On August 15, 1944, Allied forces invaded Southern France—the last of a long series of triphibious operations in the Mediterranean. Within a month they swept up the valley of the Rhone and linked up with General Patton’s Third Army. The landing took place nine weeks after the launching of the Normandy invasion and after some six months of indecision. To President Roosevelt, General Marshall, and most American strategic planners, the operation was a logical part of the grand design fashioned at the Cairo- Tehran Conference to defeat Germany decisively. To Churchill and most of the British staff, it was an operation at the wrong time and in the wrong place—an undertaking that prevented the completion of the Italian campaign and an advance through the Ljubljana Gap toward Vienna.
Behind the landings on the coast of southern France lay one of the most controversial decisions of World War II. No wartime debate between the Americans and the British showed a sharper divergence of opinion; none reflected a greater contrast in national approaches to war strategy. As the rift between the Soviet Union and the West has widened in the postwar period, the controversy that began in the secret Anglo-American war councils of 1944 has flared into the open. A growing chorus of opinion on both sides of the Atlantic has charged that the peace was lost as a result of political and strategic mistakes of World War II. No decision has drawn more fire from participants and “Monday morning quarterbacks” alike than that to invade southern France. It seems desirable at this stage of the cold war to take stock of this key decision—particularly to consider whether it really was as great a mistake as its critics have alleged it to be.
First, it is important to remember that, though the decision for the southern France venture—the so-called Anvil operation—was made by the Americans and British, it was definitely influenced by the Soviet ally. It grew out of discussions of the Big Three at the Cairo-Tehran Conference in November- December, 1943. That conference represented a showdown meeting among the Allies on European strategy, a climax to two years of debate between the Americans and British and of growing Soviet impatience for action in the West.
The divergent approaches of the Allies toward the European war were most clearly reflected initially in the conflict between British and American strategy—between the peripheral theory, espoused by Churchill and the British staff, and the theory of mass and concentration advocated by General Marshall and his staff. The British aimed to hit the German Army at the edges of the continent and launch a large-scale landing on the continent as the last blow against an enemy already in process of collapse; the Americans wanted to concentrate forces early at a selected time and place to meet the main body of the enemy head on and defeat it decisively. Both justified their theories and plans in terms of relieving the pressure upon the Russians. But neither side could readily win the other to its concept of strategy, and the long debate which ensued led to a delicate relationship with the Soviet Union. From the beginning the Russians, locked in a life or death struggle with the Germans on the Eastern front, had no doubts about the proper course of Western strategy. They wanted a second front, and they wanted it soon. Each Anglo-American postponement of that front added fuel to the fire.
By November, 1943—on the eve of Cairo- Tehran—a critical point had been reached in Allied war planning. Almost two years had now gone by since Pearl Harbor. But firm agreement among the three Allies on how, when, and where to beat even the primary foe—Germany—was still lacking. One Mediterranean operation had followed another. North Africa had led to Sicily; Sicily to the invasion of Italy. Always the skillful and resourceful argument of the Prime Minister had urged the need to continue the momentum, the immediate advantages, the “great prizes” to be picked up in the Mediterranean while the Allies were waiting for the right opportunity to cross the Channel in force. True, the Western partners had in August, 1943, agreed on a major cross-Channel attack to be launched in the spring of 1944—operation Overlord. But disturbing reports had been reaching Washington from London and Moscow. The Russians were hinting that they might accept increased pressure in the Mediterranean even at the expense of a delay in Overlord and might even accept aggressive action in Italy as a substitute for the second front. These hints of a reversal in the Soviet position, coming on the heels of reported British cooling on Overlord, gave the American staff much concern.
