Chapter 12: Problems of Victory
The sudden surrender of Japan, officially concluded on 2 September 1945, signalized the complete victory of the United States and its Allies in the Pacific. In a letter addressed to all Quartermaster troops in Mac-Arthur’s command, the Chief Quartermaster, Brig. Gen. William F. Campbell, felicitated members of the Corps on their wartime accomplishments. Proudly, he declared that though “Victories achieved on each new island were carved out by front line troops and tacticians,” their successes “were made possible by you who worked and sweated eighteen to twenty hours a day to see that our troops had the supplies they needed when they needed them.” He continued in these words:
Food, clothing, and equipment were scarce in the early days. We were fighting one of two wars then, and our war was being supplied from the small end of the supply horn. Under these conditions yours was not an easy task, but it is to the credit of all Quartermaster personnel in this theater that from the time the American advance began in the Solomons August 1942, until its culmination in victory on 2 September 1945, not once did our attack falter because of a lack of Quartermaster supplies!
Never before in any war have supply lines been so long. Never before has so much been supplied over such distances. I am confident that logistic experts a few years ago would have said that the execution of the supply operations you have accomplished in the last four years [was] impossible. I am equally confident that historians in the years to come will write of your supply achievements as one of the miracles of this war.
No one can say that this or that arm or branch of the service achieved victory. The credit is shared by one and all alike. But to you of the Quartermaster Corps, the merits of whose activities and accomplishments I have been in a position to judge, I offer my personal appreciation and congratulations for a job well done. You have every reason to be proud of your achievements.1
Peace brought with it a drastic modification of the Quartermaster mission. The chief tasks of the Corps now became the supply of troops in the Philippines, Okinawa, Japan, and Korea, the evacuation of rear bases, and the disposition of unneeded stocks. The Office of the Chief Quartermaster, Army Forces Pacific (AFPAC), which had been set up as a special staff section in GHQ AFPAC on 21 August, supervised these new activities, whether they were carried out by U.S. Army Forces, Western Pacific (USAFWESPAC) , or U. S. Army Forces, Middle Pacific (USAFMIDPAC) .2
On 15 and 16 October the more important AFWESPAC quartermasters assembled in OCQM to adopt a plan for swift execution of their new mission. They quickly agreed upon a supply program for the
BLACKLIST Operation, as the occupation of Japan and Korea was called. Since the number of troops outside the occupied countries would steadily decline and stocks built up at the older bases to provide for a larger number of men would then far exceed demands, this program envisioned the maximum employment of stores already in the Pacific; only articles otherwise unobtainable would be requisitioned from U.S. sources. Excess stocks from the Philippines and AFWESPAC rear areas would furnish most of the required items, but when practicable, stocks from South and Mid-Pacific as well as Southwest Pacific bases would be employed. Supplies were to be shipped automatically in block loads adjusted to the size of the occupational forces. This system would remain operative until mid-February 1946, when, presumably, a fairly well-stabilized troop strength would permit a return to the normal peacetime method of delivering supplies only in fulfillment of requisitions.3
The conferees discussed at considerable length means of carrying out promptly the “roll-up” of rear bases. They agreed that Quartermaster activities at bases should be ended as soon as the troops they supplied had been evacuated. Except at Finschhafen and Hollandia, activities at New Guinea bases would cease about 31 December. Hollandia would close by 1 February and Finschhafen by 1 March. In the Philippines, Base R at Batangas on Luzon would pass to the control of Base X in Manila and become a temporary storage place for unneeded supplies and equipment that rear areas turned in for disposition. With the single exception of Base M at San Fernando, La Union, also on Luzon, other Philippine bases and supply points were to be abandoned by the spring of 1946; for the time being Base M would serve as a war reserve depot. Ultimately, most stocks would be concentrated at Manila.4
The chief Quartermaster problem in the closing of bases was the large amount of unneeded supplies. When considered in relation to the number of soldiers, stocks, except of Class III products, stood at high levels. There were several causes for this condition. One was the steady decline in troop strength as more and more men were returned to the United States for discharge from the Army. Another was the rapid build-up of stores after VE-Day in anticipation of the early arrival of many thousands of men from the ETO. Actually, the expected reinforcements never came, and instead of sharp increases, sharp decreases appeared in troop strength. Stockages thus became much more than ample. The absence of combat losses further increased excesses, for supply levels had been set in expectation of such losses. Soldiers indeed required little more than did those in the zone of interior. The rapid abandonment of old points of troop concentration introduced still another complication since bases in New Guinea, the Solomons, and other isolated areas were quickly reduced to the status of mere storage places with few or no supply functions. With scarcely any troops remaining to protect stocks, pilferage rose and losses from deterioration multiplied.5
