EIGHT

Production and Diplomatic Tasks for the Combined Chiefs

The members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff were forced to deal with many issues that fell outside the strict definition of generating and supervising campaign plans. For instance, the American members needed to be able to express in an effective manner their views to members of Congress in order to secure approval for military budgets. In addition, as service chiefs, members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff were responsible for overseeing the wartime growth of their respective services. Two of the most important of the additional duties with which the Combined Chiefs of Staff were concerned were the production of munitions and the conduct of wartime diplomacy. Certainly, weapons procurement would have been an activity that these men would have had to undertake anyway as service chiefs had the Combined Chiefs of Staff never been formed. However, it is to the credit of CCS members that they could successfully handle huge wartime weapons procurement activities on top of their global strategy-making responsibilities.

Wartime diplomacy, on the other hand, is an area in which the Combined Chiefs of Staff compiled a somewhat mixed record. In some diplomatic episodes with which the Combined Chiefs of Staff were forced to involve themselves, such as the “Darlan deal” mentioned earlier, there seemed to be no good option. In other instances, such as the passage of Allied and Axis hospital ships through combat areas, the Combined Chiefs of Staff acted with wisdom. There were occasions, however, such as in regard to the use of the Azores as an air base, when the American members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff could be a bit heavy-handed.

Production

Because so many different civilian and military bureaucracies—the U.S. War Production Board, the U.S. Office of War Mobilization, the British Ministry of Aircraft Production, the U.S. Army Service Forces, and the British Air Ministry, to name a few—had a hand in production issues in Britain and the United States, the Combined Chiefs of Staff could not exert absolute control over the production of military equipment. They did, however, have a great deal of influence over what and how much was produced. One of the key roles played by the Combined Chiefs of Staff in regard to production during the war was to balance the production goals put forth by the prime minister, the president, themselves, and the various production bureaucracies. The Allies were vastly more effective at achieving a balanced production program with which to wage war than were the Germans.

A great many new and advanced weapons became available to the Allies early in World War II. For example, several of the finest British aircraft of the war, such as the De Havilland Mosquito, the Hawker Typhoon, and the Avro Lancaster, first became available in 1942. There were also the American-built, small, escort carriers (or “baby flattops”), which proved to be crucial to the Allied victory in the war against the U-boats. The first American escort carrier, the USS Long Island, entered service in June 1941. By early 1943 the escort carriers (or CVEs) were being mass-produced, fifty of them entering service that year.1 Allied antiaircraft defense was greatly enhanced by the introduction in January 1943 of ammunition detonated by proximity fuses—highly sophisticated devices that proved very effective. Between 1940 and 1942 the British and the Americans put into service the new battleships of the King George V, North Carolina, and South Dakota classes. These ships incorporated, in addition to heavy firepower and thick armor, many improvements—such as high speed, dozens of defensive antiaircraft guns, and radar direction for the big guns—over the World War I–era battleships in use by both nations in 1939.

The creation of the Long Island through the conversion of a merchant ship hull had predated King’s appointment as Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, as did the planning for the new 27,000-ton fleet aircraft carriers (CVs) of the Essex class. Admiral Emory S. Land, director of the Maritime Commission, was responsible for the construction of merchant shipping in the United States during the war. Land’s involvement in the process that created the Long Island–type CVE resulted from the fact that although these were warships, they were hybrids, created by “nailing down” flight decks on top of merchant-ship hulls. The approval to go ahead with the creation of the first CVE was given at a meeting that, according to Land, took place “sometime in 1940 or early 1941” between Admiral Harold R. Stark (then Chief of Naval Operations), Admiral William. V. Pratt (himself a former CNO), and three other admirals—Frederick J. Horne, Royal Ingersoll, and Land himself.2 Land gives most of the credit for the very important decision to build the Long Island to Admiral Pratt.

The American fleet was augmented also during the war by eighteen new, full-sized aircraft carriers. These ships, such as the Essex and the Bunker Hill, were more than eight hundred feet in length and capable of carrying a hundred aircraft each. They were much larger than the escort carriers and were designed to engage an enemy battle fleet. The smaller escort carriers, however, were ideal for protecting convoys from submarines by projecting air cover out into the Atlantic. In April 1942 the Long Island was still the only escort carrier in the American navy, although the Americans had seven of the large, fleet-type carriers at that time. By then, King had been the fleet commander for four months. There were plans to build thirty-one new CVEs during 1942, but such plans were being brought to the attention of the Combined Chiefs of Staff by people like Admiral Land and Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves (the latter of the Munitions Assignment Committee), not by King. Reeves understood the urgency of the German submarine menace and made ceaseless efforts to provide more and better escorts for Allied Atlantic convoys.³

The Combined Chiefs of Staff had no control over what was being produced in Russian armament factories. However, as with British and American industry, Russian industry was fully mobilized for war production right away. It became clear long before the war ended that the Allies were going to win the war of production. In addition to the impressive quantity of weapons produced in Russian factories mentioned in chapter 4, the quality of Russian weaponry was quite high. For instance, it was quite a shock for Hitler and his generals, not to mention for the ordinary German foot soldier, to learn that Russian weapons technology was considerably more advanced in several critical respects than was the arsenal of German weapons with which Hitler embarked on Barbarossa. The Russians possessed the superb T-34 and KV-1 tanks at the outset of Barbarossa, albeit not yet in the necessary quantity, while the Germans were forced to rely on inferior light and medium tanks until the first heavy Tiger tanks appeared on the battlefield in late 1942.

