“2. The Levers of Influence” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 2 The Levers of Influence
Paul Nitze spent the bulk of World War II in Washington, DC, safe from enemy bombs. But he did travel, under the auspices of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, to Nazi Germany during active combat—placing him in some physical danger. He went to Imperial Japan only after its surrender. As with a number of Wall Streeters and captains of industry, he held administrative posts vital to achieving victory for the United States and its allies. Nitze socialized with well-off colleagues, living for a time in Nelson Rockefeller’s mansion.1 He also oversaw several hundred people. “The war years were an important transition period for me,” in his words, during which he went “from an analyst to an executive.”2 During this time, he achieved his goal: to become a man of action who wielded levers of influence.
Washington, 1940–1941
President Franklin Roosevelt had reoriented his fundamental approach to US national security before Paul Nitze arrived in Washington. Back in 1933, when FDR had undermined the London Economic Conference by announcing that the United States would go its way, his focus was on unilateral US recovery from the Great Depression. The Munich Conference of 1938 changed his mind. “FDR insisted with growing fervor that, in the age of airborne warfare, the world could and did threaten America,” as one historian has emphasized, “and that only in a world in which American values reigned supreme could the United States feel secure.”3 Despite the isolationist mood and neutrality acts that Congress had foisted on him, FDR prepared for inevitable conflict and attempted to educate the American people about the nature of the threat to the American way of life. Yes, the United States ought to shore up the Western hemisphere. No, it should not precipitously intervene in Europe and Asia. However, the implications of totalitarian control of the resources of the Eurasian landmass would make the forces of fascism all the more formidable once they set eyes on North America. Moreover, long-range bombing meant that the Atlantic Ocean no longer made the US homeland invulnerable to attack.
The president courted James Forrestal in the spring of 1940, tasking him to build a national security team that could convert the United States’ economic potential into military strength. After the fall of France in June 1940, he assembled a wartime cabinet that included two prominent Republicans: Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. The president gave fifty destroyers to the United Kingdom and pressed Congress to reinstate the draft. Running for an unprecedented third term, he promised to keep the United States out of foreign wars. No sooner had FDR won reelection the chief of naval operations, Harold Stark, submitted to him the much-heralded “Plan Dog” memo laying out the basic strategic concept to challenge Nazi Germany. Forrestal enlisted Nitze to assist in that effort.
Nitze lived with Forrestal in a house near the State, War, and Navy Building (now the Old Executive Office Building) adjacent to the White House. He lunched at the nearby Metropolitan Club and spent weekends at the homes of other transplants from New York or with Forrestal and other members of FDR’s inner circle. From Nitze’s perspective, there was “a sense of crisis, but not of real danger to the United States except in the very long run.”4 He dined in Georgetown, played tennis with Nelson Rockefeller, and got to know Henry Wallace, who played the piano and threw boomerangs at parties.5 “Intellectually, it was a stimulating atmosphere.”6
Much would later be made of the “Wise Men”—Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and others—whose careers intersected in Washington during the 1940s.7 They took charge amid the unpreparedness of US federal institutions to contend with World War II. Nitze interacted with them as a subordinate who clearly stood out. Demand for talent outweighed supply. The president’s July 1940 appointment of Henry Stimson as secretary of war—a position he had first held in the William Howard Taft administration three decades earlier—came off as a shrewd act of bipartisanship. Yet there were few other highly qualified candidates.
Selective Service and the Office of Inter-American Affairs, 1940–1942
In the summer of 1940, Forrestal and Nitze focused on shoring up South America and the Caribbean to defend the region from Nazi penetration. Immigration from Germany and Italy to Latin America in the years following World War I had created thriving local businesses whose owners sometimes pledged allegiance to fascist regimes. “With much of Europe now under German occupation,” Nitze figured, “the export markets on which several Latin American states had depended were effectively under the control of Berlin,” through the use of “economic, psychological, and other pressures.”8 Washington also needed to be prepared to repel a direct military incursion. Here Forrestal and Nitze worked quietly with executives from Pan American Airways—then a leading US airline—to construct airfields in the Caribbean that could be quickly converted for military use.
