Kahin and John Wilson Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, rev. ed. (New York: The Dial Press, 1967, 1969), 329–332. 34 Sharp and Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, 132. Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 186. 35 McGeorge Bundy, Memorandum for the President, September 23, 1965, Folder 04, Box 03, Larry Berman Collection, TTUVA. 36 Field Manual 31–16, 30–31. 37 The Pentagon Papers, IV: 606. 38 Westmoreland in Buzzanco, Masters of War, 179. 39 Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), xi. 40 Westmoreland to Wheeler, February 4, 1968, in William Thomas Allison, The Tet Offensive: A Brief History with Documents (New York, London: Routledge, 2008), 159. COMUSMACV to American Embassy, France, May 6, 1968, Historian’s Files, U.S. Strategy, Vietnam, 1965–1975, CMH. 41 Cronkite in Allison, The Tet Offensive, 210. 42 Robert Thompson, No Exit from Vietnam (New York: David McKay, 1969), 45. 43 William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986, 2009), 99. 44 Westmoreland directive, September 17, 1965, in John M. Carland, “Winning the Vietnam War: Westmoreland’s Approach in Two Documents,” The Journal of Military History 68, no. 2 (April 2004): 558.

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28 “SHAKY AS ALL HELL” The U.S. and Nation Building in Southern Vietnam James M. Carter

In 1966, U.S. Marine General Victor Krulak wrote that, “despite all our public assertions to the contrary, the South Vietnamese are not—and have never been—a nation.” Around the same time, Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert “Blowtorch” Komer made a similar observation when he wrote, “Hell, with half a million men in Vietnam, we are spending twenty-one billion dollars a year, and we’re fighting the whole war with Vietnamese watching us; how can you talk about national sovereignty?” Many other contemporaries also recognized the great contradiction of the U.S. war in Vietnam: the United States was fighting to maintain the existence of something which had not actually existed on its own, ever.1 What is still not well understood today, even within the scholarship on the war, is that the Vietnam War resulted from a failed nation-building project begun by the United States in 1954. It was the most thorough-going project of its kind in the years following World War II. Unlike Japan or Germany, both of which had been modern, industrial states as World War II began, Vietnam existed as a piece of a larger colony. The United States approached the southern half of Vietnam (for that is all it was; it had never been a nation) with a great deal of ambition, coupled with the naïve notion that nations could simply be built from scratch. From the outset, it did not seem to matter that no one knew all that much about Vietnamese history, culture, or politics, or that there really were no examples to draw on where this sort of thing had been done in the past. American officials and nation-building “experts” were buoyed by their own narrow view of history and of America’s place in it, and by a simple and dangerous idea at the core of their actions: modernization theory for building nations out of colonialism. Beginning in 1954, the United States swept into southern Vietnam with experts and technicians of all kinds, a Spartan military and CIA presence, a commitment to “containing” communism, and lots of cash. Over the next six years, the project mushroomed, but remained fundamentally a nation-building effort. The United States had decided upon the establishment of a separate state below the 17th parallel in Vietnam that would serve as a successful example of containment and a model for nationalists looking for a way forward in a polarized and dangerous world.

Colonialism, Cold War, and the Aftermath of World War II Weakened years earlier in another world war, it seemed unlikely that the colonial system would survive a second, far more destructive war. However, despite what seemed like the dawning of 252

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a new day, the process of decolonization took decades, and occurred in fits and starts. For its part, the United States grudgingly acquiesced in the re-establishment of British and French colonies following World War II. The advent of the Cold War meant that the United States could not simply let developments run their course. Nationalist leaders could not be permitted to “go it alone” and ignore the realities of the Soviet and American rivalry because, as President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asserted, to choose a neutral course was “immoral and shortsighted.”2 The many and complex global shifts had to be controlled, and the ambitions of nationalist leaders contained, all in the name of preventing the spread of communism. As early as 1947, President Truman argued in his famous Truman Doctrine speech that a new menace consisting of “the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists” posed a grave danger to “freedom” and to “free people,” an expression he used 23 times during the speech.3 The idea of an expanding communism menacing “freedom” around the world evolved over the next several years into the so-called “domino theory,” articulated by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. This idea of tumbling dominoes was sufficiently simple and its logic obvious enough to avoid any real scrutiny of its implications for American foreign policy. The United States had chosen to take up an ambitious role and assume responsibility for political, economic, and social developments around the emerging “third world.”4 The consequences of this set of choices would perhaps manifest most clearly in Vietnam.

“Gangsters, Pirates, Extortionists,” and Southern Vietnam In 1954, Vietnam was a country coming out of decades of colonialism and war. The most recent war was fought to oust the French. Following that eight-year struggle, in which the United States paid for a substantial share of the war, the Vietnamese triumphed over the French in late spring of 1954 at Dien Bien Phu in far northwest Vietnam. The simultaneous Geneva Conference attempted to resolve the issue of what to do about Vietnam by temporarily dividing the small nation into northern and southern demilitarized zones to allow the French time to get out and the Vietnamese to prepare for national elections and unification, scheduled for 1956. It appeared the Vietnamese might at last gain their independence. However, it was not to be, as the United States imposed itself upon the affairs of a temporarily divided Vietnam in the name of halting communism’s spread—a rationale not always conforming to the realities on the ground. The United States began providing aid and guidance to certain Vietnamese gathering around the southern Vietnamese city of Saigon. Despite the Conference’s prohibition on outside interference and despite the explicitly temporary nature of the division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, the United States sought to prevent an independent Vietnam led by the popular communist leader Ho Chi Minh.5 From the outset, the problem was that the southern half of Vietnam, that is, the part of Vietnam below the temporary divide, did not constitute a separate nation. In fact, an independent South Vietnam had never existed. If the United States was to substantially increase its involvement, it would have to contend with some very troubling realities. As a French colony for decades, Vietnam possessed little-to-no modern infrastructure, and, owing to years of recent warfare, what did exist was war-torn. American intelligence officials recognized these challenges in a survey in 1954, concluding that the situation was “likely to continue to deteriorate progressively over the next year,” and that leaders in Saigon were probably going to “seek unification with the North even at the expense of Communist domination. If the scheduled national elections are held . . . the Viet Minh [Ho Chi Minh’s army] will almost certainly win.”6 The language used makes clear the advent of Cold War considerations. The Cold War made the situation in Vietnam more urgent and the case for action more compelling. At the same time, greater involvement meant nation building of the most ambitious kind. 253

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Within weeks, the United States began to act, moving in supplies, arranging personnel, contracting with academic and private sector experts, and crafting plans for further involvement in Vietnam. By July, officials had selected the Catholic, anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of the effort to create a new and separate nation below the 17th parallel and to build modern, democratic institutions around him. He was to be president of the new Vietnamese nation. Those involved had their work cut out. United States Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT) reported following a trip that the major southern city of Saigon was “seethed with intrigue and counterintrigue, with rumors and counter rumors. The political plotting goes on in army circles, government circles, foreign circles, in party headquarters, in police headquarters, and even in the demimonde of ill-disguised gangsters, pirates, and extortionists.”7 The situation was indeed dire and Mansfield’s report only raised the urgency of getting aid to the Diem experiment as rapidly as possible. As part of that aid, and in order to build a modern democracy out of the ashes of colonialism and war, the Eisenhower administration contracted with academic specialists in economics, finance, public administration, and policing from the Michigan State University. A small team, known as the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group (MSUG), departed for Vietnam immediately. The recognized leader of the team was political science professor Wesley Fishel, a close friend of Ngo Dinh Diem who was also fully committed to the Cold War foreign policy goals of the United States. His commitment to this nation-building experiment did not blind him to the realities, however. Once in Vietnam, he, like Senator Mansfield, found the situation shocking: I’ve never seen a situation like this. It defies imagination.... The government is shaky as all hell. It is being propped up for the moment only with great difficulty. Nothing can help it so much as administrative, economic, and social reforms.... The needs are enormous, the time short ...8 Events moved quickly during these weeks. The group assembling in Saigon soon requested more of everything than initial assessments suggested. The situation was bad and deteriorating rapidly, and required greater money, personnel, equipment, and training of all kinds. The police force would have to be expanded from several thousand to 45,000. A Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation (VBI) modeled on the American FBI was rapidly being built. The MSUG would have to add more than three dozen to its ranks, and the price grew by nearly $1.4 million for these add-ons. By late spring, 1955, the MSUG signed a contract between the U.S. government, the emerging regime in Saigon, and themselves, as more people and resources poured in.9 The MSUG shared nation-building duties with a small U.S. military presence nominally headed by General J. Lawton Collins, a contingent from the United States Operations Mission (USOM), the CIA, and a growing number of private contractors. This hastily cobbled together effort would soon move from a crash program in stabilization toward longer-term goals of legitimizing Ngo Dinh Diem as leader and building the physical and political infrastructure of a viable, modern, democratic state around him. This relatively small group of Americans spent the next couple of years doing just that. The specific building projects expanded, the costs soared, and a national army grew by leaps and bounds. Dozens of private American corporations worked feverishly to study various aspects of the economy, to craft a plan for the industrialization of southern Vietnam, to build a power generation plant, a national radio and TV network, a system of roads and bridges, airports, clinics, schools, and hospitals, to piece together a banking system to finance it all, and to construct 254

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a modern political infrastructure complete with a legislative assembly checking the power of a president. The U.S. government granted hundreds of private contracts to carry out this work. Many of these went to private construction firms for a variety of projects. The number and scale of those projects grew as the years passed, until the government had to call in Halliburton and Brown & Root in the early 1960s. This was a Herculean effort. Between 1954 and 1960, the United States poured $1.5 billion into nation building in southern Vietnam as it sought to bring about its total transformation into “South Vietnam,” a modern, democratic, and sovereign state. These objectives were not just implied by the effort; they were made explicit at the outset and then reinforced over and over again as officials explained and justified what was being done in faraway Southeast Asia. Only a few years into the effort, by 1958, the MSUG could report, happily, that “armed conflict has been replaced by peaceful tensions and internal struggles.”10 Clearly, for those involved, the measures of progress and success had changed as the many obstacles to nation building came into sharper view. As the American country team moved onto longer-term goals for South Vietnam, the overall mission placed particular emphasis on providing security and economic development. Security would mean a peaceful environment in which to build democratic institutions, while economic development initiatives would help to create an independent, self-sustaining nation that could, at some point in the future, stand on its own without the growing volume of American aid. Owing to the profound lack of security, officials placed a great deal of emphasis on that aspect of the American effort. As mentioned, a key element in establishing security centered on the creation of a national police force. By the late 1950s, the American team had created the Vietnamese National Police and Security Service training center, which produced thousands of police officers each year. This success led to the establishment of municipal police precincts in all of southern Vietnam’s forty-four provinces. Additionally, modern fingerprinting, communications, and investigative systems and procedures were woven into the training infrastructure, according to MSUG trainers, in a way that would endure. The VBI was also up and running, and consisted of more than 6,000 officers. The regular police forces now numbered over 45,000. By the early 1960s, the strength of just two additional components of the police system, the Civil Guard and the Self Defense forces, climbed to 150,000. Indeed, in just a few short years, the American nation builders had crafted a system capable of policing all of Vietnam below the 17th parallel. As police experts understood, the first priority had to be the building up of police capability, which meant recruiting and training systems, qualified personnel, modern equipment and methods, and an effective system to measure progress. Once capability was in place, then the more long-term task of building up a civil police culture could be accomplished. The latter would be the proverbial proof of the pudding. As MSUG personnel spread out across Vietnam for a battery of routine inspections, they often found “rather spotty” results. For instance, policing capability in the capital city of Saigon had apparently improved dramatically as monthly reports indicated hundreds of criminal violations from littering and public disorder to gambling and prostitution. At the same time, inspections beyond that city were often disappointing: MSUG personnel found poor-to-hostile relations between themselves and the Vietnamese beyond Saigon; equipment that had been ordered and sent was missing; required training had not been carried out; and police units lacked even basic equipment such as radios and uniforms. Some units had received more than their share, while others suffered as paupers within the system. Amid this unevenness, a pattern emerged. The regime of Ngo Dinh Diem clearly favored certain units and not others as he maintained a great deal of control over the policing elements being put in place by the Americans. 255

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The pattern picked up by routine inspections grew into something more troubling with each passing year. Diem was positioning himself to retain complete control. He intended to do so in large part because he needed to in order to remain in power. The fact was his regime had continued to generate hostility and resistance virtually from its opening days. As resistance mounted, so too did Diem’s need for greater force. Consequently, the regime began cracking down on dissidents and opponents like the Buddhists. Diem himself retained tight control over the various elements of the police system, even hand-picking police chiefs in most cases. As the regime attempted to centralize authority and reach out into the countryside, the opposition increased. In order to deal with this threat, greater and greater levels of police and military force were needed, much of it justified in Cold War terms. For instance, all opposition to the regime became “Viet Cong,” a derisive term meaning Vietnamese communists. The regime launched the “denounce the communists” campaign in 1955, which served the dual purposes of crushing dissent and further extending Diem’s unchallenged authority beyond Saigon. A little less than a year into the campaign, regime officials reported that 94,000 “rallied” to the government’s side, over 5,600 surrendered, and between 15,000 and 20,000 were placed in various camps. Between 1954 and 1960, almost 50,000 people were jailed.11 The campaign aimed at much more than simply eradicating communism. Despite this crackdown, resistance grew. Meanwhile, the Americans continued to underwrite Diem’s rising dictatorship, despite significant disagreement among those in Vietnam. For their part, many Americans, particularly within the military, realized that to some degree this was the nature of nation building and the reason for the emphasis on security in the first place. Tension had already manifested among officials of the country team over the extent to which Diem should be permitted a free hand to essentially militarize the police forces. The U.S. military contingent believed he should do so, while the academics and other nation-building experts believed he should not. It should be understood, this drama played out in a fluid and volatile context. The Americans, despite their enormous resources, did not have sufficient control or power to simply dictate terms, and their Vietnamese allies obviously did not enjoy complete control over the direction of the American aid program, while neither enjoyed adequate access to, control of, or even knowledge of the Vietnamese population. Under these circumstances, the emphasis on security and military capability won out, and the rancor among and between all participants grew. This would become a greater problem as the resistance evolved into an organized and disciplined insurgency determined to oust both the Americans and the regime in Saigon. Paralleling the creation of a national policing infrastructure, the country team also put in place the infrastructure to bring about South Vietnam’s economic development. On one hand, dozens of companies went to work building hundreds of miles of modern roadways, constructing airfields, dredging canals to improve water transport, and implementing modern farming techniques to revive and expand the agriculture sector. On the other hand, all of this economic activity had to be financed and mechanisms put in place so that it would not profoundly distort what was a pre-industrial, war-torn, and tiny economy. The danger here was substantial. An enormous flood of people, equipment, and money threatened to swamp Vietnam, gut whatever value its currency had, and remove incentive to any would-be domestic producer. This would obviously completely undermine the very aim of nation building. Keenly aware of the potential to do great harm, officials created the Industrial Development Center (IDC) to finance industrial development, the Commodity Import Program (CIP) to bring in needed goods, and the counterpart fund, to do so without destroying the domestic economy. Of these three mechanisms, the IDC “withered on the vine,” according to participants, while the other two not only survived in the short term but became crucial, if for different 256

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reasons, as the project unfolded over the next several years. The CIP, as suggested, brought in a whole host of needed goods that ran the gamut from heavy construction equipment to paper products and helped in the building of a variety of businesses, from textiles and ceramics, to pencils and dinnerware. At the same time, the CIP also made necessary the counterpart fund. The money for these commodity imports, largely from American companies, went into this fund, which was managed by the regime. Through a licensing system, Vietnamese officials were able to control who could and could not import goods. Because the regime also steadfastly held the currency exchange rate at around thirty-five piasters to one U.S. dollar, importers lucky enough (or close enough to the regime) to be granted license could obviously make substantial profit without actually making anything. This system, while viewed as necessary to prevent galloping inflation, also significantly privileged Vietnamese importers over manufacturers. The unintended result of these mechanisms was that the IDC, created to lend to manufacturing startups, became a less profitable path than simply importing goods through the CIP, collecting the profit guaranteed by the exchange rate, and then re-selling them for even greater gain. Compounding this problem was the ever-increasing American aid program. As the scale of money, personnel, and other American resources grew exponentially (the Americans were providing $1 million per day to the regime by 1963), the CIP expanded, and the counterpart fund became more important both economically and politically. Eventually the economic distortions grew to such a scale that they became more and more difficult to resolve. Throughout all the years of American involvement in Vietnam, the Saigon regime could never generate more than 10 percent of GNP through tax revenue. The American program made up the rest, swelling from $400 million in the early 1960s, to $3 billion a decade later. Unintentional or not, the American effort to build a new nation below the 17th parallel in Vietnam contained the seeds of its own failure. As long as the American nation-building project in Vietnam remained of limited scale, these problems were more or less manageable. Keeping the American role limited, however, meant achieving real, lasting success and leaving the new nation of South Vietnam to stand on its own. Yet as the resistance continued to grow each year, Diem’s regime became more dictatorial, and the situation required more American aid, not less. While many American officials continued to turn in somewhat optimistic appraisals of the situation into the early 1960s, some of those closest to the project, such as those associated with the MSUG, became more and more vocal in their criticisms. Some charged that the United States’ hand-picked leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, was more autocrat than democrat. He gathered all power into his own hands and those of his close family. He marginalized, harassed, and/or outlawed opposition groups. He tightly controlled all aspects of government, police, and the economy, and made very effective use of a growing U.S. military aid program to further ensconce himself in power and insulate himself from critique. Furthermore, he answered increased resistance and opposition by unleashing greater and greater violence. He slowly turned Saigon into his own personal fiefdom, with one consultant charging that Diem had created “a police state.”12 Still, the American team remained divided. Some among the MSUG became more outraged the more they came to see themselves as playing, or having played, key roles in aiding and abetting a dictator. Others, such as military and policy types, recognized Diem’s need to beat back resistance—nearly always couched in Cold War, anti-communist rhetoric. The ugly fact remained that, if the U.S. did not underwrite his tyranny, his opponents would surely oust him in short order. If that should happen, the United States would immediately lose whatever influence it had in Vietnam. The whole project would thus come to a rather inglorious end for the United States and would certainly be viewed as a defeat. 257

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In what is the most well-known manifestation of profound problems with the effort to create South Vietnam during these years, Diem went after the Buddhists and provoked what expanded into the Buddhist crisis by 1963. Viewing the Buddhists and their long and vocal opposition to the regime as an intolerable problem, Diem moved to crush them by raiding pagodas, arresting thousands, and cracking down on free speech and public rallies. Precisely because Diem was a Catholic in a predominantly Buddhist country, these actions did nothing to enhance his legitimacy. By the early 1960s, Vietnamese referred to the regime as My Diem, or American Diem, an expression cutting to the heart of the problem when a dictator relies on outside sustenance and massive military aid to remain in place. The Buddhist crisis mounted until, in late 1963, the United States eventually allowed the Vietnamese military to remove Diem from power. A group of insubordinate generals did just that on November 2, with finality, by assassinating both Diem and his influential brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Three weeks later, U.S. President John Kennedy was also killed in Dallas, Texas. The U.S. effort in Vietnam was in tatters. Beginning in the early 1960s, American officials regularly spoke of the “war” in Vietnam as talk of nation building and economic development faded. Programs were recast in terms of whether or not they “support . . . the war directly,” as officials turned their attention to security/military issues, such as the Strategic Hamlet program, which sought the “pacification” of the Vietnamese populace.13 American involvement moved from advice and assistance to much more direct involvement, with increased military personnel (ramped up from under 1,000 to well over 16,000 in less than three years) engaging in offensive operations in the countryside of Vietnam, the use of defoliants, napalm, white phosphorus, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, and a more robust and expanded military program in general. Importantly, these developments occurred because the effort to create a new sovereign nation below the 17th parallel had not succeeded. In fact, that effort had run to ground badly. Now, as the U.S. necessarily increased its military role, it simultaneously created one of the most important contradictions in the overall effort. The aid program could not be reduced, and in fact had to be increased, in order to avoid setbacks in the war effort. As top Kennedy advisors General Maxwell Taylor and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara pointed out to the President in 1963, “any long-term reduction of aid cannot but have an eventual adverse effect on the military campaign since both the military and the economic programs have been consciously designed and justified in terms of their contribution to the war effort.”14 Yet, more emphasis on war and the related increases in aid of all kinds side-stepped the nation-building effort and really served to paste over its failings. The great contradiction in the American nationbuilding experiment in Vietnam now began to come into focus: the effort could not be wound down and it was also less and less likely to be successful. Meanwhile, the United States increased military aid to the regime in Saigon, to allow it to preserve itself while resistance mounted. For instance, of the $203 million committed to economic aid for 1963, more than 90 percent actually went toward the regime’s military and counterinsurgency budget. This strategy worked to prevent short-term disaster, even as it simultaneously undermined the larger aims of the project. In the short term, military force could be used to keep the insurgency from pushing the American-backed regime out of power. Over the long term, greater use of force undermined nation building as it made possible widespread destruction, distorted the economy, and weakened the regime. By the mid-1960s, various officials readily acknowledged the regime was utterly dependent on U.S. military and economic aid. At the same time, the war was expanding as the United States essentially took over the lion’s share of the responsibility for the military campaign. By the end of 1965, the United States had committed more than 184,000 troops to the effort. A year later, the number stood at 385,300. The point at which the U.S. could reduce its role and depart, leaving behind a sovereign South Vietnam, continued to recede further over the horizon.15 258

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The prospect of an independent South Vietnam was crushed by this gargantuan American military presence, the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars into a Saigon economy that catered to American GIs, the strangling of Vietnamese cottage industry by soaring U.S. imports (which were used mainly just to “sop up” excess American cash), and a thriving black market economy amid a level of corruption that congressional investigators found shocking. The war also occasioned a public health and refugee crisis as peasants fled the expanded war in the countryside, coming to reside in makeshift refugee camps alongside sprawling military bases, and exposing the near total lack of infrastructure to deal with them. Despite efforts to deal with these problems, for some American officials understood them well, little was done or could be done without reversing course. By the latter half of the 1960s, the United States fought a large-scale war in Vietnam with no end in sight. Although a number of experts and officials remained committed to various nation-building initiatives, the war continued to overshadow and undermine that larger objective. The simple fact remained that South Vietnam had not been made a viable, sovereign state. It was, instead, weary and badly broken through many years of war.

Conclusion On the eve of the Tet Offensive of January, 1968, then, the United States found itself in a difficult position; on one hand, officials well understood the precarious and unstable nature of conditions in Vietnam. On the other, the public did not. When the insurgency launched the offensive at the end of January, among the many things it demonstrated was that all was not well in the Vietnam War. And, contrary to General William Westmoreland’s soon-infamous assurance of a “light at the end of the tunnel,” the situation had just become far worse.16 As Vietnamese insurgents struck nearly simultaneously all across southern Vietnam, including 100 cities, thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals, and even the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, the offensive, and vivid and shocking coverage of it on American television exposed a fundamentally flawed and failed effort. Even though the offensive was quickly and decisively beaten back, it had nonetheless made a significant impact. Public opinion shifted following Tet; President Lyndon Johnson essentially resigned at the end of March; Secretary of Defense McNamara was out—fired, according to some; Westmoreland was also out, but not until after he submitted a request for an additional 206,000 troops he knew would be denied.17 Clearly a shift had occurred. Many accounts of these events place much weight on the televised comments of Walter Cronkite, who recognized that the war had become stalemated and suggested the United States needed to find a way out. Cronkite, who had just returned from Vietnam, articulated the frustration of many Americans when he said, “we have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.” Polls over the following weeks highlighted that frustration as public support for the war waned. But, as historian David Schmitz has shown, falling poll numbers merely returned to trends established during the previous year as support for the war continued its inexorable decline.18 The public relations campaign in the months leading to 1968 had only temporarily arrested that decline; the events of the Tet Offensive resumed longer-term trends. If the offensive changed anything, it was perception of the war. The reality, which officials well understood, was dire. As the public saw for itself the disaster that was unfolding in Vietnam, the day of reckoning had arrived. Officials, confronted with the high visibility of the offensive, concluded that the United States could not win in Vietnam. The war itself had come to a grinding halt, while the other, nation-building elements of U.S. involvement were torn asunder. Of 259

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a population of around twelve million, four million Vietnamese had become refugees, the expanding rate of disease and infection mushroomed into a full-blown public health crisis, southern Vietnam still lacked the physical infrastructure to deal with these mounting problems, the economy was in tatters, and corruption was endemic. The offensive produced an additional one million refugees, another 8,000–10,000 war casualties, and brought economic activity to a halt. With combined Vietnamese and American troop levels topping one million and the war’s cost to the Americans soaring to $25 billion per year, something had to give. The nationbuilding gambit begun nearly a decade and a half earlier had run aground and even the full weight of American military might had failed to change that fact.

Notes 1 For both quotes, see James Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2–3. 2 Dulles’ quote is in Department of State Bulletin XXXIV (June 18, 1956): 1000. 3 For the full text of the speech, see American Rhetoric Top 100 Speeches, Truman Doctrine, available at www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/harrystrumantrumandoctrine.html, accessed June 5, 2012. 4 Vijay Prishad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), especially chapter 3. See also Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially chapters 1 and 3. 5 George C. Herring, “ ‘A Good Stout Effort’: John Foster Dulles and the Indochina Crisis, 1954–1955,” in Richard H. Immerman, ed., John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 213–234. See also Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952–1954), XIII: 1828–1834. 6 National Intelligence Estimate, “Post-Geneva Outlook in Indochina,” August 3, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, XIII: 1905–1906. 7 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report on Indochina: Report of Senator Mike Mansfield on a Study Mission to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos (Washington, DC: GPO, 1954), 9. 8 Wesley Fishel letter to Edward Weidner, August 25 and September 4, 1954, MSUG Papers, Vietnam Project Papers, Correspondence, Edward Weidner, 1954, box 628, folder 101. 9 James Carter, Inventing Vietnam, 55–62. 10 “Law Enforcement in South Vietnam,” January 10, 1958, 12, MSUG Papers, box 682, folder 11. 11 Carter, Inventing Vietnam, 105. 12 Frank Child, “Vietnam—The Eleventh Hour,” New Republic 145 (December 1961): 14–16. 13 Carter, Inventing Vietnam, 138–139. 14 Memorandum for the President, Report of McNamara–Taylor Mission to South Vietnam, October 2, 1963, The Pentagon Papers, II: 345. 15 George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 182, for U.S. troop number by year. 16 William Westmoreland’s own account is in William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Dell, 1976), 423–431. 17 Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Politics and Dissent in the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 18 David Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (New York: Rowen & Littlefield, 2005), 111–112.

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29 THE SOLDIER’S EXPERIENCE IN VIETNAM Ron Milam

Most of the historiography of the Vietnam War deals with decision-making by leaders such as Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, and Generals Earle Wheeler, William Westmoreland, and Creighton Abrams. Yet over 2.7 million men and 68,000 women served in the Vietnam War and their stories have mostly been told through diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies. Few scholarly works have been produced about soldiers of this war, probably because it was America’s first losing effort, and what has been written about them is generally critical. This chapter will discuss the issues associated with creating and training an army that could effectively engage the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and their southern ally, the National Liberation Front (NLF ) or Viet Cong (VC). How did the combat soldier live when not fighting? For the purpose of this chapter, “combat soldier” may also describe a marine. For the millions who served in the Vietnam War, each had unique experiences which were different than their fellow soldier’s. The variable factors were where they served, when they served, and their Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). As America’s longest war, each phase of every engagement produced incidents that were unique to those who served. Thus it is difficult to define the “average” soldier, or the “typical” soldier. But those who served in combat had a special perspective on the war because it was their job to engage and kill the enemy. When America committed ground troops to the Vietnam War effort in March 1965, thousands of military personnel had already served for many years in various advisory capacities. Most had been officers or senior non-commissioned officers and had chosen the military as a career. But this new effort would require America to tap its youth as it had not done in previous wars. This military force would be the youngest, most educated, yet it would be drawn disproportionately from the lower working class of society because of the decisions that were made about conscription, or the draft, as it was often called.1 One of the earliest and most important decisions made by the Johnson Administration regarding personnel requirements was whether to call up either the reserves or National Guard. For reasons that historians still debate, there would be no call-up, and 18–25-year-old single men were identified by local Selective Service Boards as the prime targets for induction.2 But these men could apply for deferments such as 4-F medical or 2-S student, which kept them out of serving until they had “fixed” the medical problem, or completed their education. If they steadily and satisfactorily continued toward a degree, they could delay being classified 1-A, 261

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which meant ready for induction, until they graduated. This process of allowing certain elements of society to escape the risk of death in the jungles of Vietnam continued until December 1969 when a draft lottery was instituted to replace the student deferment system. By that time, the draft calls were down considerably, but through the efforts of Senator Ted Kennedy and others, a certain degree of “fairness” replaced the system of allowing those with the intellect and wealth to attend college to escape induction. Since the reserves and National Guard were never called up, these institutions became a safe haven for draft dodgers. Men whose parents had wealth or political connections were able to secure slots in local units, thus enabling their sons to avoid conscription. This happened frequently, and led to a developing attitude among many that the conscription process was inherently unfair.3 Even with these deferments, 75 percent of all men who served in Vietnam were volunteers, but they made that commitment because of the threat of being drafted. They were less likely to serve in the infantry if they volunteered. This meant that most of those serving in the infantry were draftees. These very young men, whose average age was 19, were also disproportionately black, Hispanic, and Native-American.4 And because many of them did not possess the needed skills that would have qualified them for jobs in the rear echelon, they became infantry soldiers and were thus exposed to the dangers of combat. Coupled with volunteering for airborne training for economic reasons—an additional $65 per month—these men were placed into elite units such as the 101st Airborne Division, the 82nd Airborne Division, and the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and these units were the first to be deployed into the most heavily PAVN-occupied territories.5 Equally challenging for the military was how to select, train, and assign junior officers to lead this large group of soldiers into battle. With Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) typically supplying over 70 percent of the officers for the military, had those programs continued at their current pace, leadership issues might not have become a problem. However, as the build-up in forces escalated and the war became unpopular, the ROTC programs began to deteriorate in support. The only program that could replace the losses in ROTC was Officer Candidate School (OCS). That program increased its graduation rate from 1,600 per year to over 21,000. The army also periodically closed various OCS programs which trained the officers who would work in combat support and service positions, because it was platoon leaders that would be mostly needed due to the number of casualties resulting from infantry operations. As the war entered this new phase of “big battles,” junior officers were in great demand because the majority of the battles, while designed to lure the PAVN and the VC into mass confrontation, were company led. For the entire war, most contacts with the enemy were initiated by VC or PAVN troops, and platoon-level leadership was critical.6 It is difficult to measure the extent to which soldiers participated in battle versus those who provided combat support. From the first phase of the build-up, an infrastructure to support the combat troops was developed which involved the building of division, brigade, and battalion headquarters that contained bars, officer and non-commissioned officer clubs, spas, swimming pools, and millions of tons of poured concrete.7 To support this huge infrastructure, soldiers with MOSs of recreational management, clerical, human resources, graves registration and hundreds of other jobs poured into the base camps. Known as Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers (REMFs) by their envious combat brethren, such personnel outnumbered combat troops by a staggering ten to one ratio. Thus for every combat troop drafted, an additional ten support troops were needed and most of them volunteered for such duty to avoid becoming an infantry soldier. Details of life in the rear will be addressed in a subsequent section of this chapter. 262

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The challenge for the military planners was to create an effective fighting force of men who had, for the most part, been soldiers for only four months when they arrived in Vietnam. Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) introduced the soldier to the military culture and some of the weapons he would use and provided him with a sense of the importance of adhering to discipline when under fire. But training to fight at Ft. Lewis, Washington, Ft. Polk, Louisiana, or Ft. Benning, Georgia, was not the same as training in the jungles of Vietnam, and each unit had to set up training schedules for replacements at various locations within their areas of operation (AO). Soldiers were introduced to helicopter procedures—how to deplane, setting up a cordon around a landing zone (LZ), and what to do if their chopper was shot down or crashed due to weather or mechanical failure. Soldiers were also taught the Law of Land Warfare, and how non-combatants were to be treated when taken into custody. This issue became particularly important as free-fire zones were established and villagers began to migrate into areas where they might be considered to be “VC sympathizers.” The extent to which such training occurred was the decision of division commanders.8 Platoon leaders also had to be vigilant in teaching how to use the weapons of jungle warfare that had been newly introduced in Vietnam. The M-16A1 rifle was the standard weapon of the infantry. It was given to AIT soldiers in their final days of training, and it was controversial from the beginning because it had to be kept clean, was affected by humidity, and the lubricant (LSA) had to be consistently used in great quantities. Soldiers had to be taught how to save ammunition and not fire indiscriminately on fully automatic, as well as recognizing that the weapon would fire “wide and to the right” when in automatic mode.9 Soldiers also needed training on the M-60 machine gun, which being crew-served required them to understand their role as ammo-bearers and in being prepared to pick up the “pig” if the gunner was wounded. Since this weapon wielded tremendous firepower, it was the main target of the PAVN and VC, and those soldiers in the crew had to be ready to protect the gunner, and prepared to take over if the gunner was wounded.10 The M-79 Grenade Launcher provided “organic artillery” to each platoon, thus allowing immediate response to an enemy contact without relying on external firepower. But it created a challenging leadership issue for the platoon leader in that many soldiers did not want to carry it as their primary weapon because it could fire only one round before having to be re-loaded.11 Therefore, training had to include teaching how to make that one round count if enemy contact was made. And there was always the emphasis on the importance of teamwork and the protection of each other. Soldiers were taught how to set up L-shaped ambushes and listening posts, the critical nature of “digging in” at night, setting up M1A1 Claymore mines, and the use of the PRC-10 and PRC-25 radios. And each man had to learn the job of every other man in the squad and platoon since casualties could quickly change the personnel configuration of a unit.12 As important as it was to teach about the weapons of war, it was equally important to expose the new soldier to the enemy’s often crude but very lethal weapons. The AK-47, ChineseCommunist Grenades (CHI-com), toe-poppers, and bouncing betty land mines were all used with great expertise against American soldiers, inflicting numerous casualties. And booby-traps using pungi-stakes dipped in fecal matter and other poisons had the effect of being a silent enemy, inflicting casualties without the American soldier ever engaging the enemy directly. All of this training had to be accomplished within the first few days of arriving at the soldiers’ assigned unit, and usually lasted about five days. Then the soldier would be assigned to a unit, and he would be flown to the field to begin combat operations.13 In most cases, soldiers were committed to the jungle for up to two weeks before returning to the base camp or “rear.” During this period, he would be subjected not only to enemy fire and booby-traps, but also to leeches, snakes, malaria-bearing mosquitoes, leopards and tigers, as well as continual rain, and 263

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the resulting mud. He would eat C-rations that he carried in a ruck-sack, along with about 75 pounds of equipment and ammo, and he would carry as much water as physically possible. Resupply helicopters would fly in every few days, and would often include mail from home. And if death or wounds had resulted from the operation, the helicopters would carry out the wounded and bring in new replacements. For the infantry soldier, this routine would continue for his entire year in Vietnam. His platoon leader would be relieved after six months in combat, as would his company and battalion commander. This army regulation regarding tours of duty in combat for officers was controversial because it required each newly assigned commander to climb a “learning curve” about his personnel, the AO, and intelligence about the enemy. The only relief would be a “stand-down” period of a few days every few weeks, which would be time in the rear when he would service his weapon, radio, crew-served weapon, and his own body. If he had contracted malaria, scrub typhus, or a fever of unknown origin, he could have it addressed by the nurses and physicians at the base, or he would be sent to a field or evacuation hospital. His time there would be determined by volunteer nurses and drafted doctors, who would serve a one-year tour of duty similar to the soldiers’. One of the little-known facts of the Vietnam conflict was that over 11,000 women volunteered to serve in the war as nurses. They were junior officers and usually outranked the soldiers to whom they provided medical assistance. Unlike the medical establishment in the United States, they were respected for their ability to make life-and-death decisions under severely stressful situations. In triage, these nurses were expected to decide who were the walking wounded (those who could receive treatment at a later time), those who needed treatment immediately, and those who were expectant (expected to die). This was a huge responsibility for a young nurse who probably had little training about combat nursing in her OCS class and little training about military protocol. In addition, the relationship between nurses and doctors was tenuous at times because the nurses often had more experience in mass-casualty situations than the doctors, and they were often subjected to sexual harassment because of their gender.14 Dissent within the rear echelon usually occurred when these combat soldiers had to interface with REMFs, most of whom would spend their entire tour in the base camp. Jealousy, drugs, alcohol, “fragging,” and other discipline issues permeated the rear. Returning to base camp after a mission became more challenging than combat because of the rear echelon culture. Relaxing, recreation, drinking, and conversing with other soldiers should have driven the everyday activities. However, because of the boredom that generally set in among REMFs, dissention was rampant when the field troops stood down. The majority of the rear echelon personnel were white due to the skill sets required for rear duty, or were volunteers having been able to negotiate a rear echelon MOS that took them out of “harm’s way.” When black soldiers returning from the field encountered white REMF soldiers, cultural differences became pronounced. Many of the white soldiers were from the south and preferred country music by such performers as Porter Wagner and Dolly Parton, Glenn Campbell and Merle Haggard, while the black soldiers preferred to listen to the Motown sounds of Smoky Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and the Four Tops. With music being an important ingredient in a soldier’s life, what was blaring from outdoor speakers around the camp became critical to “peace” in the camp. Rock-n-roll had its racial overtones as Jimi Hendrix was the only black artist popular among the white soldiers, and while his music should have been one of the compromise voices, his work was not typically embraced by the white officers because it was identified with drug usage, and yes, there was a drug culture in Vietnam. Historians debate the extent to which drug usage in Vietnam was more prevalent than that which existed in the United States, particularly on the streets and college campuses from which most of the soldiers had just left. But that which was available—marijuana, heroin, amphetamines, Quaaludes—was cheap and anyone who wanted it could afford it. Vietnamese citizens 264

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patrolled outside the gates of all of the division headquarters hawking their wares, which usually included drugs. So those soldiers, who lived at the base camps 24/7, had it available to them continuously. Field soldiers could only participate in this drug culture when they were standing down, and to make up for lost time they might frequently overdose. The use of drugs in the field, however, was rare since it would have been detrimental to the unit’s ability to survive, and platoon leaders recognized this. But “sick bay” had frequent patrons who had smoked too much “grass” or used even harder drugs.15 One can argue, however, that the most commonly used and abused drug in Vietnam was alcohol. Like drugs, it was available at a very cheap price—$1.75 for a quart of Jack Daniels Black Label.16 This was the drug of choice for many career officers and non-commissioned officers because they had been drinking their entire career. They found this drug met all of their social and psychological needs. It did, however, come with some side effects, such as hangovers. But it was legal, and was served on base and in clubs by men possessing recreational management MOSs. For those who had too much to drink, they could sleep off the hangover in their own bed, or if they became belligerent, they were sent to the stockade. For the younger soldier, usually non-career, his drug of choice might have been marijuana. There was frequently no hangover, and if the drug was not poisoned by some VC guerilla, he could probably function the next day. Some units might discipline him for using it, if it was discovered, but he could take his chances since time in the stockade meant less time in the jungle.17 For the platoon leader, he had to decide whether his alcoholic “juicers” were more of a detriment to his unit’s performance than were his drugged-up “heads.” Usually he would try to deal with each of them in a balanced way, recognizing that performance in the field was the most important aspect of a soldier’s duty and how he behaved in the rear was important only in maintaining good discipline. But it was a challenge that sometimes required all of the training he had learned at West Point, ROTC, or OCS. Often his efforts were in vain and resulted in the worst possible outcome imaginable, that of murder of a superior officer or non-commissioned officer. In the Vietnam War, that action became known as “fragging.” Much has been written about this terrible crime that has been prevalent among soldiers since the beginning of warfare. But the opportunity to murder anonymously with a fragmentation grenade is a phenomenon of recent wars. The record of this deviant behavior indicates that, unlike Hollywood’s frequent depiction, most of these murders occurred in the rear, at large base camps, as opposed to happening during combat in the field.18 The target was usually a noncommissioned officer or “lifer,” who was responsible for assigning soldiers to work details that were not considered important. Soldiers assigned to these tasks, known as “shit details,” often believed they were being singled out for such duties because they had just come from the field, and therefore they had not been pulling “their fair share” of rear duties. If the soldier had been drinking, or using drugs, their first reaction might be to lash out against the order, and thus they would be verbally reprimanded. The soldier would leave the area disgruntled, and plan revenge. If one soldier had such an experience, there were probably others. Most fragging incidents occurred when several soldiers with similar complaints decided to solve their problem with the same violence that they were inflicting on the enemy. With a fragmentation grenade, it could be done without leaving any fingerprints and if done without witnesses, such soldiers felt they could literally get away with murder. The distinction between such incidents targeting non-commissioned officers instead of junior commissioned officers is important because, in most cases, the platoon leader was a similar age to the instigator of the crime and was not perceived to be the cause of the soldier’s misery. And in most cases the targeted NCO was not even a combat soldier who could assist in keeping others combat ready—and alive. But the platoon leader was responsible for the activities that led to both 265

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success and survival in the jungle; therefore, he was usually not the target of murderous soldiers who were rebelling against the “military establishment.” Thus many senior NCOs were murdered by disgruntled soldiers who felt they represented everything that was bad about Vietnam. Vietnam War literature reflects mostly jungle fighting, discord between soldiers and their leadership, and the lack of confidence that they had in command decisions. But the war also provided opportunities for soldiers to participate in extracurricular activities when not engaging the enemy. Sports such as volleyball and basketball were common at most base camps, and in areas where American soldiers had combined operations with ARVN troops, friendly competition between the two units was frequent. Every division base camp also had an officer, NCO, and enlisted clubs which frequently held concerts featuring Filipino bands playing American rock-nroll. These bands were able to copy many of the sounds familiar to the soldiers, replicating such groups as the James Brown Revue, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ike and Tina Turner, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. And beautiful Filipino women were a great diversion from the stress of combat. Prostitution has been used as a form of entertainment by soldiers throughout the history of warfare. It was rampant throughout Vietnam, usually available to soldiers right outside the base camp or often within the perimeter. While not officially sanctioned by the military commanders, prophylactics were always available in the PX (post exchange) and medics were trained in how to handle all forms of sexually transmitted diseases. There were also many Vietnamese nationals working in the base camps, and many of these men functioned as pimps while house girls, laundresses, and seamstresses were lured into prostitution by them. And because birth control was not readily available to many Vietnamese women, unwanted pregnancies occurred, resulting in many Amerasian babies. All soldiers in Vietnam were given the opportunity to take a Rest and Relaxation leave. “R&R” did not count against a soldier’s 30-day annual leave allocation, but it did have to be scheduled around the needs of the unit. Several locations were available to soldiers, with most single men traveling to Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, or Australia, and most married men meeting their wives in Hawaii. Paid for by the government, these seven-day reliefs from jungle fighting or rear echelon troop support provided soldiers with an opportunity to forget the war. The military maintained control over the program and even conducted briefings for the soldiers in all of the R&R countries with lectures on cultural awareness, sexual practices and precautions, food, entertainment, and legal matters. For those returning from R&R and the normalcy of life without the threat of death, the transition was difficult because usually only half of their tour of duty had been expended by that time. The American Red Cross was instrumental in assisting the military’s efforts to provide recreational activities for the soldiers. Red Cross volunteers, affectionately known as “Donut Dollies,” visited base camps and often battalion headquarters that were located in insecure places to organize games and other activities that allowed soldiers to temporarily take their mind off the war. The Red Cross volunteers brought joy to many men who would not normally have been able to talk to a “round-eye” during their tour of duty. The Red Cross also coordinated messages through MARS, the Military Auxiliary Radio System, using ham radio operators to handle the calls. Perhaps the most important form of entertainment, diversion, or stress reliever was mail call. Letters from loved ones at home, whether they be from fathers, mothers, wives, girlfriends, or siblings, were the most important form of morale booster available to the soldier. Infrequently, a letter arrived from a girlfriend or fiancé announcing a desire to no longer correspond or be a part of the soldier’s life—the dreaded “Dear John” letter. But usually a letter from home was the most important moment of each day. Choppers brought these letters from home, along with food, water, and ammunition. For the soldier, the mail was as important as the other three items. 266

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“Care packages” from home were also common, with homemade cookies and brownies, potato chips, popcorn, and candy. Super-8 movies, cassettes and 8-track recordings were also welcomed by the soldiers. Virtually every soldier in Vietnam carried a “short-timer’s” calendar that depicted the exact date they would “DEROS” or “Date Eligible for Return from Over Seas,” which was the most important day in a young soldier’s life. The calendar might highlight other meaningful days, such as R&R, days of stand-down, or days of enemy combat, but each event that they posted to their calendar was important, because it meant they were alive another day.19 The Vietnam War produced unique experiences among its soldiers. Those who served have memories of their year in a combat zone—the fear, the exultations of survival, the buddies that they lost, and those whose names they have forgotten but whose faces they can still see in their dreams. Like no other war America has ever fought, there are feelings that will never fade in the minds of those who spent at least a year of their life in the jungles so far from home. That those memories have yet to be sufficiently addressed in the scholarship of Vietnam is another of the many tragedies of the war.

