The Evolution of American War Planning Versus Germany

Elihu Root, Secretary of War and State
(1845-1937)

By Colonel Adlof Carlson, U.S. Army

The Army and the Navy Must Be Friends

At the 1904 War College dedication speech, reform-minded Secretary of War Elihu Root encouraged the Army and Navy “never to forget your duty of coordination . . . this is the time to learn to serve together without friction.” The final ingredient in tying together the Army and Navy’s efforts was the 1903 creation of the Joint Army and Navy Board, the first standing interservice war planning association in American history. The board consisted of four principal officers of each service, with Admiral Dewey, revered hero of Manila Bay, as chair until his death in 1917. The board’s function was to issue broad guidelines for the defense of the United States, its possessions, and the Western Hemisphere. Detailed planning was the responsibility of the General Staff and the Navy Staffs, with most of the actual work done by the two war colleges.

By the early 20th century, the danger of war with Germany was real. In the first three months of 1899, a combined Anglo-American force had appeared in Samoan waters to overthrow a native government installed by the Germans. This force began to shell areas considered friendly to German rule, and later landed a force which suffered seven casualties in fighting German supported Samoans, the first blood shed in German-American hostilities. 

Bad feelings began to grow between the two countries. The Washington Post editorialized that: 

We know that by a thousand unmistakable signs and by the experience of years that in the German government the United States has a sleepless and insatiable enemy. 

In April 1904, in response to a recommendation made by Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Adna R. Chaffee, Secretary of War William Howard Taft directed the Joint Army Navy Planning Board to:

Agree upon a series of practical problems (taking them in the order of their assumed importance) which involve cooperation of the services, and for the execution of which in time of emergency the two staffs will be responsible.

The Joint Board’s solutions to these “practical problems” would become war plans signed by the two service secretaries. This was the first joint deliberate planning system in American history.

Admiral Dewey directed the chiefs of the two war colleges, Admiral Henry C. Taylor and General Tasker H. Bliss, to submit recommendations on how best to get the study underway.42 Bliss submitted a 21-page paper, which shaped American war plans for the next 30 years. He assumed that the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, which he pointed out at the time of the War with Spain was the “only” American foreign policy, would be the most probable cause of America’s future wars. Significantly, Bliss reasoned that the acquisition of the Philippines expanded the Monroe Doctrine beyond the American hemisphere. He concluded that the major European powers would not likely attack the United States itself because diversion of military resources would weaken them in the face of continental rivalries; and that the real purpose of any violation of the Monroe Doctrine would be to seize American possessions in our hemisphere or in the Philippines.  Accordingly, Bliss’s paper recommended that the two services study the following problems in this order:

1. U.S. intervention in a South American country to assist the government in ousting a foreign power supporting insurgents;

2. U.S. at war against two continental European powers [one of which was sure to be Germany];

3. U.S. at war against a coalition of Britain and Canada; and,

4. U.S. intervention into Mexico “with another foreign complication” [presumably a European power collecting Mexican debt].

The most virulent of all the potential enemies analyzed by the Joint Board was Germany. Accordingly, in 1913, these studies led to the formal plan BLACK, for war between the United States and Germany. Thus, when hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States had already contemplated the possibility of war, and had developed plans for the employment of its military forces for the defense of its territory and the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, territorially expanded to encompass its new Pacific holdings. It remained an open question, however, as to whether the country possessed the means to achieve these objectives.

This first version of War Plan Black, however, did not contemplate deploying an American army to Europe.  It saw the main threat from Germany to be naval incursions against North America and in the Pacific.

Dewey — Hero of Manila Bay

The Impact of the World War

At the time of President Wilson’s first inauguration, in 1913, the country faced two crises in foreign affairs. The first was the murder of Francisco Madero, Diaz’ successor in Mexico. Wilson, who regarded Madero as his ideological counterpart, became the uncompromising opponent of Madero’s murderer, Victoriano Huerta.

At about the same time, the California state legislature passed the Alien Exclusion Act, which forbade Japanese nationals from owning or leasing land in that state. The Japanese government, which refused to believe that the Federal government could not overturn a state law, was incensed, and began to take advantage of what they saw as a convergence of interests with Mexico.

In the spring and summer of 1913, Japan supplied arms to the Huerta government. Then, in May, England recognized the Huerta government in order to secure a steady supply of Mexican oil to fuel the warships of the Royal Navy.

These developments moved the Army-Navy Joint Planning Board to act. What the Board did was based upon the conclusion that the country could not defeat any hostile force landed on the west coast. One analysis read:

If 200,000 men of any first class hostile power should be landed on our Pacific Coast, we should have no course but to hand over to a foreign nation the rich empire west of the Rockies, with its cities, its harbors, and the wealth of its valleys and mountains.

In November 1914, the Japanese embarked on a series of campaigns in Asia and the Pacific, ostensibly in support of their British allies, but which in reality were designed to take advantage of Germany’s predicament to extend Japan’s empire. The German port of Tsingtao, as well as the Marshalls, the Caroline, and the Mariana Islands were captured, which worsened the already precarious strategic situation in the Philippines.

The situation on the sea lanes also put Americans and American interests at risk. The German High Seas Fleet, bottled up in the North Sea, was little danger, but the German submarine force became the major peril on the highseas, for which the assumptions of Plan BLACK made no provision.

Mexican President Victoriano Huerta, Right Chair,
with His Cabinet

Mexico Becomes the Big Problem

But where all of the dangers of war seemed to converge with the most immediate impact was in Mexico. In December 1914, the captain of a Japanese warship visited Mexico City. Japan was aggrieved at the United States and had been preparing for war for over 3 years.