“No one agency in the government was clearly in charge of addressing the problem [of preparedness],” according to Nitze. Concerning overall US foreign and defense policies, three strong-willed cabinet members vied for FDR’s attention. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace pressed for accommodation with leftists; Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau called for preemptive action in Europe; and Secretary of State Cordell Hull advocated for reducing trade barriers to lessen the chances of war. FDR assigned Forrestal the task of harmonizing these views.9 Neither Forrestal nor Nitze put much stock in career diplomats to make sense of things. “Most of the people in the State Department at the time had been brought up in the school of diplomacy that emphasized reporting; few were oriented toward the formulation and execution of strategic policy per se,” Nitze later recounted. “We concluded that the State Department was inadequately staffed and not intellectually equipped to deal with the radically new situation brought about by the war.”10
What exactly was the “radically new situation”? In short, the threat to the United States’ fundamental values and interests was acute even without an imminent declaration of war. Hemispheric defense—tending solely to North and South America—would not suffice when it came to protecting the American way of life in an era of long-range bombing. No longer did Fortress America offer protection. Nazi Germany might someday insist that the United States surrender in advance of an imminent attack. For Forrestal and Nitze, national security encompassed foreign policy, defense strategy, economic planning, interagency coordination, and the clout to drive private actors into action. President Roosevelt strove to educate the American people, showing how such a threat both affected them and merited their potential sacrifice. This, at the same time he was figuring it all out for himself.11 Acting upon Forrestal and Nitze’s recommendation in August 1940, FDR signed off on the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under the leadership of Nelson Rockefeller and his deputy, Will Clayton, the Texas cotton trader who would play a critical role in the wartime and postwar US economic policies.
When FDR nominated Forrestal to be undersecretary of the navy shortly after that, Nitze returned to New York where he stayed only briefly until his Dillon, Read colleague William Draper called him back to work on the Draft Act for the chief of staff of the US Army, George Marshall. Considered a “math” expert for having worked with Robert Moses on bond offerings for New York City bridges, Nitze determined the fate of millions of US citizens at a time when the majority of them opposed intervention in World War II. Ultimately, FDR signed the Selective Service Act into law on September 16, 1940, after Congress passed it by one vote.
Working on the Draft Act proved to be a pivotal assignment for Nitze. Just as FDR attempted to educate the American people on internationalism during this period, career public servants taught Nitze about American civics. “For those of us who spent most of our lives on Wall Street where the important thing is to think the problem through clearly and find a solution to a complicated problem, and think it through fast,” Nitze later recounted, “we weren’t really that much interested in the democratic process.” George Marshall broadened Nitze’s horizons. “Marshall’s view was that if we were to get into a war, then we would need a vast number of men, and if there were any suspicion that this thing was not wholly democratic and equitable, it would cause a back reaction which would be terribly serious.” In a democratic system, it was a “traumatic kind of thing” to set up a draft; unless it was done absolutely right, it was never going to work.12
“Up to that point I had looked at two aspects of the political scene—that of the world’s cultural and political position as a whole and that of me, the I, trying to do something personally, trying to get something done, to succeed, to participate, to make things better,” Nitze wrote four decades later. He looked upon this experience from the perspective of his efforts to formulate a theory that would reconcile contemplation with action or, in this case, nationalism and internationalism through the mediation of his ego. “It was the experience of working with General Marshall which impressed upon me the importance of the national ‘we’ as an intermediary between the ‘I’ and the world culture. I found the perspectives and standards of behavior associated with loyalty to the United States as a nation morally and ethically superior to a purely individualistic viewpoint, and far more effective than the soft and ambiguous generalities that so often flowed from looking only at humanity as a whole.”13 In short, George Marshall fired up Paul Nitze’s sense of patriotism.
Leadership mattered. “When a high official makes a public statement, the thing that counts is not the fine print,” Secretary of War Stimson told his lawyers during this period. “[T]he thing that counts is the billboard effect. If this is understandable to the people, what comes through is the main point; it isn’t these little minor caveats.”14 Stimson’s tutorial made the rounds within Washington’s burgeoning national security community. When it came to policy pronouncements, legalese would not suffice. Nitze discerned that appealing to the nation required a different approach than pitching a business proposal to a board of New York City trustees. The average US citizen would not conduct due diligence by poring over the details of a bid. Instead, they would react based on a tagline that could produce an emotional wallop. Declaratory policy—which was not necessarily the actual policy—had to be based on that reality.