Notes 1 Christian Appy, Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press 1993), 33. 2 LTC John D. Bruen, “Repercussions From the Vietnam Mobilization Decision,” Parameters, Spring– Summer 1972, 32. 3 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 320. 4 Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Vintage, 1978), 8. At the beginning of the Vietnam War, AfricanAmericans made up 31 percent of the military. That number would become proportional to the population as the size of the military force in Vietnam grew. Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000 contributed to this increase. 5 Ron Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 28. 6 “Tactical Initiative in Vietnam,” Center for Military History (CMH) Archives, SEA-RS-122, Ground Combat, 8. 7 Eric Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam (New York, Penguin, 1993), 35. 8 “Division Replacement Training Program,” Training Circular Number 61–5, Headquarters, 25th Infantry Division, June 24, 1966, I-1, National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), 270/030/16/6. 9 Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 86. 10 Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 86. 11 Infantry Reference Data, July, 1968, United States Army Infantry School (USAIS), 400–404. 12 Hugh McManers, Ultimate Special Forces (New York: D.D. Publishing, 2003), 141. 13 Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 95. 14 Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-six American Women Who Served in Vietnam (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1987), 5. 15 “Marihuana and Drugs,” CMH Archives. 16 Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 146. 17 Jack Stoddard, What Are They Going to Do, Send Me To Vietnam? (Las Vegas: Sunrise Mountain Publishing, 2000), 25. 18 Major David H. Gillooly and Thomas C.M.D. Bond, “Assaults and Explosive Devices on Superiors: A Synopsis of Reports from Confined Offenders at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks,” Military Medicine, October 1976. CMH Archives, SEA-RS-125b, 702. 19 Milam, Not a Gentleman’s War, 141.

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PART IX

U.S. Clandestine Operations and the Cold War on the Periphery

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30 THE COLD WAR ON THE PERIPHERY: 1953–1989 Michael J. Sullivan III

While the Korean and Vietnam Wars were the hot conflicts of the Cold War, on the periphery, a more low-level proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union played out in several other developing nations during the years 1953–1989. During six presidencies—those of Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan (Jimmy Carter was an exception)—an average of about four American military interventions, or lesser forms of forceful attempted regime changes, occurred.1 This part of the book presents case studies of five of them—Guatemala 1954, Cuba 1961, Chile 1970–1973, Dominican Republic 1965, and Grenada 1983—but these should be seen in the context of coercive U.S. action in at least fifteen other sites in countries where the U.S. or the USSR sparred for influence.2 Under Eisenhower, in addition to Guatemala, there were notable forceful actions in Iran in 1953 and Lebanon in 1958. During the Kennedy and Johnson eras, besides Cuba and the Dominican Republic, there were covert but still violent interventions in the Congo from 1961 to 1965, Laos after 1962, South Vietnam before the conventional war began in 1965, Brazil in 1964, and Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. Under Nixon and Ford, beyond Chile, there was military meddling in Cambodia from 1970 to 1975, Iraqi Kurdistan from 1971 to 1975, and East Timor and Angola in 1975. Under Ronald Reagan, in addition to Grenada, there was involvement in civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan throughout his eight years, and the bombings of Libya in 1981 and 1986. Jimmy Carter was unusual in keeping his campaign promise of “no combat deaths” during his term.3 Although many of these engagements on the periphery were indeed peripheral to America’s main concerns, several of them resulted in wide-scale death and destruction for the countries targeted by superior U.S. technology. More than two million died in the eight-year war the U.S. fueled in Afghanistan, and about one million each before the civil wars ended in Laos and Angola. Other significant death counts related to America’s interventionist policies include: Indonesia, 500,000; Cambodia, 150,000; Congo, 100,000; East Timor, 100,000; El Salvador, 75,000; and Nicaragua, 30,000.4 With nothing comparable on the Soviet side of the ledger, these statistics show that the periphery of the capitalist world was of greater concern to the U.S. than to the Soviet Union. The official rationale for most of these twenty interventions, and the initial consensus historical interpretation of them, was that the United States was responding to Soviet threats (in the 271

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form of promotion of international communist revolution) to American national interests. A more revisionist explanation, to be analyzed at greater length below, asserts that the U.S., in its role as hegemon of the global capitalist system, expanded its presence in these peripheral countries to prevent the success of any socialist alternative to the dominant economic paradigm, even if the sources of this threat were primarily domestic.5 The five cases discussed in this part reflect two types of U.S. force and violence in these interventions: conventional military invasion in the cases of the Dominican Republic 1965 and Grenada 1983, where the death tolls were 3,000 and 100, respectively; and covert operations in Guatemala 1954, Cuba 1961, and Chile 1970–1973, where fatalities eventually totaled 200,000, 100, and 3,000 in turn.6 In most such cases, American coercive influence was being used in other countries’ domestic politics to ensure the victory of the least socialist-sympathizing side, even if the leftist party was also committed to pluralism in the political arena. It is noteworthy that the first case covered here (Guatemala 1954) followed one year after the end of the conventional American war in Korea, and the first major case of regime change using U.S. covert operations, in Iran in 1953. This pattern reflected a shift in tactics that was also seen in later years: following the commitment of American forces to major war, a backlash when the costs proved high, and the subsequent use of more modest (though also violent and often more effective) forms of “unconventional” warfare. From the perspective of the economic hegemon at the core of the capitalist system, the resource-targets of American adventurism on the periphery varied widely. To take the first two examples, the overthrow of the government of Iran was aimed at protecting capitalist control over oil; the coup in Guatemala concerned who would market bananas: the local government or the multinational United Fruit Company. The point: whether it was oil or bananas, the issue was economic control, and whether this would be in the hands of international capital or of an indigenous government. In both cases, as well as in most to follow in this chapter, evidence of actual Soviet military or political presence was minimal. What was at stake was the chief ideological issue of the Cold War: capitalism-versus-socialism as an economic model for development. The resulting political arrangement in the affected state was secondary: in Iran, regime change resulted in an absolute monarchy for a generation; in Guatemala, it was thirty years of military dictatorship and civil war. Although there was a handful of public intellectuals, like Walter Lippmann and George Kennan, who criticized President Truman’s framing of the international political struggle, for most of the first generation of the Cold War (1945–1968) the historical narrative roughly paralleled the official government line.7 America was engaged in a zero-sum struggle against an expanding international communist movement that had to be contained. Poor countries in the developing world were seen as stacked dominoes; if one “fell” to communism, then its neighbors were threatened.8 Whether it was oil or bananas—or sugar in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, rice, tin, and tungsten in Indochina, or a virtual continent’s worth of minerals in Indonesia, Brazil, and the Congo—the ideological principle of capitalist control of their development had to prevail over any government encroachment. This view was mostly unquestioned by the bipartisan consensus that prevailed in American politics until the U.S. presidential campaign of 1968. In the congressional election of 1966, the raging war in Vietnam, then at the end of its second year, did not figure in the outcome of a single race. But after 1968, support for military interventions in pursuit of containment of communism became a sensitive issue. From this point on, about half the electorate was skeptical— either of the objective itself, or the price to be paid to achieve it. Subsequent presidents needed to devise new rationales to explain the “Cold War on the periphery.” But, whether it was détente under Nixon and Ford, Carter’s human rights, Reagan’s rollback, George H.W. Bush’s 272

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new world order, Clinton’s enlargement, George W. Bush’s “War on Terror,” or Barack Obama’s retrenchment, nothing replaced in the public’s mind the simple verities of the first twenty years of the Cold War.9 The period and presidents of 1945–1968 reflected a comfortable mixture of idealism and realism. On the one hand, there was fighting communism, defending capitalism, and when possible promoting democracy. On the other, there was cutting back when the cost became too difficult to bear (in Korea and Vietnam) and ratcheting down the level of militarism until the public was ready for a new round. But the ultimate objective (containment of communism) was never seriously questioned in the public arena, particularly after Eisenhower defeated Robert Taft for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1952. After this time, both parties were dominated by liberal internationalists; the strains of isolationism and unbridled nationalism (represented by those who preferred “rollback” to containment of communism) were effectively removed from mainstream political discourse. Throughout this period, however, there was also a minor chord sounded by a number of leftists and realists in the academy who questioned the premise of an international communist conspiracy and interpreted Soviet behavior as being simply in the tradition of a Great Power. There was also some awareness that any revolutions against the capitalist legacy of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America could be explained as primarily indigenous and understandable. Left revisionists led by historians William Appleman Williams in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and Denna Frank Fleming in The Cold War in Its Origins, 1917–1960 used terms like core, periphery, and hegemon to draw attention to the defense of the capitalist model of economic development in American foreign policy. But the most popular and bestselling author in this field was a professor of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, whose American Power and the New Mandarins, published at the height of anti-Vietnam War sentiment in 1969, spawned more than a score of other books by him over the next forty years.10 Realists like political scientist Hans Morgenthau and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr granted the threat to national interests, but questioned the cost and ideological justification of the response.11 Those among the consensus continued to frame American adventures abroad in terms of Soviet threats to U.S. security. After 1968, the number of Americans who became skeptical of the government rationales and motives for military interventions soared. By the time of the Nixon administration’s “incursion” into Cambodia and involvement in assassination in Chile in 1970 and military aid to those who led the coup in 1973, even historians using the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series for events twenty or more years earlier were looking at them with jaundiced eyes. The 1975 hearings of Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) that documented the hitherto suspected involvement of American intelligence agencies in such skullduggery marked the highwater point of suspicion of state-sourced rationales. Later presidents tried to put a happier face on American foreign policy: from Carter’s human rights initiatives, to Reagan’s “Morning in America” coda to the Grenada invasion, which actually did restore democracy, in addition to retaining capitalist control over agricultural production (primarily nutmeg!). By the time of George H.W. Bush’s 1991 Persian Gulf War, the USSR was virtually out of business. Nevertheless, historians as well as the American people were still dubious of official explanations of military interventions in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The skepticism rose as the United States continued to make war in what was still called the “periphery,” even though the Cold War had ended and robbed America of its enemy (to paraphrase Mikhail Gorbachev). Following the Gulf War were hostile U.S. interventions in Somalia in 1992–1993, Bosnia in 1995, Haiti in 1994 and 2004, Kosovo in 1999, and Venezuela in 2002. The use of the metaphor “war on terror” to justify the two actual wars in response to the 273

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attacks of 9/11/2001—Afghanistan (2001–present) and Iraq (2003–2011)—was an attempt to restore a bipartisan foreign policy consensus similar to that of the early Cold War. But the unhappy prosecution of these two wars, particularly the “war of choice” in Iraq, resulted in President Obama’s retiring of the term. The longer the actual wars dragged on, the greater the debate among academics as well as politicians in both praise and criticism of a policy that seemed to promise perpetual war. Twenty-first century critics like Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire (2004) and Paul Atwood in War and Empire (2010) bemoaned the recklessness of unfettered imperial adventurism.12 They often cited the work of William Appleman Williams and other prominent leftists from the previous era, like Lloyd Gardner and Walter LaFeber, who had dared to use the word “empire” back when it was unfashionable.13 Cheerleaders like Madeleine Albright and Charles Krauthammer from the liberal internationalist and neo-conservative camps, respectively, came up with their own justifications, making explicit use of such phrases as “indispensable nation” and “unipolar moment,” while embracing the enterprise of empire.14 A further look at the twenty cited interventions from the years 1953–1989 puts these later policies and scholarly debates into perspective. Many of the books cited below draw upon the resources of two excellent collections of primary source materials established during the final years of the Cold War: the National Security Archive (NSA) at George Washington University, founded in 1985, and the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, since 1991. Although they are generally focused on Europe and have accessed declassified documents from the former Soviet Union, some of the more prominent sites on the periphery (Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile) are also represented in works they have generated. In the case of the Wilson Center, there have been more than a dozen books and three score working papers.15 The NSA, which files several thousand Freedom of Information Act requests for classified documents every year, has generated even more published compilations from its staff as well as a trove of undigested electronic “briefing books.”16 The five case studies presented in Chapters 31–33—Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Chile, and Grenada—are all from the Western Hemisphere, an historical arena for American hegemony in the century before World War II, and the site of several other interventions after the Cold War, starting with Panama 1989, just three weeks after Bush and Gorbachev proclaimed its end at their meeting in Malta. Although the “threat of international communism” is prominent in the rationales for the five interventions covered here, given the U.S. historical record both before and after this time, it could also be argued that these intrusions are simply the normal behavior of a Great Power in its “backyard.”17 Among the other fifteen engagements during the years 1953–1989, four were in the Middle East, five in east Asia, three in Africa, and three more in Latin America. The Middle East is particularly interesting as the site of the first and last (and the most significant) of these encroachments: America’s engineering of the regime change in Iran in 1953, and its support for the mujahedin in the civil war in Afghanistan, 1980–1988. The CIA-directed coup in Iran was the original sin that poisoned much of America’s later policies in that part of the world. The USSR was not a serious threat to that country at that time, but the U.S. used the presence of the Iranian Tudeh (communist) Party in the coalition of the democratically elected nationalist, Mohammed Mossadegh, as the red herring to elevate his nationalization of Iran’s oil to the level of an international Cold War incident.18 The war in Afghanistan indeed involved the Soviet Union, and the U.S. success in aiding the jihadi in ousting it is cited by many as the decisive battle of the Cold War.19 But the “blowback” that occurred when men drawn from the same forces the U.S. supported in the 1980s conspired to attack America on 9/11/2001 made many wonder if it was worth the effort.20 274

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Elsewhere in the Middle East, the insertion of the U.S. military into Lebanon’s politics in 1958 was justified at the time as anti-communist in nature; but historians have since put it in a truer context, aimed at curbing the regional ambitions of the pan-Arab nationalist Gamal abdel Nasser, a sometime Soviet ally but hardly a communist.21 The CIA arming of the Iraqi Kurds in 1971–1975 had the side effect of annoying the Soviet-supported Ba’ath regime in Baghdad, but was primarily in service to America’s partner, Iran, which used the U.S. pressure on Iraq to get a favorable deal on water rights in the Sha’at al Arab in 1975. The Shah’s refusal to continue to be the conduit for U.S. aid to the Kurds after this time prompted Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s remark that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”22 Three of the Asian adventures were part of the major U.S. war in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. Most portentous were the antecedents to that war relating to the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.23 Also significant was the ten-year “secret war” in neighboring Laos.24 Finally, there was the “sideshow” in Cambodia, created as a diversion to expedite America’s departure from the main arena after 1970, but which ultimately had the effect of bringing the notorious Khmer Rouge to power.25 The other two Asian cases related to a truly significant “domino”: Indonesia, whose regime change the U.S. assisted during its “Year of Living Dangerously” in 1965–1966. While the local communists there (mainly from the ethnic Chinese minority) were the ones who suffered most (half a million deaths), there was little evidence of any proportionate Soviet or mainland Chinese governmental involvement in the country.26 Ten years later, the U.S. was motivated more by Kissingerian realpolitik in helping Indonesia to absorb (for a generation) the Portuguese colony of East Timor.27 Two of the three examples from the African continent—Congo (1961–1965) and Angola (1975)—involved the U.S. supporting pro-Western parties in proxy wars against local Soviet sympathizers. But in truth, both those conflicts were primarily tribal in nature, with the indigenous actors taking aid from whichever outside super power they could convince. In the Congo, the CIA worked to maneuver into power the initially apolitical Army Chief Joseph Mobutu; in short order he overwhelmed the more ideological (pro-Belgian and pro-Soviet) factions to become for the next three decades one of the world’s richest crony capitalists.28 In Angola, the USSR worked through Cuban intermediaries; the U.S., to its embarrassment, relied on apartheid South Africa. America’s initial intervention prevented a leftist government from coming to power, but prolonged a war that ultimately killed one million Angolans.29 Throughout all this time, oil continued to be pumped by American oil companies from Angola’s Cabinda enclave, putting the lie to claims of significant threats to specific U.S. economic interests. The bombing of Libya in 1981 and 1986 was a bit of political theater to enhance President Reagan’s domestic standing at the expense of an easy target, the flamboyant provocateur Col. Muammar Qaddaffi. Like the involvements in Iran in 1953 and Afghanistan in 1980–1988, however, the Libyan episode had an unhappy ending for the U.S.: the blowing up of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, with 192 American deaths in 1988, an act generally attributed to Libyan intelligence in reprisal for Reagan’s attacks.30 Finally, the remaining cases in Latin America—Brazil in 1964 and El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 1980s—had Cold War overtones, but can also be interpreted as the regional hegemon taking care of business in its hemisphere. The assistance to the military coup that took over Brazil paved the way for twenty years of successive junta rule, which ensured a more favorable environment for U.S. capital than that of the slightly left-of-center government that was replaced.31 Again, there was little evidence of any hostile Soviet presence as justification for the U.S. action. 275

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The wars in Central America under Reagan—in support of the government against leftist insurgents in El Salvador, and in support of the counter-government (contra) forces against a revolutionary government in Nicaragua—were brought to a hasty close when George H.W. Bush succeeded to the presidency. Without American military aid, oxygen for continued warfare soon evaporated, and political solutions were found in both societies. Today, America’s enemies of that era—the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador and the Sandinista Party in Nicaragua—form the governments in their respective states, with nary a hint of the threat of communism to the region.32 In conclusion, given this wider context regarding U.S. interventions during the years 1953–1989, the five cases to be presented in the following chapters can now be read with greater appreciation of their wider dimensions. They show that the Cold War was not limited to the core European countries where the two contesting ideologies evolved and the two major powers confronted each other directly. Rather, it was also a struggle that impacted the entire world, often to the detriment of the poor populations found on the periphery of the global capitalist system.

Notes 1 Michael J. Sullivan III, American Adventurism Abroad: Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes since World War II (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, revised and expanded edition) is the main source for the many interventions discussed in this chapter. The best of the others in this vein are John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through the Persian Gulf (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) and William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995). 2 The most prominent historian to study U.S. policy in what during the Cold War was called the “Third World” was Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Other political analysts who have covered this field include Zachary Karabell, Architects of Intervention: the United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946–62 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999) and Richard E. Feinberg, The Intemperate Zone: The Third World Challenge to United States Foreign Policy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983). 3 Jerel Rosati, The Carter Administration’s Quest for Global Community: Beliefs and their Impact on Behavior (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991). David Skidmore, Reversing Course: Carter’s Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and the Failure of Reform (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996). 4 Sullivan, American Adventurism Abroad, 15–17, Table 5. 5 Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example (New York: Oxfam, 1985). 6 Sullivan, Ibid. 7 Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1947) was the earliest and most prominent critic. George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951) followed shortly thereafter, arguing that his original idea for political containment was applied in too militaristic a fashion. 8 “Eisenhower Press Conference, 7 April 1954,” in Foreign Relations of the United States 1952–54, vol. 13: Indochina (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office), 1280–81. 9 For some examples of the quest for a popular successor formulation, see: Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy since the Vietnam War: Search for Consensus from Nixon to Clinton (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000); Ted Galen Carpenter, A Search for Enemies: America’s Alliances after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1992); and Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 10 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1959); Denna Frank Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917–1960 (New York: Doubleday, 1961); Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Vintage, 1969). 11 Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948); Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Scribner’s, 1953). See also L. Zambernardi, “The Impotence of Power: Morgenthau’s Critique of American Intervention in

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12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20 21 22

23

24

25

Vietnam,” Review of International Studies 37 (2011): 1335–1356; and Robert Litwak, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969–76 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004); Paul Atwood, War and Empire: The American Way of Life (London: Pluto Press, 2010). See also the still vital Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books American Empire Project, 2003) and Eric Walberg, PostModern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Game (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2011). William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 1970); Lloyd Gardner, Imperial America: American Foreign Policy since 1898 (New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 1976); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963). Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Miramax, 2003) and Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (Winter 1990–1991): 23–33. For other triumphalists, see Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,” Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001; Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of American Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005) and Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). For a critique of this view, see Jacob Heilbrun, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neoconservatives (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). See, e.g., Jeffrey A. Engel, Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (A Cold War International History Project) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) and Sergey Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964 (A Cold War International History Project) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Compilations or syntheses drawn from the Archive include Malcolm Byrne and Mark J. Gasiorowski, eds., Mohammed Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004); Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability: A National Security Archive Book (New York: New Press: 2003); and National Security Archive, Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (New York: Warner Books, 1987). Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). William M. Leogrande, Our Own Backyard: The US in Central America, 1979–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Richard Cottam, Iran and the United States: A Cold War Case Study (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988). Mark Gasiorowski, United States Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Milton Bearden, “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires,” Foreign Affairs 80, no. 6 (November/December 2001): 17–30. Charles G. Cogan “Partners in Time: The CIA and Afghanistan since 1979,” World Policy Journal (Summer, 1993): 73–82. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History—the Arming of the Mujahideen (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000); the title reflects a rare use of the word before the 9/11/01 attack on the U.S. Irene Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield: US Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–58 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Tom Farer, Human Rights and Foreign Policy: What the Kurds Learned (A Drama in One Act) (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Institute for Diplomacy, Case Study 515, 1993). Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983): 542n. David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (New York: Random House, 1965). U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), “Diem,” Part III.E, in Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975). Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the US, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942–1992 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Roger Warner, Backfire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). William Shawcross, Side-Show: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). Prince Norodom Sihanouk, My War with the CIA: The Memoirs of Prince Sihanouk (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

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26 National Security Archive, “State Historians Conclude US Passed Names of Communists to Indonesian Army, Which Killed at Least 105,000 in 1965–66,” July 27, 2001, available at www.gwu. edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/, accessed March 1, 2012. See also Jaechun Kim, “US Covert Action in Indonesia in the 1960s,” Journal of International and Area Studies 9, no. 2 (December 2002): 63–85; and Peter Dale Scott, “The US and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967,” Pacific Affairs 58 (1985): 239–264. 27 William Burr and Michael L. Evans, eds., “East Timor Revisited: Ford, Kissinger, and the Indonesian Invasion, 1975–76,” National Security Archive, December 6, 2001, available at www.gwu. edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/, accessed March 1, 2012. Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War against East Timor (London: Zed Books, 1984). 28 David N. Gibbs, Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money and US Policy in the Congo (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Sean Kelly, America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993). 29 Ernst Harsch and Tony Thomas, Angola: The Hidden History of Washington’s War (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977). George Wright, The Destruction of a Nation: United States’ Policy toward Angola since 1945 (Chicago, IL: Pluto Press, 1997). 30 Jonathan Bearman, Qadhafi’s Libya (London: Zed Books, 1986); also Sullivan, American Adventurism Abroad, 182–186. 31 Ruth Leacock, Requiem for Revolution: the United States and Brazil, 1961–1969 (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 1990). W. Michael Weiss, Cold Warriors and Coups d’Etat: Brazil-US Relations, 1945–1964 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). 32 For the war in El Salvador, see Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: US Policy and El Salvador (New York: Times Books, 1984) and Martin Diskin and Kenneth Sharpe, The Impact of US Policy in El Salador, 1979–1986 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For Nicaragua, see T. Bradford Burns, At War with Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Harper and Row, 1987) and Holly Sklar, Washington’s War on Nicaragua (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1988).

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31 EISENHOWER, KENNEDY, AND THE CIA Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs Joe Renouard

The U.S. interventions in Guatemala (1954) and Cuba (1961) were two of the most significant covert operations of the Cold War era. The Guatemala operation was an extensive campaign to undermine, and ultimately replace, the democratically elected, left-wing Guatemalan president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. President Dwight D. Eisenhower tasked the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with carrying out the operation as part of his policy of hemispheric anticommunism. Eisenhower also approved plans for a regime change in Cuba, against the revolutionary leader Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. The U.S. trained a small army of exiles to re-enter Cuba and foment a counterrevolution. Eisenhower departed the White House before the plan could be carried out, so it was left to President John F. Kennedy to give it the green light. In the ensuing Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA-trained exiles were soundly defeated. The ill-fated invasion convinced Castro to accept Soviet military protection, a pursuit that led directly to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The interventions in Guatemala and Cuba came about primarily because policymakers wanted to prevent the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere while also protecting American business interests. Other motives included domestic political considerations, the desire to maintain international credibility, and the persistent lobbying of discontented Guatemalans and Cubans.1 Many scholars view the period between the Guatemala and Cuba interventions as the CIA’s high-water mark. Because Guatemala was one of the agency’s greatest successes, President Eisenhower came to believe that covert capabilities were a necessary extension of U.S. power in the developing world. These operations were relatively inexpensive, had a high level of “deniability,” and required neither U.S. ground forces nor congressional or public approval. The CIA was thus very influential in Washington in the 1950s. But the Bay of Pigs is still remembered as one of the CIA’s—and Kennedy’s—greatest blunders, essentially shattering the agency’s image of invincibility. The Guatemalan and Cuban cases illustrated the possibilities and limits of covert operations in the third world. When the CIA was created under the National Security Act of 1947, President Harry S. Truman considered it a clearinghouse for intelligence, not a spy agency. It would fall to the Eisenhower administration—especially Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his younger brother, CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles—to transform the agency into a major player in American foreign policy. The Dulles brothers’ enthusiastic support of covert operations fit comfortably within Eisenhower’s “New Look” foreign policy. A career military man, Eisenhower 279

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had personal experience with the wasteful habits of the Pentagon. The costly, unpopular Korean War had further proved to Eisenhower that Americans had a low tolerance for foreign military ventures. Thus he sought to shrink the conventional military and rely on the more cost-effective methods of covert operations and an expanded nuclear arsenal—something his secretary of defense dubbed “more bang for the buck.” The one-two punch of nukes and spies would deter Soviet attacks while also containing communism in the developing world. The CIA would carry out 170 missions in forty-eight nations during Eisenhower’s presidency.2 Guatemala was one of the administration’s earliest concerns. The 1944 “October Revolution” had seen the popularly elected Juan José Arévalo replace the dictatorial military government of Jorge Ubico. The Arévalo government had embarked on a set of reforms that the president called “spiritual socialism.” He believed that these efforts were necessary in a nation beset by grinding poverty and significant ethnic and class divisions. Guatemala’s economy was based on the export of bananas and coffee, and most profits went into the pockets of local elites or foreign investors. In 1951, Guatemalans elected Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, an educated, wealthy, military academy graduate who promised to continue down the path of democratic reform. Washington did not know what to make of Árbenz at first. He was not a communist party member, but he relied on populist, anti-imperialist rhetoric and passed some controversial laws. The major source of contention was his June 1952 land reform decree, which nationalized and redistributed large tracts of fallow land in exchange for financial compensation. A March 1953 CIA intelligence assessment noted that “the influence of communists has been particularly clear in relation to the Agrarian Reform Law,” which had created a bureau “heavily staffed with communists, procommunists, and opportunists.”3 At another time, Árbenz might not have seemed like much of a threat. But this was the McCarthy era, and American policymakers were lining up to showcase their anti-communist bona fides. Legislators and the press soon dubbed Árbenz “Red Jacobo.” After dining with Árbenz, the new U.S. Ambassador John (“Jack”) Peurifoy cabled back to Washington, “If the president is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along.”4 The New Orleans-based United Fruit Company played an important role in this story. La Frutera was one of the most powerful corporations in the Americas, its reputation symbolized by its nickname, El Pulpo (“the octopus”). United Fruit owned 550,000 acres in Guatemala, as well as ships, port docks, and about half of the country’s railways. The company did not accept the land reform decree, nor did it agree on the rate of compensation for the expropriation. The Guatemalan government offered an average of $2.99/acre for 387,000 acres, but the company— through a sternly worded letter from the U.S. State Department—demanded $75/acre. (United Fruit had paid $1.48/acre twenty years earlier.)5 The company lobbied heavily in the offices of the Dulles brothers, who had earlier done legal work for United Fruit. At Eisenhower’s behest, the CIA plotted a regime change. In December 1953, they pieced together a comprehensive plan, Operation PBSUCCESS. The chief goal was to use economic, military, and propaganda methods to sow fear and dissatisfaction inside Guatemala, thus undermining the military’s and the public’s confidence in Árbenz’s leadership. By creating chaos in the capital and convincing the Guatemalan public that anti-Árbenz forces were amassing in the countryside, the CIA hoped to persuade the military to abandon Árbenz. A similar plan had helped the CIA topple the Iranian regime of Mohammed Mosaddeq in August 1953. With a budget of $3 million, the agency paid students to act as anti-communist street demonstrators, bribed senior military officials to shift their allegiances, and convinced the archbishop to ask Catholics to fight communism. In Operation SHERWOOD, they established a pirate radio station that issued anti-communist and anti-Árbenz propaganda.6 CIA headquarters also 280

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generated a “disposal list” of fifty-eight suspected Guatemalan communists who were potential targets of assassination, though the agency soon dropped the idea and refused to sanction such killings.7 A key aspect of PBSUCCESS was cultivation of a U.S.-friendly leader to replace Árbenz. The top candidate was Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a discontented army officer who had been seeking U.S. assistance for a coup. The CIA trained and placed Castillo Armas’s small army of troops at various points just outside Guatemala’s borders. When the CIA discovered that Árbenz had purchased machine guns and rifles from Communist Czechoslovakia, the Eisenhower administration touted the find as proof of Soviet intentions in Latin America. House Speaker John McCormack called the weapons cache “an atom bomb planted in the rear of our backyard.”8 The discovery gave the U.S. a pretext for more overt involvement. U.S. ships blockaded Guatemalan ports, and a disguised American plane dropped leaflets over the presidential palace, imploring the presidential guard to fight the “communists” in the Guatemalan government. The CIA’s pirate radio station issued bogus claims of a huge rebel army amassing on Guatemala’s border. Árbenz countered by declaring a state of emergency, suspending civil liberties, carrying out mass arrests, and even torturing and killing at least seventy-five of the arrestees.9 On June 18, Colonel Castillo Armas’s forces, numbering less than 1,000 men, entered Guatemala and began what proved to be a disastrous campaign. More than half of his men were killed or captured within three days. Of the three aircraft that the U.S. had committed to the mission, two were inoperable, and the third did only minimal damage to non-vital facilities.10 On June 19, when the assault appeared to be failing, Ambassador Peurifoy cabled CIA headquarters, “We have gone as far as we can with talk . . . the govt and Commies are arresting and killing . . . both friend and foe respect force alone. . . . Bomb repeat Bomb.”11 These setbacks put Eisenhower into a difficult position. With world opinion and his own credibility at stake, he wanted the operation to look like a home-grown struggle, not an American invasion. Unwilling to send in U.S. forces, he turned to the good graces of William Pawley, a wealthy businessman who had poured money into the Republicans’ campaign coffers in 1952. Eisenhower and Allen Dulles briefed Pawley on the need for a covert air force to pull Castillo Armas’s chestnuts out of the fire. When Dulles estimated that PBSUCCESS had no chance of succeeding without an infusion of American aircraft, the president said to Pawley, “Bill, go ahead and get the planes.” Pawley then fronted funds for a heavily laundered, clandestine purchase of three F-47 Thunderbolts from Nicaragua. CIA pilots used these aircraft to bomb strategic targets in Guatemala City. The Guatemalan officer corps then began to abandon Árbenz en masse.12 Once it had become clear that the army was deserting, Árbenz resigned in anger on the evening of June 27, saying in an impassioned radio speech to his countrymen, “In whose name have they carried out these barbaric acts? . . . The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company and the other U.S. monopolies.”13 Árbenz handed power to his chief of armed forces, Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz, and the next morning two CIA officers paid Díaz a visit and advised him to step down.14 After several weeks and a succession of military juntas, the CIA and its Guatemalan allies succeeded in placing Castillo Armas into the presidential palace. Despite Árbenz’s harsh indictment of El Pulpo, United Fruit seems to have played only a marginal role in Eisenhower’s decision to intervene. Within the Eisenhower administration and the CIA, the company’s interests were secondary to anti-communism and domestic politics. Guatemalan communist party leader José Manuel Fortuny agreed that American anti-communism had trumped business interests. “They would have overthrown us,” he declared, “even if we had grown no bananas.”15 The immediate results of PBSUCCESS seemed to favor American national interests. The Eisenhower administration touted the successful “rollback” of communism, while the CIA 281

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basked in its reputation of invincibility and United Fruit got the support of a “friendly” regime. Many of Guatemala’s elites, conservatives, and landowners were also satisfied, as was the Church. Castillo Armas was feted with a ticker-tape parade in New York, honorary degrees from Columbia and Fordham, and a state dinner at the White House, where Vice-President Richard Nixon toasted him warmly. “Led by the courageous soldier who is our guest this evening,” said Nixon, “the Guatemalan people revolted against communist rule, which in collapsing, bore graphic witness to its inherent shallowness, falsity, and corruption.”16 But when one considers the operation’s long-term effects, positives are hard to locate. Upon close examination, the coup was a “success” more by luck than by design. Tim Weiner has argued that the mission “succeeded by bribery and coercion and brute force, not secrecy and stealth and cunning.” Nevertheless, it “created the legend that the CIA was a silver bullet in the arsenal of democracy.”17 In the coup’s aftermath, the CIA could not substantiate an ÁrbenzMoscow connection, even with the aid of half a million documents left behind by the Árbenz government. Nor did the coup lay the foundations for liberal democracy. In Castillo Armas’s three years in power—he was assassinated in 1957—his regime’s reputation for corruption and repression did not prevent the enthusiastic backing of Washington.18 As for Jacobo Árbenz, he lived in exile in Europe and Latin America and drowned in the bathtub of his Mexico City residence in 1971. The people of Guatemala paid a tragically high price, enduring years of authoritarian rule and over three decades of a civil war in which upward of 150,000 were killed.19 The U.S. can be said to have lost a major opportunity to be an agent of progress in the developing world. The impoverished nations of Central America needed significant economic and political reforms, not military dictatorships and piecemeal economic aid. Anti-communism and geopolitics arguably led the U.S. to oppose such reforms. “In the Cold War vision of a twocamp world,” writes John Prados, “there was little room for indigenous nationalisms.”20 Piero Gleijeses went even further, accusing the Eisenhower administration of “wanton criminal negligence.”21 The coup also fueled anti-Americanism in Latin America and steeled the resolve of the region’s most zealous revolutionaries, including the young Argentine doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who personally witnessed the Guatemalan events of 1954. It is possible, however, to interpret the Guatemala operation in a more positive light. During the Cold War era, American and Soviet leaders tended to see difficult international issues as tests of their determination. By acting in Guatemala, the U.S. was sending a message to the Kremlin that America would not tolerate communist activity in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, American responsibility for Guatemala’s later descent into civil war is debatable. The nation’s profound troubles were rooted in centuries of colonial rule, feudalism, and political mismanagement; the CIA did not create these problems in 1954. Finally, Árbenz’s support was always limited, so it is possible that domestic political pressures would eventually have forced him to step down even without the coup. Less than five years after the Guatemala operation, a surprising turn of events brought the specter of communism dangerously close to American shores. On the very last day of 1958, revolutionaries in Cuba deposed President Fulgencio Batista. This was particularly troubling because the U.S. had had a special relationship with Cuba since the Spanish–American War (1898). The island nation was only ninety miles from Florida, and over $1 billion in American capital was interwoven into its economy. Furthermore, the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay was a key link in America’s hemispheric defense chain. Batista, an army colonel who had assumed power in a 1952 coup, used American investment and the quasi-legal efforts of mobsters like Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to turn Havana into a tourist Mecca renowned for its resort hotels, casinos, nightclubs, and brothels. In the age of air travel, the city became the 282

