And when assessed as purely military operations together with all the British and French experiences, minimalist occupations appeared to have a long record of success.33
At the beginning of World War II, American planners imagined a limited occupation of dissected German territory similar to the previous Rhineland operation. The decision to pursue total victory over Nazi Germany dramatically enlarged the scope of MG to replacing the existing government and remaining for a potentially indefinite period of time. It was not a mission that planners were conceptually prepared for, and as documents like the SHAEF Handbook for Military Government in Germany indicate, they never really shook the Rhineland case as a working model. Most precedent in American history involved asymmetric, colonial-style endeavors, in action if not in name. The best analogue for the planned conquest of Nazi Germany was the Union’s occupation of the Confederacy during and after the Civil War. In that case, however, the Union officers’ understanding of Southern government and a shared language minimized cultural challenges. The Civil War was about reincorporating US territory. And such was the cultural affinity felt for the South that it was only after considerable debate within President Lincoln’s administration that he ordered the Confederate states be treated as foreign territory for the purposes of occupation by Union forces, which included abrogating local law and imposing martial law.34
The thinking of men like Barrows at the School of Military Government in Charlottesville offered a possible solution to bringing an expanded occupation of Germany into line with the military’s existing approaches to MG. Barrows and men like him—many of whom ended up teaching at Charlottesville—argued that despite the military’s best efforts to conceptually separate martial rule during wartime from postwar governance, American forces had in the past been involved in numerous engagements that continued after combat ended. The US military therefore already had available a suite of strategic options for postwar occupations. For Barrows, the question of wartime versus peacetime military occupation could be reformed to “discussion … of the termination of military government,” which he noted could “only be done by Congress”; until then, however, “military government continues.”35 This interim period before MG ended became what Charlottesville instructor Joseph Harris called a “breathing spell,” a period of months or even years after the end of open warfare when MG remained and prepared for the assumption of civilian control.36
Barrows acknowledged that even when the scope for MG was expanded, the military’s adherence to remaining apolitical was a problem. In existing thought, a military governor “[could not] create civil government,” Barrows noted, because “this right is reserved for civil power.” But he argued that there was “no doubt” that a military governor’s “authority and powers … continue undiminished into the period of peace following war and until Congress itself provides otherwise.” As a result, the governor was implicitly (if not explicitly) vested with responsibility for more comprehensive governance during the interim period. Barrows showed that the civil-military division so ardently advocated in American MG strategy had been violated repeatedly when it benefited the United States. During the Mexican-American war for example, the military governor of the then-occupied Mexican territory of California organized its application for US statehood by calling civil delegates and holding a constitutional convention. And in later years, commanders in Guam and American Samoa took similar political actions.37
Military planners partially adopted Barrows’s style of thinking, defining four phases of MG beginning with wartime occupation and followed by postconflict (transitory) military governance, postwar military administration, and finally, postwar civil administration. The overarching objectives throughout remained to ensure social control and prevent resistance, but MGOs were instructed to expect different social conditions in each operational phase as their subsidiary priorities changed accordingly. According to Harris, the first phase retained the traditional aims of MG: “maintenance of law and order, the protection of our troops … and the advancement of the military mission [were] the primary and practically the only considerations.” During the second transitory period, MGOs were “to restore the normal governmental services and … encourage citizens to proceed with their normal activities.” During the postwar military administration, MG was to “operate on a stable and more long-range basis,” addressing “administration and reconstruction” in place of civilian government, which then ultimately assumed responsibility for the fourth phase.38
The progression of MG in Germany would approximately adhere to these four phases, though Barrows and Harris were aware when presenting their ideas in 1942 that overtly declaring the potential political ends of American occupation remained unpopular within the military. The desire to view MG as a strategic operation was so strong that it led to confusing positions on seemingly straightforward issues. On the question of occupying formerly German-controlled “neutral territory”—such as French, Belgian, and Dutch lands—the military recognized that civilian governments could not immediately be restored and that military priorities would remain paramount during ongoing war. The simple answer was to view such areas as liberated war zones until enemy action was pacified. But subjecting allied peoples to martial rule was contrary to the liberationist aims of the war. In the Judge Advocate General (JAG) office’s Law of Belligerent Occupation from June 1944, the writers took pains to show how occupation of such “neutral” space could be legitimate under existing international law. They also concluded that it was easier to presume that if MG existed, then so did a state of war. For the purposes of martial law, liberated Allies were to effectively be treated the same as occupied enemies.39
Harris acknowledged the institutional resistance that drove such counterintuitive conclusions in his class at Charlottesville and forced the extended four-phase concept of MG into the existing binary civil-military division, telling students: “Another classification, which may be more logical, is to divide military government into two phases: 1) the phase in which military considerations are paramount; and 2) the phase in which military considerations are no longer paramount.”40 Such reasoning allowed MG to exist during the transition from combat to liberation and also during the restoration of the former status quo in liberated, non-enemy states. It was a difference without real distinction for the trainees, beyond paying deference to the prevailing wisdom that continued to shape MG strategies. MG existed where war and danger remained, and the same principles of pacification and control were paramount.41
The attempt to confine MG to the period before the restoration of civilian control and also tailor it to a total occupation of Nazi Germany led to quixotic contradictions in the instructions for MGOs. These were subtle, yet apparent, in the 1943 edition of FM 27-5, which for instance obtusely states: “Military government may extend beyond [military] operations until it achieves the ends of national policy towards which the operations are directed.”42 The manual predicted that officers would likely face more difficult postconflict conditions than previously expected but advised that they rely on existing strategies for implementing control, which included retaining “local laws, customs, and institutions of government … except where they conflict with the aims of military government or are inimical to its best interests.”43 This meant that “so far as is practicable … subordinate officials and employees of the local government” were to be retained, which in Germany nearly always meant former Nazis of some stripe.44
The contradictions were more glaring in handbooks dealing explicitly with Nazi Germany. In the preamble to the Public Safety Manual of Procedures, Lieutenant General A. E. Grasett, the assistant chief of staff for SHAEF, tried to straddle the competing problems of a limited scope for MG and the annihilation of Nazism. On the one hand he wrote, “The maintenance of law and order is the keystone to the whole problem of an efficient Military Government, and it is therefore desirable that as early as possible, the civil public safety agencies should be reorganized and controlled so that they will cooperate fully.”Yet on the other hand he continued, “Since, however, the Nazi Party have made the German police their main instrument for imposing their will upon the German people, the responsibilities of Military Government Public Safety Officers for purging, reorganizing, and controlling the German police will
