McCloy and Lovett at the War Department
He called them the best staff he ever had. They called him “Colonel,” which is what he had been in the previous world war. At seventy-three, Henry Stimson had been slowed by age, but he was a master at instilling loyalty and dedication among those who served under him. After a lifetime of active service, Stimson had learned to concentrate on one or two large issues at a time, while delegating details to four trusted assistants.
To procure equipment for the Army he hired Robert Patterson, a lawyer and former federal judge who wore the belt of a German soldier he had killed during World War I as a constant reminder of the critical nature of his work. As his personal assistant and aide de camp, Stimson chose Harvey Bundy, a Boston lawyer of uncommon brilliance, modesty, and discretion. A product of Yale (Skull and Bones) and Harvard Law School, Bundy had served Stimson as Assistant Secretary of State in the early 1930s. He married Katharine Lawrence Putnam, of Boston’s Putnam and Lowell families, and had three sons. Two of them, William and McGeorge, in their own time would become heirs to the Stimsonian tradition.
But the real dynamos on his staff were the two men Stimson called the “Heavenly Twins,” or, in his occasional fits of temper, the “Imps of Satan”—Jack McCloy and Bob Lovett. “McCloy was the man who handled everything that no one else happened to be handling,” Stimson said in his memoirs, On Active Service in Peace and War (written in collaboration with McGeorge Bundy). Recalled McCloy: “My job was to be at all the points of the organizational chart where the lines did not quite intersect.” Lovett’s responsibility was “all matters affecting the Air Forces.” Stimson’s ability to delegate was illustrated by the mandate he gave Lovett one day when someone questioned Lovett’s prerogatives. “The next time anybody asks you what your authority is,” Stimson said, “you tell them that whatever authority the Secretary of War has, you have.”
Their work in the War Department from 1940 to 1945 would earn McCloy and Lovett, who were by then in their late forties, a central place in the nation’s national security Establishment. They would first make their names as protégés of Henry Stimson, then as powerful decision makers in their own rights. More importantly, the attitudes they formed and the style of operation they adopted would help set the bipartisan tone for the postwar period, when they and many of their friends who had entered government at the outset of the war assumed responsibility for shaping the peace.
McCloy and Lovett shared an asset that was rare in Washington: they had risen in private life by being able to tackle complicated tasks on their own, rather than relying on others to do their work. “You may think this is a small thing,” Lovett said later, “but you’d be appalled at the number of people Jack and I met in Washington during the war who had never learned to handle anything by themselves.”
Stimson came to treat his Heavenly Twins like sons. Along with their wives, they spent many evenings out at Woodley, gossiping with the Colonel and joking with Mrs. Stimson about her husband’s ferocious temper. McCloy was a frequent deck-tennis partner. Lovett, who had sworn off physical exercise, once relented and came out to Woodley for a game of lawn bowls; he was sore for a week after, and told Stimson that playing sports was the only assignment he would henceforth decline.
In the office, Stimson would summon Lovett and McCloy by using an electronic squawk box. Always confounded by mechanical gadgets, Stimson would start to talk and lean back in his chair, releasing the button. The Twins would then rush down the corridor to his office to see what he was saying. “There were a lot of bone-crushing collisions in the hall as a result,” Lovett recalled.
On one occasion when they burst in, Stimson, in one of his foul humors, insisted he had not called them. “Get back to work!” he bellowed. On the way out, they stopped off in the next-door office of Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. A moment later Stimson strode in and berated them for not having gotten back to work. It was the first time, Lovett would later joke, that anyone had been kicked out of two offices a minute after they had been summoned. On another occasion, Lovett wandered into Stimson’s office while Stimson was deep in thought and caught the full force of the Colonel’s fury. Backing out into the hall, he ran into his fellow Imp of Satan. “Stimson wants to see you right away,” he told McCloy.
To outsiders, Lovett and McCloy must have seemed a little boy scoutish, the teacher’s twin pets. Yet anyone wishing to get anything done in the War Department soon came to realize this pair of amiable interlopers from Wall Street controlled much of what went on. What made the two men influential insiders was not so much their jobs but the informal social networks they formed. McCloy’s small study in Georgetown became a nexus for the exchange of indispensable gossip. James Forrestal, who was having trouble getting inside information from his own navy brass, was among many who came to depend on McCloy, calling him daily to arrange lunch or tennis dates (McCloy invariably won) or just to check in. Felix Frankfurter, as if to make up for ignoring him at Harvard, adopted McCloy as a member of his unofficial war cabinet, which already included Acheson and Lovett. When Acheson’s daughter Mary married Harvey Bundy’s son Bill, it was Jack and Ellen McCloy who hosted the wedding breakfast.