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exotic destination of choice for well-heeled Americans. Everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Marlon Brando could be seen downing drinks and rubbing elbows at the famous Tropicana nightclub. But just outside the tourist zones, Cuba looked much like the rest of the third world. Climate, geography, and U.S. investment patterns had shaped the Cuban economy around sugar and tourism. Since most of Cuba’s land, industry, mining, and resorts were owned by Americans and Cuban elites, the poorest citizens benefited little from the influx of dollars. Over two-thirds of rural Cubans lived in thatch-roofed huts with no electricity or running water, and most children received no more than three years of education.22 The political system was equally inequitable. Corruption and cronyism were rampant, and free expression was limited. In short, Batista was yet another undemocratic but anti-communist ally of the United States. The one challenger who would ultimately get the best of Batista was a young lawyer and left-wing nationalist named Fidel Castro. In 1953, Castro led a failed guerrilla assault on the Moncada military barracks. At his trial, he gave an impassioned, patriotic speech in which he assailed the Batista regime and foreign influence in Cuba. He finished with a turn of phrase that has become a part of the national folklore: “¡La historia me absolverá!” (“History will absolve me!”) After being freed in a general amnesty two years later, he fled to Mexico and re-entered Cuba in 1956 with eighty-two revolutionaries to begin a guerrilla campaign headquartered in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Their crusade continued until Batista fled the country on New Year’s Eve 1958, along with tens of thousands of pro-Batista Cubans. By the end of 1959, 100,000 were in the U.S. The U.S. recognized the new regime within a week, but this pragmatic decision masked a high degree of anxiety in Washington. Although Castro was not a communist party member, his nationalistic rhetoric could be disquietingly anti-capitalist and anti-American. His regime also carried out reprisal executions of hundreds of Batista loyalists. Yet he tempered his antiyanqui speeches with signals that he welcomed a rapprochement with the U.S. When VicePresident Nixon met with Castro in Washington in April 1959, Nixon conjectured that the revolutionary was “either incredibly naïve about Communism or is under Communist discipline—my guess is the former.”23 In October 1959, President Eisenhower approved U.S. support for anti-Castro activity. The CIA planned to rely on Cubans both inside and outside Cuba to do the heavy lifting. These groups had a wide variety of ideologies and goals, but they were united in their aversion to the Castro regime.24 Beginning early in 1960, saboteurs set fires, wrecked rail lines, and rigged explosions, while disguised American planes dropped incendiary bombs on sugar cane fields and urban areas, causing tremendous damage to Cuba’s agricultural sector. America’s role was hard to conceal, especially after a pair of American pilots was killed over Cuba and a few others were arrested. When a French freighter delivering weapons exploded in Havana harbor, killing over seventy-five people, Castro considered it the boldest American provocation yet. (Responsibility for the explosion was never proved.)25 In March 1960, Eisenhower green-lighted a comprehensive, four-part CIA plan for Castro’s ouster. The agency would establish a propaganda radio station, cultivate a moderate replacement for Castro, organize anti-Castro operatives inside Cuba, and train an exile paramilitary force. “Our hand should not show in anything that is done,” said Eisenhower to Allen Dulles.26 The CIA amassed ships and aircraft and began training Cuban exiles to carry out a 1,500-man amphibious landing. They set up a radio station off the coast of Honduras and funded other stations broadcasting from vessels. Using a new base and airstrip in Guatemala, they sent weapons and anti-Castro leaflets to their allies in Cuba via clandestine airdrops and ship landings. The CIA also hatched several assassination plots. The proposed methods—including food poisoning, 283

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exploding cigars, hallucinogenic drugs, and even a depilatory powder that would make Castro’s beard fall out—have become the stuff of legend. In 1960–1961, CIA agents even offered the mafia boss Salvatore “Sam” Giancana $150,000 to carry out a hit on Castro. None of these plans succeeded, due in part to Castro’s habit of moving about constantly and dismissing untrusted lieutenants.27 The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were legitimate responses to Castro’s provocations. In 1960, Cuba nationalized millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. property, and Castro’s offers of compensation did little to assuage investors’ anger. By the end of the year, all U.S.-owned enterprises had been expropriated. Castro intimated that he was responding to America’s support of guerrilla violence in Cuba, but he also had economic motives. Many of Cuba’s wealthiest and best-educated citizens had fled with their capital—Batista himself took perhaps $300 million—and foreign-owned entities continued to export most of their profits. Other sources of cash, such as tourism and casinos, had dried up by decree or default. The U.S. fought fire with fire by terminating aid to Cuba, limiting sugar imports, revoking export licenses, and, ultimately, banning virtually all bilateral trade. In 1961, the two countries rang in the new year by cutting formal diplomatic relations. This animosity played right into Soviet hands. At the time of Batista’s ouster, the Caribbean basin was terra incognita to the Soviets. They did not have an embassy in Havana, nor did they have major designs on the Western Hemisphere.28 The Cuban Revolution thus completely changed the Kremlin’s view of what was possible in the third world. Against all odds and without Soviet assistance, Castro had succeeded in an indigenous struggle against an American-backed dictator. For the older Soviet leaders who had participated in the Bolshevik Revolution forty years earlier, the events in Cuba gave a shot in the arm to the Marxist concept of “international proletarian struggle.” As the U.S.–Cuba relationship soured, the Kremlin saw an opportunity. Fidel Castro had no great affection for the USSR, but he needed funds and protection against counterrevolution, assassination, and invasion. In February 1960, the Soviets agreed to trade oil, cash, and manufactured goods for a fixed annual quota of Cuban sugar. They also loaned $100 million and agreed to purchase 700,000 additional tons of Cuban sugar that the U.S. had rejected.29 In September, Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev met in New York while they were attending the United Nations. Cameras captured the curious sight of the tall, bearded revolutionary in military fatigues warmly embracing the diminutive, bald Soviet leader, both men smiling from ear to ear. By the time Kennedy was elected president in November 1960, the CIA’s coup plot was nearly complete. The original concept mirrored the Guatemala operation. After propaganda and sabotage had destabilized the regime, a trained exile force would make an amphibious landing near the town of Trinidad de Cuba and move inland to foment a counterrevolution among disaffected Cubans. Exile pilots would fly eighteen disguised American bombers from Central America to bomb Castro’s thirty-six combat aircraft and to protect the CIA supply ships. The exile force would then establish a provisional government with the backing of the U.S. and its regional allies. If they experienced trouble, they could take to the jungle and re-establish contact with the CIA. President Kennedy made a few adjustments to this plan. Reasoning that the world would not recognize a new, U.S.-friendly government if Washington’s role was too obvious, he reduced the aircraft to eight, and he requested a more remote landing zone near an airstrip so that a provisional government could remain connected to the outside world. The CIA planners went along in the belief that Kennedy would approve additional support if the invasion went awry. They chose a site ninety miles to the west of Trinidad: the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) and its adjoining beach, Playa Girón.30 284

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On April 17, 1961, CIA ships brought U.S. weapons and an army of 1,511 exiles to the Bay of Pigs. Once local authorities detected the invasion, the exiles were quickly outnumbered and pinned down near the beaches. Initial American air support was ineffective. U.S. planes only succeeded in hitting three Cuban planes and killing some civilians, while Castro was able to bomb the resupply ships and fight off the attack. Nevertheless, Kennedy refused to send more planes, due in part to his fear that such heavy-handedness would be matched by a Soviet move on West Berlin. On the second evening of the invasion, the exile commander radioed a dire warning to a CIA officer, “Do you people realize how desperate the situation is? . . . Please don’t desert us.”31 The operation was over within three days. Nearly 1,200 of the exiles had been captured and over 100 had been killed, including four American pilots. Given the plan’s myriad weaknesses, it is hard to pinpoint a single, fatal flaw. Although many have criticized Kennedy for withholding air support, others question whether such support would have altered the outcome.32 The CIA’s survey of the terrain had underestimated the difficulty of landing an invading force amid the area’s mud and mangrove trees. Beyond the logistical and tactical problems, there was the improbability of starting a successful counterrevolution. The CIA was too willing to believe exiles’ assertions that discontented Cubans would welcome the invasion. In fact, many, perhaps most, of Castro’s worst enemies had fled the country, and those who remained were imprisoned, executed, or just kept quiet. Even if anti-Castro sentiment in Cuba had been strong enough to sustain a rebellion, the invasion was a poorly kept secret. As early as 1959, Eastern bloc intelligence agencies learned that the U.S. was training exiles for an invasion.33 Further leaks may have come from the Cuban trainees, the Kennedy administration, or CIA operatives. A January 1961 New York Times headline proclaimed, “U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Air-Ground Base.”34 Three months later, CBS reported that there were “unmistakable signs” that the invasion was imminent. Kennedy was furious. Castro “doesn’t need agents over here,” he fumed to an aide. “All he has to do is read our papers.” Castro, who had long believed that an American invasion was inevitable, imported Soviet-made tanks and anti-aircraft guns and sent his pilots to train in Czechoslovakia.35 Why did Kennedy authorize the invasion? He felt the need to demonstrate American power to the Soviets, and he feared “losing” Cuba in much the same way that the Democrats had been accused of “losing” China in 1949. He may also have been more inclined to act because he was new to the presidency. Moreover, so much time and effort had gone into the invasion plan that it would have seemed callous to call it off. Finally, partisan grandstanding, questionable media reports, and dubious intelligence had transformed the Cuban Revolution into a dire “emergency” for America, arguably far out of proportion to the actual threat. It became a matter of faith in Washington that Castro and his revolution were a danger to the United States. Given these factors, Kennedy had almost no choice but to intervene.36 Yet, although Kennedy took full responsibility for the debacle, Eisenhower also deserves some blame. He escalated the conflict at a time when Castro seemed amenable to an understanding with the U.S. He then accepted that Castro’s removal from power was in America’s national interest. A relatively simple plan to offer covert support to dissidents in Cuba quickly evolved into costly plans for a full-fledged invasion. Eisenhower knew that there were weaknesses in the invasion plan, yet neither his administration nor the CIA fully explained these to Kennedy. They presented the plan as a probable success.37 Two major ex post facto internal investigations found that policymakers and operatives had ignored clear warning signs of failure.38 The Bay of Pigs debacle had lasting significance for the CIA, the Cold War, and U.S.–Latin America relations. Kennedy—unused to failure, and furious that planners had overestimated the 285

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chances of success—lost faith in the military and intelligence communities. He forced Allen Dulles and two deputy directors to resign, and he told an aide that he wanted to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”39 He also blamed the Joint Chiefs of Staff—“those sons-of-bitches with all the fruit salad [who] just sat there nodding, saying it would work.”40 Meanwhile, Fidel Castro emerged as a Cuban national hero for repelling the “invasión yanqui.” On May 1, 1961, he declared that Cuba was officially a socialist country and that “the revolution has no time for elections.”41 Despite Kennedy’s anger, he did not “splinter” the CIA. To the contrary, he gave the agency an active role in his redoubled efforts to oust his Cuban bête noir. In November 1961, he ordered a multipart plan—Operation Mongoose, also called the Cuban Project—to use propaganda, sabotage, and even assassination to help the Cuban people overthrow the regime.42 Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy told the operation’s leaders that the Cuban problem was “the top priority in the United States government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”43 Operation Mongoose continued for several months but came to an abrupt halt on October 14, 1962, when American intelligence discovered the construction of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Thus began a crisis that would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. Taken together, the covert missions in Guatemala and Cuba provide a few major lessons. The successful Guatemala operation helped make the CIA a major part of America’s foreign policy arsenal. But because the Bay of Pigs was such a disaster, the agency would never again be as influential as it had been under President Eisenhower. Irrespective of this failure, American policymakers continued to see nearly every global hotspot as a vital national interest. The combination of the containment doctrine and the fear of “losing” nations to communism led policymakers to maintain their vigilance in the developing world. The Bay of Pigs had taught them that covert support of indigenous resistance was not enough to win the global struggle against communism. Only four years later, President Lyndon Johnson would deploy U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic and, far more significantly, he would send thousands of troops to Vietnam.

Notes 1 Michael Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008), xi–xiii. 2 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 70, 76. 3 National Intelligence Survey, March 1953, CIA FOIA, available at www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/ files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000914961.pdf, accessed August 1, 2012. 4 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 94. 5 Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 54–55, 72–77. 6 Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), xv. 7 Ibid., 137–142; Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 97. 8 Cullather, Secret History, 79. 9 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 99. 10 Ibid., 100–101. 11 Cullather, Secret History, 161–162. 12 Max Holland, “Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy: William Pawley and the 1954 Coup d’Etat in Guatemala,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 36–73; Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 102–103. 13 Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 199–200. 14 Cullather, Secret History, 101–102.

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15 Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 7. 16 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 118. 17 Ibid., 80. 18 Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 232–233. 19 Cullather, Secret History, 113–123, xxiii–xxxvi. 20 John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2006), 122. 21 Cullather, Secret History, xxxiii. 22 Grow, U.S. Presidents, 29–30. 23 Memcon, April 25, 1959, National Security Archive, available at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/19590425.pdf, accessed August 1, 2012. 24 Prados, Safe for Democracy, 218–219. 25 Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New York: Oxford, 2010), 17–18; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble:” Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 40–55. 26 Memcon, March 17, 1960, FRUS, available at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus195860v06/d486, accessed August 1, 2012. 27 Prados, Safe for Democracy, 215–217, 228–229; CIA, “Survey of the Cuban Operation and Associated Documents,” in Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press, 1998). 28 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 12. 29 Michael S. Mayer, The Eisenhower Years (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 198–200. 30 Grayston L. Lynch, Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs (Dulles: Potomac Books, 2000), 37–45. 31 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 176. 32 James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), 87–88, 100–103; Lynch, Decision for Disaster, 80–81. 33 Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 36, n6. 34 Paul P. Kennedy, “U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force,” New York Times, January 10, 1961, 1. 35 Jones, The Bay of Pigs, 68, 42–43. 36 Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner’s, 2011), xv–xvi; Grow, U.S. Presidents, 52–56. 37 Prados, Safe for Democracy, 234–235. 38 Inspector General’s Survey; Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 179; The Ultrasensitive Bay of Pigs, National Security Archive, available at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB29/index.html, accessed August 1, 2012. 39 Tom Wicker, John W. Finney, Max Frankel, and E.W. Kenworthy, “CIA: Maker of Policy, or Tool?,” New York Times, April 25, 1966, 1. 40 Jones, The Bay of Pigs, 131. 41 Patrick Symmes, The Boys from Dolores (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 236. 42 John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 377–378; Jones, The Bay of Pigs, 155–159. 43 Helms to McCone, January 19, 1962, FRUS, available at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ frus1961-63v10/d292, accessed March 23, 2012.

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32 U.S. CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS IN CHILE 1970–1973 Lubna Z. Qureshi

During the Cold War, U.S. policymakers followed events in Latin America with grave concern. Washington justified their frequent interventions in Latin American affairs with the argument that, if it did not do so, Moscow would quickly step in. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 gave this argument some substance. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev regarded his Cuban counterpart, the communist Fidel Castro, as a vital collaborator in his challenge to the capitalist superpower. For Khrushchev, communist Cuba would serve as an example for the rest of the developing world. Aid arrived in Cuba in the form of economic assistance, but military hardware from the Soviet Union also came, including nuclear missiles. Understandably, President John F. Kennedy and his advisors could not tolerate the presence of nuclear missiles ninety miles away from Florida. At the same time, it remains questionable whether Cuba would have accepted Soviet missiles, or if Khrushchev would even have offered them, had Castro not felt so threatened by the United States.1 In other historical instances of American intervention, policymakers offered far less substantial evidence of Soviet involvement to defend their actions. One example was the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala. While Arbenz was merely a socialist with a commitment to reform, Washington mistook him for a communist proxy for Moscow.2 Still, some policymakers may have found such a mistake convenient to make, even though honest errors were always possible in an appraisal of the Guatemalan political scene. By the time Salvador Allende, another socialist, came to power in Chile in 1970, honest errors were no longer possible. It was obvious what kind of man and politician Allende really was, not that it mattered to President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. They had their own agenda. In their implementation of détente, Nixon and Kissinger sought to preserve America’s status as the dominant world power. Nevertheless, they managed to treat their counterparts in negotiation, Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union and Mao Tse-Tung of China, as equals. This was not the case with Latin America. That area was part of the unofficial empire of the United States. Although the Latin American states were nominally independent nations, Washington effectively manipulated their economic and political systems. Many Latin Americans challenged this manipulation. As tensions with the Soviet Union relaxed, what Nixon and Kissinger dreaded was not armed conflict with the communist superpower over Latin America, but nationalism within the region itself. For the Nixon administration, Allende was a dangerous representative of this nationalist impulse.3 288

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The president and the national security advisor had a special contempt for Latin Americans. Undoubtedly, Nixon and Kissinger were influenced by the cultural prejudice against Latin America that was so prevalent within the United States in their intellectually formative years. From their own geostrategic perspective, they also had little reason to respect Latin America, a region that had repeatedly come under the domination of foreign powers since the Age of Exploration. Both men equated civilization with force; therefore, they regarded subject nations as uncivilized and unworthy of self-determination. The president doubted the capacity of speakers of all the Romantic tongues, not just Spanish, for self-government. He went so far as to compliment the authoritarian style of former President Charles de Gaulle.4 As far as Nixon’s national security advisor was concerned, the profound issues of war and peace concerned only Europe and Asia. Latin America simply did not count. In June of 1969, the Chilean foreign minister complained about the exploitative nature of U.S. assistance when he visited Washington. Kissinger dismissed his Chilean visitor with the claim that Latin America had no importance at all.5 In Chile, the presidential campaign of the socialist Salvador Allende challenged that assumption. He came to power representing the leftist coalition known as the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity. His opponents were Radomiro Tomic of the Christian Democratic Party, and Jorge Alessandri of the National Party. There were communist members of the UP, but their influence was negligible. Most of the members were just described as progressives who favored reforms that Western Europeans already took for granted, including universal health care, land reform, and a living wage. Many of Allende’s reforms would come at the expense of U.S. corporate interests. Even though Allende envisioned a socialist Chile that allowed room for private enterprise, he intended to nationalize key industries, including telecommunications and copper, many of which were foreign owned.6 For example, the U.S. corporation International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) owned the Chilean Telephone Company, or Chiltelco. Chiltelco charged exorbitant rates and neglected to provide poorer areas of Chile with adequate service, so Allende vowed to nationalize the telephone industry.7 The socialist candidate’s determination to nationalize the copper industry was far more significant, for copper was Chile’s most important export and was almost exclusively under foreign control. The leading copper corporations, Anaconda and Kennecott, were American. Allende’s predecessor, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, realized the situation was untenable, and offered to partially purchase these companies in a process known as Chileanization.8 The corporations agreed, but purposely inflated the book value of their Chilean assets. For example, Kennecott, whose assets in Chile were worth $65 million, collected $81.6 million for only 51 percent of its El Teniente mine, and one-fourth of two other mines. Furthermore, control over the management, extraction, and sale of copper remained in U.S. hands.9 In Allende’s view, the drawbacks of Chileanization justified the nationalization of the copper industry as a whole. Undoubtedly, Allende also believed that he had international law and precedent on his side. In Resolution 1803, the UN General Assembly on December 14, 1962 had declared “the inalienable right of all States freely to dispose of their natural wealth and resources in accordance with their national interests.”10 Rather than insisting on “prompt, adequate, and effective compensation,” the phrasing favored by Washington policymakers, Resolution 1803 only called for “appropriate compensation,” which can be broadly interpreted.11 Understandably, business leaders in the United States felt threatened. One such businessman was Donald Kendall, the chief executive officer of Pepsico. Kendall enjoyed considerable influence with the Nixon administration. There were Pepsi bottling plants all over Latin America, 289

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and Kendall did not want expropriation to become a regional trend. Displeased by the prospect of an Allende presidency, the corporate executive visited Nixon at the White House to warn him against a second Cuba.12 Additionally, Nixon had a close relationship with Harold S. Geneen, the chairman and chief executive of ITT. Geneen even sailed on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia. ITT promised to sponsor the 1972 Republican National Convention. In fact, the ties were so strong that Nixon intervened in an antitrust suit brought against ITT by his own Justice Department.13 As long as Allende remained an ideological threat, the Nixon administration would also maintain contact with executives from Anaconda, Kennecott, the Bank of America, and other companies during this period.14 Since the Nixon administration did not favor either of Allende’s opponents, it focused on a propaganda campaign against Allende himself, appropriating at least $300,000 for that purpose.15 Cold War considerations had no substantial impact on White House policy, for the administration did not fear that the election of Allende would turn Chile into a Soviet satellite. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) produced no evidence that he would. CIA Director Richard Helms noted the Soviet Union’s cool approach toward Chile, and the reciprocal eagerness of the Chilean left to maintain some distance.16 During the Allende administration, the Soviet Union provided Chile with little aid. The Soviet experience with Cuba over the last decade had soured its interest in superpower sponsorship of Latin American countries. Nixon well understood this. Rather, what gnawed at the president was the fear that if Allende liberated his country from economic dependence, other Latin American states would follow the Chilean example.17 Although domestic political pressures often compelled Nixon’s Cold War predecessors to deal aggressively with communist and socialist regimes, the new age of détente allowed the Republican president greater freedom of action.18 Republican members of Congress would have had nothing to gain by charging Nixon with appeasement of radical Chile. Furthermore, the Democrats, who controlled the chambers of the legislative branch, did not share Nixon’s antipathy to Allende. None of the recently declassified documents and tapes revealed any concern on Nixon’s part that domestic rivals would exploit the developments in Chile for political advantage. On September 4, 1970, Allende won the presidential election, to the enormous surprise of the United States. Eleven days later, Nixon summoned CIA Director Helms to the Oval Office. As his superior issued orders with the promised budget of $10 million or more, Helms took notes to “save Chile, . . . no involvement of embassy, make the economy scream.”19 The campaign against Allende had two tracks. The first track involved bribing members of the Chilean legislature, who would select the president because the victor did not win a majority of the popular vote. Managing to resist this attempted bribery, the legislators certified Allende’s election on October 24, 1970.20 Like Nixon himself, who won the presidential election against Hubert Humphrey by less than 1 percent of the popular vote in 1968, Allende was now a minority president. Track I failed, but Track II almost succeeded. A more deeply classified operation, Track II was the arrangement for the kidnapping and assassination of the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, General René Schneider.21 Unlike many Chilean officers, Schneider was staunchly loyal to the Chilean constitution, and adhered to the concept of military subordination to civilian authority. His elimination would make military intervention in Chilean politics possible. With Kissinger’s approval, the CIA cultivated relations with two fanatically right-wing generals, Roberto Viaux and Camilo Valenzuela. Growing worried that the plot would fail, Kissinger ordered Viaux to postpone it for a more propitious time, assuring him of his continued support.22 290

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Instead of calling off the plot, Kissinger merely tried to postpone it. When the time appeared opportune, the CIA provided both Chilean officers with aid. For the task at hand, CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia delivered submachine guns and ammunition to its station in the Chilean capital of Santiago.23 These submachine guns and ammunition were intended for Viaux. For Valenzuela, the CIA would also provide three untraceable submachine guns, six tear-gas grenades, and 500 pounds of ammunition.24 The first attempt at abduction on October 19 failed, but the Santiago station assured Washington that a second try would be made on the following day.25 Cryptically, CIA headquarters asked if the “[censored] stag party took place.”26 The celebration finally took place on October 22, 1970. Viaux and his team, which included associates of Valenzuela, finally apprehended General Schneider by colliding with his car. Then, according to a report by the Chilean military police, “five individuals, one of whom, making a blunt instrument similar to a sledgehammer, broke the rear window and then fired at General Schneider, striking him in the region of the spleen, in the left shoulder, and in the left wrist.” Schneider died three days later.27 In spite of these covert efforts, Allende assumed the presidency of Chile on November 2, 1970. Not even Kissinger could deny the fairness of the procedure, but what he really feared was the legitimate election of a “Marxist.”28 Allende, who came to power by constitutional means, was indeed a Marxist, but he had little in common with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but that distinction remained irrelevant to the legendary practitioner of realpolitik. Behind closed doors, the national security advisor vowed: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”29 Hoping to destabilize the Allende presidency, as well as punish Chile for the expropriation of the copper industry, Nixon imposed a credit blockade. From 1964 to 1971, the South American country had collected more than $1 billion from the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Agency for International Development. Now, it would receive nothing. Since the United States possessed 23 percent of the votes in the World Bank, and dominated the Inter-American Development Bank, this meant an end to any new loans from these ostensibly international institutions. Of course, the other banks were federal agencies.30 This had a devastating impact on a third world country whose development vitally required international credit. In his memoirs, Kissinger justified the credit blockade, recalling the president vowed to make immediate use of the Hickenlooper Amendment.31 Application of the amendment would inhibit any State Department efforts to conciliate Chile. Kissinger later claimed that the president imposed the credit blockade because the Hickenlooper Amendment, as federal law, required him to do so.32 Originally attached in 1962 to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the Hickenlooper Amendment denied aid to nations that confiscated property belonging to U.S. corporations or citizens in violation of established standards of compensation.33 The wording of legislation was not particularly rigid. The Hickenlooper Amendment would only be applicable in cases not contrary to international law ... or in any case with respect to which the President determines that application of the act of state doctrine is required in that particular case by the foreign policy interests of the United States and a suggestion to this effect is filed on his behalf in that case [in a U.S. court].34 The application of the Hickenlooper Amendment to Chile has become the subject of some historiographical controversy. Many scholars attest that Washington never formally employed 291

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the amendment against the Latin American nation. In the view of some experts, it was invoked only two times: against Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1963, and Ethiopia in 1979.35 Yet it is unclear whether the application of the Hickenlooper Amendment even necessitated a formal process of invocation. Moreover, it would be a mistake to dwell on this point, for the value of the Hickenlooper Amendment was largely symbolic. Far more than a law, the amendment was a guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy. It served as a reminder to Chile that American aid to foreign countries always came with self-serving conditions. Tellingly, Secretary of State William P. Rogers threatened to use the Hickenlooper Amendment as punishment for Chile’s uncompensated expropriation.36 Furthermore, Nixon publicly and directly attributed the credit blockade to the expropriation.37 Administration policy would not only affect bilateral aid. Nixon added that Washington would work to deny loans from the multilateral banks as well.38 Reporters were led to understand that the cutoff was based on the Hickenlooper Amendment.39 The Nixon administration may not have formally invoked the amendment, but it was applied all the same. Significantly, aid to the Chilean military jumped sharply in 1971, and then steadily increased. For fiscal 1970, the United States had provided the Chilean armed forces with a mere $800,000 in aid. Since the Nixon administration could not envision an Allende victory at that point, it saw little need to invest in the Chilean armed forces. Once Allende assumed the presidential sash, however, Nixon and Kissinger perceived a profound threat to American interests. Military aid multiplied more than sevenfold for the following fiscal year, to $5.7 million. In fiscal 1972, this financial assistance doubled to $12.3 million. During fiscal years 1973 and 1974, the time of Allende’s fall, military aid finally stabilized, increasing only from $15 to $15.9 million.40 Throughout this period, the CIA carefully cultivated important officers in the Chilean military, such as General Augusto Pinochet, a formerly strict constitutionalist who would soon acknowledge “harboring second thoughts: that Allende must be forced to step down or be eliminated.”41 Undoubtedly, the credit blockade hurt the Chilean economy, but Allende’s economic policies had weaknesses of their own. The wage increases and redistribution of wealth within Chile increased consumer demand. Indeed, some poor Chileans could now add meat to their diets for the first time. This increased demand led to shortages and inflation. The Chilean president did not adequately consider the consequences of his economic agenda as he implemented it.42 Nevertheless, Allende could have better guided his country’s development with adequate financial support. Save for the collusion of U.S. copper interests with the Nixon administration, the unrestricted opportunity to sell Chilean copper abroad could have made a difference as well.43 When Allende traveled to New York to speak at the United Nations in December of 1972, he remained highly critical of the impact of the United States on his country. Allende condemned American copper companies for having drained Chile of more than $4 billion in national wealth over a forty-year period, while 600,000 Chilean children suffered from mental retardation due to malnutrition.44 At the same time, Allende also expressed respect for American history and ideals by quoting Thomas Jefferson’s critical words about the merchant class.45 As the Chilean economy destabilized, domestic opposition increased, exacerbated by Washington. In the fall of 1972, the White House appropriated $1,427,666 to be divided, at least partly, among the Christian Democratic Party, the National Party, the Democratic Radical Party, and the Independent Radical Party for the congressional elections the following year.46 Nevertheless, these covert donations failed to prevent the UP coalition from gaining 44 percent of the vote, a remarkable increase compared to the 36.4 percent share won in 1970. Since the anti-UP parties still lacked a two-thirds majority in the Chilean Congress, they could not veto Allende’s legislative agenda.47 292

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Because of a currency shortage, the bourgeoisie could no longer buy the luxury goods which they had enjoyed so much. Doctors and other professionals demanded that Allende step down. Although Allende faced some opposition from the extreme left, Allende’s opponents within the bourgeoisie sponsored a series of strikes and demonstrations.48 In the fall of 1972 and summer of 1973, owners of the trucking industry engaged in strikes that devastated Chile because the Andean nation lacked an extensive railway system. By stopping the delivery of vitally needed goods, the economy came to a standstill. One journalist asked the truckers, who were dining extravagantly, where their money came from. “From the CIA,” they laughed.49 Despite the recent UP victory, the opposition was strong enough to convince the Chilean military that the time was ripe for a coup. The CIA knew that the coup would take place on September 11.50 As scheduled, the Chilean military overthrew Salvador Allende. As the army surrounded the presidential palace, La Casa Moneda, the air force bombed it from the skies. Determined to maintain the dignity and integrity of his office, the Chilean president refused to surrender. Allende’s personal physician then found him dead, with a machine gun in his lap.51 As with many aspects of Allende’s life, his death remains controversial. Allende’s supporters found it difficult to accept the idea that the Chilean president had committed suicide, preferring to believe that the Chilean military had simply murdered him. When the future French president François Mitterand had visited Chile in 1971, Allende revealed his contingency plan to follow the example of his own predecessor, President José Manuel Balmaceda, who had killed himself in 1891.52 Although the Chilean president’s relatives already believed that he had killed himself, they authorized a second autopsy in 2011 to settle the matter. The second autopsy concluded that Allende had died by his own hand.53 In the end, however, it probably matters little whether Allende resorted to suicide. He never had the option of escape. Had the Chilean president taken the plotters’ offer of a flight out of the country, General Pinochet laughingly implied that he never would have reached his destination.54 General Pinochet, whom Allende had just appointed commander-in-chief of the army only weeks before, emerged as the leader of the new military junta. Nixon and Kissinger had no regrets. The new secretary of state credited the president and himself for the fall of Chilean democracy.55 Pinochet reversed the reforms of Allende, turning Chile into a neoliberal haven. Although the copper mines remained in public hands, Pinochet compensated the U.S. copper companies.56 For the next seventeen years, the Chilean people lived under his brutal dictatorship. An estimated 3,500 to 4,000 Chileans were killed during the Pinochet regime.57 At least 28,000 people endured torture at the hands of the military authorities.58 Not only Chileans fell victim to the military dictatorship. Two Americans perished in the immediate aftermath of the coup. Charles Horman, a Harvard-educated journalist living in Chile, was arrested at his Santiago home on September 17, 1973.59 His dead body was discovered more than a month later.60 Frank Teruggi, an American graduate student in economics at the University of Chile, was also seized at his home. He was later found shot in the head.61 Despite the repercussions of Washington’s involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile, the U.S. imperium in Latin America was preserved. In the years after the putsch, Nixon and Kissinger attributed Allende’s fall to his own failings.62 They also implied that the late Chilean president had been under the power of the Soviet Union, although their implications lacked the support of strong evidence. Historically speaking, Chile was only one example of many U.S. interventions in Latin America that took place when Washington was engaged in its superpower rivalry with Moscow. With the demise of the Soviet Union, we can look back on the Cold War with a clearer perspective. Had the Cold War had a decisive impact on U.S. policy in Latin America before the final Soviet decline, we would have seen a change by now. Instead, U.S. policy 293

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remains unaltered. Regardless of the loss of its Soviet sponsor, Cuba remains a pariah, ostracized by the United States. Moreover, Washington’s possible sponsorship of an unsuccessful coup in Venezuela in 2002, and a successful one in Honduras seven years later, indicates the doomed Allende was not the last of his kind.63 In conclusion, the Cold War justified the course of U.S.– Latin American relations, but did not determine it.

Notes 1 See Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Steven G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 2 See Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 3 See Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). Kristian Gustafson, Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile (Washington: Potomac Books, 2007). Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 4 Oval Office Conversation: March 5, 1971, 8:30 a.m.–10:15 a.m. Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and Richard Helms. Tape 462–005, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California (hereafter referred to as Nixon Library) and http://nixontapes.org. 5 Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 263. 6 Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 246. 7 Testimony of Hal Hendrix, “Multinational Corporations and United States Foreign Policy,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations on the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-Third Congress, on the International Telephone and Telegraph, 1970–1971 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 128–129. 8 Hersh, The Price of Power, 260. 9 Hersh, The Price of Power, 261n. Albert L. Michaels, “The Alliance for Progress and Chile’s ‘Revolution in Liberty,’ 1964–1970,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 18, no. 1 (February 1976): 85. Susanne Bodenheimer, “Stagnation in Liberty—The Frei Experiment,” in North American Congress on Latin America, New Chile (Berkeley, CA and New York: Waller Press, 1973), 122. 10 Adeoye A. Akinsanya, “Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources and the Future of Foreign Investment,” Nigerian Journal of International Affairs 5, nos. 1 and 2 (1979): 75. See also Adeoye A. Akinsanya, The Expropriation of Multinational Property in the Third World (New York: Praeger, 1980) and James N. Hyde, “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Wealth and Resources,” The American Journal of International Law 50, no. 4 (October 1956). 11 Akinsanya, “Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources,” 76. 12 Hersh, The Price of Power, 273. Telephone Conversation, Donald Kendall and Henry Kissinger, September 14, 1970, 10:20a.m., courtesy of John Powers, Nixon Library. 1971 Annual Report of the Pepsico Corporation, Historical Corporate Collection of the Library of the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. 13 Robert Sobel, I.T.T.: The Management of Opportunity (New York: Times Books, 1982), 254, 279, 282–283. Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 436. Jack Anderson with George Clifford, The Anderson Papers (New York: Random House, 1973), 34–37. Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State of ITT (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), 173, 201. 14 Memorandum for the Files, “Multinational Corporations and United States Foreign Policy,” Appendix to the Hearings before the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 1077. Letter from L. Ralph Mecham of Anaconda to Chairman of the Board C. Jay Parkinson, February 10, 1971. “Multinational Corporations and United States Foreign Policy,” Appendix to the Hearings before the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 1009. 15 Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 400. 16 Richard Helms, CIA Briefing for the National Security Council, November 6, 1970. CIA Collection, FOIA website.

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17 Oval Office Conversation: June 11, 1971, 9:37am–10:36am. Nixon, Haldeman, and Kissinger. Tape 517–4, Nixon Library and http://nixontapes.org. 18 See Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) and Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 19 Richard Helms, Notes from Meeting with President Nixon, September 15, 1970. Courtesy of the National Security Archive website: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/ch26-01.htm, accessed on May 27, 2011. 20 Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, 404. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 671. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 489. Hersh, The Price of Power, 278. Memorandum, “Phase II Planning,” August 23, 1970, Attachment to “Presidential Politics in Chile: Waiting for Don Jorge?,” CIA Memorandum, Office of National Estimates, August 6, 1969, Box 128, NSC Files, HAK Office Files, Country Files, Latin America, Nixon Library. 21 CIA Document, “Track II,” October 25, 1974, FOIA website. Memorandum from Henry A. Kissinger to President Nixon, “Subject: Chile,” September 17, 1970, courtesy of the National Security Archive. 22 CIA Memorandum of Conversation, “Dr. Kissinger, Mr. Karamessines, Gen. Haig at the White House,” October 15, 1970, FOIA website. 23 CIA Cable from Headquarters to Santiago Station, October 18, 1970, FOIA website. 24 CIA Cable from Headquarters to Santiago Station, October 20, 1970, FOIA website. Hersh, The Price of Power, 288. 25 CIA Cable from Santiago Station to Washington, October 20, 1970, FOIA website. 26 Ibid. 27 Hersh, The Price of Power, 290. 28 Memorandum from Kissinger to President Nixon, “NSC Meeting, November 6 – Chile,” November 5, 1970. Box H-29, Folder 8, NSC Meetings, Nixon Library. 29 “Memorandum for the Record: Minutes of the Meeting of the 40 Committee, 25 March 1970,” March 30, 1970, NSC Files, Country Files, Latin America, Box 128 Nixon Library. “Why Did the U.S. Government Not Take More Vigorous Political Action Measures to Prevent the Election of the Marxist Candidate, Salvador Allende, as President of Chile?” March 4, 1971, NSC Files, Country Files, Latin America, Box 128, Nixon Library. 30 Federico Gil, “Socialist Chile and the United States,” Inter-American Economic Affairs 27, no. 2 (Autumn 1973): 43. 31 Henry Kissinger, White House Years, 676. 32 Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982), 376. 33 Foreign Assistance Act of 1964, P.L. 88–633 § 301 (d)(4) (1964). 78 Stat. 1009, 1013. 22 U.S.C.A. § 2370 (e)(2). 34 Ibid. 35 Noel Maurer, “Brazil, the Empire Trap, and the Hickenlooper Amendment,” Harvard Business School, February 20, 2011. R.B. Lillich, “Requiem for Hickenlooper,” The American Journal of International Law 69, no. 1 (January 1975): 69. Kristian Gustafson, Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile 1964–1974 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 151. 36 Marilyn Berger, “Chile Aid Cut Held Possible By State Department,” Washington Post, October 23, 1971, A12. 37 Carroll Kilpatrick, “President Warns of Aid Cutoff When U.S. Property is Seized,” Washington Post, January 20, 1972, A1. 38 UPI, “Countries Seizing U.S. Firms Face Loss of Aid,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1972, A30. 39 Kilpatrick, The Washington Post, January 20, 1972. UPI, Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1972. 40 E-mail exchange with Professor Noel Maurer, Harvard Business School, April 27, 2011. Anand Toprani and Richard A. Moss, “Filling the Three-Year Gap: Nixon, Allende, and the White House Tapes, 1971–73,” Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations 41, no. 3 (January 2011): 8. United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile: 1963–1973 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 34. 41 “Chile: Likelihood and Possible Consequences of a Military Coup,” September 13, 1972, CIA Collection, FOIA website.

