It was early in 1942 that the writers and orators first began to stress the phrase, "This is a war of Supply!" At Congressional hearings, at the award of Army-Navy "E's" to producers, at Officer-Candidate graduations, somewhere in the main address it was repeated - "This is a war of Supply!"
Tremendous organizations arose for the sole purpose of finding raw materials, finding a plant to process them, finding transportation to haul them to the plant and from the plant to the waterfront, from the waterfront to the Service Force dumps, from the dumps to the fighting fronts. These organizations did a mighty job and did it thoroughly. The fact remains, however, that nine-tenths of the work they were called upon to do should have been unnecessary. Nine-tenths of the bottlenecks and delays arose mainly from the fact that these agencies had to be created in a hurry, had to start from scratch, and, most difficult of all, had no definite lines of authority. The final result was good. The process of arriving at that happy ending was tangled from beginning to end with disputes over jurisdiction, with lack of understanding of the real meaning of that much bandied word "Logistics."
This misunderstanding still continues, as is plainly evidenced in the publications of the Services. To the most of us, that word still means nothing more than the planning and mounting of a single operation such as the assaults on Iwo Jima or Okinawa. These are vital operations and vital planning; but nevertheless, they are but the final results of Logistics. They are nothing more than retail delivery to the final consumer.
The standard definitions of the word usually state that the "science" - (as yet it has hardly earned that resounding name) - "includes all details of supply and transport up to but not including actual battle." If those definitions mean what they say, t rue Logistics must go even farther back than the ploughing and planting of grain, the opening of a new mine or breaking ground for a new factory. Logistics cannot be content with stating, however truly, that any given campaign will require so many airplanes, so many pairs of socks, and so many million rounds of ammunition. It has to know how, where, and by whom these things must be found, processed, moved, inspected, and used. It must take into account that unless they are found, processed, moved, and used with the least possible dislocation of civilian economy, their use will weaken that economy and reduce our ability both to prosecute the war and to reconvert to peace far beyond the degree in which they should. It must take into account peacetime methods of planning, procurement, transportation, and issue that will actually strengthen the civilian economy instead of competing with it, and that will be able smoothly to expand without building a hasty and costly organization through vital months of delay.
It is easy to say the "Navy is now Big Business," but it is not enough. It is time that the Navy really began to behave like Big Business and to realize that failure to do so can only result in a return to those dismal years when a tax-weary public regarded us as a dreary and expensive nuisance-and this time that opinion will be largely justified, for we have had experience enough to enable us increasingly and visibly to become an aid to civilian economy in such vital matters as the ironing out of seasonal industries, making for a reasonable guarantee of an "annual wage," the development of new production, and increased production of established industries, thus aiding in the maintenance of a high employment level. Huge appropriations are not necessary to accomplish these good things. It needs only competent expenditure of the funds we have and will have.
The much belabored "Carload Lot" philosophy is not the answer, for the bigger the carload the fewer the possible bidders and eventually the higher the price to everybody, civilians included. Our supply system, our basic Logistics, must become a constructive and harmonious part of civilian economy, not merely an excrescence on it. We must become a member of the Nation's production team, and we must do it quickly if troubles are to be avoided.
The first point that must be continuously borne in mind is that, peace or war, the problem of Naval Supply is a team problem. The requirement of new items needed for national defense is an outgrowt4 of the statement of military necessity-a demand for a gadget that will accomplish a given military purpose. The formulation of this need is the business of military experts and of no one else.
The translation of these military needs into concrete articles of equipment which will accomplish the desired end is a technical function and is the duty of specialists, in or out of uniform, who are versed in the required technology. It is possible, but not probable, that the military men who foresaw the need will also possess the technical knowledge to write the specifications for the new item. In any event, after the need has been demonstrated, every effort should be, and usually is, made to insure that the new specifications are as free from "bugs" as any untried invention can be.
