IWW2 Dispatches

Here is a concrete example of what I contributed to the induction effort. Certain truths permeate an army rapidly, little facts about little things that everyone seems to know. The flow of these facts – where they come from, who transmits them – that could fill volumes. Understand that and you would be well on your way to understanding the human social mind. But I digress. Ask anyone who went through the process, especially after President Prescott’s call to arms. Ask them what they remember most about the first days of induction. I would wager that a universal anecdote would emerge: Everyone got a uniform of the wrong size. Tall men received short pants. Lanky men received billowing jackets. But no one will ever admit to you of receiving a uniform that fit the first moment he put it on. Think about that:

Not a single soul received a uniform which fit him.

Doesn’t that intrigue you? Obviously any hastily-assembled bureaucracy will make mistakes, perhaps more often than not. The chaos of mobilization after twelve years of institutional denial certainly amplified this tendency. But consider the odds. Hundreds of thousands of men inducted in the first twelve months. Not a single case of a well-fitting uniform. Surely a great industrial nation could find its way to fitting properly at least some of its men, but America did not. Why not?

We didn’t let it happen, we of the Resource Optimization Board. We wrote very detailed, very careful instructions on how to measure an inductee for a uniform. We carefully streamlined the system so that even an imbecile could execute it perfectly. And then we calibrated it so that it would always yield an incorrect result – and do so in a way so subtle that the very examiners never noticed.

How could it be? Didn’t we realize that the comfort of a man’s uniform is the first major factor in his morale? Troops in good uniforms fight harder, last longer, complain less. An uneven shirt can throw off a man’s concentration. Too-tight pants can ruin a good sniper’s aim. A mismatched boot can disrupt a private’s step – a division’s worth of mismatched boots can destroy a campaign. We knew this. I measured and calibrated it. Other than a working weapon, there is little that a good soldier will crave more than a solidly-fit uniform.

And that’s the point, of course. These troops were in training for eight weeks. They knew they weren’t going anywhere and they knew they weren’t getting new uniforms from the quartermaster. It became a grand experiment: What would they do? Many, indeed most, complained loudly and often, and otherwise resigned themselves to weeks, perhaps years, of ill-fitting misery. But some… some worked out their own accommodations. Some inductees had worked with cloth in their civilian lives – tailors and the sort. They did not suffer more than a day or two before correcting the obvious flaws in their own uniforms. They rapidly learned to make some money on the side fixing the uniforms of their comrades.

Other inductees had no such skills but could lead, or motivate, or learn. One enterprising solider from Bayonne organized a battalion-wide swap of mismatched parts. He surveyed the ranks and paired the too-tall with the too-short, the thin with the wide, etc. He executed massive rounds of exchanges. And he did it all without using any official channels, without the quartermasters corps being any the wiser.

It was evolution, you see. We threw them into an environment maladjusted for their comfort. Then we saw who adapted and who sank, who progressed and who faltered. The uniforms were just one aspect. At one point, the Board had fifty two distinct variables being tracked and optimized – housing assignments, food, censorship policy for mail. We had eight weeks, less really, to sort the wheat from the chaff, and we used every method available to us.

And it worked. We created the Service from whole cloth in less than six months. It took Streiberg three times as long to engineer his miracle, and he had an example to work from. Six months and we invented an entirely new military organization – while also providing the Army with the men it needed. The like had never been done, and I dare say, it will never be repeated.

Tags: academic //