By December 1, American troops marched into Germany. While in theory the Allies shared overall policy for the occupation, in reality each country had a great deal of autonomy within its zone. The French and British showed less leniency than the Americans, who followed General John Pershing’s pronouncement that the Germans had a “duty … to regain their normal mode of life and to re-establish the schools, churches, hospitals and charitable institutions, and to continue in their regular local activities.” The Germans would “not be disturbed, but rather assisted and protected,” and all “existing laws and regulations, in so far as they do not interfere with the duty and security of the American troops, shall remain in force.”46
This new form of military occupation differed from the experience of the Philippines in several important ways. First, American policy never envisioned annexing any part of Germany (indeed, American leaders had opposed the idea of occupation in the first place). In fact, since occupation had never been part of their country’s postwar aims, American leaders scoured the ranks for soldiers who could at least speak German. That was all it took to become an “officer in charge of civil affairs” (OCCA), and the OCCAs made up the core of military government. Each OCCA joined a combat unit and supervised nearby towns or villages. While the combat units stood ready to back the OCCA in case of conflict, it rarely happened.47
Initially, the OCCAs attempted to reorganize local German government to match the organizational design of the American military. This immediately proved awkward and, as they soon realized, unwarranted. The local government already functioned with military-like efficiency. Indeed, OCCAs learned that they had gotten things entirely backward—that it would be far more efficient for the military government to mirror the civil structure of the German government. In fact, the British, French, and Belgians all took the latter approach, recognizing the inherent compatibility between the German state and their military governments.48 Therein lay a second distinction from the Philippines. In the Philippines, the occupation had aimed to remake the Filipinos in America’s republican image. In Germany, military government issued only three rules in the American zone: no public gatherings, no alcohol sales during daytime hours (a nod to Prohibition back in the United States), and no carrying of weapons.49 On the first Sunday of the occupation, American doughboys stunned the Germans by sitting next to them at church.50
When it became clear that the occupation would last years rather than months, military government began promoting economic recovery. While the terms of the Armistice prohibited Germans from “military” production, the OCCAs lacked the will to enforce the rules, and the German economy in the American zone quickly improved. As the rest of Germany convulsed in political conflict, rampant inflation, and economic disorder, the American zone turned into an island of stability.51
Perhaps the largest misunderstanding among the Allies involved fraternization rules. The United States agreed to an anti-fraternization policy for the occupation: American soldiers should only interact with Germans over official business. For the French, the order aimed to quarantine “Bolshevism”—communist ideas that had started to sweep across Germany. By contrast and consistent with progressive ideas of virtue, American leaders hoped that soldiers would return home from Europe as sexually “pure” as they arrived. But the “anti-frat” policy (as doughboys called it) failed almost immediately, in large part because of the housing situation. The military had no place to billet troops in Germany and no interest in building barracks that it would soon vacate; thus, doughboys billeted with German families, and often enough those families included young girls. Almost immediately commanders started receiving requests from soldiers to marry their (often pregnant) German girlfriends.52
At the end of the war, the army ordered Douglas MacArthur to lead his Forty-Second Division into the occupation zone. He remained until spring the next year and from this experience absorbed several lessons that mattered when he became proconsul in Japan. More than Eisenhower and Clay, he saw the political realities of occupation. When he later governed postwar Japan, he mirrored the German experience by leaving much of the Japanese civil structure in place (including, quite controversially, Emperor Hirohito). He never enforced anti-fraternization rules. Most of all, he hoped to duplicate the feeling he had when he left Germany. “When we received our orders to return to the United States,” he wrote years later, “the tearful departure looked more as we were leaving [home] instead of returning home.”53
Not long after MacArthur departed Germany, Clay arrived. The army sent a number of engineers to help with the occupation. Like many soldiers, he could see the troubles affecting the rest of Germany. He, too, drew an important lesson from his experience. “I did see the inflation,” he recalled later. “I did see the difficulties under which the new German [Weimar] government was attempting to establish itself.”54 As much as any American, he saw how economic chaos undermined the good intentions of democratic reforms.
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By 1920, the Philippines had become a mostly autonomous, albeit legally anomalous, “quasi-sovereign.”55 The insurrection had ceased, and Congress had granted the Filipinos an elective national legislature. More than 90 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, and the national legislature held wide latitude in determining domestic policy. However, the government remained headed by an American governor-general who acted as executive and could veto any act of the national legislature. While he had to gain the consent of the Philippine legislature for his own initiatives, he ultimately answered to the American president, who had appointed him. The arrangement had force because the United States maintained a garrison on the islands that reported to the governor-general.56
In 1922, the army ordered MacArthur to the Philippines as part of the garrison. His former boss Leonard Wood greeted him upon arrival (President Warren Harding had appointed Wood as governor-general the prior year). The Filipinos had “done fairly well with self-government,” Wood reported, but widespread graft and corruption had led to a doubling of government expenses with no improvement in public services. The courts had become “clogged,” small pox and cholera outbreaks had killed nearly sixty thousand Filipinos, and the Philippine government had used tax revenue to prop up a national bank that had gone bankrupt. Wood came to the Philippines to “clean things up.”57 For their part, many Filipinos had grown weary of Wood’s “supervision.” In an effort to get around him, they continually sent delegations directly to the U.S. asking for immediate independence. Harding stood by his governor-general, but it irritated Wood to no end.58 To appease the Filipinos, Wood put MacArthur to work, heading campaigns to vaccinate livestock, organize a local ROTC, and chase away jungle bandits.59
While MacArthur labored in the Philippines, Eisenhower and Clay also gained experience in America’s external state—mostly in Panama. Efforts to build a canal there had begun in 1850, when American and British negotiators agreed (in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty) not to compete with each other in constructing a passageway between the oceans. Of course, in 1850 neither country had the resources or technical know-how to compete anyway. But by the turn of the century the U.S. position had changed. President Theodore Roosevelt pressed for an American effort to create the canal, which led to the Hay—Bunau-Varilla Treaty between the United States and Panama. The treaty committed the United States to defending the independence of Panama and, in turn, granted the United States in perpetuity control of a zone stretching five miles to either side of a canal to be constructed by the Americans. The “United States would possess and exercise” governance of this area as “if it were the sovereign of the territory … to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.”60 Congress followed ratification of the treaty with an act that vested in the president all “military, civil, and judicial powers as well as the power to make all rules and regulations necessary for the government