Thus far we have what might be called the blueprint of national safety, but we are a long way from having achieved it. The needed items must be manufactured, tested, and then procured in the needed quantities. This is the duty of a trained business man and of nobody else. Only thorough and current knowledge of specialized marketing fields can point to acceptable and available substitutes for scarce and costly materials. Only in over-the-counter, small-quantity shopping for standard items can the untrained buyer be trusted to get a dollar's worth for the taxpayer's dollar without interfering with the civilian markets. Of course, if war comes, some interference is unavoidable; but in peace time any such interference is a gross example of business inefficiency. We must never bid against civilian enterprise, but must encourage surplus production, the utilization of unused capacity, or the actual expansion of employment to get our materials. Consider, for example, the effect of trying to purchase in one order from one supplier just the Navy's annual stock of paintbrushes. Small shopkeepers from Maine to California would be writing frantic letters demanding information as to why their orders for brushes remained unfilled and why such brushes as reached them cost from ten to twenty-five cents more than the last lot.
In non-standard items it is evident that there must be a trial order, and inevitable that that trial order will be at an apparently excessive price. No mechanical design has ever reached perfection at first trial, and every change in plans, whether of design or materials, costs something. Old-timers will remember the happy arrangement during the Twenties and Thirties whereby the Curtiss Wright and Pratt and Whitney engineers worked with the Engineering Experiment Laboratory of the Aircraft Factory at Philadelphia to bring forth the aircraft engines that fought World War II. There were during those years two seemingly identical spare engines for training planes on the books of the Factory's Supply officer. One was a year older than the other, and during its fabrication a number of weak points in the original design had been detected and cured. This older engine stood on the books at a price of $28,000. It had paid for learning how. Its twin, just twelve months younger, cost only $6,500. Put into quantity production such as obtains in time of emergency, similar engines could have been turned out for half the latter sum.
This adds a fourth member to the Logistics team, a member we are too apt to overlook in times of piping peace-Industry. Here again it requires a trained business specialist to achieve happy and understanding cooperation. We cannot issue orders to Industry or Labor; but we must never get out of touch with them. That touch can be maintained only by a Staff thoroughly versed in business methods and the processes of Industry as well as in the Navy's needs and the maze of legislation by which Navy procurement is governed. To put industrial experts into uniform when trouble is on the horizon is good, and in fact is the best we have normally been able to do in the past. It is far from the best that can be done in the future, however, for it is necessary, after commissioning these experts, to educate them as Navy officers before we can get the real benefit of their special knowledge. This takes more time and costs more money than we can afford. The Navy's knowledge of Industry is vital. Just as vital is Industry's familiarity with the Navy's needs and the laws governing them. That sounds like a matter difficult of accomplishment but it is really very easy with forethought. It needs only officers in constant contact with industrialists, who can in business language, translate our "From-To" legal vocabulary into commercial parlance, and who are sufficiently familiar with business law and practice to avoid the costly and the impossible in our demands.
In short, while a hundred and fifty-three years ago the Navy realized the need of a Supply Corps, it has now become apparent that that Corps must know considerably more than how to prepare a payroll or a public voucher. It must at any time be ready to answer the questions of Operations and the technical Bureaus as to where any material, new or standard, may be obtained, how long it will take, who can process it to the best advantage of the Navy and the taxpayer, and its approximate cost.
The realization has been slow and is not yet widespread. Like all efficient administrative work anywhere, the work done by the Supply Corps is seldom plainly noticeable as long as it is well done. A failure shows up like a sore thumb; but even then it is more apt to appear in the audit than visibly on board ship. Unlike most other department heads, the Supply officer cannot count upon professional help from his Commanding Officer or the Executive. The writer knew one commanding officer who bragged about his Supply officer because he had an unusually high ration cost, believing that excess cost meant better food. On the other hand, he has examined into three unsatisfactory fitness reports filed against junior Supply officers, all three alleging "lack of cooperation." In one case the Supply officer's fault consisted of refusing to pay "Special Money" on a requisition signed by a division officer; in another he had failed to procure an outfit of peacetime cabin china and silver for a wartime DD; and the third, incredible as it sounds, was submitted because the young man had been unwilling to sell tax-free cigarettes while tied up for a three-months' stay in Norfolk Yard. And there is not one Supply officer in five who has not had now and then to call up his last reserves of tact and diplomacy to convince his captain that the wanted material can be procured promptly but not in the flatly illegal way insisted upon by the Skipper. "And no damned nonsense about bids!" is an all too common but obviously not "lawful" order.
