Chapter IV: The Eisenhower Reorganization

General of the Army George C. Marshall repeatedly asserted he could not have "run the war" without having radically reorganized the department to provide centralized, unified control through decentralized responsibility for administration. The essential features of his reorganization, he strongly advised, should be retained after the war and the armed services

should be unified or integrated along the same lines.1 This approach was preferable to continuing the unsatisfactory extemporaneous wartime organization of the joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) . The JCS operated on the traditional committee system, which, Marshall told Congress, made the development of balanced national defense policies and effective control over the armed services impossible. "Committees," he said, "are at best cumbersome agencies." They reached agreement only after interminable delay. Their decisions represented compromises among the competing interests of individual agencies rather than rational calculations based on the interests of the nation as a whole. They wasted time, men, money, and matériel.2

Marshall's basic proposition was to integrate the services into a single department along the same lines as his wartime organization of the Army. A civilian secretary would be responsible for the nonmilitary administration of the services, a role similar to Secretary Stimson's during the war. Under him would be a single Chief of Staff for the Armed Forces directing the military activities of four operating commands: the Army, Navy, Air Forces, and a Common Supply and Hospitalization Service patterned after Army Service Forces. Overseas theater commanders would report directly to the Chief of Staff.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff would continue as a top-level planning and co-ordinating staff, with no administrative responsibilities, under a "Chief of Staff to the President" like Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy. The new Chief of Staff would present the views of the JCS to the President instead of the reverse as Admiral Leahy had done. The JCS would also continue to report directly to the President rather than through the civilian secretary. Its vital function would be to recommend to the President military programs which integrated military strategy and policy with the budgets required to support them.

National military policies should be balanced against the resources available to meet them, Marshall insisted. Otherwise the services would find themselves again unable to carry out their assigned responsibilities. He also sought to prevent the services from bypassing the Chief of Staff and the Secretary as the technical services had done in obtaining their own funds

Even before Pearl Harbor General Marshall realized the importance of planning ahead to avoid the kind of chaotic demobilization which followed World War I. On 18 November 1941 he recalled to active duty Brig. Gen. John McAuley Palmer, with whom he had served under Pershing, as his personal adviser on the postwar organization of the Army. On 24 June 1942 he also appointed a Post-War Planning Board to advise General Palmer on postwar organization matters. Its members, including the G1 and G-3, were too preoccupied with current operating responsibilities to pay much attention to postwar problems. Eventually they agreed on the need for a special staff agency that would devote its entire time to problems of demobilization and postwar planning.

General Marshall then asked General Somervell on 14 April 1943 to initiate preliminary studies on demobilization planning. Accordingly, General Somervell set up a Project Planning Division within the Office of the Deputy Commanding General for Service Commands to define the problem in the light of American experience in World War I and recommend a proper organization and procedures for dealing with it.

Assisted by General Palmer, the Project Planning Division submitted a Survey of Demobilization Planning to General Marshall on 18 June 1943. Based on these recommendations, Under Secretary Patterson on 22 July 1943 directed creation of a Special Planning Division as a War Department Special Staff agency to develop plans for demobilization, universal military training, a single department of defense, and the postwar organization of the Army.

The Special Planning Division's internal organization consisted of five functional branches: Organization; Personnel and Administration; Service, Operations, and Transportation; Materiel; and Fiscal. Three other branches, Legislative and Liaison, Administration, and Research, provided administrative support.

The Organization Branch developed the War Department's Basic Plan for the Post-War Military Establishment and the Army's positions on unification and universal military training along the lines outlined by General Marshall. The Personnel and Administration Branch prepared the Army's demobilization program together with the Readjustment Regulations governing its operations. The Service, Operations, and Transportation Branch, the Fiscal Branch, and the Materiel Branch, which were combined in 1945 as the Supply and Materiel Branch, concentrated on planning the Army's postwar supply organization and industrial demobilization. The Research Branch collected and evaluated reports from other staff agencies and prepared the division's periodic progress reports. On military matters the SPD reported to the Chief to Staff and on industrial matters to Under Secretary Patterson.5

The Special Planning Division followed traditional Army staff action procedures. It assigned problems for investigation to appropriate staff agencies or commands, reviewed their reports, and then submitted them for comment and concurrence to all interested agencies. After adjusting conflicting views, SPD submitted the final results to the General Staff, General Marshall, Under Secretary Patterson, and Secretary Stimson for

approval. In September 1945, two and a half years after it had begun operations, the SPD had completed action on about one half of the 150 problems initially assigned. Those remaining generally concerned Army supply and administrative organization, the subject of heated debate between ASF and the Army staff. While the Special Planning Division continued to exist until May 1946, the Under Secretary's Office absorbed the functions of the Materiel Branch in. September 1945, while the Patch-Simpson Board on the Postwar Organization of the Army removed that function from the Organization Branch.6

A primary responsibility of the Special Planning Division was the detailed planning required to carry out General Marshall's postwar programs for unification of the armed services, universal military training (UMT), and the postwar organization of the Army. Before any detailed planning could be undertaken the SPD and the Army staff had to agree on certain operating assumptions concerning the nature of the postwar world and likely U.S. military commitments in that period.

