WWI, WWII

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Chap 11 Learning and Preparing The 1920s and 1930s

Introduction

The Great War of 1914–1918 forced several nations to reconsider their diplomatic and military traditions. Disgusted and ashamed of the death and destruction of four years of total industrialized warfare, the great powers sought ways to prevent such a war from happening again. The world had changed for the European powers, for Japan, and perhaps most dramatically for the United States. Even though the United States Senate had rejected the Treaty of Versailles and President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, the United States was far from isolationist following the war. Instead of being bound by treaty to a collective security arrangement that might not be in its best interests, the United States pursued diplomatic and military policies that allowed for unilateral action while using multilateral approaches when necessary. Following this trend, the United States would be a leader in the disarmament movement of the 1920s but would also slowly increase its own military capabilities to unprecedented levels.

The war in Europe stretched American military and industrial mobilization to its organizational limits, with less-than-spectacular results. During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States would develop new strategies to improve both systems in case of another conflict. Despite having fought a war for the first time on European soil, the United States continued to see the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as its vast security moat and continued to invest heavily in capital ships. The advent of airplane technology, however, forced the United States to incorporate this power of seemingly unlimited potential into its arsenal and develop doctrine regarding its use in war. Postwar Duties

The sudden end to the war in November 1918 sped up plans for demobilizing the massive force that the United States had built mostly from scratch in 1917. The problem with disbanding such a large army was finding a rate of discharging servicemen that brought the boys home as soon as practicable but did not do undue harm to the American economy or endanger postwar occupation responsibilities. War industries also demobilized and returned to peacetime production. Because industrial mobilization had been so slow and somewhat disorganized, war industries had just approached peak production levels when the war abruptly ended. Thus, vast surpluses of equipment, weapons, ammunition, and other war materiel packed bulging warehouses at the end of the war. The War Department decided to maintain a large amount of this equipment for future use, especially for outfitting the Guard and Reserve. An unintended consequence of maintaining this circa-1918 equipment, however, was that throughout the 1920s and 1930s the military was slow to procure new, more modern weapons and other equipment.

With its demobilized force, the Army still had duties to perform. It continued to patrol the Mexican border and help quell domestic disturbances. In addition to assisting local law enforcement in restoring order in some of the violent race riots, the Army dispersed the controversial Bonus Army in Washington in the summer of 1932. Overriding President Calvin Coolidge’s earlier veto, in May 1924 Congress had passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act to give veterans of the Great War a one-time bonus payment of up to $500 for domestic service and a maximum of $625 for serving overseas. Each qualified veteran was issued a bonus certificate that could be redeemed upon maturation in 20 years. With over 3.6 million veterans eligible to receive payments, the government had to build a trust fund of over $3.64 billion, over $53 billion in today’s dollars, to cover the disbursement. By 1931, a veteran could borrow against half of the certificate’s value, but with the Great Depression deepening each passing month, more veterans began calling for Congress to authorize early redemption of the full amount of the certificates. Figure 11.1 Members of the Bonus Army on the lawn of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., 1932.

Source: Library of Congress. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other veterans’ groups added their weight to the call for early payment. By June 1932, over 17,000 veterans, their families, and other protesters had descended upon Washington, D.C., making camp in a well-organized ‘Hooverville’ on Anacostia Flats. While the House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing early payment, the Senate on June 17 defeated a similar measure. While the Bonus Army marchers had been mostly peaceful, the atmosphere grew tense. On June 28, Washington, D.C., police attempted to disperse the marchers, who resisted. Police shot several protesters, two of whom, both veterans, later died from their wounds. Based upon FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s fear of anarchists believed to have infiltrated the Bonus Army camp, President Herbert Hoover ordered Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur to break up the Bonus Army’s camp. MacArthur himself commanded the force of 600 troops, including a cavalry regiment commanded by Major George Patton, as it moved in on the camp with tear gas and fixed bayonets. Much of the shantytown burned to the ground, and several shoving matches between the regulars and the veterans broke out. One of MacArthur’s aides, Major Dwight Eisenhower, objected to MacArthur participating in breaking up the camp but to no avail. It was a controversial event from which the Army, and MacArthur in particular, took some time to recover. In 1936, Congress passed the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act, which authorized payment of the bonus certificates.

In a more positive development, the Army coordinated the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal work programs to ease the effects of the Great Depression. In 1933, the Army helped run more than 1,000 camps across the United States for over 250,000 young men participating in the CCC. While the Army was lukewarm to performing this duty, thousands of officers gained invaluable organizational and managerial experience in running the camps. Although the CCC did not significantly affect the economic crisis, it did pay thousands of unemployed young men a subsistence wage, complete beneficial public works projects, and give the American people a sense that the federal government was at least trying to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression. Perhaps most significantly, during World War II, men who worked for the CCC were fast-tracked to the rank of corporal and sergeant due to their experience in working with regular and reserve officers in the CCC. The Army of the United States

The American experience in the Great War convinced many in military and political circles that the military establishment needed a significant overhaul. The expansible army concept, dating back to the early nineteenth century, had not worked well in the massive mobilization effort required in 1917. Industrialized warfare required new and improved military organization. In 1920, Congress passed a new National Defense Act that radically altered the organizational structure of the Army and provided for a better-trained and better-prepared military force should war again threaten the United States.

The National Defense Act of 1920 created what it called the Army of the United States, which included a Regular Army of professionals, a civilian-based National Guard, and an Organized Reserve of both officers and enlisted personnel. The new Regular Army had an authorized strength of over 17,000 officers and 280,000 enlisted personnel—although throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, lack of a real security threat and then the Great Depression kept the Army at well below its authorized strength. Included in the Army were new air, chemical warfare, and finance branches.

The Army would be administered through a general staff system, much like the one that Pershing had used in commanding the American Expeditionary Force in France. The War Department would be responsible for mobilization and war planning, dividing the responsibilities between the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of War’s office. In 1921, Pershing became Chief of Staff and reorganized the General Staff into specific divisions: G-1 was for personnel; G-2 handled intelligence; G-3 trained troops and conducted operations; and G-4 organized logistics and supply. Pershing also added a War Plans Division to carry out planning functions mandated by the National Defense Act.

The new Army would be spread across nine commands, or corps, each with one regular, two National Guard, and three Reserve divisions. Also, the Army established military departments in Panama, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Because the Army was under strength, many tactical units remained skeletal, while some only existed on paper. With new mobilization plans, however, National Guard and Reserve units could quickly fill out the Army to more than two million men in a matter of just a few months. Thus, while the expansible army concept remained, it was much better organized, trained, and outfitted than it had been in the nineteenth century.

The new National Guard became a vital component of the Army of the United States, one that both addressed defense needs and reassured states that their right to maintain a militia had not been eroded by the 1917 mobilization of state guard units. The National Defense Act authorized a National Guard of over 400,000 troops, but throughout the 1920s the National Guard typically maintained only about 180,000. The massive surplus of materiel after the war made equipping Guard units quite easy. Regular Army officers trained Guard units, including 48 times a year at their respective armories and for two weeks each year in the field. Importantly, the National Defense Act required the Army staff to include Guard and Reserve officers, providing invaluable training and experience as well as input into planning and policies affecting the Guard and Organized Reserve.

