Unheeded warnings: Some intelligence lessons of the 1930s and 1940s

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Unheeded warnings: Someintelligence lessons of the 1930sand 1940sAlexander J. Groth a & John Drew Froeliger aa Department of Political Science , University of California,Davis , Davis, CA, 95616Published online: 24 Sep 2007.

To cite this article: Alexander J. Groth & John Drew Froeliger (1991) Unheeded warnings:Some intelligence lessons of the 1930s and 1940s, Comparative Strategy, 10:4, 331-346, DOI:10.1080/01495939108402854

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Comparative Strategy, Vol. 10, pp. 331-346 0149-5933/91 $3.00 + .00Printed in the UK. All rights reserved. Copyright 1991 Taylor & Francis

Unheeded Warnings: Some IntelligenceLessons of the 1930s and 1940s

ALEXANDER J. GROTHJOHN DREW FROELIGERDepartment of Political ScienceUniversity of California, DavisDavis, CA 95616

Abstract Unlike much of the literature about political and military decisionmaking,which deals with "errors" on a case-by-case basis, this essay addresses the problemin its endemic aspects. A three-fold model of built-in uncertainty is applied to allpolitical and political-military transactions. It features diffuseness or ambiguity oflanguage; multiplicity of messages received; and most critically, intellectually"unneutral" predispositions of monitors and decisionmakers called on to evaluatethe information they receive. Examples are given from the period of the 1930s and1940s including the tragic underestimation of Hitler by many Jews; Chamberlain'sappeasement policy; Stalin's apparent trust of Hitler; the French response to the NaziBlitzkrieg in 1940; and the American tragedy at Pearl Harbor. Given the nature ofthe problem, prospects of more accurate, scientific intelligence mechanisms in theforeseeable future are discounted.

Introduction

Much of the literature about military and political decisionmaking revolves around theproblem of responding to information. Correct and prompt responses are generally seenas very important, even critical, to the success of armies and nations. A considerableliterature about wars and political crises focuses on the issue of response. This literatureoften addresses the subject on a case-by-case basis. For example, there is the suggestionembodied in various works that if the United States' political and military leaders hadbeen more vigilant, efficient, or even honest in analyzing and responding to informationavailable to them, the tragedy of Pearl Harbor could have been avoided.1 If Joseph Stalinhad properly assessed information sent to him from various sources, the catastrophicimpact of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 would have beenlessened if not averted.2 If Neville Chamberlain had recognized, in time, what an evilcharacter Hitler was, perhaps the course of the Second World War would have beenaltered; perhaps it might have even been avoided.3

While not necessarily denying any of these particular hypothetical possibilities, thisarticle presents the rationale for uncertainty as a characteristic and permanent feature ofpolitical and political-military relations. Unheeded warnings, far from being an aberra-tion in political and military management, are to be expected, much as common acci-dents are to be expected.

More specifically, the persistence of error—warnings unheeded—may be attributedto three factors that usually can be identified in all major military and political crises.

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332 A. J. Groth and J. D. Froeliger

These are, respectively, the diffuse or ambiguous language of communication; the diver-sity of messages received; and, more importantly perhaps than either of these two, thepredispositions of the monitors and/or decisionmakers. The last factor involves the mate-rial and psychological "stakes" that actors have, with respect to alternatives for action,suggested by whatever information they may receive. This factor may be independentof, but in most cases it is likely to be interactive with, the first two. We believe thisformulation to be the most parsimonious, and simultaneously realistic, model of endemicpotential for error in political transactions. Because the three factors are characteristic ofsociopolitical relationships in the most general sense, our illustrations of the probleminclude ordinary citizens as well as political and military leaders.

The background and history of the Second World War abound in warnings that wentdisastrously unheeded. In each of these cases, the failure to gauge the situation correctlywas very costly to those who miscalculated, and in each case there had been substantialevidence readily available to the critical decisionmakers that should have, but didn't, putthem on guard.

While most case studies, implicitly or explicitly, take the position that a reexamina-tion of the "particulars of the case" would enable future decisionmakers to avoid themistakes of their predecessors, it is suggested here that in the aggregate, at least, suchhopes are naive. Fundamental features of political discourse and information processingall but preclude the realization of error-proof command systems. Notwithstanding all thecolossal modern advances in communication and information technology, it is unlikelythat top-level decisionmaking as of A.D. 2039 could be critically improved over, say, A.D.1939. In the remainder of this article we will present a "model of uncertainty" and offera few examples of unheeded warnings, from the period of the Second World War, whichmay serve to illustrate some of its features.

A Model of Uncertainty

Among the relevant considerations that simultaneously contribute to an explanation ofmany different events in the past and also cast a somewhat ominous shadow on the futureis the terminology of politics, the very content of the messages that are exchanged andprocessed. The language of politics and its international derivative, diplomacy, is inher-ently and often intentionally diffuse and ambiguous. It lacks the concreteness and preci-sion that are properly associated with scientific, technical, or financial information.When statesmen and diplomats speak of "dire consequences," "unshakable resolve,"and "all measures consistent with national security interests," the meaning that one canattach to such phrases must remain highly conjectural and is understandably likely tovary among different recipients of the message. Because the terms are diffuse (i.e., havemore than one possible meaning or imply more than one possible action, transaction, oridea) and because they are ambiguous (i.e., they are open to different interpretationswith respect to what, if anything, they may actually portend) they require more specula-tive reconstruction on the part of the monitor.

