Chapter 3: Mission and Organization in the Pacific
The Quartermaster mission embraced so varied an assortment of supply and service functions that an extensive organization was required to carry it out. In the three principal territorial commands in the Pacific the organization of Quartermaster activities, though it did differ slightly from command to command, everywhere retained a basic similarity. In all these areas there was a central office that supervised the activities of the Corps outside the combat zone. There were also storage and distribution centers and corps, army, and division quartermasters who supervised the operations of their service in these organizations. Everywhere, moreover, specialized Quartermaster troop units helped carry out Quartermaster functions.
Quartermaster Mission
In general the mission of the Corps was to provide the supplies and services required by all troops, regardless of the branch of the Army to which they belonged. In World War II this meant that the Corps fed and clothed the Army; provided items of equipment and general utility, whether for personal or organizational use, which were not so specialized as to lie within the province of another technical service; and carried out the final stage in the distribution of gasoline and other petroleum products—issuance to the ultimate consumers, the troops in the field.
The feeding of troops involved the provision to every soldier of a “ration,” defined as the allowance of food for one day for one man. Rations were of two general types: field rations, which were issued to units in contact with normal sources of supply, and emergency rations, specially developed packaged rations for combat units cut off from their usual means of supply. There were two field rations, designated as A and B. The A type, corresponding as nearly as practicable to the regular peacetime ration of soldiers in the United States, contained a wide variety of both perishable and nonperishable foods. In the Pacific, outside heavily populated areas, storage and transportation conditions seldom permitted the use of the fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats that constituted the very heart of the A ration. The B ration, which utilized canned or dehydrated foodstuffs in place of perishables, was of necessity frequently substituted. Front-line fighting troops customarily ate emergency rations, such as C, D, or K, each of which had been
developed for consumption during a particular phase of combat.1
The provision of clothing for the Army meant supply not only of the regular service uniform of coat, jacket, trousers, shirt, necktie, cap, and shoes, but also of variations of these garments intended to meet the special conditions of climate and terrain encountered in the Pacific. It meant, too, supply of scores of other articles, such as head nets, gloves, work suits, jungle suits, raincoats, and ponchos, which filled unusual needs. Personal equipment, other than clothing, supplied by the Corps embraced such essential items as field packs, sleeping bags, and intrenching shovels. Organizational equipment included tents, stoves, field bakery equipment, refrigerators, salvage, laundry, and bath equipment, and hundreds of lesser items.2 The numerous general-utility articles, known collectively as “general supplies,” were employed mostly for the Army’s housekeeping. They included common yet essential items like stationery, typewriters, furniture and other office equipment, soap, sanitary goods, chinaware, glassware, and mess equipment in general. The Corps also furnished cigarettes, toilet articles, candy, and scores of other things sold in post exchanges (PX’s).3 Quartermaster responsibility for the distribution of petroleum products began at the pipeline termini or other bulk facilities constructed by the Engineers for the reception of these products. At these facilities—sometimes even at ship-side—the QMC received gasoline and other fuels and transported them, often in 55-gallon drums or 5-gallon cans, to distributing points for issue by Quartermaster gasoline supply units.4
Quartermaster items were divided into four classes. Class I comprised those that were consumed at an approximately equal daily rate. Food and forage were the principal supplies in this category. In ordinary overseas language “Class I” was the term applied to rations. Class II included clothing, equipment, and other items for which the precise quantity of initial issue was set in Tables of Organization and Equipment or other War Department authorizations. Class III comprised coal and petroleum products; and Class IV, articles—chiefly general supplies—for which the quantity of initial issue was not prescribed. In theaters of operations Class I and III items were the ones whose prompt distribution was most essential; without food troops could not live and without gasoline a modern army was stopped dead in its tracks. These were in consequence the items upon which quartermasters focused their main attention.5
The procurement of supplies required much more than the mere filling of requisitions. It demanded accurate information regarding available stocks, anticipated deliveries, normal replacement needs, tactical requirements, and expected changes in troop strength. Without this information requirements could not be determined nor adequate stocks maintained. Local procurement demanded in addition knowledge of what farm and industrial products were available commercially, how production might be increased, and how local goods compared in quality with those obtained in the United States.
The QMC stored and distributed as well as procured supplies. When supplies reached their destination, whether it was a modern base in Australia or a forlorn distributing point in a New Guinea jungle with vines and trees for cover and damp soil for flooring, quartermasters stored them and, when the stocks were wanted elsewhere, arranged for their distribution. Storage and distribution, like procurement, demanded a mass of detailed information. The QMC had to know what, if any, commercial warehouses were available for lease; how far these warehouses conformed to military specifications; and how much square footage and materials-handling equipment were needed to meet the fluctuating storage requirements of different distribution areas. Finally, the Corps had to maintain close liaison with Army shipping agencies to insure prompt delivery of Quartermaster cargoes.
Besides procuring, storing, and distributing thousands of items the Corps performed many services essential to troop health and morale. It baked bread and operated laundries and showers for men in the fighting line as well as in camps to the rear. It collected discarded clothing, shoes, personal equipment, drums, cans, and ordnance supplies in fact, all discarded government property—classified these salvaged articles, and distributed them to the repair shops of the appropriate technical services. It cleaned, renovated, and reissued Quartermaster supplies and so made a substantial quantity of needed articles quickly available. In addition to caring for the living, it identified the dead, buried them in Army cemeteries, and saved their personal possessions. Quartermaster activities were, indeed, so varied that twenty types of Quartermaster units were employed in the war against Japan to carry them out.
In overseas areas all Quartermaster activities were carried out under authority of theater commanders. Though the Army Service Forces (ASF) in the zone of interior was responsible for the support of combat forces, its jurisdiction extended no farther than the ports of embarkation. Outside the United States every theater commander planned his logistical system in the manner he considered best, and all theaters in consequence had slightly different supply organizations. While Headquarters, ASF, and the technical services in the zone of interior could submit technical advice to overseas supply agencies, theaters were free to accept or reject their recommendations.6 In the QMC, particularly toward the end of the war, there was a good deal of direct interchange of technical data between the Office of The Quartermaster General (OQMG) and the central Quartermaster offices in the Pacific. The OQMG provided these offices with copies of procurement regulations, training manuals, OQMG circulars, and specifications of standard supply items, notified them of projects for new items, and provided them with samples of recently designed articles. The Pacific areas in turn submitted to the OQMG copies of their important directives. But OQMG observers’ reports, describing the actual utility of Quartermaster items in tropical, island-hopping warfare and suggesting how unusual overseas needs might be met by betterment of old items and development of new ones, constituted perhaps the best source of information available in Washington concerning Quartermaster problems in the Pacific. Incomplete though these reports often were, they nevertheless provided a more comprehensive picture of Pacific
supply operations than the OQMG could find elsewhere. While all this exchange of technical information helped that office furnish more serviceable supplies and better trained units, it did not give the OQMG any control over the operations of the Corps in the Pacific. Each area continued to have a Quartermaster organization independent of the Corps in the United States.
