Colossus (17 page)

In theory—and in most of history—empires acquire foreign territory in order to collect rents of some sort, whether by taxing their inhabitants or by extracting natural resources. In practice, American occupations tend to cost American taxpayers money, at least to begin with. The army that occupied Japan was large: four hundred thousand strong at first, and although that number soon halved, it did not fall below one hundred thousand until 1957.
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Though the soldiers’ pay and the costs of their food continued to be covered by the U.S. Treasury, it was intended that the housing, office space, heating, light and transportation that the occupiers required would be paid for by the Japanese under the heading “war termination costs.” Yet in the immediate postwar period the Japanese were in no condition to shoulder such a burden. In June 1946 the inhabitants of war-ravaged Tokyo were surviving on just 150 calories per day, a tenth of the recommended intake.
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In the first budgets of the new Japanese government, the occupation costs accounted for a third of total government spending.
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Aid to Japan, primarily to pay for imported food and fertilizer, amounted to $194 million between August 1945 and December 1946. Despite all their schemes to “downsize” the Japanese economy, the Americans plainly had an interest in its rapid recovery.

The story was not wholly dissimilar in the American zone of occupation in western Germany, with one important difference. MacArthur relished his role as viceroy. His counterpart in Germany, a military engineer named General Lucius D. Clay, who succeeded Eisenhower as military governor of the U.S.-occupied zone, could scarcely have felt less enthused about his post. “Nobody talked to me about what our policies were in Germany,” Clay later recalled. “They just sent me over there. I did not want the job. After all, we were still fighting a war, and to be the occupying deputy military governor in a defeated area while the war was still going on in the Pacific was about as dead-looking an end for a soldier as you could find.”
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The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in their April 1945 directive (JCS 1067), envisaged that the American commander in Germany would wield “supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority” and instructed him to exercise his power in a manner that was “just but firm and aloof.”
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Clay could not
wait to get rid of this unlooked-for responsibility. From the outset he planned that the military government would be short-lived; he aimed to cut his staff from twelve thousand to six thousand by February 1, 1946, and set July 1 as the target date for handing power over to a completely civilian government.
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Like Eisenhower, he believed that “the Government of Germany should, at the very earliest practicable moment, pass to a civilian organization.”
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But until this was possible, he argued, it was the job of the State Department, not the U.S. Army, to run the occupation.

After a reverse power struggle between the State and War departments, in which each side sought to pass the buck to the other, Truman fudged the issue by entrusting policy making to the former but leaving the administrative work to the latter.
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The argument nevertheless dragged on throughout 1947, with the State Department at length agreeing in principle to take over, only to dither over the practicalities; finally, in March 1948, Truman decided to leave Clay in charge. Throughout this period Clay struggled to retain good-quality officers in Germany, a task that was far from easy given the uncertain duration of army control.
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As he later reflected, “It was hard work, and it was not fun…. If we had not had our army officers to call on originally, and then to persuade them to stay as civilians, I do not think that we could ever have staffed the occupation.”
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The more expert Americans like George Shuster and George Kennan remarked on their colleagues’ ignorance of Germany’s culture, which often went hand in hand with the arrogance of the conqueror.
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Though more recent scholarship has been less harsh in its verdicts, the picture that emerges is, once again, scarcely that of an ideal occupation.
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What was planned did not happen. What happened was not planned. This was not so much an empire by invitation as an empire by improvisation.

A case in point was the policy of denazification. After four early stabs at the problem, the directive of July 7, 1945, alighted on the notion of “guilt by officeholding,” creating 136 mandatory removal categories; supplementary to this was Clay’s Law No. 8 of September 26, which decreed that former Nazis thus defined should be reemployed only in menial jobs. Yet as in Japan, so in Germany: to get rid of all the senior administrative personnel of the previous regime was a recipe for chaos. As early as the winter of 1945–46, the disruption caused by so many internments and demotions convinced Clay of the need to change tack.
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As he put it in
March 1946, “With 10,000 people I couldn’t do the job of denazification. It’s got to be done by the Germans.”
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What this meant was an inundation of questionnaires, designed to get the Germans to rank themselves on a precisely calibrated scale of malfeasance: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, fellow travelers and (as the Germans joked) the “Persil white.” Clay later called denazification his “biggest mistake,” a “hopelessly ambigious procedure” that created a “pathetic ‘community of fate’ between small and big Nazis.”
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Comparably ambitious and ineffectual were the plans envisaged in JCS 1067 to establish “a coordinated system of control over German education and an affirmative program of reorientation … designed completely to eliminate Nazi and militaristic doctrines….”
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In fact, academic life swiftly reverted to its old, accustomed pattern. The professors who had once embraced nazism now embraced Nato-ism; most kept their jobs. The first important evidence of cultural change was the emergence of a liberal press, but that was as much the work of the occupied as the occupiers, whose role was essentially permissive.