A message received in a bank calling for the transfer of $10,000 from account A toaccount B may be virtually self-executing4; so is a recipe for baking bread, or a formulafor producing a chemical compound. A statement by a foreign leader threatening "direconsequences" should such-and-such policies be pursued by another country, or severalother countries, may be open to many interpretations. What is meant by "dire conse-quences"? Does the leader articulating the threat mean what he or she says? Does theleader speak for all other relevant decisionmakers in his government? Does he, or would

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Unheeded Warnings 333

he possibly, have sufficient resources to give "dire consequences" a worst-scenariointerpretation, presumably, recourse to war? What is the intended audience and effect ofthe statement? Is the leader "rattling sabres" for the benefit of some largely domesticconstituency, for example, simply in order to maximize his domestic political position?How can one tell a bluff from the real thing?

Similar issues of ambiguity and diffuseness attach to many forms of nonverbal com-munication. How is one to interpret, for example, substantial troop concentrations beingdeployed on the frontier of state A by state B? Is one witnessing here an incipient attackby B on A or merely the use of pressure to advance B's interests in forthcoming negotia-tions? Here the answer would generally depend on a certain amount of contextual analy-sis.5 A variety of factors or facets of a potential enemy's situation, military, political,economic, diplomatic, perhaps even its historic, cultural, and social aspects need to beexamined. The more complex the analysis, the more likely would be the involvement ofmany different institutional and bureaucratic actors, ranging from military intelligence,diplomatic corps, foreign affairs specialists at home, various public and perhaps privateresearch groups, individuals, news media, and so forth.

The complexity of such an apparatus would nearly always have two adverse (orconfusing) consequences. These would be a divergence of perspectives among the vari-ous actors and agencies, conceivably resulting in a cacophony of information inputs tothe central decisionmakers. There would also be likely distortions in the informationproduced at the end of the chain of command by the very multiplicity, often collectivecharacter, and certainly hierarchical nature of the channels supplying the information. Inany particular bureaucratic hierarchy, the information conveyed at the initial receivingpoint (by, say, a CIA agent in the field) might become somewhat skewed, washed out, orsimply altered at the ultimate conveyance point; for example, from the Director of theAgency to the members of the National Security Council. Disagreement on "what isreally out there," or "what it is that we should expect in the near future," may stem inpart from intellectual differences among the information suppliers. They may reflecttheir different vantage points and they may also stem from the somewhat differentinstitutional interests of the agencies and persons who offer the information, sometimesplaying their own political games.6

The consequences of uncertainty and complexity are simultaneously likely to (a)increase the information costs of the decisionmakers, and (b) incline them to shortcutand simplify their coping behavior by resorting to evaluation cues. These cues may beexternal or internal to the actor. An external cue would be provided, for example, byhigher credibility or value attached to a particular information source as opposed to otheravailable sources. In this form of cuing, the actor is not concerned with what is beingreported and why it is being reported. All that really matters to him is the conclusion andthe source of the information.

Internal cues would be represented by individual propensities or predispositions,stemming from such factors as ideological preference, idiosyncratic likes and dislikes,and perceived self-interest, that is, response usually in strong relationship to the likelypsychological, physical, financial, and political costs to the actor.7 The uncertainty orambiguity of the actor's perceptions encourages him to fall back on personal predispo-sitions that may or may not be helpful or relevant to the situation confronted,helpful or relevant to the situation confronted.

These two forms of cuing are likely to be combined frequently. An example based onthe behavior of ordinary citizens, well documented in the political science literature, isindividual choice on policy propositions submitted to the approval of the electorate, and

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also in nonpartisan judicial elections. Typically, voters do not engage in individual re-search of the questions or personalities involved. They follow cues.8 In the case ofinitiatives and referenda, as is the case regularly in California, voters follow the recom-mendations of media guides, especially newspapers that publish lists of propositions tobe voted on with their own recommendations to the electorate. Typically, the ideologicalor partisan preferences of the voters are likely to be linked to such cues in the sense thatliberal voters are likely to follow the cues of liberal media organs and conservativevoters are likely to look at sources which, in general, are more congenial to their ownoutlook and orientation.

In still another aspect of the problem, mixed, uncertain, and ambiguous signalsportending a catastrophic disaster are likely to elicit passivity from many people pre-cisely because they call for high-cost and/or high-risk remedies against dangers that areperceived as uncertain with respect to their occurrence or unspecific with respect to theirincidence.

Unheeded Warnings: Five Illustrations

(1) Hitler and the Jews

Among the more general examples of some unheeded warnings, few are as poignant asthe failure of many thousands of Jews to flee Germany and countries bordering onGermany in the years between 1933 and 1939. No one reading Mein Kampf couldpossibly doubt the intense hostility that Hitler expressed toward Jews, or fail to note theimplicit threats against Jews that were scattered throughout its pages. These were echoedin innumerable speeches by Hitler and by his close associates. In 1933 the Jew-hatingidea was finally combined with power to determine policy. Hitler became Chancellor.His grip over Germany clearly seemed to increase as time went by, and there was alsomarked evidence of increasingly intense anti-Jewish measures in the form of Nazi legis-lation and in the behavior of Nazi authorities and followers. The Kristallnacht episode ofNovember 9, 1938 brought all these to a vivid and barbaric culmination.

Of course, many Jews did flee Germany and various neighboring countries in the1930s. Many thousands of Jews wanted to flee and sought to do so but could not becauseof highly restrictive immigration policies pursued in various countries, including theUnited States, Canada, and by the British in Palestine. Nevertheless, there were manythousands, especially among the fairly affluent middle-class strata, who might have beenable to emigrate to various countries had they chosen to do so, especially before theoutbreak of the war. For a variety of reasons, they did not seek to do so.

Among these people, the applicability of our formula appears to be especially salient.Emigration involved profound uprooting and great risks. One left a known situation inwhich one had made one's home, earned a significant livelihood, and established anetwork of family and friends in order to start life from scratch in new cultural andphysical surroundings, with an unfamiliar language, and amidst total strangers. Onecould hardly choose such a course of action except under the most compelling of circum-stances.

