(after this debacle, congress learned how many medical staffers were needed back in the states, but were stuck overseas with nothing medical to do, learning the nomenclature of the M1 rifle, the machine gun, the carbine, the hand grenade, close order drill, compass reading, map reading, first aid and sanitation; inspecting latrines, kitchens, and fly traps (not making any of this up, Sept 1945, congressional record) but I'm not going to repost all that, it's at the link if you want to dive into it page 131 https://d.lib.msu.edu/etd/23619)
50 percent of the physicians in the service did not see combat service or deal with casualties but did purely administrative work.
The problem became
particularly acute in early July when transportation
authorities found it necessary to move the thousands of
redeployed veterans from Europe to the United States.
Several things became quickly apparent. Either the rail roads were not sufficient to handle the vast number of servicemen or there were some monumental mistakes in scheduling, as members of the armed forces found it necessary
to wait an inordinate amount of time before they were loaded
on board a train.
Adding to an already unpleasant situation,
too, was the general crowding on the trains: extremely long
lines to the dining cars, and in the mornings and evenings,
lines to the restrooms.
Equipment was poor: lights did not
always work; seats were sometimes torn. And particularly irksome to servicemen was the discomfort of traveling
great distances without Pullman cars.
The hot July weather
did not help matters, either.
During this hot month of July a series of incidents
happened that dramatized some of the problems of redeployment - incidents that were publicized by the newspapers.
In
Memphis, for example, an irate railroad worker Carl Cannon
spotted a group of German prisoners of war traveling in
Pullman coaches. This was a newsworthy item, for there were
literally thousands of GI's home by now who had ridden miles
and miles in French box cars (the notorious 40 and 8) and
who could not understand why enemy prisoners of war in this
country did not travel in the same fashion.
Unknown to
Cannon perhaps was that these were hospital cases and psycho-
neurotics.
At any rate, he chose to call the local newspaper,
and one of the supervisors of the railroad sought to stop
him, which spoke better of the supervisor's courage than it
did of his wisdom, for Cannon was a 300 pound former athlete
and one time boxing coach of Mississippi State. Cannon said it was necessary for him to "slap down" the supervisor before he could make the call.
Within about a week's time from the incident that
happened concerning the German prisoners of war, a rather
voluble Colonel (Peter DePaulo, in a post a couple after this) in the Transportation Corps spoke out on
some of his ideas concerning the transportation of GI's.
It was far from adequate, according to him, and he was
particularly condemnatory of the railway equipment which
he classified as strictly "toonerville."
The Colonel's
statement which was picked up and spread by the newspapers
aroused national attention, and many people thought that
they recognized the Colonel's name, which may have been the
case, for Lieutenant Colonel Peter DePaolo was the winner of the 1925 Indianapolis 500.
The Army definitely did not appreciate
the Colonel's remark and quickly sped him down the road to
a rapid retirement. The Official explanation was that the
Colonel had more than the sufficient number of points to
be discharged. No explanation was given as to the actual
number of points that he possessed; however many, they
were more than enough.
Much less spectacular than any of these incidents,
but cumulatively more important perhaps were the letters
to Congressmen, phone calls and letters to newspapers, and
the private gripes of GI's that railway transportation was inferior.
Some blamed the railroads for the situation;
some, the Army, and some, the Office of Defense Transportation. The Mead Committee opened hearings to determine
just what the situation was with the railways, with the
hope of making some meaningful and constructive suggestions.
The Committee found, as had been maintained by the
ODT, that there was a shortage of labor on the railways and
tried to secure from the Army a pledge to furlough or
discharge men to work on them.
The Army was reluctant to
do this; they needed railway workers themselves during this
period of redeployment. They had already furloughed some
during the month of June, and, most of all, they did not
want to interfere with the point system.
The Committee
stressed that there were many former railway workers who
were not working on the Army's railroads and asked that
these be released. To stress the wisdom and practicality of furloughing these men, the Committee repeated the
observation of the Director of the CDT that one good railway
worker at work on the railroads was worth a hundred railway
workers in the Army. But the Army was still reluctant to
release them.
This particularly angered the Chairman of the
Committee who stated that there were a number of areas of
which he was aware (Iran for one) where railway labor
battalions were being phased out. Nor could the Chairman
‘understand, as he later told the newspapers, why American
Soldiers were used on the French railroads at a time when there was wide-spread unemployment throughout France.
