When General George C. Marshall became Chief of Staff in 1939, he inherited not only the staff structure sketched in the previous chapter, but also a set of planning assumptions on the nature of the next war laid down in the Harbord Board report. The basic assumption was that any new war would be similar to World War I and would require similar command and management methods. In fact the circumstances of World War II would differ radically from those of World War I, and this difference made the Harbord Board doctrine and the planning based upon it almost irrelevant from the start. In the prewar period, 1939-41, the War Department struggled along trying to adapt the Harbord concepts to the new situation, revising them piecemeal in response to the immediate needs of the moment. When war came General Marshall determined to sweep the entire structure aside and develop a new and radically changed organization adapted to the circumstances of World War II.

 

The Harbord Board had assumed that the next war would involve a single theater of operations, that the Chief of Staff would take the field as commanding general with the nucleus of his GHQ taken from the War Plans Division, and that military planning in GHQ would be primarily on tactics for a one-front war. It took into consideration neither the new importance of air power and armor, nor the necessity for genuinely joint operations with the Navy or combined operations with the Allies. The board also assumed there would be a single M-day (mobilization day) on which the United States would change overnight from peace to war as in April 1917, a concept which dominated mobilization planning between the two wars. Instead the nation gradually drifted from neutrality to active belligerency between September 1939 and December

[57]

 

Probably the most important assumption of the Harbord Board was one never stated, but clearly implied: that the President and Secretary of War would follow the practice of Woodrow Wilson and Newton D. Baker in delegating broad authority for the conduct of the war to professional military officers. This was a questionable assumption since President Wilson was the only President in American history who did not play an active role as Commander in Chief in wartime. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to exercise an independent role in determining political and military strategy was more consistent with the traditional concept of the President as Commander in Chief developed by George Washington, James Madison, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley. Even if Roosevelt had not deliberately chosen to play an active role, the vital political issues raised by World War II would have forced him to do so. Every major decision on military strategy was almost always a political decision as well and vice versa. There was, consequently, no clear distinction between political and military considerations during World War II, although many, including the President himself at times, imagined there was one.

 

Since President Roosevelt played an active role as Commander in Chief, he dealt directly with General Marshall rather than through the Secretary of War. General Marshall's primary role became that of the President's principal Army adviser on military strategy and operations. As a result, the Chief of Staff also became the center of authority on military matters within

[58]

MARSHALL AND STIMSON. (Photograph taken in 1942.)

 

the department. This fact at first complicated Marshall's relations with his titular superior, the Secretary of War. It also had important consequences ultimately for the position of the Under Secretary of War charged with procurement and industrial mobilization.2

 

There were other complications. When Marshall became Chief of Staff a bitter feud between Secretary Harry H. Woodring, a forthright, impulsive Middle Western isolationist, and Assistant Secretary Louis A. Johnson, an ambitious, active interventionist, had demoralized the department and reduced the Office of the Secretary of War to a position of little con-

[59]

sequence. This feud placed General Marshall in an impossible situation which the President's delay in dealing with it made worse. Roosevelt finally removed Woodring in June 1940, and for personal and political reasons replaced him with a Republican, Henry L. Stimson, previously Secretary of War, as well as a colonel in the AEF, Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, and Secretary of State. Stimson's great personal prestige and distinction as an elder statesman in the Root tradition became the basis for his real authority within the department rather than his ambiguous official position under a President who frequently acted as his own Secretary of War.3

 

Although the relations between the Secretary and the Chief of Staff were strained at first by the President's policy of dealing with the latter directly, Stimson and Marshall soon reestablished the alliance between the Secretary and Chief of Staff initiated by Mr. Root. Friction then gave way to a close personal relationship based upon mutual respect.

 

The Secretary and the Chief of Staff worked out an informal division of labor in which the general concentrated on military strategy, operations, and administration, while Stimson dealt with essentially civilian matters less directly related to the conduct of the war. Manpower problems, scientific developments, civil affairs, and atomic energy were among the most important of Stimson's concerns. On these and similar issues he acted as liaison between the Army and the heterogeneous collection of civilian agencies created from time to time to help direct the war on the home front. He also ran political interference for the general, protecting him from importunate congressmen, politicians, and businessmen. Sharing essentially the same values and priorities, Stimson and Marshall were a unique team in an environment where competition rather than co-operation was the general rule. The Secretary at the end of the war expressed his feelings to Marshall, saying: "I have seen a great

[60]

many soldiers in my lifetime, and you, sir, are the finest soldier I have ever known."4

 

Mr. Stimson was fortunate in being able to recruit his own personal staff, and he gradually reorganized the secretariat as he saw fit in 1940 and 1941. He chose judge Robert P. Patterson as Assistant Secretary (later Under Secretary) of War in charge of industrial mobilization and procurement. Robert A. Lovett became Assistant Secretary of War for Air and John J. McCloy a special Assistant Secretary who acted as a troubleshooter on intelligence, lend-lease, and civil affairs. A personal friend of Stimson's, Harvey H. Bundy, became a special assistant who dealt with scientists and educators, and Dr. Edward L. Bowles of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designated officially as the Secretary's Expert Consultant, worked on radar and electronics. From the ranks of these men chosen by Stimson came the civilian leadership in defense policy in the postwar period.5

 

Below the Secretary and his personal staff lay a permanent civilian secretariat. The Chief Clerk (later designated the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary) , John W. Martyn, was a veteran of long service. His office was responsible for a heterogeneous collection of War Department administrative functions, including civilian personnel administration, the expenditure of contingency funds, procurement of general nonmilitary supplies and services for the department, the development of internal accounting procedures, and the control of administrative forms used in the department.

 

The Bureau of Public Relations was directly attached to the Secretary's office. Later it was transferred to the Army Service Forces and at the end of the war made a War Department Special Staff division. Its Industrial Services Division was responsible for publicity on labor relations. In November 1940 the President appointed a Civilian Aide for Negro Affairs, Judge William H. Hastie, who worked under Mr. McCloy. The Panama Canal Zone and the Board of Commissioners of

[61]

the United States Soldiers' Home were two agencies outside formal War Department channels that reported directly to the Secretary of War for administrative purposes.6

 

Congress redesignated the position of the Assistant Secretary of War as the Under Secretary of War on 16 December 1940. At the beginning of the war in Europe this office had about fifty officers engaged in planning for industrial mobilization. By the end of 1941 the staff had expanded to 1,200 officers and civilians. The Planning Branch consisted of eleven divisions, and separate branches were created for Purchase and Contract, Production, and Statistics. It was responsible for dealing with the rapidly proliferating civilian mobilization agencies created by the President, particularly the War Production Board. The Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4, which dealt with the Under Secretary on military procurement, also found it necessary to expand its organization and operations. At first primarily a planning agency it quickly became an operating agency engaged in directing and co-ordinating activities of the supply services.7

 

Unlike Secretary Stimson General Marshall initially could not choose his own staff nor organize it as he saw fit, and while the secretariat took shape in 1940-41 the General Staff bogged down and had to undergo a radical reorganization after Pearl Harbor. Marshall inherited an organization prescribed by Congress in the National Defense Act amendments of 1920. It was adequate for a small peacetime constabulary force with Congress tightly controlling the expenditure of every dollar. It proved inadequate for the conduct of a major war. As one historian has described it:

 

By 1940 the military establishment had grown into a loose federation of agencies-the General Staff, the Special Staff for services, the Overseas Departments, the Corps areas, the Exempted Stations. Nowhere in this

[62]

federation was there a center of energy and directing authority. Things were held together by custom, habit, standard operating procedure, regulations, and a kind of genial conspiracy among the responsible officers. In the stillness of peace the system worked.8

 

By mid-1941 approximately sixty agencies were reporting to the Chief of Staff directly, creating management problems and administrative bottlenecks potentially as monumental as those that had developed in 1917. Marshall's role as general manager of the department was interfering with his duties as the President's adviser on military strategy and operations.9

 

After World War I several major industries in expanding and diversifying their operations had faced similar management problems. There was little effective control because top executives were preoccupied like General Marshall with daily administrative details to the detriment of over-all control. Major policy decisions were made on an ad hoc basis by compromise and bargaining among executives, each more concerned with his own area of operating responsibility than with the interests of the whole organization.