The SPD's Basic Plan for the Post-War Military Establishment, dated 9 November 1945, assumed for planning purposes the existence of some kind of international security organization like the proposed United Nations "controlled by major powers," including the United States. Control over the sea and air "throughout the world" would be the "primary responsibility of the major powers, each power having primary control in its own strategic areas." Finally, the "total power" of the world organization would be sufficient to deter any aggressor, including one of the major powers.

Within this framework the SPD and the Army staff made the following planning assumptions concerning the nature of the next war. The United States would have recognized the possibility of such a war at least a year ahead and have undertaken some military preparations. The conflict would be a "total war" begun without any declaration of war by an "all-out" attack on the United States as the initial objective of the aggressors. The war would last five years, and the United States would be without major Allies for the first eighteen months.

Given these assumptions the armed services should be strong enough to maintain "the security of the continental United States during the initial phases of mobilization," "support such international obligations as the United States may assume," hold those "strategic bases" required "to ensure our use of vital sea and air routes," and be able to expand rapidly through partial to complete mobilization.7

In summary, Army plans assumed the next war would be much like the last, complete with another Pearl Harbor. Basing them on these assumptions the Army submitted two versions of General Marshall's unification proposals to Congress. General McNarney introduced the first version to a special House Committee on Post-War Military Policy headed by Congressman Clifton A. Woodrum, Democrat of Virginia, on 25 April 1944. The committee took no action because of strong Navy opposition. A JCS Special Committee for Reorganization of National Defense recommended certain changes in the Marshall-McNarney plan in the summer of 1945. As a result the Army staff modified its earlier proposals, and Lt. Gen. J. Lawton Collins, Deputy Commanding General and Chief of Staff, Army Ground Forces, presented the second and final War Department proposals, the Marshall-Collins plan, to the Senate Military Affairs Committee on 80 October 1945.

The basic features of these two plans followed General Marshall's concept of unification. They also paralleled Marshall's wartime organization. The new Secretary of the Armed Forces and his principal assistants would be responsible for those nonmilitary functions Secretary Stimson and his staff had handled-research and development, procurement, industrial mobilization, legislative liaison, and public information. (Chart 11) The services together with a separate Directorate of Common Supply would be autonomous operating agencies like the Army Ground Forces, Air Forces, and Service Forces reporting directly to the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces rather than

through separate civilian secretaries. The Secretary of Defense would supervise and direct the services through an integrated functional staff rather than through a more traditional, service-oriented one. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would be responsible for co-ordinating policies and programs with the men and resources required, much as OPD had done for the Army during the war.

Both General Marshall and General Collins in their Congressional testimony stressed the integrating and co-ordinating functions of the JCS more than any other feature of the Army's proposals. One feature they did not discuss was the assignment of land-based air forces to the Air Forces without any reference to land-based Marine Corps aviation. The omission was significant because the role of Marine Corps aviation caused the most bitter interservice disputes in the ensuing Congressional battles on unification.8

the old Army dispute over whether the United States should rely for its defense upon the Uptonian concept of a large standing army or continue to rely upon a trained militia. Remembering that Congress had twice rejected the Uptonian approach in the National Defense Act of 1916 and again in 1920, Marshall did not believe Congress would support a permanent peacetime army larger than 275,000. Consequently he, General Palmer, and Secretary Stimson supported the traditional policy of relying upon trained Reserves against the determined opposition of practically the entire Army staff which favored the Uptonian view. Marshall proposed the UMT program as the most practicable means of providing a trained militia. As developed by the SPD in agreement with the Navy, the UMT plan proposed that every able-bodied male between seventeen and twenty would receive a year's military training followed by five years of service in the Organized Reserves or National Guard. UMT would be for training only, and trainees would not be considered part of the armed forces available for normal peacetime military operations. The peacetime military establishment would be "no larger than necessary to discharge peacetime responsibilities" because UMT would provide the forces needed in the event of a national emergency.

Paragraph II of War Department Circular 347 of 27 August 1944 instructed the War Department to follow the traditional American policy of relying upon trained National Guard and Reserve forces as the basis for its postwar planning. Despite General Marshall's directive the Army staff continued to oppose reliance upon the militia right down to his retirement in November 1945. A War Department Special Committee on the Strength of the Permanent Military Establishment appointed in August 1945 under Brig. Gen. William W. Bessell, Jr., initially proposed a million-man army. This figure included the Air Staff's proposal for a seventy-group air force. Marshall informed the Bessell Board that this total was unrealistic because Congress would not provide the funds needed to maintain such a large force and because without universal military training or the draft the Army could not obtain the volunteers needed. The board then revised its estimates downward to about 550,000, but General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, who succeeded Marshall as Chief of Staff, rejected this

The last part of Marshall's postwar program tackled by the Special Planning Division was the future organization of the War Department and Army. By the end of the war the Army staff had been unable to reach agreement on this subject, and the SPD assumed "for planning purposes only" the continued existence of the "Air Forces, Ground Fqrces, and Service Forces." At this point the Board of Officers on the Reorganization of the War Department under Lt. Gen. Alexander M. Patch took over this function from SPD.

