Army & Navy – Spare Parts

The Army shifted 80,000 airmen and service troops into the Ground Forces last week. Like new recruits, they will be sent ultimately to the Army’s great manpower pools—”replacement depots.” But none will be used to form new divisions. The U.S. will finish the war with approximately the same number of divisions with which it started. Today new men are being used solely to keep the original divisions going.*

The replacement system is no improvisation. The ability of the U.S. to fight two wars on fronts some 13,000 miles apart—on a scale which no other nation in the world can match—is due in part to this plan, which General George Catlett Marshall laid down in the beginning of the war.

The Casuals. The old procedure was to replace entire divisions by other divisions. For every two divisions in the field a third was held in reserve. Great numbers of men had to be kept always ready behind the lines; sometimes divisions were chopped to bits before they could be pulled out and remanned, while new outfits were sent up front. Marshall changed the system.

His method had a cold parallel in the methods of U.S. mass production: interchangeable parts for engines, guns, instruments.

General Marshall called for interchangeable human parts. Men were trained to act as fighters in whatever divisional machine they found themselves. Until they were assigned they were called, appropriately, “casuals.”

New men are now given 17 weeks of basic recruit training. Picked men get additional specialized, technical or officer training. Then they are shipped overseas in a casual company, put in a replacement depot for sorting over, finally sent to the manpower stockpile for eventual use as tankmen, artillerymen, infantrymen—whatever they have been tagged. Between induction call and combat may be only ten months.

When a division in action loses a pan or parts (a technical sergeant, a second lieutenant, a platoon, a whole company), the replacement is promptly supplied—how promptly was revealed by the entries in a captured German officer’s diary. Having battered a U.S. division to pieces, the Germans laid plans for a knockout in the morning. But by morning the astounded Germans discovered that they were faced again with a U.S. division fighting at full strength.

*Most of the men will end up in the infantry, which has the highest percentage of casualties. In the European Theater, the infantry comprises less than one-third of all U.S. troops, has suffered two-thirds of total casualties.