There was to be sure, a shortage of all railway
cars, but the shortage of Pullman cars was particularly
acute. Undoubtedly, the wear and tear involved in
transporting hundreds of thousands of troops was probably
the most significant reason for this, but apparently there
had not been a sufficient number of them manufactured during
the war.
Burton K. Wheeler said on the floor of the Senate
that many of those that had been manufactured during the
war had been sent to South America.
Senator Scott Lucas of
Illinois reminded the Senate that the Committee to
Investigate the National Defense Program had in the past
opposed the manufacture of additional Pullman cars as a
luxury that was not in the spirit of the war. At any rate, the ODT did its part, and called for the transfer of 895
Pullmans that had been used for civilian service and ordered
the manufacture of an additional 1000 cars.
Meanwhile, back at the war Department, pressure was
mounting. For a period of several weeks, the Army had been
taking a beating in the newspapers. Thoughtful articles
such as that which appeared in the New Orleans Times
Picayune tried to be fair and understand the Army's position
but at the same time stressed the importance of having the
nation's railways operate as efficiently as possible, which
the Army could help with the release of railway workers.
The last day of July the Army finally relented and announced
that it would release 2,063 men engaged in work in railway
shop battalions, and 1,362 men involved in active railway
service in Europe would be released to work on the railroads
in the United States.
A few days later with the hope of
scurrying up more workers, Patterson wrote the Deputy Commanding General of the Army Air Force and reminded him
that the previous June the war Department had asked for the
furlough of 4000 railway workers of which the Air Force was
expected to furnish 1,755, but as of the date of the writing of the letter (Aug. 2) had only furnished 814
In view
of that, Patterson asked the Air Force to speed up its
efforts. Within two weeks of the time that the Army began
the acceleration of its efforts to discharge some men and
furlough others, the war ended. There were no further
demands on the Armed Forces to release men to work on the
nation's railways.
The debates that were conducted over the nation's
coal mines and railroads, and where to get men to work them,
were indeed acrimonious at times. Unfortunately the Army
alienated a number of the members of the Mead Committee and
much of the general public, as well as drawing the ire of
prominent Senators as well.
Edwin Johnson of Colorado
accused it of hoarding manpower;
Robert Taft said that Army
policy was blind, stupid, and stubborn.
Kenneth Wherry of
Nebraska said that the Army was deliberately keeping men in the military in order to influence Congressional policy
toward the Armed Forces.
The end of the war drawing near seemed to evoke deep civil yearnings of the people, and to stimulate the desire to return to normal, everyday things. It awoke at the same time the darker side of their natures; they became less trusting; more inclined to doubt. Particularly they now suspected the purity of motive of the military. Reasons advanced for a position, or offered in way of an explanation, accepted without qualm in former times, were more likely to be questioned now. It was, after all, the temper of the times.
Congressmen realized this, and to an
extent they were even responsible for it, but they welcomed
the opportunity it gave them to reassert the civil power over the military; to curb the ambitious officer; to demand
economy in expenditures; to question the need of personnel;
to set limits on the numbers of officers and men.
At the time of Japan's formal surrender, there were millions of idle men sitting around camps. This angered the men in the camps; it angered wives and parents; and, most assuredly, it angered Congress. It was an intolerable state of affairs, and Congress took it upon itself to determine why in the old Army phrase there were men who were "busy doing nothing."
The most vocal suspicion was that the armed forces wanted to remain large because the number of officers and the availability of promotion were dependent on the size of the armed services. The brass wanted to hang onto their jobs, which were better than anything they ever had in civilian life, and the number of officers was dependent on the size of the Army.
(I could go on, the rest of this dissertation for a doctorate of philosophy is extensively filled with facts from congressional records, newspapers, letters from soldiers, etc but I don't think it relates to my focus on vehicular stuff)
(but if you want to read about the absolute shit show the Army was engaged, get to page 123 of https://d.lib.msu.edu/etd/23619 for the info on cutting lawns with bayonets,
picking up
cigarette butts and mopping floors, clean the rifles of officer
candidates, and pick up leaves in one place and put them in
another ((Instead of getting demobilized out of the Army now that the war was OVER))page 128 the Navy shamefully wasted manpower and
equipment and spoke of transports flying from coast to coast
carrying sandbags
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