The declaratory policy of the United States under Roosevelt during 1940–41 was to keep the United States out of the war by preparing to wage it. This was a rough approximation of the actual policy. FDR hoped he could deter the Axis powers and keep the United States out of the war, yet achieving this was an unlikely outcome. The president was simultaneously preparing for the eventuality that the United States would enter World War II on the side of the Allies.15 According to Nitze, “it was perfectly clear, what we were trying to do was to … prepare for a situation in which Hitler had perhaps gotten down to Dakar [Senegal, the westernmost point of Africa] and was threatening South America, and that the real threat was to the Western Hemisphere from Europe which was dominated by Hitler.”16 Under those circumstances, the United States would inevitably have to fight to defend itself.
In the summer of 1941, Nitze became Rockefeller’s assistant for financial matters in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. He also moved into Rockefeller’s Washington estate at 2500 Foxhall Road in Northwest DC. Following a split between Rockefeller and Wallace—a case of clashed egos—Nitze then worked for Wallace on a broad portfolio still covering Latin American economic affairs. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Nitze was on assignment in Asuncion, Paraguay. His later recollections of that moment focused less on the sneak attack in Hawaii than the strategic disaster that befell US forces in the Philippines. Nevertheless, Nitze’s memory of that day accorded with his overall worldview. In his mind, Japan had no choice but to attack, given the oil embargo that the United States had placed on it. Their perception of the unpreparedness of US forces led the imperial leaders to believe their attack could succeed. Nitze would return to the overriding importance of preparedness in the closing days of World War II; it would loom large in his thoughts about how to advance US national security in the postwar era.
Chief, Metals and Minerals Branch, Board of Economic Warfare
Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, turned the United States into a formal belligerent in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters.17 On April 13, 1942, FDR issued an executive order to expand the role of the Bureau of Economic Warfare (which had replaced the Economic Defense Board) to oversee the control of imports. Still working under Henry Wallace, Nitze took charge of procuring metals and minerals—including mica, quartz crystals, and beryllium—that proved essential to the overall war effort.18
Procuring strategic minerals introduced Nitze to the world outside the United States and Europe. He learned by doing and coming up with penetrating questions. Put in charge of a field about which he knew very little, he called upon those whom he immediately identified as the experts in the area. He asked them the most challenging questions he could think of in the hope of hiring the best people. Nearly all of the geologists he hired were Republicans.19 Party allegiances meant nothing to Nitze. Moreover, the national security team FDR assembled after 1939 was not dug into political tracks. At the level of the so-called wise men, it mattered little that Robert Lovett and John McCloy were Republicans working for Secretary of War Stimson, who was himself an éminence grise of the party that had vigorously opposed FDR (or that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had been the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1936).
However, party allegiance mattered greatly at the staffing level in which Nitze operated. The disdain for political patronage and shenanigans that Nitze had felt during his brief time in Connecticut and New York grew after he relocated to Washington. His basic approach was meritocratic: surround yourself with the best people. Acknowledge partisan concerns on the part of politics, but do not let that determine the right decision. Do not get hung up on titles; get the job done.
The stakes were too high to worry about political purity tests for political appointees. Instead, obtaining the right minerals could determine the difference between victory and defeat. At the Battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943, German forces led by Erwin Rommel intercepted Allied radio communications, which relied on only two frequencies because of the scarcity of quartz-based oscillator plates.20 So Nitze led a team of forty geologists to Brazil, where they rode around on horseback searching for a fresh supply of quartz.21
Back in Washington, Nitze negotiated contracts to procure copper and lead and admired the can-do attitude of titans of industry who joined the war effort and cut through bureaucratic red tape. For example, former General Motors president William S. Knudsen impressed Nitze in a meeting of the War Production Board about where tank plants would be located. “I’m afraid I have done a dreadful thing,” he admitted. “I thought it was important to get these tanks produced as rapidly as possible.”22 So he had already signed the contracts.
Nitze enjoyed tracking supply to fit demand, dealing with foreign actors, and maximizing efficiency. However, political appointees frustrated him. In September 1943, the Foreign Economic Administration superseded the Office of Economic Warfare. Leo Crowley, a prominent Democrat from Wisconsin, led the new Foreign Economic Administration and regarded Nitze as expendable. “I found Crowley a thoroughly incompetent and corrupt individual,” Nitze later put it.23 With tens of thousands of carloads of ores and metals stuck at the Mexican border, Crowley refused to sign off on an order of entry into the United States, admitting to Nitze that he wanted to get Will Clayton fired and take over his job.24
When Nitze quit out of disgust, Crowley told him he would never again work in a Democratic administration. Following this dustup, Nitze took a cab to the newly constructed Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, to see Colonel Guido Perera, an old Boston friend who had recently suggested that he join a study of how the strategic bombing affected the German war economy.25 Secretary of War Stimson signed off on the project on November 3, 1944, in response to a directive from FDR himself.
