The US defense commands

On Monday 17 March 1941 the United States War Department sent its commanders a letter entitled “Defense Plans – Continental United States”. It divided the country into four strategic areas, called defense commands: the Northeast, Central, Southern and Western Defense Commands. A defense command was defined as a territorial agency with an appropriate staff, designed to co-ordinate or prepare for the execution of all plans for the employment of army forces and installations against enemy action in its area. In peacetime it was to plan defence against attack by land and from the air, and in the event of invasion it was to take over the direction of the fighting until the War Department decided otherwise. Six days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, the United States, still formally neutral, was thus beginning to think of its own territory as a possible battlefield.

Corps areas, armies and corps

Some chronologies state that on this day the United States “turned its corps areas into defense commands” and that the name “corps” was transferred to an intermediate level of command in the field army. The sources say otherwise. The nine corps areas, which had existed since 1920 as the counterpart of European military districts, were neither abolished nor renamed defense commands. As early as October 1940 the headquarters of the four field armies (PL) had been separated from them, while the corps areas retained administration, supply and mobilisation; the change coincided with the registration of draftees. In May 1941 they were renamed Corps Area Service Commands, and only in 1942 were they replaced by numbered service commands. Army corps were not new either: since 1932 they had formed, on paper, the intermediate level between army and division, and in 1940–1941 nine such corps were activated as real field headquarters. The new defense commands were laid over the corps areas as an additional layer: each covered several corps areas, whose commanders kept responsibility for internal security, the protection of industrial plants and countering sabotage.

Where the idea came from

The need for a new organisation arose from the experience of 1940. The fall of France, the German air raids on Britain and the acquisition by the United States of bases in the Atlantic showed that the defence of the country could no longer be confined to coastal forts, while the outdated regulations on army–navy co-operation provided only for narrow “coastal frontiers”. The possibility of air attack called for defence in depth, as far as the Great Lakes and the Mississippi valley. In October 1940 the staff of General Headquarters (GHQ) proposed the creation of four territorial commands with boundaries close to those of the army areas. The GHQ chief of staff, General Lesley McNair, would have preferred to call them theatres of operations outright; he wanted a single commander in each to control fighter aviation, anti-aircraft artillery, ground forces, harbour defences and the aircraft warning service. In the winter Colonel Jonathan W. Anderson of the War Plans Division drew up on this basis a study of the organisation of continental defence, which was presented to the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, in mid-January 1941.

The longest dispute was over aviation. The War Plans Division wanted to place air defence under the territorial commanders, but the airmen, led by General Henry H. Arnold, argued that it was impossible to foresee where the real theatres of operations would arise, and that aviation had to be ready above all for operations abroad, in Hawaii or in the Panama Canal Zone. After several conferences in February Marshall decided that in peacetime air defence would be directed by the GHQ Air Force. An order of 7 March made it responsible for the air defence of the continental United States, and the letter of 17 March completed the whole reorganisation.

Four commands

To avoid multiplying headquarters, each defense command was given as its commander the commander of the field army whose headquarters lay in its area, and the army staff, reinforced by a few officers, served at the same time as the staff of the command. The Northeast Defense Command, responsible for the Atlantic coast, was taken over by the commander of the First Army, Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum. The Central Defense Command, covering the Midwest with the vital locks at Sault Ste. Marie, through which some 90 per cent of the iron ore consumed in the country had passed in 1939, went to the commander of the Second Army, Lieutenant General Ben Lear. The Southern Defense Command, on the Gulf of Mexico, with its headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, was given to the commander of the Third Army, Lieutenant General Herbert J. Brees; in May 1941, when Brees retired, he was succeeded by General Walter Krueger, who had been born in Złotów (then Flatow). The Western Defense Command, with its headquarters at the Presidio in San Francisco and responsible for the Pacific coast and Alaska, was taken over by the commander of the Fourth Army, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt. Earlier, on 10 February 1941, a similar Caribbean Defense Command had been set up in the Panama Canal Zone.

The same letter of 17 March replaced the four air districts created in December 1940 with four air forces (the First, Second, Third and Fourth Air Forces; they were formally renamed in April). Each was to have a bomber command and an interceptor, that is fighter, command. The air forces, however, were not subordinate to the defense commands but to the GHQ Air Force, and their boundaries only roughly matched those of the commands. Responsibility for the “air and antiaircraft portions of the defense plans” of the commands was entrusted to the commander of the GHQ Air Force, and instructions of 25 March ordered the armies to hand over their current anti-aircraft defence plans to him as well. GHQ itself was to supervise the planning of the defense commands only once its staff had been enlarged.

A solution on paper

The reorganisation fully satisfied no one. McNair pointed out at once that the commander who in wartime was to be responsible for defending his area did not plan its air defence in peacetime, although, given the position of the United States, an attack could come almost exclusively from the air. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, noted in his diary on 24 April that the new system struck him as a “dangerous arrangement”, pregnant with “possibilities of misunderstanding and trouble”. In June 1941 the United States Army Air Forces were created, and the GHQ Air Force, renamed Air Force Combat Command, passed out of any control by GHQ, which confused the division of responsibilities still further. The defense commands themselves, when they actually began to function in June and July, consisted of a handful of staff officers occupied with planning. The official history of the US Army nevertheless judges that the reform relieved the field armies of concern for home defence, allowing them to concentrate on training troops, and provided a ready framework for the transition to a wartime organisation.

Significance

The defense commands were a further step, after peacetime conscription and the expansion of the army, by which the neutral United States prepared for war before it had even entered it. Until December 1941 they remained largely planning bodies. Their moment came after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On 11 December 1941 the Western Defense Command was given authority over coastal defence, anti-aircraft artillery and fighter aviation in the west of the country and for several months operated as the Western Theater of Operations, and on 24 December the Northeast Defense Command was converted into the Eastern Theater of Operations, renamed the Eastern Defense Command in March 1942. As McNair had wanted, the territorial commands became, in time of danger, theatres of operations with unified command over ground and air forces.

The darkest chapter was written by the Western Defense Command. It was DeWitt who in early 1942 demanded the removal of people of Japanese descent from the Pacific coast, and, on the basis of a presidential executive order issued in February, his proclamations led to the removal and internment of some 110,000 people, most of them American citizens. Once the threat of invasion had passed, the commands lost their importance: in 1943 the field armies and the air forces were separated from them, and in January 1945 the Southern Defense Command was merged into the Eastern. Yet the separation of home defence from the training of field forces, begun on 17 March 1941, allowed the armies that from 1942 set out for North Africa, Europe and the Pacific to prepare for war overseas rather than for guarding their own coasts.