 

The managers of E. I. DuPont de Nemouxs & Co., Inc., General Motors Corp., and Sears Roebuck & Co. solved these problems by combining centralized control over policy with decentralized responsibility for operations. Control was centralized in a group of top executives without operating or administrative responsibilities, who concentrated on major policy decisions, planning future operations, allocating resources accordingly, and reviewing the results, a technique later referred to as "planning-programming-budgeting." Responsibility for operations was decentralized to field agencies. In one case, Sears, the experiences of the War Department General Staff under General March in World War I seem to have been a factor in the development of a modern corporate organization.

[63]

Engineering the reorganization for Sears was Robert E. Wood, General Goethals' Quartermaster General in World War I.10  

 

General Marshall's experience as Chief of Staff in 1939-41 led him to the same general conclusion on the necessity for centralized over-all control and decentralized responsibility for operations if the War Department and the Army were to function effectively. After World War I he had foreseen that members of the General Staff might become "so engrossed in their coordinating and supervisory functions" that they would neglect their primary missions of preparing war plans and tactical doctrine.11 In the two years before Pearl Harbor the War Department staff, including the General Staff, became a huge operating empire increasingly involved in the minutiae of Army administration. The pressing requirements of the moment eliminated all other considerations. 12 

 

Co-ordinating the technical services, for example, was difficult because of the complicated division of responsibility for their activities among the General Staff. Not only did they report to the Under Secretary on industrial mobilization and planning, but also to each of the General Staff divisions: G-1 on personnel, G-2 on technical intelligence, G-8 on training, and to G-4 only on supply requirements and distribution. The new lend-lease program of all aid short of war to the Allies created further complications, and a special Defense Aid Director was established in the department to co-ordinate this function among the numerous agencies concerned with it. Still another problem was created by the Army Air Forces' drive

[64]

for autonomy including separate administrative and supply agencies.13  

 

Serious delays in military camp construction led to the transfer of responsibility for this function and for construction of airfields and other installations from an overburdened Quartermaster Corps to the Corps of Engineers, a transfer made permanent by law in December 1941.14

 

To assist him in administering the department, Marshall added in 1940 two additional Deputy Chiefs of Staff. The existing Deputy Chief, Maj. Gen. William Bryden, was responsible for general administration of the department and the Army. Maj. Gen. Henry H. Arnold, Chief of Army Air Forces, served also as Deputy Chief of Staff for Air and participated with Marshall in the development of joint strategy. After Pearl Harbor Arnold became a member of the joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. This arrangement reflected Marshall's appreciation of the Air Forces' desire for autonomy.15

 

Maj. Gen. Richard C. Moore became Deputy Chief of Staff for supply, construction, and the newly designated Armored Force. Congress, acting on General Pershing's recommendation, had deprived the Tank Corps, created during World War 1, of its status as a separate combat arm. Between the wars the roles and missions of the armored forces in this country as in Europe were the subject of bitter internal dissension within the Army. The strongest opposition to the tank came naturally from the Cavalry whose chief, Maj. Gen. John K. Herr, in 1938 urged:

[65]

"We must not be misled to our own detriment to assume that the untried machine can displace the proved and tried horse."16

 

Asking Congress for authority to re-create a separate armored force risked public ventilation of this dispute within Army ranks. This in turn might have embarrassed the Army in its efforts to obtain Congressional support for expanding the Army to meet the threat of Axis aggression. Consequently, the Armored Force came quietly into existence at Fort Knox, Kentucky, on 10 July 1940 by direction of the Secretary of War. Congress did not designate the Armored Force as a separate combat branch until the Army Organization Act of 1950 when as the Armor Branch it officially replaced the horse cavalry. General Herr went to his grave asserting the Army had betrayed the horse.17

 

The man who delivered the coup de grace to the horse was an ardent armor supporter, Brig. Gen. Lesley J. McNair. General Marshall personally selected him as his deputy in charge of General Headquarters, when it was activated in July 1940. The primary mission of GHQ was to raise and train the new Army, but, in accordance with the Harbord Board concept, it was also supposed to become the commanding general's military operations staff in the event of war.

 

General McNair set up his headquarters across town from the War Department in the Army War College. As in 1917 physical separation from the War Department as well as preoccupation with training made it difficult for GHQ to maintain effective personal contact with General Marshall and to keep up with the rapidly changing complexion of the war. It was the War Plans Division, physically close by, upon which Marshall came to rely for immediate assistance in planning and preparing for military operations.18

[66]

Such was the jury-rigged, extempore manner in which the War Department under General Marshall organized for war. He had hoped to change things in this manner gradually without publicity or stirring up antagonisms among powerful interests groups like the chiefs of the supply services. Tinkering with the machinery did not produce satisfactory results, and two days after Pearl Harbor Marshall asserted that the War Department was a "poor command post."19

 

The pressing need, he later said, was for "more definite and positive control by the Chief of Staff." The General Staff, as he had warned, "had lost track of the purpose of its existence. It had become a huge, bureaucratic, red tape-ridden, operating agency. It slowed down everything." 20 Too many staff divisions and too many individuals within these staff divisions had to pass on every little decision that had to be made by the Chief of Staff. "It took forever to get anything done, and it didn't make any difference whether it was a major decision" or a minor detail.21 The Chief of Staff and the three deputy chiefs were "so bogged down in details that they were unable to make any decisions."

 

You had so many different people in there that there wasn't anybody who could get together and make a decision . . . . The Cavalry didn't agree that an Infantryman could ride on a tank; the Infantry said "Yes, we have some tanks, and we can ride tanks." General Herr said "Anybody who wants to ride in a tank is a damn fool. He ought to be riding a horse." And it was almost impossible to get a decision. There were too many people who had too much authority.22

 

The decision General Marshall reached was to substitute the vertical pattern of military command for the traditional horizontal pattern of bureaucratic co-ordination. This centralization of executive control would enable him to decentralize operating responsibilities. He would then be free, like

[67]

the top managers of DuPont, General Motors, and Sears, to devote his time to the larger issues of planning strategy, allocating resources, and directing global military operations.23

 

Instead of the General Staff and three score or more agencies with direct access to the Chief of Staff's office, the Marshall reorganization created three field commands outside the formal structure of the War Department: Army Ground Forces (AGF), Army Air Forces (AAF), and Army Service Forces (ASF), initially the Services of Supply. Army Ground Forces under Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, responsible for training the Army, and Army Air Forces under Lt. Gen. Henry H. Arnold were for practical purposes already functioning, the former under its designation of General Headquarters. Army Service Forces under Lt. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell was an agency new to World War II and hastily thrown together to include the Army's supply system, administration, and "housekeeping" functions within the United States. With the creation of these commands, said Maj. Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, who became the Deputy Chief of Staff in March 1942, "Immediately 95 per cent of the papers that came up to the General Staff ceased just like that." 24 During the war both ASF and AAF operated as integral parts of the War Department because they were intimately involved in military planning. AGF, on the other hand, remained a field command separate from the War Department.