In April 1915, the Japanese battle cruiser Asama was detected maneuvering off the coast of Baja California.  The Hearst press, which had so effectively worked Americans into a war fever in 1898, screamed that the Japanese had been using naval bases in Baja California.

In April 1915, the U.S. Government learned of a German plan to put Huerta, who was in exile, back in power.  At this stage of the war, Germany had already begun intrigues to tie the United States down in its hemisphere and prevent it from intervening in Europe. This plot, coming on the heels of the Lusitania crisis, almost brought the United States into the war. It was clear that German attempts to involve the United States in a war with Mexico would continue, and would become the deciding factor regarding U.S. policy. As Secretary of State Lansing put it, “Our possible relations with Germany must be our first consideration, and our intercourse with Mexico must be regulated accordingly.”

A covert operation took Huerta out of the picture, and Germany’s attention turned to Pancho Villa, the next beneficiary of German support. In January 1916, a Germanarmed band of Villistas raided a group of American mining engineers in San Ysabel, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Americans called for revenge for the “massacre at San Ysabel.” The next crisis, Villa’s March 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, produced intelligence to suggest that the threat from Mexico was more than bandit gangs.

Among the dead of the Villista raiders was a courier carrying dispatches from Villa to Emiliano Zapata, fighting  in the southern part of Mexico. These dispatches suggested a union of the two revolutionaries “to join in a concentrated attack upon the United States,” and informing Zapata that he had “sent couriers to all states to incite the population against the Americans . . . the common enemies of the Mexicans.”

This was the impetus for the deployment of  Pershing’s punitive expedition in accordance with Plan GREEN, developed by the joint planning board to deal with threats from Mexico and foreign interventions.  By late 1916, the American military was planning for a full-blown war with Mexico. However, President   Wilson's more insightful response was to prepare for war with the source of the nation's problems, that is against Germany itself. Accordingly, on January 12th, 1917, Wilson told Secretary Baker to withdraw the expedition, in time for the intercept of the Zimmerman telegram in February. In this regard, Wilson was right and the military wrong, for had the United States gone to war with Mexico, it would have played right into German

hands.

Secretary of  War Newton Baker and
General Tasker Bliss

It's 1917

By 1917, the contingencies envisioned by ORANGE [war with Japan] and [the original] BLACK were extremely unlikely—the German fleet was bottled up in the North Sea, and the Japanese fleet was far away from home waters cooperating with Allied navies in the Mediterranean—yet, the United States was not secure.It could not protect its maritime commerce, it had to contend with foreign instigated violence on its southern frontier, and it had to face the prospect of insurrection on its own territory. Further, the situation in Europe was now a factor.

If the Germans won, which in 1917 was a strong possibility, they would feel emboldened enough to expand their influence into the Americas. If the stalemate continued, and the European armies ground each other to powder, then the way would be open for an ever more aggressive Japan. As an estimate prepared by one of President Wilson’s military advisors (LTC Henry T. Allen) concluded, without U.S. involvement none of the principal nations involved in the European war could be destroyed, meaning that the war could not “reconcile the victors to the vanquished” and that postwar Europe could not escape its troublesome nature. 

At this point, American strategy underwent a profound and sudden change. Freedom of the sea lanes, and stability in the American republics could not be achieved by hemispheric defense, but only by the deployment of an expeditionary force large enough to remove the hostile regime. The quick and complete defeat of Imperial Germany, heretofore believed to be of no interest to the United States, was now recognized as essential to American security. Such thinking did not immediately catch on. At one point in April 1917, for example, a U.S. senator buttoned-holed an officer of the General Staff and asked with incredulity, “Good Lord! You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?

Army and Navy planners adapted no better than the Senate. While there were aspects of Plan BLACK which were implemented (for example, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels recounts that the seizure of German and Austrian ships interred in American ports was a provision of BLACK), existing plans were of little value for the dispatch of American forces to Europe.. Under immense pressures of time, the War Department prepared estimates for the new contingency. These envisioned invading Bulgaria through Greece, and of a landing in the rear of the German armies in France through an alliance with the Netherlands.

What Happened in 1917?

None of these concepts was, of course, fit for anything other than the trash, and the time wasted on them actually contributed to the delay of American intervention. No realistic planning was undertaken until the designated commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General Pershing, arrived in Europe to survey the requirement. As Pershing bitterly noted:

When the Acting Chief of Staff (Bliss) went to look in the secret files where the plans to meet the situation that confronted us should have been found, the pigeon hole was empty. In other words, the War Department was face to face with the question of sending an army to Europe, and the General Staff had never considered such a thing.

A later comment of Pershing’s indicates the strain on Army-Navy relations the requirements of the Western Front would cause. Pershing’s estimate that the AEF would number at least 2,000,000 men and would consume over 50,000 tons of freight per day was regarded by Admiral William Sims, the commander of U.S. Naval forces in Europe, as “very much an exaggeration or else as just an army joke.”

The First American Troops Depart for France, 1917

Once planning got underway in Pershing’s headquarters, it assumed the broad outlines of the modern American deliberate planning process, that is, with the theater commander-in-chief outlining requirements, the Army Chief of Staff making provision to provide the forces required, and the Chief of Naval Operations conducting the strategic deployment of those forces. This was the dawn of 20th century American military history.

Source:  Excerpted from "JOINT U.S. ARMY-NAVY WAR PLANNING ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND ITS LEGACY" by Colonel Adolf Carlson, 1998.  Full article available HERE.