The National Guard and regular Army were augmented by the Reserves, also established by the National Defense Act. The Organized Reserve did not experience the postwar prestige that came with Guard service but nonetheless provided continued training and readiness for thousands of men, mostly veterans of the Great War, who already had military training and experience. More successful was the Officers’ Reserve Corps, made up of veteran officers as well as a steady stream of newly commissioned officers. Later, in 1940 and 1941, such a large pool of trained soldiers made mobilization for World War II much more effective and efficient.

While the Military Academy at West Point remained the more elite and prestigious officer commissioning institution for the Army, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and the Citizens’ Military Training Camp program (CMTC) became the primary training ground for commissioning new officers. The National Defense Act increased the number of ROTC programs at colleges and universities across the United States. Over 325 schools had ROTC programs by 1928, commissioning over 6,000 new second lieutenants annually. The CMTC worked through summer training camps rather than colleges and universities. Completing a four-week summer training camp each year for four years qualified one for commissioning in the Reserves. Over 30,000 participated in this alternative commissioning program. Both the ROTC and CMTC greatly helped the Army maintain its officer needs for the Reserves and the National Guard, as well as for the regular Army.

Professional military education in the Army was reinvigorated to levels not seen since the 1880s. In addition to officer training programs at West Point and in ROTC programs across the United States, over 30 Army schools provided specialized training for most branches of the Army. Primarily directed toward officers, these schools educated not only regular officers but officers from the Reserves and Guard components as well. Like the professional military education schools in Great Britain and Germany, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the Army War College, and the Army Industrial College provided advanced education and training to more senior officers. The purpose of these schools was to produce competent officers who could command at various levels during war rather than to allow for in-depth study of war theory. Career officers in the Army, Guard, and Reserves were among the best-educated and trained in the world.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the Army of the United States was its lack of interest in armor during the 1920s. Infantry, with its rifles and bayonets, remained the ‘Queen of Battle,’ as it had under Pershing’s command in France during the Great War. Despite the impact of new tank technology, Army strategists saw little use for the vehicles beyond infantry support. As a consequence, the infantry absorbed the Tank Corps after the war. Little valuable research and development funds went toward tank warfare. Only one experimental tank brigade existed during the 1930s, and as World War II approached, the Army had only four mechanized units.

Great Britain and Germany, on the other hand, recognized the tank’s strategic and tactical potential in combat operations. Convinced that armor could operate as mechanized units on a battlefield and break through enemy lines, British military leaders gave armor a role independent of infantry support. Germany pioneered tank tactics by concentrating large but fast armor units to achieve a sort of ‘shock and awe’ impact on the enemy. Ideas and techniques developed in concert with the Soviet Red Army in the 1920s during the so-called ‘Black Reichswehr’ period gave both the Germans and Soviets a distinct edge in armor doctrine and practice. While the British, Germans, and Soviets developed new, faster, and more lethal tanks and other armored vehicles during the 1920s and 1930s, the United States did comparatively little. Equally, the financial strictures of the 1930s imposed severe interruptions for developments in all Western armies, while political interference in the Soviet Union mostly killed innovation there in the same period. Doctrine for Airpower

The rapid advancement of aviation technology during and after the Great War challenged airpower advocates and detractors alike. The Army’s traditional role as land force and the Navy’s time-honored function as ocean fleet did not allow for the smooth integration of aircraft into their strategic or operational thinking. Airpower enthusiasts went so far as to suggest that armies would be obsolete, as aircraft alone could bring an industrialized nation-state to its knees through strategic bombing. The main disagreements centered on how airpower should be used.

Among these enthusiasts were British General Sir Hugh Trenchard, Italian Air Chief Guilio Douhet, and American Brigadier General Billy Mitchell. Trenchard had been instrumental in establishing the Royal Air Force as an independent service and served as the first Chief of the Air Staff in 1917. Douhet wrote extensively on the use of airpower and theorized that bombers targeting civilian populations, in addition to industrial targets, could force such political chaos in a country to make its government come to terms. Wars would be shorter and ultimately less destructive, which was precisely the remedy that war-weary people sought after the seemingly endless slaughter of the Great War. Critics, however, rightly questioned the ethics of bombing civilians.

General Mitchell enthusiastically shared these ideas. Typical of bureaucratic organizations the Army and Navy resisted radical change and instead promoted a more conservative doctrine that aircraft could be useful in supporting air and naval operations through missions involving the pursuit of enemy aircraft, bombardment of enemy positions, attack on enemy forces in battle, observation of enemy troop movements, and artillery support. There was no concept of joint Army and Navy air operations and only minimal thought given to how airpower could be used to repel a seaborne invasion of the United States. Mitchell, on the other hand, radically suggested that airpower alone could not only defend the United States but win future wars in which land and sea forces would be obsolete.

Like Trenchard, Mitchell wanted an independent air force that would train, maintain, and operate all American military air assets, and more controversially overtake the Navy’s fleet as America’s first line of defense. To Mitchell, spending more money building battleships took funding away from building his independent air force. To gain support for his radical ideas, Mitchell boldly dared the Navy to allow Army aircraft to attack a battleship. Mitchell hoped to prove once and for all that battleships were devastatingly vulnerable in the new age of air. The Navy had already conducted staged-air attacks against mothballed vessels in 1920 and 1921, but eagerly accepted Mitchell’s challenge. Off the Virginia Capes in 1921, Mitchell got his chance as the Army and Navy agreed to a demonstration as part of a more substantial joint exercise. Using a stationary, unmanned German battleship, the Ostfriesland, as his target, Mitchell organized a squadron of Army bombers from Langley Field to ‘attack’ the battleship. The Navy had set strict rules to guide the experiment. Only one bomb could be dropped at a time. After each bomb drop, investigators would board the ship to examine the damage, if any. Mitchell probably never had any intention of following these rules. Dropping over sixty 2,000-pound bombs at the anchored vessel, the Army bombers scored 16 direct hits, none of which were strictly observed by the Navy board of investigators according to the predetermined rules. Mitchell sank the battleship, but he and the Navy disagreed on the meaning of the result. Mitchell claimed his point proven—battleships were vulnerable to air attack. The Navy rightly claimed that Mitchell’s test had been in a controlled environment. The weather was perfect, the ship at anchor, and no anti-aircraft fire dissuaded the attacking bombers. For the Navy, Mitchell had just proven how difficult it would be for aircraft to successfully attack a battleship, much less a fleet of warships.

Mitchell was a maverick who enjoyed talking to the press. When the War Department and Navy Department would not yield to what seemed to him overwhelming evidence of air superiority, he went to the public to plead his case. In an attempt to at least quiet the outspoken aviator, the War Department transferred Mitchell to San Antonio, Texas, in 1925, demoting him from his wartime rank of brigadier general to colonel, an act many considered a punishment for Mitchell’s increasingly outspoken support of airpower. He had already flirted with insubordination against his superiors, but in September 1925, he crossed it for good. On the morning of September 3, the Navy airship Shenandoah crashed during a storm in Ohio, adding to a string of recent air accidents. Fourteen crewmen were killed. Outraged at what he considered needless loss of life, Mitchell spoke to the press, going so far as to claim the Army and Navy were incompetent, even criminally negligent. The Army charged Mitchell with insubordination. His court-martial was a public sensation. Convicted, Mitchell resigned his commission in the hope of being able to promote airpower unhindered by a military chain of command. Figure 11.2 General Billy Mitchell at his court-martial, 1925.