In terms of the production and distribution of war materiel, the Combined Chiefs of Staff dealt with an extremely wide variety of items. For example, one report sent in August 1942 by the Admiralty in London to the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington dealt with distribution schedules for many different types of munitions, including escort vessels (corvettes) built in Canada, antiaircraft guns (40-mm Bofors and 20-mm Oerlikon), torpedoes, depth charges, and carrier-based fighter aircraft.4

By mid-1944 the German Ministry of War Production, which since February 1942 had been under the direction of Albert Speer, had finally and belatedly succeeded in placing German industry on something approaching a “total war” footing. Consequently, German war industry was now producing munitions at a vastly increased tempo. Great numbers of tanks and aircraft were produced in Germany during the last year of the war; however, the industrial situation was badly out of balance. The soaring production totals of tanks and aircraft achieved under Speer’s guidance dazzled Hitler. However, the armaments minister was going for quick and sensational items that would impress the Fuehrer while ignoring less glamorous but critical production problems. For example, by late 1944 there was nowhere near enough oil being produced in Germany to supply fuel for the aircraft that were rolling out of factories. Nor were enough new pilots being trained to fly them.⁵

One CCS action that served to help place the Allied production program in balance occurred in late 1942, when the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff attempted to scale down President Roosevelt’s 1943 production goals for American aircraft. Thus it is obvious that the Combined Chiefs of Staff, unlike Speer, realized that while it was urgent for the Allies to produce as many aircraft as possible, it was equally essential that the aircraft production program take into account other pressing wartime production needs. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff showed a keen understanding of production issues when, in the fall of 1942, they were forced to rebut the president’s claims that the planned production program for American factories the next year did not provide for enough aircraft. In offering their rebuttal, the Joint Chiefs were doing their part to keep the Allied production program in balance.

Specifically, in October 1942, the president declared to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that he did not see how the Western Allies could carry out their strategic plans for 1943 unless the United States could produce at least 100,000 combat airplanes in that year.6 FDR had been informed of the more modest aircraft production goals proposed by the War Production Board. The president found these “totally inadequate to meet our obvious requirements.”⁷ He felt it was well within the industrial capability of the United States to produce 100,000 combat aircraft in 1943 without detriment to other production schedules, such as those for shipping and tanks. FDR wanted the views of the U.S. Joint Chiefs in regard to which types of aircraft would be produced and what the monthly totals for each type would be in order to reach the 100,000 threshold.⁸ He did not want to know whether they thought the goal of 100,000 aircraft was feasible, having already decided for himself that it was.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had other ideas, however. The reply of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to FDR was written by Marshall and sent to the president over Leahy’s signature as a JCS document. Marshall wrote that in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs, “The program that calls for 100,000 tactical and 31,000 training planes in the desired types, is unobtainable in 1943, even if given first call on the entire resources of the nation. Furthermore, to attempt this program would almost certainly result in a reduction in output under the present . . . program.”⁹ The U.S. Joint Chiefs did, however, feel that it would be possible to build the 82,000 combat and 25,000 training planes that had initially been planned for 1943 under the existing program. In the opinion of the Joint Chiefs, even under their more modest proposal, the production of aircraft would have to be given immediate priority status, in regard to such things as raw materials and labor allocation, over that of other military equipment. Marshall’s letter pointed out to FDR that the views of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in regard to aircraft production in the United States for 1943 had the support of Army and Navy production planners, as well as that of Donald Nelson and the War Production Board.¹⁰

There were several reason why the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff felt that the president’s program would result in a net loss rather than increased output among American aircraft factories. First, a program calling for 100,000 combat aircraft and 31,000 training planes would require that the government build thirteen new assembly and subassembly plants in the United States. Due to the difficulties involved in getting any new factory up and running, the Joint Chiefs were convinced that these new plants would not be able to produce more than five thousand airplanes between them during their first year of operation (i.e., 1943). The diversion of resources that these proposed new factories would require, in terms of raw materials, labor, and machine tools, would handicap the aircraft (and other munitions-oriented) production plants that were already in existence, thereby decreasing their output.11 Therefore, Marshall wrote, among the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff here was “general unanimity in the belief that if we set our program beyond our capacity, and give that program priorities accordingly, we will actually get fewer planes than we would produce if the objective were within practical striking distance.”¹²

Marshall conceded that the confused state of production schedules in the aircraft industry in the United States was preventing production quotas from being met. There was a great need for clarification of this vital issue. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, were convinced that the president’s plan did not represent the correct answer. By way of Marshall’s report, they therefore requested the president to agree to a 1943 aircraft production schedule that provided for 82,000 combat planes and 25,000 training planes as the best means of keeping American war production on a sound and balanced basis.¹³