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42 Edward Boorstein, Allende’s Chile: An Inside View (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 111. Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 151. Jorge Arrate, Conversation with author, Santiago, Chile, June 20, 2005. 43 Gil, “Socialist Chile and the United States,” 41. “Kennecott Declares War,” in North American Congress on Latin America, New Chile (Berkeley, CA and New York: Waller Press, 1973), 199. 44 Salvador Allende, Chile: No More Dependence! (Nottingham, UK: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1973), 6. 45 Salvador Allende, Chile: No More Dependence!, 11. 46 “Covert Support for Chilean Opposition Looking to March 1973 Congressional Elections,” State Department Memorandum for Ambassador Johnson, State Department Collection, FOIA website. Cable to Santiago Station, October 12, 1972, CIA Collection, FOIA website. “FY 1972 Amendment No. 1 to Project [censored],” Memorandum for Deputy Director of Plans, March 9, 1972, CIA Collection, FOIA website. “Briefing on Covert Operations,” Memorandum for the Deputy Secretary, October 11, 1972, State Department Collection, FOIA website. 47 Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, 86. 48 Margaret Power, Right-wing Women in Chile, 1964–1973 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 148, 155–56, 156n, 10. 49 William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military Interventions and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), 213. 50 CIA Information Report, September 10, 1973, CIA Collection, FOIA website. Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003), 112. 51 Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile (New York: Verso, 2005), 222. 52 Associated Press, “Socialist Says Allende Once Spoke of Suicide,” New York Times, September 12, 1973. 53 Alexei Barrionuevo, “Allende Family Hopes Autopsy Resolves Mystery,” New York Times, May 24, 2011, A1. Alexei Barrionuevo and Pascale Bonnefoy, “Allende’s Death was a Suicide, an Autopsy Concludes,” New York Times, July 19, 2011, A4. 54 Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, 113. 55 Telephone Conversation, President Nixon/Henry Kissinger, 11:50 a.m., September 16, 1973. Courtesy of John Powers, Nixon Library. 56 Jorge Arrate, Conversation with author, Santiago, Chile, June 20, 2005. 57 Presentation by Elizabeth Farnsworth on her documentary on Judge Juan Guzman, the University of California, Berkeley, March 6, 2006. Larry Rohter, “The Saturday Profile: Shining a Light into the Abyss of Chile’s Dictatorship,” The New York Times, February 25, 2006. 58 “Para Nunca Más Vivirlo, Nunca Más Negarlo,” Prologo: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, Chilean Interior Ministry, 2004–2005, 5. 59 Thomas Hauser, Missing: The Execution of Charles Horman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 37–39, 95. Also see Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile. 60 Ibid., 169–172. 61 Hauser, Missing, 140–142, 147. Lewis H. Diuguid, “A Student’s Disputed Death,” Washington Post, June 20, 1976. Steven Volk, “Seeking Justice in Chile: A Personal History,” June 26, 2002, Oberlin College Faculty Observations: www.oberlin.edu/news-info/observations/observations_steven_volk1. html, accessed June 7, 2008. 62 See Henry A. Kissinger’s White House Years and Years of Upheaval. See also Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon and Sir David Frost’s Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). 63 Ed Vulliamy, “The Observer: Venezuela Coup Linked to Bush Team: Specialists in the ‘Dirty Wars’ of the Eighties Encouraged the Plotters who Tried to Topple President Chavez,” Guardian, April 21, 2002. Mark Weisbrot, “Does the US Back the Honduran Coup? The Obama Administration’s Condemnation of the Coup in Honduras Has Been Lukewarm Compared to the Rest of the World,” Guardian, July 1, 2009.

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33 U.S. TROOPS AS AN INSTRUMENT IN FOREIGN POLICY The Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983 Kyle Longley In 1966, Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) issued a blistering critique of President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to deploy U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965. The powerful, normally pro-administration chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stressed in his book, The Arrogance of Power, that the United States increasingly found itself identified with reactionary regimes in Latin America due to its paranoia over the establishment of another Cuba under Fidel Castro. He lamented the return to the use of American military power, drawing parallels to the growing tide of discontent with the increase of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The pugnacious, erudite Fulbright concluded that, with the Dominican intervention, “we thus lent credence to the idea that the United States is the enemy of social revolution and therefore the enemy of social justice in Latin America.”1 The use of the military by the United States in 1965 in the Dominican Republic, and later in 1983 in Grenada, re-established a pattern of a reliance on force to secure regime change in countries American leaders perceived as important to American strategic and economic aims. The Johnson and Reagan presidencies rejected calls for non-intervention in the affairs of the other nations, something pushed by Latin Americans and some Americans for many years. Driven by communist paranoia, the administrations undermined U.S. credibility in the region in return for short-term gains. The two interventions re-established the precedents, ones with long-term consequences that shaped U.S. relations with its southern neighbors. In essence, the interventions in the Dominican Republic and Grenada constituted a reinforcement of consistent patterns in U.S. relations with the countries of the Caribbean Basin. Heavy-handed military involvements combined with cultural and economic dominance of the region after the countries gained independence from Spain and France in the early 1800s to create the standard relationship. It began with the massive war of conquest in the 1840s in Mexico and continued through the late nineteenth century with the Spanish–American War. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, U.S. Marines landed in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti and threatened to do so in numerous other instances. Such occupations proved costly in terms of human life and resources, as well as international prestige, as Latin Americans in particular denounced military interventions, damaging U.S. relations with the region.2 297

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While the announcement of the “Good Neighbor” Policy in the early 1930s rejected the use of force as a means of diplomacy, the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s changed priorities. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations relied heavily on covert actions and other forms of economic and diplomatic coercion to promote U.S. concerns in the region, especially as Washington sought to concentrate on other regions outside of the Western Hemisphere.3 The Cold War in Latin America changed dramatically with the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959. His move into the orbit of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s and the harsh response of the Kennedy administration through the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose created an obsession throughout the national security bureaucracy with preventing the rise of another Castro.4 When President Johnson took over in 1963, he and his advisors inherited numerous problems in Latin America, including the Dominican Republic. There, the assassination of longtime dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 had created a power vacuum. Into the void stepped Juan Bosch, a respected literary figure and fierce opponent of Trujillo. He returned in 1962 to lead the Dominican Revolutionary Party and promised significant reforms. Elected president by a large margin, he promulgated a new constitution that included labor rights, land reform, and programs for the poor and dispossessed. Immediately, however, he encountered hostility from reactionaries who had enjoyed a relatively free rein in Trujillo’s dictatorship. After only seven months, they overthrew the popular Bosch and established a military junta.5 Originally, the United States refused to recognize the new regime for illegally seizing power, but its position softened over time. By the time President Johnson took power, the ruling junta had promised to hold elections and the United States formally recognized the government. It also pushed for reforms to mute the opposition. The junta proved inefficient and corrupt, however, its members spending an inordinate amount of time on preventing coups within its own ranks. Without a strong man like Trujillo to consolidate power, the political situation remained volatile.6 The powder keg exploded in April 1965. Pro-Bosch supporters, referring to themselves as the Constitutionalists, coalesced into a powerful force. A loose alliance of laborers, small farmers, the poor, and some progressives within the military called for a return of Bosch to complete his term and the reinstallation of the constitution promulgated after the fall of Trujillo.7 Immediately, elites and members of the military leadership rallied against Bosch and the Constitutionalists and labeled themselves as the Loyalists. Led by General Antonio Imbert, they backed a government headed by a former Trujillo crony, Joaquín Balaguer. The Loyalists quickly characterized the opposition as having ties to Castro and the communists. They requested military assistance, including U.S. troops, to foil the perceived communist takeover.8 Inside the White House, President Johnson and his advisors convened to formulate a response to the crisis. The U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo reported that the Constitutionalists had fallen under the “most extremist element.” U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic William Tapley Bennett reported, “All indications point to the fact that if present efforts of forces loyal to the government fail, power will be assumed by groups clearly identified with the Communist Party.”9 McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor, stressed, “One thing is clear: a Castro victory in the D.R. would be the worst political disaster we could possibly suffer.”10 Finally, the president and his advisors decided to intervene, despite the vocal opposition of Fulbright, who had been privy to the debates. On April 28, a small contingent of Marines landed. A few days later, President Johnson made a public statement that there were “signs that people trained outside of the Dominican Republic are seeking to gain control,” a veiled tie to the Soviet Union and Castro.11 Within a short period, Operation “Power Pack” began with more than 23,000 U.S. troops flooding into the Dominican Republic, led by U.S. Army General 298

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Bruce Palmer. “Your announced mission is to save U.S. lives,” Palmer emphasized, “Your unannounced mission is to prevent the Dominican Republic from going Communist . . . you are to take all necessary measures to accomplish this mission.”12 The landing of U.S. troops sparked widespread condemnation throughout Latin America and among various quarters in the United States. Bosch complained, “This was a democratic revolution smashed by the leading democracy of the world.”13 Demonstrations erupted against the United States throughout Latin America, the ghosts of past U.S. interventions rising again as speakers denounced the U.S. violation of the Organization of American States (OAS) charter that prohibited military action against a member state. Latin American governments issued decrees chastising the United States for its violation of sovereignty, and leading democratic voices in the region, including prominent leaders of the democratic left, such as Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela and José Figueres of Costa Rica, sought to broker a peace between the warring parties outside of the purview of the United States.14 Stinging from the criticism, including that developing domestically, the Johnson administration tried to create a coalition of states from across the region. In early May, the United States sought out support from the OAS to create a peacekeeping force. After much diplomatic maneuvering and strong-arming, fourteen countries sided with the United States and created an Inter-American Peace Force (IAPF ). Soon a contingent of 1,700 troops, most from Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, and Costa Rica, headed to the island, commanded by General Hugo Panasco Alvim of Brazil.15 On another front, the Johnson administration tried desperately to link the Constitutionalists to the communists and Castro. The CIA and State Department ultimately produced a roster of fifty-eight names of Dominicans allied with the communists, including Luis Felipe Valentino Giro Alcántara, who Time magazine described as a “Communist fanatic who studied guerrilla warfare in Cuba.”16 However, critics pointed out that many of names on the list were in exile, jail, ill, or had little if any ties to liberal, much less communist organizations. Others underscored that, in a country of millions, less than sixty people hardly constituted a dramatic threat. Despite the growing chorus of criticism from Latin America and also domestically, the Johnson administration pushed forward. U.S. troops placed themselves between the warring factions, claiming impartiality, although many observers reported that the U.S. forces restricted Constitutionalist movements while allowing the Loyalists more freedom of movement. The buffer zone also effectively ended the rebel offensive that had appeared poised to defeat the Loyalist forces and return Bosch to power.17 Under pressure on all fronts, the Johnson administration sought a diplomatic solution. President Johnson dispatched U.S. Ambassador to the OAS Ellsworth Bunker to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power. While he encountered stiff resistance from various quarters, he and others helped successfully iron out an agreement. The parties agreed to create a provisional government headed by Bosch’s foreign minister, Dr. Héctor García Godoy. He held power until supervised and monitored elections that occurred in the spring of 1966, one won by Balaguer over Bosch. The agreement also called for a demilitarization of important zones and amnesty for acts committed during the fighting. U.S. and regional forces withdrew after the election, although the threat of their return shaped the final decisions and future ones.18 Despite extricating itself from the morass, only in time to find itself sinking quickly into the more serious one in Vietnam, the Johnson administration declared the operation a success, arguing that it prevented the rise of another Castro. Soon after, the president announced the Johnson Doctrine, which declared the United States would consider internal conflicts that sought to establish communist governments an international act that would ensure a dramatic and if necessary unilateral action to prevent a takeover. The statement and intervention in the 299

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Dominican Republic in essence destroyed the last vestiges of the “Good Neighbor” Policy. The OAS collaboration in the Dominican Republic also severely damaged its credibility and fundamentally weakened the organization as a mediator in regional disputes. The Dominican intervention also fundamentally damaged U.S.–Latin American relations for many years. Colombian President Alberto Llera Camargo emphasized: the general feeling was that a new and openly imperialistic policy in the style of Theodore Roosevelt had been adopted by the White House and that, if there was intervention with Marines in the Hemisphere, against unequivocal standards of law, one could only expect—in Asia, in Africa, and in whatever—new acts of force and, perhaps, the escalation of the cold war to the hot in a very short time.19 Latin Americans throughout the region looked skeptically to the north, seeing the rebirth of “gunboat diplomacy” that had plagued the region for much of the first three decades of the twentieth century. The threat of force to prevent communist takeovers further strengthened the hand of the dictators in the region as they sang a chorus that linked any internal opposition to the communists. In addition, the mere threat of American Marines landing became a powerful deterrent to those fomenting revolution in the region. U.S. officials also continued to utilize other means of subversion against perceived enemies, the best example being the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. As a result of the intervention, the United States lost ground in the hearts and minds campaigns that continued on many levels throughout the region after 1965. U.S. power suffered a serious setback in the aftermath of the Dominican intervention following the calamity in Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis in the late 1970s. However, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan entered the White House with more bellicose language for the renewal of American military power. He concentrated on Central America and the Caribbean, where insurgencies in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala took on special significance to the president and his advisors, determined to roll back perceived Soviet and Cuban-inspired revolutions.20 While preoccupied with Central America, in 1983, the Reagan administration suddenly shone the spotlight on the small island and former British colony of Grenada (population 100,000). In 1979, Grenada’s New Jewel Movement overthrew the dictator Eric Gairy, a despotic leader responsible for the murder of political opponents and a man who once lectured the United Nations on the dangers of UFOs. Maurice Bishop took over as prime minister, appointing a self-described Marxist Bernard Coard as deputy prime minister. They established ties with the Soviet Union and Cuba, leading the Carter administration to sever relations. Problems continued in 1982 when Coard visited the Soviet Union and declared his intention to assist in the spread of communism. President Reagan retorted, “That country bears the Soviet and Cuban trademark, which means that it will attempt to spread the virus among its neighbors.”21 The obsession with Castro and the Soviet Union remained a cornerstone of the Reagan administration’s Latin American policy as events around the world stoked the paranoia. The small island of Grenada received a disproportionate amount of attention in 1983. When construction began on a new airport at Port Salines, U.S. intelligence began monitoring the project. When they showed President Reagan aerial photographs of the site in March, the president made a national address where he highlighted that, “Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended for?” He answered his own question, complaining that “the Soviet-Cuban militarization of Grenada, in short, can only be seen as a power projection” that threatened American “commerce and military lines of communication.”22 British contractors building the 300

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airport sought to assuage American apprehensions, emphasizing that the project sought only to expand tourism. However, the presence of a Cuban work brigade raised the alarm among some U.S. officials. For seven months, the problem festered as administration attentions turned elsewhere. Still, it found time to isolate Grenada from economic resources, including the International Monetary Fund, and to coerce Grenada’s neighbors into isolating the Bishop government.23 President Reagan singled out the country on several occasions. He told one group that he worried about the Cubans in Grenada, highlighting the country’s production of nutmeg. “It isn’t nutmeg that’s at stake in the Caribbean and Central America. . . . It is the United States’ national security.”24 Events spiraled downward in October when Coard overthrew and murdered Bishop, declaring a state of emergency.25 The Reagan administration, reeling from the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon on October 24 that claimed 241 American lives, decided to invade Grenada, ostensibly to protect the lives of American medical students on the island. While the students initially reported no real threats, they changed their stories later when promised entry into American medical schools. The administration also received a request from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) to help restore order on the island.26 While some planners considered only using a small group of Special Forces to land and extricate the Americans, others prevailed in the debate and a large task force departed and Operation “Urgent Fury” began.27 On October 25, 1,900 U.S. Marines stormed ashore. Administration officials kept the press in the dark and limited access by the media to the operation. For six days, U.S. troops (with an additional 4,000 dispatched over time) battled members of the Grenadian military, Cuban construction workers, and security forces. Pockets of hotspots dotted the island as Americans pounded the defenders, but some continued to hold out against the heavily armed invaders. Finally, the resistance collapsed, allowing President Reagan later to crow, “I can’t say enough in praise of our military . . . Army Rangers and paratroops, Navy, Marine and Air Force personnel, those who planned a brilliant campaign and those who carried it out.” Afterward, the military handed out more than 8,000 medals to the participants of the invasion.28 Ultimately, the United States spent more than $75.5 million on the operation that cost eighteen American lives and wounded 116. A comparable number of Cubans died as well as nearly fifty members of the Grenadian military. Soon, the United States expelled all Eastern bloc and Cuban officials, declared victory, and installed a pro-U.S. government. The new government received significant amounts of foreign assistance from the Reagan administration over several years.29 The international community had strongly condemned the invasion, particularly Latin America and Europe. Even ardent ally British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher questioned the U.S. actions and her opposition roundly skewered her administration for not knowing about or doing anything to stop the invasion.30 The United Nations Security Council voted 11–1 (with three countries abstaining) to condemn the unilateral intervention, but the United States vetoed the measure.31 Vigorous debates also occurred in the Organization of American States, led by the chairman of the Permanent Council, Fernando Salazar Paredes of Bolivia, who denounced the action as a clear violation of the OAS Charter. Other delegates from Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia all condemned the invasion but enough groups sided with Washington to table a vote on a resolution to condemn the United States.32 The debates carried over into Congress and the American public. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill complained, “We weren’t asked for advice. . . . We were informed what was taking place.” Congressman Thomas Downey added, “This is an administration that shot first and 301

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asked questions later.” Finally, prominent New York Senator Patrick Moynihan demanded that the administration answer questions on the invasion and how they related to international laws and treaties. He complained that the administration had committed an act of war and stressed, “I don’t know that you restore democracy at the point of a bayonet.”33 Despite the international outcry, the Reagan administration proudly heralded the triumph. American public opinion supported the invasion, many happy to accept the first victory of American troops since the Vietnam War. Others wanted to forget the disaster in Lebanon. Reagan would write, “I probably never felt better during my presidency than I did that day.”34 Secretary of State George Schultz described Grenada as the “shot heard round the world by usurpers and despots of every ideology. . . . Some Western democracies were again ready to use the military strength they had harbored and built up over the years in defense of principles and interests.”35 Many argued the invasion also served as a warning to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, a reminder of American military power, and also served notice to Castro regarding any plans he might have for sowing communist ideals in the region. While Congress and important elements of American society restrained the Reagan administration from initiating any other invasions, the president and his supporters continued to herald the triumph of Grenada as a sign of the resurgence of American power and its ability to roll back communist threats.36 Members of the administration, including Vice President George H.W. Bush, would replicate the actions in Panama in 1989 but, overall, American adventurism would decline with the demise of the Soviet Union and rise of democracies throughout most of the region in the 1990s.37 The military interventions in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983 reinforced existing fears of a new round of American aggression in Latin America, a pattern that had existed for more than a century. The Johnson and Reagan administrations imposed their will on those countries through the use of overwhelming force, breaking with the “Good Neighbor” policy. Driven by anti-communism, U.S. leaders responded with military force to prevent the rise of another Castro and to protect American economic and strategic interests in a region deemed vital to the United States. Yet, the threats often appeared imagined rather than real. The military interventions returned the United States to a new era of gunboat diplomacy, one replicated on a global scale after 1983, in Panama in 1989 and Haiti in 1994. They also renewed U.S. efforts to depose other regimes by different means, such as the use of covert action against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the employment of surrogates in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the 1980s. Such actions created renewed suspicions and resentment of the United States and damaged relations with the nations of the region. During the 1990s, U.S. attentions turned to the Middle East and Asia and a new era of the “Good Neighbor” seemed to be developing in Latin America, but the damage from the interventionism of the 1960s and 1970s remained fresh in the minds of many Latin Americans.

Notes 1 As cited in J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966), 85. 2 John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); Timothy J. Henderson, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); Bruce Calder, Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic During the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924, reprint edition (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2006); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of American Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

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3 Steven Schwartberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman Years (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008); Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 4 Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–1965 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006). 5 Abraham Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 6–32; G. Pope Atkins and Larman C. Wilson, The United States and the Trujillo Regime (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 79–125. 6 G. Pope Atkins and Larman C. Wilson, The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 131–133. 7 Eric Thomas Chester, Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff, and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965–1966 (New York: Monthly Review, 2001), 46–70. 8 Ibid. 9 As cited in Kyle Longley, In the Eagle’s Shadow: The United States and Latin America, 2nd edition (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2009), 255. 10 “Notes of Meeting,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Dominican Republic; Cuba; Haiti; Guyana, April 30, 1968 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), 45. 11 Michael Beschloss, Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 305. 12 “Notes of Meeting,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 43. 13 “The Hemisphere: Force for Conciliation,” Time, May 14, 1965, online version available at www. time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898799-1,00.html, accessed August 31, 2011. 14 Chester, Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff, and Commies, 114–120. 15 Bruce Palmer, Jr., Intervention in the Caribbean: The Dominican Crisis of 1965 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989), 71–76. 16 “The Hemisphere: Force for Conciliation,” Time. 17 For more on military operations, see Herbert G. Schoonmaker, Military Crisis Management: U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990). 18 Chester, Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff, and Commies, 219–251. 19 As cited in Peter Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.–Latin American Relations, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 171. 20 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States and Central America, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993); Michael Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008). 21 As cited in Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 391. 22 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” March 23, 1983, The American Presidency Project, available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=41093#axzz1WbxBAX00, accessed 31 August 2011. 23 Gary Williams, “Prelude to an Intervention: Grenada, 1983,” Journal of Latin American Studies (February 1997): 135. 24 William Leogrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1993 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 202. 25 Robert J. Beck, The Grenada Invasion: Politics, Law, and Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 91–130. 26 M. Shahabudden, The Conquest of Grenada: Sovereignty in the Periphery (Georgetown, Guyana: University of Guyana Press, 1986); 173–177. 27 Ivan Musicant, The Banana Wars: A History of United States Military Intervention in Latin America from the Spanish–American War to the Invasion of Panama (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1990), 375–381. 28 Musicant, The Banana Wars, 389. 29 For more on the operations, see Mark Adkin, Urgent Fury: The Battle for Grenada (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989). 30 Reynold A. Burrowes, Revolution and Rescue in Grenada (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 117–125. 31 Anthony Payne, Paul Sutton, and Tony Thorndike, Grenada: Revolution and Invasion (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 175.

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32 Payne et al., Grenada, 174–175. 33 As cited in Burrowes, Revolution and Rescue in Grenada, 88. Also see James Baker, III (with Thomas DeFrank), The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War & Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: Putnam, 1995), 334–335. 34 Ronald Reagan, An American Life: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 457. 35 George P. Schultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993). 36 Kai P. Schoenhals and Richard A. Melanson, Revolution and Intervention in Grenada: The New Jewel Movement, the United States, and the Caribbean (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 165–177. 37 Kevin Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story (New York: Touchstone Books, 1991).

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PART X

America and Post Cold War Interventions

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34 POST COLD WAR CONFLICTS Sean N. Kalic

The post Cold War period was a turbulent period, rich with security assessments of the future and potential opportunities for military intervention. As the world’s remaining superpower, the United States faced a “new world order” and the daunting responsibilities that came with the new assumed title.1 This critical period has a rich and diverse literature that focuses on future threats, peace and stability operations, and future U.S. force structure, which provide important lessons about how nations transition from one period to another. Furthermore, this period deviates from the traditional historiographic model of grouping scholarship into “schools of thought.” Rather, the scholarship associated with the post Cold War era tends to focus on subjects that reflect the turbulent and uncertain times associated with the demise of the Cold War and the emergence of a new international security environment. The foci of this historiographic chapter are the assessments of the post Cold War future, security threats of the new era, and major U.S. military operations from 1989 to 2001. The end result is intended to provide a broad understanding of the post Cold War era, as it emerged as a distinct period in history. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact signaled the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the final blow. In the wake of these events, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and Paul Kennedy emerged with strong assessments of the future.2 Francis Fukuyama offered a provocative analysis in The End of History, which evolved from an chapter he wrote in 1989, where he argued that, despite the long-held position by world communists that communism would triumph, western liberalism indeed bested Marx’s long-held conclusion.3 Fukuyama’s chapter and book created a significant debate as to how the former eastern bloc nations would react and evolve to the triumph of western liberal democracy. Juxtaposed to Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington argued in The Clash of Civilizations that the demise of communism and the withering of the major ideological rift shifted the dynamics of the international community toward increased potential for cultural and ethnic tension.4 Huntington stressed that the rise in cultural and ethnic tension would result in additional wars and the increased demand for international peacekeeping forces to intervene in order to maintain international and regional stability.5 The third major academic to make a prognosis in the twilight of the Cold War was Paul M. Kennedy. Kennedy wrote two very significant texts, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and 307

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Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy used history since 1500 to explain the decline of the major powers. Specifically, he highlighted the turbulent and uncertain periods that followed social, political, and economic catastrophes.6 Taking a different tack in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, Kennedy focused on burgeoning technological and economic rifts in the international community and argued that the future would be one of tension and strain.7 Together the works of Fukuyama, Huntington, and Kennedy provide a very different interpretation compared to the celebration of winning the Cold War. In fact, even though Fukuyama, Huntington, and Kennedy did not focus on military matters, one only has to extrapolate to understand the potentially violent nature of the post Cold War era. Although this idea came to be recognized by the administrations of George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton, both of their administrations recognized that the U.S. military had to move beyond the Soviet threat and focus on small wars, humanitarian operations, and peacekeeping missions. In response to these recognitions, the administrations of Bush and Clinton adapted to the post Soviet security environment. One needs only to scan the Secretary of Defense’s Annual Report to Congress and the President from 1990–2000, to get a sense of the new threat environment. Each one of these annual reports contains a section on threats.8 In turn, scholarship that dealt specifically with military and international security issues emerged with ideas about the future threats that focused on political instability, the rise of transnational terrorism, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles. Writing at the end of the Cold War, Colin S. Gray in War, Peace, and Victory began arguing that the United States needed to readjust its strategic thinking.9 Specifically, Gray recommended that the United States consider four primary variables: “unity of strategic phenomena, influence of geography, value of historic experience, and consequences of technological change,” as it thought about building a new strategy for the post Cold War era. For Gray, the start of the new epoch demanded serious introspection directed toward the purpose of crafting a sound and executable strategy for the new age.10 In 1990, Gray provided subtle hints that the future may be unstable as he watched Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union slowly crumble. For him, these events foreshadowed the potential instability, which in turn necessitated the importance of developing a comprehensive strategy for the post Soviet era. Further emphasizing that the peace dividend may lead to greater instability, Robert D. Kaplan in The Coming Anarchy asserted that the primary security threat was political instability, driven by systemic social, economic, and political issues.11 Unlike Gray, Kaplan does not emphasize the process by which the United States needs to develop a new national security strategy, but rather he identifies the potential threats that may impact the United States and its allies as they attempt to adapt to the new world order. Moving from threats to the mission of military forces, Hal Brands wrote From Berlin to Baghdad to provide a broad history of how the United States adapted its military’s mission to the demise of the Soviet Union.12 Brands emphasized the struggle the United States military encountered in the new era. He details how the United States lost its primary foe and readjusted its foreign policy, national security objectives, and military force structure in an increasing complex international security environment, dominated by humanitarian issues, political instability, and the need for military intervention. By the start of the twenty-first century, scholars and policymakers recognized political instability as a major threat. However, despite general recognition of this primary threat, transnational terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles also continued to survive as significant security concerns. Although terrorism had been an acknowledged international security threat since the 1970s, the United States began officially to identify it as such in the 1990s. In his Annual Report to 308

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Congress for 1994, Secretary of Defense Les Aspen specifically listed terrorism as a U.S. national security concern.13 Despite recognizing terrorism as a “new” threat within the new security environment, little public knowledge had been generated on specific transnational terrorist groups. However, by the end of the 1990s scholars began focusing on Al Qaeda, as the primary transnational terrorist group. Walter Laquer wrote The New Terrorism, as an introductory attempt to outline the specific terrorist groups and ideology advanced by militant Islamists.14 Moving from the broad concept of transnational terrorism to Al Qaeda specifically, scholars mirrored the transformation of the international security environment, as Al Qaeda emerged as the primary terrorist threat. Three major works cover the history and evolution of Al Qaeda. Rohan Gunaratna wrote Inside Al Qaeda, which was the first credible academic attempt to present a history and explanation of Al Qaeda as it emerged in the early 1990s to become the primary threat to international instability by 2001.15 Having had a decade to research and understand the ideological, as well as the operational, mechanics of Al Qaeda, M.M. Mohamedou in 2007 wrote Understanding Al Qaeda, which builds on Gunaratna’s work by providing a very detailed and thorough analysis of Osama Bin Laden’s ideology and the operations of Al Qaeda.16 This text provides a thorough understanding of how Al Qaeda evolved in the immediate post Cold War period. In an attempt to explain how Al Qaeda has adapted since September 2001, Christina Hemlich in Al Qaeda: From Global Network to Local Franchise argues that, despite the success of the U.S.-led Global War on Terrorism, Al Qaeda had found innovative and unique ways to maintain its operational capabilities.17 In addition to terrorism, threats such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles became primary concerns for the immediate post Cold War era. Although these threats withered as the Global War on Terrorism neared, they nevertheless remained a concern as the post Cold War era transitioned to the era of the Global War on Terrorism. Within these two concerns, there emerged four different perspectives. With the demise of the Soviet Union, a group of scholars and policymakers argued for serious efforts to reduce the overall number of nuclear warheads, if not an outright ban on nuclear weapons.18 However, “realists” began to make the argument that banning nuclear weapons was a pie-in-the sky dream, as the proliferation of nuclear weapons seemed unchecked with the demise of the Soviet Union.19 This idea that nuclear weapons would actually proliferate after the demise of the communist USSR hinged on speculation about organized crime factions buying nuclear warheads, former nuclear scientists going to work for third party countries, and the status of the nuclear weapons program of the former Soviet Union, not to mention the rise of transnational terrorist organizations who aspired to possess a nuclear warhead.20 Although a related issue, the international community’s concern about the proliferation of intermediate and long-range ballistic missiles increased, with specific attention focused on the desire of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, and North Korea to develop missile technology. Additionally, the concern over nuclear proliferation intensified as India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea strove to develop nuclear weapons.21 Unlike the debate on nuclear weapons, the left and right both agreed that the proliferation of missiles was a significant threat to the international community. These two sensitive issues remain significant. A third area of concern for post Cold War conflicts was a significant discussion about the future of war. Largely based on the spectacular performance of the United States and its coalition allies in Operation Desert Storm, the international community began to discuss the “revolution in military affairs” and the shift toward high-technology warfare.22 In 1996, George and Meredith Friedman wrote The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century.23 Using the performance of the United States in the Gulf War, the 309

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Friedmans made the argument that warfare would become dominated by high-technology, as witnessed in the Gulf War. Using Desert Storm as an example, the Friedmans stressed that infantry, tanks, artillery, ships, submarines, and aircraft would have to incorporate new technology to fight effectively in the twenty-first century. In fact, the Friedmans made the claim that the United States proved so dominate in the Gulf War due to its embracing of advanced technologies.24 Although this argument seemed strong in the year or two after Desert Storm, by the time that the United States got involved in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and even later in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Friedmans’ claim seems to have been tempered by fighting insurgencies. Moving beyond the idea in The Future of War, Bruce Berkowitz, in The New Face of War, argued that information has come to dominate twenty-first century warfare.25 Specifically Berkowitz asserts that there are four key elements (asymmetrical threats, information-technology competition, race of decision cycles, and network organization) to understanding twenty-first century warfare. For Berkowitz, the ability to use, manage, synchronize, and disseminate information in a rapid and orderly process is the key to success on the battlefield. The ideas raised by Berkowitz, when written in 2003, were already being processed and assembled into the theory of net-centric warfare, which became codified in the Office of Transformation in the Pentagon under A.K. Cebrowski.26 In fact, Cebrowski claimed that network-centric warfare would lift the fog of war.27 U.S. Army Colonel (ret.) Harry G. Summers in The New World Strategy cautioned against the net-centric warfare advocates.28 While a collection of chapters, Summers’ concluding chapter entitled “The Ten Commandments” provides key insights into the post Cold War security environment. Specifically, Summers points out “don’t fall into the technology trap” as the traditional nature of warfare has remained relatively constant and the need to remain a strong military certainly entails incorporating new technology, but requires special attention to make sure that the high technology is a true force multiplier, not just a new shiny object.29 Beyond his warning about the dazzling allure of technology, Summers also provided an assessment that in the immediate future the United States military would face a spectrum of conflict from humanitarian and peacekeeping operations to the potential for conventional war. Taken in comparison with the works written by the Freidmans and Cebroswki, Summers provides a much more balanced and seemingly realistic perspective of warfare in the post Cold War era. By 2005, the United States Army had embraced Summers’ ideas with the concept known as “full spectrum of operations.”30 This doctrinal term came to represent the wide range of tasks and missions demanded of the U.S. military in the twenty-first century, from humanitarian and natural disaster assistance to full-blown conventional warfare. As of 2012, the debate about the future missions of the U.S. military is still under discussion. However, in the latest national security strategy a new emphasis has emerged which hints at rebalancing the capabilities of the U.S. military toward the high-intensity side of the threat spectrum, since the United States has been engaged in a counterinsurgency fight for the last eleven years. Having covered the historiographic themes centering on the security environment and threats of the post Cold War, Operation Just Cause, Desert Storm, Operation Restore Hope, and Bosnia need to be discussed as they prove critical in understanding the dynamic nature of post Cold War conflicts. In 1989 as the Warsaw Pact and the Berlin Wall withered, the United States federal courts indicted Panamanian President Manuel Noriega on narcotics trafficking charges. In Panama, Noriega failed to acknowledge the results of a national election which removed him from power. As the internal tension in Panama increased, the United States became increasingly concerned as Noriega and his dignity battalions harassed U.S. military personnel stationed in 310

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Panama. The decision to invade Panama and capture Noriega came in December 1989 after months of escalation. Historian Lawrence Yates, in The U.S. Military Intervention into Panama: Origins, Planning, and Crisis Management, provides a detailed and very insightful analysis of the period prior to the initiation of Operation Just Cause.31 One of the major issues that arises in Yates’ analysis is the fact that Noriega had been slowly escalating violence and collecting intelligence on U.S. military forces in Panama. Once Noriega decided to declare war on the United States, President Bush gave the order to invade with the mission objective to capture Noriega. Often seen as the first military operation of the post Cold War era, Ronald Cole and Pete Huchthausen provide detailed and focused histories of the invasion into Panama. Cole in Operation Just Cause provided an overarching history of the military operations with an emphasis on the assessment of the U.S. military in action, as well as the impact of the Goldwater-Nichols act in this unique military operation.32 Cole also focused on the employment of joint special operations forces in this operation that is characterized as successful.33 Providing a different perspective, Huchthausen, in America’s Splendid Little Wars, argued that Operation Just Cause was a success due not to the employment of a special or unique blend of military forces, but rather because the Bush administration synchronized the foreign policy objectives of the United States with the military objectives of Operation Just Cause.34 Reviewing the works of Yates, Cole, and Huchthausen provides a detailed understanding of the planning and background leading to U.S. forces invading Panama and eventually capturing Noriega. However, beyond the specific attention to Operation Just Cause, the three authors provide a key understanding about how the U.S. military transitioned from a conventional war emphasis to embrace the wide range of potential operations necessary in the demanding post Cold War security environment. The next major military operation of the post Soviet era blossomed in 1991 as Saddam Hussein used his Iraqi military to invade Kuwait. Responding to concerns from Saudi Arabia, the United States orchestrated a vast international coalition to evict Iraq’s military forces from Kuwait. The success of the 100-hour war led to Norman Friedman’s Desert Victory, Richard Swain’s “Lucky War,” and Richard Hallion’s Storm Over Iraq praising the capabilities of U.S. military forces.35 Once the initial euphoria of the success of the U.S. military forces subsided, more critical views emerged which placed the war in a political and strategic context.36 Retired United States Marine Corps General Bernard Trainor and his co-author, Michael Gordon, wrote The Generals’ War in 1995, which was the first major work that looked at the Gulf War from a political and neutral perspective and highlighted several significant points that deflated the initial backslapping that took place in 1991 and 1992. In addition to Gordon and Trainor, works such as the Gulf War Air Power Survey by Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot Cohen and Stephen Bourqe and John Burdan’s Road to Safwan provided critical insights into some of the major technological and political problems that the U.S. military and its coalition partners encountered during the short war.37 Additionally, Dennis Memo in Arms over Diplomacy emphasizes that the Gulf War demonstrated that diplomatic, humanitarian, and coalition-building lessons were the real hallmark of the Gulf War.38 Moving from the high-kinetic actions of the first Gulf War, the United States and the international community next saw the use of U.S. military forces in Mogadishu, Somalia, first as a force to assist with food distribution and next to maintain security for major supply routes as non-governmental organizations attempted to feed the people of Somalia. Against the humanitarian plight, the lawlessness and heavy-handed violence provoked by warlords such as Mohamed Farah Aideed served to transition the humanitarian mission into a mission focusing on capturing Aideed. Ambassador Robert Oakley and John Hirsch in Somalia and Operation Restore Hope provide an insider’s political perspective on the situation as it evolved in Somalia.39 Writing nine 311

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years later from a broader military perspective, historians Robert F. Baumman, Lawrence Yates, and Versalle Washington, in “My Clan Against the World,” provide a much more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the events comprising Operation Restore Hope.40 Together these works highlight the political and military complexities of humanitarian operations in Mogadishu. From the perspective of post Cold War military operations, Somalia became a critical point in which the U.S. military demanded that it was not in the business of “nation building,” while the government of William J. Clinton argued that the new security environment demanded the use of the military in a whole host of humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. This debate was not resolved as the United States and NATO intervened in the Balkans. The two last major U.S. military operations prior to the Global War on Terrorism were in Bosnia and later Kosovo. Tom Gallagher in The Balkans after the Cold War and Robert D. Kaplan in Balkan Ghost provide an excellent and comprehensive understanding of the background of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the subsequent need for military peacekeeping forces.41 Focusing on the need to stabilize and secure Bosnia and later Kosovo, Michael Ignatieff in Empire Lite focuses on the necessary measures needed to achieve the desired political objectives.42 To get an understanding of the demands of the military operations, Robert F. Baumann, George H. Gawrych, and Walter E. Kretchik wrote Armed Peacekeepers in Bosnia, in which they provide a comprehensive account of the military operations.43 This thorough and detailed account provides critical insights and a more detailed understanding in comparison to Wesley K. Clark’s memoir Waging Modern War.44 Additionally, Rebecca Moore places NATO’s interventions in the Balkans in a wider context by focusing on peace and stability operations in the post Cold War environment.45 The debate opened by Moore faded in the events of September 11, 2001, as the world collectively witnessed the end of the post Cold War era. The post Cold War era is a fertile ground for historical research, as it holds key insights into understanding how nations transition from massive changes in the international security environment, in addition to how they identify future threats, conduct complex humanitarian missions, and restructure their military forces. In this context, the post Cold War period is significant and demands further scholarship. Within the past few years, authors have begun to look at the connections in the 1990s and trace them through to the post 9/11 period.46 As the international community emerges from the Global War on Terrorism, the need to research and write about the decade-long period between the end of the Cold War and the start of the Global War on Terrorism will only perpetuate the need for understanding this important period.

Notes 1 Jack F. Matlock Jr., Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray and How to Return to Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 3–31. 2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993). 3 Fukuyama, End of History, xi–xxiii and 3–12. 4 Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 125–182. 5 Ibid., 183–300. 6 Kennedy, Rise and Fall, xv–xxv. 7 Kennedy, Twenty-First Century, 3–136. 8 The threats varied from nuclear proliferation, to terrorism, to organized crime, to drug trafficking.