But just how compelling were the circumstances of the 1930s? Did Hitler everpublicly specify what he would do to the Jews of Europe and when he might do it? Heclearly did not. Gassing and shootings were not mentioned in Mein Kampf.

Hitler's warnings to the Jews came in large part simply in the form of steadfastadherence to verbal violence and never ending variations of hatred and abuse poured out

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in every conceivable connection with the terms "Jew," "Jewish," or "Judaism." Onesomewhat pointed warning appears in Mein Kampf in the following form:9

A people does not of itself renounce the impulse to increase its stock andpower. Only external circumstances or senile impotence can force them torenounce this urge. In the same way the Jew will never spontaneously giveup his march towards the goal of world dictatorship or repress his externalurge. He can be thrown back on his road only by forces that are exterior tohim, for his instinct towards world domination will die out only with him-self.

U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd, who had just arrived in Germany in the summerof 1933, recorded the report of a rather obscure American college professor relayed tohim on August 16, 1933. Professor Coar:

came . . . to describe his visit with Hitler. He had spent two hours with theChancellor, with Hess as a witness. Coar reported that Hitler talked wildlyabout destroying all Jews, insisting that no other nation had any right toprotest and that Germany was showing the world how to rid itself of itsgreatest curse. He considered himself a sort of Messiah. He would rearmGermany, absorb Austria and finally move the capital to Munich. Therewere other and equally important points, but Coar was not at liberty tomention them.10

Apparently within a few days of this date, two distinguished American businessexecutives had had a conversation with the Chancellor and reported on it to AmbassadorDodd on September 1st. The envoy's diary records it as follows:

Henry Mann of the National City Bank spoke of the conversation he and Mr.Aldrich had had some ten days before with the Chancellor at his summerpalace. The ideas advocated by Hitler were the same as those he had ad-vanced to Professor Coar. He is a fanatic on the Jewish problem. He has noconception of international relationships. He considers himself a GermanMessiah. But despite Hitler's attitude these bankers feel they can work withhim.11

There was no comment from the Ambassador himself on any of these observations.Even when Hitler used the word "destroy" with reference to Jews, few people guessedat the literalism that the Fuhrer attached to this term. After all, politicians often usegrandiloquent terms. Perhaps "destroy" meant something like "limit the influence of."Many Jews remembered and associated Germany with Weimar and the Kaiser and con-sidered German attitudes toward Jews to have been far more positive than, say, those ofthe Russians under the tsars.

Moreover, even if Hitler intended some great evil, there were powerful nations inEurope arrayed against him. There was Britain and there was France. Would they allowHitler to conquer Europe and do whatever he might wish? Not very likely. These nationsdefeated Germany in the First World War. They would surely restrain the aspirations ofthe new Germany.

Most importantly perhaps, as far as Hitler himself was concerned, was it not true

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that a politician's rhetoric should never be taken at face value? Perhaps the man's bitewould not be as bad as his bark.

Another example was the tragic case of the Jewish envoy from wartime Warsaw,Artur Zygelboym. Zygelboym sought to inform the "outside world," and especiallyrepresentatives of the Jewish community in the West, about the impending doom ofJewry at the hands of Nazi exterminators. On May 12, 1943 he committed suicide inLondon in the belief that he had been unable to arouse public opinion and get hismessage across to the people who might help.12 Was Zygelboym actually disbelievedwhen he told his story? Some discounting almost certainly did occur. People with whomhe spoke may have thought that his reports were exaggerated.13 Perhaps the very scale ofthe murders that Zygelboym reported made belief very difficult, if not impossible.14 Tobe sure, there were other corroborating sources.15 But the central difficulty in gettingpeople to accept the Zygelboym story was extraneous to the story itself. If his interlocu-tors really believed what he was telling them, they would have to act on it.

For most of the people involved, this was almost certainly highly unpalatable. TheBritish and American policymakers thought that they were more than sufficiently chal-lenged by fighting the Nazis. If the Nazis were indeed committing huge atrocities inEurope, the best way to stop them would seem to be to bring about the military defeat ofHitler's Germany. At least in their own minds, they were diligently pursuing this goal.Any special or additional efforts to rescue Jews would entail new burdens and risks forthem. It might even play into the hands of Nazi propaganda that pictured Allied govern-ments as Jew-influenced and Jew-dominated.16

In 1942, the leaders of the Jewish community in the United States and Britain couldfeel a sense of comfort in being part of a national consensus aimed at winning the waragainst Hitler. They donated their time, effort, and money to that end. Their sons anddaughters served in the ranks of the Allied armed forces. Victory would surely bring anend to the persecution of their fellow Jews in Europe. It was all quite straightforward.But if Zygelboym was to be believed, something more immediate and more drasticwould be required of them. They would have to become special pleaders in dramatic andhighly overt ways to make Allied governments, in wartime, do what they did not want todo, in other words, undertake some special measures and specifically designed policiesto rescue the Jews of Europe. Jewish leaders, too, were obviously aware of Hitler'srabid anti-Semitism and of significant anti-Semitism in their own countries. Zygelboymwas bringing them a message of great discomfort. One could say that not to believe itwas much easier for these people, personally and collectively, than to believe it.

The distinguished Jewish scholar, Yehuda Bauer, put it as follows:

. . . at all stages of the war there was no lack of information regarding thefate of European Jewry, though it is true that explicit news items regardingthe total mass murder reached Britain and America only in the late spring of1942 . . .

. . . [Jewish] leadership, not only in New York but even in London, didnot grasp the full impact of what was occurring to Europe's Jews. In a sense,the JDC's [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] response was thereaction of sanity: had the organization grasped what was happening, itmight well have lost its capacity to do anything at all . . .