The Lovetts gave intimate dinner parties on their balcony overlooking Rock Creek Park to which the Bohlens, McCloys, and Harrimans were often invited. More importantly, Lovett learned to cultivate the press. Eugene Meyer, owner of the Washington Post, gave a series of parties to introduce the Lovetts to Washington. Among Lovett’s closest friends were such Yale chums as Charles Merz, the editorial director of The New York Times, and Henry Luce of Time.
Lovett did not hesitate to pull on such strings. When Newsweek raised questions about the efficiency of the daylight bombing of Germany, Lovett wrote to Harriman in London asking that something be done. Harriman, who had invested in the magazine at the behest of his friend Vincent Astor, laid down an editorial line for his brother, Roland, to impose. “Tell Roland that I am in dead earnest and will brook no compromise,” Harriman wrote Lovett in April of 1943. “I have not supported Newsweek for ten years through its grave difficulties to allow our hired men to use the magazine to express their narrow, uninformed or insidious ideas . . . Roland has my full authority to use any strong arm measures he considers necessary . . . The other directors can be asked to resign if they do not go along.”
Lovett was once asked to pick the greatest negotiator he ever met. Without hesitation, he named McCloy. Indeed, McCloy seemed to have a magic ability to conjure a consensus out of chaos. Blessed with stamina and patience, he could gather a contentious group in his office, outlast their arguments, and gently but persistently prod them toward areas of agreement. He had a sensitive appreciation of how far each could be pushed. One tactic, which he called “yellow padding,” consisted of carefully preparing on a legal pad the outcome he hoped to achieve at a meeting; after edging the players toward that consensus, he would pull out his draft of “what everyone seems to be saying.”
Lovett did not share McCloy’s bottomless energy, but he was incisive and persuasive. He managed at once to seem shy yet commanding, polished yet never condescending. His humor and warmth, sprinkled with light profanity, could be disarming, but he had a demanding and forceful intellect. “There’s not a more respected man and certainly not a better liked man in Washington,” said an official of the War Production Board. General “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, defined Lovett’s strengths as “his business background and his aviation background, plus plenty of good horse sense.”
Bureaucratic runarounds infuriated Lovett. When he asked subordinates about problems and got the stock response that “everything possible is being done,” Lovett would unfurl his lanky body from its usual languid slouch, raise his hooded eyelids, and demand reams of statistics and factual evidence. Then he would pore over the figures, challenge them in detail, commit them to memory, and use them as ammunition later.
Unlike McCloy, Lovett did not relish the art of consultation and consensus building; he was, instead, a doer, someone who was a master at accomplishing a task and administering an activity. “To hell with the cheese,” he would declare when enmeshed in a tangled problem. “Let’s just get out of this trap.” When faced with disagreements, he tried to downplay ideological differences. The resolution, he insisted, would come from weighing the facts and figures. As General Marshall put it: “Lovett has the finest facility in the world for handling unpleasant problems without making anyone mad: he solves them.”
Both Lovett and McCloy, who had given up lucrative careers for their ten-thousand-dollar-a-year jobs, were nominally Republicans (as were Stimson and Bundy), but neither was politically active or ambitious. “I haven’t any political career—don’t know anything about politics and never have,” Lovett bragged to a reporter. “My business was banking, now it’s airplanes. I’m just a regular government employee, working on salary.” Once, when McCloy was visiting the White House, Roosevelt took a phone call and started talking unguardedly about campaign strategies. “Mr. President, remember I’m a Republican,” McCloy interjected with some embarrassment. “Damn it,” said Roosevelt, “I always forget.”
Despite their disdain for partisanship, both men were adroit at dealing with Congress. McCloy was instrumental in the fight for Lend-Lease and even helped contribute its key slogan. In a conversation with Frankfurter, he used the phrase “arsenal of democracy,” which he had picked up from Jean Monnet. “Don’t use those words for a few weeks,” said Frankfurter, who then went to the White House and told Robert Sherwood to use the phrase in an address he was writing for Roosevelt. During the Senate debate on the bill, McCloy sat on the floor amid the page boys so that he could help manage the fight and funnel arguments to the Democratic leader, Jimmy Byrnes.
Lovett often rankled at the endless appropriation hearings he had to face while Assistant Secretary, but he made a practice of disarming questioners with surprisingly candid responses and reams of factual material. Although he called congressional oversight one of the “pitfalls of the Pentagon,” after the war Lovett told the story of asking Albert Speer why Germany had failed to produce more Messerschmitts. “The Fuehrer told us to take the jet and make a fighter-bomber out of it,” said Speer. To Lovett this showed that dictatorships, free from democratic constraints, are prone to pigheadedness.
