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Color Plans

click image to enlarge The Philippines represented good air bases for attacks and searching.

General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the United States Army, hero of the Apache campaign, former commander of the Rough Riders, former governor general of Moro Province in the Philippines, was in an angry mood. On this particular day in 1913, he had just lost a battle with Admiral George Dewey-and Wood was not used to losing battles. The battle in question had raged for almost ten years and concerned the site for a major naval base in the Philippines.

This was a vital question, not only for the defense of the Philippines, but for all of United States naval policy in the Pacific. In any war with Japan - which, after 1905, was the only possible United States enemy in Asia - the Philippines would almost certainly be attacked. The navy would have to cross the Pacific in order to defend them, but it would need bases along the way and in the archipelago itself. It was 7,000 miles from the West Coast to Manila; from Hawaii to Manila was almost 5,000 miles. The navy would need bases for refueling and repairs at Hawaii, at the American-owned island of Guam in the Mariannas, and in the Philippines. That was why the naval base was so important. It would have to be in a strong, well-defended location, for it was estimated that it would take the battle fleet a minimum of three to four months to cross the Pacific, relieve the troops in the Philippines, and engage the Japanese forces.

The navy favored Olongapo, on Subic Bay, northwest of Manila, from which the Americans could attack the flank of an invading fleet headed for Manila. Olongapo was hard to defend against a land attack, but at the turn of the century, when the most likely enemies were considered to be Germany or Russia, this did not seem a serious problem. It was assumed that an attack by those powers would be primarily by sea. After 1905 when Japan became the potential antagonist, Olongapo looked hopeless. The army declared it could not be defended from the land side - and proposed Manila Bay instead. The navy, headed by Admiral Dewey, clung stubbornly to Olongapo, refusing to have the fleet "bottled up" in Manila Bay.

The dispute dragged on for years without resolution. The navy chose Pearl Harbor as the site for its major base while toying with the idea of making Guam its forward operating base in the western Pacific. In the meantime the army had built powerful defensive works to defend the entrance to Manila Bay; the navy, however, had no first-class base in the islands, and the army had too few troops for a really effective defense. Congress, with fine impartiality, refused to appropriate money for a naval base - whether in Guam or the Philippines.

At the close of World War I, Manila was well fortified but had no fleet base; Guam was defenseless; and Hawaii had Pearl Harbor - 5,000 miles from the expected scene of action. At the same time, Japan had acquired a broad trusteeship over the former German island possessions in the central Pacific, the Marianas, the Marshalls, and the Carolinas, all of which she had captured during the war. These island chains stood directly astride the American route to the Philippines. Japanese control of these islands, and the provisions of the Washington treaties (which prohibited further fortifications in some of the Pacific possessions of the great powers) so altered the strategic picture as to call for fundamental changes in American plans for a possible war with Japan.

The so-called "Orange Plan" for war with Japan was one of a number of contingency war plans developed by the United States before World War I. They were often referred to as "color plans" because the hypothetical enemies were each assigned a color: red for Great Britain, black for Germany, green for Mexico, orange for Japan. The plans were developed under the auspices of the joint Army and Navy Board, which had been established by the secretaries of war and navy in the summer of 1903 to consider all matters referred to it by the service secretaries requiring interservice cooperation.2 The board was made up of four high-ranking officers each from the army and the navy, with Admiral George Dewey acting as president.

After a promising start, the board angered President Theodore Roosevelt over its manifest inability to agree on a site for a Pacific base. It infuriated Woodrow Wilson by its insistence on what he considered provocative and warlike preparations during a diplomatic crisis with Japan in 1913. By the First World War, the board had "virtually disappeared."

After the war, however, the Joint Board was revived and greatly strengthened. It remained an advisory body, but it now had a permanent staff: a joint Planning Committee of officers from the army and navy War Plans Divisions. The board was empowered to consider questions on its own initiative, without waiting for referral by one of the service secretaries.

This revitalized Joint Board had the task of bringing the Orange Plan into line with the realities of the postwar world. By the time the board began its formal deliberations, navy planners had already concluded that in any war against Japan, the Philippines were doomed. The Japanese could overwhelm the defenders long before the United States fleet could reach the scene. Japan could transport 50,000-60,000 men to the Philippines in the first week of the war. In the second week she could transport another 100,000. Within the first month a total of about 300,000 Japanese soldiers could be in the Philippines. The American garrison in the islands consisted of about 11,000 men plus 6,000 members of the paramilitary Philippine Constabulary, supported by twenty airplanes. The only sensible mission for the defenders, then, was to hold out as long as possible.

So the Philippines could not be effectively defended - but who was to tell the American people? Who was going to say that war with Japan would require, in the words of General Leonard Wood, "the abandonment of American posts, American soldiers, an American fleet, American citizens in the Far East?" Wood, now Governor General of the Philippines, warned that such a course would "have a disintegrating and demoralizing effect upon our people." He did not know - any more than the joint Board - how the Philippines could be saved against the overwhelming military superiority of Japan. Nevertheless, Wood confidently assumed that the planners would come up with something. They should "keep alive the problem and work it out."

So the pattern was set. The revised Orange Plan, officially adopted in 1924, made no mention of the predictable plight of the Philippines. Instead, it bravely asserted that at the outbreak of hostilities the United States would conduct an "offensive war primarily naval in character," aimed at the establishment "at the earliest possible date" of American seapower superior in strength to that of Japan in the western Pacific. The Philippine garrison was to hold Manila Bay as a base for the navy until superior American seapower arrived.

