- Chapter VI:
Services1
for the Army
Procurement and supply were not the
only activities of the Army Service Forces; a wide variety of other duties
were also assigned to it. Before the reorganization of 9 March 1942,
most of these duties had been performed by a heterogeneous group of
administrative agencies. With the creation of the ASF, these agencies were
brought together under one superior other than the Chief of Staff.
Some idea of the size of Medical
Department operations in World War II can be obtained from a few
statistics. During the years 1942-45, the number of admissions to Army
hospitals from the Army alone was 14,700,000. This does not include
thousands of other patients who received treatment in these hospitals
certain personnel of the Navy and Coast Guard, members of Allied forces,
prisoners of war, and civilians. From November 1942 to the end of 1946,
the Army moved more than 660,000 patients from overseas areas to the
United States; of these, 533; 000 returned by water and 127,000 by air.
The movement reached a peak in May 1945 when a total of 60,000 patients
were returned to this country.
The Surgeon General of the Army,
who became a part of the Army Service Forces on 9 March 1942, was the
chief of all Army medical activities. His status as such was
not altered by the War Department reorganization. While he had certain
procurement
and supply responsibilities, these were incidental to his larger task: the
direction and supervision of professional medical service throughout the
Army.
In the strictly technical field,
the Medical Department made valuable contributions to the fields of
medical research, preventive medicine, and therapy. It worked in close
collaboration with governmental and private agencies, both in the United
States and in Allied countries. From this collaboration resulted such
spectacular achievements as the successful use of Atabrine as a malarial
suppressive and of penicillin in the treatment of a wide range of wounds
and general infec-
[93]
tions, and further progress in
the use of the sulfonamide compounds. Even more noteworthy was the
development of new insecticides, especially DDT, which proved so effective
in the control of such diseases as louse-borne typhus, one of the scourges
of armies from the earliest times.
The use of Atabrine was only one,
though a highly important, item in the Army's program of preventive
medicine. The policy of immunizing every soldier against typhoid and
paratyphoid fevers, smallpox, and tetanus kept the incidence of these
diseases so low as to be almost insignificant. With a better vaccine
available, the incidence of typhoid dropped from 0.37 in World War I, to
0.03 in World War II, and that of paratyphoid from 0.05 to 0.03. (These
figures represent the number of cases per 1000 of Army strength per
annum.) Only 12 cases of tetanus occurred during 1942-1945, a rate of 0.44
per 100,000 wounds and injuries as compared with 13.4 in World War I,
during which a policy of universal immunization against tetanus was not
adopted. The number of smallpox cases declined from 853 in World War I to
116 in World War II, a noteworthy result in view of the larger forces
engaged and the difficulty of maintaining the effectiveness of a highly
sensitive vaccine under extreme climatic conditions. Immunization
against other diseases was limited to troops serving in regions where
these diseases were a hazard, as for example, in the case of troops
serving in areas where there was yellow fever. In spite of the fact that
troops were exposed to it in these areas, there were no cases of the
disease. Unfortunately 50,000 cases of jaundice were traced to the use
of certain faulty lots of yellow-fever vaccine before these could be
eliminated.
In the field of curative
medicine, a notable example of the military importance of improved
methods of treatment was the decline in non-effective rates for venereal
disease. The average number of men absent from duty each day on account
of this disease (or group of diseases) in World War I was 45 per 100,000;
in World War II the number had dropped to 13. Another advance resulted
from the growing reliance on plasma, later supplanted in large part by
whole blood, especially for the treatment of shock as an incident to
wounds or surgery. Surgery also profited from the practice of
"phasing," which consisted of treating severe wounds by a series
of predetermined procedures taking place at the points where each could be
most efficiently performed. This reduced the gap in space and time between
disablement and expert attention. Aiding in this reduction was the
revival of mobile surgical units, a form of which had been used in World
War I; these enabled highly skilled surgeons to be rapidly concentrated
very near the front at points of greatest need. Improved means of
transport
served the same purpose, and the rapid movement of patients by air to
centers
of definitive treatment became a factor of increasing value in promoting
recovery. Another important factor enabling World War II surgeons to
keep the mortality rate low among the wounded was the use of improved
agents and equipment for inducing anesthesia.
Neuropsychiatric disorders
constituted a major problem for both preventive and curative medicine
throughout the war; no less than 18.7 percent of all patients evacuated to
the United States during 1942-45 were returned for this cause. At first
much stress was placed on the screening process-"diagnosis and
disposal"-
[94]
as a preventive. The great loss
of manpower through this process and the growing evidence that
anyone could develop a psychoneurosis under certain conditions caused a
shift of emphasis to the prevention of mental casualties by alleviating
the circumstances which helped to create them: among other things,
excessive length of combat, misassignment, poor leadership, and lack of
personal conviction about the necessity of the war. With this approach
went a more determined effort to improve psychiatric treatment so that
as many of the mentally ill as possible would be fit for at least a
limited kind of military service. Part of this program was carried out
through an elaborate system of rehabilitation which developed gradually
during the war and which was designed not only for psychoneurotics but
for the physically disabled in the final stages of their treatment.
