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Mark A. Stoler; From Continentalism to Globalism: General Stanley D. Embick, the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, and the Military View of American National Policy during the Second World War, Diplomatic History, Volume 6, Issue 3, 1 July 1982, Pages 303–321, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.1982.tb00378.x
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The years from 1939 to 1945 witnessed a revolution in the definition and scope of American foreign and defense policies. Nowhere was the impact of this revolution more profound than within the U.S. Army, where a global concept of military strategy and national interests replaced a prewar, isolationist emphasis on continental defense and self-sufficiency. Historians have noted the importance of this global redefinition of strategy and policy in both the achievement of victory over the Axis powers and the origins of the Cold War.1 Little attention has been given, however, to the process by which this redefinition took place, or the degree to which prewar continentalist doctrines survived Pearl Harbor to influence wartime strategy and the military view of postwar national policy. Both the continued influence of continentalism and its gradual dissolution during the war are clearly illustrated through an examination of the ideas enunciated by one of the most important but least recognized U.S. wartime strategists, Lieutenant General Stanley D. Embick, and the Joint Strategic Survey Committee on which he served.
Born in 1877 and commissioned from West Point in 1899, Embick had risen gradually from a second lieutenant of artillery to chief of the army's War Plans Division and deputy chief of staff. By 1941 he was one of the most respected and influential senior strategists within the armed forces. In the process he also had become a firm believer in American isolation from European and Far Eastern conflicts as well as a vociferous champion of a continental national policy and defense posture.2
Embick was by no means the only army officer to hold such beliefs before the outbreak of the Second World War. During the interwar years numerous army planners had embraced a series of isolationist ideas then prevalent within American society: that wars were primarily economic in origin; that America was self-sufficient and by no means dependent on the foreign trade which so often led to war; that participation in World War I had been an avoidable aberration caused at least in part by duplicitous British policies; that the traditional American policy of steering clear of European entanglements remained viable; and that the United States could and should eschew overseas commitments and concentrate instead on a continental economy and defense policy. Throughout the 1930s such ideas led Embick and many other army planners to call not only for noninvolvement in Europe but also for a drastic revision of War Plan ORANGE, the contingency plan for war with Japan, and for a complete American withdrawal from the Far East and Western Pacific.3
Embick's own espousal of these ideas appears to have stemmed as much from his early career experiences as from the general interwar political environment that so influenced many of his colleagues. According to one historian, he retained throughout his life the strategic outlook “of a coastal artillery officer, conceiving of the continental United States as a citadel and its overseas possessions as outposts of the main fortress,” which could be sacrificed without undue damage to national security.4 To that outlook was added a deep distrust of British policies and politicians, acquired when he served during World War I as an aide to General Tasker H. Bliss on the Allied Supreme War Council and at the Versailles Peace Conference. Watching the attempted manipulation of American troops by British leaders to achieve political objectives in peripheral areas, Embick soon concluded that these men also had manipulated the United States into a needless war and would do so again if it would serve their interests.5
During the 1930s, Embick worked to prevent a repeat performance of 1917 by calling for American withdrawal from all overseas commitments and a subsequent concentration on continental defense. The Pacific, he maintained as early as 1930, would never become the greater theater of world activity that Americans since William Seward had predicted it would. Furthermore, unlike Britain, the United States was virtually self-sufficient and possessed such abundant resources as to make foreign trade and any other overseas interests very minor and inconsequential national goals.6
Citing these facts as well as the progressive weakening of America's Far Eastern position over a twenty-five-year period, Embick in 1933 and 1935 labeled the Philippines a “military liability of constantly increasing gravity” and warned that any attempt to carry out War Plan ORANGE “would be literally an act of madness.” Rather than press for increasing defenses in the area, he called for complete American withdrawal to the line of Alaska-Oahu-Panama on the grounds that the United States had no vital interests in the Far East and that creation of sufficient defenses would be a “highly provocative” move that would force an unnecessary military confrontation with Japan.7
Embick did not limit his analysis to the Far East or his audience to other military planners. His emphasis on a continental national policy, combined with his beliefs about the First World War, led him to warn against any American involvement in the growing European crisis during the 1930s and to support Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy. When he found his calls for strategic reassessment in the Pacific overruled, he openly associated himself with Frederick J. Libby's National Council for the Prevention of War in an effort to influence the public at large as well as fellow officers. Throughout 1939 and 1940, Embick attacked American interventionists for repeating the mistakes that had led to U.S. entry into World War I and continued to call for noninvolvement in Europe, withdrawal in the Far East, rapprochement with Japan, and an emphasis on continental defense.8
Despite this anti-interventionist stance, Embick was forced to realize by 1940 that public opinion and administration policies could easily lead the United States into a global war, requiring both an alliance with Britain and the projection of American forces overseas. In June of that year he therefore approved RAINBOW 5, the Europe-oriented war plan for such a contingency, “since public opinion may force us into the war.”9 Six months later he served as head of the U.S. delegation to the combined Anglo-American staff conversations, during which this approach was formalized in ABC-1.
