Chapter 6: Civilian Personnel and Training
The Ordnance Department during World War II was one of the country’s largest employers of civilian workers. No other Army technical service had so large a work force, and the payrolls of few private industries approached in size that of Ordnance. The overseas operations of the Department were carried on by military personnel, but practically all Ordnance installations in the United States—the arsenals, depots, proving grounds, and district offices—were manned by civilians, with only a few officers and enlisted men filling administrative and specialist positions. The only important exceptions to this rule were the military training centers, which were of necessity staffed almost exclusively by officers and enlisted men. All told, the Ordnance Department mobilized more than a quarter of a million workers during World War II, roughly one fourth of all the civilians who worked for the War Department.1 It trained them in hundreds of different specialties, assigned them to new and unfamiliar tasks, and made steady progress toward developing their skills and promoting efficient teamwork.
In so doing, Ordnance was following its traditional practice. To a large extent an industrial organization, Ordnance had from the earliest days of its history leaned heavily on skilled civilian workmen to staff its manufacturing arsenals and, particularly after the first World War, had come to depend increasingly on civilian employees to operate its storage depots, carry on research projects, arid fill thousands of clerical and administrative positions in Washington and the field offices. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, in fact, civilians on the Ordnance payroll far outnumbered officers and enlisted men, their number rising from a low point of 4,250 in 1924 to 27,000 in June 1940, while the total military strength of the Department remained relatively stable at about 3,000.2
In addition to bringing a manyfold increase in the number of Ordnance civilian workers, World War II raised new problems for the Ordnance personnel division.3 Habits of thought acquired during the years between the wars when economy and careful deliberation were the order of the day had to be discarded, and procedures for hiring, training, transferring, and promoting employees had to be streamlined. Despite having entered the
war without a well-defined personnel policy and with only a small staff for administering regulations, Ordnance not only developed an effective personnel organization but also contributed in large measure to the formulation of a sound civilian personnel policy for the entire War Department.
Growth of the Working Force, 1938–45
The World War II expansion of the civilian working force began in the summer of 1938. From 12,480 in July 1938, the number of Ordnance employees mounted to over 21,000 in January 1940—an increase of more than 60 percent in eighteen months.4 Virtually all of this increase was in the field rather than in the so-called departmental service in Washington, and of all field employees, nearly 90 percent worked in the manufacturing arsenals. Most of the remaining 10 percent were employed in the storage depots, including 500 civilian workers in depots in Panama, Hawaii, and the Philippines.
The rise in the number of civilian workers between 1938 and 1940 was only the beginning of the Department’s World War II expansion. With over three billion dollars allotted to Ordnance for the fiscal year 1941, the number of civilians on the payroll jumped from 21,051 in January 1940 to 96,263 in December 1941, a 357 percent increase in twenty-four months. After Pearl Harbor the expansion proceeded at an even faster pace and continued throughout 1942. By February 1943 Ordnance employment had reached its World War II peak of 262,772. A single arsenal, Frankford, now employed almost as many civilians as had the entire Department three years earlier.5 Furthermore, in January 1942 nearly all War Department employees were put on a forty-eight hour schedule, thus increasing substantially the number of man-hours worked each week.
The civilian work force in February 1943 was not only larger than before the war, its distribution was much different. Whereas in January 1940 nine tenths of all Ordnance civilians worked in the manufacturing arsenals, these installations in February 1943 accounted for only about one third of the total work force, or 95,000. The district offices, which had employed only 239 workers in January 1940, had 37,500 employees on their rolls. Thus the arsenals and district offices together accounted for roughly half the total civilian work force in February 1943. The other half worked in the depots and proving grounds, and in the motor bases recently transferred from the Quartermaster Corps.
As the nationwide manpower shortage reached an acute stage early in 1943, the Ordnance Department intensified its manpower conservation efforts, and the number of civilian employees dropped steadily throughout the year. Not all of the reductions stemmed from the manpower conservation program; some came from cutbacks in certain phases of the production schedule and others from increased efficiency as individual workers gained experience on the job. The net result was a reduction in the number of Ordnance civilian employees from 262,772 in February 1943 to 176,384 in December 1943, a drop of 34 percent in less than a year. During the next sixteen months Ordnance civilian employment remained relatively
Ceremonial Dance at the dedication of the Indian village, Wingate, New Mexico, Ordnance Depot
stable at the 176,000 level, except for a temporary increase early in 1945. It declined slowly after V-E Day and then dropped sharply upon the surrender of Japan in August. By the end of 1945 the number of civilians on the Ordnance payroll was 86,667, roughly the same as in November 1941.