The War Department's basic plan assumed that the Air Forces would be organized into "a headquarters and such Air Forces, Commands and other elements as may be provided," that the Ground Forces would similarly be organized into a "headquarters and such Army and Corps headquarters and separate commands as may be provided," but concerning the Service Forces it assumed only that they would be "organized administratively to support the requirements of the Ground and Air Forces." The omission of any reference to ASF headquarters was deliberate. The postwar organization of the Army was to be heavily influenced by the bitter opposition provoked within the Army staff by General Somervell's wartime proposals to reorganize the Army's supply and administrative systems along functional lines.10

The first, made in both April and June 1943, would have established General Somervell formally as the Chief of Staff's principal adviser on supply and administration, replacing G-1 and G-4. The opposition of the Army staff, including OPD, killed this plan. The next three proposals made in the fall of 1948, the summer of 1944, and late 1945, all would have "functionalized" the technical and administrative services out of existence as autonomous commands. Secretary Stimson himself vetoed the first, Under Secretary Patterson the second, while the third effort, disguised as logistics "Lessons Learned" in World War II, remained buried in the files of ASF and its successor agencies.

General Somervell was not satisfied with his informal status as General Marshall's chief adviser on supply and administration. With his passion for organizational tidiness and clear-cut command channels he wanted to make this position formal, resurrecting the dual position held by General Goethals in World War I. In his view there was no need for G-1, G-4, or the Logistics Division of OPD, and in April and June 1943 he proposed to abolish them. His argument was that separating operations from planning was impractical. G-1 and G-4 were unnecessary because ASF was actually performing their functions. "The enforcement of policy inevitably tends to become the actual operation of that policy with all of the extra administrative detail and personnel required for an additional agency to do the work of another." 11 Going one step further Somervell argued that the Operations Division ought to absorb G-3 functions, leaving as the General Staff only OPD and the Military Intelligence Service, both essentially operating agencies. Thus the General Staff would be eliminated as a coordinating or supervising agency. Summarizing this concept several years later as one of the lessons learned in the war, General Robinson wrote:

ants to the Chief of Staff, concentrating its attention primarily on strategic planning and the direction of military operations. The Chief of Staff and the General Staff should not be burdened with the coordination and direction of administrative and supply activities, procedures and systems.12

Without commenting one way or another, General Marshall submitted these proposals to the General Staff and other interested agencies that almost unanimously opposed them. G-1 and G-4 remained, and their staffs and functions actually increased during the rest of the war, probably as a reaction to General Somervell's projected plans. 13

General Somervell's next campaign was to integrate the operations of the technical services along functional lines. (Chart 12) This was the heart of a proposed wholesale reorganization of the Army Service Forces from the top down known as the Long-Range Organization Plan for the ASF prepared in the Control Division. The reorganization of ASF headquarters actually carried out was that in November 1943, which centered on a Directorate of Plans and Operations. The headquarters of the several service commands were to be realigned similarly.

The offices of the chiefs of the technical services were also to be reorganized on parallel lines as the first step toward their complete functional ization. In the last stage they would be divested of their field commands and combined with the staff of ASF headquarters into a single functional staff for procurement, supply, personnel, administration, fiscal, medical, utilities, transportation, and communications. The field activities of the technical services were to be transferred to six instead of nine service commands and their various field operating zones realigned to correspond to the latters' geographical boundaries. There would be no more Class IV installations or "exempted stations" except for certain special installations such as ports

General Marshall and General McNarney supported General Somervell's plan, which they both recognized would wipe out the traditional technical and administrative services. Secretary Stimson, Under Secretary Patterson, and Mr. McCloy, on the other hand, realized the opposition and resentment this would provoke among the technical services. The Secretary doubted that the game would be worth the candle. General Somervell, "whose strong point is not judicial poise," the Secretary confided in his diary, reminded him in many ways of General Wood, especially "in his temperament." He recalled for General Marshall how Wood's efforts to reform the Army back in 1911-12 aroused such opposition that Stimson had all he could do to prevent Congress from abolishing the position of Chief of Staff altogether. General Marshall, whose experiences under General Pershing had taught him the political power of the technical service chiefs, yielded at this point to the Secretary's judgment. General McNarney, although overruled, continued to believe "washing out" the technical services was a sensible idea.15

As if to underline Secretary Stimson's arguments, opponents of General Somervell's plan within the Army leaked information about it to the press, which in turn stirred up a hornet's nest in Congress, just as the Secretary feared it would.16 One of those most strongly opposed to functionalization was the resourceful Chief of Ordnance, General Campbell, who complained to Bernard Baruch, a member of his Industrial Advisory Committee. Mr. Baruch protested to President Roosevelt personally and also wrote Mr. Stimson. The Secretary in reply said: "I stopped the foolish proposal in respect to the Technical Services when it first reached me several weeks ago." 17 General Somervell was abroad on an important political mission for General Marshall during all these events. Surveying the