Source: United States Air Force. Mitchell’s was not a voice in the wilderness, just too radical a one. Many in the Army and Navy, as well as in Congress, recognized the importance of airpower to future conflict. Still, Congress and a special investigating board appointed by President Calvin Coolidge rejected the idea of an independent air force. Whatever air development would come would be done under the current military structure.

Unconnected to Mitchell’s pleas for an independent air arm, Congress did create the Army Air Corps in 1926, with an authorized strength of over 17,000 officers and men and 1,800 aircraft. Congress also instituted a five-year expansion and modernization program for the Air Corps. This program paid reliable dividends, for, throughout the 1930s, Army aircraft improved in both type and efficiency; and by the beginning of World War II, the United States indeed had one of the best air forces in the world. Moreover, by creating an Army Air Corps, Congress had removed the stigma of air service in the Army and helped establish a culture open to sound strategic and tactical ideas. By the late 1930s, the Army Air Corps Tactical School thrived at Maxwell Field in Alabama, training a generation of tactical and strategic air thinkers that would have much success in World War II and beyond. It is intriguing that the Army ultimately advocated airpower but did not exercise similar enthusiasm for armor.

Naval aviation did not experience the Army’s internal and public travails in seeking a mission for airpower. The Naval Air Service had been created in 1917 and understandably blossomed during the war to over 50,000 officers and men with over 2,000 land- and sea-based aircraft. After the war, the Navy issued a doctrinal statement that called for a Naval Air Service capable of accompanying and protecting the fleet wherever it might be in the world.

Mitchell’s highly publicized sinking of the Ostfriesland inspired and even converted some senior naval officers, such as Admirals William Fullam and William S. Sims, to the notion that maritime airpower had a role in fleet operations. Sims had already studied what might happen if two fleets of equal strength in capital ships faced each other, with one side having more aircraft carriers than the other. He concluded that the superiority lay with the fleet that had more aircraft carriers. Air superiority at sea would expose the enemy’s fleet to massive air assault and battleship bombardment, the combination of which would be decisive. At a public demonstration of military aircraft in San Diego, Fullam noted how easily ships in San Diego Bay could have been destroyed. With the strong support of the Navy’s Chief of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, the Navy built its first carrier, the Langley, from a converted collier. The carriers Lexington and Saratoga were both converted heavy cruisers.

The Navy wholeheartedly embraced airpower as a complement to fleet operations. Congress increased budgets for naval aviation, adding more planes to the fleet. New carriers were built. At the Naval Academy at Annapolis, students received aeronautical instruction, including flight and navigation training, and air service billets grew to equal the importance of sea duty. Naval aviators even became celebrities. It had been a Navy pilot—Lieutenant Commander A. C. Read, flying a Curtis airplane—who made the first transatlantic flight (Newfoundland to the Azores to Portugal) in 1919. The polar explorer Commander Richard E. Byrd flew over the North Pole in 1926 and over the South Pole in 1928. Navy flyers routinely won the air races and competitions that were so popular across the United States in the 1920s. First Line of Defense: the Fleet

The Navy remained the first line of defense for the continental United States. The notion of a navy second to none, heralded by the Navy Act of 1916, remained in place after the war. The Naval Act of 1919 was intended to continue the building program of the prewar 1916 act. But in the postwar disarmament environment, both the United States and Great Britain, the world’s leading naval power, considered the financial cost of expanding their navies and agreed in principle to some sort of naval limitation to avoid setting off another arms race.

Moreover, some naval strategists began to question the Mahanian focus on the battleship fleet as the primary means of naval maneuver. The devastating use of submarines by Germany and the advent of military aviation during the war could indeed ultimately make battleships obsolete, as Mitchell believed he had demonstrated. As had been the case in the past, however, overcoming traditional doctrine with new technology proved extremely difficult.

With the American and British fleets still building new ships, and Japan solidifying its position as a naval power in the western Pacific, representatives from the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, Italy, China, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal met in Washington in late 1921 to discuss the concept of limiting naval arms and maintaining the balance of power in Asia and the Pacific. It is worth noting that the idea of scrapping American battleships already under construction and limiting future building came from the State Department, not the Navy Department. Nonetheless, the idea of arms reduction struck a popular chord in the postwar world.

Three agreements came from the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922. First, Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy agreed to a naval limitation treaty based upon a tonnage ratio of 5:5:3:1.7:1.7, respectively, for battleships and, interestingly, aircraft carriers. The so-called Five-Power Treaty also called for a ten-year moratorium on building battleships and cruisers. The agreement recognized that Great Britain and the United States had more extensive geographic and economic security interests and that Japan had significant regional security interests, though Japan protested its relegation as a second-rate power in the agreement. Great Britain, the United States, France, and Japan also signed the Four-Power Treaty that called for a conference of the signatories to settle any disputes over possessions in the Far East. Finally, the Nine-Power Treaty obligated each signatory to respect the Open Door policy in China, in what turned out to be a vain attempt to recognize the territorial integrity and sovereignty of China.

The United States Navy came out of the Washington Naval Conference in comparative shipshape, considering the age of the British fleet and the relatively small size of the Japanese Imperial Navy. To meet the stipulations of the treaty, the Navy had to scrap 15 old battleships, most of which would have been decommissioned regardless of the agreement. Additionally, two new ships and several in various stages of construction had to be dismantled, many of which might not have otherwise seen the sea because of congressional budget cuts. The primary purpose of the accord was to prevent the United States, Great Britain, and Japan from having the overall naval strength to conduct offensive operations in the Pacific. The treaties served an entirely preventive purpose. The Washington Naval Conference had a Wilsonian aspect, as the United States used a multilateral agreement to collectively prevent another world war—or at least a fight in the Pacific, a prospect that many post-Great War strategists feared.

The U.S. Navy in the 1920s, then, was built around the Five-Power Treaty and, in fact, was under the strength allowed in the agreement by as much as 35 percent. The money saved from the treaty limitations, however, allowed the Navy to significantly improve the quality of its fleet at the expense of quantity. In 1933, the Navy boasted only 100 ships and submarines, crewed by 90,000 officers and men.

A 1927 conference at Geneva to further limit cruisers and place limitations on destroyers and submarines came and went without an agreement. In 1930, however, such restrictions were agreed upon at the London Naval Conference. In addition to placing new limitations on cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, the London agreement extended the ten-year capital shipbuilding moratorium to 1936. If any of the signatories believed its security under threat from another nation, however, it could suspend its part of the agreement and add more ships. But if one of the signatories pulled out or broke the deal and built more ships or increased tonnage, the rest of the signatories could do likewise. If one country suspended or broke the agreement, then the whole thing was off.

