CHANGING THE U.S. DRAFT LAWS TO SUPPLY REINFORCEMENTS

THE SELECTIVE SERVICE, the agency of the U.S. government that keeps records of citizens eligible for military service, changed its rules as the war went on in order to enlist more people. The exemption for fathers was abolished: one million would be drafted in 1944–45. The average age of draftees had climbed from twenty-two in 1940 to twenty-six in 1944, and many new privates were over thirty-five. A ban on shipping eighteen-year-olds overseas was removed in August 1944. And a three-page document alerted armed service examiners how to detect draftees who were trying to dodge their duty by feigning epilepsy, pretending to be bed wetters, or using drugs to speed up their heart rate to mimic tachycardia. Would-be draft dodgers “may shoot or cut off their fingers or toes.… Some may put their hands under cars for this purpose.”

U.S. Army sergeants examine new recruits.

In December 1944, the American armed forces comprised twelve million, compared with five million for the British, but the need for even more soldiers was great. One million Army troops were now fighting the war on the Pacific front, while the Army Air Forces had requested 130,000 men to fly and maintain the new B-29 bomber, called the Superfortress, beyond the 300,000 workers already building the planes. Almost five million American men had been granted occupational deferments. Many soldiers were being sent back from Europe to work in hard-pressed critical industries, alongside millions of women already working in American factories. In December, 2,500 GIs were sent home to make artillery ammunition and an additional 2,000 to make tires; thousands more went to foundries, toolmakers, and other plants. In late 1944, Congress sensed the approaching end of the war and pressured the U.S. Army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, to reduce Army manpower so that the production of consumer goods, from toasters to Buicks, could resume on the home front.

U.S. battle casualties in Europe had doubled from October to November to 2,000 a day; on December 7, the figure hit 3,000. The trench foot epidemic caused nonbattle casualties to also double in November, to 56,000. Consequently, even as the last of the U.S. Army’s eighty-nine divisions prepared for deployment overseas, and even though more than 300,000 individual replacement troops had arrived since D-Day, General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group reported in December that every division already in the theater was below its authorized strength. “The life expectancy of a junior officer in combat was twelve days before he was hit and evacuated,” Bradley asserted. Lieutenant General George Patton wrote in his diary on December 3, “Our situation is bad; 11,000 short in an army of three armored divisions and six infantry divisions.”