Historians relish rehashing the great strategic decisions that supposedly determined the outcome of World War II: Britain’s resolve to fight on after the fall of France, Hitler’s decision to invade the Ukraine instead of aiming for Moscow, Japan’s doomed attack on Midway Island. Such choices add an air of suspense to the war, but they also miss the point about how modern war is won or lost. Decisions on when, where, and even if can only be made after the careful determination of an even more important series of strategic choices. These choices, which represent the highest level of grand strategy, are about what kind of armed forces should be constructed. Every power in World War II had to assess what weaponry they needed to build their armies and navies, and, moreover, how to balance the need for military manpower with the necessity for industrial workers to assemble war machinery. Never do these decisions receive the intense focus reserved for the use of military force, but they are determinative.
Finding the shape of America’s military was a tumultuous and at times bitter process. It witnessed the intersection of political, military, economic, and social interests and involved questions of how the American population, both male and female, should be mobilized, to what degree civil liberties should be curtailed, how billions of dollars should be spent, and, ultimately, where and how many Americans would die on the battlefield. Leahy was the only individual who played both a decisive role in these decisions and then helped determine the subsequent strategic choices of when and where American forces would be used.
In January 1942, nearly a month after Pearl Harbor had thrust the nation into war, President Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address called for an immense industrial yield, proclaiming that American output in 1942 and 1943 combined would include 185,000 aircraft, 125,000 tanks, 55,000 antiaircraft guns, and 16 million tons of merchant shipping.1 At the same time, the army planned a fighting force of extraordinary size, a formidable 215 divisions, 61 of which were to be heavily armored.2 It was a fantastical plan, yet one far beyond the nation’s productive and personnel resources.
By the summer of 1942, the United States was suffering through a personnel and production crisis, and it was clear that American industry could build nothing like as much equipment as planners had assumed. Complicating matters, the armed services demanded more and more bodies to fill their ranks, a direct contradiction with the need to keep skilled industrial workers at their jobs. Industrial production was coming up short. Donald Nelson, chairman of Roosevelt’s War Production Board, reported to the president in August that American production was set to come in far below expectations, with aircraft falling short by at least one-third.3 The shortfall set in motion America’s most important strategic debate of the war.
A test of whether any individual has power within a governmental structure is whether he or she can determine policy. Can they shape the decision-making process so that choices are made following their ideas as opposed to that of others? By this standard, when it came to the shape and size of America’s armed forces, William Leahy was far more powerful than all the other chiefs, indeed anyone else in the American decision-making structure other than Franklin Roosevelt. To understand how Leahy exercised his influence, it is best to start with his overall strategic ideas of how the United States should fight the war.
After a career spent in the naval service, and with his added diplomatic experience, Leahy returned from France with an innate bias about how the United States should engage and defeat the Axis. It was based on the overwhelming application of air- and sea power to first halt the Axis advance and then wear down their ability to resist. Like Alfred Thayer Mahan, Leahy conceived of war as a struggle over lines of trade and communication. The Allies needed to cut off the Germans and the Japanese from their different sources of production, weaken their economic fundamentals, and, if necessary, invade only once the result was beyond question. Leahy had no stomach for massive land battles, which, he believed, would inevitably lead to high and unnecessary casualties. Therefore, he saw no need for the United States to prioritize production for a large army. In his mind, mass armies belonged to the past, and America needed to win an air-sea war based on machinery over human sacrifice.
In this, he was joined by Franklin Roosevelt, probably one reason why the president determined early on that Leahy would be his point man in the military in determining the answers to these questions. It is worth noting that Roosevelt first started taking a hard line against a large army not long after Leahy became his chief of staff.4 Both agreed that the army’s future size needed to be reduced to keep production high.5 Both also believed the war would be won through the control of supply and movement. Yet surprisingly for a man so enamored of sea power, Roosevelt pushed for the production of aircraft over everything else, including ships. Having been captivated by the impact of airpower as the war had developed, he decided that the United States needed to seize air superiority to defeat Germany and Japan, and called for the production of a whopping 131,000 aircraft in 1943, 100,000 of which would be combat planes. It was a remarkable figure, imaginable only if all other construction projects were cut drastically, and it caused an intense political and strategic struggle among the top war planners.