 

The War Plans Division (soon renamed the Operations Division) became General Marshall's command post or GHQ. The rest of the General Staff, drastically reduced in numbers, were forced out of operations and confined in theory to a broad policy planning and co-ordination role for which their long, drawn-out staff procedures were more appropriate. General

[68]

Marshall insisted on this change and had disapproved earlier reorganization proposals because they offered him little relief from administrative details that came up to his office through the General Staff. Without such a reduction in personnel the General Staff would work its way back into operations, and Marshall was certain the whole reorganization would be a failure.25

 

The Marshall reorganization also abolished the offices of the chiefs of the combat arms, the offspring of the National Defense Acts of 1916 and 1920, as an unnecessary staff layer and gave their powers to Army Ground Forces which emphasized integrating the several arms into a single, unified fighting team. Among other things the creation of AGF was a triumph of the infant armored forces over the cavalry and field artillery. General Herr regarded armored forces advocates as betraying the horse, as mentioned earlier. Maj. Gen. Robert M. Danford, the Chief of Field Artillery, the only combat arms chief to record his objections in writing, obstinately insisted that field artillery remain horse-drawn. One argument repeatedly made within field artillery was that horses could feed off the land, while motor trucks could not.26

 

This streamlined structure required equally streamlined staff procedures. Out for the duration were formal staff actions with their elaborate, time-consuming processes of concurrence, cognizance, and consonance, except in special circumstances where they were appropriate. Instead procedures were developed which would produce prompter and more effective decisions and action. The three major commands were also urged to use "judicious shortcuts in procedure to expedite operations." 27

[69]

GENERAL McNARNEY

 

the same results as General March had in World War I of sweeping aside accustomed procedures. Unlike March, Marshall achieved these results without arousing widespread opposition both within and outside the department.

 

The Marshall reorganization actually had a rather long period of gestation, its basic outline having been proposed by Lt. Col. William K. Harrison, Jr., of WPD sometime in the fall of 1940.28 The Harrison plan came up for formal discussion within the War Plans Division in the summer of 1941. Brig. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow, Chief of the War Plans Division, vetoed the Harrison plan at this point because it involved "extensive experimentation with untried ideas in a critical time." 29

 

A conflict between the missions and responsibilities assigned General Headquarters and Army Air Corps came to a head in the fall of 1941 and was responsible for General Marshall's decision to scrap the cumbersome existing organization of the General Staff. What was really at issue was the Air Corps' determined drive for complete autonomy within the Army. The

[70]

War Plans Division defeated Air Corps attempts to set up a separate air planning staff independent of WPD. GHQ's control over tactical planning and operations, specifically over the allocation and tactical employment of air units in the air defense of the continental United States and certain bases in the Atlantic and overseas, was another problem. The latter were already under the formal control of GHQ, and the former would follow in the event of war.

 

The solution to this problem, proposed to General Marshall by General Arnold in mid-November, was to limit GHQ to organizing and training ground combat forces. Its command and planning functions would be transferred to WPD as a policy and strategy planning agency with broad co-ordinating authority over the separate field commands for the future AAF, ground forces, and supply services. In substance this scheme followed the plan earlier proposed by Colonel Harrison. General McNair himself at this point favored eliminating the existing organization of GHQ as part of a general reorganization of the War Department. Favorably impressed, General Marshall ordered WPD to develop the plan in greater detail to determine its practicality.

 

About a week before Pearl Harbor, Marshall recalled Brig. Gen. Joseph T. McNarney of WPD, then in London on a special mission, to head a committee to study and recommend a proper organization for the War Department. When McNarney reached Washington, President Roosevelt ordered him to serve on the special Roberts Pearl Harbor Investigating Committee. It was not until 25 January 1942 that McNarney learned from General Marshall that he was to take charge of reorganizing the department.

 

Pearl Harbor and American entrance into the war had intensified the Chief of Staff's problems and the need for a reorganization. General Marshall told McNarney he simply couldn't stand the "red-tape" and delay any longer. What he wanted was "some kind of organization that would give the Chief of Staff time to devote to strategic policy and the strategic . . . direction of the war." The First War Powers Act of 18 December 1941, like the Overman Act of 1918, gave the President power to reorganize the federal government as he saw fit for the duration of the war plus six months. This gave

[71]

General Marshall the opportunity to reorganize the War Department, subject to Presidential approval.30

 

After outlining the problem General Marshall turned the pick and shovel work of devising a practical reorganization plan over to McNarney and two assistants-Colonel Harrison and Lt. Col. Laurence S. Kuter. The trio discussed the issues, examined various alternative proposals, and on 31 January General McNarney recommended to the Chief of Staff a modified version of the Harrison plan. Advising against following traditional General Staff procedures, McNarney warned that submitting the proposal to "all interested parties" would result in many nonconcurrences and "interminable delay." Instead he recommended approving the plan, appointing the new commanders, and creating an "executive committee" to carry out the reorganization as soon as possible.

 

General Marshall announced his approval of the McNarneyHarrison plan at a meeting of representatives of the General Staff, General Headquarters, and Army Air Corps on 5 February 1942. Representatives of the chiefs of the combat arms and services and of the Under Secretary's Office were conspicuous by their absence. General Marshall said he did not want the reorganization discussed with the Under Secretary until more detailed plans had been developed. To avoid stirring up opposition General McNarney ordered that the reorganization plan be discussed only with those who had to execute it. This excluded those chiefs of combat arms whose terms were to expire shortly in any event as well as The Adjutant General, whose term was also soon to expire. 31

 

General Marshall's references to the Under Secretary of War's Office emphasized that the 5 February meeting was the first time representatives of the Army's supply agencies were consulted about the reorganization. Although nearly all the reorganization plans proposed and discussed had advocated a supply or service command, they went no further than the general proposition that supply should be under a unified command. The McNarney-Harrison plan, according to Goldthwaite

[72]

Dorr, an adviser to General Somervell, looked very much as if it had been drawn up by a group of officers who did not know much about the Army's supply system. Army Service Forces thus seems to have emerged largely as a more or less unplanned by-product of the Marshall reorganization designed to reduce the number of agencies reporting directly to the Chief of Staff. It also reflected the tendency of combat arms officers to take logistics for granted, a tendency which had caused embarrassment during World War I and would cause further problems in World War II.32

 

Both the Under Secretary's Office and G-4 had been studying the problem of supply organization on their own. The same problems that led to the McNarney-Harrison plan, the administrative burden of increasing mobilization, red tape, and divided command naturally had affected the Army's supply system. Under Secretary Patterson asked Booz, Frey, Allen and Hamilton, a management consultant firm, to suggest improvements in the organization and operations of his office. Their report, submitted in December 1941, criticized the divided command over Army logistics and the confused relationship between the Under Secretary's Office and G-4. Their solution was to appoint a military officer as "Procurement General" with functions similar to those of General Goethals in World War I. Mr. Patterson rejected this solution.

