Highways

In researching the history of the federal highway system, I came across this account of its birth, full of fascinating anecdote and prominently featuring one of the favorite figures of this blog, Gen. Lucius D. Clay.

When Sherman Adams, the President's Chief Assistant, asked who should serve on the committee, the President said, "Call General Clay."

In a biography of Clay, Jean Edward Smith quoted an oral history interview in which General Clay recalled how he became involved in the President's Advisory Committee:

Sherman Adams called me down. This was in August 1954. We had lunch with the President, and they were concerned about the economy. We were facing a possible recession, and he wanted to have something on the books that would enable us to move quickly if we had to go into public works. He felt that a highway program was very important.

It's interesting to me that the national highway system often is presented, even by historians, as a Cold War solution to the problem of mobilizing a huge military or evacuating cities in the case of nuclear war. Those were part of the rationale that the government used to sell the plan. But the reasons discussed at the time of birth, apparently, focused on other fears from the early Cold War era: that with World War II over, the Great Depression would return.

In selecting members of the committee, General Clay's idea was that, "If we were going to build highways, I wanted people who knew something about it." He chose Steve Bechtel of Bechtel Corporation, Sloan Colt of Bankers' Trust Company, Bill Roberts of Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company, and Dave Beck of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He chose them because, he said, "They knew what the highway system was all about" He added:

Steve Bechtel had more experience in the construction field than anyone in America. He wasn't involved in road building, but had a comprehensive knowledge of the construction industry. Bill Roberts built construction equipment; he knew what the problems were there. Mr. Colt was experienced in finance. We had to determine how we wanted to finance this, and so his experience was invaluable. And Dave Beck of the Teamsters certainly had an interest in highways, and he gave us labor representation.

... Although these men "knew what highways were about and how important they were," as Clay put it, none of them had been involved in the business of road building. Clay had rejected the suggestions he received from colleagues that he select such individuals as Robert Moses, the New York road builder, or a representative of the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO). He thought they represented "special interests" with preconceived ideas.

Which is typical Clay. People with the deepest knowledge of the sort of problems to be tackled. But not one of them an insider.

Where, today, would you find the equivalent of "Dave Beck of the Teamsters" to serve on such a board? Beck, ultimately convicted of corruption, may not have been a sterling choice even then. But does anyone think we're better off for not having "labor representation" in such a situation? With the direct challenge of communism -- not the wretched Soviet Union but the ideal of a worker-run economy -- a mere historical memory, do hardhats no longer count when important decisions are made?

Greatest Generation

It's long been my belief that America was supremely gifted in the generation of administrators and bureaucrats -- the middle men of the federal government -- it had from roughly 1940 to 1960. We haven't been so lucky since the Founders in any one generation having just the right skills the times demanded.

No disrespect to the fighting men and the hardworking homefront women (which I suppose is what is usually meant by "Greatest Generation"). My close family was among them. They deserve the epithet. But so do other wartime generations.

Nor do I mean to disrespect the presidents -- Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, whom I rank among the most effective we've had. But an executive is only as good as his staff.

I'm thinking of the well-known names: George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Eisenhower as general -- but also lesser-know essential men like Lucius D. Clay who helped bring up a democratic Germany from the ruins of the Third Reich.

And when you walk back through their autobiographies, you find the threads tend to converge in one place: The Philippines. Nearly all of them had a common experience in the Philippines, in the one great colonial experiment of American history. [Short version: The counter-insurrection brought out the brutality in us, but after the fighting stopped, the Americans proved themselves fairly enlightened and benevolent masters whose subjects fared better, overall, and became independent sooner, that those of most European colonizers; but what business had the people of the Declaration of Independence flirting with empire in the first place?]

Americans remain deeply ambivalent about that episode, and it is often spoken of as a national embarrassment. And often it is compared to what is happening now in Iraq.

In a sense, the course of those men's careers is unrepeatable, since they were born and grew up in an America not yet a world power, much less the world power. The painful surrender of isolationist comfort happened in their youth.

But the military services where they cut their teeth were in many ways like today's: Relatively small in relation to the size of the nation, mostly volunteer, and painfully evolving into new global situations.

Not that great men are good men, or that their greatness isn't dependent a great deal on luck. MacArthur arguably was the most dangerous American ever, a superb political general absolutely convinced -- and capable at convincing others -- that what was good for MacArthur was good for America. And for a remarkable string of months during World War II, it seemingly was so. When he won the debate over whether to strike at the Philippines or Formosa in the Pacific campaign, pure vanity drove him. Yet by the time the act was in motion, the changing situation in China made his choice the best one. His handling of Japan was a blindfolded tightrope walk, and an example of a man of utter self-confidence merging with the spirit of a culture without having the slightest real understanding of it. His luck ran out at the Yalu River, and then the hollowness of it all became apparent. But in the meantime he had done remarkable good for his country.