Supply Organization in the Southwest Pacific
Four major commands of the Southwest Pacific Area performed supply functions—General Headquarters (GHQ), the United States Army Services of Supply (USASOS), the Sixth Army, and the Fifth Air Force. The highest of these commands, GHQ, in line with its judgment of the urgency of requirements, assigned varying priorities to requisitions for supplies and to requests for technical service units from the United States. Occasionally, it even altered the number of units requested. On the basis of strategic plans and scheduled distribution of troops it issued logistical instructions and in general terms prescribed the quantity of stock to be held in different parts of the Southwest Pacific. Though all these responsibilities of GHQ were highly important to the Quartermaster Corps, GHQ, alone of the four commands, had no Quartermaster section. United States Army Services of Supply, the command most concerned with the details of getting supplies into the hands of troops, was responsible for items needed by ground troops and for commonly used supplies needed by the Fifth Air Force except technical air items. Headquarters, USASOS, planned and supervised procurement, storage, and distribution of all these supplies, and base sections and other USASOS field agencies actually carried out these functions. The Sixth Army and the Fifth Air Force, the major commands supported by USASOS, picked up and issued to their troops the supplies that USASOS brought to distributing points. Both commands established sizable organizations to administer Quartermaster matters and employed Quartermaster troop units to carry out the supply and service functions of the Corps.7
Headquarters, USASOS
The development of USASOS started in Australia in late December 1941, when Task Force, South Pacific, landed at Brisbane and set up Headquarters, United States Forces in Australia (USFIA), redesignated on 8 January 1942 as United States Army Forces in Australia (USAFIA). As the agency charged with administrative and logistical support of ground and air forces, it had responsibility for all activities of the technical services. At the outset it was regarded chiefly as a rear area command that would build up a base for the support of operations in the Netherlands Indies and the Philippines. The fall of Java in early March caused a drastic revision of this conception.8 Only with that momentous event did the Army fully realize that a huge supply organization would have to be created in Australia for the exploitation of local resources and the reception and distribution of supplies to the large land and air forces that of necessity would use the Commonwealth as their main base.
Territorially, the authority of USAFIA—or USASOS, as it became in July 1942—
covered the “communications zone,” which embraced the entire Southwest Pacific Area outside combat zones.9 Within the communications zone, which was divided for administrative and operating purposes into base sections, USASOS controlled all supply establishments, lines of communication, and other agencies needed for satisfactory support of troops. To carry out its mission, Headquarters, USASOS, established general and special staffs charged with the formulation of supply policies and the direction of their execution. In the Office of the Chief Quartermaster, often called the Quartermaster Section, was lodged responsibility for supervision of Quartermaster installations and units controlled by USASOS, for the procurement and storage of Quartermaster supplies, and for distribution of these supplies to troops within the communications zone. It was also charged with distribution of items to the supply points of organizations in combat zones. These points might be warehouses, open-storage centers, truckheads, or navigation heads set up to receive shipments from USASOS. At the supply points Quartermaster units, operating under the direction of tactical commanders, handled and stored the items of their service and issued them to using units or else transported them to distributing points deeper in the combat area where using units received them.10
Office of the Chief Quartermaster
The first task of the OCQM in Australia was the creation of an organization capable of performing under the unfamiliar conditions of an alien land in a command twice the size of the United States functions similar to those that long-established Quartermaster agencies carried out in the United States. There the Office of The Quartermaster General and the Quartermaster depots had developed over the years agencies capable of dealing with highly specialized problems. The Philadelphia Depot had long concentrated on the development and procurement of clothing, the Boston Depot on footwear, and other depots on food and general supplies. All these installations as well as the OQMG could call upon marketing and technical experts in industry, commerce, agriculture, and the universities for advice, and even before Pearl Harbor they had achieved a high degree of coordination between Army requirements and American industrial and agricultural capabilities that materially facilitated their supply activities when war came.
The OCQM in Australia started with none of the operational advantages possessed by the Quartermaster Corps in the United States. Yet it occupied in theory a position not unlike that of the OQMG in Washington. Though circumstances at first obliged it actually to carry out some Quartermaster operations, it was not set up to procure, store, distribute, or reclaim supplies and equipment but rather, like the OQMG, to plan, coordinate, and control these activities in accordance with supply programs approved by higher echelons.11
As a planning agency in the procurement field, the Australian OCQM first of all determined theater requirements for Quartermaster items and ascertained what proportion of these requirements could be obtained
in Australia and what proportion would have to come from the United States; finally, it arranged for procurement from the indicated source. The OCQM also determined how many Quartermaster officers and men were needed and, subject to the approval of GHQ SWPA, requested them from the zone of interior. In addition it provided for the establishment of bakeries, laundries, training schools, and storage and reclamation depots.12 As a coordinating agency, it designated particular installations as storers of specific items. In line with logistical instructions issued to it by higher echelons it determined the size of stocks in different base sections and transferred supplies from one installation to another in order to maintain prescribed levels. To meet varying manpower requirements, it assigned and shifted men and units within the communications zone.13 As a supervising agency the OCQM issued operating procedures, technical manuals, and special directives as guides for installations and units and through frequent inspections checked on the execution of its instructions.14
The establishment of the OCQM, like that of other technical service headquarters, was hampered for months by a far-reaching shortage of officers and by the confusion that accompanied hasty efforts to create almost overnight sections for which no plans had been formulated. When U.S. Forces in Australia set up its headquarters in Lennon’s Hotel in Brisbane on 24 December 1941, the Quartermaster Section consisted of only the Quartermaster, Maj. Abraham G. Silverman, three other officers, and two enlisted men. Shortly afterwards Major Silverman hired six Australian clerks and obtained several additional officers on detached service from the Air Corps and the Chemical Warfare Service to help supervise the loading and discharge of ships. For some weeks transportation matters indeed demanded as much or more attention from the newly formed section as did any other activity. Silverman had no assistant until 9 January when Capt. Andy E. Toney arrived and became Assistant Quartermaster. With so few helpers, the Quartermaster could do little except care for immediate operating problems.15 He centered his efforts mainly upon the discharge of incoming ships carrying Air Corps equipment and upon the storage of supplies in temporary warehouses near the Ascot racecourse.
