Dr. James D. Scudieri and Colonel Jon Klug analyze Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson Jr.’s extensive operational reports and his role as Theater Army commander under Admiral Nimitz. The discussion highlights Richardson’s advocacy for Joint operational planning and the importance of interservice cooperation. They explore his unique command challenges, including a notable civil-military incident, and reflect on how his strategic insights offer valuable lessons for today’s military leaders. This exploration underlines the significance of integrating historical perspectives into contemporary military education.

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Podcast record date: August 14, 2024

Keywords: US Army in Pacific War, World War II Central Pacific, Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson Jr., Army war-fighting functions case study, Joint functions case study

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m in the studio with Dr. James D. Scudieri and Colonel Jon Klug, PhD. Scudieri is the author of Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson, Jr., Central Pacific Theater Army Commander for Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, 1943–45. Scudieri is also a senior research historian at the Strategic Studies Institute.

Klug is the associate dean at the US Army War College.

Welcome to Conversations on Strategy. I’m so glad you are here.

Okay, Jim, why this book? Why now?

Dr. James D. Scudieri

So, my joke is, some historians, if you can’t be good, you can be lucky. And, I started doing a search on the AHEC [US Army Heritage and Education Center] website, and I blundered across a Pacific War report. It was done by General Richardson, and it turned out, as I dug more deeply,  that it was only one, and I found all six reports.

Host

Nice.

Scudieri

There were five operational reports for specific operations, and the sixth report are a series of addenda. And, that sparked a deeper look at what was going on here.

And then, I’d combine that with putting a briefing together for US Army Pacific during their first theater Army staff course, which was in July of ’22 [2022]. And, [I] had to try to condense very, very broad-brush assessments of Richardson’s reports, because the reports altogether total almost 2,000 pages. They were very sweeping, very comprehensive, highly formal, [and] categorized. The outlines follow a general trend, but they’re not necessarily all the same because the five of the six reports are specific to the operation and what he wanted to make sure everybody knew.

And then, with a tip from [my] colleague Dr. John Bonin, [I discovered] there was a small series of Richardson papers at AHEC. And, in those papers, I found unpublished notes labeled as chapters for an unpublished autobiography.

Now, the vast majority of his papers are actually at the Hoover Institution, and I was in contact with them, too. They were very helpful. It was very much a voyage of discovery. I mean, I hadn’t been tracking Richardson even in my World War II readings before.

Host

Did you want to add anything, Jon?

Colonel Jon Klug

I think General Richardson is an example of how we can look back at history and draw lessons and see how people dealt with problem sets in the past that we [still] have to today. Jim mentioned that US Army Pacific, today, is interested in what General Richardson did [and] have had similar requests about command-and-control issues in the Pacific and World War II that INDOPACOM has been interested in. So, I think it’s just a great example for Richardson [about] how we can learn and [develop] interest today in that.

Host

For non-historians like myself, what do we need to know about Lieutenant General Richardson? Who was he? Tell me more.

Scudieri

Well, I’ve been looking at General Richardson’s material for a couple of years now, and my joke is I was beginning to think I was a stepson.

I believe he’s an unsung hero. I mean, if you talk [about the] Pacific War, most people think of Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific for the Army, and even his subordinates are not as well known. But, based on what General Richardson did, I believe he is an unsung hero, which is why I say de facto he was the theater Army commander for Admiral Nimitz, and he also had several responsibilities to support General MacArthur. And, I believe that should get some more wide press.

Congress recognized his accomplishments. He was posthumously promoted to four-star general by [an] act of Congress after the war and after he had passed away.

Klug

Yeah, a couple other things on General Richardson I think that are interesting is he was at West Point as a cadet at the same time that General MacArthur was a cadet. So, they overlapped. So, one of the important things looking at the flag officers of the past is when they overlapped and who they were connected to, so to speak. You know, there [are], kind of, general officer family trees, if you will. Some of them real and some just who they know. So, Richardson and MacArthur knew each other very well from that time period. The other thing, I think, that’s important to note, just about Richardson, was [that] Marshall had sent him to the Pacific on kind of a fact-finding, you know, inspection tour before some of what Jim’s going to talk about with General Richardson in Hawaii. But, Marshall had sent him as his representative to the Pacific. So, Richardson [was] already very well known to General Marshall and had just left command of the 1st Cav [Cavalry] Division early—well, before Pearl Harbor. So, [he was] an interesting and accomplished general.