 

After General Somervell became G-4 in December 1941 he asked Mr. Dorr, who had served as Assistant Director of Munitions under Benedict Crowell in World War I, to investigate the Army's supply system informally. Equally critical of divided command, Dorr also recommended re-creating General Goethals' position as executive manager of the Army's supply system under the dual direction of the Under Secretary and the Chief of Staff. 33

 

By the time General Marshall approved the McNarney-Harrison plan there was general agreement among top War Department officials on the need for unified command over

[73]

the Army's logistical system. Secretary Stimson and General Marshall also agreed that General Somervell should be the commanding general of ASF. 34

 

The McNarney Committee conferred with Secretary Stimson who likewise approved the reorganization, suggesting only that Marshall remain Chief of Staff rather than commander in chief in order to retain the principle of civilian control. General Marshall then appointed an Executive Committee to carry out the reorganization headed by General McNarney and including representatives of the new commands and other agencies with a vested interest in making the reorganization work. McNarney emphasized that the committee was not to debate the reorganization but simply to draft the necessary operational directives to put it into effect as soon as possible. With a 9 March deadline the committee, meeting behind closed doors, hammered out the detailed plans. Secretary Stimson sent the draft of an executive order announcing the reorganization on 20 February to the President, while General Marshall undertook personally to persuade the President of its necessity. The President approved the plan with one significant change. He wanted it reworded to "make it very clear that the Commander-in-Chief exercises his command function in relation to strategy, tactics, and operations directly through the Chief of Staff." With this amendment, Executive Order 9082 of 28 February 1942 officially announced the reorganization and declared it effective 9 March 1942 for the duration of the war plus six months under the authority of the First War Powers Act of 18 December 1941. War Department Circular 59 of 2 March 1942 followed this up with a detailed operational plan for, transferring various agencies and functions to the new commands.35

 

The Marshall reorganization enabled the Chief of Staff to concentrate on the larger issues of the war, while the new commands handled the administrative details and operations. (Chart 4) The Chief of Staff now had enough time to consider the changing strategic complexion of the war and to make his

[74]

CHART 4

ORGANIZATION OF THE ARMY (THE MARSHALL REORGANIZATION), 9 MARCH 1942

 

[75]

CHART 5

THE OPERATIONS DIVISION, WAR DEPARTMENT GENERAL STAFF, 12 MAY 1942

  

 

 

The success of any large organization depends upon the ability of its leaders to select competent subordinates, not merely yes-men. In large-scale organizations governed by formal promotion systems, this approach is not always possible, and the War Department contained its share of bureaucratic incompetents. Assistant Secretary Lovett recalled there was so much "deadwood" in the department that it was "a positive fire hazard." In reorganizing the department General Marshall could select the men he wanted as his assistants, as had Secretary Stimson earlier. General McNarney became the sole Deputy Chief of Staff and acted as Marshall's general manager in running the department until McNarney went overseas in October 1944. McNarney, McNair, Arnold, Somervell, and the principal staff officers of WPD-OPD were Marshall's men, and upon them he relied heavily in the development and co-ordination of military strategy. His reputation as the Army's greatest Chief of Staff depended in no small measure upon his exceptional judgment of men.37

 

In summary the main purpose of the Marshall reorganization was to provide effective executive control over the War Department and the Army. The rationalization of the department's structure in substituting the vertical pattern of military command for the traditional horizontal pattern of co-ordination paralleled similar developments among leading industrial organizations. However disgruntled those personalities and agencies displaced by the new dispensation, the officials most. directly responsible for the management of the Army as a whole testified to its effectiveness. The complaints came mostly from those responsible for only one aspect of the war and who resented the restrictions placed on their traditional freedom of action and autonomy. 38

[76]

effectiveness of the new agencies. The successful conduct of the war depended most directly on General Marshall's military operations staff, WPD, which on 23 March 1942 was redesignated the Operations Division (OPD). Its principal reason for existence was to assist General Marshall in developing strategy and directing the conduct of military operations. It represented the Army in dealings with the Navy, the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff, the White House, and civilian war agencies. With the assistance of Army Ground Forces, Air Forces, and Service Forces OPD calculated the requirements in men and resources the Army needed to carry out the strategy and plans hammered out by the joint and combined staffs. It acted as liaison between the overseas theaters of operations and the War Department, AGF, AAF, ASF, the Navy, the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff, and the home front. Responsible for planning the Army's global military operations, for determining and allocating the resources required, and for directing and co-ordinating their execution, OPD was the Army's top management staff. 39

 

The Operations Division's internal organization reflected its several functions. (Chart 5) The Strategy and Policy Group was responsible for strategy and planning. It provided OPD's representation on the joint and combined planning staffs and liaison with other war agencies. The Logistics Group determined the resources required to support projected military operations. It also represented OPD on those joint and combined committees responsible for logistical planning. Necessarily, it worked closely with G-4 and Army Service Forces, and in the process considerable friction developed between OPD and ASF's Plans and Operations Division. ASF, believing OPD did not pay sufficient attention to practical logistical problems, especially the lead time required to produce weapons and other materiel, sought a greater role in strategic logistical planning. OPD, on the other hand, resented ASF's attempted intrusions into its areas of responsibility.

 

OPD's Theater Group was the link between the Army at home and the overseas theaters, transmitting orders to and re-

[77]

laying requests from them. It exercised greater control over theater operations in the initial stages of their campaigns than later when theater headquarters had developed their own experienced staffs. An Executive Group provided personnel and administrative services, including the operation of OPD's Message Center and Records Section.

 

With the expansion of the war the activities of these groups in OPD became so involved that it became necessary to set up a separate Current Group in February 1944 responsible solely for providing information on all current OPD operations. It prepared the War Department Daily Operational and White House Summaries, invaluable to executives for their brevity. A Pan-American Group was created in April 1945 to deal with the problems of western hemispheric defense.

 

The key to OPD's success was its streamlined staff procedure, which emphasized delegating authority to make recommendations or take action to the lowest possible level. Personal conferences by designated action officers, often junior staff members, with responsible officials of other agencies possessing needed information, replaced written concurrences submitted through formal staff channels. The belabored decisions reached by traditional staff procedures would have come too late to have any effect, and a wrong decision based on hasty research was considered better than a tardy one based on more thorough study. Special requests for action from General Marshall required a reply within twenty-four hours and were known as Green Hornets from their readily identifiable cover and the consequences of delaying action too long.40

 

The obstacles GHQ encountered before the Marshall reorganization arose from the confusion of planning and operating functions within the Army staff. As General Marshall had forecast after World War I the greatest weakness of the General Staff became its preoccupation with co-ordinating operations to the detriment of its responsibilities for long-range planning and the development of tactical doctrine. Instead of revising the

[78]

increasingly obsolete Harbord doctrine to meet the radically different circumstances of World War II, the department, reflecting the reactions of the nation at large, bumped from one crisis to the next between 1939 and Pearl Harbor, making adjustments here and there according to the needs of the moment.

 

The inability to separate planning and operating functions and responsibilities had been a characteristic vice of the Army and, indeed, of most American corporate institutions. The failure to make this distinction had hobbled the General Staff from its inception because it had been assigned both functions. The only kind of planning most Army officers understood was operational planning. When they insisted it was both impossible and impractical to try to separate planning and operations, they clearly meant immediate operational planning. With little experience in broad, long-range planning and policy-making and confined to the isolated present, they ignored the hypothetical future whose consideration almost always yielded to the demands of the moment. As a consequence the Army lagged behind in just those areas, such as research and development of weapons and other materiel and the development of tactical doctrine, where long-range planning was important.41

 

The Marshall reorganization did not settle the issue of separating planning from operations within AGE General McNair settled that issue himself.