What appeared to the Americans to be at stake was far more than the date or even the ultimate fate of Overlord. The whole strategy of the global war, the “beat Germany first” concept, the roles of the respective Allies in the coalition effort—all were in the balance. If, in the war against Germany, the British were still wedded to the theory of attritional opportunism, the Americans had staked heavily on the principle of concentration. From early in the war their global strategy, manpower and production balance, and strategic deployment had all been planned with that primary end in view. Overlord represented the hope—perhaps the last hope—of realizing their basic strategic faith, and they were determined to accept no further delay in the long-promised and much postponed invasion across the Channel. If the American staff was apprehensive over the British and Soviet attitudes, both Roosevelt and Churchill were anxious to demonstrate their good faith to Stalin.
The meeting at Tehran was the decisive conference in European strategy. Preliminary exchanges between the Americans and British at Cairo had been inconclusive. At Tehran for the first time in the war, the President, the Prime Minister, and their staffs met with Marshal Stalin and his staff. The Prime Minister made eloquent appeals for operations in Italy, the Aegean, and the eastern Mediterranean, even at the expense of a delay in Overlord. But Stalin at this point unequivocally put his weight behind the American concept of strategy. Confident of Russia’s capabilities, he asserted his full power as an equal member of the coalition and came out strongly in favor of Overlord. Further operations in the Mediterranean, he insisted, should be limited to the invasion of southern France in support of Overlord. Soviet experience over the past two years, he declared, had shown that a large offensive from one direction was not wise; that pincer operations of the type represented by simultaneous operations against northern and southern France were most fruitful. These operations would best help the Soviet Union. In turn, the Russians promised to launch a simultaneous all-out offensive on the eastern front.
Stalin’s stand put the capstone on Anglo-American strategy against Germany. In a sense, therefore, it was he who determined Western strategy. Churchill lost out, and the decision so long sought by the Americans was made. The final blueprint of the grand design for victory in Europe had taken shape.
The upshot of the discussions at Cairo-Tehran was to confirm that Overlord and Anvil were to be the “supreme operations for 1944” and that nothing was to be done in any part of the world to jeopardize their success. But in the months that followed the southern France operations came perilously close to being abandoned in favor of further exploitation in Italy and possibly the Balkans. A drawn-out debate ensued—marked by long discussions in the theater and numerous exchanges between Washington and London. Plans and preparations see-sawed—now the operation was on, then it was off—not once but several times.
The controversy over Anvil falls into two main phases, roughly divided by the landing in Normandy and the capture of Rome, both in June, 1944. The first phase is a story of confusion, uncertainty, and the temporary abandonment of the operation; the second, of gradual recovery and triumph.
The details of the Anglo-American debate in the early months of 1944 need not concern us here. A variety of interlocking pressures built up against the operation. The widespread demands to strengthen the Overlord assault, the slow progress of the Italian campaign and the move to speed it up, the lukewarmness of the British, the lack of landing craft, and shortage of other key resources— all contributed to Anvil’s decline. The debate developed first as between Overlord and Anvil and then as between Anvil and the Italian campaign. The resultant keen competition for that ever-precious commodity —landing craft—demonstrated the existing gap in planning between the strategists and the logisticians, and gave further proof of that old axiom in strategy that, to be effective, means must match plans. As priorities for an expanded Overlord assault and the Italian campaign rose, Anvil inevitably received the short end of the stick.
In April the British and American chiefs agreed to throw Allied resources in the Mediterranean into the offensive in Italy, which was to have first priority. Anvil was deferred indefinitely. This decision, marking the end of the first phase of the debate over Anvil, permitted both the Normandy and Italian campaigns to go forward. On May 12 the Allied command in Italy launched a full-scale offensive. The bridgehead and the main battle line were soon linked up, and the deadlock in Italy was broken. On June 4, two days before the Normandy invasion, the Allies finally captured Rome.
As the Allied armies swept into Rome and Normandy, the debate between the British and the Americans reopened. Would the prize be the occupation of all Italy, the capture of Istria and Trieste, and an advance through the Ljubljana Gap, with political and strategic consequences for the Balkans, or the direct strengthening of Overlord and of the subsequent continental drive? The Allies must either continue the Mediterranean drive and commit themselves to a strong and active offense in the south or throw their might into the assault on Germany from the west and content themselves with a holding role in Italy.