Recruiting Ordnance Workers
During the early stages of the emergency, recruitment was carried on primarily by the Civil Service Commission, which was, in theory, prepared to supply properly qualified individuals to fill any government job under its jurisdiction. But as the labor market tightened during 1940 and 1941, the commission was unable to supply the thousands of workers needed by war agencies. Greater authority to hire new workers was granted to local commanders, and after Pearl Harbor more aggressive recruiting methods were adopted, including newspaper and radio publicity and the opening of recruiting offices in centers of labor supply. In the Boston area, for example, a sound truck toured the city during a War Manpower Commission recruiting drive, and a recruiting office was set up on the Boston Common. Ordnance field installations listed their personnel needs with the district offices of the US Employment Service, and recruiting teams composed of Ordnance and Civil Service Commission representatives traveled from town to town enlisting typists
and stenographers. In all of their efforts, however, Ordnance installations complained that they were handicapped by Civil Service laws and regulations in competing with private industry for the services of available workers. Private industry could offer inducements such as promises of quick promotions and production bonuses that could not be matched by any government agency.6
For the Ordnance Department, recruitment was most difficult at isolated ammunition depots such as Black Hills in South Dakota, Navajo in Arizona, and Wingate in New Mexico. With no large communities nearby, these depots had virtually no local labor supplies to draw upon, nor existing housing and related accommodations for workers brought in from other areas. All of these depots drew a large proportion of their workers from Indian reservations. Recruiting officers, assisted by representatives of the Civil Service Commission, Indian agents, and tribal chiefs, sent trucks to the reservations, gave examinations on the spot, and immediately transported the recruits to the depots. Indian villages built at the depots were dedicated with appropriate ceremonies; weaving racks and looms were provided for Indian women; trading posts and schools were established; and arrangements were made so that the Indians would not have to forfeit their land because they could not farm it.7
Other installations resorted to different expedients. At Watervliet Arsenal, for example, groups of so-called commandos were formed by local business and professional men who volunteered to accept employment in the evening or on weekends to help ease the labor shortage. Elsewhere, high school students and teachers were given short-term jobs during the summer months. More than 500 natives of Jamaica and Barbados were employed at Pica-tinny. Several thousand German and Italian prisoners of war were employed at Ordnance depots and at the Erie Proving Ground, but, by the terms of the Geneva Convention, they could be used only on work not directly connected with the war, such as maintaining roads, loading and unloading nonmilitary supplies, operating heating plants, and making boxes and crates.8 No such restrictions applied to the Italian Service Units, which were composed of volunteers who supported the reconstructed Italian Government. These units were used on a wide variety of projects and proved their worth.9
By far the most important departure from traditional Ordnance practice was the recruiting of large numbers of women for work in shops and depots. Even before the outbreak of war the proportion of women employees in the Ordnance Department had risen from 11.5 percent in the summer of 1940 to 17 percent in July 1941. By the summer of 1942 it had jumped to 30 percent. This rapid increase took place before the manpower shortage reached serious proportions and was accomplished without much formal direction from the Office, Chief of Ordnance. Late in the summer of 1942 the Ordnance civilian personnel division launched an aggressive campaign to induce field installations to employ even more women workers, and as a result, the proportion of
Women inspectors working at Picatinny Arsenal
women employed rose to a peak of 47.6 percent by the spring of 1945.10
There were, of course, many difficulties encountered in recruiting women war workers. Most of the women who applied for work in Army installations lacked previous experience in industrial employment and had, therefore, to be given rather extensive training before being put to work. With some of the more elaborate job processes performed by skilled workmen at the arsenals, “job dilution” was essential before women could be taken on and assigned to the simpler steps in the process, leaving the more difficult tasks for the men. The average woman’s lack of physical strength barred her from many jobs, particularly in warehouses where workers were frequently required to lift heavy packages. State laws restricting the weight women workers could lift also had to be considered, as did laws forbidding the employment of women on night shifts. But, in the opinion of most Ordnance administrators, these problems were insignificant in comparison with the contribution to the war production program made by women workers.11
The Struggle for Delegated Authority
In administering its civilian personnel at the start of the war emergency, the Ordnance Department had to comply with the rules and regulations issued by two agencies—the Civil Service Commission and the War Department Civilian Personnel Division. With the former, Ordnance had little complaint and usually managed to adjust promptly the differences of opinion that arose. With the latter there was mounting friction during 1940 and 1941, largely due to the decision of the War Department division to maintain its tight control over personnel activities and not to delegate to the Chief of Ordnance the discretionary authority he desired.12