The extensive use of "consultants"
highly
trained experts from civilian life to supervise the professional and in
some cases the administrative activities of the Medical Department was an
important development of World War II, although it had its precedent in
World War I. These experts were armed with authority to work out policies
and standards of practice which would give the Army the highest type of
service in every branch of medicine.
Professional decisions about
medical care, so far as they could be separated from administrative
action, remained the exclusive province of the Medical Department
throughout the war. General Somervell followed clinical developments
with interest and tried to keep himself informed, but he never bypassed
The Surgeon General in seeking advice on such matters.3 The administrative
problems to which ASF headquarters
gave some attention during the rear included such subjects as the
procurement and use of personnel, the number and administration of
hospitals, the procurement and distribution of medical supplies, and the
organizational structure of the Medical Department. Since decisions in
these fields often had an important effect on the standards of
professional care, and since the Medical Department rightly considered
itself the proper guardian of those standards, it was not always easy to
reconcile the viewpoints of ASF headquarters and The Surgeon General's
office. As a result, one or the other sometimes acquiesced in a
particular line of action with considerable reluctance.
The Surgeon General reported
short ages of medical personnel throughout the war. Most constant and
most serious was the shortage of physicians particularly the various
categories of specialists but periodically there was also a shortage of
nurses, dentists, veterinarians, and other types of medical personnel. The
ASF insisted that the Medical Department economize in the use of doctors
and other members of the medical profession, and it was largely in response to the urging of ASF headquarters that members of the Medical
Administrative Corps, composed of non-medical officers, were increasingly
used for administrative duties instead of doctors, dentists, and
veterinarians. The Medical Department also found it possible
[95]
TABLE I-COMPARISON OF MEDICAL
SERVICE, WORLD WAR I AND WORLD WAR II
| |
Admissions for
disease |
Death from
disease |
Death
from wounds |
Death from injuries |
World War I
(Apr 17-Dec 18) |
*946.8 |
*16. 5 |
4.4 |
1.4 |
World War II
(Jan 42-Dec 45) |
580.4 |
0. 6 |
1.
1 |
2. 3 |
*These figures were swelled by
the incidence of influenza, which reached epidemic proportions in late
1918.
Excluding influenza. disease admission and disease death rates for
World War I would be 715.0 and 9.1 respectively; for World War II they
would be 573.1 and 0.6 to turn over a sizable portion of
the Army nurse's duties to civilian graduate nurses who could not meet the
requirements for a commission, and to cadet nurses, nurses' aides, and
male and female enlisted technicians. Nevertheless, at no time during
the war was The Surgeon General's demand for medical personnel fully
met; nor was the problem of efficient and full-time use of this personnel
ever solved to the satisfaction of all parties.
The construction and maintenance
of hospitals in the zone of interior was a joint responsibility of The
Surgeon General and the Chief of Engineers. ASF headquarters took a hand
in negotiations between them not only as a superior authority but as a
controlling force in the distribution of materials and supplies among the
various branches of the Army. A similar division of authority existed in
the movement of patients, which devolved upon the Chief of Transportation
as well as The Surgeon General; here, ASF headquarters had to mediate
between the services in order to establish proper priorities in
transportation
and to insure full use of facilities. Medical training and medical supply
also were subjects in which ASF headquarters took great interest. Thus,
while Army medical service was a responsibility of the Medical Department,
its duties were performed as a part of the work of
the Army Service Forces.
A rough means of gauging the
success of that medical service is to compare World War II with World War
I as to rates of admission (to hospital and "quarters") for
disease and as to rates of death from disease, wounds, and injuries. These
rates as shown in the table on this page represent the number of cases per
1000 of Army strength per annum.
The Chief Signal Officer was more
than a buyer of communications equipment. He was also in charge of the
Army communications system, a network of radio, teletype, and wire
communications linking the War Department with Army installations in
the United States and Army commands overseas. This work was highly
technical, and had greatly improved through the years with the growth in
technological knowledge.4
The Army Communications Service
was frequently called upon to provide
[96]
message facilities on short
notice. At the Yalta Conference in January 1945, for example, the
meeting between the political heads of the United States, the United
Kingdom, and Russia was scheduled at a place lacking communications
facilities. Some 250 tons of equipment, including radio transmitters and
receivers, teletypewriter apparatus, and a complete telephone system
for local use were transported to the Crimea. The telephone network
covered an area of 2,376 square miles, with land line telegraph circuits
crossing two mountain ranges. The long-range radio transmitting
facilities were installed in a ship anchored sixty-five miles from the
conference site the first use of such a device in American communications
history. Yet this complex, extensive installation was completed and placed
in operation in nine days.5
The work of the Communications
Service was of special interest to the Intelligence Division (G-2) of
the War Department General Staff for two reasons. In the first place, it
was essential to insure the secrecy of messages transmitted to and from
overseas. To maintain this secrecy, a variety of technical devices was
used, ranging from automatic coders and decoders to
"scramblers." 6
Secondly, radio interception of enemy messages
became one of the important sources of information about enemy plans and
intentions. It was inevitable then that the Communications Service
should operate under the closest scrutiny of G-2. This was a relationship
with which ASF headquarters was entirely satisfied.7
On the other hand, the operation
of the Army Pictorial Service was a constant source of concern to General
Somervell. Essentially, the Signal Corps had two basic photographic
missions. The first was to prepare training films and
film strips for use at Army training posts; the second, to provide
pictures of Army activities. These films and pictures might be used for
combat analysis, for training purposes, for public relations, or for an
historical record.