Host

Jim, you talked a little bit before about this treasure trove of untapped primary resources that you had access to. Did you find any surprises in your research?

Scudieri

Oh, yes. Besides the initial surprise of finding the material, as I read more deeply into the papers, I realized how much that General Richardson and his command had accomplished, not just for Nimitz in the Central Pacific, but also for General MacArthur. I spent 30 years as an Army logistician, but his work at this echelon above Corps touched a very wide area. He did not just do logistics. He touched everything across the Army’s war-fighting functions and the Joint functions. So, he did it all in some way, shape, or form, and the monograph talks about that in some detail.

Klug

Yeah, Jim, didn’t you write at one point, I think his peak was 12 divisions that he controlled, and [he] was a battle space owner—using a little bit older term, but one we’re familiar with in the last 20 years. Was it 12 divisions?

Scudieri

Yes. So, he commanded 12 Army divisions. They were released for combat either to Admiral Nimitz or to General MacArthur only when he deemed they were ready. The other interesting point is lots of books will talk about Japanese stay-behind units or individuals. Who took care of those security concerns? Well, it turned out General Richardson’s people did.

Understandably, we did not want to commit Army divisions to that long-term operation, but General Richardson and his subordinates conducted combat operations with separate infantry regiments, which is just one example of the command and all of his enabling units, and individuals did a lot more than just logistics.

Host

What lessons can today’s strategists and leaders learn from this historical study?

Scudieri

Once I discovered the sheer scope, depth, and breadth of what Richardson accomplished, I realized there are significant, I prefer the term insights to lessons learned, for the challenges that face US Army Pacific today. Richardson operated in all of the current, what we now call Army war-fighting functions and the Joint functions, and I deliberately analyzed his reports and his comments in his unpublished autobiographical notes in terms of the challenge of setting the theater—and, in particular, for setting the theater with regard to large-scale combat operations. And, I see several insights between what Richardson accomplished then and what US Army Pacific does in that area of responsibility for Indo-Pacific Command but also probably applicability to other Army service component commands across the world.

KIug

I think another example, a much more [US Army] War College example, is for the Military Strategy and Campaigning Course for the Theater Army lesson. I was a lesson author for that lesson for several years, and I had put in General Richardson as an exemplar as a bit of a historical pieceؙ to show the students a historical antecedent of what a Theater Army does. Although, that also has to do with [the fact that] General Richardson did more than just the Theater Army piece. We talk about dual hatting or triple hatting, where you have one officer who’s responsible for multiple major roles. So, we use Richardson as [an] example of that [in the] discussion as well. A historical example that we can talk about that’s completely unclassified in a way that’s interesting to the students in that this is a real-world  historical example of how it was done.

Host

Tell me what was unique about Richardson’s approach to planning.

Scudieri

I wouldn’t phrase it as much as his approach, but it was based on the scope of his responsibilities. There is no other equivalent to his command in all of the Pacific.

Host

Okay.

Scudieri

And, this goes back to certain command-and-control issues where he didn’t just have to support Nimitz. He was responsible to Nimitz in terms of command and control, but he also had responsibilities that came from the War Department for MacArthur. And, another one that most people don’t realize is [that] even throughout all of this, as the commands changed from the Hawaiian Department to his commands in Central Pacific and then Pacific Ocean areas, throughout, he retained authority for martial law for Hawaii, which is a completely different line of authority. He did so many things simultaneously.

And again, the Army was expanding. The dark days of Pearl Harbor through early ’42 [1942] were over by the time Richardson took the commands discussed in the monograph, but that’s why the monograph talks about some of the interwar discussions as well as some of those issues with regard to the dark days. And, that’s why I wanted to highlight not just the prewar plans, but what existed in Louisville, [Kentucky], we would now call Joint doctrine because they just weren’t making this up. They had some guidance. The guidance was not authoritative, and there was a road map on how to accomplish Joint operations without just starting from scratch. But again, the Army grew quickly, as did the other services. So, this is a lot of discovery learning as he goes along.