The views of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff seem to have prevailed on this issue, although the output of combat planes ultimately proved lower than they had anticipated. The record shows that the United States produced 85,898 aircraft in 1943. Of these 53,343 were combat aircraft, and 7,012 were transports; the remainder consisted of training, communications, reconnaissance, and special-purpose aircraft. While the 85,898 figure was less than what the president desired, it was still more than double the combined figure for the production of German and Japanese aircraft (41,500) during 1943.¹⁴

For Air Chief Marshal Portal, the key issue in British aircraft production seems to have been which aircraft types to put into production rather than how many to produce. Portal was determined to secure the best possible aircraft for British pilots to fly. He always placed the highest premium upon producing quality aircraft, even at the risk of slowing down the production schedules somewhat. In his constant search for better aircraft designs, Portal wrote in July 1942, to Sir Archibald Sinclair, the secretary of state for air, that one promising idea that he wanted to see followed up vigorously was that of fitting the P-51 Mustang fighter plane with a British Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine. The Merlin-powered Mustang turned out to be one of the most important decisions of the war in regard to air warfare. Portal may not have been the first one to think of this idea, but he did see its merits early on and quickly became a convert. In the same letter, Portal showed himself to be an early advocate of jet-powered aircraft.15 His early and firm backing in this area is one of the reasons why the British were able to get a jet-powered fighter plane, the Gloster Meteor, into production and into service in 1944—long before the United States was to have an operational, combat-ready jet fighter of its own.

Portal became involved in an interesting production debate with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in regard to a highly advanced fighter plane designed by Folland Aircraft in response to a requirement known as Air Ministry Specification F. 6/42. Portal felt the Folland to be an excellent design that could be a worthy successor to the Hawker Typhoon. He became involved in a running argument over the Folland fighter with Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid R. Freeman, the chief executive of the Ministry of Aircraft Production under Sir Stafford Cripps, minister of aircraft production. Portal respected Freeman due to the latter’s considerable experience in aircraft development gained during high-level tours of duty at the Air Ministry in the prewar and early wartime periods. From 1936 to 1938, Freeman had been Air Member for Research and Development at the Air Ministry. From 1938 to 1940, he had been Air Member for Development and Production. In May 1940, Freeman’s entire Development and Production Department was removed from the Air Ministry and placed in the new Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP).

This is the reason for Britain’s aircraft production miracles that followed during the Battle of Britain. Lord Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production at that time had a ready store of technical expertise to draw upon from RAF personnel like Freeman whom he (Beaverbrook) inherited in 1940. From May to November 1940, Freeman worked for Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. The two men did not get along. In November 1940, shortly after Portal became chief of the Air Staff, Freeman returned to the Air Ministry as vice chief of the Air Staff. In 1942, the year in which Freeman and Portal began to debate the Folland fighter design, Freeman retired from the RAF, but he retained the title of Air Chief Marshal. The reason for his retirement was to be able to return to the Ministry of Aircraft Production in October 1942, after Beaverbrook was gone, this time as chief executive, under Sir Stafford Cripps. In this capacity, Freeman ran the day-to-day operations of the Ministry of Aircraft Production under Cripps during the midwar period. Freeman and the MAP staff felt the Folland fighter plane was too heavy. They favored the Hawker Tempest, a design Portal thought inferior to the Folland F. 6/42.16

The chief of the Air Staff informed Sinclair that the Ministry of Aircraft production should press ahead with the Folland fighter, a new design, and regard the Tempest (which, in two variants, was an upgraded Typhoon) as a stopgap.¹⁷ Portal agreed with Sinclair and Freeman that “the Tempest is an altogether better fighter than the Typhoon, and we are counting on it to replace the Typhoon as soon as possible.”¹⁸ He urged Freeman to see that the MAP placed both the Tempest I and II into production immediately.¹⁹ This did not mean, however, that the Tempest was a good enough airplane to satisfy Portal’s exacting standards.

In explaining the need for Britain to develop a new high-performance fighter plane, such as the Folland F. 6/42, Portal wrote to Sinclair that “the trend of German design as exemplified by the F.W. 190, is towards a light, high powered, heavily armed machine with good climbing qualities and manoeuverability. If this development is to be adequately matched we need a new type with similar characteristics, designed ab initio. So much may depend on this type that the best designers in the industry should be asked to concentrate on it.”²⁰ One reason Portal felt the Folland to be such an advanced design was that though a single-engine airplane, it had two contra-rotating propellers, mounted one immediately behind the other on telescoped shafts, giving extra pulling power.²¹

Freeman informed Portal in December 1942 of another reason (in addition to the question of weight) for the reluctance of the Ministry of Aircraft Production to put the Folland fighter into production. Freeman felt sure that it would take more than two years to get the Folland F. 6/42, as a new airplane, into production. He was equally sure that the Tempest II would be rolling off assembly lines by early 1944.²² Quite bluntly, Freeman thus told Portal that “I expect therefore that you will prefer to drop any idea of the Folland as an F. 6/42 aircraft.”²³