The arrival in Melbourne on 2 February of the RPH (“Remember Pearl Harbor”) group of officers signalized the beginning of a new phase in OCQM development. Though the contingent included only eight quartermasters, they represented an important accession of strength. Among them was Col. Douglas C. Cordiner, who served as Chief Quartermaster until 15 May 1944, when Col. (later Brig. Gen.) William F. Campbell succeeded him. Another prominent officer in the RPH group was Lt. Col. Herbert A. Gardner, who, later, on 15 June 1942, became General Purchasing Agent in Headquarters, USASOS. The OCQM was now moved to Melbourne, but the cramped quarters it occupied gave no room for expansion. As few of the clerical employees accompanied the office in the move from Brisbane, operations were for a time further handicapped by the necessity of hiring
and training a new civilian staff. Because of the shortage of officers and space a full-fledged organization with divisions and branches operating in much the same manner as the OQMG did in Washington could not be established. It was nevertheless possible to designate a supply officer, a transport officer, and a purchasing and contracting officer. Not until 17 February could the OCQM submit to the zone of interior its first requisition one requesting the clothing needed to make initial issues and provide maintenance supplies for troops in northern Australia.16
In early March the OCQM moved to more commodious quarters in the Melbourne Grammar School where space sufficed to permit the establishment of a larger but still relatively small organization. Four divisions were set up—an Administrative, a Transportation, a Supply, and a Purchasing and Contracting Division. The Administrative Division performed the routine services needed by the whole OCQM for the conduct of business. It distributed mail, messages, and directives; maintained the general files of the entire office; and provided and repaired typewriters, telephones, and other necessary business equipment. All these services were normal functions of an administrative unit, but in the OCQM the Administrative Division had in addition several responsibilities that in a more highly developed organization would have been vested in separate divisions. It formulated procedures for the care of military dead and for the handling of budget and fiscal affairs. Particularly important were its manpower and training functions. It estimated how many and what kind of Quartermaster units were needed to carry out the Quartermaster mission and upon these figures based its requests for units from the zone of interior and its assignments of units to USAFIA installations. In addition it established schools for QMC officers, planned their courses of study, and developed standards for training units and casuals.17
The Transportation Division dealt with military movements of men and supplies. It aimed at the fullest utilization of both military and commercial shipping, but its staff was too small to permit much more than a survey of Australian conditions before 15 April, when the OCQM was relieved of most of its transportation responsibilities and an independent Transportation Service was set up in USAFIA. During its short existence the division created the nuclei of several small sections. One of these sections dealt with the movement of cargo and troops by Australian railroads and airlines. Another, the Motor Supply Section, procured trucks and arranged for the assembly, testing, and distribution of vehicles. Late in March a Water Section began operations with a staff of about ten veteran shipping men headed by Col. Thomas G. Plant, who for many years had served as an executive of Pacific steamship lines. This section, as its name implied, provided for the handling of seaborne movements. In order to do this, it chartered coasters, lighters, cranes, and docks, and compiled information about the handling capacity of Australian ports.18
In April, when the Chief Quartermaster was relieved of all transportation functions but those relating to trucks, the Motor Transport Section became the Motor Transport Division until it in turn was shifted at the end of August to the Chief Ordnance
Officer. Before its transfer the division entered into agreements with local automobile firms for the assembly of imported American trucks at cost-plus-fixed-fee of 5 percent. The division made comparable contracts for the repair and maintenance of these vehicles, but on the basis of a flat fee per man per hour for work actually performed.19
More important in the development of the OCQM was the Supply Division, which laid down the policies and procedures governing the supply of Quartermaster items. It was organized on a commodity basis. That meant that it was split into sections, each of which handled but one general class of supply or a few closely related classes and decided upon the procedures to be followed in handling all the major supply functions—procurement, storage, and distribution—for the particular commodities it dealt with. In the Supply Division there were three commodity branches—the Subsistence Branch, the Clothing, Equipage, and General Supplies Branch, and the Gasoline and Oil Branch. There was also a Planning Branch which collected statistics fundamental to the operations of the commodity units. From the recently established base sections it received rough estimates of the size of Quartermaster stocks within their distribution zones, lists of scarce items, the amount of orders outstanding, and statements of future supply requirements. Unfortunately, these figures were often wide of the mark, for throughout 1942 it was usually impossible to obtain trustworthy inventories or other stock records from base sections, which were all in the confused state common to rapidly growing organizations. The figures, though unsatisfactory, of necessity served as the basis on which the commodity branches determined theater supply requirements and the quantities to be bought locally and in the United States. The branches submitted requisitions for supplies from the United States to the San Francisco Port of Embarkation and forwarded local purchase requests to the Purchasing and Contracting Division of OCQM.20 The commodity branches were the agencies that actually controlled the stockage of Quartermaster items. They determined what base sections received incoming shipments, and it was they who shifted stocks from one base to another to meet fluctuating demands that rose in one place and fell in another. It was the commodity branches, too, that developed stock-accounting methods intended to keep depots constantly informed of the quantity of individual items on hand, due in, and due out.21
The Purchasing and Contracting Division was engaged chiefly in matters relating to the local buying of clothing, equipment, and general supplies. Since during most of 1942 U.S. military organizations obtained their food, gasoline, and oil through the Australian Army, the division had little to do directly with the purchase of these supplies. In performing its functions it was guided by the local purchase requests submitted by the commodity branches of the Supply Division. To care for the special problems involved in use of different methods of buying, it set up three sections to handle, respectively, open market transactions, formal contracts, and “contract demands.” These “demands,” covering eventually by far the greater part of local purchases, were simply requests that Commonwealth agencies in accordance with the reverse lend-lease arrangements negotiate contracts with Australian nationals for
specified quantities of needed items. Until these arrangements were made late in March 1942, most of the supplies for the U.S. Army were obtained locally through formal contracts with producers or by purchases on the open market. As contract demands gradually became the ordinary means of local procurement, these two methods of buying fell into disuse and the sections handling them ultimately disappeared. Another section, however, grew more important as local buying rose in volume. This was the Inspection Bureau, which accepted or rejected products offered in fulfillment of contract demands.22
The Purchasing and Contracting Division had close relations with the office of the General Purchasing Agent ( GPA), a component of USAFIA that coordinated local procurement by the Army, the Navy, and the Air Forces, reviewing their contract demands and sending them in approved form to the appropriate Australian organizations.23 If Commonwealth authorities in turn approved these demands, they made the necessary contracts with Australian producers. Generally speaking, U.S. agencies actually conducted necessary negotiations with the appropriate departments of the Commonwealth. In OCQM the Purchasing and Contracting Division formed a Liaison Section to work out terms mutually satisfactory to the Corps and to the Australians. With the help of other Quartermaster agencies this section located producers, ascertained their productive capacity, laid down specifications, and cared for contractual details.
Of all the Australian procuring agencies the Food Council affected the operations of the Corps most deeply as it was given the task of increasing food production on both the agricultural and the industrial front.24 Another agency important to the Corps was the Allied Supply Council, composed of several Australian cabinet officers and a U.S. representative. It developed plans for stimulating the Australian economy as a whole. The OCQM also had extensive dealings with the Department of Supply and Shipping, which handled contract demands for nonmechanical items, and with the Department of Commerce, which handled contract demands for mechanical equipment.25 Ordinarily, it had only unimportant relations with the Department of War Organization of Industry, which had responsibility for making ample labor available to the most essential plants, but if this department directed that workers be shifted from industries making Quartermaster supplies, the OCQM made known its concern and was sometimes able to stop the proposed action.26
In June the widening scope of U.S. Army activities required the establishment of two additional OCQM divisions. One of these was the Memorial Division, which took over the mortuary functions of the Administrative Division. This step was clearly advisable since these activities certainly would grow in magnitude as offensive operations were undertaken and casualties mounted.27 The
other new division, the General Service Division, constituted a rudimentary control agency, whose establishment was brought about by the desirability of reviewing and coordinating basic functions scattered through the commodity branches of the Supply Division.28 Its establishment reflected, too, the wartime trend toward a functional rather than a commodity organization of the sort characteristic of the peacetime War Department. In a full-fledged functional organization the commodity branches were abolished, and administrative units were set up to handle the major responsibilities of procurement, storage, and distribution. In this type of establishment a procurement division would be concerned with supervising the buying of all classes of supplies assigned to a technical service. In the OMC this meant that such a division would deal with all matters relating to food, clothing, general supplies, gasoline, oil, and other Quartermaster items.