Embick's agreement to this global, interventionist strategy was a bit misleading, however. Like many other American planners he did not view RAINBOW 5 or ABC-1 as a call for massive and immediate American intervention in Europe in alliance with Great Britain. While allowing for that possibility should the United States ignore his warnings and become a full-scale belligerent, Embick remained much more concerned in 1940 and 1941 with staying out of war and concentrating forces in the United States for continental and hemispheric defense. Blocking such a concentration was the old American emphasis on the Pacific, as epitomized in War Plan ORANGE and recently restated in RAINBOW 2 (which Embick disapproved while agreeing to RAINBOW 5), and recent British suggestions at the ABC talks that the United States help protect Singapore in any coalition against the Axis.10 RAINBOW 5 and ABC-1 effectively eliminated both threats by directing American attention away from the Pacific and, therefore, received Embick's endorsement. For the rest of 1941 he emphasized continental and hemispheric defense and fiercely resisted as militarily unsound and contrary to American interests all suggestions that the United States dispatch armed convoys into the Atlantic and an American expeditionary force to North Africa. British requests in this regard, he argued, constituted an attempt once again to drag the United States into a needless war and manipulate strategy so that American forces could protect British imperial interests in the Mediterranean.11
These views and statements did not diminish Embick's enormous influence with his military and civilian superiors. To the contrary, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall recalled Embick to active duty in 1941 and relied upon him so consistently that he became known as the Chief of Staff's senior military adviser. Embick's opposition to armed convoys and British Mediterranean strategy was brought to the attention of both Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It apparently played a key role in convincing the president to drop his 1941 plans for armed escorts in the Atlantic and American military intervention in North Africa. Stimson noted later in the year that Embick was “one of our very best strategists—a retired general whom we all rely on, including the president….”12
In 1942, Embick was appointed army representative to the Joint Strategic Survey Committee (JSSC), an extraordinary body that would become one of the most influential planning agencies in the wartime armed forces. Staffed by three senior officers appointed to advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) on the broad aspects of and relationship between strategy and national policy, the JSSC quickly became known as the group of “elder statesmen” who counseled the JCS on all global strategic and political matters, represented them at wartime diplomatic conferences, and served as liaison with the State Department.13 According to the official JCS history, the committee was “probably the most influential element” of the entire JCS organization, and one historian has aptly described the group as “at times equal in influence” to the Joint Chiefs themselves.14 Between 1943 and 1945 the JSSC would produce a series of papers that constitute, in original form, the eventual JCS position on virtually every wartime and postwar military issue with political overtones.
These papers offer detailed insights into the military's wartime view of appropriate American national policies, with special emphasis on interallied relations, territorial matters, and the relationship between strategy and policy. Not surprisingly, many of them repeat and amplify aspects of Embick's earlier continentalist views, most notably his antipathy toward Britain and any involvement in European politics. Simultaneously, they illustrate the gradual dissolution of his continentalism under the impact of domestic and international events and its replacement by late 1945 with a global concept of national security.