In June, 1944, shortly after D-Day, the U. S. chiefs flew to London for an informal conference with the British. The American chiefs held firmly to an operation in the western Mediterranean but were willing to consider other plans of action. In the end the CCS decided to explore several possibilities. General “Jumbo” Wilson was asked to furnish plans and estimates for operations at Sete and Istria as well as Anvil, Eisenhower for an operation on the Bay of Biscay. Each operation was to be planned on the basis of a three-division lift and to be mounted about July 25.
In the days that followed the divergent views came into clearer focus. General Wilson came out strongly for a push in Italy toward the Ljubljana Gap and southern Hungary. He thus advanced the British thesis that Overlord could be aided elsewhere than in southern France. General Eisenhower countered with a recommendation that Anvil be launched by August 15. Concerned because his operations in Normandy were behind schedule, he argued that Anvil would give him an additional port, open a direct route to the Ruhr, and help the Maquis. He firmly believed that the Allies could support but one major theater in the European war—the Overlord battle area. Both General Marshall and General Eisenhower stressed the need for a major port through which to pour some forty to fifty divisions waiting in the United States for battle in France. Since the SHAEF staff frowned on any Bay of Biscay operations and viewed the Sete movement as impracticable because of timing, the Americans swung back to the original Anvil to stay. The American Chiefs of Staff now lined up solidly behind General Eisenhower; the British behind General Wilson. The Prime Minister directed his attack on the President and Eisenhower while the British chiefs sought to sway their American opposites. In the face of these new onslaughts, the American lines held surprisingly firm.
Churchill was willing to help General Eisenhower but not, he stated, at the expense of the complete ruin “of our great affairs in the Mediterranean.” In fact, he went so far as to argue that to hasten the end of the European war: “Political considerations, such as the revolt of populations against the enemy or the submission and coming over of his satellites, are a valid and important factor.”
The President would not yield. To him the courses of action decided upon at Tehran still were the best means to bring about the unconditional surrender of Germany. He agreed that the political factors mentioned by Churchill were significant. But the most important task at hand was to advance into Germany. Any operations into Istria and the Balkans would be diversionary and secondary. He could not agree to the employment of American forces in this area. Nor did he think the French would support the use of their troops in the Balkans. Plans laid at Tehran had gone well so far. Any change in Anvil would have to be cleared with Stalin. The President concluded by reminding Churchill:
“Finally, for purely political considerations over here, I should never survive even a slight setback inn ‘Overlord’ if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”
Years later a still annoyed Churchill was to write, “It was his [the President’s] objections to a descent on the Istria Peninsula and a thrust against Vienna through the Ljubljana Gap that revealed both the rigidity of the American military plans and his own suspicion of what he called a campaign ‘in the Balkans.’ ” Churchill vigorously denied that anyone involved in these discussions had “ever thought of moving armies into the Balkans.’”
Whatever would have been the ultimate political or military effects of Churchill’s Balkan policy—and this is still a moot point —he was not to win out. The President, in complete agreement with his staff on this score, held firm. On July 2 he asked the Prime Minister to direct General Wilson to set the wheels in motion for an early Anvil. He declared, “ . . . I am compelled by the logic of not dispersing our main efforts to a new theatre to agree with my Chiefs of Staff. ... I always think of my early geometry—'a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.’ ” General Marshall and his staff could ask for nothing more.
The President’s personal pleas broke through the Prime Minister’s adamant position, and he consented to the issuance of the directive to Wilson. On July 2 the CCS issued this directive: Anvil would be launched with a target date of August 15 on a three-division assault basis and an airborne lift to be decided later. The build-up would be to ten divisions. Thus, after months of uncertainty, Anvil had become a more or less firm commitment— only six weeks before it was to be launched.