This pattern repeated itself over the next twelve years. Each time the Orange Plan was reconsidered navy-or, more often, armyofficers pointed out that " `to carry out the present Orange Plan . . . would be literally an act of madness.' " Yet the Joint Board shrank before the psychological and political implications of writing off the Philippines; it always reaffirmed that Manila Bay would be held, and that the United States would take the offensive in the western Pacific.

Although the Orange Plan was never formally abandoned, its objectives were progressively reduced. In 1935, the navy added a provision for capture of islands in the Marshalls and Carolines and their development as bases before the fleet proceeded to the Philippines. This implied a recognition that the advance across the Pacific might take years rather than months. Along the same lines, the mission of the Philippine garrison was changed in 1936 from holding all of Manila Bay to holding its entrances.

At the Naval War College, a generation of officers debated, tested, and refined, war with Orange. One hundred twenty-seven timesin chart maneuvers and board games-the American fleet crossed the Pacific to do battle with its Japanese opponent. How much useful knowledge was distilled from these games is still a matter of debate. Admiral Nimitz insisted that "the courses were so thorough that nothing that happened in the Pacific War was strange or unexpected." One historian of the war college agrees, declaring that the war games were "prophetic . . . the oracle of victory," while Kennedy, an equally knowledgeable analyst, finds that the studies were "impeded by insufficient data for realistic war games, avoidance of alliance problems, and disproportionate emphasis on tactics."

Whatever the case, the war college exercises did inject a certain realistic sense of the nasty problems posed by a war in the Pacific into both tactical and strategic thinking. "Sharp, bloody, and confused, the Orange tactical problems often seemed to mirror in grim reality the coming war." Bits and pieces of future campaigns in the Marshalls, the Mariannas, and the Philippines emerged – albeit incompletely and in a confused form - from the deliberations and experiments at Newport and at the navy's War Plans Division and the General Board of the Navy in Washington.

By 1937 army and navy leaders were deadlocked over the whole question of a future war with Japan. General Stanley D. Embick was now chief of the army's War Plans Division. As a captain he had helped plan the defenses of Manila Bay in 1907. As a colonel in the General Staff after World War I, he had opposed the 1924 Orange Plan; and as commander of the Corregidor fortress, he had written the critique labelling Orange an "act of madness." Embick believed that in case of war with Japan, the United States should withdraw behind its "natural strategic peacetime frontier in the Pacific: the line Alaska-Oahu-Panama." This would place the United States in an almost invulnerable defensive position.

The navy did not find this new approach appealing. Orange had always been their war: an "offensive war, primarily naval in character." Naval officers were schooled in the tradition of Mahan, which held that "war once declared must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy must not be fended off but beaten down." The very concepts of offensive and defensive were different for the army and the navy. In land warfare, defensive war usually called for different tactics than offensive war. In naval warfare, there was little difference at the tactical level between the two. A ship is both a defensive and offensive weapon. A war which was strategically defensive in character would still be fought at sea in the same manner as a war which was strategically offensive - only the scope and objectives would be different.

Now the army planners proposed to confine the navy to patrolling a defensive line in the mid-Pacific. Such a reduced and circumscribed mission was clearly unacceptable from the point of view of the navy's prestige, morale, and mission. The army saw its primary function as the defense of the continental United States, and it had hardly enough strength for this task. But the navy, with the world's largest battle fleet, could not well confine itself to guarding the army's defensive perimeter.

Unable to find a strategy acceptable to both services, the Joint Board turned the problem over to General Embick and Rear Admiral James O. Richardson, the navy's chief planner, with instructions to work out a compromise. Like most compromises, the new Orange Plan - which finally emerged from their deliberations and was subsequently approved by the Joint Board early in 1938 - avoided most of the important issues. The new plan provided for an initial defensive phase or "position of readiness" along the lines suggested by the army; at the same time, army and navy forces would prepare to take the offensive, first against the Japanese mandates and eventually westward towards the Philippines. As for the latter islands, they were to be defended at Manila, but no mention was made of their reinforcement or relief.

It was at this point that the realities of the international situation finally began to influence the abstract calculations of the strategists. Hitler had annexed Austria in March 1938, intimidated the British and French at Munich in September, and gobbled up the remains of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. France and Britain concluded a defensive alliance with Poland, while Hitler signed a "non-aggression pact" with the Soviet Union. The possibility that the United States and Japan might contend in splendid isolation appeared less and less likely as the possibility of war in Europe reached near certainty. Thus, in the summer of 1939 the joint Planning Board began work on a new series of war plans dealing with the contingency of war between the United States and a coalition of enemies.

These new plans, the "Rainbow" series, were based on five hypothetical war situations. Rainbow 1 was a plan for a defensive war to protect the United States and the Western Hemisphere north of ten degrees S latitude. In such a war, the United States was assumed to be without major allies. Rainbow 2 assumed that the United States would be allied with Britain and France. This would permit an immediate American offensive in the Pacific. Rainbow 3 was a repetition of the Orange Plan, with the proviso that hemispheric defense would first be secured, as provided in Rainbow 1. Rainbow 4 was based on the same assumptions as Rainbow 1 but extended the American mission to include the defense of the entire Western Hemisphere. Rainbow 5, destined to become the basis for American strategy in World War II, assumed that the United States was allied with Britain and France and provided for offensive operations by American forces in Europe, Africa or both. The variety of situations and strategies envisioned in the Rainbow plans epitomized American leaders' confusion and uncertainty as Europe drifted into war.

Ronald H. Spector. : The American War with Japan. The Free Press. 1985.

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