The JSSC at first concentrated on explaining and resolving the bitter debate that had emerged between the JCS and the British over proper strategy in the European theater. Despite Embick's previous warnings regarding British Mediterranean strategy and the subsequent efforts of the Joint Chiefs to focus Allied attention on cross-channel operations, London had succeeded in talking President Roosevelt into a 1942 invasion of North Africa and what appeared to be an open-ended 1943 commitment to the Mediterranean. Humiliated and angered by their defeat, the JCS requested guidance from their elder statesmen. What they received was a repetition and detailed explanation of Embick's earlier comments regarding the divergence between British and American strategies and interests in Europe that was now coupled with a new emphasis on a vigorous national policy and strategy in the Far East.15
In a series of detailed analyses in 1943, the JSSC described British Mediterranean strategy as motivated by a desire to accomplish the “foremost aims” of Britain's national policy in the past and present—retention and expansion of its overseas empire and preservation of the balance of power in Europe. The Mediterranean strategy would accomplish these goals by deploying Anglo-American forces in areas of imperial interest for purposes of postwar control, by avoiding heavy British casualties that could lead to a postwar decline in imperial strength, and by delaying German surrender until “military attrition and civilian famine” had so weakened the Soviet Union as to allow a balance of power to reemerge in postwar Europe. Placing British forces in the eastern Mediterranean would further aid in this restoration of the balance of power by allowing London to continue its centuries-old policy of blocking Soviet control of the Dardanelles. Simultaneously, the JSSC argued, it would enable Winston Churchill to prove his “indirect and eccentric” World War I peripheral ideas correct.16
Such an approach, the JSSC further argued, was militarily and politically unsound. It involved operations too remote and geographically separated from the center of German power to be decisive, was based on the dubious assumption that peripheral activities could force a collapse inside Germany, and ignored the fact that the Soviet Union might become so suspicious and hostile as a result of this approach as to sign a separate peace with Germany that would grant Soviet postwar control of the Dardanelles; such a separate peace would make victory impossible. Equally important, according to the JSSC, the Mediterranean approach was antithetical to American national policy objectives. Reverting to Embick's prewar position, the committee argued that, unlike Britain, the United States had no need for either a European balance of power or an overseas empire and therefore had nothing to gain politically by pursuing a Mediterranean strategy. The United States did have a lot to lose, however, for this time-consuming peripheral approach delayed decisive action against Japan, thereby negatively affecting U.S. Far Eastern interests.17
Unlike the United States, the committee noted that Britain did not consider China important and assumed that Japan's defeat could be postponed indefinitely without any serious military or political consequences. The U.S. policy of preserving and building up Nationalist China, the incessant demands by the Chinese government and the American public for swift and decisive action against Japan, and concern over the military and political impact of long-term Japanese occupation of the Far East all led American planners to the opposite conclusion. This “fundamental difference” over the importance of swift action against Japan, according to the JSSC, was reflected in fundamentally opposed European strategies. The American “purely military” approach via cross-channel operations was designed to defeat Germany as quickly as possible so as to be able to turn against Japan. The British approach, slow and “political” in Europe, necessitated delay in the Pacific that would be intolerable to the American people and U.S. interests.18
While these analyses clearly maintained and expanded upon Embick's prewar distrust of British strategy and belief that the United States had no major postwar interests in Europe, they revealed one drastic shift in the army planner's thinking. During the prewar years Embick had considered American Far Eastern interests both unnecessary and dangerous and had called for a total withdrawal from the area.19 Now, however, he emphasized the importance of those interests to an unprecedented degree.
