School of Military Government
The School of Military Government was an educational institution established by the United States Army in Charlottesville in early 1942, renting out facilities from the University of Virginia. The purpose of the school was to provide the Army with greater numbers of trained military government officers in the context of the recent American entry into World War II.
History
Background
Past experiences in military government
Throughout numerous early conflicts waged by the United States such as the Mexican-American War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World War I, the American armed forces often found themselves instituting 'military government' (the administration by military officers of civil government in occupied enemy territory) within the lands in which they operated. However, because neither the Army nor the federal government ever accepted such duties as legitimate military functions, the officers charged with these responsibilities had often received inadequate training for their tasks and consequently committed frequent errors in carrying out their obligations.
Following the conclusion of World War I and the subsequent Allied occupation of numerous territories throughout Europe, Colonel Irwin L. Hunt (the director of the American military government in postwar Germany) produced an account named American Military Government of Occupied Germany: 1918-1920, detailing his experience in conducting civil affairs in that country. Popularly known as the "Hunt Report," this work called for preparing the Army to exercise more effective military government over its defeated enemies by pushing officers to develop competence in civil administration during peacetime rather than in the midst of conflict.
Increasing interest in formalized training
The Hunt Report was rarely cited in studies taught by the War College throughout the 1920's and 1930's, as the Army did not anticipate ever again having to occupy foreign territories on a large scale. However, following the outbreak of World World II in 1939 and the overrunning of much of Europe by the Axis powers, the federal government gradually began to change its views on the matter, viewing the education of military officers on the supervision of civil affairs as an important subject in the context of the increasing possibility that the United States would be drawn into the ever-widening conflict.
In early 1941, the Intelligence Training Centre of the British War Office inaugurated politico-military courses at St. John's College, Cambridge, with these classes being attended by Major Henry H. Cumming and Lieutenant Charles A. H. Thomson (these being the first Americans to ever receive formal military government training). Cumming and Thomson's favorable reports on their studies, coupled with increasing American involvement in the war during the summer of that year, heavily contributed to Provost Marshal General Allen W. Gullion being assigned the task of creating a military police branch in the fall of 1941. On December 3, despite objections from certain divisions of the General Staff over how to best utilize limited resources, Brigadier General Wade H. Haislip requested Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to authorize military government training in a school to be operated "for other purposes" by Gullion.
Formation
In January of 1942, following the surprise Japanese military strike on Pearl Harbor during the prior month and the subsequent American entry into World War II, Marshall gave his official blessing to Gullion's proposal. The latter thus made Jesse I. Miller his adviser on the subject and asked him to determine the curriculum of an educational program on military government. In early February, another of Gullion's civilian advisers named Hardy C. Dillard recommended the University of Virginia as a suitable school in which to host the relevant courses due to its geographical proximity to Washington, D.C. Gullion accepted Charlottesville as the site after the university agreed to furnish all the of necessary facilities at a rent of $75 per month. Economy was to remain a strong feature of the school; the largest item of expense, professional personnel, was $11,000 in 1942, and the total budget for 1943 was $98,680, increased somewhat during the year.
An order of the Secretary of War on April 2, 1942 established the institution "to be known as the School of Military Government" at the University of Virginia, with Brigadier General Cornelius W. Wickersham being appointed its commandant and director while Colonel Frank H. Hastings served as his assistant commandant. Miller, who had done much of the work in organizing the new school, was named associate director by Gullion in May of that year. By this time, Wickersham had visited various universities searching for faculty and had canvassed other government departments for lecturers. He ended up hiring three civilian experts, one each for Germany (Arnold Wolfers of Yale University), Italy (Henry Powell of Johns Hopkins University), and Japan (Hugh Borton of Harvard University). Altogether, the staff of the school numbered 12 officers and civilian instructors, 25 other civilians, and one enlisted man.
Activities
Initial courses
The school was originally intended to enroll around 50 students at a time. The courses were scheduled to run for four months, with Army organizations and regulations also having to be taught as some students were commissioned directly from civilian life. The specialized instruction was disseminated in three forms: by lectures and seminars, by the War College committee-syndicate system of working on broad problems, and by the Command and General Staff School (Leavenworth) system, under which the students worked out specific assigned problems. Because many of the students were senior field-grade officers (while others already possessed pertinent civilian skills), the War College system in particular enabled the school to not only instruct but research and solve problems as well. The first course opened on May 11, 1942.
