Every Citizen a Soldier: The Campaign for Universal Military Training After World War II
William A. Taylor. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 232 pp. Notes. Index. $39.95.
Reviewed by Michael Neiberg
In 1947, with American military leaders eager to avoid a repetition of the unpreparedness of 7 December 1941 and with a Cold War brewing, the idea of imposing Universal Military Training (UMT) on American youth had broad and deep support. Military leaders, flush with prestige in the wake of their glorious run to victory in 1945, argued that the nation could not afford a repeat of the Pearl Harbor disaster and, more terrifying, that modern war made such a scenario much more likely if the nation did not prepare. President Harry S. Truman voiced his support, influential civic organizations rallied to the idea, and opinion polls showed that UMT had the approval of two in three Americans. Yet the training ultimately failed. William Taylor explains why in this well-researched and well-written account of a key moment in the history of American military personnel policy. If Taylor has a conviction about whether the United States ought to have adopted UMT, he has kept it to himself, focusing instead on the process, policy, and personalities that drove the debate.
Some of his conclusions may not surprise the reader. He argues, for example, that various congressional and private interests became involved in the UMT debate not for reasons of national security but to satisfy their own parochial interests, sometimes combined with an ostensible political ideology. Farmers and labor leaders, for example, generally opposed UMT either because they feared the loss of essential workers or they worried that the Army would turn young men into agents of the federal government.
Moreover, although Truman supported UMT, he did not see the program in the same way the Army did. He wanted UMT to focus more on universality than on military readiness. He saw UMT (or, in his conception, Universal National Service) as a way to instill physical fitness and prepare men for the civic roles they would play in their home communities. To Truman, it hardly mattered whether that service came in uniform or not.
To this mix, Taylor adds two important factors. The first is the persistence of race. Many African-American leaders opposed UMT because they feared it would only support and perpetuate a segregated Army. Although Truman soon integrated the armed forces by executive order, the Army’s experimental UMT camp at Fort Knox barred black soldiers, understandably raising the ire of African-American leaders. Segregationists, on the other hand, argued that UMT would have a dramatic, and in their view negative, impact on America by establishing the principle of universal service regardless of race. UMT could also lead to the integration of National Guard units. Thus did attitudes toward race influence the national-security dimensions of the UMT proposal.
Finally, Taylor argues for what he calls a “paradox of preparedness.” To sell the idea of UMT the Army consistently inflated the threat to the nation from the emerging Soviet bloc. The more it did so, however, the more it undercut its own arguments for UMT, because the program would take years to become operational. In the place of UMT came arguments for the alternative model of Selective Service, a program that proposed taking a far smaller portion of American men but training them for a longer period of time. Abandoning the principle of universality in the long term allowed for a much more effective fighting force in the short term, but it effectively killed the very UMT project the Army had set out to support.
Every Citizen a Soldier provides deep and thoughtful insights into American attitudes toward personnel policy and the way that policy changes as various parts of the American system interact with it. In making his argument, Taylor follows a tripartite model of policy, politics, and society. What the model shows in this example is that even a policy the President supported, the military wanted, and the American people liked failed to come to fruition. Whether that failure was or was not in the national interest in 1948 is secondary to the lessons that the UMT debate has for the policy process today and in the future.
No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War
David Kaiser. New York: Basic Books, 2014. 408 pp. Biblio. Illus. Index. Maps. $27.99.
Reviewed by Commander John T. Kuehn, U.S. Navy (Retired)
As a diplomatic, political, and governmental historian, David Kaiser, also a former professor at the Naval War College, brings to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s critical 18 months prior to Pearl Harbor an appreciation for both strategy and grand strategy. It is not a skill given to many, but FDR proved a master. In Kaiser’s words, “Exactly how Roosevelt and his contemporaries prepared not merely for war, but for victory, in the eighteen months after the fall of France in 1940 is the story of this book. In so doing, they created the world in which we have all spent our lives.”
Kaiser opens the book with a quote from Carl von Clausewitz on the fog of war and its complications for strategists’ decision-making in peace and war. This is followed by a verse from the book of Genesis describing the “giants” that once lived in the world. FDR is a metaphorical giant who cuts through the dense fog bank of friction that makes strategy so difficult. Kaiser also uses the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe on American generations, specifically “prophet generations” that are born in times of peace and stability and then meet great challenges later in life. Using FDR as an archetype of men like Henry Stimson, Frank Knox, Donald Nelson, and Wendell Willkie—members of prophet generations, which Strauss and Kaiser label “the missionaries”—is one of Kaiser’s primary thematic threads.
The book progresses chronologically, rapidly moving from the beginning of FDR’s second term to the crisis when France surrendered in June 1940. Kaiser emphasizes key decisions and speeches that FDR made on the road to getting the United States ready for a war that he and his closest advisers felt was inevitable. The author’s use of these speeches is particularly effective in supporting his argument that FDR kept no one in the dark about his intentions during this critical period, least of all the public. The title for the book comes from the famous “four freedoms” speech made during FDR’s State of the Union address on 6 January 1941: “Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”
Kaiser’s work adds to a growing body of scholarship on grand strategic leadership in World War II, including Masters and Commanders by Andrew Roberts (Harper Perennial, 2010) and David Rigby’s Allied Master Strategists: The Combined Chiefs of Staff in World War II (Naval Institute Press, 2012). Chapter 6 is especially worthy of praise as it recounts the Roosevelt administration’s actions and decisions to mobilize the American economy for war production more than a year before hostilities began. This book supports the idea that one reason the Allies won World War II was because they out-managed the Axis in their conduct of the war, especially in mobilizing their resources effectively in both peace and war.
