Armchair Dragoons Forums
The Reference Desk => History and Tall Tales => Topic started by: bayonetbrant on October 11, 2019, 11:12:32 PM
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https://www.businessinsider.com/results-of-wwii-survey-of-us-army-soldiers-opinions-2019-10 (https://www.businessinsider.com/results-of-wwii-survey-of-us-army-soldiers-opinions-2019-10)
Christopher Woody: Why did the War Department conduct these surveys? What did it want to find out about US troops and how did it want to use that information?
Gitre: Henry Stimson, the aged Secretary of War, outright barred the polling of US troops when one of the nation's leading pollsters, Elmo Roper, first pitched the idea in spring 1941. The War Department was not in the habit of soliciting the "opinions" of foot soldiers.
Yet an old friend of the Roosevelt family, Frederick Osborn-who had already helped to institute the country's first peacetime draft in 1940-quietly but effectively made the case.
Chiefly, he convinced Stimson and other leery officers that surveys would be for their benefit. Surveys would provide them information for planning and policymaking purposes. Allowing and encouraging GIs to openly air their "gripes" was not part of Osborn's original pitch.
When George C. Marshall became chief of staff in 1939, he compared the US Army to that of a third-rate power.
With the passage of the draft in 1940, the War Department would face the monumental challenge of rapidly inducting hundreds of thousands, then after Pearl Harbor millions of civilians. Most lacked prior military experience. But this new crop was also better educated than previous generations of draftees, and they came with higher expectations of the organization.
The surveys, then, would help address a host of "personnel" issues, such as placement, training, furloughs, ratings, so on and so forth.
The civilian experts the Army brought in to run this novel research program were embedded in what was known as the Morale Branch. This outfit, as the name suggests, was tasked with shoring up morale. These social and behavioral scientists had to figure out, first, how to define morale, and, second, how to measure it.
Some old Army hands insisted that morale was purely a matter of command, that it was the byproduct of discipline and leadership. But reporting indicated pretty clearly that morale correlated to what soldiers were provided during off-duty hours as well, in terms of recreation and entertainment.
To address the latter, the War Department created an educational, recreational, welfare, and entertainment operation that spanned the globe. The numbers of candy bars and packages of cigarettes shipped and sold were accounted for not in the millions but billions.
If you were coordinating the monthly global placement of, say, two million books from best-sellers' lists, wouldn't you want to know something about soldier and sailor preferences? A whole class of survey questions were directed at marketing research.
More at the link
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A fascinating read. Thanks for sharing, Brant.
The last line in the article definitely makes one pause for thought:
Yet as I continue to read these troop surveys, I am confronted daily by the prospect that we are losing the hard-won insights and lessons of a generation that is passing into its final twilight.
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Yes, such reporting seem to get forgotten after a span of maybe ten years.
SLAM Marshal's books are never mentioned, although his interviews were done within a few days of combat. Unfortunately, his hobby horse, that most soldiers don't aim their weapons, tends to make people discount the fine interviews.