. . . JDC leaders in the free world were acting out what may be called'normal' reactions to 'normal' disasters whereas what was happening was an

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'alpine event' . . . [implying] . . . actions leading to the breaking of normsof ordinary warfare in the interest of Europe's Jews.17

(2) Chamberlain and Hitler

As mentioned above, Neville Chamberlain was a leader who disregarded many signalsportending a catastrophic war, revisionist literature notwithstanding.18 In fact, there issome evidence that even after Hitler's military occupation of Prague in March of 1939,and even at the time of Hitler's attack on Poland, Chamberlain was still hoping to bringabout a European settlement on the basis of negotiating mutually acceptable terms withthe Nazis.

The idea that Hitler's blood lust could not be satisfied by diplomatic concessions wasextremely difficult to accept for the British prime minister. Chamberlain could neverquite face up to the foreign policy program of Mein Kampf. Mixed and misleadinginformation issued by and on behalf of Hitler after 1933 was only one source of theproblem. Critically important was Chamberlain's own view of himself and his mission inthe world—to save the peace of Europe and the British Empire by pursuing a policy ofaccommodation among the great powers. Chamberlain spent what he regarded as themost important and substantial portion of his career as a politician in the pursuit of thepolicy of appeasement. It was the most important aspect of his stewardship as primeminister.

Every signal from Germany that seemed, or could be interpreted as invalidating thispolicy as a realistic goal, was also a challenge to everything the prime minister believedabout the world and himself. If Chamberlain was right about the possibilities of a "dealwith Hitler," he was obviously a wise and good man. If he was wrong, then perhaps hewas also a fool who had done his country, Europe, and ultimately the whole world, adisservice.

Clearly, Chamberlain could not look with absolute equanimity, with a true rationalevenhandedness, at all the incoming information bearing on this stark choice of alterna-tives.

Harold Macmillan recalled this period in British political life in terms that put Cham-berlain into a wider context:

The very decency of ordinary men and women in Britain was a handicap. Inour insularity, we neither read Hitler's gospel, Mein Kampf, nor understoodthe nature of his movement, or the scale of his ambitions. We shut our eyesto the character of his internal regime . . . [there was] a universal aversionof the whole British people—Left, Right, and Centre—to war.20

(3) Stalin and Hitler

In the case of Stalin's unheeded warnings, part of the problem was the strong suspicionwith which he viewed, quite characteristically, some of the sources reporting an immi-nent German attack on the Soviet Union. Prior to the conclusion of the so-calledMolotov-Ribbentropp or Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939, Stalin had spoken publiclyabout how the Soviet Union would not "pull chestnuts out of the fire" for anyone else.In 1941 he was disposed to see in the warnings coming to him from Winston Churchilland other Western sources an attempt of the desperate British to help themselves byembroiling the Russians in a war that they, the British, were to all appearances losing.21

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To be sure, some of the warnings Stalin was receiving also came from sources that hemight have found more credible. Among these, for example, was the Soviet agent inTokyo, Richard Sorge. Information was coming in from all sorts of sources. As HarrisonSalisbury notes, "by December 29 [1940] Soviet intelligence agencies had in their handsthe basic facts about Barbarossa, its scope and intended time of execution," but he alsonotes that "there was no sign that any of this intelligence disturbed Stalin's Olympiancomposure."22 Indicative of Stalin's state of mind and, in all likelihood, of the informa-tion conveyed to him by the secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, was the treatment ofAdmiral Aleksei A. Kuznetsov sometime in March 1941. Kuznetsov not only noticedpersistent overflights of Soviet territory by Nazi planes but also issued orders to theships under his command to fire on the intruders. He reported this situation to hismilitary and political superiors.

After one such incident Admiral Kuznetsov was summoned to the Kremlin.He found Police Chief Beria alone with Stalin. Kuzentsov was asked why hehad issued the order to fire on the German planes. When he attempted anexplanation, Stalin cut him off with a stiff reprimand and instructions torevoke his order. He did so on April 11, and the German reconnaissanceflights resumed in force.23

To accept the reality of an impending Nazi attack would have exacted high psycho-logical and political costs from Stalin, costs that he was almost certainly loath to pay.The Soviet army had just been badly mauled in Finland, and it was recovering from oneof the bloodiest purges ever administered to a military establishment. Stalin was in theprocess of reorganizing his military. For this, he needed some time and, indeed, thiskind of reorganization was predicated on having a significant breather from war.

Hitler had said in Mein Kampf that it was a mistake for Germany to fight simulta-neously on two fronts. The British were still holding out in the home islands and inAfrica. The Soviet Union had a treaty agreement with Nazi Germany and was sending itsubstantial and valuable supplies. What sense would it make for Hitler to attack theRussians while the British were still fighting against him?

Of course, there was always the possibility that Hitler was a madman, that he wouldbehave imprudently. There was also the possibility that Hitler's version of prudence,contrary to Stalin's, might counsel an attack. After all, why allow the Russians toreequip and reorganize their forces? Why not take advantage of an element of surpriseprecisely because the Russians might not expect a Nazi attack on themselves until Britainhad been truly finished?

But for Stalin to believe these latter possibilities, he would have had to acknowledgeto himself and to his political associates that he had been wrong, that his expectations ofa breather were mistaken, that perhaps his pact with the Nazis was itself a great error,and that his military purges may have been, among other things, reckless. Moreover,there would have been other high costs. A few months' advance warning to the Sovietforces could have lessened the impact of the Nazi attack in 1941 but, given the state ofthe Soviet military and its decimated professional leadership, it could not have beenenough to forestall some monumental setbacks and huge losses of all kinds. Stalin didnot want to face up to an impending, gigantic disaster, anymore than Chamberlain waswilling to face up to one in 1939. Understandably, each preferred to cling to wishfulthinking, to hope against all odds.

