In an address to students at the US Army War College in the mid-1920s, Brig. Gen. Fox Conner harshly characterized the business of fighting as part of an alliance. While serving in France as an operations officer on Gen. John J. Pershing’s staff, he had witnessed the perpetual inability of the Allied and Associated powers to settle on a common strategy against the Germans or even to agree on allocation of resources. The incessant pursuit of purely national interests, in his opinion, prevented the Allies from bringing the fiiU weight of their military and economic power efficiently to bear against their common enemy. Thus, as he pondered the problem for the benefit of the Army’s future strategists, Conner concluded that, if he had to go to war again, he would prefer to go to war against an alliance, rather than against a single power.
Conner was a considerable scholar of the military art, but his strictures on the perils of alliances had already been voiced centuries before by Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war, who warned against entering into alliances without being entirely certain of the war aims of the potential ally. Hastily conceived agreements. Sun Tzu suggested, could easily founder because two powers fighting a common foe might themselves have conflicting intentions. His was sound advice, for whenever two or more nations combined their efforts in war during the succeeding
Centuries, bitter disagreements, rather than concord, were often the rule. In fact, one of the peculiarities of alliances is that successful ones have always tended to disintegrate in discord as fast as unsuccessful ones. That certainly was the American experience of World War I, the first major occasion since the Revolution when the United States had waged war in concert with allies. As isolationism and the depression jointly spiraled through the 1930s, a residuum of suspicion was directed even against the United Kingdom. There were those, both in the Army and out, who believed American naivety had been cold-bloodedly exploited in 1917 in a war to preserve the British Empire.
The Anglo-American alliance of World War II stood in contrast to the experience of 1917—18 as perhaps the most successful coalition in the history of modern warfare. From the very beginning, the United States and the United Kingdom adopted the defeat of Germany as their common goal. Agreement on ultimate aims nonetheless did not imply agreement in detail, and the progress of the war was marked by periodic disputes. Among the most famous was the occasionally acrimonious debate between Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sir Bernard L. Montgomery about the proper strategy to be employed on the European continent: the “broad front” or the “knife-like thrust.” The springs of such disagreements arose from the gradually evolving leadership of the coalition. Until 1943, Britain was the dominant partner and consequently more powerfully influenced the course of the alliance. After 1943, however, the United States, by virtue of its contribution of the greater mass of manpower and economic power, became senior partner. The Second Front debate, more than any other, was emblematic of that shift in coalition leadership. It was, furthermore, the most significant difference of opinion rhar arose between the United States and Britain during the war. Both nations agreed thar Germany had to be assaulted, but the specific agreement that the assault would be launched from England, across the English Ghannel, to the coast of France, was reached only after extended discussion. At its root, the Second Front debate was the question of whether the alliance would adhere to a long-term plan for a cross-channel attack, or would retain the flexibility to take advantage of the military situation at the time of attack to strike where Germany was weakest. Economic, political, and military differences, as well as differences in narional styles of waging war, complicated the debate.
World History
