Emmons’s resistance highlighted the extent of MGOs’ discretion, which Green noted led often to “unusual business.” For instance, when MG was imposed, bars were closed, and alcohol banned to prevent disorder, MGOs encouraged the sale of candy in their place. This approach failed to prevent soldiers or civilians from drinking, and within a few months the prohibitions were rescinded.79 Law enforcement relaxed. Sentences initially imposed by MG were harsh, but the severity eased with the lack of general resistance to martial law.80
New Expectations, Old Behaviors
Military and civilian leaders in the United States and Britain regarded World War II as different from preceding conflicts, even World War I. The Axis powers had seemingly made warfare more brutal. They openly engaged in mass killing and dislocation of undesirable groups and advocated “total war,” legitimizing attacks against civilians, who were now considered extensions of a state’s war power. It is worth noting that the Allies also engaged in total war, bombing major German and Japanese cities relentlessly, which caused mass death, physical devastation, and internal displacement. But the Allies saw these bombings as reciprocal actions in a war started by their opponents. For occupation planners, the militaristic ideologies underpinning Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, ideologies that drove this new type of war, required Germans and Japanese to resist the Allies to the bitter end.81
Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s agreement at Casablanca in January 1943 to seek unconditional Axis surrender expanded potential occupations to the entireties of Germany, Japan, and Italy, as well as large swathes of intervening territory. More officers than could be trained at Charlottesville were needed for these massive operations, necessitating establishment of Civil Affairs Training Schools (CATS) throughout the United States and Britain.82 These schools shortened the Charlottesville curriculum to between one and two months, and they became more didactic, but the core principles remained essentially the same.83
FM 27-5 was updated in 1943 to address the unique challenges of occupying areas formerly controlled by the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Where the 1940 version expected an acquiescent occupied population and largely intact societal infrastructure, the 1943 edition predicted far worse conditions: “Civil affairs control may have to be performed under the most difficult circumstances…. Civil administration may have broken down wholly or in part…. There may be rioting, looting, or other forms of disorder, particularly if the local police force has disintegrated…. If the area has been fought over or bombed, widespread destruction of buildings and other installations … may be anticipated.”84 But the updated version retained the arch-occupier contractual concept of military rule. It reiterated that MG’s mission was “to assist military operations” through social control. Specifically, its role remained “maintaining order, promoting security,” and “preventing interference with military operations.”85
The updated manual’s descriptions of postconflict conditions showed remarkable foresight in 1943, before the full extent of the war’s destruction was realized. The writers predicted “large numbers of … homeless” at least in part foreseeing the massive DP problem that the Allies later faced in Germany.86 Their dire prognosis of the horrors of Nazi and Japanese rule aimed to steel MGOs: “The enemy may have brought in large numbers of forced laborers from distant areas, who will desperately seek repatriation…. Water supplies may have been polluted…. The health and morale of the population may have been undermined. There may be few facilities to prevent the spread of pestilence from cities and concentration camps.”87 More devastating war elevated the urgency of providing “emergency relief” such as “food, clothing, shelter, and medical aid, to meet subsistence standards.” The authors also stressed that such conditions could require a more domineering form of martial rule than that traditionally employed by Americans. Officers could not assume local cooperation and were to prepare for “the actual administration of the chief political offices of the government.”88 This included the existing police, and MGOs were to prepare for “creation of a new [force].”89
The authors of the 1943 edition accurately predicted the consequences of twentieth-century, technologically enhanced warfare. Their linking of physical destruction to crime also foreshadowed the destruction-and-anarchy trope that has since permeated literature on postwar Germany. But rather than necessitating an adjustment in approach, the core calculus and overarching philosophy of MG remained the same. Officers were to care for occupied people and assume greater administrative responsibilities only where necessary to “preserve order … and [reestablish] … law and order.” Greater challenges further required officers to be more adaptive than previously, rather than less so.90
Other US military manuals and handbooks produced late in the war maintained the 1943 edition’s assumption that Nazism and Japanese Imperialism would leave a trail of destruction.91 The manuals specific to Germany cast Nazism as a totalizing, corruptive ideology. The German Police Handbook, for instance, described the “net of the SD [the SS Security Service, Sicherheitsdienst] having been thrown over the entire population,” therefore suggesting that every German police officer posed a threat to occupation security. This suggests a poor understanding of internal SS structures. Although all police fell under SS control—and ultimately that of Heinrich Himmler—the SD was SS intelligence and was not responsible for policing. But the authors of the Police Handbook appear to have used the specter of the SD to demonstrate the pervasiveness of Nazism.92 This view of Nazi Germany as different from other enemies was maintained in the Public Safety Manual of Procedures for Germany published in September 1944 on the eve of the first incursions into Germany. It adjusted MG approaches toward the specifics of Nazism so that enforcing order became suspending Nazi law, shutting down Nazi courts, and arresting Nazis.93
For the political establishment in Washington, however, Nazism posed a unique, existential threat to world peace such that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s plan to permanently break Germany into four agrarian states was not especially radical. Although not adopted, the Morgenthau Plan was seriously considered within Roosevelt’s administration until early 1945 because it answered the American public’s and the Allies’ fear of Nazism and German militarism.94 In Britain, Lord Robert Vansittart’s plan was virtually identical, and British paymaster general Frederick Lindemann, First Viscount Cherwell, openly called for his government to support Morgenthau’s vision.95 The common thinking in Washington was only barely less extreme, and the consensus fell on using occupation to transform Germany into a peaceful member of the democratic Western world order.96
Transformational ambitions were the antithesis of the military’s approach to MG. The War Department and key generals like Eisenhower resisted MG’s becoming an agent for social change. But they agreed that American legal principles like due process separated Western democracies from arbitrary Nazi rule and should be emphasized during the occupation. Fair legal practice complemented the good governance required in the arch-occupier model. If Nazi concepts of state supremacy over law and justice were also undermined, then so much the better.97
American military government was predicated on honorable officers imposing the law fairly and justly, but the historical reality was quite different. Rather than viewing the law as a transcendent, impartial arbiter of behaviors, MGOs had historically tended to use martial law (through MG Legal Codes) subjectively in order to enforce their authority. This subjectivity was clearest in the promulgation of the occupation laws themselves, which were determined on a case-by-case basis by the theatre commander who tailored the military’s court martial code. Local commanders then enforced this specific law through a two-tiered tribunal system in which commissions handled minor offenses and provost courts tried serious offenses. They were free to interpret the legal code, allocate cases to different courts, and consequently assign punishments largely as they saw fit.98 Bringing greater