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(4) The Battle of France

Finally, we have some cases of military leaders in the field failing to respond to warningsof impending disaster. In the Second World War, one of the gravest miscalculations,based on disregard of publicly available information, was committed by GeneralMaurice Gamelin, the French commander-in-chief at the beginning of the Battle ofFrance in May 1940. Gamelin received a warning that he did not appreciate whenGermany conquered Poland in September 1939. The Nazis relied on new tactics combin-ing tanks, motorized troops, and combat aircraft in close support of their advancingforces. What they did in Poland was visible to the whole world. Nazi propaganda, infact, spread and emphasized the frightfulness of these new methods of warfare. Gamelinalso received reports from various sources in Poland corroborating the new develop-ments. Indeed, he was in a position to hear all about it directly from Polish political andmilitary leaders who fled to France through Romania within a few weeks of Poland'sdefeat. The Blitzkrieg was the subject of numerous previous warnings from withinFrance's own military by Colonel, and later General, Charles de Gaulle. Nine monthselapsed between the Nazi attack on Poland and the Nazi invasion of France.

Why did General Gamelin not respond to the new military developments confrontingFrance? Why was there no evidence of massive learning on the part of the Frenchmilitary establishment, at least evidence of learning in progress, if not learning alreadyfully completed?

The answer seems to be once again in the confluence of the ambiguity of the clues, atleast from Gamelin's perspective, and the particular predispositions that guided his re-sponse under the circumstances. Gamelin never received a message telling him preciselythat the Nazi attack on May 10, 1940 would, in fact, replicate methods employed in thePolish operation. Although this may seem obvious (by hindsight) to contemporary ob-servers, Gamelin had to infer what it was the Germans would do from a variety of clues.

The ambiguity was more than sufficient to encourage Gamelin in a military analogyto the political response of Chamberlain. It encouraged him to continue the posture onwhich he had built his whole career as France's military leader. The Second World Warwould be fought on the principles of the First. There was no need to worry about theNazi blitz in Poland because France was a much stronger, larger, and formidable adver-sary. The blitz simply wasn't applicable here. No lightning strike could breach theMaginot Line. In a way, Gamelin was right. France was obviously much stronger mili-tarily than Poland. No one could possibly question that. He simply attached grosslyexcessive significance to this difference.

It is quite apparent from a variety of sources that the French military leaders, espe-cially the commander-in-chief, represented a certain mind-set not really neutrally opento whatever information might come down the way. Gamelin, already in his late sixtieswhen the Second World War began, was essentially committed to fighting the next waron the model of 1914-1918. Temperamentally, he was given to caution and to inertia. Hegenerally tended to magnify every difficulty he faced. In his behavior, he seemed toexhibit the mental and physical qualities of fatigue. He was hardly the man to turnaggressive or innovative in his old age, no matter what information poured in from theexternal world.

In his memoirs, General Andre Beaufre recalls a conversation between Gamelin andthe British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Deverell, in the summerof 1936 at which the author served as a translator. Deverell asked Gamelin what hethought of the German tanks in Spain. Gamelin replied that "all our information indi-

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cates that our policy is the right one. The German tanks, too lightly armored, are scrapiron."26

William Shirer reports a number of similar observations by Gamelin. In 1939, Ga-melin interrupted a colleague's military lecture to say that "there is no such thing as abattle of the air. There is only a battle of the land." In 1938, he had said, "We havepractically no planes? No matter; we will make a war without them."25

Another French officer, Colonel Goutard, describes the mind-set of the 1940 militaryleadership in the following, very apt terms:

Our great leaders . . . clung to a doctrine and military procedure derivedfrom the 1914-18 war, and found themselves condemned to timidity ofaction and a completely passive outlook. As soon as they were faced withnew tactics and an unexpected move, very different from that of the FirstWorld War, they could only resign themselves to a "Fate" which theydeemed inescapable and to a "Destiny" they considered predetermined.26

For Gamelin to genuinely recognize the meaning of Germany's Polish campaignwould have required a monumental, public self-repudiation. He would have had toacknowledge before his fellow officers, his political superiors, and just about everyoneelse that his notions of the impending conflict and of the proper defense of France wereall completely obsolete and mistaken. Because most of the high ranking, senior Frenchofficers surrounding Gamelin shared the military ideas of their leader, it is hardly sur-prising that he responded as he did. It would have been surprising only if the general andhis associates acted differently.

As Telford Taylor put it:

French (and British) officers, with rare exceptions, had simply failed toconcentrate on the problem of how to win ground with tanks and planes. Notknowing how to do it, they had little notion of how to stop it. . . . Unpre-pared and ill-equipped for what the Germans called Bewegungskrieg (mobilewarfare), later known popularly as Blitzkrieg (lightning warfare) it is doubt-ful that the Allies, even under inspiring and imaginative leadership, couldhave decisively stemmed the Wehrmacht's onslaught.27

(5) Pearl Harbor

Our last example of an unheeded warning was the response of the American military atPearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The final warning issued to and received by Admi-ral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter C. Short was, in a general sense, as seriousas it could possibly be. It was a war warning. But it was also a classically diffusemessage. It was entirely unspecific so far as the Hawaii command was concerned. IfJapan did go to war against the United States within twenty-four hours of this latestwarning, what would she do? Would she do anything at all in the immediate future?Would there be an attack on Pearl Harbor? That was hardly obvious. The attack, if any,could have been launched against various places, some of them rather more plausibletargets than Pearl Harbor, at least in the minds of American military leaders.28 If anattack did occur, what form would it take? Might there be, for example, submarineincursions and perhaps sabotage attempts by Japanese agents in Hawaii directed at U.S.military installations? No one could be certain.