But, in spite of their setback, there were indications that the British did not consider the matter closed. When the Allied breakthrough at St. Lo proved successful during the last week in July, the British made their final effort to cancel Anvil, which had been renamed Dragoon. With the possibility of using the ports in Brittany to reinforce Overlord, Churchill and the British chiefs tried again. Eisenhower was subjected to very intense pressure from the Prime Minister to alter his stand. Churchill also sent to Hopkins a last-minute appeal to intercede and influence Marshall.
Any worries that the Army planners may have had proved groundless, for Eisenhower clung firmly to Dragoon as Overlord’s best concomitant. Eisenhower suggested to Churchill that he was willing to change his plan of campaign only if the Prime Minister and the President ruled that political considerations were to be paramount: on military grounds alone he would not yield in favor of a Balkan campaign. With the American chiefs, Hopkins, and the President in turn standing behind the decision, the British finally conceded defeat. On August 10 the British chiefs notified General Wilson he was to proceed with Dragoon as planned, a directive which the CCS confirmed on the following day—just four days before the landing. The British would have to salvage the Italian campaign as best they could.
After more than two years of discussion, frequently warm and spirited, the great debate over the Mediterranean and the cross- Channel attack was finally laid to rest. In the final analysis, the debate over the southern France operation in the summer of 1944 represented the last gasp of the peripheral strategy advocated by Churchill and his staff from the beginning of the European struggle. But the war had already entered a new era. And in his arguments for canceling the southern France operation, Churchill was, in effect, giving peripheral strategy a new twist and a more naked political form, applying it now to the Soviet Union as well as to Germany. Despite the valiant effort of the British to win another reprieve for the Mediterranean, the American insistence on supplying extra punch to Overlord had carried the day.
So much for the wartime debate, decisions, and revisions. It is clear that the differences of opinion between the Americans and British over Anvil were but one facet of the underlying disagreement over the type of war to be fought and the objectives to be sought by the Anglo-American coalition. Now what of the postwar charge that the decision for southern France was a great mistake—a prime example of American political and strategic naivete, one of the worst blunders of the war, a blunder that helped throw the victory to the Russians? This charge has taken two chief forms. One is that the operation, designed as it was to buttress the “big blow” strategy of the Americans, must share the criticism that has been directed against that strategy. This represents a postwar version of the case for peripheral strategy over that of mass and concentration. The other form of attack is more specific—that strategically and politically the Western partners would have gained far more by an operation against the Balkans. Both have in common the notion that America concentrated too heavily on winning the military victory and not enough on political considerations.
So much of postwar writing on the grand strategy of World War II has been dominated by British writers, led by the incomparable Churchill, that the arguments advanced have become generally familiar. One can hardly pick up a book on World War II these days without coming across them, any more than one can find articles on World War II in our popular magazines which do not mention examples of American strategic and political naivete. Incidentally, the list of so-called blunders of World War II is apparently growing. Hanson Baldwin’s original modest six have been tripled by Captain William D. Puleston, USN (Ret.). From all latest reports, the southern France decision is still holding its high rating on the “big blunder” hit parade. What must be noted is that the eloquence of the British writers, the plausibility of their case, and the frustrations of the postwar years as tensions with Russia have increased—all have given their case great prominence. The resultant criticism of the American strategy runs the gamut from the nostalgic “I told you so” of the Prime Minister and the reasoned historical analysis of a Liddell Hart in favor of a counterstrategy, to a vindictive search for scapegoats by certain sections of the American press. What has been lost in all this barrage is the American case, its compulsions, its strong points, and its logic. Obscured, too, are the positive results derived from the southern France operations, although General Eisenhower has stated in retrospect, “There was no development of that period which added more decisively to our advantages or aided us more in accomplishing the final and complete defeat of the German forces than did this secondary attack coming up the Rhone Valley.” (Crusade in Europe, p. 294.)