The former bombardier and the former artillery officer particularly enjoyed inspection tours to the front. During the air attacks on Italy’s Mediterranean islands, Lovett went to North Africa to act as a cheerleader for his beloved bomber forces. Flying in a B-17 over the Atlas Mountains, he sat with the crew listening to a BBC broadcast of swing music. When they were stumped by one song, Lovett, for whom swing music was a passion, identified it correctly as an Erskine Hawkins number (“Tuxedo Junction”). “The Secretary is pretty hep, if you ask me,” said the radio operator later. “Yeah,” replied a gunner, “that bald-headed ol’ bird is the first guy out of Washington I ever met who knew anything about anything.”
At the front in Germany near the end of the war, McCloy discovered that the ninth-century city of Rothenburg was about to be shelled. McCloy’s mother had once visited the town and brought back etchings; he knew it was an ancient center of German culture. “This is one of Europe’s last great walled cities,” he told the American commander. Perhaps, McCloy suggested, it could be induced to surrender peacefully. It was, and after the war the city voted him an honorary burgher.
Stimson often dispatched McCloy to handle troublesome commanders, among them George Patton, who was publicly grumbling on the eve of D-Day about what he considered his insufficient role. McCloy told him to keep quiet. Drawing himself to his full height and wearing his ivory-handled pistols, Patton declared: “You’re taking a good deal of responsibility to come here on eve of battle and destroy a man’s confidence.” Replied McCloy: “Listen, George, if I thought I could destroy your confidence by anything I might say, I would ask General Eisenhower to remove you.” Patton unpuffed and relented.
McCloy would later refer to the decision as “regrettable in the clear light of perfect hindsight.” To Eric Sevareid in 1975 he conceded “they weren’t adequately compensated.” Yet both at the time and in the years that followed, McCloy found it difficult to wrestle with the moral complexities surrounding one of his most significant actions during the war: overseeing the forced relocation of some 110,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, from the West Coast to detention camps farther inland.
“We moved them under the President’s order,” McCloy recalled. “He was very agitated about what happened at Pearl Harbor and that our first line of defense was gone. He was the only one who could sign an order to move these people. As an assistant secretary, I could not even move a soldier, let alone a civilian.” In addition, McCloy argues, the relocated families were not treated all that horribly; they were given adequate stipends, and many were allowed to live and work outside the internment camps as long as they stayed away from sensitive areas.
Much of McCloy’s recollection is justified. The Japanese-Americans suffered far less than many other Americans who fought the war.
But the role Stimson’s prized chore boy played in the matter was far greater than merely following orders.
During the ten weeks between the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and the order to relocate the Japanese-Americans, there was a rising public concern, particularly in California, about the prospect of an enemy within. The Los Angeles Times, which the day after the attack editorialized “Let’s Not Get Rattled,” declared in January that “the rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from danger spots.” California Congressman Leland Ford insisted that “all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration camps.” By early February, even respected columnist Walter Lippmann was deploring “the unwillingness of Washington to adopt a policy of mass evacuation and mass internment of all those who are technically enemy aliens.”
Much of the fear was understandable, at least in those jittery times. The West Coast was preparing for possible raids, Japanese submarines had been detected off California, and there were reports that Japanese residents using headlights and radios were signaling ships offshore. Until the “miracle at Midway” six months later, the American Navy seemed hard pressed to protect the Pacific.
The FBI began systematically arresting hundreds of Japanese aliens considered a potential threat. But the demand grew for a blanket evacuation that would include not only resident aliens but also the second-generation immigrants, known as Nisei, who were legal U.S. citizens. Leading the crusade were General John De Witt of the Western Command along with the Army’s top military police officials. Resisting sweeping measures were Edward Ennis of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and, at least for a while, Attorney General Francis Biddle.
In late December, John McCloy was called on to find a consensus between the two factions. He quickly worked out an agreement to give De Witt broad powers to register aliens—but not citizens—and expel them from certain designated zones. Soon, however, De Witt began to bow to pressure in the military to take action against all Japanese-Americans. The American-born Nisei, argued the Army’s provost marshal, were actually more dangerous than the nonnaturalized immigrants, who tended to be older.
McCloy arranged a series of meetings in early February to break the impasse, beginning with a heated Sunday session at Biddle’s home and ending with one in Stimson’s office. After carefully listing in his diary the arguments on both sides, Stimson concluded that a wholesale evacuation was unjustifiable. “We cannot discriminate,” he said, “among our citizens on the ground of racial origin.”
In passing along Stimson’s decision to General De Witt, McCloy offered a compromise suggestion: “Perhaps the best solution is to limit the withdrawal to certain prohibited areas.” De Witt, however, began increasing the pressure for a wholesale evacuation. As he told McCloy: “A Jap is a Jap to these people now.”