An American version of Plutarch's "Lives," which I wish someone worthwhile would write, would pair Washington and Burr, Lincoln and Lee, Teddy Roosevelt and my blood relation, the eccentric anti-war Marine Smedley Butler.

And Marshall and MacArthur. Not for nothing is MacArthur's biography titled "American Caesar." And when Churchill called Marshall "the noblest Roman of them all," he perhaps said more than he knew. That was Shakespeare's line for Brutus.

Marshall arrived in the Philippines in 1902 as a second lieutenant in an army of occupation when the active stage of the insurgency there was essentially over and the colonial "nation-building" was getting underway, but a little of both were underway simultaneously. Marshall grappled with insufficiencies of military supply, absence of civilian authority, and he found himself on a number of occasions effectively governing wide swaths of Mindoro, as well as leading his own army command, isolated in a harsh climate with responsibilities far beyond his rank. It all sounds remarkably like what many of our junior officers have undergone the last few years in Iraq.

"Marshall quickly established friendships with key local civilians and exerted his authority over the company by a combination of qualities that would mark his later military career. He relied heavily on subordinates, in this case two experienced sergeants, maintained discipline, and exhibited a rare resourcefulness for a person of his age and experience," writes Marshall's biographer, Mark A. Stoler.

Stoler tells a story of the second lieutenant, then all of 21 years old, leading his troops on patrol in the tropical jungle. While they were crossing a muddy, crocodile-infested stream, a few of his men panicked in fear. They broke and ran for the other bank, knocking Marshall down and all but trampling him in the process. When he got up out of the mud, he didn't cut much of a commanding military figure. But he didn't rage and he didn't just take it. He ordered the company to fall in, then marched them back across the stream, where he immediately about-faced them and had them cross it properly. "Then he calmly inspected and dismissed them. Nothing was ever said again about the episode; there was no need to do so."

If that doesn't build character, it certainly strips away all the dross from inherent character and allows it to shine.

Marshall's conception of the citizen-soldier made him so scrupulously and firmly apolitical that he refused to even vote. Dean Acheson, who served under him in the State Department, tells this anecdote:

During the war, when a news magazine of national circulation had made a bitter attack upon President Roosevelt, a White House aide came to the Chief of Staff of the Army reporting a presidential wish that the pocket edition printed for distribution to the troops be withheld. General Marshall replied that immediately upon his receipt of such an order in writing, it would be obeyed and his own resignation as Chief of Staff would go to the White House. The matter was never mentioned again.

In fact, it would be amusing to count the number of Marshall anecdotes which end on the phrase "it never was mentioned again," or some variant of it.

It's my suspicion that Marshall was the greatest president America never had, and he seems to me proof of the argument that the only people who really ought to be president are ones who do not seek it, however ambitious they may be. That was George Washington's trait, and it was one of our original virtues. But the early 19th century showed what a charade could be made of that by performing demagogues and their partisan friends, so the country gave it up.

So when I read about the everyday stuff underway in Iraq and Afghanistan today, at places like this or this, or this, read the articulate captains describing the incredibly difficult thing they're trying to do, and actually doing, I wonder if there's another potential generation of leaders being born out there. Some will shed the uniform, some will keep it, but many of them will know a good deal more than their peers do about themselves, about power and its possibilities and about getting jobs done. Perhaps one of them quoted in those pieces is a future chief of staff, or a future president. A future Marshall or a future MacArthur.

Germany and Iraq, Part 4

[posted by Callimachus]

"No country can regain its self-respect nor progress to maturity in democratic processes in the presence of large occupying forces. ... Allied control over Germany should be exercised through leadership and not through command." [Lucius D. Clay, July 19, 1946]

"In the long run, the American people will never tolerate an area under American control in which there is chaos and hunger." [Clay, paraphrasing, and agreeing with, U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson]

WHAT WORKED

Lucius D. Clay, to me, is a key to why the U.S. occupation of Germany worked. But that may be because I find it easier to latch on to human personalities than historical abstractions.

Clay's great historical moment came during the Berlin airlift, but what he did as U.S. military proconsul in Germany during the two years before that may have been more important. He was the right man for the job -- and a lot of that was pure luck. But what mattered most was that he worked in a matrix -- not of a "well-planned" or "organized" occupation regime, but rather one that had the full support and engagement of the political and civilian leaders of America.