Portal lost this argument. The Folland fighter never went into production. In retrospect, the Royal Air Force might well have been better served if Portal’s advice had been heeded. Freeman’s confidence in the ability of the Ministry of Aircraft Production to get the Tempest II quickly into full production proved to be unfounded. It was October 1944 before the Royal Air Force received its first Tempest IIs, and then only in small quantities. Fewer than 175 Tempest IIs were produced before the end of the war. None of these ever saw combat. A different version of the airplane, the Tempest V, encountered fewer production problems and was available earlier and in greater numbers. Between April 1944 and the war’s end, several hundred Tempest Vs saw action in RAF service. The Tempest V was, in fact, the only version of the Tempest to engage enemy forces during the war. When the Tempest II finally began to operate with the Royal Air Force in the postwar era, the influence of the Folland fighter was evident in its design.24 For example, like the Folland, the Tempest II incorporated an air-cooled radial engine, a power plant Portal felt would be better able to withstand battle damage than a liquid-cooled, in-line engine.²⁵ The effect of the Folland upon the design of the Tempest II went beyond the choice of an engine, as Portal explained in frustration to an unimpressed Freeman: “Here was a design [the Folland] so much ahead of its competitors that we have been compelled to incorporate as much of it as possible into the most promising of the contemporary fighters. . . . Surely it [the Folland] must have shown outstanding merits if it was the cause of the complete redesign of the Tempest II.”²⁶

Whether at the Ministry of Aircraft Production or as Portal’s deputy at the Air Ministry in the role of vice chief of the Air Staff, Freeman was highly loyal to Portal, and the two men were good friends. Freeman advised Portal on personnel issues as well as aircraft designs. Portal felt Freeman to be a brilliant man, even when they disagreed. Portal admired Freeman for always giving his true opinions, without feeling any need to be polite.²⁷

Portal and his American CCS counterpart, General Arnold, did not always recognize the potential of new aircraft that they examined, however. The commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces exercised virtually complete control of the American aircraft industry during the war. For example, shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack the chief executive officer of the Republic Aircraft Corporation was fired on Arnold’s orders because the general regarded him as a stumbling block on the road to the increased production of P-47 fighter aircraft. In 1938, Arnold had informed Harry Hopkins that the new government-financed aircraft factories then being planned for construction in the United States would have to use modern production-line methods instead of the old handcrafted processes by which aircraft had hitherto been produced. It is therefore ironic that Arnold was slow to appreciate the merits of the North American P-51 Mustang, which was destined to be the war’s greatest fighter plane.28 Similarly, in late 1940 Portal indicated that he saw little use for the De Havilland Mosquito, which was also to attain immortal status as a superb and versatile combat aircraft.²⁹ To his credit, however, it seems that Portal was not the only one to underestimate this new type. Sir Archibald Sinclair, the secretary of state for air, also expressed grave doubts about the Mosquito at that time.³⁰ Portal’s friend and adviser, the aforementioned Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman, was right about this one. Freeman had pressed relentlessly and eventually successfully to get the Mosquito into production.³¹

While the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were attempting to get the president’s approval for a balanced aircraft production program for 1943, the British Joint War Production Staff (JWPS) was, ironically, informing the British Chiefs of Staff that the Americans were not doing nearly enough to achieve balanced production. Specifically, the British felt that virtually all of the various American munitions production programs were adopting goals far beyond the actual production capabilities of the United States. The blame for this turn of events was, according to the British production planners, shared by all the American services. They did, however, feel that the U.S. Army was the worst offender in setting overly ambitious production goals not related to strategic needs. To the British it seemed that the unbalance and decentralization of the American production system would, if not rectified immediately, have a detrimental effect upon Allied strategy as a whole. On a more specific note, the British planners also felt that the overextended priorities and goals of munitions production in the United States would deprive Britain (and other Allied nations) of finished military equipment and raw materials that had been promised to them by the Americans.³²

To illustrate their concerns, the British JWPS cited several examples. They mentioned that it was the intention of the president to see that the American Maritime Commission produced in American shipyards 24,000,000 deadweight tons of new merchant shipping during 1942 and 1943. However, the Maritime Commission was not being given nearly enough steel to accomplish this objective. One reason for this disparity between goals and raw materials was that the Americans were also planning to build 90,000 tanks during 1943. The British found this to be astonishing—under such a program the Americans would have enough tanks to equip two hundred armored divisions. At its peak strength during the war the American army never contained more than ninety divisions, the majority of which were infantry.33 The British noted that in terms of steel allotments “tank production is directly competitive with shipbuilding.”³⁴

Another area in which the Americans were, according to the British Joint War Production Staff, badly out of step in regard to matching production goals with strategic reality was in the matter of ordnance. The Americans hoped to produce in 1943 enough aerial bombs to enable their aircraft to drop 180,000 tons each month. The British had found that between the outbreak of the war and June 1942, the Royal Air Force had never dropped more than seven thousand tons of bombs in a single month.³⁵ While it is true that at that time the full weight of the combined bomber offensive had yet to be felt, the British already had some large-scale raids behind them. For example, in May 1942 RAF Bomber Command had carried out the famous “thousand bomber” raid against Cologne.