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While, arguably, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel might have done much more than hedid in defense of the fleet at Pearl Harbor, his complaint against the Navy Departmentwas not without reason. He stated that:

. . . the so-called "War Warning" dispatch of November 27 did not warn thePacific Fleet of an attack in the Hawaiian area. It did not state expressly orby implication that an attack in the Hawaiian area was imminent or probable.It did not repeal or modify the advice previously given me by the NavyDepartment that no move against Pearl Harbor was imminent or planned byJapan. The phrase "war warning" cannot be made a catch-all for all thecontingencies hindsight might suggest.29

One consequence of the uncertainty was to make the response of U.S. commanderscontingent on their own idiosyncratic assumptions about probable aspects of the situa-tion; another was to make them wary about raising their own personal costs in the faceof the general uncertainty. Under the first rubric, the Americans did not really anticipatethe sort of carrier-based mass air attack that Japan, in fact, launched against them. Therewas an apparent propensity in the U.S. high command to underestimate the Japanese. Tobegin with, there was no prior experience of the Japanese launching air attacks fromcarriers. In this case, the target at Pearl Harbor was both very far from Japanese homewaters, and it was, to all appearances, strongly defended. A powerful attack wouldrequire the support of several carriers and many warships. Sailing over vast stretches ofthe Pacific, such a large naval formation would probably be detected long before it got toHawaii. Far from its home waters, it would be vulnerable to destruction, a risk that theJapanese would presumably not wish to run. The execution of a carrier-based assaultrequired technical virtuosity that Americans of that era rarely associated with the Japa-nese.30

Under the rubric of costs and risks, it seems that neither Kimmel nor Short waswilling to put a strain on their personal relationship by demanding that the other do morethan he was already doing. They continued to confuse their cordial social relationshipwith genuinely coordinated measures of a high alert. They were also unwilling to devotetime, energy, and resources to more frequent patrol activities, and to keeping the planesand ships in their command prudently dispersed and constantly "on the move" in antici-pation of a possibly devastating air attack.

Conclusion

Given this view of the information-response nexus, what inferences can one make withrespect to current and future political-military conflicts and crises? If we diagnose "er-ror" (generally post-facto) as failure to react on the basis of an accurate appraisal ofrelevant facts and events, the potential for error, always present, is likely to increasewith the number of relatively autonomous participants and the complexity and the multi-tude of situations associated with a particular crisis or conflict.

By way of analogy, one might say that the number of people missing their intendeddestinations on a journey would tend to increase if (a) vaguely defined destinations weremany rather than few, and (b) the number of people traveling independently of oneanother (i.e., not actually following one another) was greater rather than smaller. To besure, in this particular example the more people traveled, the more they would also findtheir correct destinations. But obviously if, say, 20% made one or more mistakes on the

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road, the aggregate errors would be greater when 10,000 traveled than when only 100traveled.

In this perspective, it would not be surprising to find, therefore, that the number ofwhat may retrospectively seem tremendous miscalculations was much greater in the Firstand Second World Wars than it was in, say, the Falklands War of 1982 or the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. For each of these cases, the number of participants was minimal,and the duration of the conflict, with fewer different theaters and campaigns, did notpresent as many decisionmaking points to the actors involved.

This suggests that the regionalization, internationalization, and ultimately the global-ization of conflict are all likely to increase the frequency of error. And because there isno reliable way of predicting whether these errors (relatively few as they might be)would be committed by major or minor participants, or in more or less important situa-tions from the standpoint of the overall contour of a crisis, uncertainty is likely to be oneof the most salient aspects of the international geopolitical system in our time and theforeseeable future. Moreover, given the "anatomy of error" as we have outlined it here,the problem is not susceptible to radical technological or organizational improvement.Computers may be able to assemble and deliver more information faster than everbefore; whether they can reform the inherent diffuseness and ambiguity of politicaldiscourse is doubtful. Having more clues to choose from may not make the problem ofchoice itself any easier.

In the realm of organization, it is always possible to rearrange the relationships ofvarious officials and the political, military, or bureaucratic entities. Hierarchies can bealtered; the chain of information providers and their structured interactions can bechanged as well. This clearly can have all sorts of particular impacts in particular situa-tions. In the most general sense, however, one can still say that a rose is a rose under anyother name.31

As long as all relevant actors cannot share the same information at the same time andattribute the same significance to it, large bureaucracies and large social entities willalways exhibit a significant dissonance of judgment, no matter how the organizationalcharts may be manipulated. Thus in the future, as in the past, the most successfulpolitical and military leaders may still be those who excel in artful, intuitive judgmentsas much as, or more than in technical-scientific expertise.32

Notes

1. See, for example, Gordon Prange, At Dawn We Slept (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981):Prange lays much of the responsibility for the surprise at Pearl Harbor on Admiral Kimmel andGeneral Short, the Navy and Army commanders on Oahu. For an example of the many revisionistviews of the events of December 7, 1941, see John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its After-math (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday and Co., 1982): Toland charges that Franklin Roosevelt knewin advance of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor but neglected to share the knowledge withU.S. commanders because the attack was needed to get the country into the war. See also RobertaWohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962):Wohlstetter's study is still thought, by many, to be the best work to date on the Pearl Harbordisaster. She provides an analysis that is supportive of our own—the inevitability of uncertainty.Her central argument is that the best intelligence will rarely yield an unambiguous picture of whatis coming.

2. See Seweryn Bialer, ed., Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World WarII (New York: Pegasus, 1969): Among the many insights provided by this anthology of Sovietmilitary memoirs is the discussion of Stalin's disastrous foreign policy whose cornerstone was

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his trust of Hitler. For a good treatment of Soviet foreign policy prior to Operation Barbarossa,a policy described as "grimly ludicrous in the circumstances," see John Erickson, The Road toStalingrad: Stalin's War with Germany (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 73-98. For adiscussion of Stalin's miscalculations regarding the surprise attack on the Soviet Union byHitler and how the various post-Stalin regimes have changed their view of Stalin's culpabilitysee Vladimir Petrov, June 22, 1941 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968).