The judicious use of maps and pictures, missing from too many books these days, add value. One of the most interesting photographs is of presidential envoy Harry Hopkins and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in July 1941, placed contiguous to the text discussing FDR’s momentous decision, against the recommendations of all his advisers, to include the Soviet Union in shipments of Lend-Lease. This decision, one of FDR’s most important, is often glossed over in the histories of World War II. He made the decision at a time when Germany was the greater threat and laid the foundation, as Kaiser highlights, for the grand coalition of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union that served to underwrite—along with the earlier discussed pre-war mobilization—the eventual victory over the Axis powers. However, the difficulty of the decision, its consequences, and the comments of intelligent observers that it was a ludicrous gesture given FDR’s “four freedoms” speech is not often highlighted. Kaiser rightly dismisses the idea that Roosevelt underestimated Stalin or was naïve in his appreciation of the reality of that brutal dictator’s methods. FDR’s eyes were wide open when it came to the criminal in the Kremlin, although for years many historians have argued otherwise.
Kaiser is clearly a master of key archival material, and his integration of the cryptologic history, which has led to so much good revisionist work on World War II, is also extremely deft and effective in supporting his judgments about FDR as a master strategist and exceptional leader. This book is a must- read for those who wish to get a better sense of these important events from the past that have made our present what it is today and for those who want to serve in positions of power and influence—or to simply read intelligently about them.
Losing Vietnam: How America Abandoned Southeast Asia
Major General Ira A. Hunt Jr., U.S. Army (Ret.). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. 399 pp. Ilus. Notes. Index. Tables. $40.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Thomas A. Brooks, U.S. Navy (Retired)
It is now 40 years since the fall of South Vietnam. No one on active duty today served in Vietnam and, with the notable exception of Henry Kissinger, almost all the men who were in senior decision-making positions are gone. America seems to have little in the way of accurate collective memory of the final years of South Vietnam—the years of “Vietnamization.” Perhaps it is simply because we choose to forget.
A host of books have been written on the Vietnam War. Many take the form of reminiscences or of unit history. Others examine the issue of “why we lost,” but an unfortunate number of these are heavily colored by the political outlook of the author and take the form of “the war was wrong from the outset and we told you so.” This reviewer is unaware of many published works that employ an objective analysis of the raw data collected by higher headquarters during the final three years of the war and still existing in federal archives. Losing Vietnam is such a book.
Major General Ira Hunt served as the deputy commander of U.S. Support Activities Group (USSAG), located in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. USSAG was the command established prior to the signing of the Geneva Peace Accords to coordinate U.S. logistic support to South Vietnam’s military and serve as the coordination point with the Vietnamese Joint General Staff. Obviously, the key question they had to continually ask was, “How is the war going and what do the Vietnamese need?” To answer these questions, USSAG instituted a program of detailed data collection and operations analysis. General Hunt had instituted a similar program when he had been Chief of Staff of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam a few years before, and the program was instrumental in increasing the effectiveness of the division.
In this superbly researched work, Major General Hunt draws heavily on these data reports in analyzing what happened during the last two years of the war. The resulting analysis is not “opinion.” It is analysis of objective data, much of which is provided in the book in the form of tables, figures, or maps.
The findings will surprise many readers. Contrary to popular myth, the Vietnamese military did not collapse as soon as the Americans left. Indeed not. In the face of continuing offenses by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) fought well and defeated a number of determined NVA attacks, often inflicting very heavy casualties. Morale in the NVA during 1974 had seriously deteriorated. But it continued to throw fresh manpower into South Vietnam in violation of the Peace Accords.
The first turning point of the war occurred in July 1974 when Congress decided to make draconian cuts in aid to South Vietnam. The ARVN was willing and able to fight off the NVA but could not do so without the aid the United States had pledged and the replacement of aircraft and equipment that it had been promised. The NVA faced no such limitation on the aid provided it by the communist bloc.
The final collapse came as a result of a precipitous and most unfortunate decision by President Nguyen Van Thieu in mid-March 1975 to withdraw all ARVN forces from the northern half of South Vietnam (Military Regions I and II)—which the ARVN was successfully holding—in the face of heavy enemy attack. There had been no prior planning for this move, and the result was chaos. Both regions lost 75 percent of their men and virtually all their supplies and equipment. Thieu’s plan was to cede the sparsely populated northern part of the country and concentrate his forces in the south where most of the population and the agricultural resources were located. Had the move been well planned and coordinated, it might have worked. But it was a disaster and precipitated the fall of the house of cards that marked the last six weeks of South Vietnam. It need not have happened.
Major General Hunt goes on to provide a similarly detailed analysis of the fall of Cambodia and Laos and the effect on Thailand of the Southeast Asia, dominoes falling. After the fall of South Vietnam, there was no prospect for the continued survival of the remainder of what had been French Indochina.
Henry Kissinger, in a letter to Major General Hunt, observed, “It is the first book I have come across which actually quantifies with solid facts and statistical analysis the impact of Congressional aid cuts to South Vietnam and Cambodia.”
For the serious historian or military strategist who would want to have one book in his library to explain the loss of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, this would be it. Inasmuch as Vietnamization—like efforts under way in Afghanistan and those being reintroduced in Iraq—it might be wise to review the lessons learned in Vietnam. They echo down over the years. But is anyone listening?