One of the first original studies produced by the school attempted to determine how many officers skilled in military government the Army would need in a hypothetical occupation of the Rhineland. Utilizing the relevant figures from World War I, it was concluded that at least 4,000 officers would be required for such a task, as many as the school in Charlottesville could train in ten years. Recognizing the need for external aid in the endeavor, Miller met with three representatives of the Board of Economic Warfare (an agency that operated directly under the President of the United States and advised him on all economic matters relating to the ongoing war) in Charlottesville and secured their agreement that the War Department would assume control over the planning and training in military government, further increasing the significance of the school.
Program under attack
Although the United States had conducted ad hoc military government in nearly all of its past conflicts, deliberate planning gave to some the appearance of disregard for the country's traditional subordination of military to civil leadership. Upon the opening of the school in Charlottesville, various news outlets began to rigorously criticize the institution and its purpose, with one newspaper even describing it as a "school for Gauleiters." Although the War Department soon after clamped a tight prohibition on news from Charlottesville, causing public awareness of the topic to gradually dwindle, suspicion of the school by higher authorities slowly mounted.
On October 3, 1942, the utility of the school in Charlottesville was heavily discussed during a full cabinet meeting. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes expressed outright alarm at what he viewed as a veiled form of imperialism. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the whole felt that the program was a worthy endeavor but had personal doubts about the quality of the faculty. Later in the day, he asked for a complete explanation and lists of all the personnel, military and civilian, undergoing training at the school in order to assess the institution for himself. At another cabinet meeting on November 6, in response to an inquiry of the President as to whether the school was intending to train proconsuls in the Army's employ who would push civilian authorities out of all postwar administration in occupied areas, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson gave an oral report that officially disavowed the school of having any such goals.
Throughout that November, the school in Charlottesville came under attack from all directions. Certain figures within the War Department continued to advocate for the viewpoint that training in military government was a waste of resources when the times and places of future occupations were unknown. Several civilian departments criticized the content of the courses and the supposed subpar quality of the instructors teaching them. Gullion himself, despite being a Democrat, was accused of having filled the school with anti-New Dealers and Republicans in service to his own alleged political ambitions.The President sent Ambassador William C. Bullitt and Jonathan Daniels to Charlottesville in order to separately investigate the quality of the students, courses, and plans being formulated there.
Later in the month, Gullion managed to secure permission to commission 2,500 specialists from civilian life, although these individuals still had to be located and recruited first. In the meantime, all the school's students would have to be officers already in the Army. Because these students were selected from lists submitted by the armies and service commands, and these agencies were unlikely to relinquish their best officers, Wickersham began to complain during this time that of the 250 officers on the list for the third course at Charlottesville, only 38 would make suitable students, with these being "nothing to brag about." In response, Gullion attempted to obtain approval for direct application by individual officers but had his proposal completely sidelined.
Expanded role
Towards the end of 1942, the Military Government Division revised the earlier study produced in Charlottesville and concluded that 6,000 trained officers would be needed worldwide, with another 6,000 being recruited from tactical units as new areas were continually occupied. Since Charlottesville could not then graduate more than 450 per year, the division proposed to establish a second school at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to train another 1,200 junior officers annually. Indeed, by January of 1943 Gullion only had 85 graduates from the school in Charlottesville available for duties abroad (despite the school by this point having graduated 130 officers throughout its first two courses).
The result of these escalating demands for trained officers was the creation of the Civil Affairs Training Program (CATP). This program, which was expected to draw its students mostly from civilian life, provided the means for rapid expansion by permitting the training of numerous individuals at different universities across the country. Unlike the graduates of the school in Charlottesville, who were mostly expected to interact with their own and allied military staffs, the CATP students were given specialized training to deal directly with the civilian populations in the occupied areas, greatly diminishing the amount of time required for them to achieve mastery over their respective fields. In the meantime, the school in Charlottesville's enrollment capacity had been raised to 150 officers.
In July of 1943, in response to the recent invasion of Sicily, Gullion received permission to select students within the Army from both unit lists and individual applications at a rate as high as 400 officers per month. By September of that year, as plans for the invasion of German-occupied France were underway, the classes were further increased to 175 students, with the courses being reduced to only 12 weeks. In the last four months of the year, Charlottesville and the CATP schools together turned out more than 2,000 graduates, thereby nearly filling the estimated wartime European requirements. Recruitment for the European training program ended in December and the last European courses at the school were completed by April of 1944, with Brigadier General E.R. Warner McCabe becoming commandant later that year.[1] By the fall of 1945, a total of 2,820 officers had studied in the school, with a portion of the graduates coming from one of seven foreign countries that had sent officers to study there.[2]
References
- ↑ Web. The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany: 1944-1946, United States Army Center of Military History, 1990
- ↑ Web. Higher Education Goes to War: The University of Virginia's Response to World War II, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, July 1992