The Art of Occupation. Thomas J. Kehoe
to unforeseen conditions. Academics from Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities developed the six-month curriculum and imbued it with the intellectual rigor they believed military governance required.31 On completion, each man graduated with a diploma from the University of Virginia.32 In turn, students were carefully selected for their academic abilities, most coming from civilian white-collar professions.33
The instructors were career officers, uniformed professionals, and academics. Among them were Major General David P. Barrows, an anthropologist and former president of the University of California; Joseph P. Harris, later of the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies; and career officer Major General Thomas H. Green, who became judge advocate general in 1945.34 Many of the teachers had served in previous foreign interventions. Prior experience shaped their thinking, and they brought a range of views on issues from the phases of MG operations to salient historical precedents and the viability of American colonialism.35 Some even plumbed antiquity and reached to ancient Greece and Rome for examples their students should follow.36
These differing viewpoints reflected a consensus within the military that the conduct of military occupation and foreign governance was complex. There was no set formula for a perfect operation. Instead, it required deftness and creativity in officers’ thinking, which was reflected in the differing views of the school’s faculty. Barrows, for instance, questioned the prevailing view that military government was apolitical, existing purely during open warfare. He thought that the attempt to separate the strategic aims guiding a particular military occupation from a nation’s political intentions created an acontextual approach that denied the obvious: war was an instrument of international politics. The military, in his view, should acknowledge the political implications of its actions, though he noted that such thinking was outside the mainstream, writing, “At any rate, and however this question of definition may be decided, in this country we know very well what military government is, not so much from attempts at its legal definition as from its actual exercise.”37 Such debate about even the fundamental philosophy of MG highlighted for students the importance of critically thinking through all aspects of military occupation. And to that end, the curriculum at Charlottesville was wide-ranging in its coverage of governance, from security, criminal justice, and repression of insurgency to economic management and cultivation of morale.38
Underlying any debate was a consensus around the core principles of American military occupation, critical thinking being the primary one. The collegiate atmosphere at Charlottesville was meant to push trainees to assess problems for themselves. To that end, many assignments forced students to analyze past cases, which led to some creative interpretations. Trainee MGO Lieutenant Colonel James A. O’Brien argued that the American approach to occupying Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846–48) originated with the British occupation of Castine, Maine, during the War of 1812.39 This event, O’Brien thought, “must have been clearly in the minds of [General Winfield] Scott and his legal advisors.” He provided no evidence for Scott’s knowledge of the Castine incident, let alone how it may have influenced his use of military tribunals to control lawlessness in Mexico, so it is unclear how well O’Brien performed on the assignment. But his attempt to determine the philosophical origins of American MG highlights the kind of thinking that graduating officers were meant to possess.40
The instructors also agreed that American MG was to be limited. MG complemented combat operations and existed only so long as fighting continued.41 Social control was vital in this interpretation because, as Barrows argued, “anarchy and demoralization” in occupied areas could undermine the front.42 Social control was exercised through law, and “military government” was, in essence, martial law; it abrogated civilian law and was then adjudicated by MG through military tribunals (called provost courts).43 But law cannot exist separately from the society it governs. The Charlottesville instructors recognized that MG, once in place, was responsible for the people it occupied. Brigadier General C. W. Wickersham, an instructor at Charlottesville, summarized the complementary nature of martial law and general governance in a speech to the American Bar Association: “The military occupation of enemy territory suspends the operation of the enemy’s civil government. It is then necessary for the occupying power to exercise the functions of government and maintain public order.” But to do so, “[MG] must deal with public works and utilities, the financial affairs … public health and sanitation, education, public safety, legal matters, communications, public welfare, economics and public relations.” In this view, preventing disorder required clear legal boundaries and methods of enforcement as well as restoration of a society that provided for the general welfare.44
Wickersham’s account of MG sounds all encompassing, but the instructors—and the military more broadly—also valued minimal intervention. An occupation confined to the period of hostility could not replace existing political and societal structures. MGOs would control criminal justice, including policing and the trial process, yet indirectly monitor locally administered government. Social control through enforcement of military law and retention of existing societal structures reflected the American interpretation of what Geoffrey Best calls the “arch-occupier” model of occupation, which had been popular in Europe during the nineteenth century. European military thinking at that time believed military government to be predicated on an implicit contract with occupied people in which they are treated humanely and their society remains largely unaffected while they, in turn, agree to abide by military rule.45 First head of the Charlottesville School Colonel Jesse I. Miller summed up the approach in US military thought as a military regime that “integrates the local laws, institutions, customs, psychology and economics of the occupied area and a superimposed military control with a minimum of change in the former and a maximum of control by the latter.” Reduced to its core elements, Miller’s “minimum change … maximum control” was essentially a maxim for US MG.46
The points of agreement at Charlottesville reflected principles for MG in the Judge Advocate General’s 1940 Basic Field Manual: Military Government (FM 27-5).47 “Military government is executed by force,” wrote the authors of FM 27-5. Therefore, “it is incumbent upon those who administer it to be strictly guided by … justice, honor, and humanity.” Failure to do so could affect the social cohesion of occupied territory and MG control in turn because “a military occupation marked by harshness, injustice, or oppression leaves lasting resentment.” By contrast, “just, considerate, and mild treatment … will convert enemies into friends.”48 Although the terminology “winning hearts and minds” had not entered the military zeitgeist in 1940, this idea infused the approach described in the manual.49
FM 27-5 grew most directly from interwar interest in the military science of occupation after the apparent success of US MG in the German Rhineland after World War I. Germans appeared to have cooperated with the Americans, and US forces relied heavily on them. There were problems in the American-controlled Rhineland, to be sure, but they did not approach the looting, rioting, and racial tensions that characterized the British, Belgian, and French areas.50 Although continuing from 1918 to 1923, the US military’s experience in the Rhineland led to the publication of two influential studies in 1920. The first was colloquially known as the Hunt report after its author Colonel Irvin L. Hunt, adviser to the occupying Third Army in the Rhineland and later the officer in charge of civil affairs of the American Forces in Germany, its successor. The second was by another staff officer, Colonel Harry Alexander Smith. The antecedents to later US military thinking about MG reside in these documents. Smith partially credited the building of positive relationships with Germans to the selection of officers with “zeal and vision,” those “more likely to create than follow precedents.” Hunt emphasized the military governor’s independence from regular command.51
Hunt and Smith acknowledged that the American approach to MG in the Rhineland at least partially reflected a long history of foreign excursions that began with General Winfield Scott’s occupation of Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846–48).52 Later writers like Nobleman—a civilian lawyer before entering the army in 1942 who, after leaving Bavaria, returned to New York and wrote his doctoral thesis on the American occupation of Germany—found the origins for American MG even earlier