While it is now plain that only a thorough knowledge of Business-dubbed by President Conant the "oldest of the arts and the newest of the professions"-will bring safety and goodwill to the Services in peace or war, it is not so obvious that that has always been true. Every war in history has to some extent been a World War and has had its crippling effect on the economy of belligerent and neutral alike. The record shows plain in the sagging purchasing power of the world's currencies, occasionally "pegged" to avoid chaos, but steadily sagging just the same; the steadily impaired and seldom restored avenues of credit; and the progressive inflation, hidden but enduring, in quality and standard quantity of necessaries. Even young men can remember when the slogan of a nationally known brand of food was that "a dime will buy enough for six." Now eighteen cents is the price of two portions. Prior to World War I, men had over three hundred styles of shirt-collars from which to choose one which fitted comfortably. There are perhaps fifty today, and what survive have only one-third the laundry endurance but at three times the price. It is easy to blame greed of the producers or the higher costs of labor and materials; but the real culprit is the inefficient handling of the vast demands of periodic war which drains the lifeblood of commerce by ignorance of the veins and arteries through which that lifeblood must flow.
In the beginnings of the Navy these problems were well handled, and perhaps through a review of the past we can get an inkling of what most needs to be done now. Hull, Stewart, Truxton, Bainbridge, Rodgers, Preble - these were fighting mariners who made the Navy and molded its spirit from the beginning. They were not, however, business men; and to enable them to concentrate on their paramount duty, Command, each had on board a man then known as a Purser. These gentlemen were not picked haphazard but were drawn from the Counting Houses of the most successful mercantile firms of the American waterfront. Congress, realizing only that no commanding officer had either time or knowledge to haggle over the going price of cordage and blocks, rum kegs, round shot, clothing, tar, pitch and turpentine, salt junk and hard-tack, offered the men who did these things for stout men-of-war the same emolument which then prevailed in commercial lines - two and one-half per cent of expenditures.
With no previous experience to guide them, that arrangement seemed fair to the early Congressmen, and it was meant to approximate our present-day legislation covering wages in Naval Shipyards. However, a 54-gun frigate, in order to man the battery and maneuver the ship in battle, needed fifty officers and midshipmen, fifty Marines to shoot from the tops and spearhead the boarding party, and three hundred seamen, landsmen, and apprentice-boys. A merchant ship of exactly the same tonnage and rig could go to .sea well manned by a captain, two mates, a boatswain, a carpenter, a steward, a cook, and twelve foremast hands. The difference is obvious. With delighted but incredulous eyes, the very best young men in the counting-houses volunteered for Naval service. They knew business and they knew the logistic needs of a seagoing vessel for the three years that in those days was the normal commission. They served the infant Navy well, and from such records as survive, they did it honestly and economically. But consider for a moment two and one-half per cent of the most legitimate expenses of a ship of war for three or four years!
Inevitably this magnet for efficient young business men had to be withdrawn, as seasoned captains at $100.00 a month and eight rations, and lieutenants at $50.00 and four rations, watched youngsters in their late twenties or early thirties go to sea for three years, serve the ship well, but resign at the end of the cruise to start their own lines of China-trade clipper ships with the proceeds. In 1812 the law was drastically changed. Pursers became commissioned officers instead of serving under appointments for one cruise at a time; and their pay was set at $40.00 and two rations.
