356 Chapter Nine
affairs was thus achieved and sustained by the collaboration of British
and American officials. The same principle governed Allied military
commands. Anglo-American armed forces were controlled in the field
by headquarters staffs who established a morale of their own often
transcending narrow national identity. At the top of the military chain
of command, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, sitting normally in Wash
ington, executed a joint strategy defined from time to time at confer
ences where President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill (and
after November 1943 Marshal Stalin as well) agreed upon future plans
of campaign and concerted other aspects of high policy.^89
By the end of the war, a large number of Allied states and govern
ments in exile, together with such quasi-governmental organizations
as the Free French, clustered around the Anglo-American power
center, sharing in the bounties of Lend Lease and adding moral and
material weight to the Allied cause.
In Africa, India, and Latin America, mobilization for war was less
intense. But the resources of these lands were also sucked into the
Anglo-American war effort, sometimes through purchases on the
open market, and sometimes as a result of administrative action.
India, for example, raised a large army for operations against the
Japanese in Burma. Manufacture of equipment needed for that army
gave special impetus to India’s industrialization; and the impress of
war work and military service on India’s collective consciousness made
postwar independence inevitable.^90
Transnational organization for war thus achieved a fuller and far
more effective expression during World War II than ever before.
Thanks to the increasing complexity of arms production, a single na
tion had become too small to conduct an efficient war. This was,
perhaps, the main innovation of World War II. Implications for na
tional sovereignty in peacetime were obvious and ran counter to the
passionate yearning for local self-government that inspired Asians and
Africans to reject colonial status in the first postwar decade.
The results of systematic application of scientific knowledge to
- Many books have described the Allied strategic management of World War II.
Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York, 1948) was
the earliest inside view and remains one of the most interesting. William H. McNeill,
America, Britain and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941–1946 (London, 1953)
represents an early synthesis and interpretation. Opening of archives has not changed
the overall picture very much as reference to such a work as John Lewis Gaddis, The
United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York, 1972) will show.
- Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and
Men (London, 1974), pp. 495–522; Bisheshwar Prasad, ed., Expansion of the Armed
Forces and Defense Organization, 1939–1945 (n.p., 1956).
