In October 1947, just more than two years after the Japanese Empire officially surrendered to the Allies and the most destructive conflict in human history finally ended, the veteran American statesman Henry L. Stimson published an article in Foreign Affairs.1 As the flagship journal of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, it was a natural forum for someone such as Stimson, a former secretary of state and (twice) secretary of war with over four decades of experience at the highest levels of American government, to share some of their ideas.2 In his piece, entitled “The Challenge to Americans,” Stimson outlined what he felt were the opportunities and struggles the United States faced in the aftermath of World War II.3 He opened with a declaration: Americans faced “a challenging opportunity, perhaps the greatest ever offered to a single nation. It is nothing less than a chance to use our full strength for the peace and freedom of the world.”

Traditional accounts of the Allied grand strategic debates during World War II stress the divergence between the American and British approaches to waging war against the Axis. In these interpretations, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were the primary shapers of grand strategy and policy. However, this chapter argues these studies have focused too much on certain figures and have relatively marginalized others who played crucial roles in shaping these debates. One of those comparatively overlooked figures was Henry Stimson, who was a vital player on the American side in influencing the politics of US strategy and pushing it toward launching a cross-Channel invasion of France. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were often internally divided over how to win the war and struggled to influence policy accordingly. The lack of focused political coordination between the War Department and the JCS made it difficult to convince Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe, which opened the door to following the British Mediterranean strategy for defeating Germany, starting with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

This chapter examines how US officials responded to their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to shape Anglo-American grand strategy during 1942 by changing their approach to these debates in 1943. It argues that War Department civilian and military officials led this effort by overhauling US strategic planning processes and forcefully criticizing British strategy and policy as antithetical to American political objectives. Army planners tactically used their position within the US foreign policy process to craft a hostile narrative about British military aims to shape how their superiors approached US–UK strategy formation and to prioritize their own conceptions of America’s geopolitical ambitions. These efforts hardened US officials’ determination to advance Washington’s wartime goals above London’s and helped forge a strong level of political coordination between the War Department and the JCS for ensuring this occurred. The result was that American defense officials were able to convince President Roosevelt to back their strategic views and to shun Britain’s Mediterranean approach for defeating Germany.