Clay had to deal with an occupied nation partitioned between four powers and armies with different agendas. His own bosses, as he said, didn't know what they wanted. In the reverse of the situation in modern Iraq, the people of the occupied country stood firmly for their unity, while the occupiers -- especially France -- favored of permanent partition, and all were in some degree committed to a weak Germany. Clay inherited a job with no blueprint for success and impossible, conflicting expectations of what it would look like. The press, as always, made things more difficult than they needed to be. That kicked up popular objections at home, and some politicians tried to capitalize.

Son of a U.S. senator and descendant of Henry Clay and himself, Lucius Clay was a West Pointer, a career military man, but one with a solid understanding of politics. That in itself is harder to find in America today than it once was. West Point may be more open to Americans of all backgrounds today, but when it stopped being, among other things, a career path for sons of the political elite, a certain cross-pollination stopped happening.

Clay was brusque, arbitrary, and every bit as independent as MacArthur was in Japan, but with two fewer stars than MacArthur he had to fight harder for his autonomy, and he had to exploit the bureaucracy rather than brushing it aside as his colleague in Japan did. Consequently he makes for a less stellar biography.

Another quality that set him apart from anyone now available for the job in Iraq was that, thanks to the New Deal and the war, Clay's generation had grown up managing things on a national scale. In 1940, he became head of the emergency Defence Airport Program and organized the building or expanding of more than 250 airports, anticipating America's entry into World War II. When the war began, Clay became Director of War Department Material. He also served on the Munitions Assignment Board and the War Production Board.

But until he was appointed military governor in Germany, Clay had no intention of going there and had done no research on the place. "I truly wasn't the least bit interested at that time," he said later. "I didn't care what they did in Germany. I hadn't thought about it. It wasn't going to be my responsibility, and I was still hoping that one of these days I'd be back in the combat Army."

He never saw JCS 1067, the crucial document outlining U.S. policies and goals in occupied Germany, till he got on the plane to cross the Atlantic and assume his job.

He came to Germany knowing next to nothing about what he would face when he got there. As far as I can tell, he never learned to speak German. And he never considered that a handicap. "You don't think about handicaps when you're given a job in the Army. You go do it. Period."

It was a job for a man with civilian sensibilities but with military authority and discipline. Clay had all that. Many of the civilian candidates mentioned for the post before it was offered to him had inevitable deep ties to the big U.S. banking and industrial firms that would necessarily be involved in the occupation. Clay did not.

From the start, he insisted the military government in Germany be removed from the control of the General Staff, the better to create a civilian-heavy corps not serving purely U.S. military purposes and tangled in Army red tape. In part this was to have more of a free hand in making decisions. In part, too, he wanted to lure the kind of minds who would not happily work for a G5 within a military system.

This, and his realization that the German people needed a hand up, not further punishment, swung him into alignment with the State Department. Clay was a New Deal Democrat, but in the Roosevelt administration, State was the bastion of conservatism. It was dominated by blue-blood New Englanders, Skull and Bones alumni, and headed by conservative Republican Henry L. Stimson. The suspicion in the more left-leaning branches of Roosevelt's government was that State secretly prefered Hitler to Stalin. In some cases it may have been true. The New Dealers, Roosevelt and Clay among them, believed for too long Stalin was someone you could do business with and that the Soviet Union was just another country, playing by the same rules.

Together, Stimson and Clay steered German occupation away from the original draconian plan that technically governed it. Clay also spent much of his time fighting off Army chiefs of staff, ignoring protocols and the tactical command structure.

Clay had the power to order fundamental changes in the German social fabric. Clay used this power selectively. When it came to the German media, he kept a close eye on it, but to nurture it, not quash it. It was not censored, but protected.

Party-owned newspapers had been the norm in pre-war Germany. Clay banned them outright (by refusing the licenses without which a newspaper could not publish). Not just for the anti-democratic parties, but for all of them.

During a key phase at the start of the occupation, a U.S. military-run newspaper was the main media outlet in the American zone. But it was a freewheeling and independent minded operation, as conflicted in its mission as the U.S. itself, and eventually it caught on with the Germans and gave them an example of a free press at work, yet one not determined to destroy the occupation authorities.

Later, Clay made a point of inviting reporters from the fledgling German papers to his press conferences. At first they stood agog as the American newsmen peppered the man in uniform with prying questions. Later, they joined in.