The conflicts within the Allied production program as it stood in October 1942 were summed up by the British JWPS as follows:

The result of the absence of combined strategic requirements, therefore, is that a vast American production of war equipment is being developed, which bears no relationship to the amounts required for effective use against the enemy. . . . The seriousness of the situation lies in the fact that in the pressure which is developing upon United States supplies of raw materials and productive facilities, strategically necessary requirements are being squeezed out in favour of requirements for forces which cannot conceivably be engaged against the enemy in 1943.³⁶

They felt that the situation could be rectified if the British and the Americans adhered to what the British planners referred to as “a combined Order of Battle.” Such a document could serve as a blueprint of production requirements for the Allies on a theater-by-theater basis. By determining the equipment, munitions, and troop needs of each individual theater of operations, the British JWPS felt, a much more precise picture of Allied production needs could be obtained than was possible under the current system. As it was, production requirements were based upon the anticipated needs of Allied forces the world over, regardless of whether those forces were stationed in highly active theaters, such as the Central Pacific, or relatively quiet ones, such as the Caribbean Defense Command.37

A semblance of order seems to have been brought to the Allied production situation by the following summer—at least according to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. They informed the president in July 1943 that in their opinion the military production programs in the United States “are in an excellent state of balance at present.”³⁸ Munitions production schedules were being met, the shipping situation had improved dramatically, and the threat of the U-boats was waning. Allied merchant ship convoys now enjoyed heavy escort from warships. This meant that Allied forces overseas were receiving all the supplies and equipment they required in order to undertake offensive operations.³⁹ In order to allow this favorable state of balance to continue, the Joint Chiefs of Staff noted, “shipping must not be permitted to get ahead of the flow of munitions or beyond the capacity of the Navy to provide appropriate escort.”⁴⁰

The problem of naval escorts was crucial. A key Allied strategy in the war against the German submarines that haunted the Atlantic shipping lanes was simply to build freighters and tankers faster than the Germans could sink them. In June 1942, the Combined Staff planners warned their CCS superiors that such a policy was far more complicated than it appeared to be. The Combined Staff planners had themselves been advised by two admirals, the American Joseph Mason Reeves and British rear admiral J. W. S. Dorling, that it would be reckless to concentrate simply on building more and more merchant ships unless this building was accompanied by corresponding construction of escort vessels, such as corvettes and destroyers, with which to protect merchant shipping from submarine attack.⁴¹ Admiral Reeves (not to be confused with Rear Admiral J. W. Reeves, a carrier-division commander in the famed Task Force 58, the “muscle” of the U.S. Fifth Fleet)⁴² had served as Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet during the 1930s.⁴³ Admiral Dorling was attached to the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington.

Reeves and Dorling constituted the Munitions Assignment Committee (Navy) of the Combined Munitions Assignment Board—the latter being one of the ten subcommittees of the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization. They warned that should the Allies reduce the number of escorts built in order to concentrate on merchant ships, the gap between new tonnage being built and losses due to U-boat attack would never be completely closed. Indeed, Reeves and Dorling stated that under such a scenario there would actually be a net loss (due to sinkings) in the American merchant fleet of over 5 percent by the end of 1943 despite a projected building program that would most likely have delivered 26,500,000 tons of new merchant shipping by that time. They wanted twenty new escort vessels for every one hundred new cargo ships, instead of the 7. 3 escorts per hundred cargo ships then prevailing in American convoys.44

Reeves and Dorling found a receptive audience in the Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral King fully supported their efforts to get more escorts built quickly. King had felt in the summer of 1942 that a previous report from the Combined Staff planners had been overly optimistic in predicting that, even without drastic measures, Allied merchant sinkings would soon begin to decline. He feared that such unfounded optimism might divert attention from the pressing need to build more escorts.⁴⁵ King urged that all Allied convoys be given adequate escort and that “killer groups” be allowed to branch off “to destroy submarines once contact has been made”—a tactic that would demand even more escorts, in addition to those earmarked for convoy duty.⁴⁶ He felt that escort vessels should be given an even higher priority than merchant ships in Allied building schedules.⁴⁷ In June 1942 King stated that he was “of the opinion that the war cannot be won until the submarine menace has been removed. Escort vessels in adequate numbers are absolutely vital to the defeat of the enemy’s submarine campaign.”⁴⁸ King’s views on this issue were entirely in agreement with those of his British CCS counterpart, Admiral Pound. As we have seen in his order to the Naval Staff in July 1943 that he be notified in advance of any plan to remove any British warship from convoy escort duty, Pound was determined that the Allies maintain as many submarine-hunting ships as possible on duty in the Atlantic sea-lanes.⁴⁹

King and Pound were not, it seems, immediately successful in convincing their colleagues on the Combined Chiefs of Staff of the urgency of the Battle of the Atlantic. It took some time for escort vessels to receive the priority in regard to production that they deserved. A January 1943 message on the subject from Leahy to the Combined Production and Resources Board (CPRB) probably should have been sent six months earlier. In it Leahy informed the board that the Battle of the Atlantic was in a critical phase, with sinkings at an alarmingly high level.⁵⁰ In spelling out the need for urgent Allied action against the U-boats, Leahy informed the CPRB that the Combined Chiefs of Staff “desire that you adopt every means possible to effect an immediate acceleration and expansion of the escort vessel construction program, and also that you submit a report to them as to the effects of such expansion on other critical items of munitions.”51