This new emphasis on the Pacific, combined with a continuing disinterest in postwar Europe and preoccupation with hemispheric defense, emerged even more forcefully in a second series of papers that the JSSC prepared in 1943 on the subject of postwar bases needed by the United States and by any international police force that might be established. While paying lip service to the concept of such an international force, the committee emphasized the necessity for a comprehensive national defense policy as well as the need for numerous air and naval bases to fulfill such a policy.
Underlying the location of these bases was the JSSC assumption that prior to the establishment of any international force, the victorious allies would divide the world into three zones of responsibility—Europe/North Africa, the Far East, and the Western Hemisphere—and that the United States in its own interests would assume major and long-term responsibilities in the latter two areas. Preservation of “national security and the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine” would require not only bases in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Latin America but also total American control of the former German islands in the Pacific, which had been given to Japan as mandates after World War I. Possession of those islands by any hostile power, the JSSC insisted, would pose “a direct and grave menace to the security of the Western Hemisphere.” Furthermore, American bases in the mandated islands, throughout the rest of the Pacific, and on the Far East mainland would be “essential to the defense of our position in the Far East” as well as “valuable for international military purposes and U.S. commercial interests.”20
Embick's drastic shift on the importance of Pacific bases and interests may have been influenced by domestic political realities in wartime America. Both the public and the navy were demanding immediate revenge against Japan and the creation of a postwar situation whereby Pearl Harbor could never happen again. Such demands could not be ignored. Furthermore, throughout the war army planners tended to defer to their naval counterparts on Pacific matters in return for navy deferral on European matters. The JSSC's version of this compromise could very well have been Embick's agreement to naval conceptions on the wartime and postwar importance of the Pacific in return for their agreement to his analysis of British strategy and insistence on cross-channel operations and postwar noninvolvement in Europe.21
In all likelihood, however, the Pearl Harbor experience induced Embick to revise drastically his own views on the importance of the Pacific and Far East to American national security. In this regard it is interesting to note that numerous prewar isolationists were using the emotional public commitment to victory in the Pacific, and the suspicion of Britain that Embick shared, to argue that America's primary effort should be to defeat the Asian enemy who had so viciously attacked the United States and not to rescue Britain in the European theater. While Embick did not support such a total shift in priorities, he clearly favored more emphasis on the American war in the Pacific, largely at the expense of the Mediterranean.22 Furthermore, whatever his prewar position had been, he was now faced with the fact that the United States had been attacked and was engaged in a vicious military conflict that verged on total race war. In such a situation, wartime and postwar support of China became an essential policy objective, and the entire Pacific/Far Eastern area assumed much greater importance than it had during the 1930s. As one JSSC paper noted in late 1943,
A successful outcome of the war in the Pacific is of a concern to the United States at least as great as a similar outcome in Europe. An unsuccessful outcome, permitting a coalition under Japan's hegemony of the people of East Asia (about 55% of the world's population), would appear likely to offer, indeed, a greater ultimate threat to the United States than would a similar outcome in Europe.23
It is not accidental that this statement appeared in the first JSSC paper on a subject supposedly far removed from the Pacific War—relations with the Soviet Union. That subject, which began to occupy more and more JSSC attention in 1944 and 1945, involved the committee in some of its most controversial recommendations. It also provided Embick and his colleagues with an opportunity to restate and synthesize their emphasis on the Pacific, their distrust of the British, and their disinterest in Europe into a coherent wartime and postwar national policy.