Nitze began a new phase in his career. Rather than figuring out how to procure strategic resources in the war mobilization effort, he now tackled the problem of how best to employ arms to defeat the enemy. His experience in corporate boardrooms made him a natural addition to the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). The USSBS was no academic project. Chief of the Army Air Forces General Henry “Hap” Arnold supported it as Allied forces were making their way toward Berlin, hoping to make strategic bombing more effective in the pursuit of victory. Chairman Franklin D’Olier, the president of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, and vice chairman, J.P. Morgan vice president Henry Alexander, were no ivory-tower types.
Here, then, were action-oriented men. The USSBS was precisely the type of research project that had eluded Nitze during his foray into graduate school in 1937. And it was eminently well suited to Nitze’s relentless drive toward gathering different strands of information and rendering confident judgment.
USSBS (Germany)
The USSBS was an endeavor unique to the United States at war. It was a near-real-time historical project that involved a staff of a thousand—yet, unlike US official histories of World War II, employed no professionally trained historians—to derive lessons that senior military leaders could quickly apply to an ongoing military campaign. Early losses in the air war were considerable. The attrition rate reached 9 percent and receded only after the Allies sent bombers to flush out German fighters to shoot them down, an innovation that led to the establishment of Allied air supremacy. Even with a safer path to reach industrial and population centers, it was unclear how Allied strategic bombing of those targets could defeat Nazi Germany.
“One of the fundamental purposes of the survey is to determine whether the results obtained were commensurate with expenditures of men and materiel,” Franklin D’Olier was told in October 1944.26 Chairman D’Olier instructed his staff in December: “we shall proceed in an open-minded manner, without prejudice, without any preconceived theories, to gather the facts.”27 “We have no intention, nor should we at this stage, of commending or criticizing any individual, group, or organization in any way except as the final facts the real truth might so require.”28 In the final reports and their subsequent recollections, participants rendered candid assessments. The sharp-tongued economist John Kenneth Galbraith cited statistics showing that levels of production in Hamburg rebounded and increased almost immediately after the city was firebombed—suggesting utter futility.
Nitze assessed the impact of strategic bombing on the German production of ball bearings, which reduced friction on loads and were essential to heavy industry. He studied the Allied bombing campaign that started in August 1943 in and around Schweinfurt. The overall summary drew upon Nitze’s study to describe how the pause in bombing led the Germans, under a newly appointed local production czar, to rebuild and disperse the ball-bearing industry to restore production to preraid levels by the fall of 1944—and that there was “no evidence that the attacks on the ball-bearing industry had any measurable effect on essential war production.”29 “The Germans were far more concerned over attacks on one or more of their basic industries and services—their oil, chemical, or steel industries or their power or transportation network—than they were over attacks on their armament industry or the city areas,” the survey’s summary concluded.30 This judgment relied on reams of captured records, the wartime gathering of which cost the lives of several survey members and briefly put Nitze in physical danger.
Following the death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman took over as commander-in-chief. On May 7, Germany surrendered. In July, Truman and his team assembled in Potsdam to meet with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to discuss postwar Europe and efforts to defeat Japan. Nitze found himself nearby looking for a man named Rolf Wagenfuhr, who had headed an economic and planning section for Albert Speer. Amid rumors that Wagenfuhr sought terms of surrender to the Soviets, Nitze hoped to get to him first to procure his records.31 Such was Nitze’s objective at a time when both sides were more famously tracking down Nazi scientists who might contribute to research into nuclear weapons.
The real prize was Speer, whom Nitze had just spent ten days interviewing. Two years older than Nitze, Speer drew his keen interest. They were on different sides yet had tackled several related problems concerning wartime production. “The speed with which [Robert] Moses built the massive Triborough Bridge filled Nitze with envy,” one biographer said. “He wanted to get things done in the way that Moses got things done.”32 A similar sentiment probably animated Nitze’s interactions with the architect of the Nazi war economy. “If the military decided they wanted so and so many more tanks, somebody would have to estimate what the steel requirement was for those tanks and then that would have to be taken into account and take that steel away from some other project,” as Nitze later wrote. All sides had attempted to use primitive computers to rationalize the inputs of raw materials and outputs of tanks and airplanes to maximize efficiency. “The Germans finally turned to a different scheme in which Speer created a ring of representatives of all the chief companies in a given sphere of production and take not the heads of the companies, but those who were the senior people in the companies dealing with production.”33 Such topics excited Nitze in his conversations with Speer, who had helped build the destructive forces that had ravaged Europe.