Obviously, a primary means of eliminating excesses in stockages was through a reduction in the inflow of supplies. During the weeks after VJ-Day the Corps
accordingly withdrew most of its requisitions on Australia and New Zealand for food, clothing, and general supplies. It retained in force only a few contracts completion of which was necessary in order to provide cold-weather apparel for men going to Japan and Korea. The Corps also withdrew requisitions on the continental United States for items already available in adequate quantities and canceled the sailing of many block ships slated to depart from San Francisco with cargoes for the occupational forces.6
The disposition of base stocks presented a more involved problem than did the elimination of incoming shipments. It demanded, first of all, the determination of how much property constituted “surplus,” that is, property unneeded by any U.S. Government agency and thus disposable to civilians, American or foreign. In performing this task, Pacific areas were governed by War Department Technical Manual 38420, issued in September 1945.7 In line with its stipulations, they first estimated the distribution needs of the bases. Once this had been done, quantities of civilian-type Class II, III, and IV items on hand in excess of Pacific needs could be declared surplus without reference to the War Department. If fresh provisions or other supplies, military or civilian, were likely to be lost through rapid deterioration, they, too, could be immediately declared surplus. But unless such danger existed, neither food nor items of a military type could be so classified without express War Department authorization. Special regulations empowered overseas commands to treat all reverse lend-lease property as surplus and return it to the supplying government.8 Because of the serious shortage of warehouse space in the United States, surplus property could not be returned there without specific approval from ASF headquarters. The only items exempt from this general restriction were a few badly needed by American industry. Cotton and burlap bags were the only important Quartermaster articles in this category.9
Receipt of supplies at still active bases in the Philippines and on Okinawa continued for some months to exceed shipments, but at most of the other bases distribution activities rapidly dwindled. Even before the Pacific commands had received Technical Manual 38-420, they had begun preparations for the disposition of unneeded stocks at these declining installations. In September G-4, Australian Base Section, organized technical service teams which visited depots and determined the quantity of surplus stocks and the original cost and present value of both U.S.-owned and reverse lend-lease surpluses. These teams declared most of the property on the Australian mainland surplus. Virtually all reverse lend-lease stores were in consequence turned back to the Commonwealth.10 Only a small percentage was booked for movement to the Philippines and Japan. Owing to the shortage of bottoms and the exorbitant expense of shipping, used or deteriorated items whose value had declined to a fraction of the original cost and U.S.-owned supplies-even those of a military type—were also mostly disposed of in Australia. The Army-Navy Liquidation Commission, which had
responsibility for this task, at first turned over surplus supplies to the Commonwealth Disposals Commission for sale in small lots to merchants and manufacturers. This procedure, one G-4 officer complained, was so slow that it would keep Americans in Australia for years. Increasingly, therefore, the property was sold in bulk lots to the Commonwealth or to agencies of India, China, and the Netherlands Indies.11
Outside Australia, other rear bases also plunged at once into the formidable task of disposing of no longer needed stores.12 At Finschhafen, U.S. troops, helped by the Australians, Dutch, and Indonesians, toiled long hours in order to hasten their return home. During October, “closing out” activities attained so high a rate that Quartermaster trucks hauled nine times the tonnage they had in the previous month. By 1 November, 85 percent of Quartermaster surpluses had been sold at nominal prices in Netherlands New Guinea and other places in the Netherlands Indies. The difficulty of obtaining vessels for shipments to northern bases, let alone to the United States, mainly accounted for this large shift of property. The Australian Army also profited from the closing of the base. It received a sixty-day food supply, most of which the Commonwealth had originally procured as reciprocal aid for the U.S. Army.13
In the old South Pacific Area the Guadalcanal base, which on VJ-Day contained more than 240,000 measurement tons of government property, became the scene of hectic activity. All outlying warehouses were closed as quickly as possible, and all movable property was concentrated near the Kukum docks for disposition by the Foreign Liquidation Commission. It soon found that few buyers were willing to bid at Guadalcanal, for they could obtain the goods they wanted at other bases where commercial vessels for transporting their purchases were available in much larger numbers. Some other method of disposition was imperative. Headquarters, U.S. Army Forces, Middle Pacific, accordingly ordered property that met high standards of serviceability sent to other bases or to the United States for disposition.