By that time the counting houses had discovered that for that day, too, "Navy business was Big Business" and provided excellent training for young men. So, for many years the larger shipping firms sent younger sons into the Navy to learn the counting house trade and to gain essential knowledge of foreign port facilities. Again, for a little while, the procurement of Supply officers was no problem; but keeping good ones after they had learned their job was another matter. Forty dollars and no future could not hold them, and as fast as they matured professionally, Business on the beach lured them out of the Navy just as Business raided the Supply Corps following World War I and took some of our best from us
There followed nearly a hundred years of doldrums for any general understanding of Logistics or its vital relation to national prosperity. Advances were made, for it is a truism that any growing, profession regarded by most people as humdrum and comparatively unremunerative will inevitably attract a nucleus of enthusiasts who regard a new problem as a challenge, who get their satisfaction from a tough problem solved, and who live by Emerson's rule that "there is no limit to what you can accomplish as long as you do not care who gets the credit." From the Navy Yard scandals of 1864, the history of Naval Logistics is dotted with names of men who planned and fought and steadily pushed the Navy's business into sounder and better lines-Kenny, Galt, Mudd, Perkins, Carpenter, Cowie, Jewett, Jackson, Dyer, Potter, Huntington, Auld, Hancock-the list is not long compared to the numbers on the roster, but is impressive in its accomplishment. There have always been enough of them to carry the load in normal times, and in most abnormal ones.
Procurement of Supply officers for a generation before 1912 was by competitive examination. Occasionally a graduate of Annapolis, by choice or by reason of some slight physical handicap, entered the Corps, but the total of such Academy graduates was seldom more than one or two per cent of the current total. In those days it was considered undemocratic to insist upon a college degree before commission; but the preparation of the entrance examinations and the grading of the papers (including a mark in "Adaptability" imposed by the entrance board, which carried a weight of 49 out of 100) gave the leaven of enthusiastic and professionally educated officers some leeway in selection of candidates. Seventeen examinations had to be taken in six days, and their content made certain that unless an aspiring civilian youngster had done a fair job, with at least two years of college, his chances of success were very slim. The normal figures for examination about the turn of the century were that out of one thousand applicants, only eighty to one hundred were designated to take the tests, and less than twenty passed and received commissions. Among that handful there were always one or two who continued to study their profession and throw their energy into building up some branch of it, whether purchasing, transportation, commissary, warehousing, issue, property or fiscal accounting, marketing or inventory controls. There were also many, of course, who breathed more easily when once assured that the steward and the pay office yeomen were competent, and who thereafter devoted their time to less worrisome affairs.
Then for a time commission in the Supply Corps was restricted to enlisted men; and following World War I, large numbers were added on account of their enlisted experience. Many of the officers who came in that way have been real assets and today have gained high rank; but many who had grown middle-aged as the cautious advisors of enthusiastic young paymasters never learned that not all situations in business can be covered by the Navy Regulations, and so became that worst of all shipmates, "No-Can-Do Paymasters." Moreover most of these new officers were much older than their contemporaries in other branches-some of them too old to serve as D.O. of a destroyer or S.O. of a small gunboat without serious detriment to their health. For a number of years the mortality was high.
Meanwhile as the years following World War I slipped by in a strange fog of what in retrospect can best be described as a sort of snarling optimism, various things happened. It seemed to be taken for granted that Armies and Navies were of no further use to anyone. They could not be abolished at once, for that implied too many political repercussions, both domestic and foreign; but it was apparently assumed that the men and equipment then in the Services would last out the brief time to be covered before such expensive excrescences could go by default, and that men, ships, planes, and guns would gradually eliminate themselves by the sheer march of time. Most of us now in the upper brackets remember all too distinctly the increasing decrepitude of our ships for lack of money to repair them; the steady attrition of the commissioned ranks without adequate replacements at the bottom; ships and Army posts with complements well below the healthy "cadre" limit; not enough money to put into the field for trial one experimental tank; field maneuvers with broomsticks and perhaps a dilapidated farm-tractor to represent planned but still non-existent equipment.