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9 Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century (New York: Touchstone Books, 1990), 9–18. 10 Ibid., 14–18. 11 Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Random House, 2001), 3–58. 12 Hal Brands, From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the Post Cold War World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 39–100. 13 Les Aspin, Annual Report to the President and the Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1994), 2. 14 Walter Laquer, New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 226–282. 15 Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Berkley Books, 2002), 294–322. 16 M.M. Mohamedou, Understanding Al Qaeda: Changing War and Global Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 46–57. 17 Christina Hellmich, Al Qaeda: from Global Network to Local Franchise (London: Zed Books, 2011), 114–151. 18 Alexie Arbatov, The Security Watershed: Russian Debate Defense and Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1993), 1–56. 19 Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and A New Direction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), vii–xiv and 79–96. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory, 290–322. 20 Rensselaer W. Lee III, Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Blackmarket in the Former Soviet Union and Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 15–26 and 47–72; Aspin, Annual Report, 2. 21 Bernd W. Kubbig and Sven-Eric Fikenscher, eds., Arms Control and Missile Proliferation in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2012), 25–62; Wyn Q. Bowen, The Politics of Ballistic Missile Nonproliferation (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 51–179. 22 Mary C. Fitzgerald, “The Soviet Image of Future War: The Impact of Desert Storm,” in Willard C. Frank and Phillip Gillette, eds., Soviet Military Doctrine from Lenin to Gorbachev, 1915–1999 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992), 363–386; Mary C. Fitzgerald, “The Soviet Military and the New Technological Operations in the Gulf,” Naval War College Review (Autumn, 1991): 16–43. 23 George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War, Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996), 1–14. 24 Ibid., 10. 25 Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will be Fought in the 21st Century (New York: The Free Press, 2003), xi. 26 A.K. Cebrowski, The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare (Washington, DC: Office of Force Transformation, U.S. Department of Defense, January 2005), 3–11. 27 Ibid., 65–66. 28 Harry G. Summers, Jr., The New World Strategy: A Military Policy for America’s Future (New York: Touchstone Books, 1995), 14. 29 Ibid., 221–224. 30 “Operations, FM3–0,” Headquarters, Department of the Army (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, February 2011), 3–1 to 3–21. 31 Lawrence A. Yates, The U.S. Military Intervention in Panama: Origins, Planning, and Crisis Management, June 1987–December 1989 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 2008), 1–21. 32 Ronald H. Cole, Operation Just Cause: The Planning and Execution of Joint Operations in Panama, February 1988–January 1990 (Washington, DC: Joint History Office, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1995), 71–75. 33 Ibid., 38. 34 Peter Huchthausen, America’s Splendid Little Wars: A Short History of US Engagements from the Fall of Saigon to Baghdad (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 113–126. 35 Norman Friedman, Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait (Annapolis: The Naval Institute Press, 1991), 236; Richard M. Swain, “Lucky War”: The Third Army in Desert Storm (Fort Leavenworth: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press, 1994); Richard P. Hallion, Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 267. 36 Roland Danneuther, The Gulf Conflict: A Political and Strategic Analysis (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1992), 71.

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37 Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), vii–xv; Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Summary Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993), 223–234; Stephen A. Bourque and John W, Burdan III, The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 Persian Gulf War (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2007), 241–247. 38 Dennis Memo, Arms Over Diplomacy: Reflections on the Persian Gulf War (Westport: Praeger, 1992), 138. 39 John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1995). 40 Robert F. Baumann, Lawrence A. Yates, with Versalle F. Washington, “My Clan Against the World:” US and Coalition Forces in Somalia, 1992–1994 (Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004), 1–7. 41 Tom Gallagher, The Balkans After the Cold War: From Tyranny to Tragedy (New York: Routledge, 2003); Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghost: A Journey Through History (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 42 Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan (London: Vintage Books, 1987), 77–108. 43 Robert F. Baumann, George W. Gawrych, and Walter E. Kretchik, Armed Peacekeepers in Bosnia (Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004), 37–214. 44 Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 3–46. 45 Rebecca Moore, NATO’s New Military Mission: Projecting Stability in A Post Cold War World (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007), 9–32. 46 William J. Durch and Tobias C. Berkman, “Restoring and Maintaining Peace: What We Know so Far,” in William J. Durch, ed., Twenty-First Century Peace Operations (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2006), 1–48; Alexander Moens, NATO and European Security: Alliance Politics from the End of the Cold War to the Age of the War on Terrorism (Westport: Praeger, 2003), xix–xxv.

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35 OPERATION JUST CAUSE The U.S. Invasion of Panama Barry Mowell

The U.S. invasion of Panama was the largest active engagement of U.S. military forces since the Vietnam War, with some 27,000 troops deployed. The invasion involved coordination of various elements from all branches of the armed forces, was the most logistically complex and intricately planned and executed U.S. military operation in over 40 years, and was the largestscale airborne deployment of U.S. forces since World War II. The incursion was justified in Washington on the basis of worsening human rights violations and other illegal actions perpetrated by the dictatorship of General Manuel Noriega. The operational objectives included safeguarding American lives, facilitation of democracy and human rights for Panamanian citizens, elimination of Panama’s role as a key transit point for international drug trafficking, and protection of the Panama Canal and its continued neutral operation. Although controversy has been raised concerning certain aspects of the invasion and its justification, Operation Just Cause was successful in realizing its goals via removal of the Noriega regime. This chapter provides an overview of the invasion, its origins, and its outcomes within the framework of both military history and international affairs. The United States has had close bilateral relations with Panama since the inception of Panamanian independence. In 1903, the U.S. government supported Panamanian sovereignty from Colombia in exchange for being granted rights via the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty to build the Panama Canal and in perpetuity maintain operational and security control of the passage and the adjacent Canal Zone. Over the course of the U.S. presence, tensions periodically surfaced between the two countries over issues such as availability of jobs for Panamanian workers and pay-scale inequities between workers of U.S. versus Panamanian nationality. Animosity had also occasionally surfaced over privileges afforded to U.S. citizens, the presence of U.S. military bases, and the perception that Panama was not being adequately compensated by the U.S. for the Canal.1 Eventually, the control of the Canal and Canal Zone became a patriotic issue and a rallying cry among many Panamanian nationalists. Following escalating tensions over the control and disposition of the Canal—specifically, the right of Panamanians to fly their national flag alongside that of the U.S. in the Canal Zone—on January 9, 1964, violence erupted in which four U.S. servicemen and 23 Panamanians were killed and hundreds on both sides were injured before order was finally restored.2 The incident, often referred to in the U.S. as the Panamanian Sovereignty Riots, became known in Panama as The Day of Martyrs and its anniversary is still commemorated in that 315

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country as a day of national significance. The riots, together with widespread international condemnation of the U.S. response and continued presence, served as significant catalysts in the decision of the U.S. to relinquish control of the Canal and Canal Zone to Panama via new treaty arrangements. The Torrijos-Carter Treaties signed in September 1977 addressed two distinct elements: (1) phasing out U.S. control of the Canal Zone and ultimately control of the Canal itself over a 20-year period—the two nations jointly administered the Canal between 1979–1999, with full control reverting to Panama at the end of 1999; and (2) allowing the U.S. military to intervene if necessary to safeguard the Canal from any threats posed to its functioning as a neutral resource accessible to international shipping. The latter treaty element would ultimately serve as a legal justification for Operation Just Cause and the ouster of General Manuel Noriega, who had proven himself to be more corrupt and more authoritarian than any of his predecessors.3 Panama had been governed for much of the twentieth century by its civilian business elite, with its military largely remaining in the background, functioning as occasional political arbiter without presuming to undertake permanent administrative control.4 Panama transitioned to a sequence of military rulers beginning in 1968 with General Omar Torrijos, commander of the Panamanian National Guard, later reorganized as the Panamanian Defense Force, or PDF. By 1983, General Manuel Noriega had seized power as de facto ruler through his control of a series of puppet civilian administrations that he appointed via a rubber-stamp national legislature. Using the need to assume responsibility for Canal security as a pretext, and assuming U.S. support for his regime would remain intact regardless of his policies and conduct, Noriega became increasingly authoritarian and repressive, and emphasized the expansion of the size and power of Panama’s military, largely at the expense of economic development and other governmental programs.5 Reflecting Cold War politics and U.S. foreign policy aimed at containing the spread of communism during the era, cordial relations were often cultivated by Washington with foreign military rulers who were anti-communist in stance. A career military officer, Noriega had received training from the U.S. military at the School of the Americas and Fort Bragg and he had also been directly involved with the CIA and other U.S. agencies as a paid intelligence asset for many years.6 Upon his ascension to power, expectations were that the U.S. would enjoy favorable relations with Noriega’s regime. Initially, relations between the two governments were amicable, but they soon began to deteriorate as a clearer picture of the dictator’s criminal activities and brutal nature began to emerge. Although Noriega had been a paid informant of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, by 1984 political opposition elements within Panama were publicly accusing him of complicity in trafficking narcotics and weapons, as well as money laundering, activities in which he had been engaged for many years. Any legitimate information Noriega had been supplying to the DEA was related to drug operations in competition with the Medellin cartel, which had been paying the dictator for his protection.7 An outspoken critic of Noriega’s regime, Dr. Hugo Spadafora, had publicly accused him of criminality and planned to offer evidence of Noriega’s complicity in drug and arms smuggling, but Spadafora was subsequently murdered, garnering considerable public outcry in Panama and abroad.8 As accusations of Noriega’s corruption, brutality toward political opposition, and also his complicity in the Iran-Contra Scandal as a go-between became widely known, the administration of President Ronald Regan began pressuring Noriega to relinquish power. Economic sanctions were implemented by the U.S., including revocation of foreign aid and favorable trade privileges, freezing and prohibiting transfer of Panamanian government assets within the U.S., and withholding of Canal fees.9 The sanctions against his regime and criminal indictments of Noriega in U.S. Federal Court, as well as the popular upwelling of 316

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Panamanian public opinion against him, only served to anger the dictator, who became increasingly belligerent toward both internal opposition and the U.S. and its foreign policy with regard to the Noriega regime. In February 1988, figure-head Panamanian President Eric Delvalle attempted to fire Noriega but, with limited support from within the country’s military-security apparatus, the effort failed to dislodge the strongman, who in turn placed Delvalle under house arrest and replaced him with a loyalist.10 In the wake of the failed uprising and mounting internal opposition to his rule among the ranks of Panamanian citizens, the dictator’s supporters became increasingly active and brutal in responding to internal critics of the regime, terrorizing political opponents and destabilizing public order. Escalating street violence was not only directed at Panamanians opposed to Noriega’s rule and oppressive policies, but also toward U.S. citizens and security personnel in and around the Canal Zone. Between 1988 and May 1989, U.S. Southern Command documented over 1,200 incidents of harassment being directed toward U.S. military personnel by pro-Noriega elements.11 The conduct of pro-Noriega paramilitary street gangs, referred to by his regime as “Dignity Battalions,” as well as elements within the police and PDF, earned international condemnation and would ultimately serve as a significant U.S. justification for Operation Just Cause. Noriega continued to tenaciously cling to power in 1989. A broad coalition of Panamanian pro-democracy elements united behind the goal of ending the military dictatorship in their country via national elections in May. Opposition groups and local Catholic Church officials conducted exit polling and also tallied votes prior to turning in ballot boxes to government officials and estimated that their anti-Noriega presidential candidate won by a 3 : 1 margin.12 The Noriega regime invalidated the election results.13 International observers agreed with the Panamanian political opposition that election fraud had occurred. Consequently, the regime’s duplicity, corruption, and ongoing oppression of pro-democracy elements were widely condemned. Other foreign governments and the Organization of American States joined the U.S. in encouraging Noriega to relinquish power.14 As the situation continued to deteriorate, another U.S.endorsed coup attempt in October was quelled by Noriega’s supporters within the military. In an impassioned December 16 speech, after having the title “Maximum Leader” bestowed upon him by the National Assembly which he personally controlled, Noriega reaffirmed his intention to remain in power and announced that a state of war existed between Panama and the U.S.15 Mounting diplomatic and economic pressure intended to bring about Noriega’s abdication had only made him more intransigent and increasingly bellicose toward both the U.S. government and pro-democracy opposition elements inside Panama. As the situation continued to deteriorate over the waning months of 1989, Washington came to regard direct military intervention as necessary to facilitate regime change and restore order and security in Panama. The U.S. invasion of Panama was justified by the George H.W. Bush administration on four distinct grounds: protection of U.S. citizens in Panama; protection of the Panama Canal and its neutral operation; defense of basic human rights and democratic rule in Panama; and combating drug trafficking and related criminal incursions into U.S. territory from Panama. The frequency and intensity of the harassment of U.S. civilian and military personnel and their families living in Panama had increased progressively in the months leading up to Operation Just Cause. Conflict between Panamanian nationals and U.S. citizens had happened occasionally since the U.S. presence in Panama began decades earlier, but had not generally been widespread in geographical scope, sustained for prolonged periods, or excessively violent in nature. In his final years in power, Noriega’s government and its supporters had undertaken an increasingly active harassment campaign targeting U.S. citizens in Panama, particularly U.S. military personnel. As tensions continued to mount, tighter restrictions were imposed on access 317

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to U.S. facilities, American personnel were relocated within the Canal Zone, many of their family members evacuated, and additional U.S. troops deployed to enhance security via Operation Nimrod Dancer, but serious incidents continued.16 The most infamous incident occurred on December 15, just five days prior to the invasion in which PDF members at a roadblock shot and killed an unarmed U.S. Marine officer, and subsequently beat another U.S. naval officer and threatened his wife after they had witnessed the shooting.17 The safety of the approximately 30,000 American citizens in Panama was becoming an increasingly serious concern. The security and the continued neutral operation of the Canal was also a source of concern for U.S. authorities, given the deterioration of events in 1989. In addition to threatening the safety of U.S. personnel and their dependents living in Panama, the continuation of Noriega’s regime was increasingly regarded as posing a threat to the stable ongoing operation of the Canal. Some years earlier, Noriega had organized small-scale bombings within the Canal Zone during negotiations concerning the transfer of control and he had developed plans to sabotage the Canal and other U.S. facilities in the event of delay or other conflict between the two governments over transfer of control of Canal operations to the Panamanian government.18 The Bush administration cited the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties, which delegated the right and responsibility of defense to the U.S. military in the event the security or neutral operation of the Canal was jeopardized, as a significant justification for armed military intervention. The protection of basic human rights and the re-establishment of democratic rule in Panama had been cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy toward that nation, as well as important diplomatic initiatives for the OAS and numerous foreign governments for several years leading up to Operation Just Cause. The Noriega regime had become increasingly brutal in its efforts to crush internal political opposition, had killed, jailed, beaten and harassed Panamanian citizens critical of the dictatorship, and had subverted the outcome of multiple elections which would have removed the regime from power. Critics of the U.S. military intervention in Panama have contended that the concept of state sovereignty is paramount in international law and that accordingly the U.S. invasion was unjustified and potentially illegal.19 In contrast, non-statist approaches within international relations emphasize the needs and freedom of people above the hypothetical supremacy of states/regimes. In arguing that the U.S. intervention was an appropriate response to oppression, many international affairs scholars have stressed that U.S. actions were justified in that most Panamanian citizens opposed Noriega’s rule but were largely powerless to remove him, and that the U.S. intervention was a justifiable humanitarian initiative and a potential milestone in concepts of international law which have historically not supported foreign intervention, even in cases of severe human rights violations by oppressive regimes.20 Polls taken in April 1990 indicated widespread support among the Panamanian people for U.S. intervention to remove Noriega’s regime and restore stability and democratic rule.21 During the Reagan administration, policymakers had come to regard the trafficking of illicit drugs into the U.S. via international borders not merely as a concern of increasing magnitude for law enforcement agencies, but also as a key national security issue. The U.S. “War on Drugs” entailed both increased efforts domestically and also an escalation of effort to interdict narcotics and related criminal activities moving across transnational boundaries. The initiation of the drug war may be the single most important turning point in U.S. relations with the Noriega regime in that, from that point forward, the dictator became a liability and source of embarrassment to Washington due to his increased involvement in narco-trafficking.22 Simultaneously, the changing geopolitics in Central America, specifically the stabilization of neighboring conflicts and decline of communism, meant Noriega was less important as an ally, decreasing the willingness of Washington to turn a blind eye to his criminal activities.23 Noriega had become involved in the drug trade prior to his assent as dictator. In 1982, Noriega in exchange for a payment of between 1–10 percent of the value 318

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of each load—depending upon the exact services rendered—permitted Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel to use Panamanian territory as a safe haven and major international transshipment point for the movement of cocaine.24 Noriega also became a principle party in laundering millions of dollars of the cartel’s drug trade proceeds and had permitted the construction and operation of drug labs in Panama.25 In 1988, Noriega was formally indicted in the U.S. Federal Court for several charges related to drug trafficking and money laundering. As authorities in the U.S. and abroad became increasingly aware of the scope of Noriega’s criminal activities, his regime was further delegitimized and calls for his departure from power intensified, which were met with derision by the dictator. As of December 1989, approximately 13,500 U.S. troops were stationed in nearly a dozen military bases throughout the Canal Zone, a number roughly comparable to the combined size of the PDF and other Panamanian military forces.26 With the initiation of Operation Just Cause, some 14,000 additional U.S. troops were ultimately deployed, to supplement those already onsite in Panama. The tactical plan was to capture or neutralize 27 key targets almost simultaneously within the first few hours of the incursion, overwhelm Noriega’s forces with such superior numbers, massive air and naval support, speed, and surprise that the defenders would quickly grasp that they were overwhelmed by superior forces and capitulate—ideally within 24 hours, minimizing the scope and severity of the fighting and in turn minimizing casualties and damage to infrastructure.27 Although one engagement had been authorized minutes earlier in order to prevent PDF forces access to a bridge, at 1am local time on December 20, Operation Just Cause was officially initiated by U.S. ground, naval, and air forces. Increased activity on U.S. bases, intercepted radio chatter, and foolish and reckless public announcements by U.S. broadcast news outlets concerning last-minute troop deployments from American bases had potentially provided the PDF with a warning of at least a few hours. The element of surprise was nonetheless largely successful as Noriega’s forces had made minimal reactive preparations and the dictator himself remained skeptical of the possibility of U.S. invasion and had spent much of the night obliviously having drinks in his office and later visiting a prostitute, unalarmed even after the first reports of suspicious American military activity began to come in from his field commanders.28 The air campaign was a critical component of the operation and was in large part responsible for its speed and overall success. At the onset of operations, Panamanian radar units were jammed and rendered ineffective. Over 300 U.S. military aircraft were deployed, roughly half of which were helicopters, with the balance primarily comprised of a range of technologically sophisticated fixed-wing aircraft, including those with potent ground-attack capabilities, such as the AC-130 gunship and also the F117 Nighthawk, which made its combat debut. Through deployment of such airpower, U.S. forces quickly achieved complete air superiority and air support played a vital role in identifying and softening military targets for ground forces and quickly moving troops to objectives. A range of strategic primary targets was engaged at approximately the same time via carefully coordinated operations during the first few hours of the incursion. Some of the heaviest fighting and casualties occurred at several of the most critical initial objectives, including three airfields: Torrijos International Airport, Tocumen Military Airfield, and Paitilla Airfield, where Noriega’s private jet was housed. Significant contingents of Noriega’s forces were based at Torrijos Airport and nearby Tocumen Airfield, and the facilities could be used as escape routes by the dictator or his henchmen if not quickly secured by U.S. forces. While Tocumen was captured with little resistance, PDF forces took civilian hostages and offered stiff resistance around the main passenger terminal of Torrijos Airport for several hours. The Navy SEAL contingent tasked with securing Paitilla Airfield disabled Noriega’s jet but found themselves enveloped by heavier-than-expected resistance from PDF forces, during which four SEALs were killed and 319

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eight wounded, the heaviest U.S. casualties incurred at any single site of the operation.29 U.S. Army units were rapidly deployed to the site, quelling remaining resistance and averting disaster. The main PDF headquarters in Panama City, known as La Comandancia, was also a focal point during the first hours of the operation. Defenders in proximity to the complex hastily erected roadblocks leading into the area and exchanged heavy fire with U.S. ground forces. PDF forces around La Comandancia also traded fire with U.S. aircraft and managed to down three helicopters and damage several others.30 As a result of the intensity of the engagement, fires erupted in the nearby densely populated residential neighborhood of El Chorrillos, which caused extensive damage and numerous civilian casualties. While much of the damage to the neighborhood resulted from heavy fighting, area residents reported seeing members of the PDF and Dignity Battalions purposefully lighting fires, perhaps in an effort to cover their escape from the area and slow the advance of U.S. troops.31 Following the fall of La Comandancia to U.S. forces, resistance on the part of Noriega’s supporters quickly began to wane. Pockets of fighting continued in some localized areas of the country. Fort Amador in the Canal Zone had been jointly manned by PDF and U.S. forces and, during the process of securing the facility, several casualties were incurred on both sides and a U.S. helicopter was downed by enemy fire.32 The PDF garrison stationed in the city of Colon, situated at the Caribbean entry point of the Canal, offered some resistance initially prior to capitulating. The Rio Hato military complex, west of Panama City, was defended by a PDF contingent known to be loyal to Noriega and the airfield it contained was regarded as another potential escape route for the dictator. Army Rangers with heavy air support met stiff resistance throughout much of the night until the remaining Rio Hato defenders had fled or surrendered by morning. With the fall of Fort Cimarron, home base of an elite pro-Noriega unit of the PDF, late on the night of December 21, each of the 27 key strategic points for the first phase of the operation had been secured.33 Although organized resistance was melting away by the second day, U.S. forces continued to encounter security challenges. Criminal elements, including many members of the PDF or Dignity Battalions, took advantage of the temporary chaos caused by the invasion to loot businesses in many parts of the country, including Panama City and Colon, a situation which would persist for several days. Dignity Battalion members generally offered more resistance than did PDF elements, possibly because members of the better-trained PDF possessed a better grasp of the military futility of their situation.34 Fearing arrest by U.S. forces or reprisals by Panamanian citizens they had victimized on behalf of the now disintegrating regime, many of Noriega’s supporters among Panamanian military and security forces had abandoned their uniforms and either attempted to flee areas of military activity or blend in with local civilian populations.35 Scattered pockets of Noriega loyalists continued to fire on U.S. troops in certain urban areas and along many roadways, making open movement hazardous. On the afternoon of December 22, as U.S. troops began to enter the main areas of the city of Colon, the city’s inhabitants cheered their arrival from their rooftops and balconies while, simultaneously, small numbers of Noriega loyalists fired upon them.36 The amphibious and ground movements by U.S. forces into Colon marked the last major combat operation of the campaign and the final instance of well-organized resistance on the part of PDF forces.37 The final major engagement of any form during Operation Just Cause came the following day when an armed group of Dignity Battalion members feigning surrender approached a U.S. Airborne contingent, only to open fire upon the American troops.38 Guillermo Endara had defeated the pro-Noriega candidate and won Panamanian presidential elections on May 7, 1989, by a wide margin. Noriega nullified the results of the election and Endara himself and many of his supporters throughout the country were brutally beaten by PDF 320

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and Dignity Battalion members.39 Endara had taken refuge in the U.S. Canal Zone for his safety shortly after he had been publicly assaulted on May 10. He was sworn in as the President of Panama on the first day of Operation Just Cause. The installation of the new President was the first in a series of steps facilitated by the U.S. military operation to implement democratic rule and civil liberties in Panama, including removal of the Noriega government and its puppet legislature, restoration of judicial and penal procedures reflective of democratic rule, restoration of a free press, and reformulation of police and security forces. Fighting quickly subsided and rapid progress was made in the establishment of civil order and democratic institutions within Panama early in the operation, yet one major operational goal remained elusive initially: the capture of Noriega. Efforts to seal off Noriega’s escape routes from the country by quickly securing airfields and capturing or destroying the aircraft or boats that could have been used to facilitate his escape were successful. The dictator spent the first few days of the invasion in hiding, but as resistance rapidly diminished throughout the country and he learned of the $1 million reward offered by the U.S. for his capture, he realized his options were becoming increasingly limited. On Christmas Eve, he entered the Diplomatic Mission of the Vatican in Panama City and requested political asylum. Ten days later, Noriega exited the compound, and was promptly taken into custody as a prisoner of war and transported to the U.S. to face multiple criminal charges for drug trafficking and other offenses. After he was convicted and served a portion of his 40-year sentence in the U.S., Noriega was extradited to France in 2010 where he served part of a term he had been given in absentia in that country for money laundering and murder. In December 2011, he was transferred to Panamanian custody to begin serving a 20-year prison sentence. Operation Just Cause ended officially on January 12, 1990, though some U.S. military personnel would remain to assist with maintaining order and other duties. Some U.S. troops remained until the final transfer of the Canal on December 31, 1999. Given the total numbers deployed and the scale and complexity of the operation, U.S. casualties as well as those of opposing forces were relatively low, reflecting the careful planning and successful implementation of the elements of the invasion. Twenty-three U.S. military personnel were killed in action and 322 were wounded. Of the PDF members, 314 were killed in action, 124 wounded, and over 5,300 detained at least temporarily by U.S. forces.40 U.S. military planners as well as air, ground, and naval forces deployed during the operation had gone to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage to the country and its infrastructure. Estimates of the numbers of casualties among Panamanian civilians vary from a few hundred to a few thousand. Although the exact number may never be known, the fatalities, injuries, and displacement of civilians from their homes and livelihoods has served as a significant source of debate and contention. The U.S. Department of State contended that the military intervention in Panama was a proportional response and cited several legal justifications for direct military intervention in Panama: the U.S. had exercised a right to self-defense and to protect its citizens, as outlined in both the United Nations and the Organization of American States charters; the U.S. had the right to defend the Canal and Canal Zone via the Hay–Bunau–Varilla Treaty with Panama; and the operation occurred with the full consent of the legitimate, democratically elected government of Panama, which had been kept from power illegally by Noriega.41 U.S. foreign policy also embraces the “effects doctrine,” wherein national criminal jurisdiction is perceived to extend beyond national boundaries if the foreign crime or activity can be shown to adversely impact the U.S. in some way.42 The war had widespread popular support in the U.S., among both the general public and members of Congress due to its successful outcome, short duration, limited casualties, its comparatively modest cost of $164 million, and the acceptance of the public of the motives and justifications for the invasion as outlined officially by Washington.43 321

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In addition to those offered by the U.S. government, various other motives have been ascribed to the invasion. Some have suggested that Noriega had fallen from favor in Washington for refusing to renegotiate treaty arrangements that might have permitted American military bases to remain in Panama and also for his support of the Nicaraguan peace plan opposed by the U.S.44 Political motives have also been suggested as the Bush administration had come to increasingly regard Noriega and the favorable U.S. relationship with Noriega’s regime in previous years as a source of embarrassment in general and in particular as undercutting the credibility of the U.S. government stance in the much publicized War on Drugs.45 Additionally, while likely not a primary consideration in justifying the incursion, the fact was not lost on the Pentagon that, should open conflict erupt with Noriega’s regime, the theater of operations would serve a utilitarian function as a testing ground for new military technologies and tactics.46 The invasion and perceptions concerning its legality generated controversy. Noriega and his campaign to nullify democratic elections and basic civil liberties had been condemned almost universally in the international community by individual nations and international organizations, such as the European Community, the Latin American Group of Eight, and the OAS, many of which also demanded that he step down.47 Yet many of the same nations and organizations denounced the U.S. invasion as a unilateral act not in accord with international law or the U.S. War Powers Act, requiring advanced Congressional approval of such military operations.48 A diverse range of opinion exists as to whether the war and its justifications constitute the beginning of a paradigm shift in international relations away from state sovereignty as an inviolable absolute and toward favoring international intervention as warranted under many circumstances, such as human rights violations, or conversely, the war may have merely exemplified militarism, unilateralism, and the pursuit by a nation of its own vested geopolitical interests.49

Notes 1 David Dent, Historical Dictionary of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 333. 2 Carlos Mann, Panamanian Militarism: A Historical Interpretation (Athens, OH: Ohio University Monographs in International Studies,1996), 87. 3 Margaret Scranton, The Noriega Years: U.S.–Panama Relations, 1981–1990 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers), 22. 4 Mann, Panamanian Militarism, 46–77; Robert Harding, Military Foundations of Panamanian Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 1. 5 Marco Gandasegui, “The Military Regimes of Panama,” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs 35, no. 3 (1993): 1–9. 6 R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez, In the Time of Tyrants, Panama: 1968–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton,1990), 22–23, 235–237. 7 Edward Flannigan, Battle for Panama: Inside Operation Just Cause (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1993), 7. 8 Eytan Gilboa, “The Panama Invasion Revisited: Lessons for the Use of Force in the Post Cold War Era,” Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 4 (1995–1996): 539; Flannigan, Battle for Panama, 8–9; Koster and Sanchez, In the Time of Tyrants, 19–46. 9 Gilboa, “The Panama Invasion Revisited,” 547. 10 Ibid., 545. 11 Charles Maechling, “Washington’s Illegal Invasion,” Foreign Policy 79 (1990): 120. 12 Kevin Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1991), 178–179; Koster and Sanchez, In the Time of Tyrants, 364–365. 13 Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, 179–181. 14 Flannigan, Battle for Panama, 7; Maechling, “Washington’s Illegal Invasion,” 118. 15 R. Cody Phillips, Operation Just Cause: The Incursion Into Panama (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2004), 5. 16 Phillips, Operation Just Cause, 8–9.

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17 Ved Nanda, “The Validity of United States Intervention in Panama under International Law,” The American Journal of International Law 84, no. 2 (1990): 497. 18 Associated Press, “Documents Show Noriega Planned to Bomb Canal, Attack U.S. Posts,” Associated Press wire, August 11, 1990; Malcolm McConnell, Just Cause: The Real Story of America’s High Tech Invasion of Panama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 32. 19 Maechling, “Washington’s Illegal Invasion,”; Nanda, “The Validity of United States Intervention.” 20 Anthony D’Amato, “The Invasion of Panama was a Lawful Response to Tyranny,” The American Journal of International Law 84, no. 2 (1990): 571. 21 U.S. General Accounting Office—National Security and International Affairs Division, Panama: Issues Related to the US Invasion (Washington, DC: United States General Accounting Office, 1991), 2. 22 Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, 154–156; Gilboa, “The Panama Invasion Revisited,” 539; Steve Ropp, “Explaining the Long-Term Maintenance of a Military Regime: Panama Before the US Invasion,” World Politics 44, no. 2 (1992): 216. 23 William Leogrande, “From Reagan to Bush: The Transition in US Policy Towards Central America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22, no. 3 (1990): 613; Scranton, The Noriega Years. 24 Koster and Sanchez, In the Time of Tyrants, 285. 25 PBS Frontline. “Drug Wars: Interview with Frendando Arenas,” available at www.pbs.org/wgbh/ pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/arenas.html, accessed February 1, 2012. 26 Phillips, Operation Just Cause 18. 27 Ibid., 19. 28 Koster and Sanchez, In the Time of Tyrants, 378–379; McConnell, Just Cause, 23–25; Phillips, Operation Just Cause, 21. 29 Phillips, Operation Just Cause, 23. 30 Ibid., 24. 31 Ibid., 25; Thomas Donnelly, Margaret Roth, and Caleb Baker, Operation Just Cause: The Storming of Panama (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 137. 32 McConnell, Just Cause, 10. 33 Phillips, Operation Just Cause, 35. 34 Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, 238. 35 Donnelly et al., Operation Just Cause, 297. 36 Ibid., 298–299. 37 Phillips, Operation Just Cause, 40. 38 Ibid. 39 Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, 180–181. 40 Phillips, Operation Just Cause, 44. 41 U.S. General Accounting Office, Panama: Issues, 2. 42 Maechling, “Washington’s Illegal Invasion,” 128. 43 Eillen Burgin, “Congress, the War Powers Resolution, & the Invasion of Panama,” Polity 25, no. 2 (1992): 234–239; U.S. General Accounting Office—National Security and International Affairs Division, Panama: Cost of the US Invasion of Panama (Washington, DC: United States General Accounting Office, 1990), 2. 44 C. Johns and P. Johnson, State Crime, the Media, and the Invasion of Panama (New York: Praeger, 1993). 45 Gilboa, “The Panama Invasion Revisited,” 539–542; John Dinges, Our Man In Panama: The Shrewd Rise and Brutal Fall of Manuel Noriega (New York: Random House, 1991), 244–248. 46 Johns and Johnson, State Crime. 47 Leogrande, “From Reagan to Bush,” 616. 48 Maechling, “Washington’s Illegal Invasion,” 129; Ramses Amer, “The United Nations’ Reaction to Foreign Military Interventions,” Journal of Peace Research 31, no. 4 (1994): 432; Burgin, “Congress, the War Powers Resolution,” 234. 49 D’Amato, “The Invasion of Panama,” 516–519; Maechling, “Washington’s Illegal Invasion,” 113–129; Nanda, “The Validity of United States Intervention,” 494–500; Stewart Sutley, “The Revitalization of United States Aterritorial International Logic: The World Before and After the 1989 Invasion of Panama,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 25, no. 3 (1992): 437.

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36 THE PARTICIPATION OF AMERICAN SERVICEWOMEN IN OPERATION DESERT STORM Emerald M. Archer

Scholars often identify the Persian Gulf War as the first large-scale test of women’s participation in combat. Operation Desert Storm (ODS), specifically, was a turning point for women in the military due to the sheer numbers deployed. In this period (1990–1991), the number of female recruits increased from 2 to 9 percent for a total of 40,793 in the theater of operations. This dramatic change in female representation captured the American media’s interest and, because of extensive media coverage, the American public was witness to the reality of women’s participation in war. ODS brought explicit new questions about women’s compatibility with warfare into the public eye, such that there was increased scrutiny regarding the proper roles of men and women in a gender-integrated military. The social debate continues even today.

Overview: Operation Desert Storm Operation Desert Storm was one of two phases that constituted the Persian Gulf War. Operation Desert Shield, a defensive first-phase operation, followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. In this phase, the United States (U.S.) and Saudi Arabia worked to build forces necessary to protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region.1 Desert Shield was effectively “designed to enforce economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations (UN) on Iraq, prevent further advancement by the Iraqi military, and achieve the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi forces.”2 Once economic sanctions were regarded as ineffective, the U.S. led a UN effort in building an international coalition of military forces that could liberate Kuwait. The U.S. pressured the UN to declare a deadline for Iraq’s departure from Kuwait, which was later determined as January 15, 1991. ODS began when Iraq refused to respond to the imposed deadline. The combination of early UN actions—through resolutions, sanctions, and embargo measures—played a major role in curbing Iraq’s ability to propagate war.3 ODS signifies the offensive second phase operation by coalition forces in the battle to liberate Kuwait. Offensive measures began on January 17, 1991 and ended on March 1, 1991, limiting the fighting by coalition forces to a six-week period. During this time, air and ground operations were intense, and the use of new military technologies made attacks highly successful. The air war, which began on January 17, was relatively short and overwhelmingly successful. The U.S. used “its intelligence, and targeting assets, cruise missiles, and offensive air power to launch a devastating series of air attacks on Iraq command and control facilities, communication systems, 324

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air bases, and land-based air defenses.”4 Within the first hour of war, U.S. sea-launched cruise missiles and F-117 stealth fighters proved they could attack guarded targets like Baghdad. British, Saudi, and U.S. aircraft were close to establishing air superiority within three days, despite Iraq’s air strength. Iraq established regional air superiority after the Iran–Iraq war and possessed a landbased air defense system that rivaled most third world systems. At this time, Iraq’s air strength was unrivaled regionally, but could not stand up to coalition capabilities and strategy. In the face of Iraq’s land-based air defense system and an inventory of almost 3,000 surface-to-air missiles, these weapons were blocked by the combined ability of U.S. and British use of “electronic warfare systems, antiradiation missiles, and precision air-to-surface weapons.”5 This technological superiority allowed coalition forces to broaden their selected targets beyond Iraqi air forces and air defenses to attack critical headquarters, power plants, weapons production facilities, and communication facilities. Taken together, the triangulation of coalition air tactics, attacks on ground bases and airfields were so successful that the Iraqi Air Force was no longer regarded as an effective fighting force on January 27. With air supremacy achieved, coalition forces continued to attack Iraqi ground targets for the duration of the war. In the 30 days that followed, UN coalition aircraft struck Iraqi armor and artillery forces in the Kuwaiti theater of operations and flew into Iraq to bomb its forward defenses, elite Republican Guard units, air bases, and non-conventional weapons facilities. In retaliation, Iraq launched scud missiles against Saudi and Israeli targets. Once the U.S. and coalition air power had weakened Iraqi land forces, UN Commander General Norman Schwarzkopf launched a land offensive on February 24, 1991. The land war had two primary waves. First, a substantial “left hook” would take coalition forces around Iraqi positions to the west of Kuwait, working to surround the elite Republican Guard. This wave was carried out by a combination of U.S., British, and French armored and airborne forces. Specifically, French forces focused their attack on Iraqi lines of communication along the Euphrates River. U.S. armored, mechanized, and helicopter forces quickly advanced toward Basra on the leading edge of the “left hook.” British forces protected the U.S. flank and attacked to the northeast along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. Second, coalition forces composed of U.S. Marines and an all-Arab Corps were sent straight through Iraq’s defenses at the Kuwaiti border to hold forward Iraqi divisions. Through rapid and coordinated movements, these forces penetrated Iraqi defenses such that Iraqi ground forces could not launch coordinated counter attacks. Coalition forces were then able to move toward Kuwait City, Wafrah, and Jahrah. At this time, many Iraqi soldiers fled due to low morale and motivation, which resulted in UN forces meeting major objectives in half of the estimated time. Coalition forces continued its air attacks simultaneously, which inevitably aided in bringing about the war’s end. The events of the Persian Gulf War illustrate two important issues: (1) how technological modernization affects combat, and (2) how this modernization eradicates the notion of a “front line.” First, as evinced by the air war that preceded the land war, coalition bombing raids imposed major losses on Iraqi forces before close ground combat began. Stealth aircraft allowed for the dropping of precision munitions that were then directed by sophisticated electronic systems to strike targets. American ground forces were also armed with sophisticated weapons. The decisive victory by coalition forces in the Persian Gulf was largely due to the asymmetry in technology and training—the allied forces were better equipped in these areas than their Iraqi counterparts. Sophisticated weaponry also makes the “front line” diffuse. The power of modern weapons are not limited to those in combat Military Occupational Specialties (MOS), and the air war illustrates that advanced weapons are capable of traveling great distances before destroying specific targets. The conditions of asymmetric war, then, put everyone in danger. For example, 325

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U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia were targeted by Iraqi scud missiles, which were located hundreds of miles from the “front lines.” Although scud missiles were notorious for their inaccuracy, Iraqi scuds struck a U.S. barracks, killing 28 Army reservists (three of whom were women). Beyond the overwhelming success of coalition forces in ODS and the use of technologically advanced weapon systems, the Persian Gulf War may be most well-known for its unprecedented employment of servicewomen in the theater of operations. The Persian Gulf War marked the “largest concentrated wartime deployment of uniformed American servicewomen” in American military history.6 More than 40,000 military women served in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and they accounted for approximately 7 percent of deployed U.S. troops. Of the women deployed, “27,000 were active duty and the rest reservists. Women accounted for more than 13 percent of reservists mobilized for the campaign, but less than 7 percent of active duty personnel.”7 Moreover, the roles women played in ODS were vital to operation success—for example, servicewomen piloted aircraft transporting troops and supplies, flew reconnaissance missions, evacuated wounded soldiers, ran Prisoner of War (POW) facilities, and provided logistical support. The nature of their participation and missions made it functionally impossible to distinguish between support and combat roles. For example: Air Force women were not permitted to fly fighter planes, but they flew the tankers that refueled the fighters over Iraq. Female Army pilots, excluded from piloting heavily armed attack helicopters, flew soldiers and supplies in the first assault wave fifty miles into Iraq aboard more vulnerable, lightly armed helicopters. Navy women pilots could not be in the cockpits of fighter aircraft, but were flying helicopters from ships in waters filled with mines.8 This environment put servicewomen, like their male counterparts, in serious danger. Five servicewomen were killed in action, and eight women died in non-hostile situations. Two women were captured and held as POWs. Army Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, a female truck driver, was held for 13 days, and an Army flight surgeon, Major Rhonda Cornum, was captured after being shot down while on a search and rescue mission. Major Cornum’s capture was particularly controversial since she was molested by Iraqi forces that held her captive. At least 19 servicewomen were physically wounded due to their participation. Overall, the heroic performance of servicewomen was widely acknowledged and led many to conclude that women should be fully integrated into all areas of military service. The experience of servicewomen serving in ODS shattered traditional justifications for gendered combat exclusions.

