Thoughts on War by Phillip S. Meilinger

Author:Phillip S. Meilinger [Meilinger, Phillip S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Strategy, Political Science, Public Policy, Military Policy, Technology & Engineering, Military Science
ISBN: 9780813178912
Google: 2pnJDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2020-03-17T00:36:26+00:00

11

Unity of Command in the Pacific during World War II

A myth of World War II is that, unlike in Europe, unity of command was lacking in the Pacific. The argument goes that the Southwest Pacific Area had one commander, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Pacific Ocean Areas had another, Admiral Chester Nimitz. MacArthur complained that the Pacific Ocean Areas drained resources for little gain that he could have put to better use. In his memoirs, he railed against the command structure: “Of all the faulty decisions of war perhaps the most unexplainable one was the failure to unify the command in the Pacific … [it] cannot be defended in logic, in theory, or in common sense.… It resulted in divided effort, the waste, diffusion, and duplication of force, and the consequent extension of the war, with added casualties and cost.”1

For its part, the Navy believed that the Pacific war was “a naval problem.” Admiral Ernest King, commander of the fleet and chief of naval operations, insisted that “the entire Pacific Ocean should constitute a single theater with a unified Naval command headed by Nimitz.”2 Because MacArthur and Nimitz were so powerful, unity could not be achieved. As a result, a fundamental principle of war was ignored and the result was inefficiency, confusion, waste, and an “ad hoc” and “piecemeal strategy.”3 Another historian is even more critical, arguing that the US effort in the Pacific was “hamstrung” because of its inability to appoint a single theater commander. The result was “a wasteful allocation of resources, a dispersion of effort, and a consistent failure to pursue the most effective and economical strategy against the Japanese.” The compromise of appointing two commanders for what should have been a single theater was “grotesque.”4 In truth, a basic assumption of the above argument is false. There was no unified command in Europe, and so the ideal to which the critics of the Pacific war allude never existed.

Regarding the term “unity of command”: principles of war, in one form or another, have been claimed since Sun Tzu wrote over 2,000 years ago. As noted in an earlier chapter, the first twentieth-century effort to enumerate such principles was by a British Army officer, then-Captain J.F.C. Fuller, who published his list in 1916. These principles were soon enshrined in British Field Service Regulations, and in 1921 they were adopted with minor revision by the US Army. These early doctrinal writings referred to a principle of “cooperation” allowing diverse fighting forces to work efficiently and effectively toward success.5 By 1931 the US Army had substituted the term “unity of command” for this idea, stating authoritatively: “It is a well-established principle that there shall be only one commander for each unit, and one commander in each zone of action, who shall be responsible for everything within his unit or within his zone of action.”6 This principle was not, however, established in a joint environment. Theater commanders were not yet common in American military operations; rather, Army and Navy commanders were expected to “cooperate” when circumstances dictated.

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