With no money and little congressional support, individual army leaders nevertheless looked to institutionalize the lessons from the world war. Often they would concede budget cuts if they came along with organizational reforms streamlining the army’s command structure. Out of this came the Army Industrial College, a center to train army leaders in the economics of war (the college opened its doors in 1923).37
Less formally, those officers who remained in service looked for ways to improve themselves. “This was one of the reasons why the [West Point] Class of 1915 achieved such an outstanding World War II record,” observed Clay years later. “They were the ones who came back from World War I thoroughly convinced that we had to be more professional, and they really introduced a spirit of professionalism into the armed services. We were amateurs in World War I. We were professionals in World War II.”38
Despite missing combat, Eisenhower decided to do what he could to anticipate a future war, and, despite congressional cuts, he sincerely believed that tanks would be crucial. In this he found a lifelong friend and partner, George Patton. “From the beginning,” Eisenhower commented later, “he and I got along famously.”39 The two men concluded that tanks could fundamentally redefine battlefield tactics. If bunched together, they could punch through enemy lines and create havoc from the rear, making trench warfare obsolete. If combined with air support, they could deliver decisive blows and race across open territory. Excited by their insights, Eisenhower and Patton submitted articles in separate military journals.
Eisenhower’s contribution, “A Tank Discussion,” appeared in the latter half of 1920.40 Unfortunately, along with extolling tank warfare, it took a swipe at Congress and the infantry for shelving research into the new weapon.41 As reward for his insight, the chief of the infantry told Eisenhower that his “ideas were not only wrong but dangerous” and that he should “not publish anything incompatible with solid infantry doctrine.” If he did, he “would be hauled before a court-martial.”42 (In the meantime, German officers began experimenting with tanks and came to roughly the same conclusion, leading to the idea of blitzkrieg launched with devastating effect in World War II.)43
Implicit in Eisenhower’s strategic vision, however, lay a basic economic reality. Military success depended upon economic might and technological innovation. Future wars would turn on domestic production at least as much as tactical cunning or courage. Thus, already in the 1920s he understood the “tendencies toward mechanization, and the acute dependence of all elements of military life upon the industrial capacity of the nation,” and that led him to learn more about the way industry worked. “Large-scale motorization and mechanization and the development of air forces in unprecedented strength would characterize successful military forces of the future.”44
* * *
At the end of World War I, French military leaders found an opportunity to accomplish something they had sought for years: control of the left bank of the Rhine River. The river provided a natural and formidable barrier to invasion, and holding it would guarantee against German backsliding during the peace negotiations. Thus, French leaders insisted that the Armistice of November 11, 1918, include a paragraph stating that, “The [territory] on the left bank of the Rhine shall be administered by the local troops of occupation … carried out by allied and United States garrisons holding the principal crossings of the Rhine.”45 Initially, the Americans and British opposed this provision but ultimately gave in. Once again, the American army found itself governing territory outside U.S. borders as part of the American external state.
By December 1, American troops marched into Germany. While in theory the Allies shared overall policy for the occupation, in reality each country had a great deal of autonomy within its zone. The French and British showed less leniency than the Americans, who followed General John Pershing’s pronouncement that the Germans had a “duty … to regain their normal mode of life and to re-establish the schools, churches, hospitals and charitable institutions, and to continue in their regular local activities.” The Germans would “not be disturbed, but rather assisted and protected,” and all “existing laws and regulations, in so far as they do not interfere with the duty and security of the American troops, shall remain in force.”46
This new form of military occupation differed from the experience of the Philippines in several important ways. First, American policy never envisioned annexing any part of Germany (indeed, American leaders had opposed the idea of occupation in the first place). In fact, since occupation had never been part of their country’s postwar aims, American leaders scoured the ranks for soldiers who could at least speak German. That was all it took to become an “officer in charge of civil affairs” (OCCA), and the OCCAs made up the core of military government. Each OCCA joined a combat unit and supervised nearby towns or villages. While the combat units stood ready to back the OCCA in case of conflict, it rarely happened.47
Initially, the OCCAs attempted to reorganize local German government to match the organizational design of the American military. This immediately proved awkward and, as they soon realized, unwarranted. The local government already functioned with military-like efficiency. Indeed, OCCAs learned that they had gotten things entirely backward—that it would be far more efficient for the military government to mirror the civil structure of the German government. In fact, the British, French, and Belgians all took the latter approach, recognizing the inherent compatibility between the German state and their military governments.48 Therein lay a second distinction from the Philippines. In the Philippines, the occupation had aimed to remake the Filipinos in America’s republican image. In Germany, military government issued only three rules in the American zone: no public gatherings, no alcohol sales during daytime hours (a nod to Prohibition back in the United States), and no carrying of weapons.49 On the first Sunday of the occupation, American doughboys stunned the Germans by sitting next to them at church.50
When it became clear that the occupation would last years rather than months, military government began promoting economic recovery. While the terms of the Armistice prohibited Germans from “military” production, the OCCAs lacked the will to enforce the rules, and the German economy in the American zone quickly improved. As the rest of Germany convulsed in political conflict, rampant inflation, and economic disorder, the American zone turned into an island of stability.51
Perhaps the largest misunderstanding among the Allies involved fraternization rules. The United States agreed to an anti-fraternization policy for the occupation: American soldiers should only interact with Germans over official business. For the French, the order aimed to quarantine “Bolshevism”—communist ideas that had started to sweep across Germany. By contrast and consistent with progressive ideas of virtue, American leaders hoped that soldiers would return home from Europe as sexually “pure” as they arrived. But the “anti-frat” policy (as doughboys called it) failed almost immediately, in large part because of the housing situation. The military had no place to billet troops in Germany and no interest in building barracks that it would soon vacate; thus, doughboys billeted with German families, and often enough those families included young girls. Almost immediately commanders started receiving requests from soldiers to marry their (often pregnant) German girlfriends.52
At the end of the war, the army ordered Douglas MacArthur to lead his Forty-Second Division into the occupation zone. He remained until spring the next year and from this experience absorbed several lessons that mattered when he became proconsul in Japan. More than Eisenhower and Clay, he saw the political realities of occupation. When he later governed postwar Japan, he mirrored the German experience by leaving much of the Japanese civil structure in place (including, quite controversially, Emperor Hirohito). He never enforced anti-fraternization rules. Most of all, he hoped to duplicate the feeling he had when he left Germany. “When we received our orders to return to the United States,” he wrote years later, “the tearful departure looked more as we were leaving [home] instead of returning