Clay was a native of Marietta, Georgia, then still a pretty little town in the red hills of Georgia and not a bedroom enclave for Atlanta. It still had much old architecture, only because Sherman's armies passed through it during a wet spell, which prevented them from burning it down entirely.

Clay was shaped by his unique American experience, and the nightmare memory of an old war. He inherited the Southerner's contempt for scalawags and carpetbaggers. Thus he sought to keep his distance from the Germans he placed in local control, and to keep German operations segregated from U.S. ones, because he wanted these men to be leaders of a future independent Germany, and he feared too close association with the Americans would taint them as collaborators in the eyes of the Germans.

He need not have worried. The Germans just weren't like that. It was one case where C. Vann Woodward's "burden of Southern history" really did play a role in current events. But it turned out to be beside the point.

I think many of the points ticked off against the Bush Administration are not the reasons historians will find for faulting him: Lack of a firm plan, and uncertain expectations for what you want from an occupation, are not on their own a recipe for failure. Nor are they a guarantee of success. In a situation so large and shifting and malleable, no amount of preparation guarantees anything.

Without any deep background understanding of the nation or the situation, with a set of instructions devised more out of domestic political needs than German realities, with a sensitivity attuned to a different occupation in a different time and place, Clay yet succeeded in his job.

Clay was able to rely on a government and a nation that, no matter how confused it was about what it wanted, was in the habit of throwing its best resources into a job. Important positions and advisorships in Clay's office were filled by university presidents, leading professors, and former governors. Among those who had a hand in reconstruction of Germany was the poet Archibald MacLeish.

It never would have occurred to the Bush administration to approach leading major university presidents and poets to work in rebuilding Iraq. It never would have occurred to presidents or poets to offer. We have been at war for 5 years now. Unless you're tied by love to one of the fraction of a percent of Americans who serve in uniform, what material difference has this fact made in your life?

It was left to John McCain, the president's old enemy, to say the thing that needed to be said about Iraq, the thing Clay's generation would have understood implicitly:

In Iraq our national security interests and our national values converge. Iraq is truly the test of a generation, for America and for our role in the world. Faced with similar challenges, previous generations of Americans have passed such tests with honor. It is now our turn to demonstrate that our power, ennobled by our principles, is the greatest force for good on earth today. Iraq's transformation into a secure democracy and a force for freedom in the greater Middle East is the calling of our age. We can succeed. We must succeed.

[Part 1, part 2, part 3]

Germany and Iraq, Part 3

[posted by Callimachus]

Is it necessary to lay out the evidence that the Americans entered Germany in 1945 with no solid plan for occupation, unrealistic expectations of what they would find, and conflicting goals for their mission? I'm not aware of any modern history of the period that says otherwise.

Here's a standard summary, from a book published in 1982:

Scholarship in recent years has pointed to a general muddle on the part of U.S. agencies involved in planning the German occupation. The problem started at the highest level with President Roosevelt's reluctance to prepare for an occupation during wartime, a reluctance that increased as his health declined. Lacking presidential leadership, several government agencies adopted widely differing positions, ranging from openly reconstructionist policy at the State Department to a punitive, destabilizing scheme at Henry Morgenthau's Treasury Department. Given the failure to reconcile these differences, America's forces entered Germany without a coherent national policy, a situation that reduced the chances for cooperation among the victor nations. [James F. Tent, "Mission on the Rhine"]

The president "failed to establish clear guidelines for his policymakers. The War Department supported neither side consistently, seeking above all to minimize its role in the future occupation." The writings of some of the people highly placed in the occupation project are flush with moral idealism and transformational progressive thinking would be worthy of any modern neo-con. JCS 1067, the eventual declaration of U.S. purpose and tactics in occupied Germany, was "ambiguous."

Secretary Morgenthau was convinced that it embodied his approach. State and War Department officials had inserted certain loopholes, which they expected would allow a positive approach. Thus VE Day -- May 8, 1945 -- found Americans still lacking a consensus on postwar plans for Germany.

Osmer White, the Australian journalist who covered the fall of Hitler from inside the U.S. military, essentially disliked Americans and American ways. He seems to have found himself instinctively sympathetic to the Soviet economic system, though not to Stalin's totalitarian ways. But there is the ring of hard truth in his description of the American occupation, and it is borne out by other testimonies, including some from the men actually in charge.