In the meantime, Biddle’s resistance had begun to weaken. After a typically inconclusive lunch with the President, the Attorney General solicited an outside legal opinion from three Roosevelt intimates, Benjamin Cohen, Oscar Cox, and Joseph Rauh. “In time of national peril, any reasonable doubt,” they wrote, “must be resolved in favor of action to protect the national security.” Anxious to wash his hands of the troublesome matter, Biddle wrote Stimson that any action “should in my opinion be taken by the War Department and not the Department of Justice.”
Stimson himself began to waver from his decision not to permit a wholesale evacuation. After McCloy relayed the increasing fervor of De Witt’s demands, Stimson telephoned the White House to pose the question to the President. Roosevelt, still remaining vague, told his Secretary of War to do whatever he “thought best.”
Once again, Stimson turned the matter over to McCloy to coordinate. Instead of wrestling with the objections of the Justice Department, however, McCloy immediately telephoned De Witt in California. The way McCloy interpreted the President’s nondecision tended to guarantee that the final outcome would be a major evacuation. “We have carte blanche to do what we want as far as the President is concerned,” he told the general. As usual, McCloy saw his role as that of a coordinator rather than a policy maker. But with everyone seeking to avoid responsibility for making the policy, the decision evolved through the way it was coordinated.
De Witt and his military advisers began preparing a detailed recommendation for an evacuation. “The Japanese race is an enemy race,” they wrote, “and while many second and third generation Japanese born on U.S. soil, possessed of U.S. citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”
Only after the military men completed their recommendation, which amounted to a full-scale internment, did McCloy take it over to Bid-die’s home for another meeting with Justice Department officials.
Ennis again denounced the idea, but this time Biddle undercut him. They should get to work, he said, polishing up the plan. After Stimson approved the internment order, the President signed it on February 19. Legislation enacting the program promptly passed both the Senate and the House with only one dissenting vote, that of Ohio isolationist Robert Taft.
During the war, McCloy took a personal interest in improving conditions for the internees, visiting them often and occasionally helping those who passed loyalty tests find jobs or enroll in college in the east. He also helped form the 442nd Infantry Regiment, a volunteer unit composed solely of Nisei, which fought for the U.S. bravely, suffered massive casualties in Italy, and became the most decorated unit in American military history. Formation of the regiment, McCloy later said, was one thing he wanted to be sure was carved on his tombstone.
The moral dilemmas surrounding the program were still unsettled in 1981, when a commission appointed by President Carter examined the matter. The eighty-six-year-old McCloy, bitter at what he considered the panel’s bias, became quite prickly when finally called to testify. What occurred “was a relocation program and not an internment,” he claimed, causing the audience to hiss. With one Japanese-American commissioner, McCloy uncharacteristically lost his temper and referred to the program as being “in the way of retribution for the attack that was made on Pearl Harbor.” The panel’s final verdict was that the relocation was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”
“McCloy, I think, more than anyone believed in this,” Biddle recalled in a 1968 interview. “I never excuse him for doing this.” Others were more charitable. “McCloy was distracted and distraught with a number of problems and was essentially motivated, I think, to try to protect his boss, Henry Stimson,” James Rowe, an aide to Biddle and Roosevelt, told historian Peter Irons. Shortly before he died, Rowe said in another interview: “I think McCloy’s main motives were to try to please the generals and make things easy for Stimson.”
Rowe’s assessments are probably closest to the mark. In acting as a pragmatic coordinator of the consensus he felt was forming around him, McCloy failed to consider the moral questions involved. But raising moral considerations was not necessarily McCloy’s job, and certainly not his style. “There was no real debate about it at the time,” McCloy now says. “All of us agreed that this was a prudent step given the nefarious nature of the attack and the dangers we faced. Only in comfortable hindsight can people ignore the practicalities of the situation then.”
The Japanese relocation was not the only time during his tenure at the War Department that McCloy was involved in defending a consensus based on practical considerations against challenges made from a moral viewpoint. In June of 1944, when accounts from the first escapees of the Nazi prison camps began to reveal the full horror of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders in England and America begged the Allies to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz in the hope that this would slow the grisly genocide. They pressed their case on presidential advisers Samuel Rosenman and Harry Hopkins and on members of the War Refugee Board. They in turn asked McCloy to find out whether such bombing was militarily feasible.