 

The reorganization directive ordered AGF headquarters to separate these two functions. A small general staff, like the reduced War Department General Staff, was supposed to be responsible for basic policy decisions and not become involved in administration or operations. Under its supervision there was to be a functionally oriented operating staff responsible for personnel, operations and training, materiel requirements, transportation, construction, and hospitalization and evacuation.

[79]

separation was artificial and impractical. Its general staff could not plan without information from the operating divisions, while the operating divisions felt they were better qualified to plan because they were in closer touch with operations. This arrangement also confused relations with subordinate commands and the technical services which were also organized with no distinction between planning and operations. Inevitably the AGF general staff became involved in operations and the operating divisions in planning.

 

It was not long before General McNair complained officially to General Marshall that separating planning and operations was inefficient and productive only of duplication, delay, and confusion. With General Marshall's assent, the AGF staff reverted in July 1942 to the traditional pattern, adding a Requirements Section responsible for developing new weapons and tactical doctrine. What remained of the offices of the chiefs of the combat arms had been absorbed in March by the Requirements Section, but in the July 1942 reorganization they disappeared entirely.42 (Chart 6)

 

Army Ground Forces success depended ultimately on the effectiveness of the tactical doctrines it developed because they, in turn, determined the training the Army received and the requirements for new weapons and equipment. The Armored, Airborne, and Amphibious Commands and the Tank Destroyer, Mountain, and Desert Training Centers, integrating all the combat arms, were created because these were the areas where AGF concentrated its efforts in the development of new doctrine. They symbolized, in fact, these new doctrines. The testing of weapons and equipment by the Combat Arms and Technical Services Testing Boards and by the several combined arms commands and centers during maneuvers was all carried out within the framework of approved tactical doctrine. The schools disseminated these doctrines throughout the Army.

 

The AGF staff sections responsible for tactical doctrine, training, and requirements for new weapons and material were G-3 and Requirements. These two sections accounted for half of AGF headquarters officer strength. While G-3 concentrated on training and the Requirements Section on new weapons and equipment, they functioned as a single staff unit in the

[80]

CHART 6

ORGANIZATION OF THE ARMY GROUND FORCES, OCTOBER 1943

 

 

Source: Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, p. 407.

[81]

 

In training and tactical doctrine the influence of AGF within the Army was paramount. Responsibility and authority for the development of new weapons and equipment, on the other hand, were divided among many agencies within and outside the Army. The Requirements Section represented the AGF in negotiations with other War Department agencies concerned with weapons development such as the Research and Development Division of Army Service Forces, the technical services, G-4, and later the New Developments Division of the War Department Special Staff, a troubleshooting agency designed to expedite tile production of new equipment and its delivery to the battlefield. Outside the Army the Requirements Section maintained liaison with the National Inventors' Council and the National Defense Research Committee, which operated under Dr. Vannevar Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development. Representing the military consumer, the Requirements Section was responsible for assuring that the requirements of tactical doctrine received adequate consideration in decisions regarding new weapons and equipment. AGF's approved tactical doctrine, for instance, dictated that in developing tanks maneuverability was more important than firepower or armor. Durability and ease of maintenance on the battlefield were two other AGF priorities.43

 

The Marshall reorganization was a major milestone on the Army Air Forces road to complete separation from the Army. Now separate from the ground combat forces, the AAF directed its future efforts toward divorcing itself from the Army Service Forces and the technical services. By the end of the war it had succeeded in integrating the majority of some 600,000 Air technical service personnel into its own organization.

[82]

The immediate reason the Air Forces supported reorganizing the War Department had been its tangled relations with General McNair's GHQ organization. The autonomous status inherent in the creation of a separate Assistant Secretary of War for Air and General Arnold's later elevation to Acting Deputy Chief of Staff for Air did not apply to lower staff or command levels. The Air Staff was still subordinate to the Army's General Staff, and the Air Force Combat Command (formerly GHQ Air Force) was nominally subordinate to General McNair's GHQ as well as the Air Staff. The Air Corps proper, responsible for training, logistics, and overseas movement of men and materiel, had a greater degree of autonomy.

 

In addition to separating Army Air Forces from Army Ground Forces the Marshall reorganization promised to improve the former's status further by providing for equal Air Forces representation on the General Staff, including OPD, and on the various joint and combined staffs. Furthermore the presence of RAF representatives on the British Joint Staff Mission made it virtually necessary to appoint General Arnold as a member of the joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. 44

 

The reorganization presented AAF headquarters with the same problem as AGF headquarters-how to separate staff and operating functions. The Air Staff as a policy planning staff was to be distinct from a group of operating directorates, responsible for military requirements, transportation, communications, and personnel. There was also a Management Control Directorate, responsible for administrative services, organizational planning, and statistical controls.

 

AAF headquarters reached the same conclusion as AGF, that it was impractical to separate planning and operations, and in a reorganization in March 1943 it reverted to the familiar Pershing pattern. There were the usual Assistant Chiefs of the Air Staff for Personnel, Intelligence, Training, Logistics, and Planning as well as an additional Assistant Chief for Operations, Commitments, and Requirements with functions similar to AGF's Requirements Section. Plans Division personnel

[83]

 

The Management Control Directorate, now attached to the Office of the Commanding General, AAF, borrowed heavily from the experiences of the aircraft industry. The relationship between the AAF and the aircraft industry was a uniquely close one. They had grown up together and were mutually dependent on each other. The AAF had few traditions to hamper development along new and untried lines, including the development of modern industrial management control techniques.

 

The principal divisions of the AAF's Management Control Directorate included the Air Adjutant General's Office and the Administrative Services Division which it absorbed, a Manpower Division, an Organizational Planning Division, a Statistical Control Division, and an Operations Analysis Division. Except for the Adjutant General's Office and Administrative Services Division, the staff of the directorate was composed largely of civilian management experts.

 

The Manpower Division, established in March 1943 as a result of the developing nationwide manpower shortage, was responsible for promoting the efficient utilization of all personnel, military and civilian, by eliminating unnecessary duplication of effort and nonessential functions, simplifying administrative procedures, and releasing general service military personnel for overseas combat duty by replacing them with members of the Women's Army Corps (WAC), those on limited service, and civilians not subject to the draft. It prepared job analyses and descriptions to determine the exact number of individuals by types, both military and civilian, required to perform efficiently the functions of any Air Force

[84]

unit or installation. It controlled manpower levels in the field, while the Organizational Planning Division controlled manpower authorizations in AAF headquarters.46

 

As its name implied, the Organizational Planning Division was responsible for analyzing and recommending the proper allocation of functions within the AAF. The internal organization of the Organizational Planning Division into Training and Operations, Intelligence, and Supply and Transport Branches reflected the functional organization of AAF headquarters. This division supervised the preparation of organization charts and promoted decentralized operations, the elimination of duplication, the clarification of functional responsibilities, and other measures to provide more effective co-ordination and administration. A Publications Branch reviewed, edited, and issued all AAF administrative publications, a function of the Adjutant General elsewhere in the Army.