Of all the occupying Powers, the Americans showed themselves the most inept at the business of governing a conquered country. They maintained little or no continuity of policy. They never succeeded in making up their minds whether they wanted to administer stern justice or indulge Christ-like charity. They did not, indeed, make up their minds about anything except the 'superiority' of their own intentions. Germans must be ruthlessly disciplined into loving and respecting liberty. They must be punished for their crimes as a nation, but innocent women and children must on no account suffer. German industrialists who were guilty of warmongering and supporting Hitler must be dispossessed, but on no account should collective ownership -- Communism -- be the result of that dispossession. The American Military Government must not involve the United States in the messy byways of European politics, but Europe must, of course, be prevented at all costs from going Red!

Desperate to feed civilians in a region swollen by refugees from the East, the Americans turned to men who had held senior positions in the Nazi food distribution office. Seeking indigenous leadership to manage the local affairs of the German states that fell under their control, the Americans turned to members of pre-1933 conservative Catholic parties. But, while not National Socialist, many of them had formed alliances with them in a shared fear and loathing of the communists, and some had voted for the act enabling Hitler to take complete control of Germany.

In each case the home front press howled. But in each case it's hard to see a cleaner path through the conflicting goals and tactics of such an occupation. Certaibnluy anyone who tried to think through a better plan for Iraq in our times will recognize the conundrum:

• Rebuild the physical infrastructure of the country -- but don't give too many contracts to the few multinational corporations who are capable of doing the job, and which have extensive political connections;
  
  
• Put an "Iraqi face" on the reconstruction -- but only hire the most competent people to do the work to avoid waste and minimize boondoggles;
  
  
• Remove all Saddam's toadies from their jobs -- but don't alienate the Sunni minority from which they largely were drawn;
  
  
• Get the job done as fast as possible, the sooner to end the occupation -- but don't waste a penny of the taxpayers' money;
  
  
• Crack down on lawlessness and disorder and sabotage -- but don't do anything that could be seen as cruel or overzealous by our friends or look bad on Al-Jazeera.
  

As White wrote:

The unhappy executives of this American 'policy' in Germany were set to work for the achievement of all these inimical aims, vigorously and simultaneously; but as soon as they made progress in one direction, they were instantly restrained by torrents of criticism that they were making no progress in the other direction.

As Lucius D. Clay, U.S. military proconsul in Germany after the surrender, later put it: "Even Washington didn't really know what it wanted."

[to be continued]

Germany and Iraq, Part 1

[posted by Callimachus]

"We were very lucky, General MacArthur and myself, that we came out of an occupation as well as we did." [Gen. Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the U.S. Zone of Germany 1947–49]

I often read two things:

• The Bush Administration made an appalling and inexplicable error when it overthrew Saddam and took charge of Iraq without a plan for running and fixing the country, and without even an informed expectation of what Americans would find there once the war ended or a plan for addressing those conditions.
  
  
• By contrast, the American reconstruction efforts in defeated nations after World War II were an example of how to do it right.
  

Both could be true. But they don't dovetail together as well as people assume, when they don't study the history.

West Germany was a faithful American ally through the Cold War, and the united Germany is a rock of stability in the center of Europe. Iraq doesn't seem to be headed down that path. Yet almost all the things cited as American mistakes in Iraq also were done in Germany.

HOW MANY IS ENOUGH?

The notion that funneling more troops into the country automatically would have equaled a good outcome, for instance, strikes me as simplistic and unconvincing. Certainly there were too few in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. But you could stand a GI on every streetcorner in every city in Iraq, and the resistance would simply thrive behind their backs, in the homes. You could invade the homes, and the resistance would take to the swamps. If not the swamps, the mountains. Or the desert. Numbers alone mean nothing.

Post-war Germany often is cited as a counter-example to modern Iraq: Germany was occupied in 1946 at a ratio of troops to civilians about 10 times greater than currently is the case in Iraq.

Yet the French zone, where the ratio of troops to civilians was by far the highest among the allies, also had the most problems with resistance activities and civil unrest -- in large part because there were so many French troops there, sucking up resources from a hungry countryside and getting into proportionately more scraps with the locals. The notion that Americans should move in Iraq and Afghanistan with a light footprint makes a certain sense: especially given Gen. John Abizaid's now-famous warning that American troops would be considered an “antibody” in the Arab world.

It seems to me a case where you encounter one set of problems by doing it one way, but if you make the opposite set of choices you run into a different set of obstacles. Which seems to be the most common thread in such occupations, whether it's Germany 1946 or Iraq 2006.

The Allies over-occupied Germany, for a variety of reasons, some of them purely punitive. By 1946, even the U.S. Army acknowledged all it really needed in Germany was two mobile divisions and a combat command. That was because a real insurgency never developed in Germany. But the absence of a resistance was not necessarily a function of the numbers of invading troops.