McCloy showed little sympathy. He had already helped nix a January 1944 WRB plan to have the Army assist in rescuing victims of Nazi repression. “I am very chary of getting the Army involved in this while the war is going on,” he scribbled on the proposal. When the request came in to consider bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz, McCloy sought the advice of the War Department’s Operations Division. A memo was subsequently prepared by two members of the Army’s General Staff, who came to the same conclusions that their British counterparts had reached after a similar inquiry from Churchill. Attacks on Auschwitz would be of “doubtful efficacy,” they said, and would divert forces from attacking important industrial targets.
At the time, the military was understandably anxious to focus all available air power in Normandy as the Allies struggled to break from the beaches in the aftermath of D-Day. McCloy reported this back to the White House. According to his recollection, Hopkins and Rosen-man made no objection. “What they mainly wanted was for me to get their boss off the hook, for me to write the letters,” he recalled.
McCloy subsequently signed a series of replies to those pleading for attacks on Auschwitz. Using phrases from the memos of the Operations Division and the General Staff, he argued that the suggested bombings would be impractical and “might provoke even more vindictive acts by the Germans” (a possibility that is hard to imagine). One of McCloy’s letters is on display at the Auschwitz museum.
McCloy’s last response on the matter was to John Pehle of the WRB in November of 1944. “Use of heavy bombers from United Kingdom bases would necessitate a round trip flight unescorted of approximately 2,000 miles,” he said. “It would be a diversion from our strategic bombing effort, and the results obtained would not justify the high losses likely to result.” In fact, there were at the time American warplanes based in southern Italy, six hundred miles from Auschwitz, which were making heavy bombing raids on oil refineries only thirteen miles from the concentration camp, according to historian David Wyman and journalist Morton Mintz. McCloy says he does not remember why it was not considered possible to use planes from there, rather than Britain, to attack Auschwitz.
The decision, McCloy insists, was not based on his personal feelings but on practical military considerations. “If Roosevelt had wanted to divert the planes, we would have,” he says. “There is no reason to believe it would have done much good. The best way to help those people was to win the war as quickly as possible.” After the war, McCloy in fact worked hard to help displaced Jews and was instrumental in persuading Konrad Adenauer to increase German reparations paid to Israel.
Most of McCloy’s activities were far less controversial. One pet project, as an old artilleryman, was getting light planes for use as spotters for gun batteries. He was strongly supported by Eisenhower, but Air Corps General Hap Arnold felt it would be hard to spare the pilots. Lovett suggested that McCloy learn to fly as a way to show Arnold that regular soldiers, rather than trained air corps pilots, could handle the spotter planes. McCloy did just that. When he presented the plan to Arnold, the general replied: “Not that! I’ll let you have the planes. Just don’t make me go up with you.”
McCloy was also responsible for the construction of the Pentagon, which became known as “McCloy’s folly.” One of his greatest difficulties was getting the plans approved by Roosevelt, who fancied himself an amateur architect. He finally resorted to extortion. The President had gotten himself in a bind involving an old Harvard classmate, Putzi Hanfstaengl, a German refugee who had returned to his native country and acted for a while as a court jester for Hitler. Thinking he could pump useful information out of Hanfstaengl, Roosevelt had him sent to the U.S. from England, where he was being held prisoner. Hanfstaengl, however, turned out to be a fool, and Roosevelt wanted to get rid of him. McCloy told a White House staffer he would find a safe sinecure for Hanfstaengl at an army base in Texas if FDR would approve the Pentagon blueprints. It worked. At a Cabinet meeting the following week, Roosevelt turned to McCloy and growled, “You blackmailer!”
As Stimson’s personal envoy to foreign leaders, McCloy visited London in 1943 to press for establishment of a second front through a cross-Channel invasion, as the Allies had promised the Soviets. Churchill, who was insisting on pursuing the North African campaign instead, took McCloy on a tour of the devastated city, ending up at midnight in the bomb-gutted Houses of Parliament. “When I look across the well of this house,” the Prime Minister said, “I see the faces that should be here. I’m just a sport because most of my contemporaries are dead. They’re dead at the Passchendaele or the Somme. And we can’t endure the decimation of another British generation.”
When Eisenhower became mired in a political quagmire in North Africa after forming, on Stimson’s advice, a strange-bedfellow alliance with the Vichy French leader Jean Darlan, McCloy was sent over to coordinate the civilian administration. Upon his return, he and Stimson urged Roosevelt to put aside his personal distaste for Charles de Gaulle and recognize him as the leader of Free France. A White House Cabinet Room pad from the period shows Harry Hopkins’s doodles with a notation at the bottom: “One more crack from McCloy to the Boss about de Gaulle and McCloy is out of here.”
By the end of the war, McCloy’s reputation as an adroit fixer was made. The gnomelike Assistant Secretary seemed able to tread sensitive turf without leaving footprints or enemies in his trail. An aura of wisdom and competence surrounded him; above all, he was trusted.