Nitze’s lack of revulsion toward Speer unsettled his colleagues. Nevertheless, Nitze remained unapologetic about acknowledging Speer’s achievements even though they supported a terrible cause. “Speer, who had been an architect before the war, had demonstrated a phenomenal versatility and power of mind in developing and maintaining German war production despite the force of allied bombing and the stupidities of Hitler’s interference,” Nitze would later tell the 1953 Groton graduating class, which included his son Peter. “I have rarely met a more powerful intellect.”34 “I think you are too soft on Speer,” Nitze’s editor told him in a session on the draft manuscript of his memoir three and a half decades after that. “I wanted to portray Speer as I saw him,” Nitze responded. “He was a criminal, yes, but he was eminently more successful and effective than we were at running a war economy.”35
USSBS (Japan)
When they returned to Washington, Nitze and the rest of the USSBS received instructions to apply lessons learned from the analysis of the strategic bombing of Nazi Germany to the ongoing campaign against Imperial Japan. He spent the Fourth of July weekend at Jones Beach on Long Island with Phyllis and the children. There he formulated, on long sheets of yellow paper, a way to win the war in the Pacific.36 General Hap Arnold invited Nitze to present his plan in competition with that of a General Sampson in front of a board led by General Carl Spaatz. That plan’s mandate was to synthesize elements from each one into a new air campaign set to go into effect on August 1.
Nitze anticipated that Japan could hold out only until March 1946. He made this prediction based on his grasp of the history of Germany’s air power. With any luck, surrender would come well before that. Effective use of air power would forestall the need for a US ground invasion, a prospect that Nitze maintained would be catastrophic. “We weren’t going to accomplish a damn thing by a ground invasion,” he asserted forty-nine years later. “These fellows were going to fight to the last man and if we were against that kind of thing, fighting to the last man on the ground, I thought the estimate of 500,000 US casualties was a gross underestimate.”37
Less than four years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nitze had meaningfully contributed to plans to coerce Japan into surrender, based on his newly acquired expertise on the grim military science of strategic bombing. He drew upon economics, sociology, political science—all of the topics he had dabbled in throughout his twenties and thirties. Nitze presumed that this expertise was transferrable from one country (Germany) to another (Japan). Racial and cultural considerations did not come into play. German war planners “were of the opinion that it would have been absolutely vital for them to disperse either their chemical or oil plants or their power facilities or their steel or their transportation,” Nitze had told the Joint Strategic Target Selection Board.38 Attacking transportation hubs had stopped the shipment of coal, an act that had shut down three-quarters of the rest of German industry. According to Nitze, logic dictated that a similar approach to Japan would shorten the path to victory.
The use of the atomic bomb disrupted these plans. “What’s this all for?” Nitze had asked, some months earlier, when told to procure forty thousand flasks of mercury and two thousand tons of graphite, along with zirconium and beryllium.39 In the spring of 1945, Nitze probably knew as much—or as little—about the atomic bomb project as did the new president, Harry S. Truman, prior to FDR’s death. Never again would Nitze allow himself to be so out of the loop about a significant US military program in development.
After the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, and Japan’s subsequent surrender, on August 15, 1945, President Truman asked the Strategic Bombing Survey to continue their work. He tasked its members not only to conduct studies on all uses of air power in Japan but also to consider the physical effects of the atomic bombs, identify the key moments leading up to Japan’s defeat, and make recommendations for the postwar organization of US forces.40 At that moment, most of the other members left the USSBS and returned to the jobs they had held prior to the war. With the cessation of hostilities, there was no compelling reason for them to continue their government service. Mediating between the army and navy in how they depicted their role in getting to Victory over Japan Day was a fruitless enterprise to most of the staffers. And there was more money to be made in the private sector.
Nitze saw things differently. Promoted to vice chair upon the departure of Henry Alexander, he took on even more responsibilities in this second phase of the USSBS, traveling to Japan in September 1945 in what became his first visit to Asia.