The production of training films
involved close working relationships with the motion picture industry
centered in the Los Angeles area. Producers and actors were among the
first groups in this country in 1940 to volunteer their services free or
on a cost basis to the government. However commendable their actions may
have been, motion picture producers and their staffs were difficult to
work with. Partly because of this situation, and partly because of the
photographic service itself, many of the training films that were produced
failed to meet the needs of the Army.8 After 1942 more and more
training
films were prepared at the Signal Corps Photographic Center on Long
Island.9 For a time, the Army Pictorial Service was removed from the
jurisdiction of the Chief Signal Officer and placed directly under the
Commanding General, ASF. This action was shortly reversed when a new Chief
Signal Officer, Maj. Gen. Harry C. Ingles, took over on 1 July 1943.10
General Somervell was quite
unhappy about "this picture business." Shortly after Ingles
assumed command of the Signal
[97]
Corps, Somervell sent him an
extract from a report he had received which read:
The utter confusion that
surrounds the photographic departments in the field, is unbelievable.
There are thousands of Signal Corps photographers and they take millions
of pictures but what happens to them no one knows . The
photographers are encouraged by public relations officers in many cases
to bear down hard on pictures of the Commanding General whether or not he
is a photogenic type. In one base, out of 4,000 pictures, more than 2,500
were of the commanding general eating lunch, picking roses, riding
horses, going to the latrine, what have you .11
As a result of such prodding,
there was a marked improvement in the management of the Army Pictorial
Service, and as time passed Somervell and his assistants gave less and
less attention to photographic activities.
The Office of the Chief of
Engineers in December 1941 was the Army agency responsible for the
construction of all types of military installations, from Ordnance
factories to military posts and airfields. This agency was also
responsible for the operation of utility systems and for the maintenance
of the structures at army installations both in the United States and
overseas.
The work of the Chief of
Engineers began with the acquisition of building sites. From 1 July 1940
to the end of the war, the War Department acquired title to about
thirty-nine million acres of land, an area larger than the state of
Illinois. More than five sixths of this total involved simply the transfer
of public land from one custody, primarily that of the Interior
Department,
to that of the War Department. Much land and many facilities were leased
rather than purchased. Whether
wanted or not, real estate problems became a big job for the Army.12
The Army's construction program
was one of the first and largest phases of defense mobilization to get
under way. As of 30 June 1942, the Army's authorized construction
program amounted to about 7.5 billion dollars, of which 2.7 billion
dollars was for Ordnance plants and depots, 2 billion dollars for air
installations, and 1.4 billion dollars for Army camps to train ground
troops. The remaining 1.4 billion dollars was divided among a large number
of other installations. Only about one half of this total program was then
in place.13
During the period from July 1942
to June 1943, the construction program expanded in total volume from 7.5
billion dollars to 9.3 billion dollars, of which 95 percent was in place
by 30 June 1943. In the following two years only an additional 1.3 billion
dollars was spent on new plants inside the United States. Much of the
construction
in the late war years was for production of the atomic bomb and for air
facilities to accommodate large bombers. The construction program during
World War II was the largest construction program ever undertaken over a
five-year period of time under single direction in American history.14
As construction slowed down in
1943 and 1944, maintenance problems increased. By the end of fiscal
1945, the Corps of Engineers was supervising the
[98]
maintenance of 75,000 miles of
road, 23,000 miles of electric wire, 13,000 miles of water mains and an
almost equal mileage of sewer lines, nearly 3;000 miles of gas mains,
and 1,600 miles of steam pipe.15
That General Somervell should be
interested in the construction work of the Engineers is not surprising.
An Engineer officer himself, he had been head of a major part of Army
construction work from December 1940 to November 1941. He had a personal
knowledge of the whole program. Since certain groups in the War Production
Board were critical of the size of Army construction, after 1942 General
Somervell tried to make sure that the additional facilities were
actually needed and that materials and manpower would be available for
their operation.16 After 1944 the efficient utilization of space in
Army posts was a major objective of ASF headquarters. For example, it was
more economical to operate a few training posts at or near full capacity
than to operate twice as many at 50 percent capacity. But to convince
others accustomed to time-honored methods of operation was a difficult
chore.
Between March 1942, when the Army
Service Forces was created, and August 1945, some 6,881,011 men were
inducted into the Army. Through The Adjutant General's office the ASF
became the operating agency for performing this work.
Induction consisted of four basic
procedures: medical examination, formal induction, classification, and
initial assignment. An important question in medical examination was
setting the physical standard required for Army service. At various times
during the war, the actual physical qualifications for
"general service" were altered. Medical rejection of men
having a venereal disease, for example, decreased during 1943 as the
Army found penicillin effective in combating syphilis.
Another problem was "limited
service." For a time in 1943, the War Department refused to accept
"limited service" men from the Selective Service System because
of difficulty in making good use of them. Beginning in November 1943 the
War Department tried to assign such men to the type of work for which
they were best suited physically. A committee was organized to work out
a new physical classification system with the Deputy Chief of Staff for
the War Department as its chairman. Part of this burden fell upon the Army
Service Forces.