 

The Organizational Planning Division planned and coordinated the AAF headquarters reorganization of March 1943. It developed the three directorate system-plans and operations, administration, and supply and maintenance-adopted by all continental air forces and commands in 1944. It planned and co-ordinated the complete integration into the Army Air Forces of those technical service personnel assigned to it who still retained their original technical service identities. In its own opinion this was the most significant move taken after the reorganization toward the avowed goal of a completely separate air force.47

 

The Statistical Control Division endeavored to consolidate, standardize, and rationalize the many disparate reporting systems within the AAF, particularly in the fields of personnel, materiel development, and training. By 1945 it had succeeded in centralizing control over statistical reporting to such an extent that it could decentralize some of its operations to the

[85]

field. The statistics obtained were indispensable also in establishing effective program controls and in evaluating air operations. At the end of the war the AAF's statistical controls were the most sophisticated and effective of all the armed services.48

 

In December 1942 General Arnold directed establishment of an Operations Analysis Division (OAD) within the Management Control Directorate which would apply scientific techniques to the problems of selecting strategic air targets in Germany. The British had pioneered in this area, known then and later as Operations Research. OAD's success led to the creation of similar units within the headquarters of strategic and tactical air forces overseas. The development of new weapons and other materiel and the improvement of tactical doctrine were other areas in which the AAF employed the techniques of operations research.49

 

Co-ordinating the development, production, and ultimate combat deployment of aircraft and the highly technical training required for their operation and maintenance proved extremely difficult. Program monitoring, as this process was then called, was the progenitor of contemporary systems for project management. From a purely administrative standpoint the problem created by these programs was that they cut across established lines of functional and command responsibility. Until the end of the war the AAF never successfully solved the problem because it did not provide a centralized agency high enough in the hierarchy of command to co-ordinate and synchronize the

[86]

various program elements effectively. Although the Marshall reorganization provided for an Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Program Planning on the Air Staff, after the March 1943 reorganization this responsibility was buried as a branch of the Allocations and Programs Division under the Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Operations, Commitments, and Requirements.

 

The Statistical Control Division performed some of the work needed to balance requirements and commitments. In late 1942 it studied the requirements of the strategic air offensive against Germany on the one hand and Japan on the other. Using this study the AAF balanced resources and aircraft production schedules between the two programs. On another occasion the Statistical Control Division found that training of pilots in the United States was lagging behind the production of combat aircraft because there were insufficient aircraft available or allocated for training.

 

Brig. Gen. Laurence S. Kuter, Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Plans, assumed responsibility in mid-1943 for program planning. The appointment of Dr. Edmund P. Learned, an economist from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, as Special Consultant to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces for Program Control, followed shortly. The Statistical Control Division continued to provide essential program control data relating to training, ammunition expenditure rates, intelligence, and the accuracy of strategic and tactical bombing programs. Finally in August 1945 an Office of Program Monitoring was created which reported directly to the Chief of the Air Staff. Its responsibility was to supervise all AAF programs including the resources, requirements, allocation, authority, and commitments involved in the procurement, availability, production, training, flow, storage, separation or disposition of personnel, crews, units, aircraft, equipment, supply, and facilities.50

 

At the end of the war in August 1945, there was another major reorganization of AAF headquarters in which the Management Control Office as well as its Organizational Planning

[87]

and Operations Analysis Divisions were abolished. The Air Adjutant General regained control over the Administrative Services Division and publications. Along with the new Office of Program Monitoring the Statistical Services Division became a part of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Staff. The Manpower Division was transferred to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Personnel. The previously centralized functions of the Organizational Planning Division were fragmented among the regular staff divisions of AAF headquarters. The Operations Analysis Division's functions were transferred to the Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Operations. In December 1945 the Office of Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development was created. This office sponsored the creation of the Research and Development (RAND) Corporation in 1946 as an independent private corporation employing civilian scientists on operations research and later broader systems analysis projects under contract to the AAF.

 

Brig. Gen. Byron E. Gates, who was Director of Management Control for most of the war, believed the reason for abolishing his directorate and its Organizational Planning Division was the resentment created by such concepts as management and control among tradition-minded military officers. Other staff agencies resented what they felt was the interference of the Organizational Planning Branch in their operations, a delicate question of cognizance. These developments reflected widespread and growing disenchantment among Army officers with industrial concepts of management control brought into the AAF and ASF during the war. In the future the civilian administrators of the Army and its sister services would urge these concepts and practices on the services against continued military opposition.51

 

The Air Forces continued drive for complete separation from the rest of the Army created other organizational problems and conflicts with the General Staff and Army Service Forces, particularly the technical services. The development of an AAF personnel system completely separate from the rest of the Army also led to conflicts with G-1. According to the theory

[88]

behind the Marshall reorganization, the Army Service Forces was supposed to provide services for both AGF and AAF, freeing the latter to concentrate on their principal mission of providing trained ground and air combat troops. At the same time, the AAF was assigned responsibility for procuring and supplying materiel "peculiar to the Air Forces." The definition of this term led to a running battle between the Air Forces and the Service Forces. According to one ASF spokesman, "Army Air Forces always regarded Army Service Forces as a service organization primarily designed for the Ground Forces and incapable of understanding Air Forces' problems." 52

 

As mentioned earlier, technical service personnel, while assigned to the AAF, retained their traditional identity with their parent organizations. Ordnance Corps technicians worked alongside Air Force armaments personnel, Signal Corps men with Air Force communications personnel, and supply personnel of all arms and services with Air Corps supply personnel. Tradition required the services to draw tight jurisdictional boundaries around their activities with consequent duplication of effort and waste of manpower. Partially in the interest of efficiency General Henry H. Arnold in late 1943 requested the complete integration of technical service personnel into the Army Air Forces.

 

Two other jurisdictional disputes with the technical services involved responsibility for electronic equipment and missiles. Ultimately General Marshall had to decide these issues personally. In August 1944 he directed transfer of responsibility for development and procurement of radar and radar equipment used in aircraft from the Signal Corps to the AAF. A month later he split responsibility for the development of missiles between the Ordnance Department and the AAF. While the Ordnance Department would have responsibility for development of ground-launched missiles which "depended on momentum," the AAF would be responsible for "guided or

[89]

homing missiles launched from aircraft" or "ground-launched missiles which depended on the lift of aerodynamic forces." 53 This somewhat vague boundary became the basis for organizing the separate Army and Air Force missile programs in the postwar years.

 

Most of AAF organizational problems stemmed from its drive for complete separation from the rest of the Army. The highly advanced and rapidly changing technology peculiar to the Air Forces and the aircraft industry presented another and more difficult set of organizational problems. The main issues concerned the most effective means of co-ordinating the development and deployment of aircraft along with the training of personnel required to maintain and operate them. At the end of the war the AAF was still feeling its way toward solving these problems.54

 

The Operations Division, Army Ground Forces, and Army Air Forces evolved slowly from existing organizations in the months before Pearl Harbor. There was no such gradual evolution behind the organization of General Somervell's command, just the precedent of General Goethals' Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division in World War I. What changes had preceded the creation of the Army Service Forces had been crash actions designed to meet specific problems. The lagging camp construction program led to its transfer from an overburdened, overcentralized Quartermaster Corps to the Corps of Engineers which was faced with a cutback in its own civil works programs. The lend-lease program led to creation of a new agency, the Office of the Defense Aid Director. Co-ordination between the Office of the Under Secretary of War, responsible for mobilizing industrial production, and G-4, responsible for military supply requirements, became increasingly difficult as military programs increased in size. The solution provided by the Marshall reorganization was to combine both activities under General Somervell's Army Service Forces and relieve G-4 and the

[90]

GENERAL SOMERVELL. (Photograph taken  in 1945.)