THE CRUCIAL WEEKS

The Allied occupation was not fully in place until about a year after the war ended. In the interim there was plenty of opportunity for a resistance or an insurgency to grow up in Germany. Elements of the German army -- tens of thousands of men -- simply melted into the civilian population, which willingly hid them -- as happened in Iraq.

Even though Eisenhower tried to be scrupulous about scrubbing out any pockets of resistance that had been left behind once the Allies invaded Germany, much of the country was open territory for months. The Australian newsman Osmer White, reporting from the front as Patton advanced, had to ride back to army headquarters to file his newspaper articles. The round trip sometimes amounted to more than 200 miles. "Often unit command posts had dropped thirty or forty miles behind the action, even in the Eifel and Hünsruck where the conflict was much less diffuse than it was over the river. I would sometimes travel for an hour or more through sparsely populated areas without sighting a single American soldier.

For weeks I laboured under the delusion that this nerve-racking business of rushing back and forth to the 'front' was dangerous. Sooner or later, I thought, the German civilians would snap out of their stunned docility and start a guerrilla war. One of these fine spring mornings I was going to run into a burst of machine-gun fire or a grenade pitched out of a top-storey window ... even a wire stretched from tree to tree round a sharp bend, or a nest of mines planted overnight at a crossroads.

Elsewhere, he speculated, "I am convinced that if the German people had shown the spirit to wage a partisan campaign behind the Allied spearheads which split the country, or if the German general staff had been able or willing to regroup and concentrate substantial forces in the Bavarian mountains, Hitler would have made good his last maniacal promise to bring all Europe down in chaos should his arms fail."

Anyone who chased Patton's tanks and motorized infantry to Chemnitz, or, for that matter, followed the thrust westward from the Middle Rhine towards Berlin, could not have failed to realize how desperately thin on the ground the forces of occupation were spread. They hadn't the manpower to control a hostile civilian population.

In Iraq, remember, the first signs of trouble began within weeks of the fall of Saddam, and by the time the coalition began to make and enact plans to restore security in Iraq, the “security gap” had yawned and the country descended into looting, street crime, and organized sabotage.

A 'HARD PEACE'

Eisenhower himself apparently expected a full-scale resistance movement in Germany after Hitler's fall. As head of the invading army from the West, his beliefs and expectations shaped American policy toward the Germans. He had seen his own men die from fanatical resistance by hopelessly outnumbered Germans, and he naturally concluded the Germans were a warlike people who would never surrender and never submit. He helped harden the American policies in late 1944.

What's interesting is not just how wrong he was about the Germans. But also how close his prediction came to the conditions the Americans met after another invasion, sixty years later, in Iraq. Eisenhower foresaw great difficulty in maintaining public services and utilities in occupied Germany, and he thought the Allies ought to refuse to be responsible for the humanitarian situation after an invasion:

[I]t may well be that the German Army as a whole will never actually surrender and that we shall enter the country finding no central German authority in control, with the situation chaotic, probably guerrilla fighting and possibly even civil war in certain districts. ... If conditions in Germany turn out to be as described it will be utterly impossible effectively to control or save the economic structure of the country ... and we feel we should not assume the responsibility for its support and control.

In part as a consequence of these fears, and in part out of desire to collectively punish and de-fang the Germans (rooted, paradoxically, in the "Just War" doctrine), the Americans and their allies marched into Germany with a plan on paper for a draconian "hard peace." The document governing this, Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067, issued Nov. 9, 1944, presumes merciless victors imposing a Carthaginian peace on a resisting German population.

Germans lived under daily curfews and strict travel restrictions. Meetings of more than five persons were banned, effectively killing political activity. They had to surrender even their hunting rifles and ceremonial arms; mails and the media were under strict censorship; children prohibited from joining anything that might look like Hitler Youth, even Boy Scout troops.

Armed resistance, sabotage, and possession of weapons were defined as capital crimes in SHAEF's Proclamation no. 1. The victorious allies held German POWs for years after the fighting stopped, in contravention of international law, in part (as Churchill said frankly) as insurance against popular uprisings. By June 1945, the Americans also had detained 30,000 civilians in internment camps, and by the end of the year the number had shot up to 100,000.

UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

Yet somehow, Eisenhower's gloomy anticipation of a Germany collapsing into disorder never got through to the civilian authorities who were in charge of planning the occupation. When Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. proconsul appointed to oversee the American zone of occupation in Germany, got to Europe, he found a U.S. Control Council in place in Paris, "organized by government ministries, all on the theory that they were going to go in and take over an existing German ministry from the top and administer it." Clay said later:

Well, within a week it was clear to me that this was just a lot of damn foolishness. That there weren't going to be any German ministries in existence, and if there were, under our instructions they would never be allowed to serve, and that we were going to have a far more chaotic condition than was visualized by this rather academic organization.

