A Prescient Soldier Looks Back

By Hugh Sidey

In July of 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt decided that war was inevitable, and he asked his Secretaries of War and Navy, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, for a strategic plan to defeat potential enemies. They sent the assignment to Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, who called in Brigadier General Leonard Gerow, chief of war plans. Gerow turned to the best-qualified, brightest man he could find, a 44-year-old infantry major named Albert Wedemeyer.

Wedemeyer, now a retired four-star general living in Maryland's hunt country, recalls the moment. "Al," said Gerow, "I've got a hell of a job for you." Then he outlined the task that became known as the "Victory Program," whose conception and delivery, British Historian John Keegan wrote, was "one of the decisive acts of the Second World War."

How innocent and unprepared the U.S. was. "Do we plan for a two-front war, or what?" Wedemeyer asked Gerow. "You decide," the general replied. "What are our aims and objectives?" Wedemeyer wanted to know. "You write them out," Gerow told him.

Wedemeyer, an Omaha boy, was one of the few men on the Allied side who had graduated from the German war college, the Kriegsakademie in Berlin. His study of geopolitics there convinced him that the key to power on the Continent was control of Eastern Europe. The only answer to Hitler, therefore, lay in building a superior war machine, then getting it across the ocean and into Germany as soon as possible. Wedemeyer wanted D-day to occur by early summer 1943, a year before the invasion of France actually took place.

Unfortunately, Winston Churchill, the most persuasive of the Allied leaders, loved feint and diversion. "Periphery pecking," the Americans called it, a strategy they felt wasted lives, time and materiel even as Germany rushed ahead with new weapons, including a possible atomic bomb. Churchill got his way in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, but Wedemeyer's heartland strategy was what focused Allied might in the decisive battle. To this day Wedemeyer believes that the Allies squandered a splendid opportunity by not invading in 1943. Had they occupied Europe and stopped the Soviets at their border, he says, the Allies could have created conditions for self-determination in Eastern Europe.

Just like "Pug" Henry, the fictional naval officer in Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, Al Wedemeyer secretly met at 10 Downing Street with Churchill and in the White House with Roosevelt. Wedemeyer felt Roosevelt's demand for unconditional surrender in 1943 was a grave error, compelling Germany, which might have turned against Hitler, to fight to the bitter end. Wedemeyer's closest friend from the Kriegsakademie was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who planted the bomb that nearly killed Hitler.

The irony is that today Old Soldier Wedemeyer sees America placing too much emphasis on its weapons. He sees it becoming an armed camp when sensible strategy requires more attention to economic health and diplomacy. This is the age for concerted action among the allies, he says. The U.S. went from world leader to world subsidizer, but no longer has enough wealth to support free-world defense alone.

While he sees many "young Wedemeyers" in the services, he also sees that there is no high group concentrating exclusively on strategy. Wedemeyer would create a national strategy board, lofty and nonpartisan. "Like the Supreme Court," he says, "they would be quiet and contemplative. They would look ahead. Then we would not have an Afghanistan and an Iran. The use of military power would be the last resort. Proper military spending would flow from that."

After the war Wedemeyer returned to 10 Downing Street to have dinner with Churchill. The Prime Minister looked across the table and growled, "Wedemeyer, do you still think we should have gone across the Channel in 1943?" Wedemeyer responded, "Yes, sir, I believe it just as much today as I did then." Churchill glowered and shook his head, but not, perhaps, with the certitude of old. Even then, many of Al Wedemeyer's strategic concerns were coming true. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.