There is not space here to examine in detail the general charges against American strategy around which most of the postwar criticisms on the conduct of the war have centered. Churchill has lashed out at what he terms the American “logical, large-scale, mass- production style of thought.” J. F. C. Fuller, the British student of strategy, has expressed the same thought in referring to this type of strategy as “iron-mongering.” Chester Wilmot, the late Australian publicist, has concluded that the Americans were “militarily unsophisticated.” To paraphrase their representation of such strategy, the Americans had a conception which they pursued relentlessly and rigidly—a kind of “big business” strategy built around the notion of concentrating tons of hardware in the British Isles and hurling it across the Channel on a definite time schedule in such great quantities that the hapless Germans would be all but submerged. Such criticism begs the question whether the Churchillian approach, the peripheral approach, however suitable to British manpower, economy, and traditions, was suited to American capacities and traditions. Gordon Harrison, author of Cross-Channel Attack, has remarked, “To accuse the Americans of mass-production thinking is only to accuse them of having a mass-production economy and recognizing the military advantage of such an economy. The Americans were power- minded.” From the beginning they thought in terms of taking on the main German armies and beating them. What they wanted was a “power drive,” not a “mop-up.”
Back of the American staffs fear of a policy of attritional and peripheral warfare against Germany in mid-war lay their continued anxiety over its ultimate costs in men, money, and time. This anxiety was made all the greater by their concern with getting on with the war against Japan. Basic in their thought was a growing realization of the ultimate limits of American manpower available for war purposes. To the military, the discernible ceilings in military manpower and anxiety about the effects of a long-continued period of maximum mobilization confirmed their concept of defeating Germany by a direct, concentrated effort. But it is a mistake to believe that the Americans remained opposed to all Mediterranean operations. As the debate over the southern France operation shows, a good part of their labors in 1943 and 1944 was actually spent in reconciling them with the cross-Channel operation. It should also be carefully noted that the weakening of Great Britain and its growing dependence on the United States were well underway before the end of 1943, when the peripheral strategy to which the Prime Minister was so dedicated was still in vogue.
The controversy that has arisen over the question of a Balkan operation demands special attention. Would it not have been wiser to have invaded the continent through the Balkans and thereby forestalled Soviet domination of central Europe? The fact must be emphasized that this is a postwar debate. The Balkan invasion was never proposed by any responsible leader in Allied strategy councils as an alternative to Overlord and no Allied debate or planning took place in those terms. The evidence is clear on this point. The Balkan versus southern France argument is another kettle of fish. The Prime Minister has steadfastly denied that he wanted a Balkan invasion and the evidence, though not entirely clear on this point, seems to bear him out. But there are ambiguities in his position which remain to be explained. Clearly he was in favor of raids, assistance for native populations, throwing in a few armored divisions and the like—for the Balkans—but nowhere in his wartime or postwar writing has he faced up to the question which so frightened the American staff—the ultimate costs and requirements of an operation in the Balkans, an area of poor terrain and poor communications. This becomes all the more important in the light of World War II experience with Mediterranean operations—a striking demonstration of how great the costs of war of attrition can be. What is also clear is that both the President and the American staff were determined to stay out of the thorny politics of the Balkan area. Suffice it to say, the Balkan question was never argued out in full and frank military or political terms in World War II.
Before we accept the case for the Balkan alternative to the southern France operation, there are other points that we should ponder. With all due respect to the greatest phrase- maker of them all, there probably is no worse misnomer than the so-called “soft underbelly.” There is nothing soft about the European underbelly. As any good terrain map will show, the Balkan area has a hard-shelled back—certainly one not ideally suited for armored warfare. Aside from terrain, logistical factors must be considered. Suppose a campaign in the Balkans had bogged down or developed into a big campaign. In that case additional bases would have had to be built up in the Middle East to support it. Along with this, there was the question of turn-around time. To have reoriented the Allied effort to the Balkans might have required a great diversion from the continental build-up and might have slowed plans for redeployment to the Pacific. To have reoriented that effort to the Balkans would itself have required considerable time. That the Allies were not diverted from the northern campaign may even have been England’s salvation. For otherwise, Hitler might eventually have pulverized Britain with V-2 projectiles from launching platforms in the Low Countries.