Concentration of authority in the War Department division had gradually developed during the 1920s and 1930s when the number of civilians on the Army payroll had been small enough to permit close supervision of all hiring and firing by a central office in Washington. During the fall and winter of 1941) General Wesson became convinced that the number of civilian employees in the War Department was so large that it was administrative folly to expect that a single office in Washington could, or should, review every personnel action taken by each branch. He urged the War Department division to confine itself to top-level staff planning and policy formulation, and to delegate to subordinate commands full responsibility for putting the plans and policies into effect. The director of the division, Mr. A. Heath Onthank, did not favor such sweeping delegation of responsibility. He recognized the need for gradually assigning authority to lower administrative levels and eliminating some of the congestion in Washington, but felt that hasty delegation of power to untrained personnel in the technical services would lead to endless difficulties. In December 1940, as an intermediate step toward decentralization, he established field personnel offices in each of the corps areas and authorized them to deal directly with local Army installations.13
In January 1941 General Wesson wrote a strongly worded memorandum to the Secretary of War requesting that Ordnance be given authority to deal directly with the Civil Service Commission and to hire and fire civilians without referring each case to the War Department for prior approval. He charged that the delays and difficulties encountered under existing procedures had become “a serious impediment to the prosecution of the National Defense Program,” and would become even more serious in the future as Ordnance operations assumed larger proportions.14 The Secretary of War promptly rejected this request on the ground that Ordnance had not made use of the War Department field offices and had not itself fully decentralized personnel functions to its own field establishments.15 In his reply to this decision, General Wesson defended the Ordnance record on decentralization and called attention to the fact that the arsenals, plants, and depots had not used
the War Department field offices because they were all exempt from corps area control. He bluntly declared that he had no intention of granting to these Ordnance installations, many of which had been established only recently and were manned by inexperienced personnel, full authority to deal with the War Department field offices, and thus bypass all control by the Ordnance office in Washington.16
On the day that he wrote this reply, General Wesson presented the Ordnance case to the Crowell Committee, which had been appointed to study the problem.17 He referred to the policy followed during World War I of delegating virtually complete authority in civilian personnel matters to the Ordnance Department, and he contrasted that policy with the cumbersome procedures under which Ordnance was still operating in January 1941. But when the Crowell Committee made its report on 7 February it recommended the policy the War Department Civilian Personnel Division had urged all along—that Ordnance and other War Department agencies delegate to field establishments full authority to handle personnel transactions through the civilian personnel field offices in the corps areas.18
All of the War Department agencies concerned concurred in the Crowell Committee recommendations except the Ordnance Department. Several conferences were held during the following weeks to discuss the problem, but little progress was made. Ordnance neither delegated authority to its field establishments, nor used the War Department field offices, and the War Department personnel division continued to hold close control over the appointment, classification, and promotion of Ordnance civilians. The only definite step taken was to assign to Ordnance, as the Crowell Committee had recommended, a “service unit” composed of sixteen personnel experts from the War Department to expedite approval of departmental personnel actions.
On 16 December, less than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, General Wesson repeated the request he had made in January 1941. Before an answer was received, War Department Orders “N” came out, giving all the technical services authority to deal directly with the Civil Service Commission on departmental appointments and ordering them to delegate to their field establishments within six weeks authority to utilize the War Department civilian personnel field offices.19 Mr. Onthank informed General Wesson that these orders constituted an answer to his memorandum of 16 December and assured him that they provided “all necessary latitude in the procurement and management of civilian personnel.” Wesson was unable to share Onthank’s optimistic view of the effect of Orders “N.” Instead, he saw disastrous implications in the new directive. It put into effect, he wrote, “radical and undesirable changes in personnel procedure” that would “inevitably result in confusion and chaos.” He contended that it withdrew control of personnel procedures in the field from the
Chief of Ordnance and placed control in the hands of War Department field agencies staffed by inexperienced personnel with little or no knowledge of Ordnance Department problems and policies.20
The argument over the application of Orders “N” to Ordnance field personnel came to an end early in February 1942 when the Secretary of War agreed to exempt the Ordnance Department from the order until a classification manual could be prepared to guide Ordnance personnel officers in the field. The manual did not appear until early 1943, and by that time Orders “N” had been rescinded. In the meantime. the March 1942 reorganization of the War Department materially changed the personnel picture. All the technical and administrative services were placed under the jurisdiction of the Army Service Forces, which thereafter assumed the burden of fighting for delegated authority.
The Influence of ASF Personnel Policies
The influence of the Army Service Forces on Ordnance civilian personnel activities was direct and far reaching. The new headquarters not only carried on the fight for delegated authority, but also formulated a broad statement of personnel policy to apply throughout the ASF. It vigorously pushed wage standardization, encouraged the development of improved training programs, and exerted pressure on all the technical services to employ workers more efficiently and reduce the number of employees. In so doing the ASF, as the employer of more than three fourths of all War Department civilian workers, to a great extent set the pattern of civilian personnel management for the Army as a whole.