On 18 May 1944, the War
Department officially announced a Physical Profile plan. The plan
identified six primary physical characteristics: stamina, hearing,
eyesight, motion and efficiency of upper and lower extremities, and
neuropsychiatric condition. Within each characteristic there were four
grades the first two qualified a man for general service, grade three for
limited service, while a person falling predominantly in grade four was
rejected for military service. The complexity of the new classification
system was troublesome, but at least fuller information about the
physical condition of each person became available. With the introduction
of this plan, initial assignment
[99]
tended to be based primarily upon
physical condition. 17
After being inducted, the men
were sent to reception stations operated by the ASF where they were issued
Army clothes and given a number of tests. The most important of these
was the Army General Classification Test which divided men into five
grades according to a person's ability to learn. Those in Grades IV and V
were "slow learners" one might say, persons impossible to teach.
Other tests were intended to indicate mechanical, technical, and
clerical aptitudes. On the basis of these tests and of personal
interviews, a provisional classification was made of the kind of military
work for which the individual seemed best fitted. Various types of
military duties had been classified into a system of "military
occupation specialty" numbers.
While this system was useful, the
effort to match military assignment with classification was difficult to
administer. In a time of mass induction, assignments could not be made on
an individual basis. Moreover, personnel demands at a particular moment
did not necessarily fit the classification qualifications of the group
of men currently being inducted. Classifications did identify those
particular specialists who were in "critical supply" at any one
time, such as radio operators. These could be individually assigned. But
with the specialized manpower needs of war, and with ten times as many
different types of occupations in civilian life as in the Army, the
classification process could not insure that all inductees would be placed
at tasks related to their previous training and experience. It was very
important in selecting specialists to fill Army needs to find men who
had had equivalent civilian occupations. Encouragingly, a sample survey in 1943 indicated that 78
percent of the men studied were doing military work related to their
civilian occupational specialty.18
Shortly after it came into
existence, the Army Service Forces began to study procedures in
commissioning officers from civilian life. The Army had earlier adopted
the practice of training young officers for combat assignments in
officer candidate schools open to men selected from the ranks. Other
combat officers came from National Guard and Reserve Corps rolls. But many
non-combat branches and higher headquarters of the Army necessarily
recruited officers directly from civil life. This had always been the
practice, for example, in the Medical Corps, since the Army never had a
school to train doctors. Similarly, the Ordnance Department, the
Transportation Corps, the Air Corps, the Quartermaster Corps, the Signal
Corps, the Corps of Engineers, The Judge Advocate General's Department,
the Chief of Chaplains, and other units, especially in ASF headquarters,
needed many officers with special nonmilitary skills. All these agencies
separately recruited officers who were subject only to hasty review by a
Personnel Board appointed by the Secretary of War.
The commissioning of so many
officers in so little time involved many problems, one of the most
complicated of which was weeding out incompetents. Time was pressing and
officer procurement officials necessarily relied heavily on
recommendations.
Occasionally this had its humorous side as when one bank executive recom-
[100]
mended a West Texas county judge
in the following terms:
The old gentleman was a pretty
good old guy in his day, but he has approached the age of senility, in
addition to which he is probably the laziest man in West Texas. Although
he is a veteran of the Spanish War, he still has ideas about his prowess,
and is continually chasing blondes. He drinks a case of Budweiser every
day, and his wife has to put him to bed every night. The least said about
his honesty and ability is too much. If the Army can find any use for this
old bastard, they are welcome to him .19
Very few recommendations were so
outspoken. In fact one of the most serious drawbacks to this method of
obtaining officers was that too often influential individuals tried to
get a job for the man rather than a man for the job. There were many
complaints that only people of political or social prominence were
eligible for commissions, and that "pull" rather than merit was
too often the deciding factor.20
Such protests were natural in any
situation where so many people seeking commissions had to be turned down.
Remedial measures were taken when criticism seemed legitimate, but
undoubtedly there was much truth in Secretary of War Stimson's jest that
to satisfy, everybody, the Army would have to abolish the rank of
private.21
In fact, if it had been left
entirely to Secretary Stimson, very few commissions would have been
given to civilians. The Secretary believed that the honor of a commission
should be reserved for fighting men. In September 1942 he approved the
creation of an Army Specialist Corps where men were selected on the basis
of nonmilitary skills and wore uniforms different from those of the
Army. The experiment was abandoned in November 1942 and the practice of
commissioning civilians in the regular branches of the
Army was resumed.22 This attempt to establish an Army Specialist Corps
failed because the Army did not recognize the importance of technicians
and other experts in modern war and because such men could be more easily
obtained if they were offered commissions in the Army of the United
States.
