which effectively shut down the local economy. Violations of any restrictions led to military prosecution, and the punishments were harsh.71
But as Green later explained to students at Charlottesville, enforcing order was only part of military governance. He listed nine other issues concerning MG in Hawaii that the trainee officers should also consider in their own operations, including “food problems; control of communications; racial problems; and housing shortages.” Good governance meant attending to the full suite of people’s needs.72 Hawaiian MG was also astonishingly small, “consisting of three officers and four enlisted men,” so the broader concerns of government were handled through existing administrative structures, which demonstrated, Green argued, the feasibility of the minimalist American approach to occupation.73
MG in Hawaii imposed the most far-reaching restrictions on civil liberties ever taken on US soil. In Green’s view, the territory’s “polygot [sic] population” justified this action. Whites were a minority constituting just one-quarter (104,000) of the islands’ 420,000 people. The rest were Hawaiian and Asian, and 159,000 (38 percent) were Japanese by birth or descent.74 That nonwhites outnumbered whites three to one was an uncomfortable reality in racist, 1940s America in which Jim Crow remained law in the South and the US military was segregated. Officers in Hawaii instinctively rejected the idea of interracial harmony, instead regarding racial diversity as such a threat to peace that preventing “riots” and “racial conflict” came before “espionage and sabotage” in Green’s list of priorities after law and order.75
Fear of subversives among Hawaiian Japanese extended from a radicalized worldview. On 8 December 1941, Major General Short announced a special policy regarding alien Japanese aged fourteen and above. He “enjoined [them] to preserve the peace towards the United States and to refrain from crime against the public safety … and … from actual hostility or giving information, aid, or comfort to enemies of the United States.” Assumed to be innately guilty, alien Japanese were considered potential enemies and restricted from possessing firearms, weapons “or similar implements” of other kinds, shortwave radios, transmitting sets, or signal devices. It was also illegal for them to change their residence, travel outside the islands, or write or say anything against the United States, its military, or its government. But suspicion even resided in conciliatory actions, such as the instruction that Japanese Americans be treated with “such friendliness as may be compatible with loyalty and allegiance.” This order allowed non-Japanese US citizens to subjectively evaluate “loyalty and allegiance.”76 Similar logic led to mass internment of Japanese inside the continental United States, though such steps were impractical in Hawaii.77 The size of the Japanese population made them critical to the labor force and the economy. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox still advocated removing all Japanese to the outer islands, but Emmons argued that most were loyal Americans and prevented the plan’s implementation. In total, the number of Japanese interned on Hawaii never exceeded two thousand.78
Emmons’s resistance highlighted the extent of MGOs’ discretion, which Green noted led often to “unusual business.” For instance, when MG was imposed, bars were closed, and alcohol banned to prevent disorder, MGOs encouraged the sale of candy in their place. This approach failed to prevent soldiers or civilians from drinking, and within a few months the prohibitions were rescinded.79 Law enforcement relaxed. Sentences initially imposed by MG were harsh, but the severity eased with the lack of general resistance to martial law.80
New Expectations, Old Behaviors
Military and civilian leaders in the United States and Britain regarded World War II as different from preceding conflicts, even World War I. The Axis powers had seemingly made warfare more brutal. They openly engaged in mass killing and dislocation of undesirable groups and advocated “total war,” legitimizing attacks against civilians, who were now considered extensions of a state’s war power. It is worth noting that the Allies also engaged in total war, bombing major German and Japanese cities relentlessly, which caused mass death, physical devastation, and internal displacement. But the Allies saw these bombings as reciprocal actions in a war started by their opponents. For occupation planners, the militaristic ideologies underpinning Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, ideologies that drove this new type of war, required Germans and Japanese to resist the Allies to the bitter end.81
Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s agreement at Casablanca in January 1943 to seek unconditional Axis surrender expanded potential occupations to the entireties of Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as large swathes of intervening territory. More officers than could be trained at Charlottesville were needed for these massive operations, necessitating establishment of Civil Affairs Training Schools (CATS) throughout the United States and Britain.82 These schools shortened the Charlottesville curriculum to between one and two months, and they became more didactic, but the core principles remained essentially the same.83
FM 27-5 was updated in 1943 to address the unique challenges of occupying areas formerly controlled by the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Where the 1940 version expected an acquiescent occupied population and largely intact societal infrastructure, the 1943 edition predicted far worse conditions: “Civil affairs control may have to be performed under the most difficult circumstances…. Civil administration may have broken down wholly or in part…. There may be rioting, looting, or other forms of disorder, particularly if the local police force has disintegrated…. If the area has been fought over or bombed, widespread destruction of buildings and other installations … may be anticipated.”84 But the updated version retained the arch-occupier contractual concept of military rule. It reiterated that MG’s mission was “to assist military operations” through social control. Specifically, its role remained “maintaining order, promoting security,” and “preventing interference with military operations.”85
The updated manual’s descriptions of postconflict conditions showed remarkable foresight in 1943, before the full extent of the war’s destruction was realized. The writers predicted “large numbers of … homeless” at least in part foreseeing the massive DP problem that the Allies later faced in Germany.86 Their dire prognosis of the horrors of Nazi and Japanese rule aimed to steel MGOs: “The enemy may have brought in large numbers of forced laborers from distant areas, who will desperately seek repatriation…. Water supplies may have been polluted…. The health and morale of the population may have been undermined. There may be few facilities to prevent the spread of pestilence from cities and concentration camps.”87 More devastating war elevated the urgency of providing “emergency relief” such as “food, clothing, shelter, and medical aid, to meet subsistence standards.” The authors also stressed that such conditions could require a more domineering form of martial rule than that traditionally employed by Americans. Officers could not assume local cooperation and were to prepare for “the actual administration of the chief political offices of the government.”88 This included the existing police, and MGOs were to prepare for “creation of a new [force].”89
The authors of the 1943 edition accurately predicted the consequences of twentieth-century, technologically enhanced warfare. Their linking of physical destruction to crime also foreshadowed the destruction-and-anarchy trope that has since permeated literature on postwar Germany. But rather than necessitating an adjustment in approach, the core calculus and overarching philosophy of MG remained the same. Officers were to care for occupied people and assume greater administrative responsibilities only where necessary to “preserve order … and [reestablish] … law and order.” Greater challenges further required officers to be more adaptive than previously, rather than less so.90
Other US military manuals and handbooks produced late in the war maintained the 1943 edition’s assumption that Nazism and Japanese Imperialism would leave a trail of destruction.91 The manuals specific to Germany cast Nazism as a totalizing, corruptive ideology. The German Police Handbook, for instance, described
