The reorganisation of the US Army

On Monday 9 March 1942 the most far-reaching reorganisation of the United States Army in decades came into force. Army General Headquarters (GHQ) ceased to exist, and all the army’s forces at home were divided among three great commands of equal standing: the Army Ground Forces under Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, the Army Air Forces under Lieutenant General Henry Arnold, and the Services of Supply under General Brehon Somervell, who was promoted to lieutenant general that same day. The basis for the changes was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9082 of 28 February 1942, issued under the First War Powers Act of December 1941, and the details were set out in War Department Circular No. 59 of 2 March. On that same day the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, announced the reform in a press release.

Popular chronologies state that it was the Secretary of War who “reorganised” GHQ into three commands. In reality the reform was designed by the staff of General George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, and ordered by the President. Nor was GHQ transformed; it was abolished, and its headquarters in the buildings of the Army War College in Washington became the headquarters of the Ground Forces.

A command post that did not command

The War Department entered the war with a peacetime structure designed for an army that in the summer of 1939 had numbered fewer than two hundred thousand men. By the end of 1941 the army, expanded thanks to peacetime conscription, had more than one and a half million, and its General Staff and offices in Washington were drowning in paper. According to the army’s post-war historians, at least 61 officers and agencies had the right of direct access to the Chief of Staff, and Marshall received about fifty staff papers a day, even though he had ordered that only matters no one else could settle be put before him. Under him were the chiefs of the individual arms – infantry, cavalry, field artillery and coast artillery – the chiefs of the technical services and administrative bureaux, the commanders of four field armies, nine corps areas and four defence commands, and the commanders of the overseas departments in Hawaii, the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone.

General Headquarters, activated in July 1940, was meant in wartime to command the troops in the field, as John Pershing’s headquarters had done in France in the First World War. Formally its commander was Marshall himself; in practice it was run by its chief of staff, McNair, who was concerned above all with training units. The new war, however, had many fronts scattered across the globe and could not be directed from a single field headquarters alongside the General Staff. The responsibilities of GHQ and the staff overlapped, and disputes over who was responsible for home defence, aviation or supply dragged on for months. The air arm, to which the creation of the Army Air Forces in June 1941 had given only partial autonomy, proposed as early as October that the army be divided into autonomous air forces, ground forces and a supply service. After the attack on Pearl Harbor Marshall concluded that the War Department was a poor command post and had to be rebuilt.

The McNarney committee

The work was entrusted to Major General Joseph McNarney, an airman who had only just returned from London, where he had been an observer with the British command, and who was sitting on the commission investigating the causes of the disaster at Pearl Harbor. He presented the final plan to Marshall at the end of January 1942. On 3 February Marshall set it out to his closest associates and gave them 48 hours to comment. The work was conducted in secret so that opponents of the changes, above all the chiefs of the arms and bureaux, would not have time to organise. From 11 February an executive committee chaired by McNarney prepared the orders; as its chairman made clear, it was not a committee for voting or discussion but for writing the necessary directives. On 26 February Roosevelt approved the plan, and two days later he signed the executive order.

Three commands and one staff

The Ground Forces took over the former GHQ, the offices of the chiefs of the four traditional combat arms, which were abolished, and the supervision of new ones such as the armoured force, airborne troops, anti-aircraft artillery and tank destroyers. McNair had a single task there: to organise, equip and train the ground forces, which numbered about 780,000 men in March 1942 and more than 2.2 million by mid-1943. The Army Air Forces took in the whole of the air arm, and the former Air Force Combat Command and the office of the Chief of the Air Corps ceased to exist. Arnold, who as a member of the new Joint Chiefs of Staff already sat at the same table as Marshall and the admirals, became Commanding General of the AAF.

The Services of Supply were the most extensive. Somervell, since November 1941 head of the supply division (G-4) of the General Staff, and earlier the builder of the camps for draftees and of the Pentagon, brought under a single command six technical services, from the engineers and signals to the quartermaster and medical services, eight administrative bureaux, nine corps areas, soon renamed service commands, and the procurement previously handled by the office of the Under Secretary of War. Since Marshall wanted three commands under him rather than four, everything that did not fit into the other two went to the Services of Supply. Somervell’s deputy for requirements and resources was Brigadier General Lucius Clay, who was also responsible for Lend-Lease deliveries.

The General Staff stopped dealing with day-to-day administration. The personnel, operations and training, and supply divisions (G-1, G-3 and G-4) were cut down to a handful or a dozen or so officers each, who were to deal only with general policy. The only division that gained was the War Plans Division, renamed the Operations Division (OPD) in the second half of March. From 16 February it was headed by Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, who noted in his diary that the whole General Staff would be cut down except for his division, which was getting “all the joint and combined work, all the plans and all the operations”. The Operations Division became the headquarters from which Marshall directed the war on every front. The theatres of war and the overseas departments were in practice subordinated to it, and the four defence commands, which had been under GHQ, passed under the direct authority of the War Department. McNarney became Deputy Chief of Staff and dealt with current business on Marshall’s behalf.

Those who lost most from the reform were the chiefs of the arms, who for decades had guarded their traditions, regulations and promotions. Several generals who had previously reported directly to Marshall and were senior to Somervell now found themselves under his orders. Marshall, on the other hand, got what he wanted: instead of dozens of subordinates he had three commanders and an operations division, and he could devote the time this freed to strategy, talks with the British and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its place in the war

The structure of March 1942 survived, with minor changes, until the end of the war. In 1943 the Services of Supply were renamed the Army Service Forces, because the old name did not reflect the breadth of their tasks. McNair’s Ground Forces trained the divisions that fought in North Africa, Italy, France and the Pacific; McNair himself was killed in Normandy in July 1944 by bombs from his own side’s aircraft. The Army Air Forces, in practice a third armed service, gained a free hand in building the bomber fleet that was to strike Germany and Japan. The Operations Division drew up the plans for the invasion of Europe, and as early as June 1942 Eisenhower left for London as commander of the US forces in Europe. After the war the Army Service Forces were disbanded in 1946, and the National Security Act of 1947 turned the Army Air Forces into an independent air force. The reform of 9 March 1942 gave the US Army an organisation that enabled it to wage war on several continents at once.