The functional concept was embodied to a considerable extent in the General Service Division since this unit was given a large measure of authority over storage and distribution activities and lesser authority over procurement matters. It was particularly concerned with operations at USAFIA field installations. Its Warehousing Branch was charged among other things with the modernization of depot operations. To achieve this objective, it made frequent inspections of handling and storage methods and suggested how they might be bettered to enhance the safety of supplies and to conserve time and manpower. The Warehousing Branch had as another objective the equitable division of warehouse equipment. In carrying out this function it planned the distribution of equipment in line with the varying volume of supplies handled by the base sections. Another branch of the General Service Division, the Inspection Branch, performed practically all OCQM inspections except those relating to storage and the acceptability of goods offered under local procurement contracts. It investigated such routine but important matters in the base sections as requisitioning procedures, inventory practices, compilation of lists of scarce items, and maintenance of employees’ time records as well as special problems like pilferage of supplies on docks and in warehouses. A third branch, the Planning and Statistical Branch, was the former Planning Branch of the Supply Division. It had been transferred because the statistical information it gathered came mostly from the field installations with which the new division was chiefly concerned.29
Since no suitable method of reviewing the purchase authorizations of the commodity branches in the Supply Division had been developed, that task, too, was assigned in August to the General Service Division, which set up a Procurement Control Branch to accomplish it. This branch analyzed the authority for proposed purchases to make sure that procurement regulations were being observed; determined whether prospective costs had been calculated properly; and checked the desirability of local procurement as opposed to procurement in the United States. Thus responsibility for some procurement as well as storage and distribution problems was lodged in the General Services Division.30
Although the activities of the OCQM increased rapidly during the first half of 1942, that office was “comparatively much shorter of operating personnel than any
other section.”31 In June it was functioning with only 33 officers as compared with an authorized 107. This substantial discrepancy stemmed in part from the establishment of the independent Transportation Service and the consequent loss of about half the Quartermaster officers and in part from the fact that the War Department for a time made no distinction between the old and the new service and often filled Quartermaster requests for officers with men suited for Transportation rather than Quartermaster work.32
During the summer QMC operations, like those of other technical services, also suffered, briefly, from the transfer of OCQM, along with the rest of the former USAFIA, from Melbourne to the headquarters of the newly established United States Army Services of Supply in Sydney. This move, another of a series that eventually brought the OCQM to Manila, temporarily interfered with OCQM activities but did not halt them.33
In late 1942 the widening scope of military activities brought about an almost complete reorganization of the OCQM. As that office had become in some respects a counterpart on a small scale of the OQMG, the administrative changes were modeled upon those made in the Washington office during the previous spring. These changes wiped out the predominantly commodity organization of the OCQM and substituted one based to a substantial degree upon function. The reorganization, begun in December 1942 and completed in March 1943, eliminated the Supply Division, the heart of the old office, and created several functional divisions.
In the reorganization the desirability of coordinating and controlling basic operating functions, an objective that had already won recognition in the establishment of the General Service Division, received still more recognition in the creation of a new staff agency, the Planning and Control Division, which exercised general supervision over all operations both in the OCQM and in the base sections. This division absorbed the storage and procurement control functions of the General Service Division and in addition gained the right to review and make recommendations about all Quartermaster operations. OCQM “operating” divisions, which meant all divisions except the Administrative Division and the newly established Inspection Division and Food Production Advisory and Liaison Division—all three regarded as staff agencies—were now required to coordinate their activities with the policies of the Planning and Control Division. Besides carrying out its control functions that unit served as a statistical clearing house for the whole Corps in the Southwest Pacific. Its statistical information was employed to set up replacement supply factors on the basis of area experience and to compute total area requirements for Quartermaster items. With its far-ranging functions the new division encroached extensively upon responsibilities traditionally in the province of commodity branches.34
Inspection activities, though essential to control operations, were not assigned to the Planning and Control Division. They were performed by the Budget, Accounting, and Inspection Division, commonly called the
Inspection Division. This new division was formed by the consolidation of the Fiscal Branch of the Administrative Division and the Inspection Branch and the Field Service Branch of the discarded General Service Division. As a fiscal agency, it prepared estimates of future expenditures for OCOM and Quartermaster base section activities; allocated funds; and maintained records of lend-lease transactions involving the Corps. As an inspection agency, it shouldered the tasks that had been performed in this field by the old General Service Division, analyzed inspection reports made by OCQM representatives, and tried to see that action was taken on recommendations made in these reports. In the final analysis it was responsible for all inspection activities of the Corps except those relating to procurement.35
In the reorganization the Supply Division became the Storage and Distribution Division. Though that division still had commodity branches, they were shorn of most procurement functions. The preservation of these branches, even with narrowed responsibilities, represented a compromise between the functional and commodity principles, but there was no serious breach of functionalism since the commodity branches were concerned almost exclusively with the technical direction of storage and distribution operations. The only significant procurement activity remaining in these branches—and it was one that stemmed directly from the distribution responsibility—was the requisitioning of supplies needed to maintain prescribed stock levels.36
In the Procurement Division were vested virtually all procurement responsibilities, including those of the former Purchasing and Contracting Division, except ones relating to subsistence. These were handled by another new division, the Food Production Advisory and Liaison Division. The Procurement Division established policies and procedures to govern the local purchase of the supplies for which it was responsible, followed up contract demands, and inspected articles before they were accepted. In close cooperation with Commonwealth agencies it conducted a fairly extensive research and development program, which was directed at the development of specifications suitable to Australian industries rather than at the design of new items, the usual goal of this work.37
The Food Production and Advisory and Liaison Division was set up primarily to prepare for the end of the rationing of American troops by the Australian Army and for the beginning of large-scale reverse lend-lease procurement of food. The division was headed by the Deputy Chief Quartermaster, Col. (later Brig. Gen.) Hugh B. Hester. It had as one of its principal functions rendering technical advice to the Australian Food Council.38 This advice was aimed chiefly at the inauguration of a large-scale canning and dehydration program and the increase of farm production. The division represented a reversion to the commodity type of organization, for it was charged with the storage and distribution as well as the procurement of all subsistence except fresh provisions, which were to be bought by the base sections. With this important exception it was
responsible for the entire U.S. Army food program in the Southwest Pacific.39
The Food Production Division did not remain long in the OCQM. On 27 February 1943 its staff and functions were taken over by the newly created Subsistence Depot, headed by Colonel Hester. This installation, located at Sydney, operated under the direct supervision of the Chief Quartermaster and served as the central buying, storing, and distributing agency for all food except perishables, which continued to be procured by the base sections. To increase farm production, the Subsistence Depot set up an elaborate organization to offer technical help to Australian agriculturists and food processors and through the American Lend-Lease Administration to import seeds, farm machinery, and processing equipment. Besides carrying out many of the details of local procurement, it requisitioned food from the United States in amounts adequate to make up any deficiencies in Australian production.40 The depot stored huge quantities of rations in branches at Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. These stocks, normally totaling about a ninety-day supply, formed a reserve constantly available to base sections for maintaining their food supplies.41
In addition to the divisions charged with the major responsibilities of control, procurement, storage, and distribution, two others were set up to supervise reclamation and training functions. These activities had grown so much in magnitude and importance that they could no longer be managed properly by small branches of divisions interested primarily in other matters. Garments, shoes, tents, and other commonly used items in need of repair were accumulating in larger and larger quantities, and more and more Quartermaster units and casuals requiring additional training were arriving in the area. To cope with these problems, the Salvage and Reclamation Branch of the Supply Division and the Training Branch of the Administrative Division were materially enlarged and made divisions.42
The major reorganization of the OCQM in the winter of 1942–43 had hardly been completed before the reconstitution of USAFFE occasioned another reshuffle of OCQM functions. USAFFE had become inactive after the fall of the Philippines, but in February it was revived and made responsible for the formulation of supply policy. The Chief Quartermaster and the heads of other technical services were transferred to the restored command, and USASOS became in theory merely an agency for the execution of policies made by USAFFE. For several months the Office of the Chief Quartermaster was located in the revived command. At the same time there was also an Office of the Quartermaster, USASOS, headed by Col. Lewis Landes. Since Colonel Cordiner took his key planning assistants with him to USAFFE, the number of officers available to Quartermaster staff divisions in USASOS was greatly reduced, and it became necessary to consolidate these divisions into a single organization, the Administrative and Planning Division.