The development of the ASF personnel program began in April 1942 with the appointment of a staff of experts to survey the status of personnel management in the field installations of the technical services and corps areas.21 As a sample, the group selected for study the ASF installations in the New York area, including the Ordnance district office, Picatinny Arsenal, and offices and depots of other technical services. After visiting these establishments the investigators reached some rather disturbing conclusions. They reported that the activity carried on under the name of “personnel work” at the ASF installations was of a routine clerical nature and was not regarded as a major management responsibility; that recruitment, induction, and training of workers did not receive the attention they deserved; and that wage administration was not governed by any uniform standard.22
When the ASF personnel division tackled the problem of remedying these deficiencies it found itself blocked at the start, as Ordnance had been for the past two years, by the concentration of authority in the War Department Civilian Personnel Division. After several months of discussion, however, the policy that the Ordnance Department had fought for since the beginning of the emergency was adopted. In August 1942 the Secretary of War issued Orders “M” delegating to each of the three major commands—Army
Air Forces, Army Ground Forces, and Army Service Forces—authority to take final action on nearly all civilian personnel transactions. ASF immediately passed on this authority to Ordnance and the other services and directed them, in turn, to decentralize personnel operations to their field establishments. Since there was now no question of Ordnance field installations having to deal with War Department field offices, and since most of the new depots and plants were now staffed with more experienced personnel officers, the Ordnance Department promptly complied with the ASF directive.23
In August ASF published an official statement of policy emphasizing the need for closer attention to such matters as job placement, safety, training, and the establishment of equitable rates of pay.24 The new Chief of Ordnance, General Campbell, immediately directed his personnel branch to work toward these objectives and also persuaded a prominent industrialist, Mr. Walter C. Pew of the Sun Oil Company, to accept a commission as a lieutenant colonel and come into the Ordnance Department as head of the civilian personnel branch, Mr. Pew accepted the post with the understanding that he was to work closely with the veteran assistant chief of the branch, Maj. George W. DeCamp, who had a thorough knowledge of government procedures. These two men, the one representing private industry and the other government service, were selected by General Campbell to foster in the field of personnel administration the concept of the “Industry-Ordnance team.” They served throughout the rest of the war as directors of Ordnance civilian personnel activity.
One of the first problems tackled by the ASF civilian personnel branch in the summer of 1942 was establishment of uniform methods of wage administration in the supply services and corps areas. For employees in the so-called Classification Act positions, rates of pay were fixed by law, but for many in the ungraded positions, such as machinists, munitions handlers, and carpenters, there was no uniformity.25 No standard wage scale was used throughout the Army, and, as a result, wages paid at Ordnance installations were sometimes out of line with wages paid for similar work elsewhere in government and in private industry. In many labor areas the Army technical services found themselves in competition with each other and with the Navy, Air Forces, and private industry. The situation was obviously one that demanded the immediate attention of the ASF personnel division, for it was a source of endless dissatisfaction among employees and contributed to high turnover rates.26
For many years the Ordnance Department had determined the wages of its ungraded employees by surveying the rates of pay for comparable work in local private industries, and had prescribed a set of basic principles to be followed by local commanding officers in making wage surveys.27 In 1941 Ordnance was the only technical service using wage surveys to
determine rates of pay. In the spring of 1942 it went a step further by experimenting at two arsenals, Springfield and Picatinny, with the method of job evaluation developed by the National Metal Trades Association.28 Because this method of classifying jobs according to their level of difficulty represented the practice of the most progressive metal trades industries, its use by Ordnance was carefully studied by the ASF personnel division during the summer of 1942. When the ASF manual on wage administration was issued in October, it embodied the essential principles of the wage survey system and labor classification methods used by the Ordnance Department. The manual was henceforth used as a guide for wage administration in the ASF, and, further to assure uniformity among ASF installations, all wage boards were thereafter headed by a service command officer and included representatives of all the ASF installations in the locality under survey.29
Another area of personnel management that received close attention throughout the ASF, particularly during 1943, was conservation of manpower. During the early phase of the emergency, when production had been the paramount need, conservation had been a secondary consideration. In September 1942, as both war production and selective service made heavy demands on the nation’s manpower resources, the Ordnance Department took steps to cope with the situation by ordering all its field establishments to reduce their staffs.30 In November it published a small pamphlet, generally known as the “Blue Book,” which outlined a program of conservation, and on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, General Campbell, launching a drive to make substantial cuts in the Ordnance payroll, issued a freeze order to the effect that no vacancies were to be filled except with the personal approval of the local commanding officer or district chief.31 This drive was commended by General Somervell who ordered copies of the Blue Book to be sent, as a model, to all the other technical services.