Undaunted, General Somervell and the Control Division continued to press for consideration of their plan to functionalize the technical services. Responding to a request from the Special Planning Division, the Control Division on 15 July 1944 resubmitted a combined and revised edition of its earlier proposals .as a Plan for Post-War Organization of the Army Service Forces. This included its recommendations to confine the General Staff to strategic planning and the direction of military operations, to make the Commanding General, ASF, the Chief of Staff's adviser on supply and administration, and to create a "single, unified agency for all supply and administrative services for the Army," including the AAF. In addition to abolishing G-1 and G-4, the report requested restoration of the War Department's budget function to the ASF because "all fiscal operations should be placed in one organizational unit," suggested abolition of the New Developments Division because it duplicated and complicated the research and development work of ASF headquarters, and asked that the civilian personnel functions be transferred from the Office of the Secretary to ASF on similar grounds.

Complaining that the AAF was attempting to make itself completely "self-contained and independent," the report recommended that ASF should be responsible for most AAF housekeeping functions and for "the procurement and supply of all items of supply and equipment, including those peculiar to Army Air Forces. There is no more reason for making the present exception for aircraft than for making an exception for tanks or radio or artillery." Under the ASF there would also be one transportation system for land, sea, and air, except for elements organic to tactical units.

ASF's mission, the Control Division argued, was "to integrate in an economical manner all the supply, administrative, and service functions of the Army." The continued existence in law of the technical and administrative services as semiautonomous agencies was inconsistent with this principle, and the National Defense Act should be amended accordingly. The law ought only to provide for the principal officers of the department: the Secretary, Under Secretary, and assistant secretaries, the Chief of Staff and the General Staff, and the three major commands. The detailed subordinate organization of the department should be left "for administrative determination" by the Secretary of War. Similarly the commissioning of officers in the separate arms and services was inconsistent with the organization of the Army into three major commands. The law should provide for commissioning and assigning all officers only in the "Army of the United States," and branch insignia should be abolished.

The chiefs of the technical and administrative services would continue to exist in this plan, unlike the previous one, but they would serve simply as a functional staff and command no field agencies. Under this scheme, the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, organized internally along commodity lines, would be the staff agency responsible for procurement and production, including research and development and maintenance and repair. (Chart 13) The Quartermaster General's Office, also organized on a commodity basis, would be responsible for storage, distribution, and issuance of all supplies and equipment. The Office of the Chief of Engineers would be responsible for all construction, real property (including national cemeteries), mapping, and its traditional "civil functions," the Office of the Surgeon General for all medical activities, the Office of the Chief of Transportation for all types of transportation and the Army postal system, and the Office of the Chief Signal Officer for signal communications and for photographic

The Judge Advocate General would be responsible for all legal activities currently performed in the technical services. The Office of the Provost Marshal General would be assigned responsibility for civil defense in addition to its other duties. All fiscal activities of the technical services would be transferred to the Office of the Chief of Finance, and The Adjutant General's Office would be responsible for all personnel functions, publications and records, personnel services, and labor relations. The National Guard Bureau and the Office of the Executive for Reserve and ROTC Affairs would be abolished and their functions assigned to the ASF Chief of Military Training and to The Adjutant General.

The Control Division advocated organizing the supply and administrative services of overseas theaters and commands on the same pattern as the ASF and the service commands. All supply and service troops not organic to a subordinate tactical unit would be placed under a single service of supply whose commander would bear the same relation to the theater commander as General Somervell did to General Marshall. Within tactical units from armies down to regiments a single service troop commander would replace the special staff, G-1 and G-4.

These "reforms" were so radical and comprehensive that they affected nearly every agency in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Forces. To the extent that they were known throughout the Army they added fuel to the existing animosity toward the ASK Under Secretary Patterson vetoed the plan, saying that roles and missions of the technical services and the service commands should be left unchanged. Consequently the proposal was not submitted to the Special Planning Division, but General Robinson presented a copy of it to the Patch Board a year later as part of his testimony.19

The final proposals developed in the Control Division for inclusion as Chapter 16 of General Somervell's final report retained the same basic organization proposed earlier with the following exceptions. The Chief of Ordnance and the Quartermaster General would administer and control major field activities including arsenals, large procurement and storage depots, and major maintenance and repair facilities. The plan developed in some detail the procedures by which the Army's supply system would operate under this pattern of organization. Second, it proposed separate seacoast commands to control ports of embarkation, holding and reconsignment points, distribution depots, staging areas, and personnel replacement centers. Finally the report offered a detailed war mobilization organization plan for the federal government in which an Allocations Board would ration scarce resources, production facilities, labor, and transportation among government agencies in a manner similar to the Controlled Materials Plan of World War II.