Then there is the important factor of public opinion. Would the American people in the summer of 1944 have tolerated a shift from the much-publicized second front to an effort in the Balkans? The judgment of the President, the responsible American policy maker, was no. Here it is important to consider the divergent approaches of the Prime Minister and the President to the European war. To Churchill, anxiously watching the rapid Soviet advance into Poland and the Balkans, the war had become more than ever a struggle for great political stakes and he wished Western Allied strength diverted to fill the vacuum left by the retreating Germans and thereby forestall the Russian surge. Had the President joined with the Prime Minister as he often had in the past, the American military staff’s concentration on bringing the war against Germany to a swift military conclusion might yet have been tempered and the war given a more direct political orientation. But the President would not, and the Prime Minister by himself could not. Many reasons may account for the President’s position— state of his health, anxiety to wind up the war against Japan, desire to get to the business of peace. In any event, by the last year of the war the President was caught on the horns of a political dilemma. There is reason to believe that he was not unconcerned about the unilateral efforts of the Soviet Union to shape postwar Europe. But domestic political considerations required him to fight a quick and decisive war—one that would justify American entry and the dispatch of American troops abroad. He had done the job of educating the American people to the need for active participation in the European conflict, but whether he could have led them to a prolonged war or to a prolonged stay of American troops in occupation duties—such as might have resulted from the more active American role in southeastern Europe desired by the Prime Minister—was more doubtful. Moreover, President Roosevelt’s policy for peace, like President Woodrow Wilson’s, seemed to rest on national self-determination and an international organization to maintain peace—not on the balance of power. To realize this aim he had to take the calculated risk of being able to deal with Stalin and winning and keeping the friendship of the Soviet Union. To use American military strength to play the game of European power politics might have defeated both aims.
While Churchill appeared willing to go a long way in the same direction, he hedged more in the direction of the traditional balance of power theory. Churchill’s inability in the last year of the war to reverse the trend reflected the change in balance between American and British military weight and the shifting bases of the Grand Alliance. The Prime Minister had the purpose but not the power, the United States had the power but did not elect to use it. After the middle of 1944, British war production became increasingly unbalanced, and the British fought on to the end of the war with a contracting economy. Thus the last year of the war saw the foundations' of the Alliance in further transition, British influence waning, and the United States and the Soviet Union emerging as the two strongest powers in the world.
It is in the light of this shift in the power balance that we must consider the Prime Minister’s alternatives. The strong presumption in the postwar debate is that if the Allies entered the Balkans, the Russians would somehow have been held in check. The counter arguments must also be weighed. Aside from questions of military feasibility, there is no certainty that such a move would have produced the desired peace. Had the Western partners become involved in the Balkans, the Russians might have gone all the way to the Channel, perhaps picking up the strategic Ruhr along the way. Had the Western Allies entered the Balkans in force in the face of the advancing Russians, there is also no assurance that new embroilments might not have been begun then and there as the Americans feared. With the traditional balance of power upset, Great Britain growing weaker, the Russians intent on pushing their strategic frontiers westward, and the United States determined to leave Europe soon, more fundamental measures than the temporary diversion of some Western military power—largely American power at that —would seem to have been required to check the Russians and assure the peace in Europe.