“I remember flying in over Tokyo Harbor on a most beautiful kind of a pale blue day light clouds, a small island rising out of the harbor supporting very Japanese looking pine trees, Fujiyama on the left and coming to the conclusion this was the most beautiful country I’d ever seen,” Nitze later recalled. “Then we got down to the airfield, and close to it we could see all these figures. I thought it was the most beautiful island populated by the most hateful of all people.” As with “all Americans” in 1945, he conceded, he felt deep “anti-Japanese prejudices as a result of Pearl Harbor.”41 This broad-brushed depiction of the defeated foe went beyond anything Nitze said about Germans—he was disturbed by political developments in Nazi Germany, but never hated Germans. It probably reflected a then-widespread sentiment among Americans that they considered the Japanese even less human than the Germans.42 In his coldly rational way, Nitze did not regard ethnic or racial distinctions as inputs when it came to the statistics-driven Strategic Bombing Survey. The success or failure of allied bombing campaigns were numerically measurable independent of whatever prejudices Nitze or anyone else held.
Shortly after his arrival in Tokyo, Nitze reported to Allied Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, who lectured him on the role of air power in the lead-up to Japan’s surrender and ordered him not to cause trouble during his stay. Establishing an office in the Dai Ichi building, where MacArthur had his general headquarters, Nitze led daily operations of the USSBS in Japan even though D’Olier retained the title of chair. The objective, as Nitze explained to the staff, was to finish up interviews and fieldwork by December 1, 1945, and return home by Christmas. With a team of interpreters, Nitze interviewed top Japanese officials, including Prince Konoye, the former prime minister who had resigned in October 1941 after purportedly failing to convince the rest of his government to avoid going to war with the United States.
In this interview and others, Nitze attempted to modulate the aggressive style of questioning that had worked for him on Wall Street—in other words, he learned diplomacy on the job. When questioning Marquis Kido, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, on what led Japan to surrender, Nitze followed the advice of his interpreter: “I would phrase the question by saying, ‘Marquis Kido, when did it first occur to you that the Will of Heaven demanded that the Emperor seek a different course?’ ” It pleased Nitze to learn from Kido that he regarded the Battle of Saipan in 1944 as a turning point that led him to pursue plans for peace with the United States. This depiction comported Nitze’s own previous view that a reconfiguration of the air campaign would have produced a victory without a ground invasion. Nitze paid no mind to the fact that Kido and others had strong incentives to portray themselves as voices of moderation amid the fanatical members of the war cabinet who had been ready to fight to the end. In Hiroshima, where Nitze walked through the ashes, he found a city that was flattened. As he would observe—infamously—the destruction was not that much worse than that of other Japanese cities where conventional air attacks had taken a devasting toll.
Nitze wrote much of the Summary Report (Pacific War), which was published in July 1946. It concluded that Japan was likely to have surrendered by the end of 1945 even without the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In subsequent years, that conclusion has become a Rorschach test for scholars and anyone else interested in Truman’s use of the atomic bomb against Japan. Critics of the decision point to this official account of the US government, which strongly suggested that it was unnecessary to achieve victory. Critics of Nitze, in turn, point to his equating of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to 210 B-29s and 120 B-29s respectively, and to the matter-of-fact statement in the summary: “Trains were running through Hiroshima 48 hours after the dropping of the atomic bomb on that city.”43
This was a coldly clinical assessment of what was unimaginable horror for anyone trapped inside the city. Reference to the trains ought to be considered in the context of Nitze’s staunch advocacy for changing the overall war plan, at the start of the summer of 1945, along with this sentence earlier on in the same paragraph in the Pacific War summary report: “The railroad system had not yet been subjected to substantial attack and remained in reasonably good operating condition at the time of surrender.”
Convinced as he was that the implementation of his own plan at the start of the summer would have forced Japan to surrender, it is not surprising that Nitze concluded that the atomic bombing was unnecessary. The kilo tonnage of both conventional and atomic bombs was measurable; Nitze’s lack of sentimentally at the horror of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not change that basic fact. His assertions about redundancy of the atomic attacks came not from Nitze’s empathy for the victims but rather his stubborn conviction that his own strategy was better. In interviews with Japanese leaders that fall, he pressed them to get the answers he sought. The testimony itself, according to one historian, showed “only Kido supporting [it] and everyone else stating that Japan would have fought on indefinitely. When would Japan have surrendered without the bomb and the Russians? The only credible answer is that given by Robert Butow when Freeman Dyson asked him about it: ‘The Japanese leaders themselves do not know the answer to that question.’ ”44
As the de facto head of the Strategic Bombing Survey, and one of the few who stayed on past January 1, 1946, Nitze made sure that his view came through in the chairman’s reports. This does not necessarily mean he was wrong; it merely suggests that he had gone through the logic chains and arrived at the conclusions before he landed in Japan. From Nitze’s perspective, he was writing the survey not so that it could wind up in a university library to be pored over by scholars at some later point. Rather, it was to precipitate action in the real world following the end of World War II. Nitze’s accounting for the start of the war, as laid out in the Pacific summary report, said as much about US national security policies—past, present, and future—as it did about Japan.