Salvage and reclamation activities in Australia involved sorting, classifying, and repairing vast quantities of clothing and equipment.
Otherwise, the pattern set by the basic changes of the previous winter remained unaltered. In October, only six months after Colonel Cordiner left USASOS, he, along with the other technical service chiefs, was sent back there and given the same responsibilities he had formerly been charged with. Colonel Landes’ office passed out of existence, the divisions eliminated in the spring were revived, and USAFFE became in the main an administrative agency, which affected Quartermaster supply chiefly through the assignment of priorities to cargo movements. This difficult task, involving various shipping agencies and several armed services and territorial commands, was accomplished by a central priorities office in Headquarters, USAFFE, and by branch offices in Headquarters, USASOS, and each USASOS port.43
There can be little doubt that the numerous and sometimes bewildering changes in OCQM organization exerted in general an unfavorable influence on Quartermaster activities. Hardly a division or branch remained unaltered long enough for its staffs, military and civilian, to become proficient in the duties given them. Almost constantly functions were being modified or shifted from one administrative unit to another. Similarly, officers were transferred from assignment to assignment.
To a considerable degree this state of flux was unavoidable. At the outset the few available officers of necessity shouldered a variety of tasks, often unrelated. Later, the partial shift from a commodity to a functional organization demanded a period of adjustment to unfamiliar procedures. This had barely begun when it was interrupted by the administrative modifications accompanying the revival of USAFFE. After a few months these modifications were in turn rescinded, and the organization of the previous spring restored. But the shuffling and reshuffling of functions had not yet come to a conclusion.
Centralization of Procurement Activities
The most important administrative changes that subsequently affected the OCQM were those which removed most local procurement activities from the technical services and centralized them in a single field agency. These changes originated in the main as a result of the northward movement of combat activities. That movement obliged Headquarters, USA-SOS, with its technical service sections, to move north also in order to keep in close touch with the forces they supported. Yet since Australia carried on procurement activities of the highest importance to the area as a whole, it was almost mandatory to establish in that country organizations capable of making immediate on-the-spot decisions about the problems that arose there. A buying agency, was particularly necessary in Sydney to continue close business relations with Commonwealth officials and local contractors after Headquarters, USASOS, departed from that city and finally from Australia itself. That requirement in turn demanded the concentration of technical service procurement activities in new agencies which would remain in Sydney or at least in Australia after the offices of the technical service chiefs had moved elsewhere. A second and less urgent reason for greater centralization of procurement
activities was the growing belief in the desirability of consolidating these activities so as to help eliminate the confusion and the duplication of effort inherent in imperfect coordination of USASOS purchasing units.44
The transfer of Headquarters, USASOS, to Brisbane in August 1943 started the process of consolidating procurement operations. That event at once raised the question of whether the military buying agencies should participate in the move. It was answered by the establishment at Sydney of rear-echelon procurement units representing the technical service staff sections. The Quartermaster unit was the Purchasing and Contracting Branch of the OCQM Procurement Division, which was still charged with local procurement of clothing, equipment, and general supplies. Within a few weeks all the rear-echelon units were combined with the Subsistence Depot and the Engineer Depot to form the USASOS General Depot, a field agency of G-4. The new installation, modeled on the Subsistence Depot and headed by Colonel Hester, was to procure all military supplies obtained in Australia except fresh provisions and other items bought by base sections. Like the Subsistence Depot, the General Depot was to receive and store supplies and deal directly with Commonwealth agencies.45
The establishment of the USASOS General Depot meant that the OCQM, having lost most of its authority over subsistence, now lost effective participation in the buying of clothing, equipment, and general supplies. It retained only the responsibility of computing requirements and informing the General Depot through procurement and distribution directives how much of an item was wanted, when it was wanted, and where it was wanted. The OCQM and other technical services objected to the new arrangement as it deprived them of important functions traditionally theirs. Chiefly because of their opposition the General Depot was abolished, even before centralized procurement actually became effective, and purchasing was decentralized once more to the individual services working through the rear-echelon units.46
The revival of something like the earlier procurement organization lasted only until late January 1944, when all U.S. Army procurement was again centralized—this time in a Procurement Division, which operated at Sydney, like the General Depot, as a field agency of G-4, USASOS. This division, which Colonel Hester served as Director of Procurement, had not only a mission comparable to that of the former General Depot but also shared with the new Distribution Division, another G-4 field agency in Sydney, the functions of computing supply requirements and issuing procurement directives. Whereas the Quartermaster Branch of the Distribution Division determined SWPA requirements for Quartermaster supplies, submitted the directives for local purchases of all Quartermaster supplies except food to the Quartermaster Branch, Procurement Division, and informed Headquarters, USA-SOS, of the quantities needed from the zone of interior, the Procurement Division itself initiated the contract demands for subsistence on the basis of area requirements as determined by its sister division and on the basis of quantities procurable in Australia
as determined by its own staff. Finally, the Procurement Division had the important task of obtaining from local sources, not only nonperishable foods but also fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, milk, bread, ice cream, and other perishables, a function previously performed by the base sections. For the first time all major aspects of the buying of food were thus concentrated in a single organization.47
In March 1944, the Procurement Division ceased to be an agency of G-4, USA-SOS, and came directly under the Commanding General, USASOS. It retained this status until August, when it became part of Headquarters, Base Section, USASOS, recently set up to control the only remaining active base sections in Australia—those at Sydney and Brisbane. Local buying indeed became the most important activity of this subordinate USASOS command. The Procurement Division was now given the new tasks of maintaining prescribed stock levels and supervising the distribution of supplies in the Commonwealth, tasks that the Distribution Division, just transferred to New Guinea, had formerly carried out. The Procurement Division thus became a distribution as well as a purchasing agency, but it retained its enlarged responsibilities only until February 1945, when, owing to the comparative decline of local procurement as a factor in area supply, the division was discontinued. Its distributing functions were then returned to OCQM in the Philippines, and its local purchasing activities were taken over by the Sydney base. This situation was still in effect when the war against Japan ended.48
Looking back upon the emergence of procurement organization in USASOS, Colonel Hester later maintained that the numerous administrative changes had increased the difficulty of maintaining consistent policies and caused so rapid a turnover of officers that operations could not always be accomplished effectively. In his opinion these changes had impaired relations with both government and business agencies, for they were often accompanied by cancellations of contracts and soon afterwards by their reinstatement. The Commonwealth Government, according to Hester, became convinced that “we did not know our requirements.”49 Industry, he added, was obliged to make so many alterations in its work schedules that production occasionally fell substantially below capacity. In his judgment all local procurement functions, including those of the General Purchasing Agent, should have been consolidated from the very outset in one office, as was done in the South Pacific, where the Joint Purchasing Board negotiated with the New Zealand Government, formulated procurement policies, and received, stored, and shipped sup-plies—functions that in Australia were carried out by the General Purchasing Agent, the Procurement Division, and the technical services.