All of the signatories assuredly violated the spirit of the naval accords, but Japan openly broke the treaties in the early 1930s when it began expanding its sphere of influence in Asia and the Pacific. After 1933, the Washington and London agreements were indeed finished. President Franklin Roosevelt, who had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Great War, began building a stronger navy as soon as he took office in 1933. As part of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, Roosevelt ordered over $200 million spent on building 32 ships through 1936. In 1934, Congress passed the Vinson-Trammell Act, which authorized the replacement of older vessels, including one carrier, two cruisers, 14 destroyers, and six submarines in 1935 alone, followed by similar replacements through 1942. It is essential to understand, however, that these increases in naval shipbuilding would only bring the U.S. Navy up to its treaty limits, even though the treaties had largely ceased to exist. And with the lead time required to build a capital ship, few of these vessels would actually join the fleet before the early 1940s. The Marine Corps and the Development of Amphibious Warfare

Despite its expansive role in France as part of the American Expeditionary Force during the Great War, the Marine Corps radically demobilized after the conflict and continued to fine-tune its mission. Intervention operations and occupation duties in Nicaragua, Hispaniola, and China and developing an amphibious warfare doctrine kept the active but still small Marine Corps quite busy during the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1926, the Marines landed in Nicaragua to end political chaos there and did not withdraw until 1933. Disputes between the Nicaraguan Liberal and Conservative politicos over election results in 1924 and 1925 erupted in violence that approached civil war. Throughout 1926, the American legation in Nicaragua used Marine shore parties to protect American lives and property. By late 1926, however, Liberal forces had killed an American citizen and sacked some American-owned warehouses. The Coolidge administration supported the Conservative government that had been elected previously, and in early 1927 the president decided to intervene in Nicaragua. By February, the 5th Marine Regiment was onshore, supported by a six-plane observation squadron. With one battalion defending Managua against Liberal forces, smaller units occupied strategic towns along the railroad from Managua to the coast. Figure 11.3 United States Marines with the captured flag of Augusto César Sandino, 1932.

Source: United States Department of Defense. Coolidge sent former Secretary of War Henry Stimson to work out an agreement between the Conservatives and Liberals. With Marine units strategically placed to prevent the two armies from taking advantage of the temporary ceasefire, Stimson brought the two parties together in the so-called Peace of Tipitapa. New elections would be held in 1928, and both armies would disband and be replaced by a new national Nicaraguan army. The 11th Marine Regiment arrived to help implement the peace accord.

Some Liberal bands held out, including one led by Augusto César Sandino, who had refused to sign the Peace of Tipitapa. The Marines were caught in an impossible situation. They had to simultaneously disarm rebel bands, build a new Nicaraguan army, and pacify large regions of the countryside. Sandino presented the most troubling problem. Marine Brigadier General Logan Feland sent a force of over 200 Marines deep into territory controlled by Sandino to bring him in, by force if necessary. Sandino, however, hit first in an attempt to surprise the Marines and their Nicaraguan Guardia allies. Fighting in the predawn darkness, the Marines recovered quickly and repulsed several assaults by Sandino’s force of over 600 men. With daylight came help from above, as the Marine observation planes strafed and even dive-bombed Sandino’s positions. This may have been the first use of dive-bombing techniques in military aviation history. Sandino suffered heavy losses, with perhaps as many as 100 killed to one Marine killed. This incident led to almost five years of war with the so-called Sandinistas; it ended finally with the establishment of the Somoza dictatorship in 1933, which remained in power until the late 1970s.

Meanwhile, in China, Marines in 1927 garrisoned Shanghai and Tientsin to protect American lives and property amidst the Chinese civil war and the threat of foreign intervention from Great Britain and Japan. Marine units found themselves caught in a complicated situation between rival warlords and Chinese nationalist forces, not to mention foreign maneuverings, in China. General Smedley Butler returned from a turbulent two-year leave, serving as director of public safety for the city of Philadelphia, to command the 4th Marine Regiment in China. The so-called ‘China Marines’ stayed on station in China under these conditions until they were withdrawn in November 1941.

Occupation duty for the Marines also included extended stints on Hispaniola in the Caribbean. All told, the Marines lost fewer than 100 officers and men from combat action while fulfilling these often thankless duties as the State Department’s ‘police force’ in the Caribbean, Latin America, and China. Trying to make the most of this challenging duty, the Marines gained valuable experience that would serve them well in the Pacific during World War II. Many Marine officers, such as Captain Lewis (‘Chesty’) Puller, learned a great deal about small-unit action, guerrilla warfare, and pacification. In 1925 the Marine Corps even published a pacification guide, the Small Wars Manual, based mostly upon the writings of Majors Samuel M. Harrington and Harold H. Utley. Occupation and intervention duty, however, convinced many in the State Department and Congress that these duties were the Marine Corps’ principal function. As unpopular as pacification became by the 1930s, the Marine Corps needed to distance itself from these missions and refocus on creating a sufficient advance base force for the Navy.

Wanting to narrowly define its unique mission beyond being an imperial constabulary, the Marine Corps boldly took the position that assault from the sea against fortified positions was possible, if not necessary, especially in a war in the Pacific. Holding and maintaining advance bases for the Navy would be paramount, and only the Marines could do it. Under the direction of Commandant John A. Lejune, the Marines studied amphibious assault, learning from experience and the disastrous British campaign against the Turks at Gallipoli during the Great War. Important doctrinal concepts were worked through by Major Earl H. Ellis, especially in his 1921 paper ‘Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia,’ which was to prove prophetic of the course of operations in the Pacific in 1943–1944.

This study assumed that with the support of naval gunfire and airstrikes against enemy positions, waves of Marines with heavy equipment, such as tanks and artillery, could sweep ashore from landing craft. Landing exercises in the mid-1920s proved problematic since neither the Marines nor the Navy had landing craft or transport to carry the tanks, artillery, and other necessary equipment to successfully assault a beach from the sea. With little funding to put into research and development of landing craft, yet tasked with developing the tactical means to carry out amphibious assaults, the Marines instead spent much of the pre-World War II years developing the theoretical concepts of amphibious assault.

This effort paid off in the early 1930s with the publication of Tentative Manual for Landing Operations and the establishment of a Fleet Marine Force within the Pacific Fleet. The Manual outlined a doctrine for amphibious assault, including pre-landing bombardment, air support, ship-to-shore communications, and the continual flow of supplies and reinforcements during the landing. By creating a Fleet Marine Force, the Navy and Marines committed themselves to develop landing craft and other support equipment for amphibious operations. It was through this effort that the landing craft familiar in World War II were first developed. The Fleet Marine Force would require a minimum of 25,000 Marines in wartime. In the mid-1930s, the entire Marine Corps numbered just over 16,000 officers and men, making landing exercises recreating wartime conditions all but impossible. Still, when World War II began, the Marine Corps had in place a doctrine to guide island assaults in the Pacific. Amphibious assault had been the butt of many a joke about the Marines among the Army, which ironically found itself indebted to the Marine Corps as it conducted significant amphibious operations in both the European and Pacific theaters during World War II. War Planning

During the interwar years, perhaps the most critical function undertaken by the American military was updating plans for mobilization and military operations. The military and industrial mobilization for both the War with Spain and the Great War had been nothing short of shameful. The color-coded war plans that had been around since the early 1900s also needed updating. The rise of ideological militarism in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the 1930s created even more incentive for improving mobilization and war plans.

Creating a mobilization plan that coordinates industrial capacity and manpower needs with security requirements is extremely difficult, particularly when war might suddenly befall a nation rather than allow for a gradual buildup. To overcome this difficulty, the Army-Navy Munitions Board sought to coordinate procurement and supply between the two services. The National Defense Act of 1920 made the War Department responsible for mobilization and created a special assistant secretary position in the War Department to carry out this function. Industry representatives and even Bernard Baruch, who had chaired the War Industries Board during the last year of the Great War, assisted the War Department by providing data, ideas on how to transform peacetime production to wartime production, and information on manpower needs that the War Department would have to balance against military manpower needs. Also, the Army Industrial College, established in 1924, studied logistics and industrial mobilization.