Before he got to Europe, however, Clay had been under the usual illusions. Asked what he thought he would find in Germany, he answered, "I knew pretty much the type and kind of physical destruction we were going to find. But I don't think I appreciated that there would be a complete breakdown of government (and all other services, really), largely through unconditional surrender."

"The totality of the German collapse took the invaders by surprise," White wrote. "They had expected that basic civil administration would continue to function and were nonplussed when it fell apart."

Compare this to the situation in Iraq in 2003:

Contrary to popular belief, the United States and the United Kingdom did undertake extensive planning for postwar Iraq. Unfortunately, this planning focused on humanitarian relief and was based on the assumption that the institutions of the Iraqi state, including police, could be relied upon to keep the state functioning and to maintain order after the overthrow of the regime. Prewar planning did not envisage the need for an extensive program of work in Iraq’s police and justice sectors.

Most of the administrative structures of central and local government had collapsed when the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and its successor, the CPA, took over the administration of Iraq in April and May 2003. Whereas prewar planning had envisaged merely the removal of the top-level Ba’athists and regime loyalists, most of the security sector institutions evaporated overnight. The intelligence and security agencies, Ba’ath Party organizations, and paramilitaries went underground. Many soldiers simply left their units, and police officers went home. The disappearance of the state and party institutions left the country open to a wave of looting and disorder, exacerbated by organized sabotage.

Although coalition military planners had hoped to use some Iraqi army units for security and reconstruction tasks, the armed forces had effectively “self-demobilized,” and their infrastructure was devastated both during combat and during the looting that followed the collapse of the regime. Coalition officials also decided that it would be unconscionable to retain any of the secret police agencies that were so heavily associated with Saddam’s regime.

to be continued ...

Voice of America, part I

What if, instead of the fitful and incompetent pro-American propaganda the U.S. has attempted to beam into the Islamic world, we had gone into Iraq and set up a team of Kurdish and Shi'ite expatriates who had fled Saddam in the decade or two before the war and gave them a television network.

They would have been chosen for their commitment to a tolerant, democratic, free Iraq, and given training in media. But they would not have been kept on a tight leash. They would be free from any taint of the old regime but not unwilling to question or criticize the occupation of the liberators. They would fully understand the centrality of religious and tribal identities in their country, but they'd be able to use that knowledge to both lure an audience and draw it away from those old foundations, in the ways Iraqis must change if they are to form a strong, free, modern state.

The question is, almost, "what if Americans had set up their own Al Jazeera." The answer is not quite hypothetical. Something similar was done in Germany after World War II, in the form of the newspaper Neue Zeitung, published for the German population from 1945 to 1955. Printed on the Munich presses of Goebbels' old Völlkischer Beobachter newspaper, the Neue Zeitung was set up by the U.S. Office of Military Government in Germany to be "an American newspaper for Germans" and to instill in them values that would ensure peace.

Its purpose was to foster the democratic 'reeducation' of German society; to inform locals of U.S. foreign policy, viewpoints, and the American way of life; and to present them 'with a model of U.S. journalistic practice.

As usual, with American projects, this was not a matter of brilliant planning or careful ideology. U.S. officials "were articulate in saying what kind of paper they did not want. But they never clearly said what they did want apart from vague allusions such as 'a democratic newspaper' or 'an official organ of OMGUS.' Consequently, the Neue Zeitung, like a chameleon, continually changed its color. As such, it represents a quite accurate example of the often confused, reluctant, and incoherent course of U.S. policy in postwar Germany."

From the start, a few opportunists at the helm of the Neue Zeitung took advantage of bureaucratic confusion and lax rules and turned what had started as a regional Army newspaper meant to dictate to and re-educate the vanquished people into the first strong voice of modern, post-Nazi Germany. It was a smashing success with its readers, and it helped awaken a beaten-down Germany.

[The information in this series of posts largely will be drawn from the academic historical study "Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany 1945-1955," by Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht. The quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from that book.]

With the important distinction that the Americans ruled in Germany in 1945 as part of a team of theoretically equal allies, and that they came ostensibly as conquerors, not liberators, it's difficult to read "Transmission Impossible" (written in 1999) and not be struck by comparisons to the situation in Iraq.

At the end of the war, American troops flooded into Germany with no coherent overall national policy for the occupation, let alone for Germany's reeducation.