Admiral King’s role as Chief of Naval Operations in the production and distribution of munitions and supplies was often, but not always, helpful. In February 1943 King dispatched a memo to his commanders of the U.S. Pacific and Atlantic Fleets (Admirals Chester W. Nimitz and Royal Ingersoll, respectively) stating that the emergency that had begun with the Pearl Harbor attack had set off a dizzying increase in the production and distribution of all kinds of munitions and supplies. Now that the situation had stabilized, King felt that it was time to find out exactly what was in the supply pipeline and to get that material out to the fighting areas.⁵² He urged the two commanders to “take all steps to eliminate the stagnation in the reservoirs of materials of all kinds—munitions, supplies, stores, spare parts, etc.; reduce the size of the reservoirs of materials to the practicable minimum; and, generally, see to it that the flow of materials through the pipelines—to the operating forces—is as direct and as adequate as naval efficiency can make it.”⁵³

King’s approach to other logistical issues did not always have such a sensible ring to it. Waiting until the summer of 1942, as we have seen, to organize the merchant ships traveling up and down the east coast of the United States into coastal convoys was a major error on King’s part. Consequently, the six months following the Pearl Harbor attack saw marauding packs of U-boats sinking American ships at will a few miles off the beaches from Cape Cod to Florida.⁵⁴ Also, in regard to the aforementioned escort carriers, King’s biographer has noted that the impetus for their construction did not come from King.⁵⁵

Wartime Diplomacy

The diplomatic skills of the Combined Chiefs were much in demand during the war, especially in the case of the Americans. In London, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was kept abreast of all important war information by Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff. The American situation was somewhat more muddled. In addition to its absence, noted earlier, from big wartime conferences such as Teheran, the U.S. State Department in general lacked influence during the war and was in disarray. For example, the American ambassador in London, John G. Winant, was forced to get most of his war information from the British, due to the fact that his superiors in Washington failed to keep him informed of new developments.56

Perhaps it would have been better if the U.S. State Department had been kept more in the loop during the war. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were at times heavy-handed diplomats, to say the least, intervening in diplomatic matters without consulting the State Department or their British CCS colleagues. This characteristic is nowhere more apparent than in the enthusiastic response in September 1943 by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to the news that the government of Portugal had agreed, effective October 8, 1943, to allow the British to use the Azores as an air base. The Americans were eager to use the Azores themselves as a staging and refueling base on their aircraft ferry route, and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff wishfully concluded that the United States was automatically included in the agreement for the use of the islands. The actual situation was far more complicated and called for delicate handling. Even General Marshall appears to have been uncharacteristically blind to the delicacy of the Azores situation as the Americans plowed ahead like bulls in a china shop.

American aircraft were already using a northern ferry route (Newfoundland–Greenland–Iceland–Scotland), as well as a southern route that involved flights from Brazil to West Africa. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were certain that an Azores base would allow a more expeditious transfer of American aircraft to the European theater than the rather circuitous southern route. Accordingly, the Americans wanted to put the Azores into their ferry air route right away and on a large scale. The British chiefs urged a more cautious and gradual approach, in which the activities of the Americans would initially be cloaked “under British cover.”⁵⁷ There were good reasons for caution on the part of the British Chiefs of Staff. The government of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal had not known that through its deal with the British it was granting the United States a major air base. The agreement governing the use of the islands had been negotiated by Britain and Portugal alone, having been made possible by the existence of a formal treaty of alliance between the two nations dating back to 1373. Even with the alliance, the negotiations over the use of the islands as a British base had been quite delicate, owing to Portugal’s neutrality in the war. The completed agreement (signed by a representative of the British Chiefs of Staff, Air Vice Marshal C. E. H. Medhurst, and Vice Admiral Alfredo Botelho De Sousa of Portugal) therefore stipulated that Britain was to keep the size of its Azores garrison force to an absolute minimum.58

The British were proud of the fact that they had reached this agreement all on their own, without any help from the United States. They did not, therefore, appreciate the overzealous attitude of the Americans.⁵⁹ After the British had done all of the negotiating, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were proceeding with what would essentially constitute American annexation of the islands.⁶⁰ For example, in regard to the island of Terceira, the Americans urged the immediate construction of “one landplane base at Lagens Field with two 7,000 ft. runways for air transport and ferry operations, and accommodations for 3,500 personnel.”⁶¹ British anxiety was heightened further by the fact that the Americans also wanted to station four squadrons of long-range maritime patrol aircraft on Terceira for hunting German U-boats in the Bay of Biscay.⁶² For the islands as a whole, the Americans intended to station 6,800 army and 1,400 naval personnel.⁶³ All this when the entire British garrison for the Azores was to number no more than two thousand.⁶⁴ In reaction to the extensive American demands in regard to the use of bases in the Azores, the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington lamented that “the whole principle of the permanent stationing of U.S. ground forces in the islands is one that will cause great difficulty with the Portuguese.”⁶⁵ George Kennan was stationed in Lisbon at the time and was horrified at the manner in which the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were running roughshod over the Portuguese government. It is interesting to speculate how far his firsthand knowledge of the heavy-handedness of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of War Henry Stimson during this particular foray into wartime diplomacy may have influenced Kennan in his determination three years later, when he wrote the Long Telegram, to be sure that policy makers in Washington understood what was really going on overseas.⁶⁶

