Draft registration in the United States

On Wednesday 16 October 1940, from seven in the morning until nine in the evening, queues of men formed at schools, polling places, town halls and offices throughout the United States. That day the obligation to register applied to all men who had reached the age of 21 but not yet 36, citizens and resident aliens alike. It was the first practical step in implementing the Selective Training and Service Act, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed a month earlier, introducing the first peacetime conscription in American history. By evening more than 16 million men had registered; the White House later gave a round figure of 16.4 million. The registration closed a month in which the United States, still formally neutral, built a civilian draft administration and switched the command of its army at home from a peacetime footing to preparation for war.

Field armies separated from the corps areas

The first of these changes took place within the army itself. Since 1920 the territory of the continental United States had been divided into nine corps areas, created under the National Defense Act of that year by a War Department order of 20 August 1920. They are sometimes dated to 1921; in fact, all that was created in 1921 were mobilisation plans providing for field armies to be formed on their basis. A corps area, the equivalent of a European military district, was both an administrative office and a command: its commander managed garrisons, barracks, supply and the records of reservists, and at the same time commanded the units stationed in his area and was responsible for their training.

In 1932 the Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, ordered a higher echelon to be added to this structure. Four field armies (PL) were created: the First Army in the north-east and on the Atlantic coast, the Second Army in the Great Lakes region, the Third Army in the south, along the Mexican border, and the Fourth Army on the Pacific coast. For eight years, however, they existed mainly on paper. Each was usually commanded by the commander of one of the corps areas, who kept his existing duties, and army staffs were improvised from corps-area staff officers, especially for the summer manoeuvres. A general commanding an army thus spent most of his time on barracks, budgets and administration rather than on training troops for combat.

When the army began to grow rapidly in the summer of 1940, this arrangement was no longer adequate. On 26 July General Headquarters, United States Army (GHQ) was activated; under the de facto direction of Brigadier General Lesley McNair, it was to direct the training of the field forces. Within days of taking up his post in August, McNair concluded that the creation of GHQ in effect meant “superimposing a theater of operations upon the zone of the interior” and required deeper changes. He proposed that the corps areas should deal solely with the affairs of the “zone of the interior” – the support base at home – while combat units should be organised, trained and administered by armies, corps and divisions as if they were already in a theatre of operations. The Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, adopted the idea.

A War Department letter of 3 October 1940 separated the headquarters of the four armies from the corps areas. The armies received their own commanders and their own staffs, independent of the corps-area staffs, and were to concentrate on training their subordinate corps and divisions. The corps areas kept garrison administration, supply and mobilisation matters, but ceased to command the field forces. This change is usually placed within the month as a whole, from 1 to 31 October, and rightly so, since carrying it out took several weeks. For example, General Herbert Brees, who had commanded the Third Army since the end of September, also remained commander of the Eighth Corps Area in Texas until 9 November, when his successor took it over. In November the army headquarters companies were activated; in May 1941 the corps areas were renamed Corps Area Service Commands, and in 1942 they were placed under the newly created Services of Supply, separate from the ground forces.

The official history of the US Army Ground Forces observes that the reform was incomplete: the armies still relied on the barracks and supply of the corps areas, and GHQ never became a full theatre-of-operations headquarters. Nevertheless, the four-army plan of 1932 was put into effect for the first time, and the American army at home gained a command structure that made it possible to train and move whole armies, not merely individual garrisons.

A civilian at the head of the draft

The second change was the appointment of a director of the draft. The Act of 16 September created a new federal agency, the Selective Service System, but for the first weeks its preparation was directed by officers who since 1936 had been planning a future draft in a joint Army and Navy committee. Their head was Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. Hershey, who in October was promoted to brigadier general and appointed executive officer of the new agency – in effect, deputy director.

Roosevelt, however, who in the middle of an election campaign had to fend off accusations that he was leading the country into war, wanted the face of the draft to be a civilian. On 15 October, the day before registration, he gave the post of director to Clarence Addison Dykstra. Born in 1883, Dykstra was a political scientist and a specialist in municipal administration: he had taught political science at the University of Chicago among other places, worked for the Los Angeles municipal water and power utility, served as city manager of Cincinnati from 1930 to 1937, and from 1937 had been president of the University of Wisconsin. The choice of a scholar and capable administrator with no military background was meant to persuade the public that the draft would be a tool neither of militarists nor of party patronage.

The system itself was deliberately decentralised. In a letter to the state governors of 21 September Roosevelt asked them to direct the draft in their states and to nominate candidates for the local boards, made up of unpaid civilians, often veterans and local worthies. The fate of the draftees was to depend on their neighbours, not on officers. Some 6,500 such boards were set up across the country.

Registration day

Registration was carried out by volunteers, among them members of local election boards, teachers and officials. Each man gave his name, address, age, place of employment and a person who would always know his address, and in return received a registration card, which he had to carry with him. Employers were asked to give their workers time off to register. Residents of Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico registered on later dates set by separate proclamations. After the registration places closed, the cards were handed to the local boards, which assigned them numbers from 1 to 7,836 in random order.

That day Roosevelt spoke on the radio. He said that more than 16 million young Americans were renewing the “three-hundred-year-old American custom of the muster”, going back to colonial times, when every citizen able to bear arms had to turn out for the common defence. He pointed out that a nation of 130 million people had about half a million soldiers under arms in the army and the National Guard, while smaller countries had four, five and six million, and he insisted that the programme was preparation for defence and for defence alone. He called the registration “a keystone in the arch of our national defense”, and told those registering: “democracy is your cause – the cause of youth”. This duty, he said, had been imposed on Americans from without by those who had “created the name and deed of total war”. Three weeks earlier Germany, Italy and Japan had concluded the Tripartite Pact, aimed squarely at the United States, and the German air force’s night raids on Britain were continuing. That same day Marshall named the building of morale and discipline as the main aim in training the first intake of draftees.

Registration went off calmly and efficiently. Few men refused to register, mostly on religious and pacifist grounds, even though the Act provided non-combatant service or civilian work for conscientious objectors. The best-known case was that of eight students at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, among them David Dellinger, who announced that they would not register even in order to obtain exemption as ministers; in November they were sentenced to a year and a day in prison. The race question also cast a shadow over the registration. The Act prohibited discrimination on grounds of race or colour, but on 9 October the White House announced that the army would maintain segregation and that black soldiers would serve in separate units, in numbers proportional to their share of the population. This provoked outrage among African-American leaders in the very middle of the election campaign.

Significance

The registration of 16 October gave the United States a roll of its manpower reserves on which the army could draw for years to come. The first order of call-up was settled in a national lottery in Washington on 29 October, when Henry Stimson drew number 158 from the same glass bowl that had been used in 1917. The first draftees put on uniform on 18 November. With the voters in mind, on 25 October Roosevelt promoted Colonel Benjamin O. Davis to become the first black general in the US Army, and on 5 November he won the election against Wendell Willkie, who had not opposed the draft.

Dykstra held office only briefly. In March 1941 he became chairman of the National Defense Mediation Board, which settled labour disputes in the defence industry, and from 1 April, when he left his post, the system was in practice run by Hershey, who was appointed director in July 1941. He headed it until 1970. The separation of the armies from the corps areas proved lasting: the First, Second, Third and Fourth Armies, trained in the great manoeuvres of 1941 in Louisiana and the Carolinas, provided the cadres and staffs for the armies that from 1942 fought in North Africa, Europe and the Pacific. On the basis of the registration begun on 16 October 1940 and of subsequent ones, extended after Pearl Harbor to men aged 18 to 64, more than 10 million Americans had been inducted into the armed forces by 1947.