The ASF established an Officer
Procurement Service to recruit specialized officer personnel.23 During
the year 1942 approximately 104,000 officers were commissioned from
civilian life. Nearly half of these were medical personnel, with most of
the remainder about equally divided between special units of the Army
Air Forces and of the Army Service Forces. 24
In July 1943 the Acting
Secretary of War, Mr. Patterson, directed that, with certain exceptions,
officer recruitment from civilian life be discontinued. In the year ending
30 June 1944, only 16,119 persons were commissioned from civilian life,
80 percent of whom were doctors and chaplains.25
A major innovation in Army
personnel policy came in the summer of 1942 when Congress authorized a
Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, renamed in September 1943, the Women's Army
Corps (WAC). The ASF supervised the recruitment and training of this
corps; by April 1945 its
[101]
personnel totaled nearly 100,000
women. 26
After legislation in November 1942, lowering the induction age
limit from twenty to eighteen years, the War Department developed the
Army Specialized Training Program for assigning some 150; 000 young
soldiers to institutions of higher education. The program was administered
by the Army Service Forces. The principal fields of study were
engineering, medicine, mathematics, and various other branches of science,
with a few assigned to personnel psychology and foreign area study. The
program served in part to provide uninterrupted training for
professional specialties of importance to the Army; it also served to
insure continued operation of institutions of higher education, many of
which might otherwise have faced financial ruin. Because of Army manpower
shortages, the program was almost completely liquidated on 1 April 1944,
the medical phase being the major survivor .27
The War Department General Staff
abolished the limited service classification in July 1943, and directed
that all men be discharged who could not meet the current medical
definition of "general service." 28
The policies of
discharging physically disqualified and overage enlisted personnel,
discussed earlier, caused the ASF to separate nearly 70,000 men a month in
1943.29 The experience brought the realization that existing separation
processes were slow and clumsy. The ASF staff then set up new and
simplified separation practices. The effectiveness of these changes was
evident in the rapidity with which men were able to leave the Army at the
end of the war.
In June 1943, the War Department
decided upon a policy of rotation in order to return to the United
States men with lengthy overseas service. Rotation was a basic morale problem. There was a
saying common among battle weary troops, that "the Army consists of
this division and eight million replacements." 30
Such troops needed
relief. In September 1943 the ASF set up fourteen stations to receive
soldiers returning from overseas and to assign them to new duties in the
United States. In the year ending 30 June 1944, some 74,000 men were
handled by these reception stations.31
As more and more overseas personnel
became eligible for return to the United States, General Marshall grew
concerned about the arrangements for their reception. He talked the matter
over with General Somervell and others, and suggested the use of resort
hotels to which enlisted men and officers might bring their wives for a
period of ten to fourteen days before receiving a new assignment.
In September 1944, the Army
Service Forces accordingly opened five so-called redistribution centers at
well-known resort hotels located at Lake Placid, Asheville, Miami Beach,
Hot Springs, and Santa
[102]
Barbara. A sixth was opened at
Atlantic City in December. Two Army posts also became redistribution
stations. This arrangement came to an end on 12 May 1945, just after V-E
Day. Altogether, more than 130,000 officers and men and 20,000 dependents
went through these redistribution stations.32
In January 1944 the Personnel
Division of the General Staff made new efforts to retain men regarded as
essential. Previously, each of the commands in the United States the
Army Air Forces, the Army Ground Forces, and the Army Service Forces had
its own procedures for shifting enlisted personnel from one type of work
to another. The ASF created three reassignment centers which received
about 23,000 persons between February and June 1944. Reassignments of some
kind were found for all but about 1,000 of these. The operation ceased on
1 July 1944.33
Two new activities in the
personnel field, started by the War Department after 1940, came under the
ASF in 1942. One, originally called morale services and later designated
information and education activities, involved primarily an effort to
maintain morale and to provide useful information. The media of
communication ranged from a weekly newsmagazine, Yank, to motion
pictures (the "Why We Fight" series), radio broadcasts, and
booklets
about foreign lands. 34
Correspondence courses, discussion materials, and eventually European schools for soldiers
awaiting transportation home,
were also parts of this program. Much of the material produced in
furtherance of this work was imaginative and marked by excellent
craftsmanship. How effective it proved was always uncertain. Soldiers'
attitudes were ascertained through questionnaires and the results used to
determine policies.
For example, the War Department
scheme of discharges after V-E Day on a point system was devised after a
survey of soldier opinion.
The second activity was
recreational, involving organized sports, motion pictures, USO shows for
troop entertainment, books (specially printed pocket editions), musical
materials and records, handicraft and art materials, and the management of
post exchanges (the soldiers' general store).
In February 1944 ASF headquarters
established a personal affairs program to provide individual counseling to
soldiers. The biggest single task was to make certain that officers and
enlisted men fully understood the arrangements for making allotments to
dependents. Soldiers or their families also sought advice about insurance
and bond matters, employment, housing, maternity and medical care, and
death benefits. Personal affairs officers and their assistants not only
provided a central source of information for those needing help but were
also expected to help make arrangements to insure that the necessary aid
was actually provided .35
In connection with this program,
a Women's Volunteer Committee, national in scope, was established to
promote the participation of Army wives and others in Army welfare
activities. Women were encouraged to volunteer their services to the
American Red Cross and Gray Ladies. Others worked directly with the Army
Emergency Relief Fund and with personal affairs officers in visiting the
homes of sol-
[103]
diers' families when children
were born, when there was an illness or other emergency, and when word
of overseas death was received .36
The Personnel Division of the War
Department General Staff, G-1, was responsible for over-all policy,
but the actual administration of most War Department central personnel
policies was in the hands of the Army Service Forces .37 It was
inevitable,
perhaps, that the ASF should regard its personnel responsibilities
somewhat differently from its duties with respect to procurement and
supply. General Somervell tended to give more attention to procurement
and supply matters than to personnel administration, since the former
seemed always more crucial. In fact the assignment of extensive
personnel operating duties to the ASF had not been a part of the
reorganization which Somervell had himself desired. To a real extent, the
Personnel Division of the WDGS (G-1) remained the top planning unit on
personnel matters, and ASF personnel officials closely consulted G-1 about
all personnel policies. The ASF director of personnel, Maj. Gen. Joseph N.