Throughout 1942 and 1943 American planners had consistently emphasized that continued Soviet participation was essential to victory in the European war and that its entry into the war against Japan would be highly desirable. In late 1943 and 1944 the JSSC forcefully reiterated these conclusions and carried them a step further into the postwar era. After Axis defeat, the committee argued, Soviet military power would be enormous. Possessing “assured military dominance” in the Middle East and Northeast Asia as well as Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union “could not be successfully challenged eastward of the Rhine and the Adriatic” and would therefore be able to “impose whatever territorial settlements it desires in Central Europe and the Balkans.” This “phenomenal” and “epochal” development of Soviet power, the committee noted, matched a precipitous decline in British power and heralded a shift in the world power balance unparalleled since the fall of Rome. Not even an Anglo-American alliance, the JSSC noted, could hope to defeat the Soviets in a future war.24
In light of these facts, the fundamental importance of the Soviet effort against Germany and its entrance into the Far Eastern war, and the lack of vital American interests in the European-Mediterranean theater, the committee concluded that postwar as well as wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union was an achievable and mandatory national policy. Britain's policy, however, was a futile and dangerous continuation of the centuries-old effort to block Soviet expansion into southeastern Europe, an effort in which Britain was now attempting to enlist U.S. troops and support. Such a policy was not only doomed to failure but also could easily result in a Russo-German peace, a Soviet refusal to enter the Far Eastern war, or an unwinnable World War III. During the spring and summer of 1944 the JSSC spelled out the implicit conclusions of such an analysis: the United States should accede to Soviet control of southeastern Europe and should under no circumstances support any British attempt, military or political, to prevent such control or to form an Anglo-American-West European bloc against the Soviets. To minimize conflict between the Big Three while the war continued, all territorial issues should be postponed. Policy for the duration of the war should be to give each ally freedom to dictate armistice and occupation terms within its own sphere of operations.25
Such a policy translated into an implicit quid pro quo. The United States would agree to the cross-channel operations that the Soviet Union demanded and offer no opposition to postwar Soviet hegemony in southeastern Europe. In return, the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan and support postwar American control of the mandated islands and hegemony throughout the Pacific. Wartime occupation policies would establish the essential military control for such postwar agreement, and the expected British efforts to block this emerging understanding would have to be squelched as dangerous to both the prosecution of the war and peace in the postwar era. The JSSC thus argued against eastern Mediterranean and for cross-channel military operations and maintained that the Soviet Union should be allowed to dictate Rumanian armistice terms much as the Western Powers had dictated Italian armistice terms. Simultaneously, the committee insisted that the United States be granted total postwar control over the mandated islands. When the State Department objected to total control as contrary to its overall trusteeship policy, the JSSC responded with a restatement of its Soviet policy and with insistence that all territorial settlements be postponed until after the war had ended.26 Through such postponement the armed forces would be able to establish military control over the Pacific, just as the Soviets were establishing it in southeastern Europe, and thus present the postwar peace conference with a fait accompli.
Growing U.S.-Soviet friction did not seriously alter this JSSC position. Indeed, the committee consistently argued that Soviet power and the need for wartime and postwar cooperation precluded any strong American protests to the Soviets. It also implied that duplicitous British policies were the real cause of many U.S.-Soviet disagreements and maintained that southeastern Europe was an area of concern for the Soviet Union and not the United States.27
Embick admitted that the future of Germany and Western Europe was a different matter. In an apparent reversal of his previous statements regarding the British and American interests in Europe, he joined his JSSC colleagues in March 1945 in forwarding to the JCS a scholarly study that emphasized the past importance of British power in shielding the United States from European aggression and concluded that there was “scant evidence” the United States could withstand an attack by a power dominating all of Europe. The prevention of such domination would therefore have to be a continuous U.S. concern in the future, and Washington could “in no case” tolerate Soviet control of the entire Continent or “place sole reliance for security on Soviet good intentions.”28