One day, as American forces pushed into Germany, Roosevelt called McCloy into his office. “Heil hoch Kommissar für Deutschland!” he announced. McCloy was baffled. “I’m making you High Commissioner for Germany,” Roosevelt explained. “Don’t you think that’s premature?” McCloy asked. “We haven’t won the war yet. You ought to have a military governor.” He suggested Lucius Clay. Not only could he command troops, McCloy argued, but he was an engineer who knew how to handle logistical problems. “Oh, McCloy, I’m too tired to argue with you,” Roosevelt replied. It was March of 1945, and McCloy was suddenly struck by how weary the President indeed looked.
While McCloy was juggling a mélange of tasks, Lovett was concentrating on a single big one: building up America’s air power. In 1938, the Army Air Corps had 1,773 planes and trained 500 pilots. In 1942, it built 47,000 new planes and trained 30,000 pilots. By the following year, planes were being churned out at a rate of 8,000 a month.
To accomplish the goal, Lovett carefully cultivated the White House. In February of 1941, just after taking office, he called on Harry Hopkins, FDR’s powerful adviser, taking along McCloy for support. Lovett’s modest goal: To get the President to double the production of planes. “While I don’t go so far as to claim that air power alone will win the war,” he wrote in his memo to Hopkins, “I do claim the war will not be won without it.”
Hopkins was impressed. Deal maker that he was, however, he raised another matter once Lovett had concluded. During his recent visit to England, Hopkins related, Churchill mentioned that he was having problems diverting pilots from combat in order to ferry American-supplied planes across the Atlantic. Was there anything that could be done? Lovett went to work on Juan Trippe, president of Pan Am and a friend from Yale, who offered to supply civilian pilots for the ferry work. Hopkins subsequently agreed to press the issue of air power on the President.
Fearing the erratic style of both the President and the former social worker who was his closest aide, Lovett kept up his pressure. “Since the period of gestation of our airplane is unfortunately about twice that of a human,” he wrote Hopkins, “we have to make up our minds very soon if we are to have any benefits from added capacity by the end of 1942.” The President was persuaded. He sent word to Lovett to draw up a presidential directive vastly increasing the production of bombers and other planes.
Lovett’s private inspection tour in 1940 had convinced him that, in order to get these new planes produced, assembly-line techniques must be imposed on the industry. Lovett understood the need for constant design improvements. “What’s the use of flying kiddie cars?” he noted. But to streamline the process he designated only a few factories to experiment with new models; others were ordered to churn out standard planes as quickly as possible. “The airplane manufacturers were like a lot of custom tailors, and our job was to turn them into Hart Schaffner and Marxes overnight,” he told a reporter in 1943.
Lovett also used more daring methods. “One way I got production moving was telling the companies to go ahead even before the contracts had been written or the money appropriated,” he recalled. “I’d give them a letter of intent. If it weren’t for the fact that a war was going on, I’d have ended up in Leavenworth.” It worked. One factory, in fact, delivered eighty-five completed engines on the day that the government signed the contract for their construction.
Forrestal, working closely with Lovett, was doing the same thing as Under Secretary of the Navy. It helped that Di Gates, Lovett’s colleague in the Yale Unit and former roommate in New York, served as his counterpart, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for air. By March of 1941, six months after Forrestal had taken office, the Navy had approximately $4 billion worth of letters of intent outstanding.
When Forrestal and Lovett wanted to build bases in South America as way stations for U.S. planes flying to Africa, the State Department said it could not be done. Forrestal decided to take the problem to their mutual friend at Pan Am. Trippe agreed that his airline would build the bases using money paid from a secret contingency fund controlled by the President. “You know, Jim, you’re taking a big risk,” said James Rowe, the President’s man at the Justice Department. “If America doesn’t enter the war, you could go to jail.” Forrestal replied: “I’m so sure we’ll get into the war and need these bases that I’ll take my chances.”
Administering the phenomenal burst of warplane production was only the most tangible of Lovett’s accomplishments. Equally important was his role in changing the military mind-set and bringing America into a new age of air power. When he took office, Lovett said, there were officers who “continued to regard the airplane as a rather dangerous contraption from which a bolt might drop and scare the daylights out of [their horses].” Certainly there was little understanding that air power might be more than an adjunct to ground fighting, that it could do more than merely provide support for infantry and artillery attacks. The notion of “strategic bombing,” the use of planes to conduct long-range offensive campaigns, was generally dismissed.