3. For an account of events leading to Munich see Robert Shepherd, A Class Divided: Ap-peasement and the Road to Munich, 1938 (London: MacMillan, 1988): Shepherd chronicles thegeneral policy of appeasement resulting from the horrors of World War I and how the illusions ofthe policy were shattered by Hitler; see also Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (GardenCity, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1979): Taylor suggests the possibility of a larger war being avoidedif Hitler had been opposed in Czechoslovakia. A determination to do so might have helped an anti-Hitler "Putsch" materialize.

4. Compare our bank message with one that called on its board of directors to recommendmeasures that would promote the long-term financial health of a client corporation engaged in avariety of business activities. Here, the action demanded is relatively vague, possibly open todifferent interpretations, and, if acted upon by a collectivity, likely to elicit different, conceivablyeven contradictory responses.

5. In the 1990 Persian Gulf crisis, it appears that U.S. intelligence agencies were clearlyaware of large Iraqi troop concentrations on the Kuwaiti frontier for several days before theinvasion; there was, however, uncertainty about the intentions of Iraq, with the possibility that thebuildup was intended merely to put pressure on Kuwait in bilateral negotiations. See also GlennH. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1977), Chapter IV, 282-339 on information processing with its evidence of high incidence of"error" in various past crises. Note the challenging conclusions of this chapter with respect tobargainers: "From our information processing standpoint it is necessary to accept the high proba-bility that the opponent, like oneself, needs to be honest at some times and evasive or evendeceptive at others, and that an occasional deception or evasion does not mean that nothing theopponent says or does can ever be believed. The problem is to judge when he is being honest andwhen not" (p. 339).

6. See Graham Allison, The Essence of Decision, Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Bos-ton: Little, Brown, 1971), 162: " . . national behavior in international affairs can be conceivedof as something that emerges from intricate and subtle, simultaneous, overlapping games amongplayers located in positions in a government."

7. For perhaps the classic case study regarding individual propensities or predispositions seeOle R. Holsti, "The Belief System and National Images: A Case Study," in J. N. Rosenau, ed.,International Politics and Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1969), 543-550. Holsti's studycenters upon John Foster Dulles and the connections between his belief system and his perceptionsof the Soviet Union.

8. See Philip L. Dubois, From Ballot to Bench, Judicial Elections and the Quest for Ac-countability (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), chapter 3, 64-100, on cues in votingbehavior in state judicial elections. Lacking substantial information, voters often follow themost superficial but readily available cues in making their choices; among these is an apparent(and occasionally only apparent . . .) recognizability of a name. As Dubois notes, "the dra-matic effect of name confusion under the nonpartisan ballot in Ohio was clearly demonstrated inthe 1970 race between a Democratic Brown (Allen) and J. J. P. Corrigan, a Republican ap-pointee of Governor John Rhodes. In this race, a Democratic candidate associated by name withRepublicanism faced a Republican candidate possessing a 'Democratic name' in Ohio politics.The correlation between this judicial race and the 1970 gubernatorial contest was an astounding. . . 0.41; many Democratic voters obviously voted for Corrigan and many Republicas forBrown, resulting in a moderately partisan vote in the wrong direction!" (p. 84). See alsoGary C. Byrne and J. K. Pueschel, "But Who Should I Vote For County Coroner?" Journal ofPolitics 36(3) (August 1974):778-784.

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9. See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, unexpurgated edition, vol. 2 (London: Herst and Blackett,1939), 539.

10. See William E. Dodd, Jr. and Martha Dodd, eds., Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933-1938(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 24.

11. Ibid., p. 31.12. Zygelboym left a letter on May 12, 1943 which read in part: "By my death I wish to

make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting theextermination of the Jewish people." See Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews,1933-1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 318.

13. See Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's FinalSolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). Referring to such reports Laqueur writes that theeditors at the New York Times " . . . quite obviously did not know what to make of them. If it wastrue that a million people had been killed this clearly should have been front page news; it did not,after all, happen every day. If it was not true, the story should not have been published at all.Since they were not certain they opted . . . to publish it, but not in a conspicuous place. Thus, itwas implied that the paper had reservations about the report: quite likely the stories containedsome truth, but probably it was exaggerated." Laqueur notes that the news involving Hitler's"final solution," emanating from Europe at the time, met with a similar response elsewhere,including Hebrew papers in Palestine which were unhappy about "unproven and exaggeratedrumours" (pp. 74-75).

14. See Seymour M. Finger, American Jewry During the Holocaust (New York: Holmes andMeier, 1984) for the following appreciation: "At the outset, it was supposed that Nazism was notessentially different from the many forms of anti-semitism in the past. . . . " "The persistent beliefof Jews—both leaders and common citizens, in Europe and elsewhere—that Nazism was only anespecially bad outbreak of anti-semitism was not implausible in the 30's. . . ." "Even as the warwent on and word of the mass slaughters began to spread, this deeply inculcated perception ofanti-semitism obscured the vision of Jews in Europe and America" (p. 47). See also pp. 53-55 onAmerican Jews' wartime attitudes and concern with the views of non-Jews.

15. See Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, p. 336. There was also the information conveyedby the Polish envoy to the West, Jan Karski, later published in his book, The Story of a SecretState (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944). See also Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, theRoosevelt Administration and the Holocaust 1938-1945 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1970),178-181 on what the State Department had learned, and suppressed.

Karski's mission from Warsaw to London and his effort to relay information about the fate ofthe Jews in Poland is probably the most famous of such efforts made during the war. Among thoseto whom Karski took such information, in addition to the Polish government-in-exile, were An-thony Eden, Bill Donovan, Herbert Hoover, Cordell Hull, Henry Stimson, Francis Biddle,Stephen Wise, H. G. Wells, Arthur Koestler, Walter Lippman, and Franklin Roosevelt himself.See Laqueur, Appendix 5.