These proposals, submitted to General Somervell in November 1945, were deleted from his final report, which was published in 1948 as "Logistics in World War II: The Final Report of the Commanding General, Army Service Forces," because the War Department reorganization of May 1946 and the National Security Act of 1947 had overtaken them.20

The Army staff's opposition to continuing Army Service Forces after the war stemmed from animosity engendered by General Brehon B. Somervell's aggressiveness and the huge size of his headquarters as well as from opposition to his various reorganization proposals. The opportunity to abolish ASF came with General Marshall's retirement as Chief of Staff and his replacement by General Eisenhower after the war. The latter's impending appointment was common knowledge, at least in the higher echelons of the department, in the summer of 1945.

ate course of action on reorganizing the department. General Porter replied by suggesting the appointment of an ad hoc board of high-ranking officers representing the General Staff and the three major commands to assist the Special Planning Division in developing a proper organization for the department and the Army in the immediate postwar period.

Consequently General Thomas T. Handy, the Deputy Chief of Staff on 30 August created a Board of Officers on the Reorganization of the War Department, headed first by General Patch, and, after his death in November, by Lt. Gen. William H. Simpson. Handy made the board itself rather than SPD responsible for recommending a suitable organization, and appointed representatives from the technical services instead of the three major commands, flatly rejecting a personal request from General Somervell to appoint General Robinson. The board included one representative each from OPD and SPD, the Chief Signal Officer, and a veteran Ordnance organization and management expert, Maj. Gen. Charles T. Harris, Jr. As head of a blue-ribbon Committee on the Post-War Organization of the Ordnance Department Harris had recommended continuing the department's division along commodity lines with responsibility "from design to obsolescence" assigned on this basis, a concept directly contrary to General Somervell's functional approach. Of all the members of the Patch-Simpson Board General Harris was the only one with much experience in organizational planning. General Patch himself, a blunt combat veteran with no General Staff experience at all, was frankly baffled by the complex organization, procedures, and vernacular of the department and relied heavily upon the judgment of his colleagues. The end result was a committee deliberately weighted against the Army Service Forces.21

There was a small group of veterans who had been responsible for the operation of the War Department during the war and who favored continuing the Marshall organization. Besides General Marshall these included Mr. Patterson, Mr. Lovett, General Somervell and his staff, Maj. Gen. Russell L. Maxwell, the G-4, and General Joseph T. McNarney and the three members of his 1942 Reorganization Executive Committee, Brig. Gen. William. K. Harrison, Jr., Maj. Gen. Laurence S. Kuter, and Maj. Gen. Otto L. Nelson, Jr. The latter were questioned primarily on the background and rationale of that reorganization. General Marshall and - General McNarney emphasized the need to keep the General Staff out of operations because its procedures delayed action too long. General McNarney went further and recommended abolishing the technical services entirely.

The second and largest group consisted of representatives from the technical services and General Eisenhower's staff who opposed ASF because they regarded a separate supply command as violating the principle of unity of command. General Handy was only formally neutral on ASF, while Dr. Bush, Dr. Bowles, and Brig. Gen. William A. Borden were interested primarily in the future status of the Army's research and development program.22

Knowing General Eisenhower would be the next Chief of Staff, the Patch Board paid particular attention to a rough plan suggested by him for dividing the Army staff into a small planning and co-ordinating staff at the top and a series of functional operating "directorates" for "technical coordination and supervision." Below these staff elements the Air Forces, Ground Forces, and the technical services would exercise "command functions." The board found it difficult to determine just what General Eisenhower intended by having a planning and co-ordinating staff as well as a system of directorates, and

his reference to the former as a "General Staff" added to the confusion. General McNarney thought Eisenhower's plan was "a more or less bastard conglomeration of the War Department General Staff and the Naval System of Bureaus" with two of everything. To him it meant a return to the prewar organization with the General Staff thoroughly involved in operational matters, and everything bogging down. Why, he asked, go back to an "outmoded" organization which was incapable of running the department in an emergency. The only improvement he could see was that it did not propose to resurrect the old combat arms chiefs.23

Where General Marshall had insisted that the General Staff must stay out of operations, the Patch Board came to the opposite conclusion. In its report it asserted that the "old theory that a staff must limit itself to broad policy and planning activities has been proved unsound in this war." It blamed the Marshall reorganization for stripping the General Staff of its operating functions so that it could not perform its missions properly. On the other hand, it stated that the General Staff "should concern itself primarily with matters which must be considered on a War Department level." Authority to act on all other activities must be "delegated to the responsible commands." What the General Staff should do when these commands disagreed among themselves the Patch Board did not say.

The board's proposed reorganization represented a return to the prewar Pershing pattern with two exceptions. It did not recommend resurrecting the old combat arms chiefs, and, second, it suggested that all officers should be commissioned in the Army of the United States rather than by arm or service. By comparison the Navy had been organized in this manner since 1889.

The Patch Board plan divided the department and the Army into four echelons: the Office of the Secretary of War, the General and Special Staffs for staff planning and direction, the administrative and technical services restored to their prewar autonomy, and an operating level, the Air Forces, Ground Forces, and Overseas Departments.

Within the Secretary's Office it proposed a new Assistant Secretary for Research and Development aided by a civilian advisory council and a separate Research and Development Division. These proposals reflected recommendations by Dr. Bush, Dr. Bowles, and General Borden. They had insisted that research and development must be removed from the control of procurement and production officials because these two sets of functions were antithetical.