In 1930, the War Department created an Industrial Mobilization Plan to put the nation’s industrial might on a wartime footing while the military first ensured the security of the United States and then conducted offensive campaigns to defeat the enemy. The first plan found few supporters in Congress, which thought the plan too decentralized and too advantageous to industry considering the economic crisis devastating the country at the time. A subsequent revision increased centralized planning and gave the War Department apparent authority to put in place price and wage controls, which gave the military near-complete control over the American economy during a war. Although the Industrial Mobilization Plan was much needed, its timing could not have been worse. Aside from the Great Depression, the Senate investigation of profiteering by munitions manufacturers during the Great War made suspect any union between the War Department and American industry, war or no war.

Bringing together American industrial potential with its military might in a cohesive plan continued to elude planners. The 1937 Protective Mobilization Plan, the brainchild of Secretary of War Harry Woodring and Army Chief of Staff Malin Craig, made the most progress toward this end. In addition to organizing American industry for war production, the plan realized the interdependence of the military and the American economy during wartime. Militarily, it used the National Guard and the Navy to provide the first line of defense while the Army mobilized to meet wartime needs. This plan included specific details on training camps for individuals and units to avoid repeating the severe shortcomings of the 1917 mobilization. The plan assumed a mobilization similar in size to that of 1917; in fact, the mobilization that began in 1939 was ultimately over twice that size. The plan also assumed that the United States would be at war almost overnight, rather than envisioning the gradual, escalating crisis the United States faced from 1939 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The military needed new equipment. The stockpiles left over from the Great War had long been exhausted and worn out. The economic crisis did not help matters, as the federal government had a difficult time finding the money to update weapons, equipment, and facilities. The Army needed modern artillery, mechanized vehicles, anti-aircraft weapons, and updated infantry arms. The other problem the Army faced was that it could not predict to Congress what type of future war the United States might face. Another war in Europe would require different force structure and equipment than would a war in the Western Hemisphere—say, against Mexico, or an attack on the Panama Canal. Thus, the Army’s safest, though not most complete, policy became to spread funding thinly across several types of units and to opt for increased and better-trained manpower over modernization.

A few bright spots surfaced, however, including replacing the 1903 Springfield rifle with the M-1 Garand semi-automatic rifle and adopting modern mortars and howitzers for infantry and artillery use. The horse was finally phased out as a means of transportation, being wholly replaced by motorized transport. Smaller, more mobile divisions took the place of the large, cumbersome division model established in 1917. By the mid-1930s, manpower needs were also at least partially addressed, as the Army increased in size to 165,000 enlisted personnel.

The Air Corps found growth during the mid-1930s as well. In 1931, both the Army and Navy concurred that the Air Corps should be the lead in repelling a seaborne invasion of the American coast. Long-range patrolling from Hawaii and the Philippines, as well as the Panama Canal Zone, was added to the growing list of Air Corps responsibilities. Mitchell’s disciples tactfully argued for an expanded bombing mission for the Air Corps. By 1934, the Air Corps boasted 11 attack squadrons, 20 observation squadrons, 17 pursuit squadrons, and 27 bomber squadrons. The new emphasis on pursuit and bombing gave rise to new strategic and tactical doctrine, including daylight precision bombing of industrial targets and formation flying of bombers for self-defense against enemy interceptors, which arguably would allow bombers to penetrate deep into enemy territory. New aircraft that utilized mono-wing, closed-canopy designs with more powerful engines made these missions possible. By the eve of World War II, tactical air support for ground operations and strategic bombing, à la Mitchell, had become firmly entrenched in Air Corps doctrine.

The Navy enjoyed some expansion after the collapse of the limitation agreements and increased Japanese naval building. The Naval Act of 1938 authorized a $1.1 billion ten-year building program that would place the Navy at 20 percent over the old tonnage limits and double the size of naval aviation to over 3,000 aircraft. By comparison, in 1939, the Navy had 15 battleships to Japan’s ten, five carriers to Japan’s six, 36 cruisers to Japan’s 37, 104 destroyers to Japan’s 122, and 56 submarines to Japan’s 62. Japan had 500 carrier-borne aircraft, while the United States maintained over 800. Still, the Navy, especially in the Pacific, was woefully short on adequate forward bases, a problem that was not addressed until war broke out in the Pacific in 1941. Beyond the Western Hemisphere, the fleet would be hamstrung by a tenuous logistical line back to the United States. Manpower also lagged, as the Navy was at only 80 percent strength in 1939 with 125,000 officers and seamen. While strides had been made to improve naval readiness, the Navy, along with the Marines, remained underprepared for major conflict.

War planning during the 1920s and 1930s focused on hypothetical conflict with Great Britain, which was unlikely, and with the Empire of Japan, which was more likely. War Plan Orange supposed a Pacific war against Japan. First proposed in 1903, the joint Army–Navy plan assumed that the conflict would be a naval war in which Japan would quickly overrun American possessions in the Pacific, including Guam and the Philippines. Once fully mobilized, American naval forces and airpower would then retake these possessions and others necessary for basing to finally blockade the Japanese home islands. Exhibiting the influence of Mahan, the plan called for a climactic, decisive fleet action to decide who ruled the waves in the Pacific.

War Plan Orange had many defects, but chief among them was advance basing. Securing advance bases in forward areas was a problem because until the 1930s the Navy and the Marine Corps had little means of doing so. The handful of American possessions in the western Pacific offered basing alternatives, but the Army and Navy could not decide where to establish their primary base. Manila and Guam were the principal candidates. Because the Army and Navy were unable to make a choice before 1922, the Five-Power Treaty made the decision for them, as the agreement included a provision prohibiting the construction of new bases. Pearl Harbor in Hawaii already existed, and though not yet developed enough to base the Pacific Fleet, it was as far west as the United States could get under the agreements. The Navy argued that it could maintain a supply line from Pearl Harbor to keep the hungry Pacific Fleet operating. Disagreement arose regarding whether to defend Manila. The Army, quite naturally, wanted to hold it until reinforced. The Navy debated whether reinforcements could even get to the Philippines in time to save the Army garrison.

Even Pearl Harbor was not invulnerable to attack. As early as 1919, Admiral William B. Fletcher warned that aircraft from a carrier fleet could easily surprise military bases in Hawaii and probably destroy them before any effective defense could be mounted. In 1921, Major General Charles T. Menoher authored a report claiming that Pearl Harbor and other military installations on the island of Oahu were defenseless unless the United States had air superiority, which in 1921 it did not. During the 1930s, per War Plan Orange revisions and in response to Japanese aggression in China, the Navy deployed the bulk of its fleet to the Pacific, including the new carriers Lexington and Saratoga.