During this period of shrinkage and decay, the Supply corps (as noted above, top-heavy in the elder age-brackets) shrank very fast indeed; and the dwindling PS and T appropriations were barely enough to cover the annual graduating class at Annapolis. At one time the Corps was less than sixty per cent of its authorized strength, although that complement was set at a figure far below the one-to-eight ratio contemplated in all personnel studies of the past. As result, one after another of the traditional functions of Supplies and Accounts had either to be abandoned or surrendered to some technical Bureau or to the Secretary's Office; one after another of the Bureau's accounting duties had to be loaded on the shoulders of the already undermanned field. From each class graduating from the Naval Academy came one or two or perhaps five young men who were genuinely interested in business or who, in the words of one of them, "figured that someday soon they would abolish the Navy altogether, and I wanted to know something that would be of use in getting a job Outside!" But for every recruit the Corps thus gained, two or three elderly men retired for age, blood pressure, or a heart murmur.
By 1934 the shrunken figures of the Line were unable to make room for an entire Annapolis class year by year. Resignations were encouraged but did not appear in sufficient numbers to remove the problem. Then somebody remembered the vacancies in the Supply Corps, and the School of Finance and Supply - a branch of the Postgraduate School - was born at Philadelphia. The student body at first was restricted to Line graduates with at least two years at sea, and applications for transfer were requested.
The response, as might be expected, brought mixed results. In this way some of the best officers the Corps has had were recruited, although many outstanding applicants were not permitted to transfer. One young man asked permission to enter the first F and S class in 1934. He was not allowed to transfer until he was wearing three stripes in 1946. Failing eyes brought in several, and again some of them made excellent Supply officers. But also there were many who thought a year's "leave" in Philadelphia would please the wife, or whose future in the Line did not seem too rosy, or who just plain disliked night watches.
The advent of the Vinson Bill and a Navy minded President changed the general picture, and soon only such Line officers as had minor physical defects could be spared for the annual F and S classes, and the School began to fill up with NROTC graduates. During the seven years of its existence the School of Finance and Supply went far to fill the vacancies but did nothing to increase the inadequate complement. It did, however, provide the Corps with a growing body of young officers whose educational background made them eligible for post-graduate business training at Harvard, and as many as possible were sent there. By the time the emergency of 1939 came along, some sixty or seventy officers had been through that exacting course; and the value of it was apparent to anyone as World War II loomed large and larger. Those sixty or seventy carried much more than their proportionate weight during the war years. The value of sound business training was apparent.
When war became only a question of time, the School of Finance and Supply at Philadelphia, designed to train Regulars, and the school in Washington training Reserves were merged into one and moved to the Navy Supply Corps School, which was established at Harvard itself.
As the war unrolled, the Navy Supply Corps School (NSCS) was required to expand its original program in various ways. Once the immediate appalling gap between numbers of Supply officers available and numbers required was approximately closed and future expansion of the war could be met by a steadily increasing flow of young business men, there was established the so-called Midshipmen-Officers Branch, designed to provide officers who had been educated to do real planning rather than merely to carry out adequately the plans of already overtaxed seniors. Candidates were screened by the Navy three times and fin ally by the Harvard Graduate School before being selected. At that, the mortality in the first term was noticeable. In addition to approximately nineteen weeks instruction in Navy supply and disbursing procedure, these students had two 4-month terms which approximated one year of the regular Harvard two-year course and for which they received Harvard credit. Subjects covered ranged from Fuel Studies and Foreign Resources, through Accounting and Transportation, to Business and Government Policy, Production Organization, and Statistical Controls.
As the parent four-month General Service school overflowed facilities at Harvard, a branch was established at Wellesley. In its year of existence this school produced 762 young officers who proudly referred to themselves as the only living male graduates of that distinguished institution.
The entire campus of Babson Institute was next occupied by another branch of NSCS. Here Specialist officers of proved business experience and standing got a terrifically condensed sixty day course in Navy methods and the laws which govern them. Hardly a student attending the Babson School was as young as his senior instructor. Each class was heavily sprinkled with World War I ribbons, and many of the students had sons in the Service. These gentlemen did splendid service in their chosen lines of business during the war; and it is now no mean asset to the Navy that on account of the Babson Branch there is hardly a Rotary, Lions, or Kiwanis Club in America that does not include at least one former officer of the Navy.