It appears clear that back of Churchill’s Balkan policy lay the traditional British balance of power theory. But there is a serious question here, too, for students of strategy and international affairs to consider. At the risk of oversimplification, it may be said that traditionally the British practice rested on its treasure, its Navy, and some ground force— all placed where they could do the most good. By the summer of 1944, Britain had neither the treasure nor the uncommitted ground force to give, and its Navy could serve little against a land power like the Soviet Union. Clearly it would have required Allied help— especially American—to make the theory work. With American public opinion unprepared for a sudden shift in objective, from Germany to the Soviet Union, and with American tradition opposed to involving its forces in European power politics, how realistic was the Churchillian policy? Furthermore, Communism has been called “an ideology in arms”—an ideology with its own body of doctrine, tactics, and ethics that can apparently operate on a global scale and assume many forms of power, a colossus that can apparently wait generations to attain its ends. That the balance of power theory was a useful concept in Britain’s past history vis-a- vis continental Europe is undoubtedly true. Whether the British experience with the traditional balance of power theory in Europe is the answer to the Communist threat now, any more than it could have been in the summer of 1944, is questionable. Willy-nilly, the power balance in the world has changed, and power itself has assumed new forms. Existing stockpiles of thermo-nuclear weapons may have already outmoded the World War II concept of “industrial mobilization potential” as a basis of national power. Even Churchill has come to recognize that a “balance of terror” has become the substitute for a traditional balance of power.
What does all this mean for students of strategy and foreign affairs in 1958? It means that the simple pat judgments in postwar writing must be carefully reassessed—that if what was done has not led to a millennium, there is no assurance that the alternative would have done so either; in fact, we might have been worse off. It also means that all the so-called mistakes of World War II must be taken in the context of their time. Far more important than the “blunders’ reflected in the hard-pressed strategic and political decisions of the war was the inability of a wartime partnership to bridge the gap between the Western partners and the Soviet Union—to overcome the legacy of suspicion and of divergent conceptions of international action and morality. And far more important, too, was the failure of an Allied military victory to prevent the further weakening of Western Europe, a weakening that began in the first World War. Advocates of the strategy of the indirect approach have uniformly oversimplified the American strategic case, passing over its compulsions and strong points, even as they have closed one eye to World War II experience with Mediterranean operations. It also seems clear that, despite all the advantages of hindsight and all the persuasive and eloquent arguments that have been marshaled against the alleged American political and strategic naivete in World War II, there is no certainty that the war could have been planned to produce a faster or cheaper victory over Germany and at the same time have put the West in a fundamentally more secure position in relation to the Soviet Union in postwar Europe. In a sense the cards were stacked against the West from the beginning, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the strongest continental power was an almost inevitable product of the shift in the power balance, a shift set in motion in World War I.
And what of the future? The comparatively simple terms in which American strategists approached the decision on southern France would seem to be out-of-date. As the United States moves out to new and uncharted frontiers of experience and assumes its unprecedented position in world leadership in this tense atomic age, the task of American strategists has become the most difficult and challenging of all the military arts. The assumptions underlying strategy are changing rapidly. What was true yesterday is no longer true today. The strategist must deal with a new world environment in the context of which national security must be safeguarded, a whole new complex of political, economic, military, and technological realities—all in process of flux. He will have to harness not only technical skill to military requirements but the art of the historian to that of the intelligence officer. For, to measure alternatives properly, he will have to weigh not only future probabilities but the experience of the past as well. Or, to go one step further, he will be able to look forward and outward only as effectively as he can look backward and inward. In strategy as in politics, flexibility would seem to be the tack. Planning will have to consider limited as well as unlimited warfare. Here the answer may be a strategy of the direct approach, of mass and concentration; there of the indirect or peripheral approach. Sometime the solution may be a blend of the two; sometimes something far different from either. But whatever the precise solution at any moment, the approach must be one that will strike a balance between American traditions and long-term interests and short-term military and political capabilities. In military as well as foreign affairs, American planning must be prepared to examine all possible approaches to our new global problems and to capitalize on European as well as American experience. It must be prepared to exercise the same qualities of courage, ingenuity, and adaptability that enabled our pioneering forebears to conquer a wilderness. But the final product—in external as well as internal affairs—must represent the best of American thinking and not a pale imitation of outmoded European models.