Centralization of Distribution and Miscellaneous Activities
At the same time that the procurement activities of the OCQM were being whittled down in order to concentrate control of these
activities, distribution activities were undergoing a comparable attrition for much the same reason. Early in 1944, when stocks in New Guinea had sunk to precariously low levels, the Distribution Division was established under G-4, USASOS, to attain a better balanced division of all military supplies throughout the Southwest Pacific. As an agency untied to any technical service, it would, presumably, be uninfluenced by the special interests of these services and hence would be better able to control distribution in line with the actual needs of the combat forces. As the agency charged with over-all control of distribution, the new division took over from the technical services the keeping of consolidated stock records for the entire area and the maintenance of all base section stores at prescribed quantities. In order to facilitate the prompt movement of supplies to the installations needing them most, the new division in accordance with priorities set by higher echelons coordinated and scheduled shipments between Australian bases, and shipments from Australia and the United States to advance bases or forward areas. Through a Distribution Branch at Milne Bay in New Guinea it also controlled shipments north of Australia.50
In March, only a few weeks after its establishment, the Distribution Division was separated from G-4 and the Distribution Branch from the Distribution Division. Both organizations were put directly under the Commanding General, USASOS. The independent status given the Distribution Branch was the first step toward moving the center of the distribution system north from Australia and placing it nearer to the combat areas. This action originated in the need for an agency free to decide on the spot what to do about the increasingly complex distribution problems of the advanced areas. These problems were becoming both numerous and difficult. Adequate stocks were ever harder to obtain as cargo movements were slowed by lengthening distances between bases and by the shortage of interisland shipping. Food stocks in New Guinea had indeed become so low that equitable division of rations became a major task of the new branch.51
The second step in the northward shift of the distribution system came in June, when the Distribution Branch was moved to Oro Bay and made part of the Intermediate Section (INTERSEC), USASOS, which controlled all USASOS units and activities in the areas supported by the bases at Port Moresby, Milne Bay, and Oro Bay. The third step came two and a half months later when the Distribution Division itself was transferred from Australia, made part of INTERSEC, and given the functions of the formerly independent Distribution Branch. It was at this time that the division lost control over stock distribution in Australia to the Procurement Division.52
The same process that had taken procurement and distribution functions out of the OCQM affected its graves registration, central baggage, and reclamation and salvage activities, which demanded hundreds of civilian manual and clerical workers as well as fairly elaborate commercial repair shops. Such shops did not exist in New Guinea; nor would civilian employees accompany
the OCQM when it was moved to Hollandia. For these reasons the sections handling these activities remained in Australia until April 1945, when the removal of Headquarters, USASOS, to Manila made available both Filipino clerks and repair shops and made possible the return of the sections to the OCQM. At the same time Quartermaster distribution functions were again turned over to that office. Since Australia was fast declining as a supply source because of the thousands of miles that now separated it from the bulk of Southwest Pacific troops, the OCQM two months later also recovered most of its original procurement responsibilities. The lengthy process of turning over Quartermaster activities to field agencies and rear areas thus came to an end.53
Organization of Quartermaster Operations in the South Pacific
The Army in the South Pacific at first had no central supply organization. Such an agency could not be set up till the full scope of Army air and ground operations became known and an agreement was reached with the Navy on the precise delimitation between the supply functions of the two services. In the absence of a central supply agency the forces that occupied the main South Pacific islands operated as independent supply commands responsible only to the War Department. Task force G-4’s exercised staff control over supply operations, and the senior officer of each technical service acted as special staff officer as well as commander of all elements of his service. On New Caledonia, for example, within a few hours after the first American
troops landed in March 1942, a Quartermaster office was established to carry out these functions.54
Each task force quartermaster submitted requisitions on the zone of interior for items not furnished automatically. As no means of coordinating these requisitions existed, they were sent in without reference to the needs or the stocks of other forces. Despite the fact that the U.S. organizations were located only 1,000 miles or so from agriculturally rich New Zealand, that country at first provided them comparatively little food. The task forces secured most of their rations as well as most of their other supplies from the West Coast, 4,000 miles or so away. To conserve shipping on this long run, USAFIA supplied the troops in the South Pacific to the extent of its capacity, and many Quartermaster articles were procured in this manner.55
Shortages of men and units severely handicapped task force quartermasters in their efforts to carry out both their regular organizational responsibilities and those of a theater SOS. Quartermaster troops constituted less than 2 percent of task force strength and had little knowledge of the more specialized duties of the Corps.56 That service nevertheless employed its scanty manpower in every kind of Quartermaster operation. At Nouméa the 130th QM Battalion, a truck organization, for five months ran the food dumps, the gasoline
Quartermaster truck company motor pool. Note the use of landing mat in the conversion of the semitrailer in the foreground.
dumps, and the clothing warehouses and transported supplies to the limit of its capacity. It was directed to haul materials, regardless of size, for all technical services, but its standard 2½-ton trucks were much too small to carry rails, lumber, landing mats, and other bulky materials. It solved this dilemma by trading small vehicles to the Navy for large ones and ingeniously converting trucks into tractors capable of pulling semitrailers constructed from salvaged 6-ton vehicles. The Corps attempted to make up for the scarcity of men by extensive utilization of both combat organizations and native workers, but tactical troops were reluctant workers and native laborers were unaccustomed to steady application and had little mechanical skill.57
The acute shortage of junior officers presented a perplexing problem that was finally solved by the establishment of an officer candidate school in New Caledonia and by direct commissioning from the ranks. Officers thus acquired helped fill the needs of undermanned forces. On New Caledonia these officers staffed the clothing and equipment repair shops, the salvage collection service, and the graves registration service. They also assisted in procurement activities, which for several months included procurement for other technical services since the QMC alone among the technical services in the South Pacific had a fairly large body of officers experienced in such activities.58
All these makeshifts relieved personnel shortages somewhat, but the situation
demanded more fundamental action. By July 1942 there were about 60,000 Army ground and air troops in the South Pacific, and substantial reinforcements were on their way. The Americal Division was then in New Caledonia, the 37th Division was in the Fijis, and smaller forces were in New Zealand, Efate, Espiritu Santo, Tongatabu, Bora Bora, Wallis, Upolo, and Tutuila. An Army territorial command was obviously required to supervise and coordinate the supply of these scattered garrisons. This need was accentuated by the preparations for the Guadalcanal campaign. On 7 July Maj. Gen. Millard F. Harmon, Chief of the Air Staff in the War Department, was therefore appointed commanding general (COMGENSOPAC) of the newly created U.S. Army Forces in the South Pacific Area (USAFISPA). He served under Vice Adm. Robert L. Ghormley, commander of the South Pacific Area and South Pacific Force (COMSOPAC), and his responsibilities were limited to administration, supply, and training of Army ground and air troops.59 General Harmon’s mission included the determination of Army logistical needs, the supply of Army bases, the procurement, through the Joint Purchasing Board (JPB), set up by Admiral Ghormley in June, of materials obtainable in New Zealand, and the requisitioning of other materials from the San Francisco Port of Embarkation.60
At the time it was difficult for General Harmon to develop a centralized supply system. Though he exercised no control over operational plans, Admiral Ghormley and his successor, Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., constantly consulted him on tactical matters and the disposition of Army forces, and for some weeks following the establishment of USAFISPA headquarters at Nouméa in late July, Harmon’s still incomplete staff was immersed in these problems to the exclusion of almost everything else. In any event it was too limited in numbers and logistical experience to control supply effectively. The main body of Harmon’s projected staff was indeed still in California and arrived in New Caledonia only in late September.61
A plan for centralized supply control, prepared by Brig. Gen. Robert G. Breene, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-4, was then put into force. General Breene had soon concluded that the ordinary G-4 section lacked sufficient power to handle the complex logistics of island warfare and to integrate Army supply operations with those of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Allied forces. His plan called for a central command with more authority than a G-4 section normally possessed. This headquarters, commanded by Breene, was set up at Auckland in mid-October as the Service Command. Early in the following month it was redesignated the Services of Supply (SOS SPA) and moved to Nouméa in order to be closer to the center of operations.
