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Road to Rainbow: Army Planning for Global War, 1934-1940
 | By: Henry G. Gole
Reviewed By: Col. Stanley L. Falk, AUS retired
Once in a while a new book comes along that drastically revises our previous understanding of historical events or developments. Sometimes it includes new facts, sometimes new interpretations, sometimes both, but whatever the combination, it makes us stop and reconsider conclusions we had previously held without question.
The Road to Rainbow is one of those groundbreaking books. Based on previously untapped sources, it carefully spells out and documents a new and convincing version of the story of pre-World War II Army planning and its impact on the development of strategy for the great conflict that was soon to come.
The standard interpretation of American military planning in the years leading up to World War II has focused on a series of so-called "color plans," designating potential enemies by color: Orange for Japan, Black for Germany, Red for Great Britain and so forth around the world. These color plans, it was believed, considered only individual enemies, rather than a coalition of hostile foes, paid insufficient heed to the actual state of international affairs and overlooked the possibility that the United States might itself wage war as part of a group of allied nations. Only plan Orange, it was thought, was fully developed before the late 1930s, and Naval planners were given most of the credit for this. Army planning before the last years of that decade was generally dismissed -- even by official Army historians -- as limited, simplistic and barely more than a series of abstract exercises. It was presumed to have been of little use in developing the so-called Rainbow plans for coalition warfare against a combination of enemies, the plans that became the basis of Allied strategy in World War II.
In reaching these conclusions, however, historians had overlooked a significant body of evidence inconspicuously tucked away in the basement and attic of the Army War College (AWC) in Carlisle Barracks, Pa. Stored in some two dozen footlockers, it consisted of War College course materials for the period 1919-1940 that conclusively demonstrated the important role of AWC students and faculty in paving the way for the Rainbow plans.
In a readable and well-documented presentation, the author concludes that as early as 1934, War College classes were developing plans for coalition warfare against Japan; from 1935 to 1937, for war against both Germany and Japan; and from 1938 to 1940, for defense of the Western Hemisphere with Latin American allies. He shows how students weighed the probability of a two-ocean war and the need to defeat Germany first in any conflict with both Japan and Germany. He demonstrates finally the manifest connection between AWC planning and the eventual Rainbow plans as well as the interaction between the College and the Army’s War Plans Division (WPD).
The author begins by outlining the condition of the American military between World Wars I and II, the role of the Army War College in strategic thinking, the planning process at the college and the exchange of ideas and personnel between AWC and the War Plans Division. The bulk of the book is devoted to a year-by-year description of the more important student plans, with emphasis on their evolution from individual color plans to those for coalition warfare in both Europe and the Pacific, including the "Germany first" decision.
These plans, of course, would have been merely student exercises had they remained only in the class files at the War College. In fact, however, the plans and supporting planning process were well understood by people on the Army General Staff, who indeed often asked that specific plans be prepared by the students. The proximity of the War College, then at what is now Washington, D.C.’s Fort McNair, and the War Plans Division, just a trolley ride away at the State, War and Navy Building, made for a close relationship between AWC students and faculty and officers in WPD. Furthermore, War College graduates were frequently assigned to the War Plans and other General Staff divisions. It is not that plans developed at the college were simply rubber-stamped into final War Department plans, but they clearly provided the basis for high-level strategic thinking and decisions, often by officers who themselves had worked on the plans while students or faculty at the War College.
In the small American pre-World War II Army, concludes the author, officers at the War College and on the General Staff constituted a nucleus that ran the peacetime Army, planned for global war and became the commanders and staff who led the Army in World War II.
His challenging presentation spells this out clearly and convincingly and corrects what up to now has been the standard version of U.S. Army strategic planning in the key interwar period. |
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