 

Office of the Under Secretary of War of their operating responsibilities. This had the virtue, from the military standpoint, of establishing unity of command over the entire Army supply system in the zone of interior.55

 

General Somervell was an Army engineer with a well-earned reputation as an aggressive troubleshooter and administrator who could cut through red tape and get things done. He had been assigned as head of the Quartermaster Corps Construction Division in December 1940 to expedite the Army's lagging camp construction program. He immediately reorganized the division replacing old branch chiefs with engineers who had worked with him before, Lt. Col. Edmond H. Leavey, Lt. Col. Wilhelm D. Styer, and Capt. Clinton F. Robinson. A year later Somervell was promoted to G-4 and thus a logical choice for the new command. Neither Secretary Stimson nor General Marshall ever appears to have regretted their selection. Somervell's aggressiveness did stir up controversy and bitterness

[91]

within and outside the Army as General March had done in World War I, but General Marshall later reflected that if he had to do it all over again, "I would start looking for another General Somervell the very first thing I did."

 

General Marshall also looked to General Somervell as his chief adviser on supply, treating him as G-4 of the General Staff as well as commanding general of the ASK Somervell also benefited from the support of Secretary Stimson and of Harry Hopkins in the White House. On the occasions when he lost a round in the constant bureaucratic feuding within and outside the department, he lost because either the Secretary or General Marshall sided with his opponents.56

 

The organization of General Somervell's headquarters in the beginning was a hurried, makeshift grouping of the agencies and personnel assigned to his command. Integrating their operations required repeated reorganization of ASF headquarters during the next year and a half. The immediate need was to link the mobilization and production functions of the Under Secretary's Office with the military supply requirements and distribution functions of G-4. General Somervell merged their staffs into one operating agency, the Directorate of Procurement and Distribution, and attached it to his own office. At the next level were nine staff divisions responsible for procurement and distribution operations, training, civilian personnel, military personnel, fiscal, military requirements, military resources, and international (lend-lease) . These in turn supervised ASF operating divisions, the technical and administrative services, and the service commands.57

 

Industrial mobilization remained the principal concern of General Somervell and his staff during the first year. In 1943 emphasis shifted to supply planning for offensive military

[92]

operations overseas. At this point attention focused on the ASF Operations Division, the agency responsible for logistics planning.

 

Organizational changes within ASF headquarters reflected this change in its primary mission. The Directorate of Procurement and Distribution had become merely one of several staff divisions a year later. The Operations Division absorbed its distribution functions because supplying overseas theaters required effective control over and co-ordination of domestic transportation and supply facilities. In a further reorganization in November 1943, the Operations Division was attached to General Somervell's office and redesignated the Directorate of Plans and Operations. The former Procurement Division became its Supply and Materiel Division.. As the link between logistics, the business of ASF, and strategic planning, the business of OPD and the JCS, this agency became the most important element in ASF headquarters. Its chief, Maj. Gen. LeRoy Lutes, and his staff, aggressively supported by General Somervell, represented the interests of ASF in the frequently rancorous disputes with OPD over the proper role of logistics in strategic planning.58

 

The organization of ASF headquarters after November 1943 remained relatively stable. Both the Directorate of Plans and Operations and the Control Division were attached to General Somervell's office, indicative of their great importance and influence within ASF headquarters. (Chart 8) Beneath General Somervell was a Deputy Chief of Staff for Service Commands who relieved him of this administrative burden. The ASF staff now included seven divisions: four operating divisions for personnel, military training, supply, and materiel, and three administrative services, the Fiscal Director (the Chief of Finance), The Adjutant General's Office, and the Office of the Judge Advocate General. Like AGF and AAF General Somervell's staff believed that the attempt to separate staff and operating agencies was impractical.59

[93]

GENERAL LUTES

 

The creation of the Control Division within ASF headquarters was a major administrative reform within the Army introduced by General Somervell. Under Maj. Gen. Clinton F. Robinson it performed functions similar to General Gates' Management Control Division introduced about the same time in AAF headquarters. Its members for the most part were drawn largely from civilian management experts rather than military officers who had had little experience with industrial management.

 

Its main purpose was to develop and employ industrial management techniques in the supervision, direction, co-ordination, and control of the disparate functions and operations for which ASF was responsible. As in the AAF, there was a Statistical Branch responsible for developing statistical controls within ASF and for standardizing statistical reporting techniques. Its Monthly Progress Report, a comprehensive study covering over a dozen major functions, was one of the principal means by which General Somervell and his staff reviewed ASF operations. It alerted them to problems as they developed and helped them maintain a proper balance among the various elements of the Army's supply system.

[94]

CHART 8

ORGANIZATION OF THE ARMY SERVICE FORCES, 15 AUGUST 1944

 

[95]

 

The Administrative Branch performed functions similar to the AAF Organizational Planning Division. It studied and developed plans for more effective organization and administration, and it promoted the use of industrial management techniques generally throughout the ASF. Its most important function was administrative troubleshooting. Employing civilian consultants, it conducted hundreds of special management surveys ranging from manpower conservation to co-ordinating the allocation of scarce commodities within the Army under the Controlled Materials Plan.60

 

The technical services, particularly the Ordnance Department, resented the Control Division and its efforts to impose management controls alien to their traditions of bureau autonomy. They regarded its efficiency experts as a horde of uninformed, meddlesome busybodies. What they resented most of all was the Control Division's persistent efforts to reorganize the Army's supply system along functional lines in the manner of the Root and March reforms. Functionalization as the technical services understood it meant their ultimate demise as independent operating agencies. Merely mentioning functionalization was enough to send the Chief of Ordnance, Maj. Gen. Levin H. Campbell, Jr., into a towering rage. As in the AAF, opposition stemmed from the fact that management control concepts were based on the experiences of modern industry rather than the Army. To combat arms officers, on the other

[96]

hand, management controls violated the principle of unity of command.61

 

The main purpose of Army Service Forces was to supply and equip the Army, including, theoretically, the Air Forces. The Marshall reorganization made this task difficult because it did not provide for the complete integration of the Army's supply services as it had the combat arms in Army Ground Forces. Instead the traditionally autonomous technical services remained intact, operating the Army's supply system and providing technical services under the direction of ASF. ASF was thus a holding company, a device industry generally regarded as inherently clumsy, inefficient, and difficult to control.

 

In World War II there were seven technical services. In order of seniority and tradition they were the Quartermaster Corps, the Corps of Engineers, the Medical Department, the Ordnance Department, the Signal Corps, the Chemical Warfare Service, and, after July 1942, the Transportation Corps, staffed at the top by engineers but created out of the Quartermaster Corps. Differing widely in organization and purpose, the technical services had two traditional features in common, their administrative independence and their dual roles as staff agencies and operating commands.62

 

As administratively independent agencies they continued to control their own organizations, procedures, personnel, intelligence, training, supply, and planning functions. They had their own budgets which accounted for over one-half the Army's appropriations. As operating agencies they had installations located in many Congressional districts, their principal source of political support.

 

Their dissimilarities were as marked as their similarities. They differed widely in their often archaic procedures, the result more of historical accident than of conscious planning.

[97]

These differences generated a prodigious amount of red tape, making it difficult for the department and ASF to control their operations and for industry to do business with them. ASF and the efficiency experts of its Control Division hoped to rationalize their structure and operations along sound businesslike principles.

