No Bed of Roses: The Manpower Crisis Hits Home
By Elizabeth Shannon
In June 1944, only days after his eighteenth birthday, Robert Pogue of Cincinnati was inducted into the U.S. Army. On Christmas night, he left for a port of embarkation to France. On February 3, 1945, he was killed in active combat. In just seven months, he went from civilian to soldier to casualty, all before his nineteenth birthday.
Later that February, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio told Pogue’s tragic story on the floor of the Senate. Taft had received telegrams and letters from many of his constituents citing specific cases of young Americans who had been inducted at eighteen, given “inadequate training,” hastily sent overseas and immediately assigned to units engaged in combat on the front. Such a policy, the senator declared, was “wholly without justification,” “grossly unfair to the boys involved” and a “violation” of earlier statements made by the War Department which had been widely regarded as “definite promises.”
Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall was deeply sympathetic to the plight of parents whose boys were on the front lines. Shortly after the Normandy invasion, he had paid a brief visit to the temporary Anzio Cemetery in Italy, leaving a heavyhearted tribute to his own stepson who had recently been killed in combat. But neither this personal tragedy nor the strain of public and congressional opinion prevented him from keeping the big picture in view.
U.S. forces were facing what Marshall would later call “the final manpower crisis of the war.” Prolonged and heavy fighting in both Europe and the Pacific since the fall of 1944 had drastically depleted the ranks. The great need to maintain momentum during the decisive battles in progress required a steady flow of replacements. All other replacement resources, however, had been exhausted. It was regrettably time to draw inductees from a lower-age bracket.
Unfortunately, Taft’s speech fomented public and congressional criticism of sending eighteen-year-olds into combat. There was widespread concern over the short period of time between the induction of young soldiers and their becoming casualties; the commitment of eighteen-year-olds to battle in lieu of older and more experienced soldiers available for combat assignments; and the length of the allotted training period for troop replacements.
Marshall took great pains to dispel these widespread misconceptions and to explain the War Department’s policy from a military perspective. He enumerated the thousands of soldiers who had been stripped from divisions in the United States to fill the quotas of replacements before any eighteen-year-olds had been sent overseas.
He clarified the vast difference between time required to train an entire division and time required to train individual infantry replacements. He gave his assurance, based on personal observations in training centers and on the front, that these young men were being trained more intensively and completely than American soldiers had ever been trained in the nation’s history. He explained how the present procedure – painful as it was to endure – would bring the war to an earlier conclusion, thereby saving more lives, wounds and dollars than if they delayed operations with slower replacements.
These well-reasoned arguments, however, did not settle the issue for the critics. Over the next few months, Marshall continued to face the enormous pressure of public and congressional opinion while attempting to meet the urgent needs of the front lines.
About a week after Taft’s public invective of the War Department, Marshall confided the difficulties of his position to Eisenhower. He had spent the previous day answering attacks on the use of young men and the inadequacy of their training while also answering radios from field commanders emphatically protesting against the shortage in replacements. “The combined circumstances could hardly create a more illogical pressure.” Caught between the demands of the home front and the demands of the fighting front, he wearily concluded: “Making war in democracy is not a bed of roses.”
This manpower crisis reminds us that leadership does not always take the form of decisive moments. Often, it involves managing the conditions of uncertainty or instability in which decisive events are taking place. Marshall and his War Department associates did not settle the crisis firmly and resolutely with a single policy. Rather, they handled and directed it carefully, adapting to circumstances as they arose.
Moreover, they handled and directed it through the turbulence of the conflicting – and often exasperating – demands and expectations of others, a challenge humorously highlighted in Eisenhower’s response to Marshall: “Sometimes when I get tired of trying to arrange the blankets smoothly over several prima donnas in the same bed I think no one person in the world can have so many illogical problems. I read about your struggles concerning the eighteen-year-old men in combat…and went right back to work with a grin.”