By 1938, it was apparent that the United States might face a simultaneous two-ocean war. The color-coded war plans designed to fight a single enemy would not suffice if the United States had to fight Germany and Japan at the same time. To plan for this worst-case scenario, the War Department ordered a review of all war plans. The recommendations became known as the Rainbow war plans. Five scenarios were studied. Rainbow One called for the defense of the entire Western Hemisphere, not just the United States and its own possessions, as had been the policy in the past. Rainbow Two and Rainbow Three supposed that the United States would fight in the Pacific against Japan, basically following War Plan Orange while its allies, France and Great Britain, fought Germany in Europe. Rainbow Four envisioned an Atlantic war fought by the United States without allies. Rainbow Five assumed an alliance with France and Great Britain and recommended giving primacy to the Atlantic theater while holding in the Pacific. Assuming the loss of Guam and the Philippines, Rainbow Five proposed to defend the Panama Canal Zone, the Atlantic coast, and shipping lanes across the Atlantic as well as conducting land operations in Europe, perhaps even Africa, all while fighting a defensive war in the Pacific. In essence, Rainbow Five was a defeat-Germany-first strategy, and it was this plan that ultimately provided the basis for war planning at the outset of World War II. Conclusion

In August 1928, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Premier Aristide Briand signed a remarkable agreement called the International Treaty for the Renunciation of War. More commonly known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, the agreement stated that signatories to the treaty would renounce war as a means of achieving national policy objectives. In all, more than 60 countries signed the pact, including Germany, Japan, and Italy. The only exception for war was self-defense, which was vaguely defined in the treaty. Such a concept, to outlaw war, was certainly understandable following the trauma of 1914–1918. It was, however, naïve and idealistic in the worst of Wilsonian traditions.

In the 1930s, the world again seemed to irrationally tumble toward conflict. Germany rejected the Treaty of Versailles, rearmed, and then undertook an escalating policy of aggression in Europe. Japan disavowed the League of Nations and initiated an overtly aggressive policy of expansion in Asia. Even Italy, a weak and ill-governed state, became enamored with the expansionist urge in its conquest of Ethiopia. Even more troubling was that these states denounced liberal democracy and capitalism for political theories that espoused national socialism and militaristic nationalism. These nations chose their paths for numerous reasons, including the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, and what they perceived as real threats to their national interests and security. The United States responded with a series of neutrality acts passed by Congress that were designed to prevent the nation from being unwillingly pulled into war, as it had been in 1917.

The United States also responded with better military preparedness than it had during the Great War. As the prospect of war loomed ever higher in the late 1930s, the American military was better prepared for conflict than ever before. Although not perfect by any means, the Army and Navy, as well as American political leaders, had learned valuable lessons from mistakes in the Great War. These mistakes would at the very least be minimized as the United States prepared to enter the greatest, costliest, and perhaps most tragic conflict in human history. Still, as the United States entered World War II, it did so with a military culture built around loyalty and toeing the party line. During the interwar period, the American military had not tolerated mavericks or independent thinkers very well. This rigid attitude toward new and different ideas would have to become more flexible and accommodating for the United States to successfully fight the next world war.

Roark Book

CHAPTER 25THE UNITED STATES AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR

(Roark, 2019, p. 745-747)

Nazi Aggression and War in Europe

The Axis powers Germany, East Prussia (Germany), and Italy set forth on offensives from 1936 through 1941 predominantly to strengthen their control of Europe. In March 1936, the German forces marched to Rhineland in Western Germany. In 1938, they moved eastward to Austria in March and to Sudetenland in September followed by their attack on Czechoslovakia later in March 1939 and on Warsaw, Poland in September 1939. From East Prussia, Germany invaded Latvia in March 1939. 1940 had German forces push through Ardennes in France to Dunkirk, Paris and eastern France to Vichy besides their advancement on Luxembourg, Belgium, and further north. Germany invaded Norway through the North Sea and headed to Finland from where they attacked Estonia. The German invasion of Denmark and Norway also took place via a different sea route in 1940, while on the west they also advanced to London in Britain. The advancements widened throughout Europe in 1941 as they headed from Lithuania to Leningrad; from Poland to the Soviet Union and Ukraine; from Romania along the southern region of Ukraine to the east; from Austria to Yugoslavia; and from Bulgaria to Greece. The limit of German advances extended until Vichy France in Western Europe; from Leningrad southward along Moscow to Ukraine in Eastern Europe; and Bulgaria–Turkey border on the southeast. On the other hand, Italy made advances to Ethiopia navigating the Mediterranean Sea in 1935 and to Albania via the Adriatic Sea in 1939. The Maginot Line ran from the Swiss-French border on the south and to Saar on the north.”

By 1939, Hitler had annexed Czechoslovakia and demanded that Poland return the German territory it had gained after World War I. Recognizing that  appeasement  of Hitler had failed, Britain and France promised Poland that they would go to war with Germany if Hitler attacked. In turn, Hitler tried to prevent the Soviet Union from joining Britain and France in support of Poland. Despite the enduring hatred between fascist Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, the two nations signed the Nazi-Soviet treaty of nonaggression in August 1939, exposing Poland to an onslaught by both the German and Soviet armies.

At dawn on September 1, 1939, Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg (literally, “lightning war”) on Poland. “Act brutally!” Hitler exhorted his generals. “Send [every] man, woman, and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly.” The attack triggered Soviet attacks on eastern Poland and declarations of war from France and Britain two days later, igniting a conflict that raced around the globe. In September 1939, Germany seemed invincible, causing many people to fear that all of Europe would soon share Poland’s fate.

After the Nazis overran Poland, Hitler soon launched a westward blitzkrieg. In the first six months of 1940, German forces smashed through Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The speed of the German attack trapped more than 300,000 British and French soldiers, who retreated to the port of Dunkirk, where an improvised armada of British vessels ferried them to safety across the English Channel. One observer noted that the British rescued “hardly enough tanks to fight a regiment of well armed Boy Scouts.”

By mid-June 1940, France had surrendered the largest army in the world, signed an armistice that gave Germany control of nearly two-thirds of the countryside, and installed a collaborationist government at Vichy. With an empire that stretched across Europe from Poland to France, Hitler was poised to attack Britain.

“‘We shall fight on the seas and oceans [and] … in the air,’ Churchill proclaimed, ‘whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, … and in the fields and in the streets.’”

The new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, vowed that Britain, unlike France, would never surrender to Hitler. “We shall fight on the seas and oceans [and] … in the air,” he proclaimed, “whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, … and in the fields and in the streets.” Churchill’s defiance stiffened British resolve against Hitler’s attack, which began in mid-June 1940, when wave after wave of German bombers targeted British military installations and cities, killing tens of thousands of civilians. The outgunned Royal Air Force fought as doggedly as Churchill had predicted and finally won the Battle of Britain by November, clearing German bombers from British skies and handing Hitler his first defeat. Churchill praised the valiant British pilots, declaring that “never … was so much owed by so many to so few.” Advance knowledge of German plans aided British pilots, who had access to the new technology of radar and to decoded top-secret German military communications. Battered and exhausted by German attacks, Britain needed American help to continue to fight, as Churchill repeatedly wrote Roosevelt in private.

From Neutrality to the Arsenal of Democracy

Most Americans condemned German aggression and favored Britain and France, but isolationism remained powerful. Roosevelt feared that if Congress did not repeal the arms embargo required by the Neutrality Act of 1937, France and Britain would soon fall to the Nazi onslaught. “What worries me,” Roosevelt wrote a friend, “is that public opinion … is patting itself on the back every morning and thanking God for the Atlantic Ocean (and the Pacific Ocean),” and ignoring “the serious implications” of the European war “for our own future.” Congress agreed in November 1939 to allow warring nations to buy arms and nonmilitary supplies on a cash-and-carry basis.

In practice, the revised neutrality law permitted Britain and France to purchase American war supplies and carry them across the Atlantic in their own ships, thereby shielding American vessels from attack by German submarines. Roosevelt searched for a way to aid Britain short of a formal alliance or declaring war against Germany. Churchill pleaded for American destroyers, aircraft, and munitions, but he had no money to buy them under the prevailing cash-and-carry neutrality law. As the Battle of Britain raged late in the summer of 1940, Roosevelt agreed to deliver fifty old destroyers to Britain in exchange for American access to British bases in the Western Hemisphere, the first step toward building a firm Anglo-American alliance against Hitler.