Simultaneously, the study echoed previous JSSC recommendations, emphasizing the importance of U.S.-Soviet cooperation and that “while the United States can afford to make no concessions which leave its security or vital interests at the mercy of the Soviet Union, there is almost no other concession which it can afford not to make to assure Soviet collaboration in the maintenance of security.” American leaders would therefore have to be careful not to support all British interests or to oppose Moscow “in areas which the Russians consider vital, except for patently good cause.” Southeastern Europe, according to the JSSC, constituted just such an area. It was vital to the Soviets and could be conceded to them without endangering American security, British protests to the contrary notwithstanding. To reemphasize this point, Embick and his colleagues hedged their support of the scholarly study by warning that it had “dangerously overstressed” the importance of Britain to U.S. security “as a vital interest to be defended, to whatever extent required, by our armed might….”29
A few months later Embick restated and expanded this position, and in the process he illustrated just how limited his concern with postwar Europe remained. In June and July 1945 he argued forcefully for acceptance of Soviet demands for base rights and treaty revisions regarding the Kiel Canal, Bear Island, Spitsbergen, and the Dardanelles, and against the acquisition of unilateral American base rights in Iceland. Icelandic bases, he warned, would “project the United States into the European theater, cannot be defended as essential to our own national security and may be expected to arouse Russian suspicions.” The same held true for any American opposition to Soviet requests. To justify his recommendations, Embick cited Soviet geography, security interests, policies, and power since Peter the Great, past British attempts to block Soviet expansion, and the need for postwar cooperation and peace. He concluded that the United States had no strategic or “moral justification to deny Russia year-round access to both the Atlantic and Pacific,” and pointedly noted the inconsistency in objecting to Russian requests for bases “while ourselves asking [for] base rights in areas remote from our shores, such as Iceland, the Azores and the more distant Pacific islands.”30
What is perhaps most extraordinary about Embick's ideas is the degree to which they were accepted. Between 1943 and the German surrender in May 1945, they received the concurrence of his JSSC colleagues and formal JCS approval. With minor alterations the JSSC papers containing these ideas were then forwarded as the official position of the Joint Chiefs to the White House and the State Department, where they subsequently exercised enormous influence over American policy and policymakers.31 Within the Army General Staff, however, strong opposition emerged as early as spring 1944.
This opposition was found in both the Intelligence (G-2) and Civil Affairs divisions of the staff, but it was most clearly verbalized in the Strategy and Policy Group (S&P) of the Operations Division (OPD). Referred to as the army's “brain trust” and located within the division known as General Marshall's “Washington Command Post,” S&P was staffed by an extraordinary group of young, intelligent officers who possessed exceptional powers, responsibilities, and influence. Throughout 1942 and 1943 these men had maintained close relations with Embick and expressed fundamental agreement with the strategic and anti-British assessments of the JSSC.32 By 1944, however, they had accepted a broader definition of “national security” than the one being enunciated by Embick's committee. They therefore voiced strong opposition to the proposed Soviet policy. In the process they began to modify the harsh anti-British statements that had marked their earlier papers.
As early as January 1943 one dissenting officer in S&P argued that the United States was and should be fighting to preserve the British empire, but not “merely to perpetuate” it. In actuality, he insisted:
We are fighting for a secure and orderly world where we can exploit our American genius. The British Empire is the most satisfactory order-producing agency that is, or will be, available in the Middle East either now or at war's end. So, in simple self-interest, we are—or should be—fighting to preserve at least large slices of the British Empire.33
By the spring of 1944 this view dominated S&P thinking and meshed with an attack on the JSSC recommendations concerning the Soviet Union and southeastern Europe. In April the Strategy Section joined with the Civil Affairs Division of the General Staff to challenge Embick's Rumanian surrender policy. Acknowledgment of Soviet hegemony in the Balkans, it warned, could “easily result in a lowering of United States prestige with the U.S.S.R. and an inability to back British interests in the area, even though it might be to our advantage to do so.”34 One month later the Strategy Section “seriously questioned” the JSSC's entire Soviet policy, which it bluntly compared to the discredited appeasement policy of the 1930s. Advocates of “feeding the bear to keep him quiet,” it warned, “apparently overlook the fact that in every case the bear has turned upon the nations feeding him with the result that either the feeders are themselves eaten or are certainly mangled in the ensuing melee.” Maintaining that the Soviets could not be trusted and were at that very moment attempting to extend their influence into Latin America, the Strategy Section concluded that the JSSC “premise that the U.S.S.R. must be appeased in order to keep peace is basically unsound,” that the United States “must support Britain wherever possible,” and that the JCS should therefore reject the JSSC recommendations.35
Deputy S&P Chief General George A. Lincoln also opposed the JSSC recommendations, questioning the conclusion that the United States did not have the inherent conflict of interests with the Soviet Union that supposedly characterized Anglo-American relations as well as the committee's assumptions regarding a serious postwar decline in British power.36 By July, OPD was warning General Marshall that it did not agree with the “questionable assumptions” upon which the JSSC recommendations had been based.37