Evolving Policy Around Gender Scholars often identify the Persian Gulf War as the first large-scale test of women’s participation in combat in U.S. history. ODS was pivotal in demonstrating the little difference that exists between combat and non-combat roles, and illustrated that advanced technology does not guarantee the safety of servicewomen when relegated to non-combat positions. Like servicemen serving in ODS, servicewomen took great risks and performed superbly in harsh environments. General Schwarzkopf and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney noted their magnificent performance and that the war effort would not have been successful without their service.9 This kind of commentary created a forum to discuss opportunities for greater female participation, leading to congressional debate. It was the realities of ODS—that women did so well in combat environments—that problematized the traditional notions of what women could do in the military, and eventually led to the lifting of statutes that limited their participation in fundamental ways. 326

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Representative Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) was the first to directly challenge the combat exclusion law. On May 8, 1991, the House Armed Services Committee adopted an amendment to repeal the exclusionary ban prohibiting women from piloting Air Force aircraft engaged in combat missions.10 Representative Beverley B. Byron (D-MD) recommended broadening the repeal to include servicewomen in the Marine Corps and Navy. The House removed all restrictions against female combat aviators as part of the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993, and was passed on May 22, 1991. There was little resistance to the amendment in the House, but the bill was heavily opposed in the Senate. The Senate chose to debate the entire gamut of issues related to women in combat (e.g., questions of ground combat, deployed mothers, etc.) rather than accepting the House’s proposal outright. Republican and Democratic senators alike argued in defense of the combat exclusion law. On June 18, 1991, all service chiefs opposed opening combat units to women in testimonies delivered to the Manpower and Personnel Subcommittee. General Merill A. McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff, went so far as to say “that he would select a male pilot for a combat position even though a woman aviator competing for the same job was superior in all respects to the man.”11 Despite these testimonies, there was weak congressional opposition to removing the aviation restriction because no one could show that military effectiveness would be compromised if women flew combat missions. Realizing there would be little support to block the repeal, Senators John Glenn (D-OH) and John McCain (R-AZ) proposed that an appointed presidential commission conduct a study on the issue of women in combat. Meanwhile, in bipartisan support for repeal of the exclusionary law, Senators William V. Roth (R-DE) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) urged their colleagues to support two provisions— that is, repealing the combat aviation exclusion and appointing a presidential commission to review the matter.12 The proposal to create a presidential commission passed; however, the Senate refused to table “the Roth– Kennedy amendment repealing the combat aviation restriction and then passed the amendment by voice vote.”13 The House later accepted the Senate version of the legislation and Public Law (P.L.) 102–190 was signed into law on December 5, 1991. In accordance with the Roth– Kennedy amendment, the new law also stipulated that a commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces examine the issue of women in combat. The Defense Department chose to delay any policy changes until the commission produced a final report. The commission report recommended that Congress reinstate combat aviation exclusionary policy, but the recommendation was ignored by the newly elected Clinton administration and Congress. The new Democratic administration championed greater opportunities for servicewomen. Defense Secretary Les Aspin saw the expanded combat aviation policy as a first step in opening all combat positions to women with the exception of ground combat positions. The outstanding performance of servicewomen on sea duty during ODS could not be denied and provided justification for opening positions on combat ships to women. As a result, Aspin demanded that the Navy open as many combat ship positions to women as was practical and work toward developing a proposal to repeal the combat ship restriction.14 Congress responded and repealed P.L. 103–160, or the combat ship exclusion law, in 1993 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 1994. Without hearings in the Senate or much debate, the last exclusionary statute was removed. There was less enthusiasm by the public and Congress to open ground combat positions to women, despite the fact that they served almost everywhere in ODS. Since military personnel were largely opposed to this change and Congress was not interested in taking on the issue, the questions regarding opening ground combat positions to women was left to the Clinton administration. The administration decided to draw a clear line between ground combat and all other combat roles, and Secretary Aspin requested that the Army and Marine Corps study possible 327

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opportunities for women to serve in assignments such as field artillery and air defense artillery. Secretary Aspin also created an implementation committee to guarantee that policies on the assignment of women were adopted consistently across the services. The committee was charged with reviewing the appropriateness of the risk rule, a law that “prohibited women from serving where the risk of injury, capture, or death [was] equal to or greater than for men in combat billets.”15 The risk rule was deemed antiquated by the committee and recommendations were made to replace it with a policy on ground combat. Secretary Aspin rescinded the risk rule on January 13, 1994 and it became effective in October of the same year. He also “approved a new direct ground combat assignment rule that excluded women from units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat.”16 This law went into effect on October 1, 1994. In the face of so much progress, at least two issues continued to restrict women. First, Secretary Aspin authored a memo on January 13, 1994 that mandated all services provide policy that restricts the assignments of women in certain circumstances.17 Furthermore, in the same legislation that lifted the ban prohibiting women’s service on combat ships, the law stated that any proposed change to ground combat policy must be sent to the Senate 90 days before any change could be made. This requirement demonstrated that Congress planned to scrutinize any attempts made to expand women’s future opportunities in the Armed Forces.18

Acceptance of Women in the Armed Forces? The contributions of servicewomen in ODS were certainly reflected in congressional debates and new legislation. The actions of servicemen within the U.S. military, however, did not always represent these sentiments. The sexual misconduct of servicemen against servicewomen at the Tailhook convention, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and within service academies provide ample evidence to suggest that servicewomen were widely discriminated against in the wake of ODS. The first real sex scandal in the gender-integrated military took place at the 1991 Tailhook convention. The Tailhook Association, a private gathering for Marine and Navy aviators, met annually in Las Vegas for opportunities to interact with fellow aviators and participate in professional symposia. The 1991 convention was the first gathering since the victory in the Gulf and approximately 4,000 participants were in attendance. Of these attendees, 32 were active duty admirals and Marine Corps generals. The convention demonstrated incredible hostility toward female aviators, where 26 servicewomen, a majority of them naval officers, were sexually assaulted. On the weekend of the gathering, lewd behavior by male aviators occurred in the “hospitality suites” themselves or in adjoining hallways. Lewd activities included stripper performances, drinking shots of alcohol from women’s navels, “butt biting,” and “ball walking,” where fully clothed male officers walked around with their genitals exposed.19 The most notorious of these activities—the “gantlet”—took place within the hallway lining the “hospitality suites.” The “gantlet” was made of “two lines of men who groped, grabbed, tore the clothing of, and otherwise abused civilians and military women.”20 What is most alarming is that this assault was organized—specifically, gestures were used to signal specific activities and the assaults were presided over by a “master of ceremonies,” the Pentagon’s Inspector General. Two heroic actions should be noted, despite intense misconduct. First, one “hospitality suite,” rented by a helicopter squadron, was described as a “safe haven” in the midst of chaos created by male officers. Second, at least one woman retaliated after being attacked. Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen, an A-6 bomber pilot, was butt bitten by a visiting British officer, who she knocked unconscious with a 328

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single punch. She was able to respond because one individual attacked her. Women who found themselves mobbed in the “gantlet,” like Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, were not so lucky. An investigation later established that 100 assaults had transpired, for which 140 suspects were identified. The punishments received varied substantially, from punitive letters of reprimand and immunity, to non-judicial hearings. Overall, the morale of the Navy was severely compromised due to the conduct of its officers, the resulting witch-hunt in trying to punish offenders, and the seemingly arbitrary nature of punishments. This behavior did not represent an environment where men and women were treated as equal, and may have resulted from male anger related to the increasing number of female aviators flying combat missions. The Army soon experienced its own sex scandal. In November 1996, three soldiers stationed at Aberdeen Proving Grounds were charged with numerous sexual offenses based on allegations made by several female trainees. One drill sergeant, Staff Sergeant Delmar Gaither Simpson, was charged with rape and sodomy and later sentenced to 25 years in prison. Simpson’s case marks the most severe punishment related to these scandals, and there are many who believe that dishonorable discharge would have been a more appropriate punishment.21 Twelve additional soldiers were ultimately charged with similar offenses. Additionally, by May 1997, 26 more instructors stationed at Fort Leonard Wood were under investigation for fraternizing with female trainees. Of those investigated, two drill sergeants were discharged and sentenced to serve time in prison due to sexual misconduct. In the wake of Tailhook, the Army was quick to distance itself from the previous naval scandal. First, the Army created a global “hotline” where service members could call and report sexual misconduct anonymously. The Army also publically adopted the position that sex between superiors (instructors) and subordinates (trainees) would be deemed as rape because of stark power inequities—that is, consensual sex was impossible due to skewed power dynamics. Where Tailhook highlighted the arrogance of the naval command, Aberdeen raised many questions related to the absolute command of instructors over recruits.22 Furthermore, the Army made great strides in making the investigative process as transparent as possible. This was in direct contrast to the way the Navy investigated the Tailhook convention—the Navy’s initial response was to cover up the sexual misconduct.23 In an attempt to avoid the mistakes the Navy made in its investigation, the Army may have overreached. There is some evidence to suggest that female soldiers were pressured to make false claims about abuse they experienced.24 Problems associated with Tailhook, Aberdeen, and Fort Leonard Wood illustrate the gendered dynamic of active-duty servicemen and women after ODS. The atmosphere at American service academies after ODS is instructive when it comes to reinforcing military culture. In training the best future military officers, U.S. service academies failed to eliminate sexual abuse and discrimination within their institutions. Soon after ODS, several studies indicated that female cadets were systematically abused and discriminated against at all U.S. service academies. This finding was acknowledged in five governmental reports published between November 1992 and March 1994. A 1994 report claimed: 50 percent of the female midshipmen at the Naval Academy experienced some form of harassment at least twice a month. The rate rose to 59 percent of female cadets at the Air Force Academy. Leading the pack were female cadets at West Point. Seventysix percent of young women at the U.S. Military Academy would report recurring harassment to the GAO, giving the female cadets the dubious, but predictable, distinction of being the most harassed women on record at any military college campus in America.25 329

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Servicewomen were publically celebrated for the heroic service in ODS, but military culture within the academies did not reflect opinions of equality. Overall, misconduct by individuals representing the U.S. military at various conventions, training sites, and academies were isolated incidents in an environment where abuse and assault continued unchecked.

Acceptance (and Backlash) of the American Public On the issue of women in combat, the American public was divided. Many Americans demonstrated their support for women in combat through opinion polls, but dissenting opinion emerged from conservative forums and the media. Opinion polls released directly after ODS revealed that Americans generally supported the presence of women in combat. Newsweek reported on a Gallup poll released in August 1991 that found “53 percent of Americans surveyed would support combat assignments for women, but only if they wanted them; support fell to 26 percent when the assignment was involuntary.”26 Only 18 percent said women should never be assigned to combat roles. A year later, data released from a Roper Organization poll found that Americans supported the maintenance or increase in the numbers of military women. Support decreased in cases where women were associated with ground combat—only 38 percent of respondents advocated for their inclusion in close combat assignments.27 Public opinion likely influenced governmental officials to push for expanding servicewomen’s opportunities. Indeed, the Defense Department identified one of the most important lessons of ODS—that is, the extent to which the United States public accepted the meaningful role and contributions of women in combat.28 The public’s general support for granting greater opportunities to servicewomen was not without opposition. Support for maintaining exclusionary policies may have originated from the way in which society symbolically viewed women. Some individuals made use of traditional gender roles—men protect the home front and women keep the hearth fires burning—to emphasize responsibilities during wartime.29 If men were limited to the role of “protector” and women were relegated to the role of “nurturer,” any deviation from this norm may produce societal trauma.30 This “trauma,” however, never materialized in the wake of ODS. Beyond traditional gender roles, individuals appealed to the limits of women’s bodies and the disruptive nature of their participation in war as evidence that exclusionary policies should remain in place. Some feared full integration of women into the military would lead to decrements in performance, sexual distractions for men, and weaker unit cohesion. Women’s presence could destroy bonding between servicemen, which would ultimately interfere with performance and esprit de corps. Women’s visibility could even create diversions and rivalries that could lead to unnecessary risk-taking and protection of servicewomen by servicemen.31 The media contributed to the visibility of servicewomen and framed the discussion around them in gendered language. While the military made overt claims that women were professionals at war, the media often represented women as private and protected citizens. This dichotomy appeared in the media coverage of Melissa Rathbun-Nealy’s POW status and the “Mom’s War” moniker attributed to ODS. Rathbun-Nealy was captured by Iraqis on January 31, 1991 and released to the Red Cross on March 4, 1991. Media converge pertaining to this event highlighted public concerns about the extent to which women were taking real risks in wartime. Questioning women’s integrity reinforced the notion that women were protected people rather than war fighters. The media also linked sexuality to war by speculating whether she had been raped while held as a POW. People posed questions like, had “she been a victim of rape or torture like so many Kuwaiti women?”32 This question highlights sexual misconduct as a primary concern about women’s 330

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participation in combat. Many articles were written in gendered language, reinforcing the accepted status of men and the reluctant acceptance of women in wartime. A Newsweek writer questioned how the American public would react to the torture of a servicewoman, and concluded that “for women in the military, attaining equality may carry a terrible price.”33 The media rarely mentioned the price servicemen paid in war. Gendered language was also evoked to show differences between servicemen and women. USA Today reported two distinct reactions of servicemen and women upon returning home from war. Where a woman “fell into her mother’s arms” with “tears streaming down her face,” her male peer “showered [his family] with kisses.”34 These images reinforce traditional gender roles, where stoicism and emotion are natural for men and women, respectively. Some media outlets reported that ODS was a “Mom’s War,” which alerted the public to the alarming number of deployed mothers serving in ODS. The media manufactured the perception that a large amount of mothers were passing their children off to family while they went abroad, and many worried that orphans would be the direct result of their participation. However, there were more servicemen married than their counterparts, and more men had children than did women. While this statistic was lost on the media, the Navy felt that single parent and dual-career couples coped under such circumstances with their usual professionalism and competence, and caused few problems.35 The public was not convinced by these reassurances and believed that mothers should not abandon their children. After victory in the gulf, “sixty-four percent of Americans [said] it [was] unacceptable to send mothers into a warzone.”36 Overall, the media seemed to position women on opposing sides of the spectrum—as either deployed warriors or dutiful wives supporting their warrior husbands. Women’s successful integration into ODS eventually led to greater opportunities for servicewomen in combat. Although there was much public debate, many military and governmental officials recognized their contribution to the extent that ODS could not have been won without them. Accolades at the highest levels did not prohibit discrimination within the military—specifically, cases like the Tailhook and Aberdeen illustrate the resentment some servicemen felt toward their female counterparts. In covering ODS, the American media often framed the conflict in gendered terms. By representing servicewomen as helpless POWs and emotional warriors, the media may have played a role in strengthening gender role stereotypes around war. Even today, two decades after the ODS victory, gender role stereotypes continue to be used as evidence that women and war are incompatible. Despite this, there is no doubt that servicewomen today have more opportunities than their predecessors: female officers lead male units, female Marines may join the Lioness Program, and servicewomen are represented among the highest-ranking officers in the military. Additionally, the Pentagon announced its recommendation to Congress that women should be allowed to serve in jobs closer to combat in February 2012. While servicewomen are prohibited from serving in direct combat roles (e.g., infantry, armor, and special operations), they can be now assigned to jobs at the battalion level, which has traditionally been deemed too dangerous based on proximity to combat. Most recently, the Army is considering opening its prestigious Ranger School, a 61-day-long combat leadership course, to women.37 These ever-expanding opportunities, along with servicewomen’s continued exemplary service in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, communicate a sense of equality previously absent within the military. Servicewomen have made clear gains since ODS, but their gender continues to create barriers in the domain of war. Continued restrictions on women in combat mean that women will never hold the titles of Commandant of the Marine Corps, CENTCOM commander, or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They may have won many battles, but the fight for a gender-neutral military is far from over. 331

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Notes 1 Anthony H. Cordesman, “The Persian Gulf War,” in John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2 James D. Milko, “Beyond the Persian Gulf Crisis: Expanding the Role of Servicewomen in the United States Military,” The American University Law Review 41 (1992): 1312–1313. 3 Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, eds., The Lessons of Modern Warfare, Volume IV: The Gulf War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 9. 4 Cordesman, “Persian Gulf.” 5 Ibid. 6 Milko, “Beyond,” 1313. 7 Martin Binkin, Who Will Fight the Next War? (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1993), 18. 8 Georgia Clark Sadler, “Women in Combat: The US Military and the Impact of the Persian Gulf War,” in Laurie Weinstein and Christie C. White, eds., Wives and Warriors: Women and the Military in the United States and Canada (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997), 80. 9 Kate Muir, Arms and the Woman (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, Ltd., 1992). 10 Alice W.W. Parham, “The Quiet Revolution: Repeal of the Exclusionary Statutes in Combat Aviation—What We Have Learned from a Decade of Integration,” William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 12, no. 2 (2006): 377–401. 11 Sadler, “Women in Combat,” 84. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 85. 14 Ibid., 86. 15 D’Ann Campbell, “Combatting the Gender Gulf,” Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review 2, no. 63 (1992): 67. 16 Sadler, “Women in Combat,” 90. 17 Ibid., 91. 18 Ibid. 19 Kingsley R. Browne, “Military Sex Scandals from Tailhook to the Present: The Cure Can Be Worse Than the Disease,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 14, no. 749 (2007): 749–789. 20 William L. O’Neill, “Sex Scandals in the Gender-Integrated Military,” Gender Issues 16, nos. 1–2 (1998): 65. 21 Browne, “Military Sex Scandals,” 771. 22 Carol Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004). 23 O’Neill, “Sex Scandals,” 69. 24 Browne, “Military Sex Scandals,” 772. 25 Ibid. 26 Cynthia Nantais and Martha F. Lee, “Women in the United States Military: Protectors or Protected? The Case of Prisoner of War Melissa Rathbun-Nealy,” Journal of Gender Studies 8, no. 2 (1999): 185. 27 Roper Organization, Attitudes Regarding the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, survey conducted by the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces (August, 1992). 28 Milko, “Beyond,” 1323. 29 Chandler v. Callaway, No. C-74–1249 RHS at 4–5 (N.D. Cal, Nov. 1, 1974) (Lexis, Genfed Library, Dist file). 30 Kenneth L. Krast, “The Pursuit of Manhood and the Desegregation of the Armed Forces,” UCLA Law Review 38 (1991): 499, 529. 31 Krast, “The Pursuit,” 536. 32 P. Freeman, F. Weinstein, and J. Greenwalt, “Survivor of 32 Too Many Arabian Nights, Melissa Rathbun-Nealy Heads Home from Baghdad,” People (March 18, 1991): 46. 33 Newsweek, “Women in the Military: The First POW,” Newsweek (February 11, 1991): 20. 34 Nantais and Lee, “Women,” 188. 35 Campbell, “Combatting the Gender,” 75. 36 Ibid. 37 Lily Kuo, “U.S. May Send Women to Elite Ranger School: Top Army Chief,” Reuters (May 16, 2012), available at www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/17/us-usa-women-rangers-idUSBRE84G00 820120517, accessed February 8, 2013.

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37 U.S. TROOPS IN NON-TRADITIONAL ROLES Humanitarian and Peacekeeping Operations Keith Pomakoy

The end of the Cold War provided an opportunity for a significant change in American foreign and military policy. The absence of a major threat to American security, the overwhelming dominance of American technology on the battlefield, the almost unique logistical capabilities of American armed forces, and the “peace dividend” that supposedly accompanied the end of a half-century of global conflict led many to believe that a hopeful new age of humanitarianism had arrived. Yet the most prominent humanitarian ventures of the 1990s, those in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, achieved mixed results at best. The end of the decade left some proponents of an activist humanitarian foreign policy with the sense that many missed opportunities had existed during the 1990s. President George H.W. Bush stood as the first beneficiary of the altered reality of post Cold War world politics. In his 1991 State of the Union Address, Bush commented “that the end of the Cold War has been a victory for all humanity.” Speaking as a coalition of states stood poised to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, Bush had every reason to be hopeful. The freedom of action afforded by the decline of the Soviet Union allowed Bush to talk of a world “where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”1 Yet Bush’s policies did not match his rhetoric, and Bush fought the war in the Persian Gulf for very limited, clearly defined goals. The unwillingness of Bush to expand his war aims to include a march on the Iraqi capital and an overthrow of the Baathist regime came to be seen by many contemporaries as a mistake. More recent events have illustrated the risks inherent in nation-building exercises. Many critics, reflecting on the events of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are now more cautious in their assessments of Bush’s strategic decisions. The attitude that Bush had missed the opportunity to remove a mass murderer from power in 1991 was representative of a growing intellectual movement that saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity where America could and should make humanitarian intervention a primary policy goal. The low American casualties of the Gulf War and some very dramatic bomb damage assessment briefings lent credibility to the idea that military humanitarian intervention could be accomplished with ease.2 In this fecund atmosphere of interventionist thought Bush committed American military forces to a humanitarian mission in Somalia that would have profound consequences for American policy over the next decade, and that would define American military humanitarian intervention until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks led the George W. Bush administration to shift policy dramatically.3 333

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Desperate humanitarian conditions plagued Somalia and prompted American involvement in the crisis. A civil war, the disintegration of civil authority, and a catastrophic famine described as “Biblical” led to hundreds of thousands of deaths by early 1992.4 The United Nations (UN) had been active in the country throughout the year, but the lack of a civil government partner severely impeded operations. In December 1992, with the goal of facilitating the delivery of relief in the area, UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 794 passed unanimously. A UN force, primarily American, deployed with mixed objectives. The limited goal of providing security for relief operations stood as the primary aim of this phase of the mission. George H.W. Bush, by then a lame duck, agreed to “take the lead in creating a secure environment” in Somalia. While American forces had been working to supply aid to Somalia under the title Operation Provide Relief since August 1992, this new effort, called Operation Restore Hope, represented the deployment of 38,000 military personnel from twenty-three nations into the country. America provided approximately 25,000 service members, and commanded the international effort. Bush reassured an America enamored with the Powell Doctrine that limited goals existed for this deployment—the establishment of a “secure environment in the hardest-hit parts of Somalia, so that food” could be supplied—followed by the withdrawal of most American military personnel.5 The military mission started inauspiciously. News cameras and bright lights in the pre-dawn hours greeted the U.S. Navy Seals who moved onto the landing beaches that would be used to deploy elements of the I Marine Expeditionary Force. The landings proved otherwise uneventful, and international forces quickly established order in much of Somalia. The general level of security allowed humanitarian relief to proceed, and this phase of the military humanitarian intervention proved reasonably effective in the shattered context of Somalia. This situation, however, changed significantly in March with the passage of the more ambitious UNSCR 814. The UN now placed more emphasis on nation building while simultaneously attempting to increase the level of security in Somalia. This marked a significant moment for military humanitarian intervention.6 Up to this point international forces had enjoyed success through a combination of limited political interference, strict rules of engagement, and overwhelming potential force. A contemporary American official said that the initial relief mission by its nature [was] not too significant a military operation. You move in, take the airfields in a half dozen places, then clear out the roads and establish an environment and let the aid go. And the combat forces could be replaced by peacekeepers. To have that kind of military operation, that could be repeated as necessary—I think it would be a pretty good object lesson. It would create a new environment, having mounted an operation like that.7 An editorial from the New York Times endorsed Bush’s actions, but offered a cautionary warning: “the danger is that a well intended but ill-planned operation in Somalia could fix the wrong kind of precedent or, even worse, backfire.”8 In this case, the newspaper’s comment proved prescient, and the situation in Somali deteriorated after the passage of UNSCR 814. William J. Clinton, president since January, changed America’s military role in Somalia. The new plan, Operation Continue Hope, represented part of a UN effort to build an effective civil government in Somalia, and at the same time led to a reduction of combat forces. Hence the mission had changed significantly, and abandoned its limited character, at the same time that combat capabilities degraded. The overwhelming force of Operation Restore Hope, by October 1993, turned into 16,000 peacekeepers (rather than peace enforcers). While some American 334

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combat forces did stay behind, including a 1,100-member quick reaction force from the 10th Mountain Division, combat capabilities had declined significantly. The structural change in UN forces corresponded to growing belligerency on the part of Somali militias. Peacekeeping requires the cooperation of local authorities. This new UN initiative not only lacked the power to enforce cooperation from Somali warlords, but the UN began targeting local militias, making voluntary cooperation all the less likely. Thus, with the best intentions, the preconditions for the defining military humanitarian intervention disaster of the 1990s had been conceived. In June, a warlord styling himself General Mohamed Farrah Aidid attacked UN peacekeepers and over twenty Pakistani soldiers died. A UN-inspired, American-led retaliatory raid engaged Aidid’s forces on June 11.9 Clinton declared the operation against Aidid a success, but Somalia did not stabilize and the warlord continued to elude capture.10 Administration officials vowed to stay in Somalia until the violence subsided.11 Requests from local American commanders for a more robust combat capability went unfulfilled, and the Clinton administration continued to rely upon UN peacekeeping forces to support American combat operations in Somalia. By August, as success had not materialized, the New York Times expressed growing concern over the mission in Somalia and asked if it was time to leave. An editorial charged that a humanitarian mission to deliver food to millions of starving Somalis is degenerating into an obsessive search-and-destroy operation against supporters of a single warlord ... Americans have not just a right but an obligation to demand that the Clinton Administration explain what compelling national purpose justifies such risk to the lives of U.S. soldiers and Somali civilians caught in the crossfire.12 An American-led mission to capture Aidid on October 3–4 resulted in the deaths of eighteen service personnel, the loss of two helicopters, and saw the awarding of two posthumous medals of honor.13 These combat deaths proved too much for the Clinton administration to tolerate. The failure of the American military to capture Aidid, complete with video footage of celebrating Somalis dragging the mutilated corpses of dead American servicemen through the streets of Mogadishu, led to a search for blame—and a quick way out of the debacle. A request for reinforcements, including the heavy armor that would have made the casualties suffered in the October effort to snatch Aidid less likely, finally received belated approval from an administration that admitted to command failure in Somalia.14 Public opinion turned sharply against a continuance of the mission. The Clinton administration set a withdrawal date for American forces, ended the hunt for Aidid, and switched to a defensive role.15 The UN-sponsored humanitarian intervention that had started with such hope the previous year ended with the withdrawal of American forces in March 1994, and most UN forces left early the following year. Somalia descended into a virtually lawless condition that provided a haven for piracy into the new millennium.16 Food distribution did take place, especially after American combat forces entered the country, but the larger UN mission failed. The inability of the international community to deploy the military might needed to achieve hegemonic control over Somalia—rather, the unwillingness to sustain that force as the mission grew to one of state building and UN forces assumed a lead role—led to the ultimate collapse of the undertaking. The Clinton administration’s failure to supply local commanders with the forces that they had requested contributed to the humiliating loss of American lives and the precipitous withdrawal of American support. Somalia had established the “wrong kind of precedent,” as the New York Times had warned.17 Indeed, the failure in Somalia had a chilling effect upon the Clinton administration.18 The so-called “Somalia Syndrome,” caused by a battle that would not have merited a press conference during the Vietnam War, led to an extreme reluctance of the president to 335

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intervene with ground troops, and unrealistic (and difficult to achieve) force protection estimates among American commanders already suspicious of humanitarian missions.19 An administration that came to office ideologically predisposed to eschew ground commitments—a legacy of the Vietnam War for the American left especially, but not exclusively— found itself unwilling to risk another debacle. Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25) after Somalia, reaffirming American commitment to UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement efforts, but only when the mission’s political and military objectives were “clear and feasible.” PDD-25 served to prevent the type of open-ended commitment that had occurred in Somalia and established a series of factors to be considered before America would commit forces to UN Chapter VI or VII operations. In practice PDD-25 directed policy planners away from operations that required the deployment of American ground forces into combat.20 The end of the Cold War also brought instability and disintegration to Yugoslavia, and Bush’s hope that nations would stand together to achieve “universal aspirations” again did not materialize. Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s with disastrous consequences for many of its citizens—Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs. The George H.W. Bush administration viewed the situation in Yugoslavia as more difficult than that in Somalia. Lawrence S. Eagleburger, acting secretary of state, commented that in the case of Yugoslavia, it ought to be clear to everyone that the use of force as a means of bringing that war to an end would require far more in the way of troops and far more in the way of commitment [than in Somalia].21 The incoming administration called Yugoslavia “perhaps our most difficult foreign policy problem.”22 The Clinton administration showed no willingness to commit ground forces to an effort to use force against the warring factions, and this reluctance increased with the failures in Somalia.23 Clinton initially let the UN and the European powers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) take the lead in fashioning a policy toward the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and some in a resurgent post Cold War Europe were happy to act without American leadership. Several states in Europe attempted to negotiate a series of ceasefire agreements, and sought UN support for peacekeepers—after the fighting had stopped. This approach proved ineffective in the face of the expansionist goals of the Serbs, and to a lesser degree of those of the Croats as well.24 As the ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia prepared for war, the European powers worked to secure an arms embargo. Serbia, retaining control of most of the federal army (the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, or JNA), possessing a domestic arms industry, and importing a sizeable weapons cache before the embargo, found itself adequately supplied. Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina possessed very few weapons and consequently suffered horribly in this genocidal civil war.25 President Clinton called this embargo a “mistake” that allowed Serbs and Croats to have more weapons than the Bosnians.26 It probably facilitated the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The UN authorized peacekeepers in February 1992. Initially restricted to Croatia, this United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) for the Former Yugoslavia eventually moved into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. America contributed a limited number of personnel to this deployment, including a hospital unit. UNPROFOR’s initial role clearly did not encompass a broad mandate for peace enforcement. In 1993, UNPROFOR began guarding UN-authorized safe areas—perhaps most infamously at Srebrenica.27 UNPROFOR accomplished numerous humanitarian successes, but the professed neutrality of the UN generally worked to the advantage of the better armed Serbs, and fighting continued.28 336

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In July 1995, peacekeepers at the UN safe area of Srebrenica allowed a Serb force to occupy the town and massacre 6,000–8,000 Muslims. UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali had issued public assurances that he would use airstrikes to defend peacekeepers and UN safe areas if his subordinates asked him to do so. Despite specific warnings that UN forces would defend the town, UN peacekeepers did not intervene to protect their charges.29 This failure finally prompted a stronger UN/NATO response. Clinton, in 1993, said that the “United States should lead” on the humanitarian issue in Yugoslavia. However, he had not envisioned a war to resolve the crisis. He commented that the principle of ethnic cleansing is something that we ought to stand up against. That does not mean that the United States or the United Nations can enter a war to redraw [the borders of] Yugoslavia, or that that would ultimately be successful . .. this is, clearly, the most difficult foreign policy problem we face.30 The failures of UNPROFOR, especially at Srebrenica, led to a growing American determination to force an end to the conflict. The changing military balance in the former Yugoslavia, as Serb forces began to show signs of weakness by mid-1995, now afforded the opportunity to effect a political solution with the use of airpower. Clinton agreed to American participation in NATO air attacks, and by August 30 sustained pressure under the name Operation Deliberate Force attempted to bring all sides to the peace table. These military developments led to the Dayton Accords in November 1995, and the General Framework Agreement for Peace the following month,31 thus ending the major fighting in the area. Dayton divided up Bosnia and Herzegovina essentially along the battle lines—something that did not sit well with all observers. An author in the New York Times opined that the result “came about because of the blindness and weakness of Western politicians, diplomats and soldiers.”32 The unwillingness of the international community to use force early in this conflict, and the UN arms embargo, helped to perpetuate a genocidal conflict in a region that had one of the necessary preconditions for a successful defense—a state willing to defend itself. While the arming of Bosnia and Herzegovina might have expanded the war, it is possible, especially when one considers the eventual outcome, that an armed state with NATO airpower at its disposal could have been able to protect itself. The Dayton Accords led to the introduction of a multinational peacekeeping force into Bosnia and Herzegovina. Approximately 20,000 American soldiers, including elements of the 1st Armored Division, deployed to implement the peace agreement. Termed IFOR (Implementation Force) and commanded by NATO, this deployment consisted of approximately 60,000 soldiers from NATO and non-NATO nations, including a combat brigade from Russia. Combat units rather than peacekeepers, IFOR performance in the former Yugoslavia should be praised for the restraint shown in a difficult situation. Commanders generally attempted to defuse tense situations, and resisted the temptation to turn to NATO’s overwhelming firepower to implement force-based solutions. American formations typically rotated through Bosnia in one-year deployments and developed working relationships with the numerous factions in the region. However, deploying this force proved somewhat difficult. American formations in Europe—then in the midst of a massive drawdown following the end of the Cold War and Operation Desert Storm—had to be restructured and retrained prior to deployment (training alone cost $89 million), and the number of European borders this force had to cross during its initial deployment into the former Yugoslavia from Hungary required significant diplomatic efforts. The logistical support for a deployment to Bosnia provided further challenges. In December 1996, IFOR transitioned to SFOR (Stabilization Force) and began the stabilization period of the NATO mission. The post-Dayton peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia, 337

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limited in scope and enjoying some level of support from the various civil authorities, have been successful, although stresses did emerge during the Kosovo War.33 In 1998, Serbia launched a new genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing in the predominantly Albanian region of Kosovo. NATO, in an effort to protect Kosovar Albanians, began a sustained bombing campaign called Operation Allied Force on March 24, 1999, which lasted for seventyeight days—unfortunately the air attacks had the effect of speeding up the genocidal process.34 The absence of a joint air-land approach stands as a major deficiency of this operation, but NATO had no intention of deploying ground forces if “organized armed resistance” remained in Kosovo.35 Additionally, any effort to introduce NATO combat soldiers had to overcome all but insurmountable international opposition from states sympathetic to Serb interests (especially Russia), and any putative invasion would have required almost ninety days of preparation before it could be launched, leaving the Kosovar Albanians at the mercy of the Serbs during that time.36 The legacy of Somalia and PDD-25 functioned to make the deployment of American ground forces unacceptable to the Clinton administration. Without a ground component, the humanitarian crises raged unabated until June. On June 9, a Military-Technical Agreement providing for the phased withdrawal of Yugoslav forces and the introduction of peacekeepers (KFOR) was signed, and NATO ground forces entered Kosovo on June 12 under UNSCR 1244. An incident at the Pristina International Airport marred the initial deployment when Russian soldiers occupied an area designated for British use. U.S. General Wesley Clark ordered the British to block the runways at Pristina to prevent Russian reinforcements. The British commander, Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson, insisted that challenging the Russians amounted to an unnecessary risk and refused to comply. Recriminations followed in all directions; Clark’s reputation suffered as a result, but Jackson, who received support from his superiors in Britain, saw his reputation enhanced. The crisis resolved after a series of negotiations—much as Jackson had predicted. America initially contributed 7,000 troops to KFOR, including Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. KFOR supervised the evacuation of Yugoslav forces, disarmed the Kosovo Liberation Army, and provided humanitarian relief. While problems persist, KFOR has generally been successful.37 In the absence of a major adversary, the 1990s represented the period of America’s greatest military strength. Yet this period proved disappointing from a humanitarian perspective. While the First Gulf War achieved both its military and political objectives, the war left a despot in power—and that despot brutally suppressed his people. The operation in Somalia started with great hope, but first faltered as the mission changed from famine relief to nation building, and then collapsed after U.S. Army Rangers hunting Aidid suffered unacceptable losses. In Bosnia, the international community instituted an amoral arms embargo and attempted to wait out the crisis. Kosovo revealed a greater determination of the international community to act, but the unwillingness to deploy ground troops left the Kosovar Albanians vulnerable to massacre and mass rape. What lessons can be gleaned from this tumultuous period? First, and perhaps most importantly, especially given the determination of modern genocidaires, is an idea that is and ought to be self-evident: reacting to humanitarian crises is not easy.38 Despite the advent of precisionguided munitions and the end of Cold War politics, humanitarian military intervention proved difficult to accomplish—in many ways far more so than nineteenth century interventions—in the face of heavily armed local populations and a shortage of political and popular will. The ability of a Somali warlord first to defy and then to drive off a UN peacekeeping force illustrated the weaknesses of most UN-led forces. America’s precipitous withdrawal set, as the New York Times warned, the wrong type of precedent. Often the complicated workings of the UN led to 338

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the deployments of soldiers who were not allowed to protect the innocent, presenting a façade that could be exploited in areas such as Bosnia, and led to horrific failures such as Srebrenica. Second, the logistical requirements of peacekeeping and peace enforcement tend to be significant. While careful staff work can solve logistical problems, infrastructure weaknesses from crowded port facilities to inadequate road networks have a very real impact upon operational planning and deployment. In Somalia, easy access to the coast allowed sea and air resources to mediate the deficient road networks, and in Bosnia friendly governments and European rail networks allowed commanders to deploy the 1st Armored Division quickly. However, in areas lacking these compensatory mechanisms, the deployment of large forces would be far more difficult—and take more time. Third, American peacekeeping efforts generally enjoyed success during the 1990s. Before the mission changed in Somalia, and after the Dayton Accords and the Military-Technical Agreement were signed, American forces were able to provide security for humanitarian operations. The disappointments of American military humanitarian intervention in this period came at moments when security could not be guaranteed—either because political decisions had a deleterious impact upon local conditions, as in Somalia, or, as in the former Yugoslavia, because the introduction of a peace enforcement ground force did not emerge as a viable policy option. The disappointments of the 1990s have left many convinced that American military humanitarian intervention could have accomplished more. Strangely, many in the political left and right in America came to agree upon this point by the end of the decade. Spreading democracy and ending genocide became, to many, achievable goals based on the lessons of the 1990s. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks provided the George W. Bush administration with the opportunity to implement the right’s view of the lessons of the 1990s, and the Barack Obama administration contains a number of individuals who espouse the left’s view of humanitarian intervention. However, the events of the 1990s do not support the idea that great humanitarian goals can be achieved with minimal effort.39

Notes 1 George H.W. Bush, “State of the Union Address, January 29, 1991,” available at www.presidency. ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19253, accessed July 16, 2010. 2 Keith Pomakoy, editorial, September 11, 2011, Post-Star, available at http://poststar.com/highlights/9-11/guest-essay-attacks-led-to-historic-change-in-foreign-policy/article_3ec6fd2c-dc2111e0-a7e8-001cc4c03286.html, accessed April 7, 2012; Stephen Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell: the United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991–2003,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, nos. 3–4 (September–December 2010): 149–172. 3 Robert F. Bauman, Lawrence A. Yates, with Versalle F. Washington, “My Clan Against the World”: US and Coalition Forces in Somalia 1992–1994 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004), 1–5. 4 Kenneth Allard, Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned (Washington, DC: University Press of the Pacific, 1995), 3–13. 5 “Transcript of the President’s Address on Somalia,” December 2, 1992, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 6 “Transcript of the President’s Address on Somalia,” December 2, 1992, in the New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Bauman et al., “My Clan Against the World,” 1. 7 Eric Schmitt, “US Assesses Risks of Sending Troops to Somalia,” December 1, 1992, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 8 Editorial, “Do it Right in Somalia,” December 1, 1992, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 9 Michael R. Gordon, “U.S. Attacks Somali Clan Chief to Support UN Peace-keepers,” June 12, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

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10 “Excerpts from Clinton’s News Conference at the White House,” June 18, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 11 Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Forces to Stay in Somalia to End Warlord Violence,” August 27, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 12 Editorial, “Somalia: Time to Leave?” New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 13 Allard, Somalia Operations, 19–20. 14 R.W. Apple, Jr., “Clinton Sending Reinforcements after Heavy Losses in Somalia,” October 4, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 15 Drummond Ayres, Jr., “A Common Cry Across the U.S.: It’s Time to Exit,” October 9, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Douglas Jehl, “U.S. Shifts to Defensive Role in Somalia Mission,” October 20, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 16 Elisabetta Povoledo, “Former Hostages are Recovering at a U.S. Base,” January 27, 2012, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Jeffrey Gettleman, “Money in Piracy Attracts More Somalis,” November 9, 2010, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Gettleman, “A Taste of Hope in Somalia’s Battered Capital,” April 3, 2012, New York Times, available at www.nytimes.com, accessed April 6, 2012. 17 Editorial, “Do it Right in Somalia,” December 1, 1992, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 18 Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 322–324. 19 Bauman et al., “My Clan Against the World,” 1–5. 20 PDD-25, online at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, available at www.clintonlibrary.gov/_ previous/textual-Presidential_Directives.htm, accessed January 2, 2012. 21 Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Assesses Risks of Sending Troops to Somalia,” December 1, 1992, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Michael R. Gordon, “Avoiding a Quagmire,” August 11, 1992, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 22 “Excerpts from President Clinton’s News Conference at the White House,” June 18, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 23 Bauman et al., “My Clan Against the World,” 201–210. 24 William Rubinstein, Genocide: a History (New York: Pearson Education, 2004), 281–85; Alan Riding, “A Toothless Europe?” July 4, 1991, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Paul Lewis, “Three European Nations Propose UN Peace Force for Yugoslavia,” November 14, 1991, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 25 Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (New York: Harvard University Press, 2001), 139–184; Stephen Engelberg, with Eric Schmitt, “Serbs Easily Out-flank UN Arms Embargo,” July 5, 1992, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 26 “Excerpts from President Clinton’s News Conference at the White House,” June 18, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 27 UN Department of Public Information, available at www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/ unprof_p.htm, accessed July 28, 2010. 28 John F. Burns, “Aid Trucks Arrive in a Bosnian Town after Serbs Yield,” March 20, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Anthony Lewis, “Lessons of Disaster,” July 17, 1995, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 29 Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 163–165; Chris Hedges, “UN Warns Serbs of Bombing if they Attack Dutch Unit,” July 10, 1995, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 30 “Excerpts from Clinton News Conference: ‘The U.S. Should Lead’ on Bosnia,” April 24, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; “Excerpts from President Clinton’s News Conference at the White House,” June 18, 1993, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 31 Robert F. Bauman, George W. Gawrych, and Walter E. Kretchik, Armed Peacekeepers in Bosnia (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004), 27–31; R.W. Apple, Jr., “Goal of Bombers: The Bargaining Table,” August 31, 1995, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 32 Anthony Lewis, “What Weakness Brings,” September 11, 1995, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 33 Richard M Swain, Neither War nor not War, Army Command in Europe During the Time of Peace Operations: Tasks Confronting USAREUR Commanders, 1994–2000 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2003), 45–70. 34 Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 175–182; Craig Whitney, “NATO’s Plan: A Barrage, not a Pinprick,” March 23, 1999, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Steven Lee Myers and Michael R. Gordon,

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35 36

37 38 39

“Lacking Ground Troops, General Seeks more in the Air,” April 8, 1999, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Bruce R. Nardulli, Walter L. Perry, Bruce Pirnie, John Gordon IV, and John McGinn, Disjointed War: Military Operations in Kosovo, 1999 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2002), 6–7. Michael R. Gordon and Craig R. Whitney, “2 Allies Press U.S. to Weigh the Use of Ground Forces,” April 22, 1999, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Steven Erlanger, “Allies were Nearing Kosovo Ground War,” November 7, 1999, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Elizabeth Becker, “U.S. General was Overruled in Kosovo,” September 10, 1999, New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 99–110. Keith Pomakoy, Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), passim; Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell,” 149–172. Pomakoy, editorial; Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell,” 149–172.