After World War I, the air chief of Allied forces had reported that the “most important and far reaching” contribution of airplanes was their use for observation; the Army’s official textbook in 1920 taught that “strategical bombing is a luxury.” Waging a lonely struggle against this mind-set was a handful of disciples of the legendary General Billy Mitchell, an ardent air-power advocate who was court-martialed in 1925 for his attacks on the army high command. They formed a small clique at Maxwell Air Force Base dedicated to the idea that strategic bombing could change the course of modern warfare.
In Lovett they finally found an advocate with clout. Through his personal experience with the Yale Unit in Bruges during World War I, the Assistant Secretary had seen what relentless strategic bombing could do. The success that the Nazis were having in adopting this tactic further strengthened his beliefs.
Lovett was among the first American policy makers to envision that effective use of bombers might someday make the trench obsolete. He helped move America into an age in which long-range bombers, freed from the task of providing support for ground troops, could launch offensive campaigns as effectively as army units or navy ships. “Such was the cast of the military mind that the full potential of air power as an independent, offensive weapon had not penetrated the domain of artillery and battleships,” Jonathan Fanton, now president of the New School in New York, has written. “It fell to Lovett to weave into the collective conscience a theory of air power as modern as the technology itself.” The specifics of Lovett’s concept—and in particular his conviction that sustained bombing could destroy the morale of an enemy—may not have been fully justified; but his faith in strategic bombing was destined to change the way America would wage war at least through the Vietnam era.
His first task in breaking what he called the “trench-mind mentality” was convincing Stimson that air power was more than just another weapon to be put at the disposal of ground troops. Soon after being sworn in, Lovett set up a tutorial for the Secretary in which he argued that air power represented a brand-new form of warfare and should be given organizational autonomy as the British had done with the Royal Air Force. “At irregular intervals in history,” Lovett told the old artillery colonel, “some new development has altered the art of war and changed the fate of peoples and the world.”
The structure of the Army’s air forces, Lovett said, “resembled nothing in the world so much as a bowl of spaghetti.” The production of planes and the training of personnel was the duty of the Air Corps. The actual use of planes was handled by the General Headquarters of the Air Force. In order to release the potential of air power, he argued, these tasks should be unified under a command of their own.
Stimson was persuaded, but he noted in his diary, “I fear Marshall and his deputies are very much wedded to the theory that it is merely an auxiliary force.” So the Secretary asked Lovett to give his seminar to Marshall. “At present, our air force is operating under an organization, the command and control of which is designed primarily to insure direct support of the ground forces and not the entire field of operations open to air warfare,” Lovett argued. “The weapon must be controlled and utilized within a tight-knit, flexible organization as modern as the instrument itself.”
Marshall proposed a deal: He would support greater autonomy for the Army Air Corps if Lovett would resist pressures from Congress and elsewhere to set up an independent U.S. Air Force as a separate branch of the military. Lovett approved. “Even those . . . who favor the ultimate creation of an independent Air Force agree that the air forces must learn to walk before they can run,” Lovett wrote in a memo for Congress. “Regardless of the merits of the idea in theory, it is subject to the generally accepted rule that a good idea executed at the wrong time becomes a bad idea.”
In seeking funds for new warplanes, Lovett placed special emphasis on the heavy-bomber program: the B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators that he hoped would prove the value of long-range strategic attacks. He also worked with Hap Arnold and others to incorporate the role of heavy bombing into AWPD-1, the war plan Roosevelt requested in mid-1941. It advocated six months of concentrated strategic bombing to soften up Germany for a 1943 invasion. Lovett estimated that four thousand heavy bombers could destroy 154 critical facilities in Nazi territory, such as power stations, oil depots, and rail links.
But strategic bombing, Lovett felt, had an even more important role. German civilians must personally feel the pain of war, which had not happened in World War I; only bombing could properly punish them and sap their morale. In the process of destroying their war-making capacity, Lovett told an audience at the University Club in New York, “the German people can be given their first searing lesson in the heart of their hitherto untouched homeland that crime does not pay. This should reduce their will to fight.”
In early 1942, Lovett received a captured German document that emphasized heavy bombing of Allied facilities. It prompted him to put on paper his specific ideas about strategic bombing. The most important thing, as he learned from his own sorties during World War I, was that the air attacks must be concentrated and incessant. There was little value in dispersing air power on many fronts. “The success of the use of this weapon depends on its employment en masse, continuously and aggressively,” he wrote. “Our main job is to carry the war to the country of the people who are fighting us—to make their working conditions as intolerable as possible, to destroy their plants, their sources of electric power, their communications systems.”
When Lovett learned that plans for a cross-Channel invasion had been postponed until 1944, he was upset that this meant the shift of many Allied air units engaged in bombarding Europe. He asked Stimson to resist Eisenhower’s request that planes be diverted for use over North Africa. To buttress his case Lovett enlisted friends in the press, particularly at Life magazine, to publish articles showing the damage that bombs were inflicting on Germany. The reports gave Congress and the public, frustrated over the slow progress of the Allies, an outlet for their anger. Nevertheless, most of the Eighth Air Force was redeployed to North Africa.
