Victory Program

WORLD WAR II’s REAL VICTORY PROGRAM Author: James Lacey Word Count: 8,219 It has long been an article of faith among World War II historians that then Major Albert Wedemeyer, a junior member of the Army’s War Plans Division, foresaw and laid out America’s mobilization and production effort during World War II. The basis of this claim lies in a fourteen page document, The Ultimate Requirements Study: Estimate of Army Ground Forces, which Wedemeyer completed in early September of 1941. The histories of World War II, which mention what became known as the “Victory Program,” generally focus on this as a document of remarkable prescience and the basis of most of America’s wartime strategic and mobilization planning. Ironically, such reviewers developed this opinion without ever reading the document. In fact, Wedemeyer’s “Victory Program” was wrong in nearly every particular.1 Moreover, its effect on mobilization or future war plans appears to have been virtually nil. In fact, one searches in vain for documents, memos, or letters produced during the war that reference Wedemeyer’s program.2 In modern terms, Wedemeyer’s version of the “Victory 1 An early copy of this document can be found in the Wedemeyer Papers, Box 76, Hoover Institute, Stanford University. It has been reprinted: Charles E. Kirkpatrick, An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present: Writing the Victory Plan of 1941(Washington D.C., 1992). 2 There is not a single copy to be found in any of the records of the Office of Production Management, The War Production Board, or FDR’s War Files, nor is it mentioned in any of the early histories of these organizations or their successors. In short, there is no evidence that any civilian with a major role to play in military production was even aware it existed. Further, although the Wedemeyer papers indicate a copy was sent to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, no record of it can be found in any of Stimson’s papers and his only mention of Wedemeyer in his autobiography is in reference to operations in China. Moreover, there appears to be no copy of the document in General Brehon Somervell’s (head of Army Supply Forces) papers or in the papers of Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, who was responsible for all Amy procurement. 1 Program” is analogous to any one of hundreds of PowerPoint presentations given to Pentagon audiences every month – over in an hour and just as quickly forgotten. It was not until after the war that historians discovered the “importance” of Wedemeyer’s Victory Program and created the myth of a lone genius who clearly saw the path the United States must follow. Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, a volume of the Army’s official history of the war, devotes a whole chapter to Wedemeyer’s work.3 In only a single footnote does the reader learn that the chapter rests entirely on the author’s conversations with by then Lieutenant General Wedemeyer, as he was unable to find any other confirmation of Wedemeyer’s tale4 In fact, Wedemeyer’s life-long marketing effort to secure his place in history appears behind virtually all of the uncritical acceptances of claims that he was the author of the “Victory Program.” In his own 1958 book, Wedemeyer Reports, the general was not shy about claiming credit as the genius behind U.S. planning for the war. He went into great detail about how he formulated the “Victory Program,” and how it influenced later deliberations.5 Throughout his life, Wedemeyer’s various efforts at self-promotion were unceasing. For instance, in an extensive oral history recorded by the Center for Military History in 1972, he again put the formulation of the “Victory Program” at the forefront of Joint Chiefs 3 Mark Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations (Washington D.C., 1950), p. 331. After this it is impossible to trust any of the volumes of the army’s official histories when they discuss the “Victory Program” or Wedemeyer as all of them, including; The Army and Industrial Mobilization for War (which might have been expected to confirm sources a bit better) reference Watson’s chapter on the “Victory Program” as their primary and often sole source. 4 Watson, Chief of Staff, p.338. 5 Albert Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports! (New York, 1958), pp. 63-85. 2 planning for the war.6 In the same interview, however, Wedemeyer lamented that he had never received credit for many of the other ideas, which he claims originated with him, including the plan for Operation Overlord and the post-war Berlin Airlift.7 In 1990, the Army’s Center for Military History continued a long tradition of official scholarship crediting the “Victory Program” to Wedemeyer, when it published, An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present Writing the Victory Plan of 1941, which argued that Wedemeyer’s “Victory Program” represented the most important strategic document of the war. Only in the preface does the author acknowledge that his entire work rests on extensive interviews with Wedemeyer, who oversaw every aspect of the writing and production of yet another official report glorifying his work.8 However, Wedemeyer’s greatest post-war public relations coup was to call his study the “Victory Plan,” thereby confusing or conflating it with the actual “Victory Program,” which industrialists used to conduct their production planning. The actual title 6 Col. Don H. Hampton (Interviewer), “Interview with General Albert C. Wedemeyer,” (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: USAWC/USAMHI Senior Officer Oral History Program, March 14, 1984). 7 It should be noted that after a page-by-page review of the Official Minutes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (National Archive, RG 218.2), there was not a single reference to Wedemeyer’s program. Further, there is no mention of General Wedemeyer in references to the actual “Victory Program” in either General Marshall’s papers (stored at the Marshall Library, Lexington VA), or in his deputy, General Thomas Handy’s papers (stored at the Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania). 8 Charles E. Kirkpatrick, An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present: Writing the Victory Plan of 1941(Washington D.C., 1992), p. 2. In his bibliography, Kirkpatrick states, “few papers in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., relate to mobilization, in part because of President Roosevelt’s habit of conducting business orally. There is little of relevance in his papers, or in those of Harry Hopkins (the President’s chief advisor on war production matters), or Henry Morgenthau (Secretary of the Treasury).” The George C. Marshall Papers in the George C. Marshall Library (Lexington, Virginia) likewise contain little information pertinent to the Victory Plan. Albert C. Wedemeyer’s personal papers, which focus on the later part of his career, are in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, California. Documents pertaining to the Victory Plan in that collection may also be found in the records of the War Plans Division. They offer little information that reflects on the day-to-day development of the Victory Plan.” Given all of this, it appears that Kirkpatrick’s research clearly shows that the Wedemeyer plan did not make much of an impression on anyone responsible for strategic mobilization; however, he inexplicably refuses to come to the conclusion in his book. Furthermore, a comparison of the Wedemeyer Papers pertaining to the “Victory Program” with those in the records of the War Plans Division shows they are identical. It is not too much of a speculative leap to assume that Wedemeyer copied them at some point to add to his own files. 3 of General Wedemeyer’s study was the more prosaic, “Ultimate Requirements Study: Estimate of Army Ground Forces,” and the term “Victory Plan” occurs nowhere in the text. The actual “Victory Plan” was a combination of a strategic policy document written by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, and a production plan written by an economist in the Office of Production Management, Stacy May. The contributions of both will be examined in considerable detail later. Churchill’s comment that “history would be kind to him because he intended to write it” was not lost on Wedemeyer. To a large degree, he patiently wrote himself into the historical narrative step-by-step over the course of fifty years. As a result, historians have generally accepted the general’s contention that his “Victory Plan” was central to America’s planning during World War II. How did he get away with this historical scam? His success in fooling so man for so long was that he focused on the one thing his “Victory Plan” got right. He predicted that the United States could field a maximum military force of between twelve and fourteen million men, a figure remarkably close to the number finally mobilized – twelve million at the peak.9 Late in life he provided an account of how he arrived at this number. He claimed to have inquired from a number of government agencies and Princeton University’s Demographics Center as to the number of men it would take to maintain industry, agriculture, and government.10 Once he had those figures in hand, he deducted the final 9 The Ultimate Requirements Study, Wedemeyer Papers, Box 76, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA. A full copy of Wedemeyer’s so-called “Victory Program” can be found as an appendix of An Unknown Future and a Doubtful Present: Writing the Victory Plan of 1941. The peak mobilization number can be found here: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Series 25, “Selected Manpower Statistics, pp.

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