In the summer of 1945, S&P again labeled Embick's recommendations equivalent to appeasement and warned that acceptance of his position would endanger American security. The goals behind Soviet base demands, it concluded, were first control of the Near and Middle East and then world domination. Furthermore, any American agreement to treaty revisions leading to internationalization of European waterways could serve as a dangerous precedent for the Panama Canal. S&P admitted that a policy of preserving unilateral American control over that waterway and British control over Gibraltar, while denying similar Soviet control in the Dardanelles, appeared inconsistent. However, this was a “logical illogicality” because neither Western power could “by the greatest stretch of the imagination be accused of expansionist or aggressive actions,” while the same was far from true of the Soviet Union.
S&P also challenged Embick's entire conception of a hemispherically oriented national defense policy not related to British imperial interests. Soviet control of the Near and Middle East, it warned, would threaten American oil interests in the Persian Gulf as well as the British lifeline and the security of the British fleet. Since implementation of the Monroe Doctrine had previously rested on the power of that fleet, any weakening of British sea power could endanger hemispheric security. Moreover, both world wars had been “fought on the basis that defense of the United States required action in Europe and Asia.” Creation of a situation in which the United States could not intervene on both continents would “concede to Russia full freedom of action” and make hemispheric defense “a worthless concept.”38
By mid-1945, S&P and other branches of the army staff were far from alone in their criticisms. Throughout late 1944 and early 1945, military and diplomatic personnel directly involved in negotiations with the USSR had been complaining of Soviet noncooperation and hostility. Most notable in this regard was General John R. Deane, head of the U.S. military mission in Moscow, who, along with Ambassador Averell Harriman and American military representatives on the East European Allied control commissions, concluded that the United States should respond to Soviet intransigence with a new tough policy that included retaliation. Marshall was sufficiently impressed to bring Deane's reports to the attention of Stimson and the Joint Chiefs and to request immediate JSSC “study and recommendation as a matter of priority.” But when Embick and his colleagues rejected retaliation in April as ineffective and dangerous, they were unanimously supported by the JCS.39
Additional and more formidable opposition to Embick's position surfaced in June and July of 1945. Upset over the fact that the general was “having a bad influence in the Army of thinking in narrow terms of the defense of the Western Hemisphere rather than of the world,” Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy informed OPD on 16 June that Embick's opposition to Icelandic bases represented “a rather restricted concept of what is necessary for national defense.”40 One month later the Joint Planning Staff and Vice Admiral Russell Willson of the JSSC voiced disagreement, on both diplomatic and security grounds, with Embick's recommendations regarding Soviet base demands. If American resistance to these demands was not practicable, then the United States should obtain a quid pro quo in the form of base rights in Iceland and Greenland. Resistance was preferable, however, in order to maintain the U.S. policy of postponement of all territorial issues for the peace conference, where they would be treated as a whole, and to prevent a deterioration in “the bargaining position on worldwide United States security requirements.” Moreover, Willson noted, the “preferred treatment” previously granted the Soviet Union in violation of U.S. policy had led only to further demands, demands that should now be resisted:
… not only as untimely, but as unnecessary for Soviet security and contrary to long-range and over-all security considerations from our point of view. This war has been fought to prevent an aggressive nation from dominating Europe, and ultimately threatening the Western Hemisphere. From the long-range security point of view, and until the post-war situation and Soviet policy can be seen more clearly, we should, in so far as practicable, resist demands and policies which tend to improve Soviet position in Western Europe.41
The State Department seconded Willson's assessments and conclusions. So did the Joint Chiefs, who in mid-July accepted his minority reports over the majority JSSC papers signed by Embick and air forces representative General Muir S. Fairchild, and so informed the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee.42
This JCS action was followed by a series of shocking and unexpected events: the detonation of two atomic bombs and the subsequent surrender of Japan; an extremely rapid demobilization of the American armed forces; a sharp increase in Soviet demands for postwar concessions; a further deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations; and intense acrimony and stalemate in the first round of the peace negotiations in London. Together with the July rejection of his advice, these events forced Embick to reassess his views immediately before his November retirement from the JSSC and to accept the global military commitment and anti-Soviet policy he had previously resisted.