The mission of SOS SPA was the logistical support of Army and other forces that might be assigned to it. This meant in general the supply of the island garrisons guarding the lines of communications between the United States and the Southwest Pacific and the support of tactical forces. These forces, under the direction of Admiral Halsey, advanced up the Solomons ladder in a series of amphibious operations that began on Guadalcanal in August 1942 and ended in
March 1944 with the occupation of Emirau, ninety miles north of New Ireland. The latter operation, in conjunction with that carried out at the same time by MacArthur in the Admiralties, gave the Allied forces control of the approaches to the Bismarck Sea and enabled them to flank the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul and protect their advance into the waters leading to the Philippines. This operation marked the successful termination of the South Pacific Area tactical mission. Most of the ground and air forces in the area, totaling about 150,000 men, were then transferred to General Mac-Arthur’s command, and the South Pacific became essentially a communications zone, supplying and mounting out Army and Marine Corps forces sent there from the Central Pacific Area for rehabilitation, training, and re-equipment preparatory to the Marianas and Carolines operations. So extensive were these tasks that until late 1944 there was little diminution in the magnitude of SPA supply activities.62
As long as the South Pacific was an active operational command, it constituted an expanding area in, which new SOS operating agencies were constantly being set up and old ones enlarged. The most important of these agencies were the service commands established on strategically located islands to support offensive operations and supply all troops in their areas. These agencies, like USASOS base sections, operated through technical service sections and controlled the organizations, men, and depots concerned with SOS tasks. Quartermaster activities at Headquarters, SOS SPA, were conducted through the Quartermaster Section of the Supply and Salvage Division. This section, headed by Lt. Col. Carmon A. Rogers, was the largest agency under SOS, and like the OCQM in USASOS, exercised centralized control over Quartermaster operations.63
The joint operations of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps in the South Pacific called for close cooperation in order to reduce confusing duplication of logistical efforts. The form of this cooperation was laid down in the Basic Logistical Plan for Command Areas Involving Joint Operations. Approved by the War and Navy Departments in March 1943, it directed the organization of joint Army-Navy staffs in the Pacific Ocean Areas to coordinate the activities of all supply and service agencies. In the South Pacific Admiral Halsey set up a Joint Logistical Board (JLB) to fashion cooperative supply policies and a Joint Working Board (JWB) to carry out these policies. The decisions of these two boards determined the precise scope of Army responsibility for supplying other services.64
The QMC was assigned a broader mission than it had in Army-controlled areas. This was particularly true of the procurement and distribution of food. Before June 1943 representatives of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps had met at irregular intervals and made informal agreements roughly defining their respective missions in this field. After that date the JWB assigned definite functions to each service. It made the QMC responsible for the procurement, storage, and distribution of nonperishable subsistence and combat rations for Army, Navy, and Marine Corps units, whether ashore or afloat, and of perishable food for units ashore. The Navy procured perishables for units afloat and furnished ocean transportation for all such provisions,
whether for use at sea or on land. Only in the Samoan Islands and Funafuti Island was the Army excluded from any responsibility for food.65
The broad functions given to Quartermaster agencies for provisioning Navy and Marine Corps as well as Army units sharply increased the dimensions of the Quartermaster subsistence program. Though Army troop strength alone was usually smaller than in the Southwest Pacific, the QMC, owing to the large number of Navy and Marine Corps units, at times procured and distributed rations for as many or more men than it did in the neighboring area.
Whereas the Corps was charged in general with procurement of subsistence in the South Pacific, the Joint Purchasing Board, a body composed mostly of Navy representatives, remained responsible for the centralized procurement of food as well as other supplies obtained locally in New Zealand. The Corps, believing it should control all local procurement of subsistence, was never wholly satisfied with this allocation of responsibility. Increasingly, however, the naval representatives on the board devoted their major attention to negotiations with New Zealand government agencies, while the Quartermaster representatives more and more cared for the details arising in the purchase of the items with which they were charged. These officers functioned much like their counterparts in the Subsistence Depot in Australia, determining how production could be increased and what equipment and materials were needed to raise agricultural output.66 The Quartermaster, SOS, provided the Joint Purchasing Board with estimates of future requirements on an area basis, and the board then determined the amount of each item procurable locally. On receipt of these figures the Quartermaster, SOS, could readily ascertain the quantity of supplies that he must requisition from the United States to meet area needs.67
The South Pacific Area obtained food not only from New Zealand and the United States but also from Southwest Pacific stocks of subsistence produced in Australia. During the early months, supply from this source was conducted in a somewhat haphazard fashion satisfactory to neither command.68 In January 1943 this situation was materially improved by a comprehensive agreement between the two areas, which accepted 400,000 men as the number to be supplied in the combined commands during 1943 and which provided that each area would estimate its requirements on the basis of half that number and inform the other area of its deficiencies. These, if obtainable locally, would be added to that area’s procurement schedule and submitted as separate contract demands on the Australian or the New Zealand Government. Practically speaking, the burden of making up deficiencies fell almost entirely on the Southwest Pacific.69
Toward the end of 1943, the OCQM, USASOS, finding it increasingly difficult to send all needed food to the New Guinea bases and at the same time fill South Pacific demands, objected to the practice of
requisitioning and holding rations specifically for the neighboring command. It recommended that Southwest Pacific requirements be filled before any shipments were made elsewhere and that no stocks be earmarked for other areas. In a conference between the two areas in late 1943 these recommendations were substantially accepted.70
Quartermaster procurement for all three armed services in the South Pacific was not confined to food. It was applied also to the procurement and distribution of insecticides for the extermination of the anopheles mosquito and other insect bearers of malaria, dengue fever, filariasis, and scrub typhus, diseases that caused more casualties than did the Japanese.71 Post exchange items constituted another group of supplies common to the three services that the JLB recommended be procured and distributed solely by the QMC. As in other overseas areas, each service in the beginning had procured its own sales items and sold them in its own stores. Every Army PX obtained its stock from the United States through individual purchase orders on the Army Exchange Service rather than from area warehouses. This method obliged each store to bear losses in transit. As a result exchanges sometimes had few items to sell. From the close of 1942, therefore, the QMC in the South Pacific, as in other operational areas, had gradually been charged with the procurement of more and more articles for PX’s. It tried to maintain large stocks of candy, soap, toothpaste, and other common items in South Pacific warehouses, but there were almost chronic shortages of cigarettes, beer, and soft drinks. Since articles unavailable in post exchanges were repeatedly found in the ship’s service stores maintained by the Navy, soldiers became increasingly dissatisfied with the Army stores.
This disparity in the variety and quantity of articles for sale to the different services engendered a sense of discrimination among the men and hurt their morale. Toward the end of 1943 the JLB accordingly proposed that the Quartermaster Section, SOS, buy all post exchange supplies for all the services. This plan was approved by both the War and the Navy Departments early in 1944, but Admiral Halsey never carried it out because he was uncertain concerning the future strength of his area.72
The principle of unification was applied also to the collection and repair of salvaged materials, matters of considerable importance in the South Pacific owing to the rapid deterioration of footwear and textile items, replacement of which was difficult. Though the QMC never actually had enough salvage personnel, it had more than any other organization and therefore was charged with the collection, classification, and repair of typewriters, cots, tents, shoes. clothing, and other salvageable articles common to the three services.73
On 1 August 1944, after conclusion of offensive operations in the South Pacific, the SOS SPA became the South Pacific Base Command (SPBC). As such, it was primarily responsible for the staging and rehabilitation of Central Pacific divisions in the South Pacific Area, the support of combat activities in the Central Pacific, and the
Section of the Quartermaster salvage depot at Milne Bay, New Guinea.
supply of three Southwest Pacific infantry divisions in the northern Solomons. When at the end of the year offensive operations spread to the Philippines, which lay too far west to be readily supported by the SPBC, its major functions became the “roll-up” of the area and the transfer of its excess supplies to other commands.74
Quartermaster problems in the two areas below the equator were for the most part not dissimilar. In neither area were there at the outset any Quartermaster agencies; from top to bottom such organizations had to be established in a few short months. The chief differences between Quartermaster operations in the two areas sprang almost entirely from the broader responsibilities placed upon SOS SPA for the supply of rations and certain other items to Navy and Marine Corps organizations.