The General Staff divisions were designated Directorates instead of Assistant Chiefs of Staff, emphasizing that they were not merely staff advisers but would have "directive authority" as well. The Operations Division was abolished and its functions parceled out among other divisions. The control over overseas military operations went to the new Directorate of Operations and Training. The Strategy and Policy Group became the nucleus of a revived WPD known as the Plans Division. In restoring the technical services the Patch Board recommended legislation to make the wartime Transportation Corps a permanent agency. This was a major change from the interwar period when transportation was fragmented among several services.

In the zone of the interior (ZI) the board recommended abolishing the service commands and transferring their installations and housekeeping functions to four Army commanders under AGE The Military District of Washington would continue to operate under the direct jurisdiction of the department. The technical services would be supervised by the new Directorate of Service, Supply, and Procurement, which would combine G-4 with allied functions of ASF headquarters. All other ASF administrative functions it would transfer to appropriate General or Special Staff divisions. "Thus there is no need for an Army Service Forces headquarters organization," the board concluded.

The report, submitted on 18 October, was circulated among all interested agencies within the department, among the three major commands, and overseas. General Eisenhower approved the report, but added that he wanted to limit procurement to only three or four services. General Marshall, not wishing to tie his successor's hands, also approved.25

In a vigorous valedictory General Somervell dissented from the report in principle and in particular. Although largely ignored at the time, the objections he raised were important. They involved problems either created or unsolved by the Patch Board and the ensuing reorganization that would come up again and again in the next two decades.

The Patch Board's recommendations amounted to returning to the prewar organization of the department, General Somervell asserted, repeating the errors made after World War I and ignoring the lessons of World War II. The ideal organization for supply and services was to place all command authority and responsibility for such operations in one agency which would also act as the Chief of Staff's adviser on these functions. General Goethals had managed to develop such an organization which might have been more efficient than the one ultimately adopted.

The basic organizational pattern might be functional, commodity, geographical, or staff and line, but major industrial corporations had found that combining more than two of these patterns resulted in "diffusion of responsibility, crossing of lines of authority, and general confusion." The Patch Board proposed to combine three or four different patterns and so did not provide the same simple, clear-cut command channels it recommended in the case of AGF. The logic of eliminating

If the Patch Board report were approved, General Somervell suggested certain specific changes in its recommendations. He thought Congress should be requested to amend the National Defense Act of 1916 to permit the Secretary to change the internal organization of the department at his discretion by administrative regulation.

Second, he objected strongly to the separation of research and development from procurement and production. Instead he would place the proposed Assistant Secretary under the authority of the Under Secretary who was responsible for procurement and the proposed Research and Development staff agency under the new Directorate of Service, Supply, and Procurement. During the war, he asserted, it had been difficult to "reconcile conflicts between the desirability of introducing improvements and the requirements of mass production. Only if one agency included responsibility for both research and procurement could the inevitable conflicts, . . . be settled expeditiously so that deadlocks do not delay or prevent the procurement of adequate weapons in the necessary quantities..."

Concerning the technical services he said there ought to be a single command and communications line from the Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement (SS&P) to all the technical services as there was from the Director of Personnel. The many functions performed by the technical services as autonomous commands-personnel, training, intelligence, planning, and operations as well as supply-should pass through the Director of SS&P and be co-ordinated by him with other General Staff divisions. Any other organization would result in confusion, duplication, and overlapping of authority.

He also disagreed with the proposal to make the AGF and AAF responsible for housekeeping and similar Army-wide services throughout the zone of the interior. The ZI organization should have a permanency during emergencies and mobilization which tactical organizations would be unable to provide. Army Air Forces and Army Ground Forces were primarily tactical and training organizations and should not be burdened with service and supply functions not organic to their units. At

When General Patch died the board was reconvened in December under General Simpson to consider changes suggested by various agencies and to recommend a final reorganization plan. In its report submitted on 28 December the Simpson Board singled out General Eisenhower's suggestion to limit procurement to three or four services for special comment. Admitting that there was considerable duplication among the services in procuring identical items, the Simpson Board defended the existing conditions with each technical service doing its own procuring. This was, it said, not an organizational but an administrative matter to be dealt with by reviewing such cases item by item.

The board made several changes in the original plan. It proposed placing research and development under the Under Secretary instead of adding a separate Assistant Secretary, but it retained a separate division on the General Staff. After protests from the Operations Division against splitting responsibility for planning and operations the board reduced the number of directorates by merging the Directorate for Plans with that of Operations and Training and suggested six rather than four field armies. It also kept the Civil Affairs Division and a new Historical Division, created on 17 November 1945, as special staff divisions.