In October Embick and the rest of the JSSC warned the Joint Chiefs that the Soviet Union appeared to be embarking on a course of world domination rather than simply defensive control over contiguous areas, that such domination was inconsistent with American security requirements, and that rapid demobilization had seriously weakened America's ability to check Soviet advances, despite U.S. possession of the atomic bomb. Indeed, this new weapon actually posed more of a threat to the United States, with its concentrated industries and exposure to sealaunched air attacks, than it did to the industrially dispersed and geographically inaccessible Soviets. In light of these facts the JSSC called for a complete reexamination of America's military position, so that Washington would be able to “draw the line” on Soviet aggression, and a continued U.S. monopoly over the atomic bomb for as long as possible. For the future the necessity of being able to intercept enemy aircraft carrying atomic weapons, as well as to project American air power against an enemy, “demands that our defensive frontiers be well advanced in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the shores of the Arctic.”43 Continentalism and noninvolvement in Europe, Embick was finally forced to admit, were no longer feasible policies.
The years from 1940 to 1945 thus witnessed the gradual dissolution of Embick's continentalist outlook. He had shifted from a policy of non-involvement and withdrawal in the 1930s to acceptance by 1940–41 of the possibility of a worldwide military intervention in alliance with Great Britain. By 1942 he had been forced to operate within the reality of such intervention and had begun to emphasize the importance of the Pacific to postwar American security, while maintaining his disinterest in Europe and distrust of the British. He held this position for the duration of the war and used it to justify a policy of accommodation with the Soviets, but in early 1945 he modified it so as to include Western Europe within American security interests. Late that year Embick finally accepted the global commitment and anti-Soviet stance he had so fiercely resisted in the past.
In retrospect, what may be most interesting is not this gradual abandonment of continentalism in favor of globalism, but the degree to which Embick retained many of his essential ideas throughout the war and was able to influence American strategy and policy. Not until two months after the European war had ended did the Joint Chiefs reject his advice, and not until the Japanese defeat, the atomic bomb, and increased U.S.-Soviet friction had revolutionized the situation did Embick accept a global and anti-Soviet national policy. For the entire length of the European war, U.S. strategy and policy remained linked to the limited concept of national security that Embick and his JSSC colleagues enunciated.
This concept was based on the belief that a self-sufficient United States need not concern itself with Europe after the war, that its wartime strategy and postwar security did not need to be tied to British continental and imperial interests, and that there was no inherent conflict between wartime or postwar Soviet and American interests. Though they at first agreed with these beliefs, younger army planners began to argue in 1944 that postwar American security would require a globalized defense of British interests, intervention in European affairs, and opposition to any Soviet expansion. Embick continued to insist that such a policy was not necessary for American security, and that it was dangerous to both the successful prosecution of the war and the creation of a peaceful postwar world. The issues that divided Embick from the younger officers in this debate—whether American security could indeed be based on continental self-sufficiency or whether it required global military commitments, defense of British interests throughout the world, involvement in Europe and opposition to the expansion of Britain's enemies—were quite similar to the issues that had divided isolationists and internationalists during the 1930s and that still divide historians who debate the origins and inevitability of the Cold War.