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PART XI

September 11, 2001 and its Aftermath

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38 SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 AND THE WAR ON TERROR Martin Loicano1

September 11, 2001 was a watershed in U.S. military, social, and political history. Terrorist attacks combined the worst effects of Pearl Harbor and the demoralizing destruction of the U.S. capitol in the War of 1812. Americans were generally shocked, angered, and confused by these seemingly unprovoked attacks. They wanted answers and wanted those responsible punished. The attacks on 9/11 triggered the lengthy and costly Global War on Terror (GWOT), which included the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and military actions in Asia and Africa. The United States’ world view changed; military historian John Keegan observed that: Before 9/11 the American people, if largely uncomprehending of the outside world, viewed it through benevolent eyes; after 9/11 they saw enemies everywhere. Before 9/11 American governments had, for fifty years, sought to keep the peace by leading a Western alliance of the like-minded; after 9/11 Washington committed itself to the defence of America first and foremost.2 The new President, George W. Bush, gradually developed a preemptive warfare doctrine that later bore his name. The administration’s security policy was defined by “unilateralism, preemption, and low-profile nation-building.”3 This doctrine materialized most forcefully in Iraq. From 2001 to 2003, GWOT operations had the more limited goal of eliminating Al Qaeda— the terrorist group held responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their allies. Al Qaeda was a multinational terrorist organization under Osama Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi national who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. They formally declared war on the United States in 1996. According to former FBI agent Ali Soufan, Bin Laden “was in many ways a product of the mixture of two extremes of 1970s Saudi Arabia: a militant version of Wahhabism and Saudi wealth.”4 He and his followers were driven by the perception that past U.S. actions killed untold numbers of Muslims and interfered with self-determination in the Islamic world. By the end of 1999, Al Qaeda maintained hundreds of hard-core operatives in over sixty countries. In author Steve Coll’s words, they were “poor, eager, and uneducated [men] . . . inspired by fire-breathing local imams, satellite television news, or Internet sites devoted to jihadist violence in Palestine, Chechnya, and Afghanistan.”5 They were also increasingly capable of violence worldwide. Al Qaeda attacked U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in July 1998 and the destroyer USS Cole in October 2000. On September 9, 2001, Al Qaeda 345

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assassinated the strongest Taliban rival, Ahmed Shah Masud. As Camille Tawil, an expert on militant Jihadist groups noted, Al Qaeda conducted the assassination to enhance ties with the Taliban and then turned its full attention to the United States.6 The resulting terrorist attacks against New York and Washington killed more than 2,800 people from over 100 nations. Civilian aircraft became weapons aimed at U.S. economic and military centers—the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed en route to its target due to passenger intervention. These terrorist attacks spurred unilateral foreign policy in Washington, DC. New domestic security policies, such as the Patriot Act, changed numerous federal statutes and revised procedures for dealing with terrorism, expanded government power to use law enforcement tools to root out terrorism while increasing surveillance and controls on citizens and non-citizens alike.7 Additionally, U.S. intelligence agencies substantially reorganized and a new cabinet-level agency, the Department of Homeland Security, was created. Such measures became possible on 9/11, which created support for President Bush and provided the government with wide leeway in its response to the attacks. The country demanded an immediate response; defense policy critic Jeffrey Record observed that, “In the wake of 9/11, no president could have refused military action against Afghanistan.”8 The ensuing Global War on Terror drew criticism from many quarters. U.S. leaders employed controversial and sometimes disconcerting methods. The Patriot Act and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which held suspected militants without legal prisoner of war status, prompted discussions about the social costs of new U.S. policies. These initiatives, intended to prevent a second attack on U.S. soil, sparked heated public debates about the relationship between international law and security that continue today. Enduring issues include the legal and ethical ramifications of extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, enhanced interrogation techniques, and the handling of prisoners of war. The response to 9/11 began with Operation Noble Eagle, a joint-service campaign to strengthen domestic security. USAF and Civil Air Patrol flights to protect the United States began immediately and continued into 2012. The Air Force flew 23,733 sorties in 2001–2002 alone.9 Navy and Coast Guard assets patrolled American waters. The Army mobilized almost 34,000 soldiers for “border security, consequence management, and other aspects of homeland defense.”10 Operation Noble Eagle provided additional protection for U.S. military bases and cities at considerable cost. As of 2011, Noble Eagle carried a $29 billion price tag; the GWOT as a whole tallied $1.23 trillion.11 Within three days of the attacks, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the president to use force against terrorist groups connected to 9/11. Two GWOT operations were soon underway; Operation Active Endeavor began on October 4 in the Mediterranean Sea to interdict potential terrorist movements. At the same time, American leaders worked to secure basing and overflight rights to engage the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. U.S. forces soon operated from Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan, Manas in Kyrgyzstan, Dushanbe in Tajikistan, and in Pakistan.12 Air operations began in Afghanistan on October 7. Initial efforts included 1,500 attack sorties, psychological operations, and humanitarian assistance. Operation Enduring Freedom’s ground phase began on October 12, when two Special Forces A teams (twelve-man teams with expertise in weapons, engineering, demolitions, medicine, communications, and intelligence) arrived to coordinate with anti-Taliban elements.13 The partnership between the international community and Afghan opposition to the Taliban and Al Qaeda grew quickly from humble beginnings. The Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance and the United States formalized their working relationship shortly after 9/11. After decades of fighting the Soviets, other Mujahedeen, warlords, and finally the Taliban, the battered Northern 346

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Alliance held only parts of northeast Afghanistan when CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks flew to meet its leaders in October 2001; according to General Franks’ memoir, American Soldier, a large sum of cash changed hands.14 The United States found a partner to pursue General Franks’ strategy to employ only small numbers of coalition forces. By late 2001, a small contingent of U.S. Special Forces, Marines, CIA operatives, U.S. Air assets, and Northern Alliance fighters ousted the Taliban and drove Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. This technology-driven small footprint approach advocated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld triggered a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign. Rumsfeld and others argued that U.S. technology created a revolution in military affairs, allowing small numbers of specialized ground forces and supporting airpower to win on the battlefield. The small footprint approach disrupted the Taliban, but eliminating remaining opposition and stabilizing Afghanistan required far more resources. Taliban and Al Qaeda elements took sanctuary in remote areas and in Pakistan; insecurity persisted. James Gannon observed in his book, Obama’s War, that, “So enmeshed was Pakistan with the Taliban that in late 2001 hundreds of ISI [Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency] officers and soldiers of its paramilitary Frontier Corps fought against the Northern Alliance and, by proxy, against America.”15 The international effort was insufficient to conduct the complex operations needed to stabilize Afghanistan. The Army’s first major official history of this war notes that “. . . in the months following the beginning of OEF, the U.S. Government struggled to initiate a concerted effort to create a coordinated and comprehensive approach to transitioning Afghanistan to stability.”16 The Taliban and other insurgents proved resilient. Accordingly, U.S.-led military operations continued even after U.S. leaders declared major combat complete on May 1, 2003.17 The new Afghan government under Hamid Karzai made some progress, but foundered against the resurgent Taliban by 2005–2006. Karzai’s administration lacked the means and commitment to secure Afghanistan. Decades of war and misrule in Afghanistan overmatched international aid, leading U.S. and NATO forces to expand combat and stability operations. Insurgent attacks persisted mainly in southern and eastern Afghanistan near cross-border sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, where the ISI sheltered and supported the Taliban and the Haqqani terrorist network.18 Current conditions suggest that inadequate international effort in 2001–2007 drove spiraling insecurity and corruption which in turn greatly diminished popular support for the war in Afghanistan and abroad. Operations in Afghanistan clearly lost direction when U.S. leaders shifted their focus to Iraq in 2003, causing other operations to suffer. The United States and Iraq came into conflict in the first Gulf War in 1990. Removing Saddam Hussein became U.S. policy in 1998, when President Bill Clinton declared that, “. . . so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world.”19 fell under consideration for GWOT operations in late 2001. According to then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, The 9/11 attack made the Iraq problem appear more grave and urgent ... not because any officials assumed Iraq was involved in the hijackings . .. it was because al Qaida had demonstrated that America’s enemies had the opportunity, will, and means to cause devastating harm to our country without having to defeat us militarily.20 The decision for war rested on now-refuted claims of Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and collusion with Al Qaeda. President Bush admitted that his administration acted on erroneous intelligence in 2003, but, in Decision Points, argues that he decided correctly at the time. Bush noted that: 347

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Members of the previous administration, John Kerry, John Edwards, and the vast majority of Congress had all read the same intelligence that I had and concluded Iraq had WMD. So had intelligence agencies around the world. Nobody was lying. We were all wrong. The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat.21 We now know Saddam Hussein almost certainly no longer possessed WMD in 2003, but this information resulted from post-invasion searches, when Iraq could no longer restrict inspections. Given the 9/11 Commission’s report on the appalling state of American intelligence agencies in 2001, it is unsurprising that these same agencies misjudged Iraqi capabilities. The 9/11 attacks and the run-up to the Iraq War showed the U.S. was no better at gathering and assessing intelligence than when American intelligence failed to predict Pearl Harbor and the 1968 Tet Offensive. By contrast, General Tommy Franks’ initial military campaign for regime change in 225 days succeeded beyond most expectations.22 Iraqi armed forces collapsed in the first days of the invasion. Operation Iraqi Freedom’s first phase employed only 200,000 ground troops and nine hours of air attacks. Precision targeting, new generation precision-guided munitions, and timely human intelligence combined to enable strikes on important military targets: Iraqi force concentrations, air defenses, and suspected locations of Iraqi leaders, including Saddam Hussein’s residences.23 The unprecedented speed of the U.S. advance disrupted Iraqi counterattacks and defense. Though hard fighting took place in Najaf, Basra, and parts of Baghdad, U.S. forces occupied Baghdad by April 9, just twenty-one days into the invasion. Much as was the case in Afghanistan in 2001, U.S. forces quickly became victims of their own success—small, powerful U.S. forces were good at toppling governments but unable to stabilize countries afterwards. Postwar operations in Iraq and Afghanistan decry the clear need to build the strongest and broadest coalition possible. The war highlighted the capabilities and limitations of U.S. military and nation-building efforts in the early twenty-first century. Rushed U.S. decisions left Iraq ungovernable for want of experienced personnel. Journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who worked in Baghdad’s Green Zone in 2003, characterized American officials in Iraq as: a motley bunch: businessmen who were active in the Republican Party, retirees who wanted one last taste of adventure, diplomats who had studied Iraq for years, recent college graduates who had never had a full-time job, government employees who wanted the 25 percent salary bonus paid for working in a war zone.24 These same U.S. authorities administrating Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority dismissed Saddam’s government and security forces in May 2003, despite having no replacements. According to analyst Michael O’Hanlon, a frequent visitor to Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq unraveled by 2005–2006. Each month, more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians were killed and nearly 100,000 driven from their homes.25 Having gone to war on flawed grounds, international support lagged behind nation-building personnel and resource requirements. Many nations were slow to contribute to a war they thought unnecessary. The final lessons of the Iraq War remain unclear, but one thing was clear—the United States government was ready for war in March 2003, but not ready for the peace. The Iraq War also diverted resources for operations in Afghanistan. U.S. Army Lieutenant General Richard P. Formica served in both wars. He contrasted resource levels for the two campaigns in his December 2009 testimony to the Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting: 348

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we have had a “Culture of Poverty” that has hung over our entire experience in Afghanistan. It is not just that this is the 4th or 5th poorest country in the world, but it is in our approach to what we do—the result of a longstanding shortage of resources. This is endemic to the entire operation. When I was in Iraq in 2004, if we needed something, we got it. But in Afghanistan we have had to figure out how to do without it.26 In both wars, nation building lacked the resources to achieve their mission, but in Iraq at least military resourcing grew to meet requirements. From 2003 until early 2010, significantly more military resources went to Iraq than Afghanistan. For example, in early 2003, a brigade from the 10th Mountain Division, one of the Army’s best regular units was assigned to serve as trainers in Afghanistan, but was later diverted to Iraq. The Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan instead received the 45th Brigade, Oklahoma National Guard. Iraq became the top priority for U.S. military resources and remained so until late 2009. Expenditures on Iraqi and Afghan forces reflected Bush administration priorities. From 2004 through 2006, Iraqi forces garnered $13.7 billion, Afghanistan just $3.5 billion. Total U.S. military expenditures from 2001 through 2009 were $733 billion for Iraq versus $324.4 billion for Afghanistan. This gap is even more glaring in the context of Iraq’s comparative wealth and Afghanistan’s abject poverty (2011 CIA estimates place the Iraqi GDP four times larger than Afghanistan’s—$129 billion versus $30 billion), and the fact that operations in Afghanistan covered two more years.27 Likewise, U.S. forces in Iraq operated with far more personnel. In 2003, U.S. forces in Iraq averaged 133,844 troops, whereas in 2001–2002 U.S. forces in Afghanistan averaged 7,008 troops.28 At the height of the 2007 troop surge, 170,300 U.S. forces served in Iraq, compared to a maximum of 99,000 in Afghanistan in July 2011. U.S. forces in Iraq comprised seventy to 90 percent of forces in the CENTCOM operational theater well into 2009, despite the introduction of a troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. The Global War on Terror illustrated the importance of basing military action on the level of political support sustaining the conflict. Small efforts in Afghanistan versus major operations in Iraq contradicted U.S. popular opinion, which supported a strong effort against Al Qaeda, but found Iraq a less compelling place to fight. Some U.S. leaders and citizens questioned the rationale for going to war in Iraq when Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Bush administration’s claims that Iraq was the “central front in the war on terror” failed to take hold abroad and prompted significant domestic opposition.29 Scholar Jeffrey Record was one among many who judged the Iraq War “not only unnecessary but also bungled in execution”; he questioned why the United States chose to employ “. . . insufficient force . . . on behalf of exceptionally ambitious objectives resulting in an unexpectedly bloody protraction of hostilities and an attendant loss of domestic political support.”30 Likewise, historian John Dower concluded that, “America’s war of choice against Iraq was tactically brilliant and strategically idiotic.”31 U.S. operations in Iraq drew frequent, growing criticism because they were complex, expensive, and appeared to lack direction. Many nations ultimately provided support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but beyond close U.S. allies Canada, the UK, France, Australia, Italy, and Germany, few countries offered substantial contributions between 2001 and 2005. U.S. success in the GWOT required persistent efforts to build broad coalitions to offset initial perceptions of unjustified U.S. unilateralism. U.S. leaders gradually cobbled together a forty-nine-nation coalition in Afghanistan and forty for Iraq, but this process took too long to arrest insecurity and waning popular support.32 Insufficient international forces in both wars’ initial years encouraged insurgents to continue their 349

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resistance. The Iraq War distracted willing nations from contributing to the Afghanistan mission and discouraged other nations from taking part altogether. From the outset, international political support for the Iraq War was low and complicated by vested interests. The March 2003 effort to achieve another UN resolution against Iraq foundered on French, German, Russian, and Chinese objections. These nations argued for continued inspections, with France stating the strongest opposition. On February 14, 2003, the same day UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix presented his findings from another round of inspections in Iraq, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin categorically disputed the wisdom of military intervention. France believed further diplomatic efforts could prevent war and still achieve the objectives of Resolution 1441: to disarm Saddam Hussein in accordance with sixteen other UN resolutions passed since 1990. The speech predicted the difficulty of occupying Iraq and urged patience for Blix to produce results. He also made clear that France would veto any war resolution. Russia, Germany, and China held similar positions.33 These four nations shared another commonality—substantial business interests in Iraq. USMC Lieutenant General Michael Delong, General Franks’ deputy CENTCOM commander, noted a litany of economic interests in Iraq that corresponded to the volume of a nation’s resistance to the Iraq War. Chinese firms held contracts for underground electrical systems, oil exploration, and telecommunications, and supplied arms to Iraq since 1981. Russia supplied the majority of Iraq’s arms in the preceding decades and a Russian firm, Lukoil, held a $4 billion contract to rebuild oil fields in southern Iraq. German firms held hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi defense contracts, while France’s Fina Elf Corporation held contracts for up to 25 percent of Iraq’s oil reserves. The Hussein regime owed France more than $6 billion, including money for weaponry.34 These nations’ significant vested interests played a role in their objection to war. However, by going to war over these objections, the United States garnered fewer allies, and weakened the position of some allies planning to join the coalition. Additionally, President Bush lost significant political capital by failing to further work through the UN. Lastly, each nation who refused to join left the coalition less able to generate skilled personnel to manage the complex situation in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. Collectively, the U.S. leadership’s approach to the GWOT rendered the Iraq War unpopular and left the Afghanistan War under-resourced to a degree that squandered initial Afghan goodwill and prompted a Taliban resurgence. The GWOT taxed the United States heavily. U.S. armed forces evolved to conduct counterinsurgency and counterterrorism while maintaining a significant conventional force and nuclear arsenal through a decade of grinding worldwide operations in the wake of 9/11. Significantly expanded domestic security programs impacted the relationship between the government and society. Domestically, privacy and security issues played out in an increasingly polarized body politic. Eleven years after Al Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington, DC, the United States has spent more than $1.25 trillion during a global recession and seen more than 6,400 service members killed and more than 48,000 wounded since 2001.35 Many more returned from war with serious psychological injuries. Al Qaeda lost Osama Bin Laden and other leaders but proved a resilient organization that continues to seek ways to attack the United States. Al Qaeda operations are expanding in Yemen and continue in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Iraq has a new government, Saddam Hussein has been executed, but widespread instability persists. NATO operations in Afghanistan continue and the United States recently penned a ten-year security agreement with Hamid Karzai’s government. However, the war against the Taliban and its allies continues unabated; Afghanistan lacks good government and effective security forces for the foreseeable future. Pakistan continues to hedge its bets by aiding both the U.S. and the Taliban. Without NATO troops and aid, Afghanistan is likely to collapse into yet another civil war. U.S. armed forces proved adept 350

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at military operations, but the U.S. government was demonstrably incapable of following military success with effective nation-building operations. Only a unified whole-of-government approach with sufficient international resources and personnel can ensure stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These challenges are daunting, but as a RAND Corporation study points out, the U.S. in 2012 “is much better equipped today to handle future terrorist threats.”36 Continued instability in Southwest Asia suggests that any successful U.S. commitment there must be enduring. This commitment depends on political will and financial resources that may or may not prove available. The Taliban and the Hussein government have been ousted and Al Qaeda has been diminished, but prolonged conflict and significant military expenditures have weakened the United States’ resolve and global credibility. As a result, the final outcome of the Global War on Terror remains indeterminate. The ultimate results of U.S. operations since 9/11 and the overall place of the Global War on Terror in U.S. history remain to be seen.

Notes 1 The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, or Air War College. 2 John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 89. An excellent overview of the war through 2008 with a primarily positive slant. A good companion to Tom Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006) and The Gamble: General Petraeus and the Untold Story of the American Surge in Iraq, 2006–2008 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), which take a more critical standpoint. For operational history, see Dale Andradé’s Surging South of Baghdad: the 3d Infantry Division and Task Force Marne in Iraq, 2007–2008 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2010) and the On Point series from the Contemporary Operational Study Team at Fort Leavenworth. 3 Brian Michael Jenkins and John Paul Godges, The Long Shadow of 9/11: America’s Response to Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011), 17. 4 Ali H. Soufan with Daniel Freedman, The Black Banners: the Inside Story of 9/11 and the War against alQaeda (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 11. 5 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 474. Coll’s work, along with Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) and Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), provide the best overview of the complex interplay between Pakistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the U.S. Another excellent work on Al Qaeda is Camille Tawil’s Brothers in Arms: The Story of Al-Qa’ida and the Arab Jihadists (London: Saqi Press, 2010). 6 Tawil, Brothers in Arms, 171. Tawil offers an invaluable look into the Al Qaeda organization, its doctrine, and the history of Al Qaeda’s emergence from obscurity. 7 Ali Ozdogan, “Expansion of Executive Power by the Patriot Act,” in O. Nikbai and S. Hancerli, eds., Understanding and Responding to Terrorist Phenomenon (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2007), 356. 8 Jeffrey Record, Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2010), 28. This book along with John Dower’s Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, Iraq (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010) stand out for the scholarly rigor that supports their strong critique of the Iraq War and its conduct. 9 Rebecca Grant, The First 600 Days of Combat: The U.S. Air Force in the Global War on Terror (Washington, DC: IRIS Press, 2004), 19. Grant provides a detailed overview of events in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks based in part on interviews with military personnel who led the first response to the attacks. 10 Conrad Crane, “The U.S. Army’s Initial Impressions of Operations Enduring Freedom and Noble Eagle” (Carlisle PA: Center for Strategic Leadership, September 2002), 2. 11 Amy Belasco, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War in Terror Operations Since 9/11” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, March 29, 2011), 3 12 For a detailed analysis of Pakistan’s decision to allow U.S. forces to stage operations from Pakistan, see Ahmed Rashid’s introduction to Descent into Chaos.

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13 A-teams in Afghanistan coordinated Afghan forces, called in tactical air support, and helped Northern Alliance commanders operate against the Taliban, among other duties. 14 Tommy Franks, with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 309–310. 15 James Gannon, Obama’s War (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2011), 68. Gannon provides a good analysis of the composition of the insurgent groups in Afghanistan and the high degree of support they receive from sympathetic elements of Pakistan’s leadership. 16 Donald P. Wright, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, A Different Kind of War: The United States Army in Operation Enduring Freedom, October 2001–September 2005 (Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2010), 319. Wright’s team assembled a solid master narrative of operations and personalities in the first four years of U.S. participation in the war in Afghanistan. They have incorporated an impressive array of primary sources and interviews with key participants. At times, the authors are overly optimistic in their interpretations of events, but the work remains vital to scholars of Afghanistan for its thoroughness and comprehensive details. 17 Kenneth Katzman, “Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 4, 2012). Katzman has produced an excellent overview of U.S. policy and the War in Afghanistan; this work is an ideal starting point for any new student of the war. 18 C. Christine Fair’s work on contemporary Pakistani views on militant groups provides important insights into why Pakistani leadership is divided on the issue. See C. Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra, and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Islam, Militancy, and Politics in Pakistan: Insights From a National Sample,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 4 (2010): 495–521. Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos is a good source of historical background on the reasons for Pakistani support for the Al-Haqqani and Taliban groups operating in western Pakistan. 19 Speech by President William J. Clinton, December 16, 1998, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ events/crisis_in_the_gulf/texts_and_transcripts/236858.stm, accessed 20 August 2011. 20 Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), ix. 21 George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), 262. 22 For an example of a positive account of the war, see former Congressman Duncan L. Hunter’s Victory in Iraq (Greenville, CS: Genesis Press, 2010). For a more critical view, see Tom Ricks’ Fiasco. For a balanced military history of the early part of the war, see Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2005). Additionally, Jon T. Hoffman’s edited volume Tip of the Spear (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2010) is a good look at early operations in Iraq from the ground level. 23 Human Intelligence, or HUMINT, refers to data reported via interpersonal methods rather than technical means, such as satellites. HUMINT has proven critical to accurate reporting of ground conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. 24 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 13. 25 Michael O’Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan, Toughing it out in Afghanistan (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 2010), 83. 26 Statement By Major General Richard P. Formica, U.S. Army Former Commanding General, Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan to The Commission on Wartime Contracting, December 18, 2009, 3. Full text available at: www.wartimecontracting.gov/docs/hearings/20091218/ Statement_of_Major_General_Richard_P_Formica_Former_CSTC-A_Cmdr.pdf, accessed February 9, 2013. 27 CIA World Factbook, available at www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ rankorder/2001rank.html, accessed May 24, 2012. 28 Belasco, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War in Terror Operations Since 9/11,” 3. 29 Donna Miles, “Bush Calls Iraq Central Front in Terror War, Vows Victory,” American Forces Press Service, October 6, 2005, available at www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=18145, accessed August 30, 2011. 30 Record, Wanting War, 157. 31 Dower, Cultures of War, xxiv. Dower has an extensive publication record addressing World War II in the Pacific and the post-World War II era. Cultures of War compares U.S. leadership and World War II

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32

33 34 35

36

era decision making to the GWOT era, which provides strong criticism of the Bush administration’s war effort within a historical framework. This book, though not without faults, is the best of the current crop of books taking a comparative historical approach to current U.S. conflicts. For a detailed account of efforts to gain allied support for the Iraq War and the mechanics of that process, see Daniel F. Baltrusaitis, Coalition Politics and the Iraq War, Determinants of Choice (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010). Full text of the February 14, 2003 speech is available on the UN website at www.un.int/france/documents_francais/030214_cs_france_irak.htm, accessed February 9, 2013. Lieutenant General Michael Delong USMC with Noah Lukeman, Inside CENTCOM: The Unvarnished Truth about the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishers, 2004), 87. Global War on Terrorism Casualties by Military Service Component—Active, Guard and Reserve, October 7, 2001 through April 30, 2012, Defense Manpower Data Center: Data, Analysis and Programs Division, available at http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/gwot_component. pdf, accessed February 9, 2013. Jenkins and Godges, The Long Shadow of 9/11, 4.

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39 OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM The United States in Afghanistan Kevin W. Farrell

The deadliest attacks in U.S. history occurred on September 11, 2001, dramatic events that rank in significance alongside the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The date stands as one of the bloodiest days in U.S. history and certainly was the most dramatic loss of American civilian life in the history of the Republic. Decades later, the very mention of Pearl Harbor conjures painful memories for any American old enough to remember it.1 While virtually all Americans remember 9/11 and the deadly attacks masterminded by Osama Bin Laden, many Americans seem to have forgotten that these attacks triggered the longest war in U.S. history, one that is apparently set to continue for years to come, and one that presents the most vexing military challenge since the Vietnam War. The direct military involvement of the United States in Afghanistan has lasted well over a decade and, according to official pronouncements, it is currently expected to continue through 2014. Since September 11, 2011, the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has undergone distinct phases that might be characterized as follows: initial incursion (2001); light footprint (2002–2006); counterinsurgency (2007–2012) with a “surge” (2010–2011); and a period of handover and expected withdrawal (2012–2014). Yet, despite this extended commitment, the situation there remains confusing, even to those well versed in the topic. This chapter provides a brief overview of how and why American involvement has evolved the way it has and provides some idea where it might be headed. Uniformed and civilian international observers have drawn many conclusions about both recent and current military operations in Afghanistan. The apparent rapid collapse of the Taliban in the early months of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan appeared to indicate that special operations forces, supported by precision-guidance weapons and high-technology communications, can accomplish what once required massed field armies signifying a new era in warfare. Others have countered that the basic rules of warfare have not changed and thus the original principles of warfare remain valid. While yet another school, still dominant in American military circles, has argued in support of a counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizing close connection with the civilian population in a reinvigorated version of the “winning the hearts and minds” approach advocated by some during the Vietnam War. While an extended examination of the history of Afghanistan is well beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth briefly noting the experiences of the two previous great powers who attempted to subdue and perhaps “civilize” Afghanistan in the past two centuries: Great Britain 354

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and the Soviet Union. Both empires left the region having woefully failed to accomplish their objectives. Great Britain, in an attempt to secure the borders of its most important colonial possession, British India, and prevent Russian expansion into a region it considered vital, fought extended campaigns normally grouped together as the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842), the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1881), and the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919). The result was full British withdrawal from the region, complete Afghan independence, and significantly the solidification of the borders of Afghanistan. Afghanistan stands to this day as the least successful of all British colonial ventures.2 Some six decades after the last British combat in Afghanistan in May 1919, the Soviets would find themselves mired in a protracted war there. Although this was not the first Soviet invasion of its southern neighbor, the size and cost of the invasion of 1979 dwarfed the previous incursions, relegating them to relative obscurity.3 With surprisingly few casualties, the Soviets secured Kabul and the major Afghan cities within days of launching their Christmas Eve invasion in 1979, in some ways eerily anticipating aspects of the American-led invasion years later. Control of the majority of the countryside of Afghanistan eluded the Soviets and Afghan allies even at the peak of Soviet military involvement.4 Apart from rocket attacks or seizure of key facilities, the struggle for the Soviets in Afghanistan was for control of the fiercely independent rural population. Key cities and outposts often had to be re-supplied by air since most logistic routes were frequently targeted for ambushes, a situation common to the contemporary American experience. The Soviet strategy focused on securing the key cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and the highways linking them to the Salang Pass and the Soviet Union. The objective was to carry the war directly to the opponents of the Soviet-backed regime, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) in a manner similar to the counterinsurgency doctrine of the United States and its allies today.5 Having secured the major cities, the Soviet military effort focused on defeating the Mujahedeen in mountainous and remote regions where most of the fighting occurred. There were major exceptions, most notably the largest rebel attack of the war when over 5,000 Mujahedeen attacked the DRA garrison at Khost in 1985 and fierce guerrilla street fighting in Kandahar, also in 1985.6 However, such massed attacks were rare, just as the insurgent attack against the joint British and American Camp Bastion in southern Afghanistan on September 14–15, 2012, was not typical. This attack was the greatest destruction of U.S. military equipment since the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War and insurgents succeeded in destroying six AV-8B II Harrier jump jets and damaging two others, inflicting almost $200 million in damage and killing the commanding officer of the Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron and one of his noncommissioned officers in the process.7 The Soviet tactic, similar to allied tactics today, was to remove the enemy from his base of support. This often meant that the civilian population bore the brunt of Soviet operations, either indirectly or on purpose. The end result of Soviet strategy was the death of tens of thousands of civilians and the mass exodus of millions, both within Afghanistan and to neighboring Pakistan and Iran. What is telling from the Soviet experience, however, is that, similar to the experience of the United States in Vietnam, the Soviets developed effective tactics to deal with the Mujahedeen. Throughout both superpowers’ wars, it proved impossible for the resistance to make a concerted and extended stand against its far better equipped and supplied enemies. Without much difficulty, the Soviets maintained solid control of the key cities of Afghanistan (Kabul, Herat and Khost) and held them throughout the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979–1988.8 The overwhelming majority of combat occurred in what military professionals term “complex terrain,” defiles, mountains, valleys, and urban areas. Interestingly, on November 26, 2010, the United States surpassed the length of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan.9 355

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Despite their determined efforts to enable the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (after 1987, the Republic of Afghanistan) to become a nationally accepted and legitimate government, the Soviets never succeeded and the vast majority of the country and its population remained outside the control of the Soviet army and the DRA. Tactics might have worked at the local level, but the Soviet strategy, despite significant effort and improvement throughout the war, failed in the end.10 It remains unclear as of this writing the degree to which the United States and its coalition partners have fully digested the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. Once the Soviet Union withdrew (and subsequently ceased to exist), the United States paid little attention to Afghanistan throughout the 1990s. Within a dozen years of the Soviet withdrawal, however, Afghanistan would be the staging area for the deadliest foreign attack on American soil in the entire history of the United States. The Soviet Union fought a nine-year war from December 24, 1979, to February 15, 1989, which began with an attempt to shore up the government of its communist neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. It sought to improve infrastructure, eliminate corruption, end the opium trade, educate all citizens, allow religious toleration, shore up the government, and improve the economy. Ultimately the Soviets failed in these efforts and, exhausted, withdrew with the hope of propping up their proxy from afar and as cheaply as possible. However, the war critically weakened the communist regime of the Soviet Union to such an extent that it collapsed and broke into 15 republics. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan lost its main source of outside support and by 1992 the country had dissolved into a lawless state, with tribal warfare and anarchy being the norm. Without a central government, an ongoing struggle persisted between Islamist warlords, most notably the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, until the American-led response in the fall of 2001. The invasion of Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, began on October 7, 2001, with a combined assault with forces from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and warlord groups within Afghanistan known collectively as the Northern Alliance. President George W. Bush’s stated goal of the invasion was the destruction of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization and the removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, criminal and repressive organizations that were directly linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Prior to the end of that year, this objective expanded to include the creation of a viable democratic state and one that could function effectively in the international community of nations. Throughout the 1990s, the United States exercised no consistent policy toward Afghanistan and the decade was characterized by a brutal struggle between warlords of shifting allegiances. With the collapse of Mohammad Najibullah’s government in 1992 (ironically his government had fared better after the Soviet withdrawal, but the cessation of Russian oil under Boris Yeltsin doomed it), militia factions battled for control of Kabul and reduced the city to ruins. Casualty figures are not known, but civilian deaths easily numbered into the hundreds of thousands. By the middle of the decade, the forces fighting within Afghanistan had coalesced into the Northern Alliance (known also as the United Front of Massoud and renamed the Northern Alliance when the former enemies, Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, united), led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, and the Taliban, which was strongly backed by Pakistan. Throughout the 1990s, the Taliban allowed Al Qaeda to train its forces in Al Qaeda-controlled parts of the country. After Al Qaeda launched attacks against U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton launched missile strikes against suspected Bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan, with little apparent effect. At this time the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was also conducting clandestine activities in Afghanistan in an attempt to capture or kill Bin Laden, but to no avail. However, these activities built relationships with Afghan warlords that would later prove useful during allied operations in Afghanistan following the October invasion of 2001. 356

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In 1999, Abdul Haq, leader of the Pashtun anti-Taliban faction, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Tajik anti-Taliban faction, brought together the Tajiks, Hazara, Uzbeks, and many Pashtun war bands and even some defecting Taliban in a grand coalition to work toward a united Afghanistan under the titular leadership of the exiled Afghan king, Zahir Shah. Touring Europe in the spring of 2001, Massoud warned the European Parliament that his intelligence had found significant evidence of a major terrorist attack being prepared by Al Qaeda, but he had no specific information and his warning went largely unheeded. Although he had spent virtually his entire adult life fighting other warlords and the Soviets, and he had survived numerous assassination attempts, two Arabs posing as Belgian journalists succeeded in mortally wounding him when they detonated an explosive hidden in their camera, killing themselves in the process on September 9, 2001. On the morning of September 11, 2001, a series of coordinated attacks shocked the entire world. Four commercial airliners were hijacked, and two struck and destroyed the World Trade Towers in New York City, one struck and severely damaged the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a fourth crashed prior to reaching its suspected target of the Capitol or White House in Washington, DC. From the beginning the most likely suspect was Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist organization. By this time, Massoud had been eliminated and Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda irregulars and the Taliban, led by Mullah Omar, controlled all but about 20 percent of Afghanistan. Only the mountainous and remote territory of northeastern Afghanistan remained under the control of the Northern Alliance. In trying to determine the best way to strike back after the most deadly foreign attack ever launched against the United States, the magnitude of the challenge quickly became apparent. Afghanistan is comparable in size to Texas and at the time had a population estimated to be approximately 26 million people. However, its cities were largely dilapidated and lacked even the most basic of services due to years of war and neglect. A former member of the Clinton administration summed up the challenge succinctly, “When we looked at the Afghanistan situation, there was a sense we were going to bomb them up to the Stone Age. There is just so little to attack.”11 Prior to 2001, the only direct military action taken by the United States against Afghanistan had been an ineffectual strike by 72 cruise missiles launched during August of 1998. The event prompting this strike was the bombing of American embassies in the capital cities of Kenya and Tanzania, costing 12 American and 212 African lives. The Central Intelligence Agency traced these attacks to the Al Qaeda terrorist network and President Clinton authorized the cruise missile strikes against the training and operations bases of Osama Bin Laden in retaliation. The missiles had no discernible effect when they detonated near Khost and Jalalabad.12 Between the attack on the embassies in Africa and the attacks of September 11, 2001, there were other Al Qaeda acts of terrorism, most notably the suicide strike against the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded another 39, but these did not invite retaliation. Although conventional U.S. military forces had no experience in Afghanistan, during the 1980s the CIA worked closely with the resistance groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the socalled Mujahideen, in resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. American agents provided large sums of money and eventually sophisticated surface-to-air Stinger missiles often credited with tilting the balance of the war in favor of the insurgents, although their overall impact has been somewhat exaggerated.13 In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense began planning its military response. The U.S. Government demanded that Mullah Omar and his organization, the Taliban, surrender Osama Bin Laden to the United States. Pakistan attempted and failed to convince Omar to turn him in to the United States and as a result the United States 357

