National Defense: Job for the Engineers

To Capitol Hill last week went the draft of a bill to put the Army’s gargantuan $3,000,000,000 construction program into more competent hands. The bill did not say that. It proposed simply to take Army construction away from the Quartermaster Corps and turn it over to the Corps of Engineers.

By itself the bill was enough to set Army tongues wagging in officers’ clubs from Manila to Trinidad. They wagged faster because the measure had been drawn at the instance, not of meddling politicians, but of the War Department itself. It had the approval of Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson, Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall and all the rest of the Army’s top crust, with one exception. That exception was the Quartermaster General, Edmund Bristol Gregory. True to Army tradition, he said little more than that he was against it.

The War Department’s bill was open admission that the Quartermaster Corps had done a substandard job of housing soldiers, building flying fields, providing industrial facilities, storehouses, new roads and railway trackage for the great national defense emergency. It was recognition of what seemed an obvious fact: that the Engineers, staffed by the cream of West Point graduating classes of the past 20 years, buttressed by crack reservists and National Guardsmen from the country’s best technical jobs, could do the job with vastly more efficiency.

Almost since the first shovel of dirt was turned in the emergency construction program the Quartermaster Corps has been under fire. Bereft once before of its construction functions, during World War I, it had got them back, in 1920 (by recommendation of General Pershing), since then has had lots of experience building barracks, officers’ quarters, CCC camps, flying fields.

Yet investigations of the recent Army building program by earnest Representative Albert Joseph Engel of Michigan, and by the Truman Committee, showed that many a camp had been put in the wrong place, that one had had to be abandoned because there was no adequate water supply, that costs had run double and triple the estimates of the Quartermaster Corps.

Against some of these criticisms West Pointer Gregory had a fair defense if he had been free to talk. Camp sites are not picked by the Corps itself but by Corps Area boards which have only one Quartermaster Corps member. Picking is almost invariably complicated by pork-barrel politics. Moreover, Congressional dawdling with emergency measures forced the Corps to start its big program much too late, made it take heroic measures for speed. So costs were skyrocketed by high wages, strikes, tremendous bills for overtime.

The Quartermaster Corps generally did its prime job: providing the best housing, whatever the cost, in time to shelter emergency soldiers. But the sad and overweighing fact was that the Quartermaster Corps job was not topflight.

General Gregory could see the handwriting on the wall last spring when 30% of his construction job was taken away from him. The 30% was construction of Air Corps facilities and Atlantic bases. He could see more of the fateful hand writing when his construction division was placed under a crack Engineer: slim, 49-year-old Brigadier General Brehon Somervell.

Without construction (and maintenance of Army facilities, also headed for the Engineers) the Quartermaster Corps still has its gargantuan job of feeding and clothing an army of 1,572,000. But the loss of construction and maintenance work strikes at an equally important function. Of 7,559 officers now on Quartermaster duty 1,404 are on construction and maintenance duty.

In World War I, the Quartermaster Corps lost not only its construction job but the job of running the Army’s motor transport, which was given to a separate wartime unit. Last week the Munitions Building bristled with reports that that pattern was to be repeated. Scheduled by rumor to take over motor transport and boss it for World War II was no engineer, no soldier, but a tough transportation man: Chicago’s John D. (Drive-Ur-Self) Hertz.