President Roosevelt refused to commit to a definitive plan. The War Department and the State Department wanted to let the Germans up easy in a "soft peace;" the Treasury Department on the other hand wanted to dismantle the Prussian military-industrial complex and turn Germany back to pre-modern pastoral state, while the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) wanted to transform the Germans and unleash their potential for modern democracy. None of them quite got their way.

In the end, the occupation became the army's job for more than four years. This develoment exacted its price. The rather abstract and idealistic definition of reeducation endorsed by scientists, policy makers, and intellectuals proved useless to U.S. military officials. Trained as soldiers, they expected clear orders rather than philosophical concepts. 'I had no policy given to me as to what kind of democracy we wanted,' [U.S. Military Governor Gen. Lucius D.] Clay recalled many decades later. 'I did not have very much experience in the field myself, never having voted myself.'

The American effort in postwar Germany benefitted, however, from the fact that, in four years of warfare, a team of German-speaking émigré intellectuals who had fled the Third Reich had been brought together and trained at Camp Sharpe in Maryland in information media, psychological warfare, and psychology. Many were Jewish, and many had lived in America for decades. But largely they loved and understood Germany, and when they went back there after the fall of Hitler, they were home again.

Heading the newspaper in its crucial early years was Hans Habe, dandy, scion of a Hungarian-Jewish publishing family, who had edited a Viennese paper before the anschluß and had revealed to the world in 1935 that the Führer's family name was not "Hitler" but "Schicklgruber." Habe agreed with U.S. strategies of democratizing Germany to restore it to a place of honor among nations. But he loudly disapproved of strategies.

In his opinion, the Allies had to make democracy appealing by presenting it like a movie, not a lecture, to the German audience. Like moviegoers, the Germans would view the reeducation program with both curiosity and skepticism, always considering if they should continue watching or leave the theater. In order to make the audience 'stay,' as in a theater, the political reformation had to catch the Germans' attention, stir their natural curiosity, cater to their historical experience, and woo their taste in matters of Kultur. And as with a good movie, the program had to include famous actors, a dynamic plot, and many dramatic scenes.

"Kuktur" meant an emphasis on high art, as opposed to popular culture. It meant long articles by intellectuals, a gray front page, and ponderous prose. Yet Habe and his staff successfully wove into these recognizable German frameworks themes of freedom, creativity, individualism, and tolerance.

The exiles and émigrés assumed the role of "cultural middlemen." "The émigrés at the Neue Zeitung believed that reeducation could not consist simply of familiarizing Germans with American culture and showing them the advantages of democracy. Instead, they encouraged local readers to broaden their closed notion of Kultur and accept other concepts and ideas. They packaged American culture and ideas in the context of German highbrow culture, Bildung, and gender conceptions, and emphasized core democratic values, such as tolerance and individualism, by appealing to very traditional German interpretations of Kultur, such as elitist art."

The editors' effort to cloak U.S. values in a German guise is most obvious in their handling of Americana. They chose not to emphasize American material lifestyles because the vast gulf between the prosperity of postwar America and the sense of hopelessness in defeated Germany would have made the contrast even more painful to their readers. When covering the United States they usually wrote from the perspective of a cosmopolitan observer and focused on the country's political significance, culture, way of life, and German-American mutual perceptions. European academics, POWs, and prominent émigrés enthusiastically recounted their experiences in U.S. cities, camps, and universities.

In addition to the émigrés, the Neue Zeitung staff consisted in part of native German journalists who had been more or less untainted by Nazi publishing. The Germans in the newsroom included communists and socialists as well as conservatives and non-Nazi nationalists. But they, too, brought a mix of ideas. Two of the editors had been in the German army but deserted to the American side during the fighting in Italy in 1944. They had been sent stateside to reeducation camps.

They admired Franklin D. Roosevelt and preferred the American admixture of philosophy, sober pragmatism and basic optimism, over the cultural pessimism (Kulturpessimismus) of Heidegger and Spengler. [Alfred] Andersch returned from the United States not with a knapsack full of canned food, as did many of his fellow prisoners, but with loads of American books.

Another former tank soldier on the staff had kept a diary during the war in which he consistently referred to Hitler as "that pig." The book was found, the soldier was court-martialed, and likely would have been hanged had not a sympathetic judge produced an opinion ruling the man was insane due to a past unhappy love affair.

The Neue Zeitung was a phenomenal success. Three months into its existence, circulation had jumped from 500,000 copies per issue to 1.6 million. And from the very start, American authorities slammed the paper for the exact reasons that Germans loved it.

[to be continued]