The Waves needed still another school they could not be housed either at Harvard or Wellesley, so the SC-W branch was opened at Radcliffe.
It occurred to the Department that not since ten young men had worked with Mendenhall in 1907 to establish the Accounting System, had the Navy trained any cost accountants, and that the only officers who knew that phase of the business were now in their sixties. So in 1943 a postgraduate course of four months was opened, and officers with some accounting training before entry were ordered there. This school did not last long, for the first class was hardly unpacked before the questions of Congress made it apparent that the Navy had better take stock of its war plant without delay. So the emphasis was shifted and some 125 young men were provided with the tools to make our Title E accounts approximately correct for the first time since 1938.
By 1943, while the end of the war was not in sight, the end of usefulness of great quantities of materials in plants badly needed for less obsolescent items became acute. While contract termination was still in the future and had been bespoke by the Industrial College, such matters as plant clearance and surplus disposal were crying for attention. The mention of them sent anticipatory shudders along many an aging spine whose owner could remember what injudicious surplus disposal had done to cotton, rubber, aircraft, textiles, aluminum, and many another industry in the dismal early 1920's. That was a job requiring special and thorough indoctrination, so the so-called War Adjustment School opened j this was also post-graduate and was supplied with students who had just returned from their full time on the fighting fronts. While actual disposal of surplus was not given to the armed Services under the Murray Bill, NMR and DA was charged with plant clearance, the determination of what was actually surplus and its declaration to War Assets Administration. The Navy's record in these matters will stand and has stood severe scrutiny, for those young men under the leadership of Rear Admiral Buck and Commodore Batchelder did a really remarkable job which earned all the laudatory comment it has received from the leaders of industry and commerce.
Then finally, in 1945, with the war rolling up on all fronts and some 19,800 supply officers available for duty, it was possible to return to the 1943 project for training accounting officers, by now more than ever imperative since the new system brought out by Secretary Forrestal's order was about to go into effect. This new accounting system is not merely a matter of keeping track of appropriation expenditures and job orders, nor of juggling overhead items in the air until new construction money becomes available to absorb them. Instead of being merely a local affair, the new system is Navy-wide and places the various Shipyards as much in competition with each other as so many rolling mills. The Fiscal Officer is no longer just a recorder and book-balancer, as was the old Accounting Officer. He must in effect discharge the duties known to Industry as those of a Comptroller, and upon his presented figures the shaping of the Manager's policy must be based unless trouble is to follow. That means real cost analysis as well as cost accounting, so a new school with a small number of young but senior Supply officers convened for eight months of specialized and rigorous instruction at Harvard. There was time for only one graduating class at this school before V-J Day and the winding up of the war made the withdrawal of the Navy schools from Harvard facilities imperative.
Officially, the Navy Supply Corps School is now located at Bayonne, and is concerned with research in Logistics, food and food chemistry, preparation of courses discussed hereafter, and the administration of correspondence courses and refresher courses for Reserves in residence. Classes are convened for the "General Service" instruction of former Specialists and new graduates from the Naval Academy who are entering the Corps. NSCS, however, can never be expected to provide adequate numbers of either Regular or Reserve Supply officers who really know business and business law which apply uniquely to the Navy. Actual business instruction must be had elsewhere.
During the war and the training under one central administration of some 16,600 Supply officers, elderly and young, male and female, the Navy Department was able to find basis for definite future plans. Old timers had been appalled at the necessity for ordering new officers on their first duty to put a new ship into commission; but the youngsters did it with no more trouble than grizzled lieutenant-commanders had encountered in pre-war years. These young men were efficient, and no four-months' drill in Revised Statutes, Comptroller's Decisions, and Bureau Manuals could account for their efficiency. It must have been in their background, and there were adequate records of what those backgrounds bad been.
It had been proved that two years of postgraduate training at Harvard had accomplished wonders for Supply officers both past and present, but that source of professional education was limited by funds available, and also by space available at Harvard, in post-war times at a premium as applications from acceptable candidates outnumbered possible acceptances by around twelve to one.