Dalton, therefore did not exercise the control over personnel matters that
General Clay did over procurement activities or General Lutes over
supply matters.
The close relationship between
G-1 and ASF was formalized when on 4 April 1945 the Assistant Chief of
Staff, G-1, sent a memorandum to the War Department Deputy Chief of Staff
entitled "Personnel Operating Responsibilities of Military Personnel
Division, Army Service Forces." This memorandum reiterated that the
Military Personnel Division, ASF, would be the operating arm for G-1 on
all questions involving military personnel throughout the Military
Establishment.
In a memorandum on 29 June 1945,
the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, informed the Commanding General, ASF,
of the military functions, Army-wide in scope, which were being
delegated to him, subject to WDGS policies. The delegated functions
included a wide variety of duties, among which were the preparation of
legislation and executive orders affecting military personnel, staff
supervision of the naturalization of worthy aliens serving in the armed
forces, the operation of War Department personnel centers, the
processing of prisoners of war, War Department liaison with the national
headquarters of the Selective Service System, and the preparation of
recommended changes in personnel policies and procedures.38
In effect this memorandum
restated the existing operating duties of the ASF. It served primarily as
a reminder to both the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces that the
ASF was the central personnel agency for the War Department and that as
such, it was expected to take the lead in this field. This memorandum was
welcome to the ASF. It confirmed that G-1 would confine itself to review
of personnel administration by the ASF and would not try to duplicate
activities which the ASF was prepared to perform. The ASF felt that this
memorandum made for continued harmonious relations with the Personnel
Division of the War Department General Staff.
[104]
The Provost Marshal General, who
became a part of the Army Service Forces in 1942, had three major
responsibilities: the organization and training of military police units,
the protection of vital military and industrial installations from
sabotage,
and the custody of prisoners of war. In 1942 the Provost Marshal General
also began the task of supervising the recruitment and training of
military government teams for service overseas.
Military police personnel guarded
military installations, apprehended soldiers "absent without
leave," and patrolled trains and major cities to insure the proper
behavior of soldiers. In the year ending 30 June 1945, the Provost Marshal
General investigated over 47,000 complaints of alleged criminal acts
performed by military personnel within the country, about 20 percent
involving crimes against other persons, and about 80 percent crimes
against property.
Internal security operations were
troublesome because the extent of military responsibility was not
clearly defined. Of the Army's duty to insure the security of its own
installations, there was no doubt. But there was uncertainty about what
the Army should do to protect vital industrial properties, especially when
local police forces and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were on the
job. As the war progressed, the number of industrial plants whose
security arrangements were inspected by the ASF declined from a peak of
13,701 in May 1943 until by 30 June 1945, only 698 remained.39
Fortunately sabotage was never a great problem during World War II,
partly because of the relatively small number of people inclined to be disloyal and partly because
of the careful anti-sabotage precautions which were taken.
The training of personnel for
military government duties overseas created more than the usual number of
difficulties, including controversies with other agencies in Washington.
Army doctrine stipulated that military government was primarily
responsible for preventing interference with military operations. But in
attempting to conform to this doctrine broadly in the Army's training
program, Somervell was accused of trying to take over the duties of other
American Government agencies. Then on other. occasions, the ASF was
accused of being indifferent to the need for reconstructing the civilian
economy in occupied areas previously devastated by the enemy. The Army
doctrine just mentioned in general confined military government to those
activities necessary to maintain order and public health.
With mounting victories abroad,
the custody of prisoners of war within the United States became a major
task. By 30 June 1944 there were about 200,000 German and Italian
prisoners of war in the United States, and about 569 Japanese. A year
later the number had increased to over 425,000, mostly Germans.40
General Somervell insisted that these prisoners play a part in easing the
manpower shortage, and he took pride in the fact that from 86 to 94
percent of all prisoners of war were usefully employed.41
Beginning in the autumn of 1944,
the
[105]
custody of American military
prisoners came under the jurisdiction of The Adjutant General, who
supervised rehabilitation centers and disciplinary barracks, the two
types of Army penal institutions where military prisoners convicted by
courts martial served their sentences. The Under Secretary of War named a
board of prominent penologists to advise in this work. Any military
prisoners not guilty of a capital offense or certain other major crimes
might be sent to a rehabilitation center where an effort was made through
rigorous training and psychological guidance to restore men to military
duty. Of the 34,209 prisoners admitted to rehabilitation centers during
the war, about 13,940 were restored to military duty and 10,562 were sent
on to disciplinary barracks to serve out their sentences. By the end of
the war, the numbers held in disciplinary barracks (penitentiaries) had
reached 13; 468.42
The Judge Advocate General was
the legal officer of the War Department. Throughout the war his major
responsibility was the supervision of the system of military justice.