“December 7, 1941, found the United States and its Allies provocatively weak in the Pacific, particularly in land and carrier-based air power,” according to the summary. Japanese leaders who clamored for an attack figured that it would take eighteen months for the United States to mobilize sufficient strength to counter imperial forces in the Pacific, after which the US political system would not have the wherewithal to fight the kind of war its own leaders would encounter. “The weakness of the United States as a democracy would make it impossible for her to continue all-out offensive action in the face of the losses which would be imposed by fanatically resisting Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and the elimination of its Allies.” Wartime United States, Japanese leaders figured prior to December 1941, would ultimately seek accommodation that would allow Tokyo to retain much of its territorial gains.45
The United States had wrecked Japan’s plans by unexpectedly mobilizing rapidly—thanks to the work of men such as Forrestal, Draper, Rockefeller, Wallace, Clayton, and Knudsen—and deploying forces in the Pacific, where the adversary “never fully appreciated the importance of adequate maintenance, logistic support, communications and control, and air fields and bases adequately prepared to handle large numbers of planes.”46 And, “along with all other military powers prior to the war, the Japanese had failed fully to appreciate the strategic revolution brought about by the increased capabilities of air power.”47 Control of the air was not considered a requirement for their basic war strategy. “Had this basic requirement been well understood it is difficult to conceive that they would have undertaken a war of limited objectives in the first place.”48 Nitze believed that a clear-eyed understanding of the opponent could deter aggression and lead to restraint.
Miscalculations on the part of Japanese leadership could not excuse what the summary identified as clear US failures leading up to December 1941. “Prior to Pearl Harbor it had been decided that, in the event of war, Germany would have to be eliminated first, and that our initial role in the Pacific would, in large measure, be defensive.”49 This prioritization had clearly underestimated Japan’s offensive capabilities, as events would demonstrate. “To have implemented an adequate plan in December 1941 would have required better intelligence regarding Japanese intentions and capabilities, an earlier understanding of the predominant and indispensable role of air strength and full public support for the necessary appropriations, well before the actual outbreak of war.”50
Along with this judgment, the summary offered additional lessons in hindsight about preparedness—both in its deterrent effect and necessity should deterrence fail. “One thousand planes in the Philippines, at least equal in performance to the best then available to the Japanese, including types effective against shipping, well-manned, equipped and supplied, and dispersed on some 50 airfields,” it concluded, “would have seriously impeded the original Japanese advances if knowledge of their existence had not entirely dissuaded the Japanese from making the attempt.”51 The lack of prewar economic intelligence had handicapped US target selection on Japanese home islands and, according to the summary, had obscured the case for focusing strategic bombing on the railroad system, which was, again, a key part of Nitze’s plan in the early summer of 1945.52
The atomic bomb had raised the stakes of air warfare, but it had not fundamentally transformed it, the Pacific summary report went on to say. “The threat of immediate retaliation with a striking force of our own should deter any aggressor from attacking,” it stated. “If we are not to be overwhelmed out of hand, in the event we are nevertheless attacked, we must reduce materially our vulnerability to such attack.”53 That meant the dispersal of US military forces, especially as they related to components used to construct atomic weapons, as well as setting up forward operating bases. Above all, it meant sustained expenditures in peacetime, noting that the United States had afforded Japan a head start on the torpedo and other technologies. “This type of work has become so complex that expenditures for research and development in the order of one billion dollars annually may be required to assure an acceptable degree of national security.”54
“The Survey’s report on the European war stated that the great lesson to be learned in the battered cities of England and ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring,” the Pacific summary concluded. “This is fully supported by the example of the devastated cities of Japan and their unhappy and hungry surviving inhabitants.”55 The objective of maintaining peace was supported by preserving the strength and security of the United States, which was based “upon principles of tolerance, freedom, and good will.”56 Strength based on these principles was no threat to world peace, and the prevention of war could not be furthered by the neglect of that strength. “As one of the great powers we must be prepared to act in defense of law and to do our share in assuring that other nations live up to their covenant,” the summary concluded. “The United States must have the will and the strength to be a force for peace.”57 For the United States to be weak was to invite an attack on the nation.