These changes were relatively minor. More important was a shift in emphasis. While the General Staff must operate and at the same time decentralize operating responsibilities, the board said, it should also act to eliminate duplication. While there should be greater autonomy for the AAF, it should be granted without creating unnecessary duplication in supply, service, and administration. "The only workable procedure for removing and preventing duplication," it concluded, "lies in the good faith and friendly collaboration of the using commands and services under the monitorship of the appropriate General Staff director." Friendship, co-operation, persuasion,

On 23 January 1946 General Handy approved a final version of the Simpson Board report with minor changes. Again, after comments from the Operations Division the proposed Directorate of Operations, Plans, and Training was split into separate divisions for Plans and Operations and for Organization and Training. The former inherited OPD's principal responsibility for integrating plans and operations. At the same time, General Handy appointed five directors for the new organization. A few days later General Eisenhower placed General Simpson in charge of executing the Simpson plan with authority to decide all questions "that cannot be resolved by the interested parties" and to "monitor and direct" the reorganization itself. 28

Originally set for 1 March the effective date of the reorganization was postponed three months because certain problems required further study. One concerned the relations between the Air Forces and the rest of the Army. Until this matter had been finally settled, the Simpson Board decided not to request formal legislation making the Transportation Corps a permanent agency. As a result General Eisenhower found it necessary to reaffirm on 6 February the War Department's intention to request permanent status for the Transportation Corps at some later date.

Forces would provide 50 percent of the officers assigned to the General Staff as it theoretically had done under the Marshall reorganization, while the number of technical and administrative service officers assigned to the AAF would be decided by mutual agreement between the latter and the individual technical services concerned. 29

Two attempts were made to establish greater General Staff control over the technical services than that provided for in the Simpson plan. General Lutes, General Somervell's successor and the first Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement, requested that responsibility for supervising "strictly" technical training be transferred to the Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement from the Director of Organization and Training.

General Hodes rejected this proposal. The whole purpose of the reorganization, he said, was to reduce the large War Department overhead. That was why the Patch and Simpson Boards had recommended abolishing ASF headquarters and the service commands in the first place. Under the new organization no functions should be performed at the General Staff level if they could be delegated to the administrative and technical services. Consequently the Director of SS&P "must decentralize his activities" to the appropriate services and "avoid duplicating and overlapping organizations on the General Staff level." General Eisenhower and the Simpson Board intended that the training of technical service troops not assigned to tactical air or ground units should be "under the General Staff supervision of the Director of Organization and Training." Thus were the basic principles of the Simpson Board report spelled out in practical terms. Decentralization and avoiding duplication meant that effective operational control over the Army's supply and administrative systems would return to the chiefs of the technical and administrative services. As a practical matter, on technical training the services would

General Simpson reiterated his and General Eisenhower's determination to restore effective control over operations to the technical services once more after a committee Simpson had appointed on the Territorial Sub-Division of the Zone of the Interior proposed to transfer control over the assignment of officer personnel from the services to the Directorate of Personnel.

The committee, headed by Brig. Gen. George L. Eberle, Acting Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3, suggested that "personnel functions should not be vested below the War Department." Following the pattern established for officer personnel of the combat arms (and by the Navy in 1889) , he proposed establishing a Central Officers Assignment Division under the Director of Personnel and Administration to be staffed by senior field grade officers from each arm and service selected by mutual agreement among the chiefs of the services, AGF, and AAF. They would advise the Director of Personnel and Administration on policies and procedures governing the assignment of officers. They would also direct the assignment of officers, except general offfcers, "to and from special details and assignments directly under the War Department" and on the transfer of officers among the arms and services.

General Simpson rejected the Eberle Committee's proposal that control over personnel not be delegated below the General Staff level. There would be no changes "in the functions, duties, and powers" of the chiefs of the technical and administrative services, and they would continue "to exercise appropriate officer personnel ftfnctions. Further centralization of authority in the War Department itself, he said, was "entirely contrary to the principles of the Simpson Board." 31

The research and development functions of the War Department received special emphasis on 29 April 1946 when General Eisenhower directed the establishment, effective 1 May, of the Research and Development Division as a General Staff division ahead of the general reorganization of the War Department itself. In addition to his responsibilities as adviser on research and development matters to the Secretary and the Chief of Staff, the Director of Research and Development would also be responsible for supervising testing of new weapons and equipment and for the development of tactical doctrines governing their employment in the field. This proposal would have centralized supervision over what became known later as "combat developments" for the first time in a single General Staff agency.

The following day General Eisenhower issued a policy statement on Scientific and Technological Resources as Military Assets, which stressed the importance of research and development to the whole Army. World War II could not have been won, the general stated, without the expert knowledge of scientists and industrialists. In the future the Army should promote close collaboration between the military and civilian scientists, technicians, and industrial experts. The Army needed the advice of civilians in military planning as well as for the production of weapons and should contract out to universities and industry for this assistance. Such experts require "the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research" with a minimum of administrative interference and direction. In considering the employment of some industrial and technological resources "as organic parts of our military structure" in national emergencies, he thought there was little reason "for duplicating within the Army an outside organization which by its experience is better qualified than we are" to do this work.