Laqueur also recounts the story of the Polish emissary's meeting with Justice Felix Frank-furter to relay information about the mass slaughter in Europe. Frankfurter told Karski that he didnot believe him. When Karski protested, according to Laqueur, Frankfurter explained that hedidn't mean to imply that Karski had not told the truth, he simply meant that he could not believehim, due to the magnitude of the atrocity. (See Laqueur, p. 3.)

16. According to Feingold (Politics of Rescue), American Jews were generally very con-cerned in the 1930s with domestic anti-Semitism and feared to stimulate it by any "overly aggres-sive" pressure tactics exercised vis a vis the U.S. government. (See pp. 6-15.) Among theofficialdom of the American administration "there was a certain annoyance at the priority de-manded by the Jews when the entire world hovered on the brink of totalitarian domination" (p.306). Some officials considered proposals for special aid to the Jews of Europe as Nazi-inspireddiversion (p. 307). See also Barbara Burstin, "Rescue in the Opening Rounds of the AmericanJewish Conference" in S. Pinsker and J. Fischel, eds., Holocaust Studies Annual, volume I,America and the Holocaust (Greenwood, FL: Penkeville Publishing Co., 1984), pp. 151-162.

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17. Yehuda Baver, American Jewry and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State UniversityPress, 1981), 456-457.

18. For a discussion of revisionist views see Harry Elmer Barnes, Revisionism: A Key toPeace and Other Essays (San Francisco: Cato Institute, 1980), 12-70. In particular, see A. J. P.Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Fawcett, 1961). Taylor, whom Barnesdescribes as the only writer to have produced a "forthright book" on the causes of World War II(p. 16), described Munich as "a triumph for British policy—a triumph for all that was best andmost enlightened in British life" (pp. 183-184).

19. As Anthony Eden put it in his memoirs: "There were always those ready to persuadeChamberlain that a fresh initiative towards the dictators would yield lasting results and that he wasthe man in all the world to make it. On this score he was the subject of incessant flattery. This is aform of adulation to which Prime Ministers must expect to be subject, it is gratifying to indulge andhard to resist." The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon: Facing the Dictators (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 648. According to Eden, [Chamberlain's] "assessment of the dictators[Hitler and Mussolini] was optimistic and unreal" as late as February 1938 (p. 679). Even in thesubsequent Munich period "a hazy optimism prevailed in official quarters" and, as Eden put it,"Worst of all was Mr. Chamberlain's conviction, perfectly sincere in my opinion, that he was in theway to bringing about world appeasement." The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), 15-16 and 28.

20. Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change, 1914-1939 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966),524-525.

21. As Adam Ulam rightly observed: "the lust for war did for Hitler what morbid suspicious-ness did for Stalin: it warped the workings of an intelligent mind, [and] interfered with brilliantpolitical and strategic concepts of which they were otherwise capable." Stalin: The Man and HisEra (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 550.

22. Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Harper andRow, 1969), 58.

23. Ibid., p. 59.24. General Andre Beaufre, 1940, The Fall of France (London: Cassell, 1965), 52.25. William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic, An Inquiry Into the Fall of France in

1940 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 608.26. Colonel A. Goutard, The Battle of France, 1940 (London: Frederich Muller, 1958), 14-

15.27. Telford Taylor, The March of Conquest: German Victories in Western Europe, 1940 (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 311. See also Anthony Kemp, The Maginot Line: Myth andReality (London: Frederick Warne, 1981): "It is now known that the French had plenty of warn-ing of German intentions," including when and where the German attack would begin and theorder of battle. "All of this mass of evidence was available to Gamelin—but he remained uncon-vinced (p. 83).

28. "No records were kept of the activities in the White House that afternoon, [December 6,1941] but War Secretary Stimson noted in his diary that everyone was worried about the Japanesefleets converging on the Gulf of Siam." David Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, vol. 2(New York: William Morrow, 1971), 1078-1079. See the text of the dispatch sent by AdmiralHarold K. Stark to Hawaii and the Philippines on November 27, 1941. Several possible targets ofa Japanese attack identified in it did not include Pearl Harbor. John Toland, Infamy, p. 7. RobertaWohlstetter has argued that the United States "failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want ofrelevant materials but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones," Wohlstetter, Warning and Deci-sion, p. 387.

29. See Gordon Prange, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (New York: McGraw-Hill,1986), 433.

30. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York:Pantheon Books, 1986) "The contempt for Japanese capabilities prior to the actual outbreak ofwar was shared by the English and the Americans; and in retrospect, the calamitous consequencesof such arrogance have overtones of a bleak, contemporary morality play" (p. 99).

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31. "To be responsive to a wide spectrum of problems, governments consist of large organi-zations, among which primary responsibility for particular tasks is divided. Each organizationattends to a special set of problems and acts in quasi-independence on these problems. But fewimportant issues fall exclusively within the domain of a single organization. Thus governmentbehavior relevant to any important problem reflects the independent output of several organiza-tions, partially coordinated by government leaders." Graham Allison, Cuban Missile Crisis cit., p.67.

32. See Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations, who conclude as fol-lows: "We may speculate that in the more pluralistic (if not 'multipolar') world that has beendeveloping since the early 1970s, there will be less consensus in major power crises. . . . Interna-tional pluralism produces ambiguity about a state's interests and a consequent plurality of domesticopinions as to what those interests are . . . internal changeability, and the inherent ambiguity ofinterest in a system that is at least moving toward multipolarity, augers unpredictability. Unpre-dictability could, in turn, induce ever greater all-around prudence than we have seen in nuclearbipolarity—or, we must add, a greater potential for dangerous miscalculation" (p. 530).

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Documents

Unheeded warnings: Some intelligence lessons of the 1930s and 1940s