To conserve manpower, Ordnance made organizational studies to improve operating efficiency, eliminated all but the most essential activities, reduced the number of guards, firefighters, and chauffeurs, and discharged the least efficient employees and chronic absentees.32 In the Ordnance districts the largest reductions were made in the ranks of inspectors, mainly because of the increased efficiency of individual inspectors, improved inspection by manufacturers, and adoption of sampling techniques. The Pittsburgh Ordnance District, for example, dropped 800 inspectors from its rolls during 1943, and the total employment in that district at the end of 1943 was 50 percent less than in October 1942.33
The Field Service was hit hardest by the manpower conservation drive in 1943. By
Table 9: Civilian accident frequency rates at ASF installations
| Total ASF | Service Commands | Ordnance | Chemical Warfare Service | Corps of Engineers | Transportation Corps | |
| 1943 | 12.3 | 14, 2 | 7. 1 | 37.7 | 13.3 | 20. 2 |
| 1944 | 8,7 | 9. 8 | 5. 5 | 11.8 | 10. 5 | 14. 5 |
| 1945 | 6. 3 | 6. 6 | 4, 3 | 7.9 | 7. 5 | 11.3 |
Source: ASF Hq, Statistical Review World War II, App. K, p. 165. Data for 1942 are not available. Each figure represents the number of injuries per million man-hours.
the winter of 1942–43 the Industrial Service had passed the peak of its expansion, but the Field Service was just then coming into its own as the storage and distribution agency of the Ordnance Department. During 1943 the Field Service depots not only had to cope with the rapidly increasing inflow of supplies of all kinds from war production plants but also had to handle the steadily mounting outward flow of supplies to troop units overseas. The only reductions in the Field Service work load came in August 1943 when several depots were transferred to private companies for operation under contract. To hold the line, or to reduce its personnel strength, meant for the Field Service the most rigid economy in the use of manpower, adoption of the most efficient operating methods, and the use of labor-saving machinery wherever possible.34
One of the major weaknesses in the civilian personnel programs at ASF installations revealed by the 1942 New York survey was the lack of attention to employee safety. Of all the technical services, the investigators found that only the Ordnance Department had an organized accident prevention program. Largely because of the hazardous nature of many Ordnance operations, safety programs were begun in the arsenals and depots many years before the outbreak of World War II and were well established by the spring of 1942. When scores of new loading plants and ammunition depots came into operation in 1942, safety became such an important phase of Ordnance activities that an Explosives Safety Branch was organized in Chicago under the direction of Col. Francis H. Miles, Jr.35 A statistical summary, compiled by ASF headquarters at the end of the war, shows what a remarkable safety record the Ordnance Department achieved during World War II. (See Table 9.)
Training Ordnance Workers
During the twenty years before 1940 the Ordnance Department had not found it necessary to give much attention to training civilian employees. Throughout those years the Department had experienced little difficulty in recruiting skilled craftsmen and professional workers to fill occasional vacancies. Ordnance mobilization planning, however, did not overlook the fact that in time of emergency large
numbers of men trained in the production and handling of munitions would be needed. More than six years before war came, Frankford Arsenal revived the four-year course for apprentice machinists that it had discontinued in 1921, and in 1937 Rock Island Arsenal enrolled thirty-six apprentice machinists.36 The other arsenals soon made similar provisions for training young men in various Ordnance specialties, and by the fall of 1940—more than a year before Pearl Harbor—the training activities of the Ordnance Department had reached such large proportions that a training unit was created within the civilian personnel division.
In the training of many types of Ordnance specialists there was a fruitful exchange between the Ordnance Department and private industry all during the war period. Ordnance employees were trained in the maintenance of specialized types of equipment at factory schools, and employees of industrial firms studied at Ordnance installations. As early as the summer of 1940, for example, six Ordnance employees were trained at the Sperry Gyroscope Company on the maintenance of antiaircraft fire control instruments. A few months later five inspectors and three chemists, who were to be stationed at the Radford Ordnance Works when it was completed, were in training at the Carney’s Point plant of the DuPont Company. This process was reversed when Ordnance undertook to train small numbers of operating personnel of the companies that were to operate the new munitions plants under construction in 1940 and 1941. As reservoirs of production know-how, the arsenals and depots trained engineers, chemists, and other technicians selected by the contractors to operate GOCO plants.37
One of the most important phases of arsenal training began in the summer of 1940 when courses were instituted for inspectors who were to serve in the districts. Each arsenal instructed the trainees assigned to it on those items it normally produced. Picatinny, for example, trained most of the ammunition inspectors; Frankford offered courses on optical instruments, mechanical time fuzes, and ammunition; Rock Island gave instruction in the inspection of mobile artillery carriages, recoil mechanisms, and machine guns. Later, as the districts made arrangements for training their own inspectors at local trade schools and colleges, the arsenal courses were discontinued.38
After creation of ASF in March 1942, the many-sided Ordnance program of civilian training became even more varied and elaborate. At Rock Island Arsenal courses were added for administrative specialists, armament maintenance men, field service supervisors, traffic managers, welders, storekeepers, checkers, and foremen.39 At Frankford training was given to lens grinders, draftsmen, machine operators, engravers, fuze assemblers, and other specialists in related fields. New employees were trained at many installations to become machine operators, and after they were assigned to production work they
were given additional on-the-job training to improve their efficiency. Thousands of laborers and munitions handlers were trained as explosives operators, and large numbers of women were trained for clerical work.