George Marshall, with the army’s needs at the forefront of his mind, had completely different priorities from the president’s. Focused on an army-centric, Germany-first strategy that called for a cross-Channel invasion as early as possible, he wanted a formidable land army with millions of soldiers supported with phalanxes of tanks. If Marshall were to get his way, air and sea production would have to bear the brunt of the cuts everyone knew were coming. At the same time, he would need to keep Hap Arnold and the US Army Air Force on his side; if he called for cuts to aircraft production that were too steep, the mercurial Arnold might rebel. Not to mention that the president himself prized air production over all else. Taking a middle line, the army argued for a balance between aircraft and ground equipment.6 The navy, it seemed, would be left to deal with an ever-dwindling slice of the budget.
The Joint Chiefs first debated the production crisis on October 20. George Marshall and the army’s supply chief, Lt. Gen. Brehon Somervell, attacked Roosevelt’s aircraft-focused plan and called for a united military front to force the president into line.7 In essence, they wanted the Joint Chiefs to undermine the president and take the authority to give direct instructions to the War Production Board about what the United States should construct for its armed services. Admiral King was more circumspect, speaking up for a new balanced program; Leahy, as chairman, was restrained. In the meeting, he called for joint staff planners to come up with a new construction plan by November 10, which could then be presented to the president.
Marshall was determined to get his way. Attempting to circumvent Leahy to put pressure on the president, Marshall and other senior army officers submitted to Harry Hopkins in October a plan calling for 7.5 million soldiers in uniform by the end of 1943. Though it fell short of early 1942 expectations, they were still asking for a very large ground force, allowing the army to mobilize 111 divisions and 224 air force combat groups.8 This move to cut out the president’s chief of staff showed just how weak Marshall was in Roosevelt’s power structure. Rather than embracing Marshall’s ideas, Hopkins went to the president and warned him against the military’s machinations. He said that the “Army and Navy” (he didn’t use the phrase “Joint Chiefs of Staff,” thereby leaving Leahy out of the charge) were trying to trick FDR into accepting a reduced aircraft construction plan.9
If Leahy had seemed noncommittal about production during the Joint Chiefs meeting of October 20, it was because he was spending much of his private time with the president on this very issue and had no need to engage in debates with his fellow chiefs. In fact, Roosevelt spoke far more to Leahy than to the other chiefs during the production controversy.10 Between October and December, the height of the dispute, the two men dissected the issue in their daily morning briefings and at least seventeen extra meetings, often involving only themselves and at times Harry Hopkins.11 In terms of the president’s time, the other chiefs were peripheral. Ernest King lunched with Roosevelt on October 7 and Hap Arnold had a half-hour meeting with him on October 8; incredibly, George Marshall had not a single minute alone with Roosevelt during this crucial period of the war.