One of the more interesting episodes of CCS wartime diplomacy had to do with the unusual career of the Gripsholm, an 18,000-ton passenger liner of the Swedish American Line. As we have seen, the American members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff exercised considerable control over the allocation and utilization of American merchant shipping. For the most part, this shipping consisted of troopships, freighters, and tankers. The Gripsholm, whose prewar career had been devoted to carrying passengers back and forth across the Atlantic between Stockholm and New York, as well as occasional cruises to the Bahamas or the Mediterranean, was used for a different purpose: between March 1942 and March 1946 the ship was chartered by the U.S. government at a cost of $17,000 per day to serve as a mercy ship in affiliation with the International Red Cross.67 In this role, the Gripsholm was used by the Americans “to carry exchange prisoners-of-war, children, diplomats, repatriated seamen and Allied nationals with neutral status.”⁶⁸ Typical of the wartime voyages of the Gripsholm was one in March 1944 in which the ship carried more than six hundred Americans from the Far East to New York. Some of these passengers were American POWs. The remainder were American women and children trapped in Japan by the outbreak of the war.⁶⁹

To carry out these voyages safely, the Gripsholm was entitled to the same kind of immunity from attack that was granted under international law to hospital ships. To receive this protection the Gripsholm was forced to adhere to the same sort of rules that governed the passage of hospital ships through combat areas. The entire ship was given a coat of white paint, and along each side the word “Diplomat” was spelled out in large black letters, more than five feet from top to bottom. This brightly marked hull was fully illuminated during the hours of darkness, in sharp contrast to the blackouts imposed on convoys and combat vessels.⁷⁰ Other rules governing the use of hospital and mercy ships stipulated that such vessels could not travel in convoy, were forbidden from steaming in a zigzag pattern, and could not be used to carry military equipment, munitions, or combat troops.⁷¹

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff faced a pressing problem in regard to the Gripsholm in the autumn of 1943. By that time, the Joint Chiefs had been made aware of the mistreatment of American prisoners of war, such as the survivors of the Bataan Death March, who were suffering terribly in Japanese camps. Marshall, King, Arnold, and Leahy were also aware of the potential propaganda value these atrocity stories held for the American war effort. The difficulty lay in the fact that the Gripsholm was then in the midst of a voyage carrying Japanese civilians home from the United States. In return for the safe passage of its own citizens on board the Gripsholm, the Japanese government had agreed to release a group of American citizens and to distribute Red Cross parcels and food being carried by the Gripsholm to American prisoners of war being held in the Philippines. (This exchange took place at Mormugao, a Portuguese-controlled port on the west coast of India approximately 250 miles south of Bombay.) The Joint Chiefs felt that once the ship docked, it would take from three to six months for the supplies to reach the American POWs.⁷²

The president wanted the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as to when it might be advisable to publicize the atrocity stories brought back by American POWs who had escaped from Japanese camps without detriment to the ability of the Gripsholm to deliver its present cargo, and any future cargoes, of food and medicine to American prisoners being held by the Japanese. FDR also wanted to be certain that such stories, if and when they were made available to the American public, did not cause the Japanese to react by worsening the conditions under which American prisoners were living. Interestingly, the president sought the views of Stimson, Knox, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff but not of the State Department on this issue.73

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with the president that the best course of action for the immediate future was to refrain from informing the American public as to the conditions under which American prisoners of war were living. Like him, they felt that it was imperative that the mercy missions of the Gripsholm be continued without interference.⁷⁴ The Joint Chiefs were aware of how acute was the need of American prisoners of war for relief supplies. According to Admiral Leahy, “American officers who have escaped from Japanese prison camps have stated that conditions in these camps could scarcely be much worse and that unless such conditions are improved within a short time very few of the American prisoners will survive. They agree that Red Cross food and supplies are of paramount importance to these prisoners at the present time.”⁷⁵ General Marshall felt that the Joint Staff planners should periodically review the situation with a view toward ascertaining the appropriate time when the atrocity stories in regard to Japanese treatment of American prisoners of war could be released to the American public without detriment to the safety of those prisoners.⁷⁶