Nitze’s Wartime Conclusions
In the span of twelve months, from the fall of 1944 to that of 1945, Nitze went from working for a political hack to briefing generals and then issuing orders to them upon the cessation of hostilities. Four years in Washington before that prepared him to delegate responsibilities, manage upward, and mediate the considerable friction among different military services. The five years he spent for the government’s wartime effort gained him no permanent status or tenure. Unlike in the military or foreign or civil service, he was outside an established career track. The practice of national security came from learning and doing. It upended hierarchies. As the lethargy of US prewar institutions clearly demonstrated, upending was necessary.
From his wartime experiences, Nitze drew several key lessons. First, he was as good a strategist as anyone he encountered. While he shrewdly placed conditions on accepting General Douglas MacArthur’s offer to make him head of Japan’s postwar economy—and then turned it down when the general refused—Nitze undoubtedly regarded the offer as validation of his abilities and strategic acumen. World War II reinforced Nitze’s confidence that he could stand his ground in a debate with anyone. He believed that he had come up with a plan that applied the lessons of air power in Germany to Japan. There would have been no need for the use of the atomic bomb had only the generals and the president accepted his plan to apply the lessons of air power in Germany to Japan. Nitze’s motivation was not humanitarian impulse (i.e., sparing Japanese civilians) but the cold, hard logic of weighing evidence and drawing conclusions. “The survey’s task was to measure as precisely as possible the exact effects of the two bombs,” as he later described the Strategic Bombing Survey, or, “to put calipers on the problem so that people back home would have a factual frame of reference within which to draw conclusions about the bomb’s true capabilities as well as its limitations.”58
Nitze also took from the wartime experience the possibility of generating answers to big questions. Why did the Japanese go to war with the United States? He attempted to figure that out in the period after Japan’s surrender. Such questions were answerable, he believed, and the answers could help determine policy prescriptions. Nitze was also writing the report, which would be published on July 1, 1946, amid early developments in the Cold War such as Joseph Stalin’s “Election Speech” on February 9, 1946, in which the Soviet leader blamed World War II on a crisis of the capitalist system of the world economy. Nitze surely had an eye on the collapse of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union.
What, then, was the lesson to take from the recent conflict in terms of the rising danger of Soviet power? The key takeaway was that the United States, having failed to mobilize its strength on the eve of its entry into World War II, could not afford again to let down its guard. The battleships lost at Pearl Harbor could just as well have been scrapped anyway. Fortunately, from the United States’ perspective, the carriers were out to sea. Yet the United States had failed to prepare adequately for a naval war with Japan. As the Strategic Bombing Survey noted, a small force of airplanes in the Philippines would have gone a long way in the opening days of war following December 7, 1941. “Larger overall appropriations to the armed forces, beginning at the time of Japanese occupation of Manchuria when the threat to peace in the Far East became evident,” the survey went on to conclude, “might have made war unnecessary and would have paid for itself many times over in reduced casualties and expenditures had war still been unavoidable.”59 Whether or not Nitze drafted that particular sentence, he certainly endorsed this point. Only military preparedness could deter potential enemies, he was certain. In the long run, it was the least expensive way to protect US lives.
“I became convinced therefore that any postwar reorganization of the armed forces should include provision for, first, a vigorous research and development program, to assure the optimum exploitation of science and technology for national defense; second, a vastly improved system of intelligence gathering and analysis to avoid a repetition of the Pearl Harbor disaster; and lastly, closer coordination of the armed forces under an integrated department of defense oriented toward weapons systems based upon modern technology,” Nitze later recalled. An ideal organization, as Nitze saw it, was for a “Department of Strategic Forces” responsible for “deep strategic attack against an enemy’s heartland and the defense of our heartland against such an attack by an enemy” as well as “to achieve general control of the air through the progressive destruction of enemy air forces.”60
The National Security Act of 1947 would later fulfill each of these provisions, establishing the Department of Defense, CIA, and United States Air Force. However, it did not establish a cadre of individuals who could maneuver between the fields of defense policy, intelligence, grand strategy, and diplomacy. Nitze set an example that others would replicate. In his capacity working on matters of national security during the war, Nitze operated outside any military chain of command and did not join the professional civil service. He had obtained tremendous knowledge and on-the-job training, and there was a clear demand for his abilities. He was not prepared to move away from Washington, DC, and never would.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.