The Anglo-American allies quickly cooperated to advance radar technology. The British had invented a top-secret radio-wave transmitter that allowed radar to identify an object as small as a few inches. British leaders desperately needed to use the new radar to attack German bombers and submarines, but they lacked the resources to develop the technology quickly and make it widely available to the military. In September 1940, the British shared their technology with American scientists, who soon received the support of Roosevelt to organize a top-secret group of physicists and engineers in universities and corporate research labs to learn how to adapt the new radar to help fight the war.

One American scientist explained the significance of the new radar technology by saying, “If automobiles had been similarly improved, modern cars would cost about a dollar and go a thousand miles on a gallon of gas.” With headquarters at the Radiation Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, American scientists across the nation worked feverishly to improve radar. Eventually their efforts helped airplanes and ships to navigate and identify enemy aircraft and targets on land and sea, directed antiaircraft fire against enemy planes, and made possible the radar-based proximity fuse which caused antiaircraft and artillery shells to explode when they got near a target. For example, a proximity fuse caused the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima to detonate at an altitude that created maximum destruction. These and many other military uses of radar technology contributed greatly to Allied military campaigns.

While German Luftwaffe (air force) pilots bombed Britain, Roosevelt decided to run for an unprecedented third term as president in 1940. Roosevelt was reelected, and the voters sent a message of support for American involvement in the European war. The Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, who was ridiculed by New Dealers as a “simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer,” attacked Roosevelt as a warmonger. Willkie’s accusations caused the president to promise voters, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” a pledge counterbalanced by his repeated warnings during the campaign about the threats to America posed by Nazi aggression.

Once reelected, Roosevelt maneuvered to support Britain in every way short of a declaration of war against Germany. In a fireside chat shortly after Christmas 1940, Roosevelt proclaimed that the United States had to become “the great arsenal of democracy” and send “every ounce and every ton of munitions and supplies that we can possibly spare to help the defenders who are in the front lines.”

In January 1941, Roosevelt proposed the  Lend-Lease Act , which allowed the British to obtain weapons from the United States without paying cash, but with the promise to reimburse the United States when the war ended. The purpose of Lend-Lease, Roosevelt proclaimed, was to defend democracy and human rights throughout the world, specifically the Four Freedoms: “freedom of speech and expression … freedom of every person to worship God in his own way … freedom from want … [and] freedom from fear.” Isolationist opponents accused Roosevelt of concocting a “Triple A foreign policy” that would lead to war and “plow under every fourth American boy.” After fierce debates, Congress approved Lend-Lease, starting a flow of support to Britain that totaled more than $50 billion during the war, far more than all federal expenditures combined since Roosevelt had become president in 1933.

Hindered in his plans to invade Britain, Hitler turned his massive army eastward and on June 22, 1941, began a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, his ally in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had any love for Joseph Stalin or communism, but they both welcomed the Soviet Union to the anti-Nazi cause. Both Western leaders understood that Hitler’s attack on Russia would provide relief for the hard-pressed British. Roosevelt quickly persuaded Congress to extend Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, beginning the shipment of millions of tons of trucks, jeeps, and other equipment that in all supplied about 10 percent of Russian war materiel.

As Hitler’s army raced across the Russian plains and Nazi U-boats tried to choke off supplies to Britain and the Soviet Union, Roosevelt met with Churchill aboard a ship near Newfoundland to cement the Anglo-American alliance. In August 1941, the two leaders issued the Atlantic Charter, pledging the two nations to freedom of the seas and free trade as well as the right of national self-determination.

Japan Attacks America

Although Roosevelt worried about war with Germany, Hitler avoided directly provoking the United States. Japanese ambitions in Asia clashed more openly with American interests and commitments, especially in China and the Philippines. Unlike Hitler, the Japanese high command planned to attack the United States in order to allow Japan to rule an Asian empire it termed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The Japanese appealed to widespread Asian bitterness toward white colonial powers such as the British in India and Burma, the French in Indochina (now Vietnam), and the Dutch in the East Indies (now Indonesia). The Japanese claimed that they would preserve “Asia for the Asians.” However, Japan’s invasion of China—which had lasted for ten years by 1941—proved that its true goal was Asia for the Japanese ( Map 25.2 ). Japan coveted the raw materials available from China and Southeast Asia, and it ignored American demands to stop its campaign of aggression.

MAP 25.2 Japanese Aggression through 1941 Beginning with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan sought to extend its imperialist control over most of East Asia. Japanese aggression was driven by the need for raw materials for the country’s expanding industries and by the government’s devotion to militaristic values.

“The map highlights the islands Sumatra, Java, Celebes, southern Borneo, Western New Guinea as Dutch East Indies; India, present-day Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Malaya, and northern Borneo as British Colonies; and Alaska and Philippines as American colonies.

The extent of Japanese control through 1941 ran from French Indochina with its prominent cities of Hanoi and Saigon; the cities along the eastern coastal belt of China comprising Swatow (Shantou), Canton (Guangzhou), Hong Kong, and Amoy (Xiamen); Formosa; the eastern and northeastern part of China along the banks of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River comprising of the cities Nanchang, Nanjing, and Beijing; Manchuria; Korea; the southern half of Sakhalin Island and Kuril Island on the North Pacific Ocean; Japan; and a quadrilateral comprising of the Mariana island; Caroline Island, and Marshall Island in the southern Pacific Ocean.

The map identifies the islands of Guam, Wake, Hawaii, and Aleutian on the Pacific Ocean as U. S. colonies and the Bougainville Island and eastern New Guinea as Australian Mandate.”

In 1940, Japan entered a defensive alliance with Germany and Italy—the Tripartite Pact. To obstruct Japanese plans to invade the Dutch East Indies, in July 1941 Roosevelt announced a trade embargo that denied Japan access to oil, scrap iron, and other goods essential for its war machine. Roosevelt hoped the embargo would strengthen factions within Japan that opposed the militarists.

Instead, the American embargo played into the hands of Japanese militarists headed by General Hideki Tojo, who seized control of the government in October 1941 and persuaded other leaders, including Emperor Hirohito, that swift destruction of American naval bases in the Pacific would leave Japan free to achieve its war aims. On December 7, 1941, 183 aircraft lifted off from six Japanese carriers and attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on the Hawai’ian island of Oahu. The devastating surprise attack sank all of the fleet’s battleships, killed more than 2,400 Americans, and almost crippled U.S. war-making capacity in the Pacific. Luckily for the United States, Japanese pilots failed to destroy oil storage facilities at Pearl Harbor and the nation’s aircraft carriers, which happened to be at sea during the attack.

Bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

The map shows the Hawai’ian island Oahu and Maui, and the U.S Naval Air station in Ford Island which lies in the center of Oahu. While the East Loch remained undamaged, major losses from sunk and damaged ships was incurred at the south and southeastern coastline of U.S. Naval air station.

Pearl Harbor Attack A Japanese photographer took this photo just as the attack on Pearl Harbor began. A torpedo has hit the American battleship West Virginia, causing the huge plume of water and smoke. Other ships have already been torpedoed and are sinking. Two Japanese aircraft can be seen in the upper right quadrant of the picture, while Japanese submarines are invisible beneath the surface of the water.