His office received the records of all general courts martial held in the
United States some 18,000 in the year ending 30 June 1945.43 Boards of
review,
established overseas, studied the records of general courts in their
respective areas. Cases were also reviewed to determine the desirability
of clemency. A special effort was made to cut the time lag between the
specification of charges against an officer or enlisted man and the
conclusion of his trial.44 Secretary Stimson and Under Secretary
Patterson took a great interest in all aspects of military justice, and
sought, through review of cases, to prevent malfunctioning of the
system. During the war the Judge Advocate General's office reviewed a
total of 67,318 cases.45
The Judge Advocate General's
office studied all legislation pending in Congress affecting the Army, and
prepared written opinions on all legal matters on which the War Department
General Staff or any of the three commands sought advice. This office also
handled tort claims against the Army, tax problems of Army procurement,
land and patent law matters, and a variety of other legal matters. In
September 1944 the judge Advocate General, upon the direction of the
Secretary of War, began preparations for the trial of enemy individuals
charged with cruelties, atrocities, and acts of oppression against members
of the armed forces. Also, the Judge Advocate General took the lead in
behalf of the United States Government in preparing evidence on war
crimes after the creation of the United Nations War Crimes Commission in
London.46
The Chief of Finance was the War
Department's disbursing and accounting agent, and in addition, was
responsible for a number of other financial services which had grown up in
the Office of the Under Secretary of War. With the reorganization in 1942,
all financial activities were consolidated within the Army Service
Forces.
An important fiscal problem
through-
[106]
out the war was to insure that
War Department obligations were promptly and accurately paid. In the
month of June 1945, for example, the Army paid 940,000 commercial invoices
and had only a backlog of seven days' bills at the end of the month.
Another 1,100,000 bills for common carriers were paid in that month for
the transportation of troops or war supplies. None of the bills unpaid
at the end of the month had been on hand for more than twelve days. In one
year, the War Department, in paying its various obligations, issued more
than 130 million checks.47
As troops arrived overseas in
increasing numbers, two new problems appeared. One was to devise a method
of handling foreign currency that would enable the Army to pay for local
purchases. The other was to find a way to discourage individual soldiers
from obtaining local currency with American dollars. Troops were urged
to send more money home, to save through deposit accounts paying 4 percent
interest, or to buy savings bonds. Through these measures, it was
estimated that the amount available to military personnel overseas for
making local purchases was reduced to about 15 percent of total pay.48
Moreover, special currency was devised for soldiers to use in post
exchanges and in paying military bills. This currency was useless to local
inhabitants.
The Office of Dependency Benefits
became one of the big operations of the Army Service Forces. This
office, located in Newark, New Jersey, kept control records on all
family allowances (for the support of dependents of enlisted men going
overseas) and family allotments (voluntary assignment of officers' and
enlisted men's pay to dependents). Under the family allowance program,
the government contributed about two dollars to
every one by a soldier up to a maximum, of about $60.00 a month. By June
1945 there were 4 million family allowance accounts and 3.8 million family
allotment accounts. The speedy payment of these obligations was a vital
morale factor, and even at the risk of overpayment and duplication, these
checks were mailed promptly.49
Payroll deductions from civilian
and military payrolls for the purchase of war bonds, adequate banking
facilities for civilian and military personnel, the careful examination of
all disbursements, the management of nearly 7 billion dollars in advance
payments to contractors and of another 7.6 billion dollars in guaranteed
loans from banks, the auditing of terminated contracts, property
accountability these were just some of the fiscal problems of the ASF.
Among the deductions from
military pay handled by the Army were premium payments for National
Service Life Insurance administered by the Veterans Administration.
Every officer and enlisted man in the armed forces was entitled to term
life insurance up to a total amount of $10,000. The ASF urged every
inductee to purchase the full $10,000 policy. General Somervell believed
that this insurance should be compulsory, but he was never able to
persuade the War Department General Staff to agree.50
The ASF Fiscal Director, General
Carter, convinced Somervell that since the
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government assumed administrative
costs, the rates on National Service Life Insurance were too high. New
mortality tables had been adopted by private insurance companies, while
the Veterans Administration ignored the new data on the increased life
span. General Somervell forwarded this information to the General Staff
with a strong recommendation for remedial action which would have reduced
the average monthly cost of a $10,000 policy from $6.95 to $2.25. The
Personnel Division of the WDGS on 3 February 1944 opposed the
recommendation.
Finally, Secretary Stimson on 27 April 1944 signed a letter, drafted in
the ASF, to the Veterans Administration suggesting the distribution of
premium dividends to all policy holders. Administrator Hines replied to
the Secretary on 12 May, agreeing that arrangements should be made for
dividend payments and outlining the policies his office would follow in
making such payments. But the letter said nothing about when dividend
payments would begins51 Somervell thereupon wrote a memorandum for the
files the only time in his nearly four years as commanding general of
the ASF that he ever wrote this type of document stating that the action
taken by General Hines did not remove the "abuse of premium rates
greatly in excess of those which current actuarial tables provide." 52
Five years later, Somervell's position was substantiated when on 1
January 1950, the Veterans Administration began to pay dividends resulting
from insurance premiums paid during World War II.
