Special Observers: a History of SPOBS and USAFBI, 1941-1942
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Special Observers: A History of SPOBS and USAFBI, 1941-1942 BY © 2016 Richard H. Anderson Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chair: Adrian R. Lewis, Ph.D. ________________________________ Co-Chair: Theodore A. Wilson, Ph.D. ________________________________ Sheyda Jahanbani, Ph.D. ________________________________ Paul Atchley, Ph.D. ________________________________ John M. Curatola, Ph.D. Date Defended: 06 December 2016 ii The dissertation committee for Richard H. Anderson certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Special Observers: A History of SPOBS and USAFBI, 1941-1942 ________________________________ Chair: Adrian R. Lewis, Ph.D. ________________________________ Co-Chair: Theodore A. Wilson, Ph.D. Date approved: 06 December 2016 iii Abstract In late spring, 1941, a small group of U.S. Army officers traveled to Britain to plan for Anglo-American cooperation if and when the U.S. entered World War II. Because the United States was still a neutral country and to prevent potential enemies from knowing the group's purpose, the U.S. Army called its mission to Britain the "U.S. Army Special Observer Group" (SPOBS). From May, 1941 until June, 1942, SPOBS (known as U.S. Army Forces in the British Isles or USAFBI after January 8, 1942) developed plans with the British for establishing U.S forces in the British Isles. Changing strategic conditions however, made much of this work obsolete. As a result, the Allies had to develop new plans for establishing U.S. combat power in Britain. The fact that the Allies never implemented SPOBS’ plans in their entirety has led scholars to underestimate the significance of the group’s work with the British. This study asserts that the process of planning that the Special Observers engaged in with their British counterparts played an essential role in setting the conditions for Anglo-American cooperation in the European Theater. iv Acknowledgments I have many people to thank. First, I would like to thank Theodore Wilson, Adrian Lewis, Sheyda Jahanbani, Paul Atchley, John Curatola, Jeffrey Moran, Jonathan Earle, Christopher Gabel, and Brent Steele for providing me with feedback and guidance at various stages during this project. Their mentorship has been critical in my development both as a historian and as an Army officer. I would also like to thank the Omar N. Bradley Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation for generously providing me with the funding to conduct my research in the U.K. and the U.S. I owe a debt of gratitude to the faculty at the United States Military Academy Department of History for their guidance and assistance. Colonel Ty Seidule and Lieutenant Colonel Jason Musteen provided me the flexibility in my schedule that allowed me to conduct research at various points during my time at USMA. Steve Waddell provided me with valuable primary source materials and he, along with John Stapleton, Eugenia Kiesling, and Majors Bill Nance and Dave Musick provided me with invaluable insight during our discussions regarding the Interwar period and the Second World War. Numerous people assisted me in the search for source material for this project. They include the staffs at the U.K. National Archives, the U.S. National Archives, the U.S. Army Center of Military History, the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Columbia Center for Oral History, the East Carolina Joyner Library, the Eastern Regional Coal Archives, the George C. Marshall Research Library, the Library of Congress, the Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives, the National Personnel Records Center, the U.S. Military Academy Library, and the Washington County Free Library. I would particularly like to thank Sara Morris for helping me find James E. Chaney’s childhood v home, Robert Arnold for allowing me to have access to the Henry H. Arnold Project, Edward M. Coffman for sending me material from his interviews with Charles L. Bolte, Philip Bolte for responding to questions I sent him about his father, Harriet Cozens for providing me with information about her father, Mark Cornwall-Jones for allowing me to have access to his family history, and Leila Boyer for allowing me to look at the personal papers of James E. Chaney. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My wife Pam was infinitely patient and understanding throughout this project. Without her support, I would not have been able to finish it. I would also like to thank my daughter Maya and son Marshall for getting dad to shut the computer down when it was time to play. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Prelude and Establishment 2. Operation INDIGO 3. The RAINBOW-5 Task Forces 4. Ground and Air Logistics Planning for RAINBOW-5 5. Learning to Communicate with Your Significant Other 6. Lend-Lease and Aid to the Soviet Union 7. Command Relationships 8. Operation MAGNET 9. Policies and Systems 10. Planning for Operations BOLERO and ROUNDUP 11. Command Relationships Revisited Epilogue 1 Introduction On 14 November 1957, members of the National Defense Executive Reserve (NDER), a subunit within the Interstate Commerce Commission, gathered in Washington D.C. The organization’s purpose was to recruit people from various public and private occupations, to include agriculture, business, education, energy, labor, management, and transportation, and train them to augment the staffs of federal departments and agencies during national emergencies. 1 Appropriately, the guest speaker for the event was a man well-acquainted with national emergencies. As a U.S. Army officer during the Second World War, he had led British, American, and Canadian forces on one of the most complex military operations in history, the Allied invasion of Normandy. 2 As president of the United States, he struggled to keep the Cold War cold, implementing a doctrine of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons to prevent overt communist expansion. 3 Now he would try to impart some of his experience to the convention’s participants. After a brief salutary greeting, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began his speech with a short story: Some years ago, there was a group in the staff college of which some of you may have heard, Leavenworth Staff College. This was before our entry into World War One, and in that course it was necessary to use a number of maps and the maps available to the course were of the Alsace-Lorraine area and the Champagne in France. But a group of ‘young Turks’ came along who wanted to reform Leavenworth. They pointed out it was perfectly silly for the American Army to be using such maps which could after all be duplicated in other areas without too much cost--they would get some area maps where the American Army just might 1 Code of Federal Regulations, Title 32A Revised December 31, 1956 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), 207; and Request for Records Disposition Authority, from Federal Emergency Management Agency to General Services Administration National Archives and Records Service, 6-1-87, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) website, http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/rcs/schedules/general-records- schedules/n1-grs-87-010_sf115.pdf , accessed 3 November, 2015. 2 Accounts of the D-Day invasion are legion. Anthony Beevor provides an excellent overview of Battle of Normandy in D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 3 Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2007), 147-52. 2 fight a battle. So they got, among other things, maps of the area of Leavenworth and of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and in succeeding years all the problems have been worked out on those maps. The point is, only about two years after that happened, we were fighting in Alsace-Lorraine and in the Champagne. 4 Upon ending his story, he explained how it was relevant to the assembled, would-be crises managers: I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning. So, the first thing you do is take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven’t been planning, you can’t work, intelligently at least. That is the reason it is so important to plan, to keep yourselves steeped in the character of the problem that you may be one day be called upon to solve–or help to solve. 5 Eisenhower was attempting to convey two ideas that have long held currency with professional soldiers. One was that plans almost never work out the way one intends them to do. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Chief of the Prussian General Staff during the Wars of German Unification, famously wrote that “no plan of operations survives the first collision with the enemy main body.” 6 The second is that, despite the fact that plans almost never work out the way one intends them to, there is intrinsic value in planning as a process. The U.S. Army has and continues to hold to these ideas in its own planning doctrine: All planning is based on imperfect knowledge and assumptions about the future.