The democratization of Western Germany was, without question, one of the great successes of American postwar policy. But it is important to recognize that it was driven forward in large measure by Clay’s desire to hand over power to a civilian authority as soon as possible. If the State Department refused to do the job, then once again it would have to be the Germans themselves. Although JCS 1067 had envisaged “the preparation for an eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis,” its bottom line was that, for the foreseeable future, “no political activities of any kind [would] be countenanced unless authorized.”
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The Americans in Germany, however, were positively impatient for German political activities to begin. In the first working session of the Allied Control Council (ACC) on August 10, 1945, they proposed the immediate creation of German central administrative institutions, headed by German state secretaries, to implement the general directives of the ACC.
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Fritz Schäffer, who had belonged to the conservative Bavarian People’s Party before 1933, was appointed prime minister of Bavaria within four weeks of V-E Day (though he was dismissed after just a few months). Parties were allowed to organize in the American zone almost at once, and as early as October 1945 Clay created a Council of Minister Presidents (
Länderrat
) in Stuttgart, to which he delegated a rapidly increasing number of adminis-
trative responsibilities. By the end of 1945 all the new or reconstituted states (
Länder
) throughout the U.S. zone had German governments and “pre-parliaments.” In the first half of the following year, local governments were formed, and elections held, first locally and then, successively, at the level of
Landkreis
(district), city and finally state. By October all the American-controlled states had their own constitutions, which were approved by the military government and then by referenda; simultaneously, elections to the new state parliaments were held.
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In September 1946 Secretary of State James F. Byrnes made a speech in Stuttgart in which he stressed the American commitment to a rapid democratization of Germany:

It never was the intention of the American Government to deny to the German people the right to manage their own internal affairs as soon as they were able to do so in a democratic way, with genuine respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms…. It is the view of the American Government that the German people … under proper safeguards, should now be given the primary responsibility for the running of their own affairs…. It is our view that the German people should now be permitted and helped to make the necessary preparations for setting up a democratic German government…. While we shall insist that Germany observe the principles of peace, good-neighborliness, and humanity … the American people hope to see peaceful, democratic Germans become and remain free and independent…. The American people who fought for freedom have no desire to enslave the German people. The freedom Americans believe in and fought for is a freedom which must be shared with all willing to respect the freedom of others…. The American people want to return the government of Germany to the German people. The American people want to help the German people to win their way back to an honorable place among the free and peace-loving nations of the world.
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With those words he expressed a recurrent aspiration of American occupations before and since: the hope for a rapid transition from military rule to democratic self-government. Yet this hope could be fulfilled in Germany only because the Germans themselves could still recollect how
democratic institutions functioned. After all, they had been shut down for just twelve years. Certainly, if the Germans had needed detailed instructions from Clay and his colleagues, they would have been disappointed. As Clay later admitted, “I did not have very much experience in the field [of democracy] myself, never having voted at that time. I came from a state where soldiers were not allowed to vote.” On one occasion, he, John Foster Dulles and a group of State Department officials “spent a whole day disagreeing on a definition of democracy. This was entirely within the American delegation. We could not agree on any common definition for democracy.”
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During discussions with the future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Clay sought guidance from Washington on the subject of federalism but found he “could never get a strict definition for what they really intended to do to create a federal government.” He ruefully concluded: “I think we have a peculiar idea of our government being perfect without knowing really and truly how it works.”
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The leading historian of the American occupation of Germany has concluded that “the newborn West German government of 1949 … was conceived and delivered by the American Army,” but this was more out of expediency than democratizing expertise.
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In any case, it is important not to overstate the extent to which West Germany truly was democratized. Although the first elected West German government took over from the military government in the spring of 1949, the Occupation Statute enacted that year severely circumscribed the German politicians’ control over their own foreign and defense policy. It also reserved to the occupying forces the right “to resume … the exercise of full authority if they consider that to do so is essential to security or to preserve democratic government in Germany.”
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By contrast, the economic recovery of Germany happened with painful slowness. As in the case of Japan, this was largely because the initial thrust of postwar policy was either directly or indirectly to inhibit rather than stimulate growth—insofar as there was a coherent thrust at all. There was in fact a tension from the outset between the harshly retributive ideas for deindustrialization of Henry Morgenthau’s 1944 plan and the more pragmatic aims of the army reflected in its
Handbook for the Military Government of Germany
; nor was there any consensus among the depart
ments of State, War and Treasury, to say nothing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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JCS 1067 was a compromise document, but it still retained elements of the Morgenthau Plan. Thus it formally instructed the military government to “take no steps (a) looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany, or (b) designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy.”
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Instead Clay should aim to “decentralize the structure and administration of the German economy to the maximum possible extent” and to “require the Germans to use all means at their disposal to maximize agricultural output.” At the same time, he was told “to ensure the production and maintenance of goods and services required to prevent starvation or such disease and unrest as would endanger occupying forces.”
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The result was a zone-wide SNAFU, as the testimony of numerous insiders like Harold Zink, Lewis Brown, and Carl Friedrich revealed in the later 1940s, when many of them returned to American universities to turn their experiences into dissertations.