Leahy was quickly revealing himself to be the glue holding together the president’s war effort, and he used his access to Roosevelt to destroy Marshall’s plans.12 On October 23, Leahy met with Roosevelt, Donald Nelson, and the heads of the different American industrial-production agencies, and the president gave approval to increase the production of escort vessels for the ongoing sea war—money directed not toward Marshall’s army but to the navy.13 On October 26, Leahy spoke with Secretary of the Interior Ickes about the balance between civilian and military production. Later that day, Leahy and Ernest King met with Roosevelt and, in a sign of how important the war against Japan was at the time, convinced the president to order twenty additional ships to the Pacific.14
At such an early stage of the war, Leahy knew that preserving America’s workforce was of paramount importance. Chairing a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, he listened as the civilian heads of different regulatory agencies—including the War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission, and the Office of Economic Stabilization—addressed the mounting industrial crisis. Leahy realized that he would need to take the lead and block the formation of a large army to make sure that production was available for air and sea needs. “It appears clear from statements made by the informed officials,” he wrote, “that with ten million men in the Armed Services . . . great difficulty will be encountered in providing sufficient material for the war effort and for civilian use.”15
Having made his choice, Leahy focused on deciding exactly what the United States would build with its industrial workforce. While the nation’s eyes were locked on the invasion of North Africa, Leahy was determined not to lose sight of the Pacific. Epic clashes such as the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway had convinced him, the longtime advocate for the battleship, that now the aircraft carrier was the weapon that would defeat Japan, and he wanted to make sure that enough of them were built that victory in the Pacific theater could happen as quickly as possible. Thus, aircraft-carrier production could not be held back by the overwhelming focus on aircraft—even if that meant changing the president’s stated priority list.
On November 10, less than forty-eight hours after American troops landed in Morocco, Leahy chaired a meeting of the Joint Chiefs. Marshall and King, preoccupied by the invasion, were represented by subordinates. When Hap Arnold spoke in favor of Roosevelt’s aircraft plan—which had been reduced to a final target of 107,000 planes, 82,000 of which were combat—Leahy openly differentiated himself from the president. The building of aircraft carriers was so important, in his opinion, that they trumped FDR’s plan for a focus on aircraft alone.16 He instructed the joint army and navy planners to go prepare a new priority list to be given to the president.
When the planners reported back a few days later, Leahy’s influence was evident. The list now had three specific first-class priorities: Roosevelt’s 107,000 aircraft plan, a new destroyer escort plan, and Leahy’s carriers.17 Yet Leahy was hardly trying to circumvent the president. On November 20, he sent to Roosevelt a formal memo arguing that while he accepted the president’s plan for 107,000 aircraft in 1943, it shouldn’t preclude other areas. Conflating his own preference with that of the Joint Chiefs as a whole, he wrote, “There is no item which the Chiefs of Staff consider to be more important than aircraft carriers and escort vessels.”18
Over the next few days Leahy worked directly with Roosevelt and Donald Nelson, head of the War Production Board, to finalize the new priority list. From his point of view, the other Joint Chiefs were not helpful, and he bypassed them almost entirely. “I am convinced that Mr. Nelson is making every effort to meet the military and naval needs,” he wrote, “and I get very little useful assistance from the Navy Department or the Army Air Force.”19
A few days later, Leahy sent Nelson a letter specifically laying out the new production priorities, combining Roosevelt’s desire for aircraft with his own preference for more carriers. Leahy told Nelson that the 1943 target production of aircraft was to be FDR’s preferred figure of 107,000. At the same time, aircraft-carrier construction was to be prioritized so that 13 aircraft carriers (larger than escort class) would be completed in the calendar year 1943.20
Leahy’s success was unprecedented. He achieved his vision, even more so than Roosevelt. In 1943, even after great industrial exertion, the United States manufactured fewer than 85,000 aircraft, only 53,000 of which were combat planes. Yet American shipyards finished 15 aircraft carriers of either the Essex or Independence class, two more than Leahy originally envisaged.21 These carriers became the backbone of the fast-carrier strike force that dominated the war against Japan in 1944. The army, meanwhile, suffered the brunt of the cuts. It was now planned that the United States would build almost 50 percent fewer tanks by the end of 1943, with cuts in artillery production of 33 percent and small arms of 13 percent.22 The meaning of these cuts would be clear soon: the United States would not be able to invade France in 1943, as George Marshall wanted, but would have to wait until 1944, Leahy’s preferred target year. It was as decisive a triumph as Leahy could have imagined.