About three fourths of surplus stock met these standards. The other fourth was badly deteriorated or was obsolete. Authority for its destruction or abandonment was obtained, and it was burned, buried, or dumped at sea.14
The Guadalcanal close-out report revealed that the Foreign Liquidation Commission had sold 17,828 measurement tons, or about 7 percent of base surpluses. Of this quantity, 13,277 tons, or nearly three fourths, consisted of motor gasoline, diesel fuel, and other Quartermaster supplies. In monetary terms Quartermaster items realized only the surprisingly small sum of $26,354, a mere quarter of total sales of $100,864; indeed, for each ton of Quartermaster supplies the U.S. Government obtained only two dollars. Property shipped from Guadalcanal to other Pacific bases or to the United States for sale amounted to 165,831 measurement tons, or 69 percent of all Army surpluses. Abandoned or destroyed articles came to 58,831 measurement tons, or 24 percent. Originally, this property had cost $19,888,587, of which $2,027,728 had been spent for Quartermaster supplies.15
Closing-out operations at Guadalcanal, though not unrepresentative of those found at the more remote rear bases, did not wholly typify such operations in the Pacific. The proportion of abandoned or destroyed property in particular reached higher levels than at any but the most isolated installations. Moreover, few if any bases outside the Solomons and New Hebrides were as severely handicapped in the sale of surplus property as was Guadalcanal by remoteness from civilian markets and by lack of commercial shipping. But everywhere sales suffered from the scarcity of U.S. dollars, which were at first usually demanded in payment of purchases. By January, revised regulations permitting acceptance of bank drafts drawn against dollar balances had materially eased the currency shortage in New Caledonia, and in Australia and New Zealand the termination of reverse lend-lease agreements and the subsequent use of dollars for Army food purchases had provided the currency required by buyers of surpluses.
No fully reliable statistics covering the disposition of unneeded property in the Pacific are available. The G-4 Section, AFWESPAC, which supervised disposal activities at the old Southwest Pacific bases submitted, as of 30 June 1946, approximate figures covering the principal phases of the disposition program in that command. Up to that time it had approved declarations of surpluses totaling for all Army technical services 1,316,000 long tons, with an original cost of $991,804,000. Of this huge quantity, reverse lend-lease property had reverted to the procuring country, about 31,100 tons had been donated, abandoned, or destroyed, and about 1,042,200 tons returned to the United States. Most of the remaining surpluses had been sold to foreign governments by negotiated sales or was about to be so disposed of. The Philippine Commonwealth and the Chinese Government were the chief beneficiaries of this method of sale. They received, respectively, a large part of the surpluses in the Philippines and on Okinawa, and they received this property at little or no cost and thereby materially aided their shattered economies.16
Aside from its role in the disposition of surplus property, which, by mid-1946, was fast nearing completion, the QMC had few major tasks attributable directly to wartime operations that remained to be carried out. It was, it is true, engaged in a graves registration program that would continue for several years and that called for verification of the identification of the soldier dead, concentration of their remains in a few Pacific cemeteries, extensive search for the bodies of those still missing, and eventual return of most of the dead to the United States for burial in places chosen by next of kin. Otherwise Quartermaster responsibilities in the Pacific were increasingly like those normally carried out by the Corps in peacetime posts overseas. No longer did it find routine activities handicapped by shortages of men, supplies, and equipment or by transportation troubles. No longer did it have to contend with the insoluble problem of forecasting the supply needs of task forces. Nor did soldiers any longer go without fresh food, beer, tobacco, socks, and well-fitted clothing. In Japan and Korea, as in Hawaii and the Philippines, troops were well fed and well clad.
Yet if the accomplishment of current tasks posed few difficulties, the QMC was faced in the Pacific as elsewhere with the highly important responsibility of planning and
preparing for the future in a world living under the dark shadow of an apparently interminable cold war relentlessly waged in all quarters of the globe. The necessity of preparing for a future clouded by incalculable hazards confronted the QMC, like all other components of the Army, with a complex problem of preparedness such as the service had never before faced in peacetime. The uncertainties surrounding future Communist actions hampered the efforts of all parts of the Army to achieve a degree of organized readiness adequate to check any aggression. When, for example, the 38th parallel became in 1945 the line separating the Soviet and the U.S. forces occupying Korea, few men foresaw that within five years this division of the country would become the excuse for the invasion of South Korea by North Korean Communists. Had diplomats and strategists possessed the gift of prevision, the Army would probably have retained much of the surplus property it had so hastily sold or abandoned after VJ-Day and would certainly have kept larger stocks in its depots. There were at first neither sufficient troops nor equipment in the Pacific to repel the invaders. Consequently, though the North Koreans did not possess formidable strength, the Army was unable for three months to fight its way north to the 38th parallel.
In spite of the difficulty of foretelling what the Communists would do or even the character of future wars, which might indeed be conducted in so revolutionary a manner as to outmode all prior concepts, the QMC stood ready to play its traditional part as the handmaiden of diplomacy, strategy, and tactics. In that capacity it was prepared within the limits set by budgetary allowances to carry out its routine activities and to plan the execution of the supporting role assigned to it by shifting diplomatic and strategic concepts of future warfare.