The Adjutant General operated the
Army Postal Service, whose biggest problem was the overseas delivery of
mail to troops. In the months of March
through June 1945, air mail expanded to 2
million pounds, while mail hauled by
surface ships reached a peak of 1.7 million
pounds in January 1945. Parcel post reached
a peak of 1.7 million sacks in October
1944. V mail, whereby letters were
microfilmed and then reproduced at their
destination, was especially advantageous in
the early years of the war when airlift was
scarce, but the volume declined as
air-mail service became available. By April
1945 the average time for an air-mail
letter to reach the European continent from any
part of the United States was 10.2 days;
for the South Pacific it was 7.3
days.53
The Adjutant General was also the
central publications office of the War Department, publishing and
distributing all kinds of War Department orders and instructions, as
well as Army manuals, the text books of military activities. Each month in
the year ending 30 June 1945, the office handled an estimated 6,000 tons
of forms, and publications. The time required to print and distribute
this volume of matter, and the prevention of unduly large stock age at any
one point or at any one time were continuing problems.54
Most of the activities just
mentioned, and much supply work in the United States
[108]
focused upon the posts, camps,
and stations where troops were trained. The management of these posts
for the Army Ground Forces, and the supervision of certain functions at
air bases, fell to the Army Service Forces. Army posts were areas where
transportation, communication, and other facilities had to be provided;
hospitals, motion picture theaters, and post exchanges operated; supplies
furnished to troops, publications distributed, chapel services
conducted, and eventually, troops and trains moved to ports of embarkation
for shipment overseas. This housekeeping job in the United States was a
major concern.
The Army Service Forces was also,
to a limited extent, a training command. The procurement, supply, and
service duties of the ASF often obscured the fact that the command also
trained individuals and troop units for overseas duties. The component
services of the ASF, such as the Quartermaster Corps and the Ordnance
Department, trained individual men for assignment to the quartermaster
battalions and ordnance companies which were an integral part of a
ground combat division. These services also trained individuals for
assignment to similar duties for the Army Air Forces. In addition, each
higher tactical command, such as a corps or particularly an army, had to
have communications, transportation, motor maintenance, medical,
construction, and other service units. These units, as well as individuals
assigned to them, were trained by the ASF.
More than this, each overseas
theater as a whole had ports of debarkation, storage depots, medical
facilities, financial offices, maintenance shops,
communications units, and recreational facilities. Theater commands
needed units for guarding military prisoners and prisoners of war, units
for construction and repair of military installations, units to operate or
manage transportation, units to take care of records and general office
management, units to handle the legal work of the overseas command,
chaplains, and others. Personnel, both officer and enlisted, were
trained to meet all of these needs in overseas commands. In other words,
the ASF had to train people to do, on a somewhat more limited scale for
each overseas command, the same services that the ASF performed within
the United States for the War Department itself.
When training statistics were
first collected in January 1943, there were 519,000 persons undergoing
some form of instruction at ASF installations. This number rose to a
total of 700,000 in the month of September 1943 and then declined to a low
of 207,000 in March 1945. Altogether, from the beginning of 1942 to the
end of the war, some 6,000 troop units with a total personnel of more
than 1,000,000 men with more than 300,000 individual replacements were
trained and shipped overseas for supply and service activities within
theaters of operation .55 But in spite of this seemingly large total, the
role of the ASF in this field was relatively small when compared to that
of both the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces.
The Organization and Training
Division, G-3 of the WDGS, provided the over-all supervision of
training. Apart from General Somervell's constant concern about the
insufficient number of sup-
[109]
ply troops available to perform
the overseas support operations, the ASF had few disputes with G-3 of
the WDGS. Since a small part of the G-3 personnel had been transferred to
the ASF at the time of the War Department reorganization, the ASF had to
construct a training staff almost from scratch in 1942. These training
responsibilities
tended to grow with the course of the war, but the personnel in charge
found no difficulty in working closely with G-3. The quality of the
training
staff within the Army Service Forces was such that General Somervell was
content largely to leave training problems to its discretion. This staff
in turn, seldom embarked upon any new training policies without prior
informal consultation with G-3.
The ASF developed its own
schedules for activating and training supply troops, and occasionally
disagreed with the AGF about the division of training responsibilities
between the two commands for supply troops .56 The ASF was ready to
accept G-3 as arbitrator, and the resulting division of organization and
unit training responsibilities between the ASF and AGF was on the whole
satisfactory to the ASE
Occasionally the ASF felt that
G-3 was not sufficiently prompt in issuing revised military unit
organization programs (the so-called troop basis), but recognized that the fault was not controllable by
G-3. Every time a general change was made in the number of divisions, air
groups, and nondivisional units to be organized, or in the size and
internal organization of troop units, the Army Service Forces had to
revise
its procurement plans. Therefore, the ASF constantly sought to keep
abreast of any changes in the thinking about troop organization and
strength. G-3 was dependent in turn upon the strategic and tactical
planning of the Operations Division of the War Department General Staff
before it could introduce official changes in military organization.
No summary can give adequate
attention to the multitude of problems which arose in the service
activities of the Army Service Forces. But it is important to understand
that the ASF had many responsibilities extending well beyond the
procurement
and distribution of supplies and the operation of a transportation system.
It was a cardinal element of General Somervell's thinking at all times
that the ASF was a service command of the Army, and that its role had to
be understood in terms of the ramifications of its many and widely varied
duties.
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Page Created June 13th 2001
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