 

All the Army technical services in practice combined commodity and service functions, but in most of them one element was clearly subordinate to the other. Some were organized along commodity lines like the Ordnance Department, which was responsible for the design, development, production, distribution, and maintenance of materiel from the cradle to the grave. The Corps of Engineers, the Medical Department, and the new Transportation Corps performed services for the Army and were organized along recognizable functional lines as such. The Quartermaster Corps and the Signal Corps combined both commodity and service features in their organization. This combination created serious management problems at times. The Signal Corps in World War II had difficulty in satisfying the requirements for producing communications and electronics equipment on the one hand and on the other of providing Army-wide communications services. In the Navy communications services were a function of naval command under the Chief of Naval Operations, while the Bureau of Ships and the Bureau of Aeronautics were responsible for the production of communications equipment.

 

As a general rule the military service elements of these organizations in the field were designated as corps such as the Corps of Engineers or the Transportation Corps, while each headquarters was designated by the historic title of its chief as in the Office of the Quartermaster General, the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, or the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Civilian employees were not members of the several military corps.63

[98]

That friction should- have developed between General Somervell's headquarters and the technical services is not surprising, given the latter's tradition of resisting executive control over their operations. It was just as natural for General Somervell, saddled with the responsibility as their commander for supplying the Army, to seek effective control over their operations.64

 

While General Somervell's principal mission was supply, the Marshall reorganization also assigned ASF responsibility for supervising the Army's four administrative services: The Adjutant General's Office, the Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Finance Department, and the Office of the Provost Marshal General. To these were added responsibility for a wide variety of special staff agencies, exempted stations, and boards, including the financial and budget functions of the Budget and Legislative Branch, the Budget Advisory Committee, the National Guard Bureau, the Office of the Executive for Reserve and ROTC Affairs, the Chief of the Special Services Division, and the Post Exchange Services. The Command and General Staff School and the United States Military Academy were assigned to ASF for administrative purposes, although G-3 was responsible for curriculum and doctrine. New agencies created in World War II and added to ASF's responsibilities were the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps), the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), and the Officer Procurement Service (OPS). The ASTP involved specialized training of enlisted personnel at civilian universities until the manpower shortage shut down the program, while the OPS recruited civilian experts directly as officers in the Army.65

 

The only apparent reason for assigning this ill-assorted collection of agencies to an essentially supply organization like ASF was to relieve General Marshall and his staff of their administration. Their assignment to ASF, conceived in haste by officers unfamiliar with War Department administration, created serious problems of administration and co-ordination.

[99]

General Somervell and the Control Division, interested in integrating ASF headquarters on functional lines, tried first to group these agencies under a loose Administrative Services Division. But they had so little in common with one another that this solution was abandoned in November 1943. Some were assigned to The Adjutant General's Office as essentially personnel functions; others became specialized staff agencies within ASF headquarters. Congressional pressure made the National Guard Bureau a separate staff agency, and in May 1945 it became once more a War Department Special Staff division. The Executive for Reserve and ROTC Affairs remained under the Directorate of Personnel until May 1945, when it, too, became a special staff division. Congressional pressure also led to the removal of the Budget Division together with the Budget Advisory Committee from the Chief of Finance's Office and its establishment as a special staff agency in July 1943.66

 

The status of the newly organized Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was the center of a running feud between its determined director, Col. Oveta Culp Hobby, and General Somervell's staff. At first placed under the Director of Personnel in November 1943, the Office of the Director of the Women's Army Corps became a special staff agency of ASF attached to General Somervell's office. His staff continued to veto Colonel Hobby's proposals for improving the status of women in the Army, and in February 1944 General Marshall agreed to remove the Office of the Director of the Women's Army Corps from ASF and place it under the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, whose chief, Maj. Gen. Miller G. White, proved to be more hospitable. Such was the opposition to the WAC among conservative Army officers that General Marshall personally had to intervene repeatedly to ensure that his directives aimed at improving the status of the WAC were carried out.67

 

Personnel functions within the Army were divided by the reorganization between G-1, as the policy planning agency, and ASF, which through the Directorate of Personnel and The Adjutant General's Office was responsible for personnel operations. In fact, responsibility for personnel was divided among

[100]

a great many agencies throughout the Army. The growing manpower shortage which emerged at the end of 1942 led to the creation of several more personnel agencies at the War Department Special Staff level, further diffusing responsibility for this function. ASF shared responsibility for one major supply function, the research and development of new materiel, with AGF and other agencies, both civilian and military. Postwar planning was another function initially assigned to General Somervell's headquarters but made a special staff agency when it began operations. The work of the judge Advocate General and the Chief of Chaplains was so professional in nature that they conducted their operations largely independent of control by ASF. They were attached to General Somervell's office for administrative purposes only.68

 

For reasons over which it on the whole had little control, ASF was less effective in supervising and directing these various administrative agencies than in performing its essential functions of supplying and equipping the Army. One major reason was the haste with which these functions were assigned to ASF without considering the inadvisability of assigning them to an agency concerned primarily with supply and distribution all over the world. Additionally, there were some functions like the National Guard Bureau and the Budget Division whose political implications were such that the Secretary or the Chief of Staff had to assume responsibility for them whether they wanted to or not. Finally, in some instances, the division of responsibility among numerous agencies of the department, particularly in the case of personnel operations, necessarily weakened ASF's control over these functions.

 

Army Service Forces responsibilities for administering the Army extended to the old corps areas, which were reorganized into eight, later nine, service commands plus the Military District of Washington (MDW). They became the Army's housekeepers. The theory behind the housekeeping concept was functional. The new service commands were to free the Army Air Forces and Army Ground Forces from such chores to concentrate on training the Army. Under this concept all Army

[101]

installations within the United States were divided into four classes. Class I stations, directly under the commanding generals of the service commands, included a wide variety of organizations from induction stations to general hospitals and prisoner of war camps not assigned to the AGF, AAF, or the technical services. Class II installations housed AGF troops and Class III AAF units. Class IV stations were those that traditionally had been under the command of the chiefs of the technical and administrative services.

 

The housekeeping functions the service commands performed at Class II, III, and IV installations were standard community services such as construction of buildings and their maintenance and the provision of public utilities, post exchanges, and recreation facilities.69 The friction between ASF "landlords" and their "tenants" developed because ASF, acting through the service commands and post commanders, determined the allocation of men, money, and materiel for these functions. AGF and AAF commanders might request facilities, but it was the post commander or his superiors who determined what money was to be spent where. In one instance a division commander requested construction of a .22-caliber range. The post commander disapproved, and the dispute went all the way up through channels to General Marshall personally for decision. 70

 

Because it sought complete independence from the Army the AAF naturally wanted control over its own housekeeping functions, including control over the allocation of funds. This dispute involved the technical services as well because AAF wished also to set up its own independent technical air services. A temporary compromise, reached in 1944, designated the chiefs of the technical services rather than ASF as "agents of the War Department General Staff" in supervising their respective activities at AAF installations. The technical services to this degree regained their status as special staff agencies reporting to the Chief of Staff rather than General Somervell.71  

[102]

Combat arms officers as well as those from the technical services wanted to abolish the service command idea because it violated the sacred principle of unity of command. If they were to be responsible for training troops then they also wanted the authority to control everything needed to do the job, including housekeeping functions.72  

[103]