The most important additions to Ordnance training prescribed by ASF during 1942 and 1943 were the “J” programs, originated for use in war plants by the Training Within Industry Service of the War Manpower Commission.40 ASF installations were directed in August 1942 to introduce the Job Instructor Training (JIT) course to teach supervisors how to give on-the-job instruction to their subordinates. All supervisors were to be given the JIT course before the end of the year and then, beginning in January 1943, they were to be given the second of the War Manpower Commission courses, Job Relations Training (JRT), JRT dealt with such basic elements of personnel management as stimulating job pride, adjusting grievances, and maintaining discipline. When this program was completed in June, the third phase of supervisor training, Job Methods Training (JMT) was begun. JMT was a program of work simplification designed to show supervisors how to analyze jobs and devise more efficient work patterns.41
Of all war production plants, Picatinny Arsenal took the lead in pioneering the JMT course. It conducted the first in-plant JMT Institute in the United States, in October 1942, and thus became the first plant in the country to hold institutes in all three “J” courses. During the following year Picatinny conducted a greater number of ten-hour JMT courses and trained a larger number of supervisors than any other war plant. “From the standpoint of the resulting conservation of manpower, materials, and machine capacity,” wrote the author of the JMT course to Col. William E. Larned of Picatinny, “your savings are far ahead of any other private or governmental installation. From every angle your program is far and away the most outstanding in America.”42
Much of the training given in late 1943 and early 1944 was guided by the replacement schedules drawn up at all Ordnance establishments to provide for the orderly replacement of men inducted into military service. Because the War Department in 1941 adopted the policy of asking local draft boards to grant occupational deferments to its civilian employees only in the most unusual circumstances, Ordnance employees were drafted at a rapid rate after Pearl Harbor. At Rock Island Arsenal, to take one example, 2,500 employees entered military service during 1942 and an equal number during 1943. And, in terms of production line requirements, men were taken into the armed forces in a haphazard fashion, the selection depending more upon their age, physical qualifications, and family status than upon the nature of their employment. To remedy this situation, Frankford Arsenal early in 1943 pioneered the replacement schedule plan for the War Department and demonstrated the practicability of working out long in advance a systematic program to train draft-exempt replacements for men likely to be called for military service. The selective service boards were then requested
to grant temporary occupational deferments, on an individual basis, until replacements for the men could be trained. After replacement schedules were prepared throughout the Department in 1943, each Ordnance installation could plan well in advance for the replacement of men to be taken into the armed forces.43
April 1945, when the European phase of the war was about to end, nearly every activity of the Ordnance Department was covered by a civilian training course of some kind. There were 355 distinct courses being given to employees, most of them of the on-the-job type, and nearly 17,500 persons completed a course during the month. The course producing the most graduates in April 1945 was that on general safety procedures; next in order came orientation and induction training, work simplification, and work measurement.44
Statistics on training are apt to be misleading because they were usually kept in terms of the number of persons who completed courses, regardless of the length of the courses or the level of their difficulty. Ordnance courses ranged in length from the ten-hour “J” courses to the four-year programs of apprentice training, and varied in difficulty from typing and truck driving to lens grinding and contract termination. The number of course completions was surprisingly high because many Ordnance employees, probably most of them, completed more than one course of instruction during the war, and some completed a dozen or more. Although Ordnance had only 262,772 employees on its payroll at the peak of its strength, it has been estimated that Ordnance workers chalked up more than 700,000 “completions” between August 1942 (when maintenance of statistics on training began) and August 1945.45 Although there was occasional criticism during the war that training was overemphasized and “over-organized,” and that it interfered with production when workers were taken from their jobs to spend hours in a classroom, the prevailing opinion was that time spent on training was more than reclaimed in increased production, higher morale, and reduced turnover.46
Employee Relations
Employee relations were of greater importance to Ordnance during World War II than during the years of peace chiefly because wartime conditions of employment were far different from those before 1941. As the war years brought a “worker’s market” in which jobs were plentiful and workers were scarce, the threat of dismissal no longer held any terror for the average employee. He knew that he could find another job in a few days, and he also knew that his employer was eager to avoid the expense resulting from high turnover rates. The problems of management were further complicated as the war years brought into Ordnance employment thousands of men and women with little or no previous work experience, and with little understanding of the need for strict observance of rules and regulations.