There was also the drawback that a Supply officer is not available for this advanced training until he has put in several years at sea, nor as a rule is he ready for it. Now, business in the Navy has one outstanding difference from the duties of all other branches. New Line officers, new doctors, new engineers, start their professional careers not only with minor problems but under the eye of competent and experienced seniors. They are junior O.D.'s, interns, assistants, gradually working up as they gain experience through division officer to department head, to executive, to single command, and then to flag rank. It is an orderly progression, and at no point in the scale until the top is an officer very long away from competent advice and supervision.
The neophyte Supply officer faces a different problem. Sometimes he is an assistant on a capital ship, but if so is apt to have no voice in the shaping of policy nor any knowledge of the steps by which his senior has arrived at that policy. Most often he goes straight to independent duty as Supply officer of a DD or a gunboat, where out of a clear sky he must meet emergencies and make decisions all by himself and without any advice beyond what he can find pertinent in his undergraduate notebooks. His normal problems differ from those of the Supply officer of a battleship or aircraft carrier only in number of items in the issue room, number of names in the money list, and number of dollars in the quarterly allotments. His small size magnifies his commissary problems, for real subsistence economies are easy with a complement of over six hundred, but need sound planning when under three hundred. He has not the built-in facilities and storage space his senior brethren have at their disposal, and must early learn that too much of anything is as great a crime against the ship's endurance as too little. The first cruise, as all old timers will testify, is the Supply officer's toughest one and the one in which sound judgment is most often demanded of him. It is imperative that he be given a chance before that first cruise begins to know the basic principles of his business as well as the local vocational ground rules of it.
The extension of the Selective Service Act to lads of eighteen brought this matter of background to a head. Until that time candidates for Supply Corps commissions averaged 24-25 years in age, held from one to three degrees, and had had from one to five years actual business experience. Moreover they were among the more forward looking of the country's young business men who had seen the looming future and volunteered where they were best prepared to serve. The is-year draft changed all that, and the question arose at once: how to prepare a boy of nineteen or twenty to absorb the intricate tangle of laws and decisions, of special professional knowledge, which he must have to keep his ship and himself out of grave trouble?
Past experience had shown that in the General Service branches of the Supply Corps School, young men who had studied business had a large initial advantage. Young CPA's were troubled at first over calling an operational statement a "balance sheet," and "crediting" an appropriation when it got more money; rising young lawyers needed some eight or ten weeks to discover that in the Navy decisions have to be made right now instead of after weeks of precedent searching; Arts and Sciences graduates found difficulty in realizing that theory and logic have small part in executing a law already on the books. They all did well after becoming oriented, but the business graduates had a head start of weeks on the others. They became efficient with less effort and in far less time. It was evident that if the V-12 program for the Supply Corps was to provide anything but dismal mortality and the humiliation of scores of good lads, it must have an undergraduate curriculum crammed with sound business philosophy as well as the two basic terms of indoctrination. This was no easy problem, but it was finally solved and solved well when four noted Commerce Deans-Doctors Herluf Olsen of Dartmouth, Homer Vanderblue of Northwestern, Ray Calkins of Columbia, and Leslie Buchan of Tulane-met in Washington at the request of the Bureau of Personnel and mapped a six-term pre-Supply course based on their long .experience in preparing young men for the Navy and on the statistics furnished by NSCS. Youngsters finishing this program came to their final naval training at Harvard punch-drunk from two unremitting years of absorbing machine-gun bursts of subjects well beyond their normal years, but well-grounded for their specialized instruction. They had everything but maturity, and the battlefronts soon provided that.
The solution of this V-12 problem pointed plainly to the solution of the post-war problem, both for Regulars and Reserves. There remained only the method of putting it into effect without breaking the taxpayers' hearts and exhausting the patience of Congress.