The Army itself, he said, should separate responsibility for research and development from "procurement, purchase, storage, and distribution" functions. Finally, he believed all Army officers should realize the importance of calling on civilian experts for assistance in military planning. The more the Army can rely upon outside civilian experts in such fields, "the more

Formal proclamation of the Eisenhower reorganization required Presidential action. Under the First War Powers Act of 1941 (55 U.S. Statutes, 838) President Truman in Executive Order 9722 of 1$ May 1946 amended Executive Order 1082 of 28 February 1942 by calling for "decentralization" within the War Department. It "authorized and directed" the Secretary of War within thirty days "to reassign to such agencies and officers of the War Department as he may deem appropriate the functions, duties and powers heretofore assigned to the services of supply command and to the Commanding General, Services of Supply."

Carrying out this directive War Department Circular 138 of 14 May 1946 prescribed the new departmental organization effective 11 June 1946. (Chart 14) Formally abolishing ASF and the service commands, it also provided greater autonomy for the AAF. At the General Staff level greater emphasis on research and development had already been provided for by removing this function from procurement and supply and making it a separate General Staff directorate.

The necessary degree of efficiency and initiative in the top echelons of the War Department can be attained only through the aggressive application of the principle of decentralization. Thus no functions should be performed at the staff level of the War Department which can be decentralized to the major commands, the Army areas or the administrative and technical services without loss of adequate control by the General and Special Staffs.

The Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, became the Director of Personnel and Administration and G-2 Director of Intelligence. G-3 became the Director of Organization and Training, with responsibility for War Department as well as Army-wide organizational planning added as an afterthought because the Patch-Simpson Board had neglected to consider this subject. G-4 became the Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement with responsibility for logistical planning, a function previously shared with OPD and ASF headquarters.

The Operations Division became the Directorate of Plans and Operations, inheriting OPD's role as the Army's representative with the joint Chiefs of Staff and its various committees, simply identified as "appropriate joint agencies" because JCS as yet had no legal status. Except for the Historical Division created in November 1945, the special staff agencies were the same as those existing at the end of the war. By that time the Information and Education Division, National Guard Bureau, and the Executive for Reserve and ROTC Affairs had been removed from ASF headquarters and made separate staff agencies.

Having abolished the service commands, the Eisenhower reorganization transferred their functions to six zones of interior armies under the Commanding General, AGF, on the principle of unity of command. Ground and Air Force officers in the United States and the ETO had resented their lack of control over the resources required to train troops and carry out military operations. The friction between Ground and Air Forces commanders in the zone of interior and post and installation commanders under the service commands had been paralleled in the ETO. For example, Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, had complained that ASF was "a blood-sweating behemoth." 33

In the Eisenhower reorganization installations or activities under the traditional command of the chiefs of technical services were exempted from control by the AGF armies as was the Military District of Washington which continued to operate directly under the Deputy Chief of Staff. When technical or administrative service activities were located on installations under AGF or AAF control, AGF and AAF were to perform approximately forty, later sixty housekeeping or community service functions for their tenants. These functions also included responsibility for national cemeteries, induction centers, counterintelligence, and "action in domestic emergencies." Finally a separate Replacement and School Command was set up distinct from the ZI armies themselves and under the Commanding General, Army Ground Forces. To add geographic to the existing functional decentralization of Army operations the reorganization directive announced that Headquarters, Army Ground Forces, would move to Fort Monroe, Virginia, as soon as practicable.

The Eisenhower reorganization was a victory for those favoring a return to the Pershing organization based on the experiences of a single operational theater command, such as the AEF in World War I, and Eisenhower's ETO in World War II. It was a victory of the General Staff and the technicalservices over the Army Service Forces, of Army Ground Forces and Army Air Forces over the service commands, and for those insisting on separating research and development from production and procurement.

The victory of the technical services was the most important. In destroying ASF, they had re-established the traditional principle of vesting effective executive control over the Army's supply and service activities with the bureau chiefs. They had also knocked down an effort by combat arms officers to place the assignment of officers under the Director of Personnel and Administration. Internally they kept their own research and development functions, which remained subordinate to production and procurement almost by definition since the technical services were themselves commodity or service commands. They had eliminated the ASF service commands in the zone of the interior but retained their traditional exemption from control by Army field commanders.

The War Department again became a "loose federation of warring tribes" with "little armies within the Army," as Mr. Lovett said to the Patch Board. In abolishing ASF and its agencies, the department could not avoid the management problems which General Somervell and General Marshall had solved by establishing firm executive control at the top. The lack of effective control by the functionally oriented General Staff over the multifunctional agencies and commands they were supposed to supervise and direct remained an unsolved problem. General Eisenhower's view was that teamwork, cooperation, and persuasion were better than tight executive control as a management philosophy. He stated:

Each bureau, each section, each officer in this War Department, has to be part of a well-coordinated team. Our attitude one toward the other has to be that of a friend expecting assistance and knowing that he will get it. If we will always remember that the other fellow is trying to fulfill our common purpose just as much as each one of us is, I think no more need to be said about teamwork. But I will insist on having a happy family. I believe that no successful staff can have any personal enmities existing in it. So I want to see a big crowd of friends around here.34