The Japanese scored a stunning tactical victory at Pearl Harbor. In the long run, however, the attack proved a colossal blunder. The victory made many Japanese commanders overconfident about their military strength. Worse for the Japanese, Americans instantly united in their desire to fight and avenge the attack. Roosevelt vowed that “this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.” On December 8, Congress endorsed the president’s call for a declaration of war. Both Hitler and Mussolini declared war against America three days later, bringing the United States into all-out war with the Axis powers in both Europe and Asia.

How did isolationism shape American foreign policy in the 1930s?

(Roark, 2019, p. 742-743)

The First World War left a dangerous and deadly legacy. The victors—especially Britain, France, and the United States—sought to avoid future wars at almost any cost. The defeated nation, Germany, aspired to avenge its losses by renewed war. Italy and Japan felt humiliated by the Versailles peace settlement and believed war would increase their global power. Japan invaded the northern Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931, with ambitions to expand throughout Asia. Italy, led by the fascist Benito Mussolini since 1922, hungered for an empire in Africa. In Germany, National Socialist Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, the first step in his quest to dominate Europe and the world. These aggressive, militaristic, antidemocratic governments seemed a smaller threat to most people in the United States during the 1930s than the economic crisis at home. Shielded from external threats by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Americans hoped to avoid entanglement in foreign disputes and to concentrate on climbing out of the Great Depression.

Roosevelt and Reluctant Isolation

Like most Americans during the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt believed that the nation’s highest priority was to attack the domestic causes and consequences of the depression. But unlike most Americans, Roosevelt had long believed the United States should actively engage in international relations.

The depression forced Roosevelt to retreat from his previous internationalism. He came to believe that foreign affairs threatened to divert resources and political support from New Deal efforts to promote domestic recovery. Once in office, Roosevelt sought to combine domestic economic recovery with a low-profile foreign policy that encouraged free trade and disarmament.

Roosevelt’s pursuit of international cooperation was hindered by economic circumstances and American popular opinion. After an opinion poll demonstrated popular support for recognizing the Soviet Union—an international outcast since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917—Roosevelt established formal diplomatic relations in 1933. But when the League of Nations condemned Japanese and German aggression, Roosevelt did not support the league’s attempts to keep the peace. He feared isolationists would withdraw support for New Deal measures in Congress. America watched from the sidelines when Japan withdrew from the league and ignored the limitations on its navy imposed after World War I. The United States also looked the other way when Hitler rearmed Germany and recalled its representative to the league in 1933. Roosevelt worried that German and Japanese actions threatened world peace, but he told Americans that the nation would not “use its armed forces for the settlement of any [international] dispute anywhere.”

The Good Neighbor Policy

In 1933, Roosevelt announced that the United States would pursue “the policy of the good neighbor” in international relations. This policy declared that no nation had the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another. Roosevelt emphasized that the  good neighbor policy  applied specifically to Latin America, where U.S. military forces had often intervened. The policy did not indicate a U.S. retreat from empire in Latin America, though. Instead, it declared that, unlike in the past, the United States, influence in the region would not depend on military force.

Roosevelt refrained from sending troops to defend the interests of American corporations when Mexico nationalized American oil properties and revolutions boiled over in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Cuba during the 1930s. In 1934, Roosevelt withdrew American Marines from Haiti, where they had been stationed since 1916. Roosevelt’s hands-off policy honored the principle of national self-determination, but it also permitted the rise of dictators in Nicaragua, Cuba, and elsewhere who exploited and terrorized their nations with private support from U.S. businesses.

Military nonintervention also did not prevent the United States from exerting its economic influence in Latin America. In 1934, Congress gave the president the power to reduce tariffs on goods imported into the United States from nations that agreed to lower their own tariffs on U.S. goods. By 1940, twenty-two nations had agreed to such reciprocal tariff reductions, helping to double U.S. exports to Latin America, a policy that planted seeds of friendship and hemispheric solidarity while contributing to the New Deal’s goal of boosting the domestic economy through free trade.

The Price of Isolation

In Europe, fascist governments in Italy and Germany threatened military aggression. Britain and France made only verbal protests. Encouraged, Hitler plotted to recapture territories with German inhabitants, all the while accusing Jews of polluting the purity of the Aryan master race. The wild-eyed anti-Semitism of Hitler and the Nazi Party unified non-Jewish Germans and attracted sympathizers among many other Europeans, even in France and Britain.

In Japan, a militaristic government planned to follow the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 with conquests extending throughout Southeast Asia. The Manchurian invasion bogged down in a long and vicious war when Chinese Nationalists rallied around their leader, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), to fight against the Japanese. Preparations for new Japanese conquests continued, however. In 1936, Japan openly violated naval limitation treaties and began to build a battle-ready fleet to seek naval superiority in the Pacific.

In the United States, the hostilities in Asia and Europe reinforced isolationist sentiments. Popular disillusionment with the failure of Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic goals caused many Americans to question the nation’s participation in World War I. In 1933, Gerald Nye, a Republican from North Dakota, chaired a Senate committee that declared greedy “merchants of death”—American weapons makers, bankers, and financiers—had dragged the nation into the war to line their own pockets. International tensions and the Nye committee report prompted Congress to pass a series of  neutrality acts  between 1935 and 1937 designed to keep the nation out of foreign wars. The neutrality acts prohibited making loans and selling weapons to nations at war.

By 1937, the growing conflicts overseas caused some Americans to call for a total embargo on all trade with warring countries. The Neutrality Act of 1937 imposed a “cash-and-carry” policy that required nations at war to pay cash for nonmilitary goods and to transport them in their own ships. This policy benefited the nation’s economy, but it also helped foreign aggressors by supplying them with goods and thereby undermining peace.

Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939

The desire for peace in France, Britain, and the United States led Germany, Italy, and Japan to launch military offensives because they believed that Western democracies lacked the will to oppose them. In March 1936, Nazi troops marched into the industry-rich Rhineland on Germany’s western border, a blatant violation of the Versailles peace treaty. A month later, Italian armies completed their conquest of Ethiopia, projecting fascist power into Africa. In December 1937, Japanese invaders captured Nanjing (Nanking) and celebrated their triumph in the “Rape of Nanking,” a deadly rampage that killed two hundred thousand Chinese civilians.

In Spain, a bitter civil war broke out in July 1936 when the Nationalists—who were fascist rebels led by General Francisco Franco—attacked the democratically elected Republicans—who were called Loyalists. Both Germany and Italy reinforced Franco, while the Soviet Union provided much less aid to the Republican Loyalists. The Loyalists did not receive help from European democracies or the U.S. government. But more than three thousand individual Americans fought alongside Republican Loyalists in the Russian-sponsored Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Abandoned by the Western democracies, the Republican Loyalists were defeated in 1939, and Franco built a fascist bulwark in Spain.

Hostilities in Europe, Africa, and Asia alarmed Roosevelt and some Americans. The president sought to persuade most Americans to moderate their isolationism and find a way to support the victims of fascist aggression. He warned that an “epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading” and pointed out that “mere isolation or neutrality” offered no remedy. The popularity of isolationist sentiment caused Roosevelt to remark, “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and find no one there.” Roosevelt knew he needed to maneuver carefully to help prevent fascist aggressors from conquering Europe and Asia, which would leave the United States an isolated island of democracy.