On the eve of the January 1943 Casablanca Conference, Lovett went to the White House to press his views on the President. He also gave his longtime partner Harriman a crash course in the theory of saturation bombing and persuaded him to act as an advocate in Casablanca. There the tactic of bombing Germany relentlessly by day and by night was formally adopted by Roosevelt and Churchill. Its code name: POINTBLANK. Harriman wrote Lovett a long letter hailing the development. “It is recognized that the bombing is an essential prelude to our occupation of the continent,” he said. “If there are a few people down the line who have not yet learned the gospel, don’t let it worry you.”
As the war ended, Lovett hoped to document the critical importance of air power through the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which he organized. It was a mammoth undertaking in which more than fifteen hundred experts tried to quantify the damage bombers had inflicted on German industry, transportation, oil supplies, cities, and general morale. The nominal head was Franklin D’Olier, an amiable former commander of the American Legion and chairman of Prudential Insurance Company. But the main driving force was Chicago lawyer George Ball; he had independently come up with the same idea of conducting a full-scale bombing survey while he was a member of the Air Force Evaluation Board in London and had presented it to Stimson and Lovett. Ball recruited two of his friends: Paul Nitze and economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The three of them led teams of staffers into liberated Germany, interviewed scores of military experts and civilians, and conducted the first full-scale interrogation of Hitler’s Production Minister, Albert Speer.
What they found did not exactly confirm Lovett’s expectations. Galbraith discovered that the bombing had scarcely disrupted the manufacture of tanks and other panzer weaponry. Average monthly production of 1942 was 516 vehicles; after the 1943 bombing began in earnest, monthly output increased to 1,005, and it went up to 1,583 the following year. The February 1944 concentrated Allied raids on Germany’s airframe plants had been similarly ineffective. More fighters and bombers were produced in the month after the attacks than the month before them. Speer also told Ball that some of the urban bombing had actually freed up laborers from destroyed shops to work in outlying munitions factories. All in all, German production in 1944 was three times what it was at the beginning of the war. Especially fruitless had been the attempt to destroy German morale by the bombings; there were no signs that this occurred.
On the other hand there was evidence that attacks on rail lines and oil depots had greatly slowed German troop movements and curtailed training. By keeping German planes in the air, the bombing also helped deplete the Nazis’ air force. The massive fire-storm raids on Hamburg did diminish morale there, at least for a while, but the fact that they were not followed up diminished their impact. The bombing of the Ruhr had perhaps the greatest effect, bringing industry to a standstill by destroying the transportation systems.
The final summary report of the survey, compiled after much dispute among the members, was predictably a mixed bag. But the skeptical personal conclusions reached by Ball, Galbraith, and Nitze stayed with them over the years. “History and future policy would have been served by a more dramatic finding of failure,” Galbraith later noted of the survey’s final report, “for this would have better prepared us for the costly ineffectiveness of the bombers in Korea and Vietnam.” When Lyndon Johnson was considering a resumption of the Vietnam bombing in January 1966, Ball was opposed. “I recalled my experience on the Strategic Bombing Survey,” he says, “pointing out that in both Europe and Japan the Survey found that ‘one does not break the will of the population of a police state by heavy bombing.’”
Lovett disagreed. He felt that some of the findings added credence to his faith in strategic bombing, and he was unhappy with the heavily qualified conclusions. The effects of the bombing were hard to quantify, and Lovett was uncomfortable with things that could not be quantified. He traveled to Germany on his own to talk to Goering, Messerschmitt, and Speer. The production of planes had been hampered, Messerschmitt told him, by the lack of materials. Everywhere he went he saw evidence that German industry had been brutalized by the Allied bombing. What he heard was what he wanted to hear, and he came back convinced that the survey had underplayed the importance of America’s long-range bombing.
Upon his return, Lovett set up a task force to produce detailed reports on the status of all Air Force personnel and weaponry. Calculating machines were borrowed from the Prudential Insurance Company and government statistic bureaus. “I wanted to know every morning precisely and exactly how our Air Force was,” he recalls.
One of Lovett’s most trusted young analysts on the project, who shared his passion for facts and statistics, was Robert McNamara, a Harvard Business School graduate who had been assessing bomb targets for the Air Corps. After the war, when Lovett was at his winter home in Hobe Sound, Florida, his neighbor Henry Ford II mentioned that he needed new talent for the postwar expansion. Chief among the “Whiz Kids” Lovett recommended was McNamara.