Institutional Politics and the U.S. Military's War Plan Orange
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INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS AND THE U.S. MILITARY’S WAR PLAN ORANGE Steven J. Pedler A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of The requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2007 Committee: Walter E. Grunden, Advisor Douglas J. Forsyth Gary R. Hess © 2007 Steven Pedler All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Walter Grunden, Advisor This thesis examines the U.S. military’s War Plan Orange, and seeks to identify why no serious effort was made to rectify internal inconsistencies within the plan, despite widespread knowledge of their existence. The analytical framework for this study is the “bureaucratic politics” model utilized in the work of scholars such as Graham T. Allison, J. Garry Clifford, and Morton H. Halperin. The thesis concludes that the failure of military and civilian leaders to address the internal contradictions within War Plan Orange resulted from communication breakdowns and from competing policy goals advanced by institutional actors within the Harding, Hoover, and Roosevelt administrations. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has benefited from the input and assistance of a number of individuals. The staff of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland exhibited incredible patience with a first-time researcher, and provided invaluable help in tracking down many of the records I have cited. I am especially grateful to Eric van Slander for the time he spent familiarizing me with the Archives’ Military Records room. The members of my thesis committee, Dr. Walter Grunden, Dr. Gary Hess, and Dr. Douglas Forsyth, all provided valuable feedback on a number of drafts, and their input shaped the development and maturation of this thesis. I am very much indebted to Tina Amos and DeeDee Wentland in the offices of the BGSU Department of History for their assistance in navigating the university bureaucracy, and for their perpetual optimism. Last, but assuredly not least, my wife Kristi has been unflagging in her support, and has always feigned great interest in the dustiest details of early twentieth century U.S. bureaucracy. To all of these people, and to everyone else who has contributed to the creation of this work, I offer my sincerest thanks. Steven J. Pedler v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER I. POSTWAR SCHOLARSHIP ON WAR PLAN ORANGE .......................... 5 CHAPTER II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ................................................................ 23 CHAPTER III. HISTORY, POLITICS AND THE “EVOLUTION” OF WAR . PLAN ORANGE……………………………………………................................... 44 The Joint Army-Navy Board and the First War Plan Orange.................................... 45 Factors Undermining the 1914 Orange Plan.............................................................. 51 I. Japan’s Acquisition of the Mandates......................................................... 53 II. The Washington Naval Treaty ................................................................. 59 III. The Philippine Independence Movement ............................................... 75 The 1920s: The Orange Plan Revisited .................................................................... 80 The U.S. Military and the Philippine Question.......................................................... 90 Civil-Military Relations and the Philippine Question ............................................... 120 U.S. Asian Policy in the Early Twentieth Century .................................................... 127 CONCLUSION – BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS AND WAR PLAN ORANGE................ 142 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................. 153 1 INTRODUCTION On May 6, 1942, the United States’ garrison on Corregidor Island, in imminent danger of being overrun and with its supplies of food and ammunition nearly exhausted, surrendered to forces of the Imperial Japanese Army under the command of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma. The following month saw the end of organized American resistance to the Japanese in the Philippines, as subordinate commanders on neighboring islands, at times with great reluctance, complied with surrender orders issued by Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright, the senior army officer in the Philippines. The surrender of the final U.S. command on Negros on June 3 capped a six-month campaign in which an army of 140,000 American and Filipino troops had been utterly defeated. The surrender of American forces in the Philippines must be considered one of the greatest disasters in the history of the U.S. armed forces. Curiously, the collapse of American resistance was never subjected to the sort of elaborate inquiry that so often has followed other major defeats, such as the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor. Louis Morton, the historian charged with compiling the army’s official history of the Philippine campaign of 1941-42, laments that “Few military disasters of modern times are as sparsely documented or inadequately recorded in the official records as the defeat of America’s forces in the Philippines in the first six months of World War II.”1 Nevertheless, in the years following the end of the Second World War, a number of authors conducted examinations of the Philippine campaign in an attempt to identify the factors that contributed to the American defeat. General Douglas A. MacArthur, the commanding officer in the Philippines at the time of the war’s outbreak, has been the subject of considerable criticism for his decision to utilize the under-trained and under-equipped Filipino 1 Louis Morton, The United States Army in World War II: The Fall of the Philippines (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1953), 585. 2 army to conduct a forward defense against the Japanese, rather than stockpiling men and supplies on Luzon’s Bataan Peninsula in accordance with guidelines issued by his service superiors. MacArthur and his air commander, Major General Lewis H. Brereton, openly blamed one another for communication breakdowns that resulted in the destruction of the majority of the U.S. Far East Air Force on the ground on the first day of the war. The key element of this dispute concerned who bore responsibility for the F.E.A.F. being caught with the bulk of its planes on the ground despite the fact that both Army and Navy commanders in the Philippines had received news of the Pearl Harbor raid more than eight hours earlier. While mistakes on the part of senior U.S. commanders in the Philippines may have accelerated the collapse of American resistance, however, the consensus among commentators is that they had no bearing on the campaign’s ultimate outcome. The true responsibility, it is argued, lies deeper—with plans and assumptions that had guided American military thinking for years, even decades, before the Second World War. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the Pacific War, the strategy that would be adopted by the U.S. military in the event of a conflict with Japan was outlined in a series of documents collectively referred to as War Plan Orange. In certain respects, the forecasts of the plans were very accurate. The Orange Plans correctly predicted that a Japanese attack upon the United States would very likely be launched without a formal declaration of war. They also accurately predicted that any conflict between the U.S. and Japan would be of a very prolonged duration. However, while at the strategic level the Orange Plans offered a relatively accurate depiction of the course of a U.S.-Japanese conflict, their expectations about the roles and responsibilities of U.S. forces in the Philippines were completely unrealistic. The American garrison was expected to mount a holding operation against an expected invasion with the ultimate goal of denying Manila Bay as a base for Japanese 3 naval operations. The garrison was to hold out until the arrival of a massive relief expedition from the West Coast, spearheaded by the battleships of the Pacific Fleet. Before the war began, however, the navy had quietly shelved its plans for rescuing the defenders. The relief expedition upon whose arrival rested the sole hope of the Philippine garrison would not be launched. This glaring discrepancy within the Orange Plan led historian H. P. Willmott to term it “a curious combination of the sound and the bizarre.”2 Perhaps the greatest irony related to both War Plan Orange and its consequences for those charged with carrying out its provisions is that the existence of these internal inconsistencies was quite widely known within the senior ranks of the Army and Navy. In fact, the impossibility of mounting an effective operation to relieve the Philippine garrison had been widely acknowledged within the military for nearly two decades. Yet despite this knowledge, relatively little effort was ever made to revise the Orange plans to more accurately reflect the military situation in the Pacific. This thesis traces the history of the Orange plans and identifies some of the factors that led to the failure to adequately address their fundamental shortcomings. My central hypothesis is that the failure to adequately address the shortcomings of the Orange plans can best be understood as a result of competition and miscommunication between actors within the U.S. government. The data analysis leans heavily upon the extensive body of “bureaucratic politics” literature