When ASF came into the picture in the spring of 1942, there was ample evidence of the need for improved employee
relations at many Army installations. The turnover rate among ASF employees was described as being “nothing less than astronomical. Workers left their jobs wholesale. Out of every 10 people hired, only four or even fewer would remain , . . for as much as one year.”47 Ordnance was no exception to the rule. At Springfield Armory, for example, 4,700 persons were hired between December 1941 and June 1942, but 1,600 resigned during the same period. At Picatinny and Frankford Arsenals the annual turnover rate during 1942 approached 50 percent.48
A relatively high turnover rate during the hectic months following the attack on Pearl Harbor was to be expected as workers adjusted themselves to new conditions of employment and shopped around in the worker’s market, but in the summer of 1942 the ASF personnel division decided that the rate was excessive and that the time had come to do something about bringing it down to reasonable proportions. One of the first steps taken in this direction was the adoption of a standard procedure for handling employee grievances at all ASF installations. This was the same procedure that had been in force in Ordnance for many years. It provided that an employee, acting by himself or through a representative, should normally take up his complaint first with his immediate supervisor, and that all supervisors should try to straighten out misunderstandings or difficulties presented to them.49
In dealing with complaints, personnel administrators in Ordnance and at ASF headquarters recognized that most grievances were of a minor nature but were, like a stone in one’s shoe, no less irritating for their small size. They recognized, too, that the great majority of such grievances could be satisfactorily handled at the lowest or next-to-lowest level of supervision if the supervisors had sufficient training and aptitude to do the job. Throughout the ASF during 1942 and 1943, therefore, intensive efforts were made to train supervisors, through the “J” programs, to become more adept in dealing with their subordinates.
The need for care and intelligence in introducing new Ordnance employees to their jobs was best illustrated in the employment of inexperienced women workers. Many women who had never before done any work outside their own homes volunteered for war work and then found themselves unceremoniously assigned to jobs in huge shops or warehouses before they had an opportunity to get their bearings. The most that was done for them was to put in their hands a small pamphlet containing the rules and regulations of the installation. On far too many occasions the women thus hastily put to work found the transition from home to factory too difficult to make and resigned at the end of their first week. The time saved at the expense of proper induction and preassignment training was thus lost as the whole cycle of recruitment and assignment had to be repeated with others,50
More attention was also given to the proper placement of new employees. In the early stages of war mobilization, when workers were recruited with all possible
speed and when thousands of inexperienced men and women were put on the payroll overnight, careful testing and placement of each individual had been impossible. “The tendency was to take all comers,” stated the ASF personnel manual. “The employee was placed on the working force in the hope that in one way or another he would gravitate toward the right job and stay with it.”51 Placement in the Ordnance Department was more highly developed than it was in other branches of the Army because of the technical nature of most Ordnance activities, but it still left much to be desired in the spring of 1942. At Springfield Armory, for example, there was no aptitude testing or preshop training for men during the 194142 period.52 Early in 1943 an Ordnance-wide campaign was launched to give more consideration to the placement of workers. Personnel staffs were directed to draw up a job description for every position, keep a record of each employee’s qualifications, and assign each worker to the job for which he was best qualified. This campaign was in line with the provisions of the ASF policy statement of August 1942 and probably contributed as much toward promoting good employee relations and reducing turnover as any other single step taken by the Ordnance Department during the war.
Experience soon demonstrated that in the work history of the average employee, in Ordnance and throughout ASF, two days were of crucial importance—his first day on the job, and the day he quit work. Ordnance personnel administrators concentrated a large share of their efforts on those two days. The first day, or more often the first week, was devoted to the induction and training of the new employee so that he would get started on the right foot. The last day, or the day on which he resigned, the employee was called in for an “exit interview” that had a dual purpose: to persuade him not to leave his job, and to discover what factors were causing him to leave. The employee was encouraged to speak freely and frankly about his reasons for leaving. It was sometimes felt that he chose to conceal his real reasons with a plausible excuse that would forestall further questioning, but the skillful interviewer was often able to discover the underlying causes of dissatisfaction. Among the reasons most frequently given for leaving Ordnance employment—excluding calls to military service—were acceptance of a better job, ill health, and transportation difficulties. Many workers took jobs elsewhere that offered higher pay, entailed less dangerous work, or were more convenient to home. Many Ordnance arsenals, depots, and plants were of necessity situated at remote points, causing workers to make long trips by bus or automobile every day. A large number of women workers reported that they were quitting because of ill health caused by the heavy work to which they were not accustomed, or because they were needed at home to take care of children. When the exit interviews revealed that employees were resigning because of specific conditions within the establishment that could be remedied, steps were taken to eliminate the conditions.