This post-war problem, however, was not confined to the Supply Corps but took in the entire Navy. To enlarge the Naval Academy sufficiently to care for future officer requirements would entail either the expensive absorption of most of the city of Annapolis and a tremendously costly building program, or finally to agree to the often-suggested but always undesirable device of having more than one Naval Academy in various sections of the country. With V-12 experience behind us and the realization that wars, while supervised by professional Regulars, must be fought and to a great extent planned by trained Reserves, the Navy Department came up with a hopeful solution. Formulated by Admiral Holloway and his staff, the legislation known to the Navy as the Holloway Plan was submitted to Congress and was quickly approved by that august body. The Holloway Plan is now in operation in over fifty universities and colleges across the nation, designed to provide not only a goodly number of qualified young officers annually but also to build up steadily a well-indoctrinated Reserve whose background is identical with that of the young men who elect the Navy as a career.
Some minor difficulties attended the first application of the Holloway Plan to the Supply Corps, as many officers, both Line and Staff, were misled by the efficiency of the many Academy graduates who have excelled as Supply officers and forgot the many others who became only rule-of-thumb record-keepers with no real understanding of the Supply Corps' mission. So, for a time, the slogan of "Everybody with the same background" required candidates for Navy business commissions to take the entire four years of Line preparation. Much of that preparation is necessary. Aside from the basic indoctrination, every officer in the Navy should know something of communications, damage control, and practical gunnery. However, before a Supply officer is called upon to demonstrate his ability in theoretical gunnery, practical engineering, maneuvering by radar or the mooring board, it is safe to assume that only the Chaplain will have survived with him and that the ship will be in a highly damaged and unmaneuverable condition.
It soon proved to be a question of undergraduate time. There are only so many hours in the academic year, and academic requirements for a degree use up a considerable portion of them. Thirty-two purely Naval hours from the student's normal one hundred and twenty left very slim opportunity for any flexibility or for the acquisition of anything resembling the liberal education which is the basic requirement of any worthwhile degree. Deans rightly forbid any student to overload himself to the danger point. So for the first year, Line captains at universities where Supply Corps units had been established wrote protesting that the requirements were keeping out of the Navy and the Naval Reserve more eligible young men than they allowed to enter. The extreme case was one District where, in the fall of 1946, one hundred and sixty-two well qualified candidates applied, but the summer of 1947 saw only two of them who had been able to graduate with both a degree and a Supply Corps commission.
This example was sufficient. NROTC Bulletin 103 was issued August 25, 1947, reducing the Line-course demands upon Supply Corps candidates. Not as much reduction as has been granted the Marine Corps was allowed; but the preparation for a Supply Corps commission now needs only the standard 24 semester-hours of purely Naval undergraduate work, one-fourth of which is strictly Supply study and covers approximately the same ground formerly covered in 45 hours at Harvard. These courses are constantly under revision as research at Bayonne proves the need. Competent instructor officers are also trained at Bayonne before being assigned to college duty. Through long experience with the Navy through the war years the Commerce Deans involved understand our problem thoroughly and contribute mightily to the planning of each candidate's four years. Moreover, many of the Supply courses so closely approximate standard civilian business that many civilian Commerce students, although not contemplating a naval career, apply for them, and the courses are accepted as full degree-credits in most institutions.
This program will eventually provide not only Supply officers well equipped to develop the Logistic side of the Navy, but will insure for the first time a truly ready Reserve who, in addition to their Naval knowledge, keep constantly abreast of national economic conditions.
It will be some years before the full results of this wide and thoughtful program became apparent; but it is already having its effect in bringing the Navy into the minds of the college-going public, of filling junior key spots in Industry with knowledgeable Reserves, of spreading better civilian understanding of our place in the economy of the nation, and of eliminating in future emergencies many of the costly "quickie" schools needed in the past to give even the best Reserves an inkling of their real war duties. It will go far to dissipate the fog of misunderstanding which too often stands between the Navy and the Nation it serves. Thoughtful civilians will have something besides the rumbling of columnists upon which to base opinion of the Armed Services, and gradually the Services themselves will cease to puzzle over the mental processes of their civilian "opposite numbers." We will understand each other at least. To an Old timer that spells the Millennium!