Nazism. American and British command expected tenacious Nazi resistance during the occupation. As late as April 1945, the chief of staff for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF)—the overarching command structure on the western front—British Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan was sufficiently confident that Germans would continue fighting after defeat of their regular army. He reminded commanders that draconian anti-reprisal measures were permitted,23 including “forced evacuation” and “destruction” of resistant areas “by bombing, artillery fire, or burning.”24 The need for such violence seemed to necessitate a repressive occupation. It was a vision of MG that SHAEF supreme commander, American general Dwight Eisenhower, appeared to suggest when characterizing MG as the answer to Nazi insurgency.25 Strict martial law would allow “resistance to … be ruthlessly stamped out,” he announced on the eve of the Western Allies’ invasion of Germany in September 1944.26
But as powerful as fears of German resistance were within Allied command, most MGOs on the ground approached occupation like Hamilton and Joublanc did, relying on cooperative Germans.27 The structure of MG meant that it could not be about domination. Small MG detachments (labeled so because they were groups of officers “detached” from a larger unit) comprising between five and twenty officers and an equal number of enlisted men were responsible for each city and rural district captured by the Allies.28 Consequently, Germans were expected to offer more than deference to martial law; they were to provide material assistance to MG.29 Thus at its very heart, there was a conflict in the American military’s approach to occupation during World War II between fear of Nazism and the expectation that MGOs could rely on helpful Germans.
The Long History of American Military Government
The conflict was not so apparent in late 1941 when, following the United States’ entrance into the war, the military began training officers for foreign occupation. The US Army’s Provost Marshal’s Office (PMO) established the first Military Government Training School in May 1942 at the Charlottesville campus of the University of Virginia. The academic setting was chosen to impart the challenging and august nature of this endeavor.30 The army felt that such training could not be formulaic learning by rote; MGOs had to understand the complex military science of occupation and acquire the critical skills necessary to adapt to unforeseen conditions. Academics from Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities developed the six-month curriculum and imbued it with the intellectual rigor they believed military governance required.31 On completion, each man graduated with a diploma from the University of Virginia.32 In turn, students were carefully selected for their academic abilities, most coming from civilian white-collar professions.33
The instructors were career officers, uniformed professionals, and academics. Among them were Major General David P. Barrows, an anthropologist and former president of the University of California; Joseph P. Harris, later of the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies; and career officer Major General Thomas H. Green, who became judge advocate general in 1945.34 Many of the teachers had served in previous foreign interventions. Prior experience shaped their thinking, and they brought a range of views on issues from the phases of MG operations to salient historical precedents and the viability of American colonialism.35 Some even plumbed antiquity and reached to ancient Greece and Rome for examples their students should follow.36
These differing viewpoints reflected a consensus within the military that the conduct of military occupation and foreign governance was complex. There was no set formula for a perfect operation. Instead, it required deftness and creativity in officers’ thinking, which was reflected in the differing views of the school’s faculty. Barrows, for instance, questioned the prevailing view that military government was apolitical, existing purely during open warfare. He thought that the attempt to separate the strategic aims guiding a particular military occupation from a nation’s political intentions created an acontextual approach that denied the obvious: war was an instrument of international politics. The military, in his view, should acknowledge the political implications of its actions, though he noted that such thinking was outside the mainstream, writing, “At any rate, and however this question of definition may be decided, in this country we know very well what military government is, not so much from attempts at its legal definition as from its actual exercise.”37 Such debate about even the fundamental philosophy of MG highlighted for students the importance of critically thinking through all aspects of military occupation. And to that end, the curriculum at Charlottesville was wide-ranging in its coverage of governance, from security, criminal justice, and repression of insurgency to economic management and cultivation of morale.38
Underlying any debate was a consensus around the core principles of American military occupation, critical thinking being the primary one. The collegiate atmosphere at Charlottesville was meant to push trainees to assess problems for themselves. To that end, many assignments forced students to analyze past cases, which led to some creative interpretations. Trainee MGO Lieutenant Colonel James A. O’Brien argued that the American approach to occupying Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846–48) originated with the British occupation of Castine, Maine, during the War of 1812.39 This event, O’Brien thought, “must have been clearly in the minds of [General Winfield] Scott and his legal advisors.” He provided no evidence for Scott’s knowledge of the Castine incident, let alone how it may have influenced his use of military tribunals to control lawlessness in Mexico, so it is unclear how well O’Brien performed on the assignment. But his attempt to determine the philosophical origins of American MG highlights the kind of thinking that graduating officers were meant to possess.40
The instructors also agreed that American MG was to be limited. MG complemented combat operations and existed only so long as fighting continued.41 Social control was vital in this interpretation because, as Barrows argued, “anarchy and demoralization” in occupied areas could undermine the front.42 Social control was exercised through law, and “military government” was, in essence, martial law; it abrogated civilian law and was then adjudicated by MG through military tribunals (called provost courts).43 But law cannot exist separately from the society it governs. The Charlottesville instructors recognized that MG, once in place, was responsible for the people it occupied. Brigadier General C. W. Wickersham, an instructor at Charlottesville, summarized the complementary nature of martial law and general governance in a speech to the American Bar Association: “The military occupation of enemy territory suspends the operation of the enemy’s civil government. It is then necessary for the occupying power to exercise the functions of government and maintain public order.” But to do so, “[MG] must deal with public works and utilities, the financial affairs … public health and sanitation, education, public safety, legal matters, communications, public welfare, economics and public relations.” In this view, preventing disorder required clear legal boundaries and methods of enforcement as well as restoration of a society that provided for the general welfare.44
Wickersham’s account of MG sounds all encompassing, but the instructors—and the military more broadly—also valued minimal intervention. An occupation confined to the period of hostility could not replace existing political and societal structures. MGOs would control criminal justice, including policing and the trial process, yet indirectly monitor locally administered government. Social control through enforcement of military law and retention of existing societal structures reflected the American interpretation of what Geoffrey Best calls the “arch-occupier” model of occupation, which had been popular in Europe during the nineteenth century. European military thinking at that time believed military government to be predicated on an implicit contract with occupied people in which they are treated humanely and their society remains largely unaffected while they, in turn, agree to abide by military rule.45 First head of the Charlottesville School Colonel Jesse I. Miller summed up the approach in US military thought as a military regime that “integrates the local laws, institutions, customs, psychology and economics of the occupied area and a superimposed military control with a minimum of change in the former and a maximum