The Central Pacific Quartermaster Organization
Unlike the South and the Southwest Pacific Areas, the Central Pacific Area started with an established peacetime organization in the Hawaiian Department. Within that department there were already a Quartermaster Section at Department Headquarters and Quartermaster depots on Oahu. During the first eighteen months after the outbreak of hostilities, when the main functions of the Hawaiian Department were the training and staging of troops for amphibious operations in other areas
rather than for offensive activities of its own, Quartermaster problems were less complex than those of the southern commands. No extensive organization was required for distribution operations or local procurement as few indigenous items were obtained and there were no sizable bases outside Hawaii.
The Quartermaster Section functioned much like similar sections elsewhere, advising the commanding general of the area on policy matters and preparing estimates of the men and supplies required to carry out the Quartermaster mission. It also dealt with day-to-day operations, translating area requirements into requisitions, supervising unit training, and controlling the activities of subordinate organizations, such as the Quartermaster Depots at Fort Armstrong and Schofield Barracks, the School for Cooks and Bakers, the Quartermaster Supply Areas on Oahu, the service units operating these and similar installations, and the Quartermaster units sent to Hawaii for training. The only units of this type not controlled by it were those which furnished Quartermaster services in the outer islands under the supervision of the Hawaiian Department Service Forces and those which were assigned or attached to ground or air forces. Until late 1943, Quartermaster operations were, then, in general of a routine nature.75
As in the South Pacific, a Joint Logistics Board and a Joint Working Board developed plans for joint supply. Each service in Hawaii filled most of its own requirements, but the principle of joint supply was applied to the small advance bases. On Johnston and Palmyra Islands, where the Navy controlled all but a few facilities and had the larger forces, that service furnished all classes of supply. On Fanning and Christmas Islands, where the Army had the larger interest, it provided Class I, II, and IV items.
After large-scale offensive operations began with the attack on the Gilberts, Quartermaster responsibilities were substantially increased, for it was then agreed that during such operations the Army would furnish rations to Navy and Marine forces and provision these elements at the advance bases established as a result of combat activities. From this time onward, the QMC fed a steadily rising number of men, including eventually more than 100,000 marines. The principal effort of the Corps came, therefore, during the last two years of the war, when it handled four to six times as many supplies as it did in the preceding period.76
Since the support of combat troops was taking up more and more of the time of technical service chiefs and since base operations were becoming daily more important, the Central Pacific Area was reorganized in June 1944 to relieve these officers of routine duties. The functions of Headquarters, U.S. Army Forces, Central Pacific Area (USAFICPA), as the Hawaiian Department had been redesignated in August 1943, were divided between two new agencies—Headquarters, U.S. Army Forces, Pacific Ocean Areas (HUSAFPOA), and the Central Pacific Base Command (CPBC). This reorganization divided the functions of the former Quartermaster Office, Central Pacific Area, between the two new establishments, both of which had their headquarters on Oahu.77
The Office of the Quartermaster, HUSAFPOA, headed by Brig. Gen. George E. Hartman, inherited the planning, policy-making, and supervisory responsibilities of the Office of the Quartermaster, Central Pacific Area. It determined area and base stock levels as well as unit and supply requirements for combat organizations, supervised the building up of stockpiles by the base commands, and planned the logistical support of tactical forces and the development of Quartermaster base facilities on newly won islands.78 As the CPBC was in essence a communications zone, the Office of the Quartermaster in that command looked after the countless details involved in the support of operational forces and in the development and supply of bases, old and new. Its responsibilities included the collection of statistics of stocks on hand and on order; the correlation of these figures with theater requirements as estimated by HUSAFPOA so as to ascertain what additional supplies were needed; the storage and distribution of stocks in accordance with directives from HUSAFPOA; and the establishment and supervision of Quartermaster base installations and services.79
The Quartermaster mission of the CPBC was of signal importance from July to November 1944. During that period the Marianas campaign was triumphantly terminated, and a substantial part of the forces that conquered Leyte was mounted. As the American forces moved toward Japan it became more difficult to control the supply of Pacific Ocean Areas troops from now distant Oahu. When the Okinawa campaign started, Saipan was therefore made the headquarters of the new Western Pacific Base Command, set up to assume in its territory tasks similar to those of the Central Pacific Base Command. The new command operated under the general supervision of the Quartermaster, HUSAFPOA. It participated in the logistical support of the tactical forces operating in the western Pacific and supplied garrisons totaling about 130,000 troops on Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, Angaur, and Ulithi.80
Meanwhile General MacArthur on 6 April 1945 had been given command over all Army troops in the Pacific. This event had little influence on Pacific Ocean Areas supply activities. It merely meant that in the future HUSAFPOA would submit its reports to MacArthur as Commander in Chief, Army Forces, Pacific (CINCAF-PAC), rather than to the War Department. In July HUSAFPOA was redesignated as Headquarters, U.S. Army Forces, Middle Pacific (HUSAFMIDPAC), and Brig. Gen. Henry R. McKenzie succeeded General Hartman as Quartermaster.81
Though Quartermaster functions in the Central and the Western Pacific eventually embraced the logistical support of formidable task forces and the maintenance of large stocks at a long chain of growing bases, Quartermaster distribution operations were never as difficult as they had been earlier in these areas. This favorable situation was partly a result of the fact that supplies during the first two years had come to Honolulu almost wholly from San Francisco, only 2,000 miles away, and had been distributed over relatively short distances within the Hawaiian group; partly of the fact that shipping in the last two years, when distances became much greater, was never as scarce as elsewhere; and partly of the fact
that a full-scale Quartermaster organization existed in the mid-Pacific from the outset.
The central Quartermaster organizations in the two areas below the equator probably never attained as high a degree of efficiency as those to the north. When American troops first came to the south, there was in all that enormous territory no central Quartermaster organization to supervise the activities of the Corps and to inaugurate large-scale operations in support of combat troops. Such organizations had to be improvised without the benefit of carefully developed prewar plans and in the midst of uncertainty as to the precise role the U.S. Army would play in that part of the world. The confusion and doubts of the early months were quite naturally reflected in a dangerously undermanned Quartermaster organization. Frequent shifts in the location of SOS headquarters, particularly in Australia, made it almost impossible to retain a fully trained civilian staff drawn from local inhabitants and thus intensified the difficulty of building up an effective central office. Even more important hampering factors were the repeated changes in the internal organization of central Quartermaster offices—again, most notably in Southwest Pacific Area. No one principle of administration was long followed in USASOS; changes were almost constantly being made, often accompanied by shifts of supervisory officers and a general shuffling of activities within divisions. Apparently, this unsettled state of affairs often lowered efficiency. It might have been better if a definite administrative principle had been early adopted and then consistently adhered to.