INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS AND THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S “PHILIPPINE PROBLEM” Steven J. Pedler A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2011 Committee: Gary R. Hess, Advisor Marc V. Simon Graduate Faculty Representative Douglas J. Forsyth Walter E. Grunden ii © 2011 Steven J. Pedler All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Gary R. Hess, Advisor The defeat of the U.S. military garrison in the Philippine Islands at the hands of the Japanese in 1941-42 is one of the greatest military disasters in the nation’s history, yet also one that has received comparatively little attention from scholars of the Second World War. This dissertation seeks to identify the factors responsible for the defeat. It argues that the loss of the Philippines is best understood not as a military failure, but rather as a failure of the interwar U.S. foreign policymaking process. This failure stemmed most directly from the emergence in the interwar United States of a climate of “disintegration” between key civilian and military leaders, leading to a fragmented and often incoherent foreign policy. This development resulted primarily from the refusal of senior State Department officials to recognize the military as a legitimate participant in the foreign policymaking process, leading to the exclusion of the U.S. Army and Navy from this process for much of the 1920s and 1930s. Other factors also played contributing roles, among them a series of international political developments that substantially altered the strategic balance of power in the western Pacific, the emergence of a vigorous Filipino independence movement, and a failure on the part of U.S. war planners to clarify expectations regarding the fate of the Philippines in the event of war with Japan. This dissertation asserts that the story of the U.S. defeat can best be told by means of an interdisciplinary approach that draws heavily upon the work of Graham Allison, Morton Halperin, and other scholars in the field of bureaucratic politics. It also incorporates the concept of civil-military “disintegration” proposed by Barry R. Posen in his 1984 monograph The Sources of Military Doctrine. iv To Kristi: Thank you for your support, encouragement, and love. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As any graduate student can attest, the production of a doctoral dissertation is inevitably a collaborative process. A great many individuals have offered invaluable assistance during the course of this project. I am particularly grateful to my committee chair, Dr. Gary Hess, for his comments, feedback, and suggestions. I wish to extend my thanks to my other committee members as well. Dr. Walter Grunden contributed a particularly keen editorial eye, and offered constant encouragement when it was most needed. Dr. Douglas Forsyth offered invaluable assistance in the development of the project’s theoretical and methodological framework. I am deeply indebted to the staff of the Department of History at BGSU, Tina Thomas and DeeDee Wentland, for their assistance in navigating the university’s bureaucracy, and for their perpetual optimism. I am grateful to the staff of the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland, for their assistance in tracking down research materials. I am particularly indebted to Eric van Slander for his help in familiarizing me with the Military Records Room. I also wish to thank Ed Burns and Richard Peuzer for their assistance in locating valuable research materials. Paul Barron and Jeffrey Kozak of the George C. Marshall Library at Virginia Military Institute were incredibly generous with their time, despite being confronted with waves of researchers flooding their facilities during the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History. I am also indebted to Lisa Long and Keith Manecke of the Ohio Historical Society for their assistance with my forays into the Warren G. Harding Papers. To all of these individuals, I wish to express my deepest thanks. The quality of this project has been substantially improved as a result of your input. Any remaining errors of fact or logic are entirely my own. --Steven J. Pedler vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 1 - Historians and American Strategic Policy in the Pacific Between the World Wars …………………………………………. 8 Chapter 2 - The Framework: Theory and Policy .…….…………………………………... 50 Chapter 3 - The United States and the Philippines: From Colony to Commonwealth …… 79 Chapter 4 - Interwar International Political Developments: The Paris Peace Conference and the Naval Disarmament Movement …………………………… 116 Chapter 5 - U.S. Civil-Military Relations: “Disintegration” and its Consequences ……… 175 Chapter 6 - Interwar U.S. Strategic Planning and its Limitations …………………………. 239 Epilogue - The Curious Case of the 1941 Reinforcement Effort …………………………. 307 References …………………………………………………………………………………. 345 Introduction Shortly after noon, local time, on December 8, 1941, approximately ten hours after the raid upon Pearl Harbor, American military forces in the Philippine Islands came under heavy attack from Japanese aircraft flying from bases in Formosa. These initial air strikes inflicted crippling losses on the men and machines of the U.S. Far East Air Force (FEAF), and effectively eliminated the ability of American air power to contest Japanese landings on the islands, which began two days later. Over the course of the next six months, the islands’ American and Filipino defenders were steadily pushed back into a number of isolated enclaves scattered throughout the archipelago, the most famous of these being the Bataan Peninsula and tiny Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay. By May of 1942, the surviving defenders on the island of Luzon, with their supplies nearly exhausted and cut off from any hope of reinforcement, were forced to surrender. Outlying commands in the southern Philippine islands surrendered over the next several weeks, bringing an end to a campaign that had witnessed the total defeat of an American and Filipino army of nearly 140,000 men. The American defeat in the Philippines must be regarded as one of the most significant military disasters in the nation’s history. Yet despite its scope, the loss of the Philippines remained relatively unexamined in the years that immediately followed. While other major defeats, most notably Pearl Harbor, were the subject of extensive inquiries from both the military and Congress, no such investigation was ever conducted regarding the Philippine campaign. Louis Morton, author of the U.S. Army’s official history of the Philippine campaign of 1941-42, lamented 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 1 in the first six months of World War II.”1 The debates that did occur regarding the loss of the islands tended to focus narrowly upon the period immediately preceding and following the Japanese invasion. An extremely acrimonious dispute emerged between General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the U.S. Army Forces, Far East (USAFFE), and his air commander, General Lewis Brereton, regarding who bore principal responsibility for the destruction of the bulk of the Far East Air Force on the opening day of the war. MacArthur was also the target of considerable criticism for attempting to use the undertrained and under- equipped Philippine Army to conduct a forward defense on the island of Luzon, rather than conducting the immediate withdrawal to the Bataan Peninsula suggested in a number of prewar strategic plans. It is the contention of this dissertation, however, that such narrow analysis misses the point. While mistakes on the part of American military officers in the Philippines may have exacerbated the problems confronting the islands’ defenders, they did not create them. The extraordinarily thorny strategic position in which the U.S. military found itself in 1941 was the product of a number of factors, many of which had been decades in the making. A fuller examination of these factors provides a more complete and satisfying explanation for the misfortune that befell the U.S. military in the Philippines during the opening months of the Pacific War. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. foreign policymaking process was characterized by chronic miscommunication, and, at times, complete non-communication, between senior civilian and military leaders. This condition, which Barry Posen has termed “disintegration,” meant that it was very difficult for interwar U.S. leaders to craft a national 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 foreign policy whose objectives (ends) were commensurate with the capabilities (means) on hand to attain them. The available evidence suggests that responsibility for the emergence of this climate of disintegration must be shared by both civilian and military leaders. In the final years before American entry into World War II, some efforts were launched in an effort to bridge the civil-military divide, but these endeavors were both too little and too late. International developments during the interwar decades also weakened the U.S. strategic position in the western Pacific. The first of these developments was Japan’s acquisition of a League of Nations Mandate over three key Central Pacific island groups—the Carolines, Marianas, and Marshalls. Japanese control over these islands greatly complicated efforts to plan for the reinforcement of American forces in the western Pacific, as they lay directly astride the shortest route to the Philippines from Hawaii or the West Coast. Of even greater significance were the numerous arms limitation conferences held during the 1920s and 1930s, most significantly the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22. The provisions of these treaties guaranteed that Japan would possess local superiority in the western Pacific vis-à-vis the U.S.