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prepared for direct military intervention. On September 20, 2001, President George Bush presented arguably the most important speech of his presidency when he stated with great conviction that the United States would not shirk from the challenge presented by Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Effectively in a state of war, the United States prepared to harness its tremendous resources and global network of naval bases, airfields, and staging areas to destroy the terrorist cells in Afghanistan and those connected to them throughout the world. In deference to Muslim sensibilities, a number of operational names were rejected and “Enduring Freedom” became the name selected for the defeat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and ultimately would include the lengthy and problematic attempt to conduct nation building there.14 On October 7, 2001, land-based and carrier-based aircraft delivered bombs and precisionguided munitions while American and British naval vessels launched dozens of cruise missiles that struck Taliban and Al Qaeda targets throughout Afghanistan. As had been the case with the strikes launched during the Clinton administration, the effect of these raids was minimal, other than the death of innocent Afghan civilians and some United Nations workers, but there was no mistaking that Operation Enduring Freedom had begun.15 U.S. military planners recognized that the removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan required the presence of troops on the ground to close with and destroy the enemy. The difficult issue would be to get the right soldiers to the right place at the right time. The initial plan called for special operations forces to deploy by air into Afghanistan in October and November 2001 and to link up with the Northern Alliance, at the time reeling from continued setbacks and pressed into the northern and most mountainous regions of the country, and help them prepare for a spring offensive against the Taliban.16 Without a substantial presence in the country which was completely without a functioning infrastructure, any western involvement would be initially heavily dependent on indigenous allies. In keeping with the traditional mission of the U.S. Army Special Forces, the Northern Alliance irregulars were to be trained and led by American advisors uniquely suited to the task. However, the plan never came to fruition as events unfolded rapidly and dramatically as the massive and precise firepower of the United States suddenly enabled the Northern Alliance to provide a tremendous advantage. Two key leaders within the Northern Alliance were crucial to the unexpectedly rapid Northern Alliance victory that was to occur in the fall of 2001. Mohammad Fahim Khan, successor to the slain Massoud, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, an experienced combat veteran of the SovietAfghan War who had fought on both sides during the extended conflict, but ended up on the anti-Soviet right side at the end, served as key intermediaries working with American and British forces. The Northern Alliance wanted to press the attack against the Taliban before the onset of winter and did not want to wait until the following spring. Civil war had been raging in Afghanistan continuously since the Soviet withdrawal, and to a significant degree throughout the Soviet occupation, and the leaders of the Northern Alliance recognized that the Taliban was most likely exhausted. With the additional massive and precise firepower the Americans and British could bring to bear, leaders in the Northern Alliance believed correctly they would have a significant advantage over their longtime foes.17 The first major victory in Operation Enduring Freedom and the most urban of the battles yet to take place there occurred in the far northern-central part of the country at the city of Mazari-Sharif. On November 9, 2001, “General” Abdul Rashid Dostum and “General” Osta Atta Mohammad, with the support of U.S. airpower directed by U.S. Army Special Forces advisors, led a Northern Alliance breakout of the Balkh Valley and seized the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Just outside the city, several hundred Pakistani volunteers prepared to defend a girls’ school-turnedfortress, but smart bombs destroyed the school and killed the Pakistanis. Shortly thereafter, some 3,000 Taliban fighters in the city surrendered to the Northern Alliance.18 358

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Similar success quickly followed suit as Taliban fell to the Northern Alliance on November 11, 2001, as the defenders changed side and joined the Northern Alliance, reflecting a pattern of shifting alliances that has described the pattern of fighting in Afghanistan for decades, if not centuries.19 A general pattern characterized the initial months of Operation Enduring Freedom. The Northern Alliance would advance southward until it encountered significant Taliban resistance, then it would call in air-delivered munitions to destroy exposed positions. Typically negotiations took place and the “Taliban” defenders would switch allegiance and join the Northern Alliance. City after city fell in this manner throughout November, culminating with the fall of Kabul in December 2001. As the Northern Alliance approached the capital city of Kabul, the Taliban simply abandoned it, so that by the dawn of the new year of 2002 the major cities of Afghanistan, Herat, Bagram, Kabul, and Kandahar, were all in the hands of the Northern Alliance. Thus within only a few months of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and its British and Australian allies had accomplished the stated goals of President Bush. In a remarkably short period of time and in some of the most inaccessible terrain in the world, Al Qaeda and the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan. The main disappointment of the initial months of the campaign was the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, where a hard-pressed Taliban force was allowed a truce and this act was later seen as a ruse that allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape into Pakistan. Nonetheless, the year ended with a very positive outcome to what only a few months previous had appeared to be an almost insurmountable task to topple the Taliban. However, just as the initial and clearly defined objective was achieved, the overall mission of the United States and its allies widened considerably. In December 2001, Hamid Karzai, the emerging leader of the new Afghan government, appealed directly to President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the international community not to abandon Afghanistan, but rather to assist it in rebuilding and development so that it could function as a legitimate democracy.20 While attention in the United States was increasingly focused on the growing likelihood of a military confrontation with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, few in the United States appeared to notice when President Bush expanded considerably the scope and role that the United States would take in Afghanistan. In December 2001, the United Nations authorized the creation of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF ) and recognized Hamid Karzai as the president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. During a visit to Washington, DC, in January 2002, the first by an Afghan leader since King Zahir Shah visited President John F. Kennedy in September 1963, President Karzai and President Bush held a joint press conference in the White House Rose Garden. The comments by both men reflected a drastically altered and strengthened relationship between the United States and Afghanistan. Clearly articulating the new policy, President Bush stated unequivocally, “The United States is committed to building a lasting partnership with Afghanistan. We will help the new Afghan government provide the security that is the foundation of peace.”21 There was no additional Congressional legislation as a result and the event drew relatively little coverage by the media, even though it represented a significantly altered U.S. policy in the region. For the next decade, events in Afghanistan were overshadowed by the larger, costlier, and bloodier conflict that followed the U.S. invasion and liberation of Iraq that began on March 20, 2003. Only with the withdrawal of the United States from Iraq on December 18, 2011, did larger media attention return to the war in Afghanistan, although it never attained the level of controversy or intensity that the war in Iraq did. As President Barack Obama famously argued during his election campaign, this was America’s “war of necessity,” although in reality it had long been America’s forgotten war.22 359

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Since then the United States and ISAF, consisting mainly of troops provided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), conducted operations in Afghanistan aimed primarily at targeting insurgent and terrorist groups. With the lead provided by the United States, attempts were also made to reduce corruption, enforce the rule of law, eliminate the cultivation and sale of opium, and create a functioning central government that operated according to the principles of representative democracy. Apart from numerous high-profile killings or captures of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, the other initiatives largely proved to be outright failures or incomplete at best, in a pattern remarkably similar to the Soviet experience. Initially authorized by the United Nations Security Council on December 20, 2001, to secure and stabilize Kabul, NATO formally assumed command of ISAF. In cooperation with the United States, ISAF subsequently assumed responsibility for southern Afghanistan on July 31, 2006, and for eastern Afghanistan on October 5, 2006. Throughout the decade, however, U.S. troop levels remained low in comparison to those in Iraq and only mid-decade exceeded 20,000. Operations in Iraq remained the primary focus of U.S. military operations and the war in Afghanistan was clearly the lesser of two ongoing wars.23 It would not be until 2007 that the United States and primarily its British ally began to increase its troop levels and undertake a more proactive role in fighting the insurgency. In 2009, newly elected President Obama announced a “surge” to accelerate the American program in Afghanistan and sent 33,000 additional troops by December of that year, but he also announced plans for a full withdrawal of combat troops by the end of 2014. The vast majority of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan have occurred during his tenure in office and support for the war is virtually nonexistent, while casualties continue to mount: 40 U.S. servicemen were killed in July 2012 and another 31 in August 2012, approaching rates that equaled or exceeded the highest levels of the Iraq War.24 Although the approach exercised by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan for the past 11 years has changed somewhat, overall the pattern resembles greatly that of the former Soviet Union. Although it is impossible to predict with any certainty, it is quite likely that the end result of the United States’ effort in Afghanistan will resemble that of its predecessor.

Notes 1 Strictly speaking, September 11, 2001 ranks as the second most deadly day in American history, with approximately 3,000 people killed (New York Times, April 11, 2002). The Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War is generally considered the single bloodiest day in American history, with over 6,000 battle deaths and over 15,000 wounded. From James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3. 2 For a superb account of how parts of Afghanistan, especially the capital city of Kabul, did modernize relatively quickly, see Part IV, “The Present,” in Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 415–666. 3 Thomas T. Hammond, Red Flag Over Afghanistan: The Communist Coup, the Soviet Invasion, and the Consequences (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 9. The three previous invasions or incursions took place in 1925, 1929, and 1930. 4 David C. Isby, War in a Distant Country: Afghanistan: Invasion and Resistance (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1989), 56. 5 Robert F. Bauman, Russian–Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, Leavenworth Paper Number 20 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1993), 136. 6 Ibid., 145. 7 Marine Corps Times, September 25, 2012. The Marine aviation squadron was based with several other U.S. Marine Corps units on the British base. 8 The official Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan began in May of 1988, but significant Soviet involvement—and casualties—in Afghanistan began well before the December 1979 invasion and continued well into 1989.

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9 Army Times, November 26, 2010. 10 A superb and concise analysis of the Soviet–Afghan War can be found in Bauman, Russian–Soviet Unconventional Wars, chapter 4, “The Soviet–Afghan War,” 129–210. This should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the Soviet experience or involved with current U.S. operations there today. 11 Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 293. 12 Ibid., 286. 13 See in particular George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). 14 The original operational name was “Infinite Justice” but this was rejected because, according to some, it evoked images of the Crusades. 15 Tanner, Afghanistan, 295–296. 16 Charles H. Briscoe, Richard L. Kiper, and James A. Schroder, Weapon of Choice: U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2003), 94. 17 Throughout Operation Enduring Freedom, air power has been a powerful asset but not without controversy and cost because of numerous real or supposed “friendly fire” incidents. One significant incident occurred as early as December 5, 2001, when a 2,000-pound precision-delivered bomb killed three American and five Afghan soldiers and wounded dozens of others, including the newly appointed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. Tanner, Afghanistan, 308. 18 Briscoe, Weapon of Choice, 101–102. 19 Tanner, Afghanistan, 301. 20 As late as October 2001, President Bush stated publicly that the United Nations would have the lead for rebuilding Afghanistan (San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 2001). 21 CNN U.S., January 28, 2002, available at http://articles.cnn.com/2002-01-28/us/rec.bush.karzi_1_ afghan-interim-leader-hamid-karzai-karzai-vow?_s=PM:US, accessed September 25, 2012. 22 Washington Times, August 21, 2012. 23 Washington Post, July 23, 2008. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen stated publicly that Iraq remained his top priority and Afghanistan second. 24 Washington Times, August 21, 2012.

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40 OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM 2003–2010 Alexander Alderson

Strategy—A prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multinational objectives. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. . . . Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Sun Tzu1

Introduction In the early hours of March 19, 2003, the U.S. launched military operations to decapitate Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime and to remove the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A ground invasion followed, exploiting weeks of aerial bombardment and over a decade of international pressure. In a blitzkrieg advance, U.S. and coalition forces bypassed the main southern Iraqi cities to close on Baghdad.2 Their speed, firepower and maneuver overwhelmed those parts of the Iraqi Army that stood and fought. Those that did not simply melted away. By April 9, Iraqis gathered on the streets of Baghdad to celebrate their freedom. The U.S.-led operation had been a masterpiece of planning and execution, despite Ankara’s last-minute denial of an avenue of approach into Iraq through Turkey. While the invasion was a major theater-level success, the war was not yet won. On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Standing on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, he acknowledged that there was still “difficult work to do in Iraq.”3 Seven years later, on August 31, 2010, President Barack Obama declared, “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”4 50,000 U.S. troops remained in Iraq until December 31, 2011 to train and assist Iraqi Security Forces. The U.S. had finally pulled itself out of what the late-Senator Edward Kennedy described as a “quagmire.” Iraq had not been George Bush’s Vietnam.5 It very nearly was. The measurable costs of the war are sobering: 4,408 U.S. service personnel were killed, a further 31,922 wounded 362

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in action and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians are dead as a result of the war.6 The war cost the U.S. government over $802 billion.7 From late 2002, the U.S. government’s rationale for war against Iraq was clear. Unless Iraq complied with UN Security Council resolutions and disposed of its WMD and medium-range missiles, the U.S. would compel it through military force. Force would only be used, however, if diplomatic pressure through the UN failed. It did and, as the UK’s senior defense civil servant later said, “a military plan put there for coercive and contingent purposes had to become a reality.”8 The conduct of the war raised profound questions about the links between policy, strategy, campaigning and the conduct of tactical actions. The campaign’s transition from warfighting for the purpose of regime change to nation building and counterinsurgency has questioned what Russell Weigley described as “the American Way of War” to the extent that Antulio Echevarria has suggested it was nothing more than a “way of battle.”9 This chapter charts the development of U.S. strategy in Iraq from 2002, through the counterinsurgency renaissance of 2006–2007, to the end of the campaign. It looks at how the U.S. faced up to and then adjusted its strategic and military approach to the constantly changing political, diplomatic, legal and security challenges overthrowing Saddam’s regime created both in Iraq and at home. The issue at stake is how shortfalls in strategy, planning, preparation and methods both constrained and eventually shaped U.S. strategy in Iraq.

Planning for War, Neglecting the Peace The popular view is that there was no plan for the post-hostilities phase of the military operation—the so-called Phase IV. There was a plan but it was operational, not strategic, developed by Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida, and Coalition Force Land Component Command (CFLCC) in Kuwait. The plan developed from an existing plan to defeat the Iraqi regime and deny it the use of WMD.10 Planning for the overall campaign started in July 2002 on the assumption that CFLCC would be relieved by a follow-on force and a Joint Inter Agency Control Group which would move in to take over responsibility for security, humanitarian assistance and infrastructure repair.11 In January 2003, CFLCC returned to Phase IV planning, now called Eclipse II (a reference to the plan for reconstructing postwar Germany). It used two corps to restore stability through sequenced operations to first stabilize, then develop a secure and stable country, and finally to complete the transition from Coalition control to a peaceful, self-governing Iraq.12 Almost inevitably, however, commanders and planners remained focused on the early stages of the campaign and the need to defeat Iraqi forces. Post-conflict operations were not the priority. As Kevin Benson, CFLCC’s chief planner, recalls, “it was difficult to retain the attention of decision makers on how we would conclude the campaign.”13 It was clear that Phase IV would be a considerable undertaking, far more complicated than initial planning had anticipated. Thoughts that the campaign would merge almost seamlessly from one phase to another quickly evaporated. On March 17, 2003, Benson recommended an entirely new plan for Phase IV, not just to employ Iraq’s large male workforce, but to address the range of threats and flash points which could face the Coalition. These included resistance from remnants of the regime and terrorist attacks on oil infrastructure and Coalition lines of communication. Likely flash points included the settling of sectarian scores between Kurds, Shi’a and Sunni groups, religious rioting and the threats to Shi’a holy cities and symbols. Benson’s early assessment proved accurate as events unfolded but policy and strategy did not evolve quickly enough to reflect emerging priorities and challenges. Iraqi infrastructure was 363

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badly in need of repair and protection, which would need international, non-governmental and military support. All this would need more troops. CFLCC estimated it needed at least twenty brigade combat teams. The force flow, therefore, had to continue into Phase IV, a conclusion agreed by commanders at CFLCC and CENTCOM.14 This did not happen. Instead, from mid2003 U.S. and UK force levels were driven down as quickly as possible.

Post-Conflict Stability and Instability The Coalition force, designed for and successful in the combat phase of the campaign, proved to be too small and incorrectly postured for the complex challenges of post-conflict stabilization.15 In the political and security vacuum of summer 2003, the armed opposition groups identified by Benson emerged to challenge the Coalition and to secure their own position and interests. These included former regime loyalists seeking to return the Sunni Ba’ath Party to power, a number of militant Shi’a groups, of which Moqtada al Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi was the dominant force, and the Iranian-backed Badr Corps. Within weeks, Al Qaeda (AQI) was present. Each group had its own objectives; not all were intent on overthrowing the nascent Government of Iraq (GOI). Several quickly developed links into Iraqi ministries or provincial councils and they fought to preserve their position of influence in the time-honored Iraqi way. Besides the crucial issue of force levels, the plan made several flawed assumptions: that Iraq’s civil administration would be able to cope after the invasion; that Iraq’s security forces could maintain security; that the Coalition follow-on force would be able to lead the way in governance and development.16 The reality soon became uncomfortably clear: the U.S. military was unable through approach and resources to bring stability to Iraq as quickly as the Iraqi people expected. Without security and effective Iraqi governance and leadership, and as long as external parties interfered with emerging political processes, Iraqi groups defaulted to the age-old motivation of fighting for power—get it and keep it. Political authority for the temporary governance of Iraq was vested in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), established in May 2003. It was the UN-recognized, U.S. and UK-led coalition authority. The CPA was also unprepared, under-resourced and unable to address the central political challenges of postwar, post-regime Iraq, which was also unable to rise to the challenge of rebuilding its political institutions and mechanisms. The CPA’s early decisions made the security situation worse, in particular that to disband the Iraqi Army in May 2003.17

State of Denial For the first two years or so following the invasion, a state of denial existed about the problem U.S. forces faced.18 It was seen as anything but insurgency and this limited the responses needed to resolve the problem. Many soon highlighted the unpreparedness of U.S. forces for counterinsurgency operations.19 Widespread looting across Iraq in the summer of 2003 showed that the Coalition could not maintain order and the country started its slide into intractable guerrilla war. Despite disorder, sniping and bombings, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his team refused to link them to irregular warfare. It took a year before General John Abizaid, the new CENTCOM commander, acknowledged that the U.S. was facing “a classical guerrilla type campaign.”20 His statement had little evident effect on the strategy or its ways and means. The nub of the problem was, as Bruce Hoffman observed, “the failure to detect early on the signs of incipient insurgency, combined with initially hesitant and uncoordinated responses in terms of meshing political as well as military approaches.”21 This, Hoffman noted, gave the 364

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insurgents “time to entrench themselves in the civilian population and solidify their efforts,” while the security forces for the most part groped and stumbled about. By the time the authorities realized the seriousness of the situation, both politically and security wise, it was already too late.

Casey’s Campaign Plan: Counterinsurgency Emerges but Transition Dominates In May 2004, President Bush laid out a four-step strategy for Iraq. The steps were to hand over full sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30, 2004; to establish the stability and security “that democracy requires”; to continue rebuilding infrastructure so that Iraq could “quickly gain economic independence and a better quality of life”; finally, to enlist additional international support for Iraq’s transition.22 Again, no additional forces were made available. General George Casey took command of Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) in July 2004. He worked closely with two British officers to produce a campaign plan, which was published in August 2004.23 It laid out Casey’s vision for the Coalition operation and was the first plan of its kind. Lieutenant General Sanchez, Casey’s predecessor, had not seen the need for one. Casey’s plan established the intellectual framework for the campaign and focused on ensuring successful Iraqi elections in December 2005. The plan was important because it described how security operations would support the Iraqi political process. Crucially, it drew together a wide range of measures—Iraqi and Coalition, military, political, economic and information—into a classic counterinsurgency approach, which was now how the campaign was described. The challenge to effective counterinsurgency came from the underlying strategy itself: transition, which entailed standing U.S. forces down as the Iraqis stood up, was the Coalition’s “ticket home.” This had been the approach since mid-2003 but Casey’s plan also addressed the need to neutralize the insurgency. By March 2005, it was clear that developing the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF ) was taking longer than anticipated.24 The situation was greatly complicated by the growing strength of the insurgency and by the ISF ’s ever-changing shape and structure. This made it difficult to train, mentor and support them, particularly the Iraqi police which failed to abide by the law. Progress was difficult to measure. By summer 2005, Casey’s team was optimistic that further force reductions were possible. Successful operations in Najaf, Karbala and Tal Afar had shown what the Iraqi forces and officials could achieve. Unfortunately, optimism masked the realities of the complex and unequal pattern of development across Iraq, as security proved difficult to impose across the country. One of the main issues was an inconsistent understanding of and approach to counterinsurgency. To overcome this, Casey established a counterinsurgency Center for Excellence at Taji, near Baghdad, in October 2004 through which all brigade and battalion command teams had to pass. Successful operations during 2005 in Al Qaim, Tall Afar, Najaf and Samarra demonstrated core counterinsurgency competencies: a clear focus on population security, intelligence-led operations and close co-operation with the ISF. Unfortunately, not all units managed this. MNF-I still believed that the Coalition could cope with what it had, since Iraqi forces were gradually coming on stream. The issue, however, was much more the quality of the forces being fielded, not just the numbers. Those Iraqi units that had U.S. mentors and advisors fought well. Elsewhere, shadowy special police units operated outside the law. As former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, and former Congressman Lee H. Hamilton reported to Congress in late 2006, the Iraqi police could not “control crime, and they routinely engaged in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention torture, and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians.” The Ministry of the Interior, which organized the police, was “confronted by corruption and militia infiltration and lack[ed] control over police in the provinces.”25 A further change in strategy followed. 365

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On November 30, 2005, President Bush unveiled The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.26 Its main themes—integrated and mutually reinforcing political, security and economic tracks— had been aired on October 19, 2005 by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who articulated four new criteria for success: We and the Iraqi government will succeed if together we can: break the back of the insurgency so that Iraqis can finish it off without large-scale U.S. military help; keep Iraq from becoming a safe haven from which Islamic extremists can terrorize the region or the world; demonstrate positive potential for democratic change and free expression in the Arab and Muslim world, even under the most difficult conditions; turn the corner financially and economically, so there is a sense of hope and a visible path toward self-reliance.27 Victory in Iraq laid out the three main tracks in detail: their core assumptions, objectives, approach, conditions to be achieved, measurements of progress and challenges. The political, security and economic elements were then broken down into eight pillars or strategic objectives.28 Each pillar contained “at least five independent lines of action and scores of subactions, with specific objectives being met by military and civilian volunteers, Iraqis, and . . . international partners.” The strategy laid out an integrated approach that went beyond “offensive military operations and the development of Iraqi security forces in combating the insurgency.”29 As the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted, it called “for cooperation with and support for local governmental institutions, the prompt dispersal of aid for quick and visible reconstruction, and central government authorities who pay attention to local needs.”30

2006–2007: Failure Looms The turning point in the Iraq campaign came with AQI’s bombing of the Shi’a al-Askari Mosque in Samarra on February 22, 2006. This prompted a savage backlash by Shi’a militias, after which armed groups turned on rival religious and ethnic sects within the Iraqi population and the level of violence increased dramatically. By July 2006, over 100 bodies every day were being dumped on Baghdad’s streets, all the victims of sectarian death squads. In response, the Iraqi population returned to its foundations of tribe, sect or ethnic group and society, polarized under the Ba’athist regime, fractured along ethnic and sectarian lines. The U.S. strategy of transition was heading toward defeat and the shortcomings of the Iraqi state were starkly evident. It simply could not exercise effective governance. As Iraq disintegrated, militant groups emerged to fill the power vacuum. This turn of events had profound implications for Iraq politically and made Coalition success all the more difficult. Without a strong, responsive and effective government, the militant ethno-sectarian factions used violence and subversion to oppress and intimidate sections of the population. MNF-I described it as a “zero-sum game . . . a struggle for the division of power and resources among and within ethnic and sectarian communities.”31 By mid-2006, it was evident that the strategy of transition was heading for failure and seemed impossible to turn around. America and her coalition partners faced defeat and Iraq faced the terrible prospect of continuing inter-sectarian violence, political turmoil and regional isolation. Even the most optimistic commentators had to face up to the brutal reality that defeat was inevitable. The only way out was for President Bush to change course and change he did, despite all the conventional thinking and advice.32 366

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During the summer of 2006, a small group of military officers and strategists looked for an alternative approach.33 U.S. force reductions, while politically attractive in terms of reducing the casualty rate, were adding to the ongoing problems in Iraq. The principal protagonists in seeking a strategic change were retired General Jack Keane, Fred Kagan (a former West Point history professor who worked at the American Enterprise Institute) and the then-Major General Ray Odierno (already selected to take command of the multi-national corps in Iraq in December 2006). Keane’s role was particularly important. He knew the Department of Defense (DoD) and he was a highly credible voice. The team’s work prompted an internal DoD analysis of the concept of a surge of U.S. forces. This was Keane’s opportunity to influence President Bush.34 In early December 2006, the case for the surge was made first at the Pentagon and then to the president. Keane and Kagan argued that the campaign in Iraq—vital to U.S. security— was at a critical point because efforts to eliminate the insurgency by political reconciliation and accommodation had failed, and widespread sectarian violence threatened the whole campaign. Focusing on Baghdad, the center of gravity, they argued that, through a quick, decisive change in U.S. policy, security and stability could be restored. This was a return to classical counterinsurgency theory.35 Five days after being briefed, President Bush announced his intentions: I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops. And I talked about this to Secretary [of Defense] Gates, and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea.36

The 2007 Surge In January 2007, the White House published a new strategy for Iraq, The New Way Forward.37 It was soon followed by the announcement that General David Petraeus would take command in Baghdad. He was to be joined by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat and an acknowledged Middle East expert. The new strategy provided a surge of five additional American brigades to bolster Odierno’s revised Baghdad security plan.38 The plan was underwritten intellectually by the new U.S. doctrine for counterinsurgency, which Petraeus had championed through its year-long development.39 Petraeus and Crocker determined that the theater-level campaign had to achieve four main tasks: secure the population in order to create the political space for the GOI to make political progress; foster and support political reform and development (the campaign’s main effort); use economic development to cement political and security gains; and pursue diplomatic efforts to re-establish Iraq regionally and internationally. This was an important step forward because the Crocker-Petraeus plan linked The New Way Forward to the considerable collaborative civilian and military efforts, both underway and required in Iraq to achieve the existing objectives. By summer 2007, three important developments tipped the security balance at last in the counterinsurgents’ favor. First, in al Anbar province, AQI’s depredations of the predominantly Sunni tribes provoked a violent backlash against the extremists, which the U.S. Marine Corps was quick to exploit. Insurgents became counter-terrorists. Second, the deployment of the five U.S. “surge” brigades and the rapid expansion in the Iraqi Army provided enough forces for Petraeus and Odienro to secure and stabilize Baghdad. Finally, a Sadrist “freeze” on attacks on Iraqi and Coalition Forces allowed Petraeus to concentrate on dismantling and defeating AQI.40 367

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With security improving, intense pressure from Crocker and Petraeus on the Iraqi government enabled considerable political progress to be made.41 By April 2008, it was reasonably clear that The New Way Forward had met its immediate objectives of helping the Iraqi government to protect its people, and isolating extremists to the point where AQI no longer posed a significant threat. As the year drew on, the situation stabilized further.42

Defining the End State On April 10, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates confirmed the desired U.S. end state for Iraq: a unified, democratic and federal Iraq that could govern, defend and sustain itself; an Iraq that was an ally against Jihadist terrorism and a net contributor to security in the gulf; and an Iraq that helped bridge the sectarian divides in the Middle East.43 On May 22, 2008, President Bush developed these conditions further: Success will be when al Qaeda has no safe havens in Iraq and Iraqis can protect themselves. Success will be when Iraq is a nation that can support itself economically. Success will be when Iraq is a democracy that governs itself effectively and responds to the will of its people. Success will be when Iraq is a strong and capable ally in the war on terror. And when our country succeeds in Iraq, generations of Americans will be more secure.44 It is possible to conclude from this that the strategy—that prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power—was clear. Despite the frequent use of the word “strategy,” it was not always clear what it meant. Within the U.S. administration, some wanted a clear statement on what constituted success, and how much more time and what further resources, particularly U.S. troops and government money, would be required to complete the mission. A GAO June 2008 report highlighted shortcomings in the U.S. strategy. The principal issue was that The New Way Forward was incomplete; it articulated goals and objectives for only the near-term phase, which ended in July 2008. There was no indication of long-term strategic goals or how to achieve them. Second, it questioned a “strategy” contained in disparate documents such as presidential speeches, White House fact sheets and an NSC PowerPoint presentation, rather than in a clearly articulated planning document like Victory in Iraq. Finally, it noted that the classified Joint Campaign Plan was “an operational plan with significant limitations.” It did not make up for absent strategy.45 These observations get to the heart of long-term, interventionist campaigns. What are the issues associated with developing the strategy and then articulating it, and what impact do these issues have when it comes to designing a counterinsurgency campaign? Are the traditional expectations about strategy and planning still relevant?

Conclusions The military campaign to invade Iraq in March 2003 was breathtakingly successful. It was the embodiment in so many ways of visions of twentieth century warfare and the big brother of the 2001 operation that removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The combination of special operations forces, precision weapons and local forces provided a model for future war which was highly attractive to those seeking to transform the U.S. military into a high-tech, light, agile, highly potent force.46 Operation Iraqi Freedom deposed Saddam Hussein. 368

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Unfortunately, it collapsed the Iraqi state and overturned its political structure. It took control away from the Sunni minority and gave it to the Shi’a majority. This prompted a primarily Sunni insurgent backlash, which the Coalition largely contained, despite facing an adaptive adversary, even when Al Qaeda materialized. It took three years for the U.S. government to settle on what sort of problem they faced. Some had suggested as early as 2003 that the U.S. would face some form of low-intensity conflict for at least six to twelve months.47 The security challenge which emerged was anything but low intensity. Unfortunately, the response was to focus on defeating symptoms, not the root cause. As a result, the Coalition’s slowness to recognize the deepening communal power struggle took the campaign close to failure.48 Despite this, the U.S. still found a way out. Stephen Biddle observed that in 2006, “Iraq was the single most controversial subject in the U.S. The view was that the war was hopelessly lost, and that U.S. forces simply had to pull out.”49 Yet from mid-2007 through 2010, by a combination of diplomatic, security and development initiatives, strong operational and tactical level political and military leadership, and a unified approach employed at every level, Iraq’s bloody sectarian civil war was contained. More importantly for the U.S., Operation Iraqi Freedom ended more positively than was thought possible four years earlier. It would be too easy to make the central conclusion “don’t invade someone else’s country without thinking it through.” The military planners had at least sketched out the likely challenges. The critical shortcoming was the failure of the U.S. government to develop, resource and coordinate a strategy that saw the war through to the end. For the first six and a half years, policy constrained thinking and the resources needed to bring about the clear objectives President Bush laid out in early 2004. Five years after the invasion, British diplomat Sir Jeremy Greenstock concluded, “Hindsight makes it progressively easier to criticise [sic] the Coalition, and particularly the United States, for their woefully inadequate planning and their bad mismatch of resources to tasks after the conflict was over.”50 In the years following the invasion, as Anthony Cordesman noted, the U.S. proved unable to “focus relentlessly on the desired outcome of the war and not the battle or overall military situation.”51 Until the surge was authorized, the fear articulated so clearly in U.S. military doctrine was the reality: “If operational objectives are not linked to strategic objectives, the inherent linkage or “nesting” is broken, eventually tactical considerations can begin to drive the overall strategy at cross-purposes.”52 It took the very real prospect of defeat to emerge before the president took the decision to surge more forces into Baghdad and put fresh, determined leadership into Iraq. A more favorable strategic outcome was eventually achieved by better matching ways and means to the objective sought. Unfortunately, the period before the strategic catch-up cost the U.S. too much in lives, money and reputation. The WMD debacle certainly undermined the credibility of the Coalition’s decision to go to war. Whether the U.S. subsequently did enough to secure a more politically and economically diverse Iraq than it liberated in 2003 is not yet clear. Nor is it clear what effect the change in strategy has had on Iraq’s position regionally and the U.S.’s position internationally. The fact is that the U.S. eventually faced up to and then adjusted to the political, diplomatic, legal, military and reputational challenges thrown up by Iraq. It did, eventually, address shortfalls in strategy, planning, preparation and methods. While the necessity-driven counterinsurgency renaissance of 2006–2007 achieved noticeable tactical and operational-level results in Iraq, the danger U.S. strategic thinking now faces is that which Colonel Gian Gentile, Professor of History at West Point, has noted: that the “new way of war” is nothing more than a “strategy of tactics.”53 Why must it be avoided? As the first five years in Iraq showed, and as Sun Tzu once said, “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” 369

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Notes 1 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). 2 An authoritative U.S. Army history of the invasion is to be found in Colonel Gregory Fontenot, E.J. Degen and David Tohn, On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Staff United States Army, 2004). See also Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Allen Lane, 2006). For coverage of pre-invasion decision-making and planning, see Steven Metz, Decisionmaking in Operation Iraqi Freedom: Removing Saddam Hussein by Force (Carlisle PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, February 2010); Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006). For accounts of the conduct of the war, see Bob Woodward, State of Denial, Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Bing West, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq (New York: Random House, 2009). 3 President George W. Bush, “President Declares End to Major Combat in Iraq,” May 1, 2003, available at www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/01/iraq/main551946.shtml, accessed April 21, 2011. 4 “Remarks by the President, Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq,” The White House, August 31, 2010, available at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/08/31/ remarks-president-address-nation-end-combat-operations-iraq, accessed April 21, 2011. 5 Evan Thomas, “The Vietnam Question,” Newsweek, April 19, 2004. 6 Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF ) U.S. Casualty Status Fatalities as of August 5, 2011, available at www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf. 7 Congressional Research Service, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11, RL33110 (Washington, DC: September 2, 2010), Table 3, 11. 8 House of Commons Defence Committee, Lessons of Iraq, Third Report of Session 2003–2004, Volume I (London: The Stationery Office, March 2004), 31. 9 Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973); Antulio J. Echevarria II, Toward an American Way of War (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2004). 10 “An OPLAN for a theater campaign is the operational extension of a CCDR’s theater strategy, and translates theater strategic concepts into unified action.” JP 5–0, IV-3. 11 HQ JLFCC, OPLAN COBRA II, January 13, 2003, paragraph 3b. 12 Colonel Kevin C. M. Benson, discussion with author, Fort Leavenworth, KS, July 15, 2011. 13 Kevin C.M. Benson, “ ‘Phase IV’ CFLCC Stability Operations Planning,” in Brian M. De Toy, ed., Turning Victory into Success: Military Operations after the Campaign (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2004), 180. 14 Ibid., 185. 15 Lessons of Iraq, Paragraph 387, 156. 16 Ibid., 151. 17 Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, Dissolution of Entities, May 23, 2003. 18 Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraq’s Evolving Insurgency and the Risk of Civil War (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Revised: January 26, 2007), 15. 19 See Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies And The Essence Of Strategy: Can The American Way Of War Adapt? (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2006); Jeffrey Record, The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency (Cato Institute Policy Analysis Paper No. 577, September 1, 2006); Ricks, Fiasco. 20 Mr. Di Rita and General Abizaid, DoD News Briefing, U.S. Department of Defense news transcript, July 16, 2003. Thom Shanker, “After the War: Military; U.S. Commander in Iraq Says Yearlong Tours are Option to Combat ‘Guerrilla’ War,” New York Times, July 17, 2003. 21 Bruce Hoffman, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Occasional Paper, 2004), 3–4. 22 President George W. Bush, “American Strategy in Iraq” (address delivered to the Army War College, Carlisle, PA on May 24, 2004 as recorded by the New York Times), available at www. nytimes.com/2004/05/24/politics/25PTEX-FULL.html?pagewanted=1, accessed August 4, 2011. 23 Lieutenant General, later General Sir John McColl, Casey’s deputy, and Colonel, later Brigadier Andrew Sharpe, the so-called campaign manager.

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24 U.S. Government Accountability Office, Rebuilding Iraq: Preliminary Observations on Challenges in Transferring Security Responsibilities to Iraqi Military and Police (Washington, DC: United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-05–431T), 2. 25 James A. Baker and Lee H. Hamilton, The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward—A New Approach (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 9–10. 26 National Security Council, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (Washington, DC: The White House, November 30, 2005). 27 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Iraq and U.S. Policy, testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, October 19, 2005, 2. 28 Defeat the terrorists and neutralize the insurgency; transition Iraq to security self-reliance; help Iraqis form a national compact for democratic government; help Iraq build government capacity and provide essential services; help Iraq strengthen its economy; help Iraq strengthen the rule of law and promote civil rights; increase international support for Iraq; strengthen public understanding of coalition efforts and public isolation of the insurgents. Victory in Iraq, 25–26. 29 U.S. Government Accountability Office, Stabilization, Reconstruction, and Financing Challenges (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-06–428T), 10. 30 Ibid. 31 MNF-I internal assessment, April 2007. 32 Baker and Hamilton, The Iraq Study Group Report. 33 For accounts of the decision-making behind the Surge, see Metz, Decisionmaking in Operation Iraqi Freedom; Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006–2008 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008). See also West, Strongest Tribe, 173–224; Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 25–45. 34 See Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General Petraeus and the Untold Story of the American Surge In Iraq, 2006–2008 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 74–104; Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends, 30–36. 35 Frederick W. Kagan, Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, Phase I Report (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, January 2007), 5. 36 Peter Baker, “U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time,” Washington Post, December 20, 2006. Kaplan and Keane explained their plans in Frederick W. Kagan and Jack Keane, “The Right Type of ‘Surge’: Any Troop Increase Must Be Large and Lasting,” Washington Post, December 27, 2006. 37 The White House, Fact Sheet: The New Way Forward in Iraq, Office of the Press Secretary, 10 January 2007, available at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-3. html. 38 Emma Sky, “Iraq 2007—Moving Beyond Counter-Insurgency Doctrine: A First-hand Perspective,” The RUSI Journal 153, no. 2 (April 2008), 30. See also Brian Bennett, “The General,” Time Magazine, November 30, 2008, and Ricks, The Gamble, 105. 39 U.S. Department of the Army, Field Manual 3–24—Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: Headquarters Department of the Army, December 2006). 40 See David J. Kilcullen, “Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt,” Small Wars Journal, posted on August 29, 2007, available at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/anatomy-of-a-tribal-revolt. Also Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Key Trends and Developments, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 9, 2008); also Michael O’Hanlon, The Road Ahead: Progress and Challenges in Iraq (Washington, DC: Brookings, Spring 2008); Kimberly Kagan, “The Future of Iraq: The Decline of Violence, the Rise of Politics,” The Weekly Standard, July 28 2008, volume 13, issue 43. 41 Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, “A War We Just Might Win,” New York Times, July 30, 2007. 42 General David H. Petraeus, “Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq,” September 10, 2007, available at www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/Petraeus-Testimony20070910.pdf. See also Stephen Biddle, Michael E. O’Hanlon, and Kenneth M. Pollack, “How to Leave a Stable Iraq,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 5 (September/October 2008). 43 Prepared Testimony for Secretary Robert M. Gates before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Thursday, April 10, 2008, available at http://armed-Services.senate.gov/statemnt/2008/April/ Gates%2004-10-08.pdf. 44 The White House, What Will Success Look Like in Iraq? President Bush Attends Division Review Ceremony, Fort Bragg, NC, May 22, 2008, available at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ news/releases/2008/05/20080522-6.html.

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45 U.S. Government Accountability Office Report to Congressional Committees, Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Progress Report: Some Gains Made, Updated Strategy Needed (Washington, DC: United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-08–837, June 2008), 60. 46 Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002). 47 Anthony Cordesman, What is Next in Iraq? Military Developments, Military Requirements and Armed Nation Building (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 2003), 2. 48 Internal MNF-I assessment, April 2007. See also Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraq’s Evolving Insurgency: The Nature of Attacks and Patterns and Cycles in the Conflict (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Working Draft, Revised: February 3, 2006), 1; and Cordesman, American Strategic and Tactical Failures in Iraq: An Update (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Working Draft for Outside Comment, Revised: August 8, 2006), 12. 49 Stephen Biddle, “Iraq: Where Are We? Where Have We Come From? Where Are We Going?” (Paper presented to the Oxford Leverhulme Changing Character of War Program, University of Oxford, May 26, 2009). 50 Jeremy Greenstock, in Terence McNamee, ed., War Without Consequences: Iraq’s Insurgency and the Spectre of Strategic Defeat (London: Royal United Services Institute, London, 2008), ix. 51 Anthony H. Cordesman, Shaping the Future of Counterinsurgency Warfare: a Strategic Approach (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2005), 11. 52 U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Publication 5–0, Joint Operational Planning (Washington, DC, December 2006), III-38. See also Steven Metz, Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, January 2007). 53 Gian P. Gentile, “A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army,” Parameters (Autumn 2009), 7.

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