The Road to Rainbow: Army Planning for Global War, 1934-1940

In the 1930s, as now, democracy was under attack from the Left and the Right. In the 1930s, as now, public opinion -- or at least the noisiest part of it -- was almost unanimous in announcing that democracy and liberty had to take a backseat to collectivity, appeasement and vapid appeals to a human nature better than any hitherto observed. Luckily, at least in the '30s, there were a few grownups with a realistic view of the world. They numbered hundreds and mostly worked in obscurity, while tens of thousands of enemies of democracy filled Madison Square Garden and called them militarists. So some of them were, as Henry Goles details in "The Road to Rainbow." If not for the resonance with current events, this book would be pretty much inside baseball. Now, it's hot as a poker. In military planning, the United States was guided by isolationism and fear of entangling alliances, and up to 1934, hypothetical war planning had always assumed a single opponent. Each country was given a color -- thus Plan Orange for war with Japan, Plan Black for Germany. (The USA was Blue.) In 1941, the United States found itself simultaneously at war with a host of aggressor states, and it fought against them under a strategic plan called Rainbow. Historians, even those who worked for the Army, have often assumed that Rainbow was developed in haste. Not so, says Goles, who is the first historian to go through the student papers of the Army War College, which lay ignored in a basement for decades. He discovered that starting in 1934, the Army War College always set its problems as wars fought in "participation with Allies," and in most years, against coalitions of foes. The studies made by these students showed a deep understanding of world events -- much deeper than those of the appeasers and antidemocrats -- and the factual and intelligence material they gathered was not merely academic. When the fighting started, national war planners had this mass of information already at hand. Furthermore, Goles shows that the college worked hand in glove with the Wars Plans Division of the Army General Staff. In fact, WPD or the chief of staff of the Army usually directed the college commandant to what it thought needed attention that year. It was commonly said in the 1930s that the democracies could not match up with the corporatist or collectivist polities, which were hailed as the future of mankind. Democracy, it turned out, had more brains than its foes, and when it came to putting the systems to the test, the antidemocratic forces made far more and worse strategic mistakes than the Allies. The realistic prewar planning helped bring this about. It was a close encounter. Thanks to the refusal of the peace faction to provide either men or munitions for defense, in the first two years of the war a lot of outnumbered, outgunned young men were maimed and killed. "The army," Goles writes, "was resource poor in an isolationist country, but it invested its limited resources and energ

Some students of war may find this book difficult only if they have a rudimentary background of the inter-war period. On the contrary, if you have read the Army "Green Book Series" you may find it diificult to tell where Army War College Students analysis of the future events begin and actual events of the period 1939 thru 1945 are now known history. Accordingly, this book should be a companion book to "Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942", United States Army in WW II, by Maurice Matloff; and "Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943-1944", United States Army in WW II, by Maurice Matloff and Edwin Snell.With the benefit of new found material,this book brings to light the amount of real effort and "Spade Work" that went into the several war plans that are known as the Rainbow Plans. These student officers broke new ground in attempting to gel a "Jointness" into war planning and are much more astute in there geo-political-military analysis than previously written history acknowledges. Additionally, as successive classes have the benefit of the previous years work, coupled with events as they transpire, the predictions and recommendations for the conduct of the war were startingly accurate. For example Chapters 5 and 6 are a discussion of student war planning activity in 1936 and 1937, read and then compare those two chapters with actual events thst occured in 1939/40. Of wider significance is the fact that this book debuncts, with specific primary sources, both the specified and implied myth that war planning just sort of materialized in 1940-41 and had been done entirely in a vacuum without consideration of "joint operations", or the wider political-military impact, not true; certainly there where huge silo's, but the students and subsequent war plans staff recognized many significant pearls of wisdom that resulted in both the student analysis and the wide question and evaluation process of the student methodolgy. A review of the appendix's, especially Appendix A and B, is revealing on the number of graduate students that served in high level staff positions. It is unequivocal that the plans implemented in 1941 to 1945 had there incubus in 1934. The real beauty of the book is that each chapter can stand alone. if you want them to. You can study the new chapters and compare the results against each of the chapters in the two companion references that I mentioned.All in all, this is a highly illuminating book, must read book, that brings a fresh approach to US Army Officer competance and vindicates the idea that we were totally unprepared for war. Perhaps in many other others yes, but not in the planning phase prior to our involvement.

Gole has set out to study the war plans gamed by the Army War College in the 1930s, with very interesting results. The students (who appear to have been company- and field-grade officers) had a remarkable grasp of how World War II would work out, foreseeing for example a sneak attack by the Japanese, the early loss of the Philippines, a "Germany first" strategy on the part of the western allies, and a cautious island-hopping retaking of the Pacific by the U.S. Understandably, they did not take such leaps as the possibility that Germany might over-run France in a few weeks, or that the development of carrier warfare might make the climatic naval battle (expected by both the U.S. and Japanese navies) an impossibility. Gole's point, as I understand it, is that by playing these annual games, a third-rate army (the U.S. Army had fewer than 200,000 men in the late 1930s) was able to leverage its officer corps into a cadre that could command an army ten times as large, and that was therefore ready to wage and win a global war. The book will repay a second reading. - Dan Ford