Scientists employed at Ordnance laboratories deserve at least brief mention in this section on employee relations, if only for the fact that a rather comprehensive
survey of their job attitudes was made at the end of the war.53 To some extent, also, the attitudes of the laboratory scientists were typical of professional workers throughout the Ordnance Department. When the scientists spoke confidentially, and under the cloak of anonymity, they were frequently vitriolic in condemning certain aspects of their employment. A large proportion of them, including more than half the small group of Ph.Ds, planned to leave the Ordnance Department after the war ended. Many of these men chose not to remain with Ordnance because they felt there was no assurance that Congress would support an adequate postwar military research program, but all were influenced to some extent by the conditions of employment in Ordnance as they had experienced them during the war. The complaints most frequently voiced were: (1) salaries were too low; (2) there was too much red tape, too many “channels” causing delay and frustration; and (3) professional men were not treated with sufficient dignity and trust. Among scientists with high professional ratings, one of the grounds for dissatisfaction was the Army-wide practice of placing commissioned officers in top positions—and then transferring them as soon as they became familiar with their jobs.54 Many scientists resented having to take orders from officers with less experience and less professional education than themselves, and then being denied personal recognition for their own achievements. Complaints of a related nature stemmed from the practice of placing research laboratories at the manufacturing arsenals under control of the arsenal commanders. The arsenals were naturally production minded and did not always evince full sympathy for the research problems of the laboratory. As one scientist described the situation, “It’s like living with your mother-in-law. You are welcome, but you’re not free.55
Many of the complaints made by the scientists were of a petty nature, hardly worthy of professional men holding responsible positions. Many of them centered around being required to observe routine regulations, which the scientists considered as properly applicable only to clerical workers. Research scientists, for example, objected vehemently to punching a time clock and being held to a rigid lunch schedule. Their complaints suggest that some arsenal and laboratory administrators may have shown poor judgment in not allowing more freedom of action to the scientists, many of whom were eager to work overtime on their research projects, and that the scientists themselves might have shown greater willingness to accept the inevitable restrictions imposed by employment in a large organization. Whatever judgment of the situation may be offered, the fact remains that for large numbers of scientific workers Ordnance employment was not sufficiently attractive to hold them after the war.56
At the end of World War II the War Department was in a far stronger position, as far as civilian personnel management was concerned, than it had been when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In few, if any, other areas did the Army make greater progress during World War II. Starting in 1938 and 1939, when it was generally considered to have the least progressive civilian personnel program in the federal government, the War Department made steady progress until it eventually achieved what one Ordnance official labeled “the best personnel program you will find anywhere—bar none,” And to the development of this enlightened personnel policy the Ordnance Department made a substantial contribution.
Experience during World War II demonstrated the need for decentralization of War Department personnel administration in time of war, and amply justified the Ordnance Department’s unremitting efforts to break down the tight centralized control maintained until August 1942 by the War Department Civilian Personnel Division. Concurrently, World War II experience demonstrated the need for a broad and continuing program to train civilian personnel officers for field installations. At the end of the war the decentralization policy was so firmly established, and was buttressed by such a large force of trained personnel administrators in the field, that it was carried over into the postwar years as a permanent feature of War Department policy.
The months of August and September 1942 formed a great divide in the history of War Department and Ordnance personnel management. These were the months during which the newly formed ASF began to take positive steps to correct the deficiencies in personnel administration revealed by the New York field survey. In August 1942 War Department Orders “M” appeared, delegating to the three major commands—ASF, AAF, and AGF—most of the authority formerly concentrated in the personnel division of the Office of the Secretary of War. Also in August came the publication of a civilian personnel policy for the entire ASF and the launching of an intensive program of supervisory training under the “J” programs. In September 1942 the Ordnance program to conserve manpower was given added impetus, and the commanders of all field installations were directed to employ a larger proportion of women. At the same time, plans were made to standardize wage administration throughout the ASF along the lines dictated by Ordnance experience.
To measure the progress made in civilian personnel management in the War Department during World War II, one need only compare the report of the New York field survey of May 1942 with the conditions of civilian employment that prevailed throughout the Army in the spring of 1945. Although the Ordnance Department at the beginning of the war was more advanced in personnel matters than some other branches of the Army, the New York survey revealed that many of its practices were still in an embryonic state. Its training, safety, and wage administration programs were well established before Pearl Harbor, but the induction and placement procedures at many Ordnance installations left much to be desired. Stimulated and encouraged by enlightened supervision of the ASF personnel division, and given greater freedom of action by the decentralization order of August 1942, Ordnance made steady progress and by 1945 had a well-rounded personnel program administered by a well-trained staff.