The subject of the Gripsholm presented the Combined Chiefs with problems similar to those encountered in regard to the related issue of hospital ships. For example, after the Australian hospital ship Centaur was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Pacific, the Combined Chiefs of Staff opposed immediate retaliation in kind. In urging restraint in the form of allowing continued safe passage for Japanese hospital ships, the CCS was certainly motivated by a desire to keep from giving the Axis the opportunity to produce effective anti-Allied propaganda. Its members had other reasons as well, however. The Americans conceded the possibility that the attack on the Centaur might have been accidental. The Americans themselves had accidentally attacked four Italian hospital ships; upon realizing their error, the Americans had issued a formal apology to the Italian government. The American members of the Combined Chiefs felt that the best way to respond to the Centaur incident would be to continue to refrain from attacking Japanese hospital ships unless and until the Japanese should sink any more Allied hospital ships. The primary reason that the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed retaliatory attacks against Axis hospital ships was the pragmatic one that, as they were aware, the Allies were operating more hospital ships than Germany and Japan combined. Those ships would, of course, have been themselves endangered if the Allies began making retaliatory attacks against Japanese hospital ships to avenge the Centaur.77

An additional problem for the Combined Chiefs in this regard was that as the tide of the war turned against Japan there were rumors that the Japanese might, out of desperation, be using their own hospital ships for military purposes. Specifically, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff reported in June 1943 that “there have been numerous reports, not verified, that [Japanese] hospital ships have been used to transport troops and materials of war. . . . Some [of same] are reported to have been steering zig-zag courses.”⁷⁸ In December 1943, the Japanese government lodged a formal complaint against the United States stating that American forces had attacked four Japanese hospital ships in the Pacific. The U.S. State Department, to which this document had been forwarded by the Spanish embassy in Washington, sought an advisory opinion from the Joint Chiefs of Staff as to how to reply. The British government had also received a copy of this complaint. Both the Americans and the British customarily issued formal replies to the Japanese in these instances, whether or not they admitted guilt in the specific attacks concerned.⁷⁹

That there was any diplomatic activity between the Western Allies and Japan is surprising in view of the ferocity of the conflict in the Pacific and Far East. For instance, British troops captured when the Japanese army overran Burma, Malaya, and Singapore in 1942 suffered terribly for the remainder of the war. They were used for forced labor under intolerable working conditions on projects like the Burma–Siam railway; the death toll among the POWs due to abuse and neglect was very high.⁸⁰ The bitterness with which the two sides fought each other in the Pacific is apparent in the island campaigns, such as at Tarawa, where when the smoke cleared in November 1943 the victorious Americans took only seventeen prisoners out of a Japanese/Korean garrison of 4,500 that had been on the island when the assault began.

The diplomatic skills of the British Chiefs of Staff were repeatedly put to the test by the difficulties of British personnel serving in the Soviet Union with No. 30 Mission. Its commander, Lieutenant General Giffard Martel, appealed to the British Chiefs of Staff Committee in July 1943 on behalf of two British soldiers under his command who were facing the prospect of harsh disciplinary action from Russian authorities for an unnamed, but apparently minor, offense. The British chiefs got to the point quickly in their reply to Martel: “Reference your Mil. 9522 Foreign Office have decided in first instance approach Americans with view to joint representation to Russians that service personnel should be tried by their own Authorities. Meantime do not hand over Pte. Spencer or Sgt. Ryan without further instructions. . . . Hoping to obtain Foreign Office approval instruct you embark these men for U.K. earliest.”81

One highly volatile diplomatic crisis into which the Combined Chiefs of Staff were drawn began during the final days of the war in Europe. At that time it seemed possible that British and American troops might actually come to blows with the Yugoslav forces of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. The American, British, and Russian governments were most anxious that this not happen, especially since Tito’s forces had been an effective part of the anti-German wartime coalition. In the final days of the European war, in early May 1945, as the inter-Allied 15th Army Group was driving German forces out of northern Italy, it became apparent that Tito’s forces were intent upon installing themselves in as much Italian territory as they could. The Western Allies found it highly objectionable that Tito should seize Italian territory. Particularly sensitive in this regard was the port of Trieste, which the Allies badly needed for supply purposes. Eventually, the Trieste issue was settled peacefully to Allied satisfaction.⁸² However, the Combined Chiefs of Staff had prepared a number of documents outlining strategies that Allied forces should adopt should the Trieste situation escalate. These documents show that while the Combined Chiefs hoped to avoid armed conflict with Yugoslav troops, they were determined nevertheless to secure Allied interests at all costs. One such CCS directive, written by the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, informed British Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, the Allied theater commander in the Mediterranean, “In the event of refusal by Marshal Tito to comply with demands of His Majesty’s Government and United States Government you will, on instructions from us, eject (using force if necessary) all Yugoslav forces from southern Austria, Trieste, Gorizia, Montfalcone, Pola and such areas of Venezia Giulia as are necessary in order to secure and protect your lines of communication to Austria.”83 Although this directive never had to be carried out, the Combined Chiefs of Staff were clearly in the thick of the crisis over Yugoslav forces in northern Italy and the Balkans.⁸⁴

In both the production and diplomatic spheres, then, the members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff proved that they were a farsighted and multitalented group of individuals—although they were capable of overstepping, as in the case of Portugal and the Azores. Their ability to take on such responsibilities in addition to developing campaign strategies serves as evidence that the Combined Chiefs were uniquely suited to operating within a modern coalition at war.