Leahy had won the debate over production priorities, but he still had to make sure that the armed forces did not recruit so much manpower that it would compromise the reaching of his targets.23 If early military manpower demands were met, the United States would have more than 11.5 million men in uniform by early 1944.24 By late 1942, the army was still hoping for a force of more than 8.2 million by the end of 1943, which would then grow more in 1944.25 Leahy thought such plans not only excessive but dangerous, leading to the military gaining too much authority in civilian affairs. Army plans, he claimed, would have “wrecked” the labor market.26 How he blocked these plans showed just how subtly Leahy could manipulate his different positions to ensure the outcome that he and the president wanted.
The first step was to keep the workers who were so valuable to America’s war effort from being driven out of their jobs. The staff planners on the Joint Chiefs, for instance, advocated that the working week for factory workers in vital industries be increased by almost a third, to fifty-four hours. This would, it was argued, allow the United States to have a better chance to meet its production targets while freeing up more men to fight.27 This politically naïve plan would have been social dynamite, and Leahy was determined to squash it. He had the reference to a fifty-four-hour week deleted from the joint staff planners’ report that had been prepared for the Joint Chiefs.28 At a December 1 meeting of the Joint Chiefs, he stated that the military should not try to dictate personnel policy to the civilian administration. To Leahy any such move was a dangerous example of the military expanding its powers.
Having kept the military from advocating such a self-destructive policy, Leahy was left with the conundrum that he was presiding over a committee whose members mostly supported the maximum increase possible in the size of the armed forces. Marshall and King continued to push ahead with their earlier recruitment plans.29 Yet Leahy did not feel he could, or should, oppose them directly during Joint Chiefs meetings. Instead, he used his time with the president to subvert their wishes. He allowed Marshall to argue for as large an army as possible and sent that forward as the formal recommendation of the Joint Chiefs. Yet in private moments with the president, as he later admitted, Leahy spoke against such a plan.30 Leahy was perfectly aware that he and Roosevelt agreed on this question and was confident of getting the right result.31
He knew exactly what he was doing. The president continued to turn to Leahy over Marshall, King, or Arnold when it came to matters of personnel policy. In early 1943, Roosevelt appointed a committee of five trusted individuals to analyze the politically sensitive question of personnel controls and domestic legislation.32 Leahy was the only military man on the committee, the rest being civilian heavyweights: Harry Hopkins, James Byrnes, Bernard Baruch, and Samuel Rosenman.33 Together they had to recommend policy on the kind of issues that military leaders normally avoided—such as the rise in wages and prices, and to what degree controls should be put in place for both or either.34 The overarching question was whether the United States should opt for draconian labor laws. These laws would have allowed the federal government to force any individual it wanted into war work, which would have freed up more existing industrial workers for the army and navy. But it would have been politically controversial and unprecedented within the history of American civil liberties. Marshall and the army were supportive. Leahy helped spike their hopes. In personnel committee meetings, Leahy sided with those who argued against strict labor laws. He was, for instance, strongly opposed to any plan that would see the federal government conscript labor. Eventually, the committee, with Leahy’s wholehearted approval, decided against recommending coercive laws. It was an example of his behind-the-scenes operation. He used the trust of the president, plus the myriad different positions in which he had been placed, to guarantee that the United States followed his strategic ideas.
The United States, in the end, fought precisely the war that William Leahy wanted it to fight. It was an air-sea machinery-based war, with a remarkably small land army, all things considered. The army’s eventual strength of 7.7 million at the high point of the war was still much smaller than they had expected to have by the end of 1943 and was more than 2 million men smaller than Marshall wanted it to be in 1942.35 This restriction in army manpower led to what is known as the “90-division gamble.”36 This small-army gamble, in which Marshall had called for 215 divisions at the start of the war—coming on the heels of the decision to focus on aircraft and aircraft-carrier construction—represented the most important strategic decision that the US government would make during World War II. This decision pre-answered most of the American strategic debates that would occur in the coming years. It decided the outcome of more battles and campaigns than the actions of famous battlefield commanders, whom we like to think of as the individuals who determine the outcomes of wars.
William Leahy had produced a tour de force on how to exercise power in Washington.