And, it wasn’t just unique for him, necessarily, but it was [important] for the Army and the other services to be able to start with the relatively small size of the prewar Army that had focus on the color plans against single countries, and then, that morphs into the rainbow plans to conduct global war simultaneously.

Klug

I think it would also be fair to say that General Richardson was an advocate for Joint operations and Joint planning. Tying back to his relationship with Marshall, as Marshall worked with Admiral King, his equivalent in the Navy, they advocated for Nimitz to take more steps down the Joint path, if you will, and that included building what became a Joint staff for Nimitz—really the first staff. And, when we look at the history of Joint operations, it’s really Nimitz’s J-4, so the supply area, that was really your first true Joint staff section. And Richardson had worked with his boss, Nimitz, to try to convince him to go in that way. And, Nimitz was already in favor of that. He was a believer in Joint operations, but his Army commander, Nimitz’s Army commander, and Nimitz, and then support from Marshall and support from King—they ended up building what, in essence, is the first true Joint staff section, and then headquarters, which was vital for operations in the Pacific against the Japanese. So, [it played] a huge part there, and Richardson advocating for a gentleman named Brigadier General Edmond Levy, who was really the key leader in the J-4 when they first built the J-4 section. So, he’s an Army logistician working with Navy logistics to try to bring them together. But that’s a whole other story.

Host

This has been really great. Do you have any anecdotes or other insights that you can share?

Scudieri

Well, most readers for this period will not be surprised to see that there was a considerable amount of interservice rivalry, especially at the higher levels.

And, perhaps more so since there was guidance but not definitive law or doctrine for Joint operations. But, I came across an interesting comment by Richardson in his autobiographical notes that he issued to his staff, and that was, “Hey, we’re here to win the war. We will support Nimitz to the best of our ability, bottom line.”

Klug

The other thing that I would always emphasize with the military strategy and campaigning instructors was a little anecdote I find fascinating that General Richardson was held in contempt of court as the military governor. So, what was going on here was federal judge Delbert [E.] Metzger wanted two German-Americans to appear in his court, but they were in military custody, and Richardson, as his military governor and in his military governor role, said, “No.”

So, the judge held him in contempt and levied a $5,000 fine on him for that—and this was drug on for a while in the newspapers in Hawaii, Honolulu, but also back in the US. It went so far as President FDR [Frankline Delano Roosevelt] actually had to pardon General Richardson for this charge. And, I think it’s interesting, but it’s also a great example of civ-mil [civil-military] friction at, kind of, the lowest level, and that civ-mil relations is an important aspect of what we teach here at the [US Army] War College [and] what we explore with the students.

Host

This has been really fun, but we do have to wrap it up. Do you have any concluding thoughts that you’re willing to share?

Scudieri

Well, this was a long road because, as I mentioned, it began with a briefing to the US Army Pacific staff in July of ’22 [2022], and the publication date’s two years later.

[When] we originally started the project, I was going to write an article, and there’s so much material. Then the Press said, well, expand [it] to two articles, and then it went from two articles to a full-blown monograph. So, it’s been a pretty long road, but I would not have gotten there without the incredible support of the War College Press editors.

And, I also like to use this as an example of what some of us call applied history, which is why I organized the monograph in terms of the current Army war-fighting functions and the Joint functions. We don’t have time to do history for history’s sake in this environment. And so, I wanted to package it so that our current practitioners can get the biggest bang for the buck with the least effort.

Host

Jon, do you have anything?

Klug

Just that this is a tremendous contribution. I’m glad that Jim has pressed through and offered this up. I know it’ll impact the folks in Hawaii or going to Hawaii, but I also know that, not just moving forward, we’ve used a lot of Jim’s research for discussion in our Pacific campaigns elective with students. So, we’ve been doing that for a few years now, Jim and I, with different students. So, this has informed their understanding of the strategic but also the campaigning level of what we’re doing in that elective.

Host

Listeners, you can find the historical study at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/969. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Decisive Point, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.

This has been great. Thank you.

Klug

Thank you.