The world owes a debt of gratitude to men like General George C. Marshall, as they took a “hollow force” of less than 200,000 men and gradually built them into a vast juggernaut in the space of three or four years. Some selective info:
[b]Draft or Volunteers for Prewar Recruitment?[/b]
The time needed for producing full battle equipment for a 2,000,000-man army was rightly estimated at last, thanks to the sharp exchanges of mid-June among President, Chief of Staff, Assistant Secretary, and Mr. Knudsen, but the manner of raising the men to compose that force was not determined. Two methods--supplementary rather than alternative--had been under consideration by the Army. One was the draft. It had received, as mentioned, the Staff's normal attention and plans for its employment had been methodically drawn, but final policy making had not projected the draft into the prewar scene with any degree of confidence or vigor. On 20 May 1940 during a conference in the Chief of Staff's office attended by G-1, G-4, and Quartermaster Corps representatives General Marshall inquired: "Assuming Congress gave us a Selective Service act, how long would it take to procure 750,000 men?" He was told that 45 days would be required. He then asked about tentage available for housing so large an army as this would mean, the assumption being that summer housing was in mind, and was told that the supply on issue and in storage was ample.4 Information of this character necessary for decision on the draft apparently had been gathered and coordinated by the Staff: the decision to use the draft, however, was not within the Army's power, and this circumstance explains much that took place in June 1940.
The other method of troop raising in contemplation was the "Civilian Volunteer Effort" (CVE), through which the authorities in the forty-eight states were expected to assist in a volunteer recruiting campaign to expedite the enrollment of men for the Regular Army or the National Guard or both. The CVE was looked upon as a means of raising enough men to fill out the PMP and hence adequate for any prewar preparation hitherto contemplated.5
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Its political virtue was of a negative sort--it would avert the necessity of going to Congress with a plea for draft legislation, sure to occasion long debate, as the Army rightly foresaw, and likely also to be defeated in a peace-minded Congress. That Congress was still essentially peace-minded to the extent of refusing to consider a peacetime draft was the conviction of numerous leaders of the Democratic majority in the Senate, as was to be made manifest by their refusal to introduce a draft bill, and presumably of the President himself, for he abstained from sending any encouragement in the matter to his legislative lieutenants. If White House and Army alike erred in their judgment of what the 1940 Congress would do in the light of Blitzkrieg's towering flames, it must be remembered (1) that thus far Congress had been reluctant to go the full distance in other respects, (2) that there then was an active pacifist movement in America, and (3) that the Congressional and Presidential elections were only a few months distant, and the Democratic National Convention (where the third term would be a dominant issue) was almost at hand. Also, it must be remembered that in mid-June the Army was pressing for appropriation measures of the most urgent character with which literally nothing must interfere (to permit raising the Regular Army to 4,000,000 men) and was preparing recommendations for still other and far larger appropriations to be introduced shortly. If there was fear that these essential measures would be jeopardized by advocacy of a draft bill traditionally unpopular in peacetime, the fear was understandable. If, therefore, the Army's concern over the war threat tempted it to advocate a peacetime draft without delay, the impulse had to be controlled, for this would mean enunciation of a legislative policy, and no such policy could be advocated unless and until both the policy and its timing were approved by the White House.
There was another practical consideration that influenced professional Army thinking on the subject of troop training. This was the small number of officers and men immediately available for the training of recruits. Three principal sources existed. One was the Regular Army which itself was in process of expanding
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from the emaciated state of 1939 and which would have its hands full taking care not only of the recently granted increases of 17,000 and 53,000 men, but also of the 120,000 entirely new men it was to ask for shortly (raising the total from 280,000 to 400,000 men). Another source was the National Guard; it now numbered 242,000 men, but many of these were little more than raw recruits, and many others would be discharged for various reasons soon after mobilization. A third source was the Reserve officers, over 100,000 of them, for the most part recent graduates of the college ROTC units with excellent qualifications but only limited field training.6 It was apparent to the professional Staff planners that, if time permitted, the most efficient way to train a large Army was, first, to give thorough training to a small one which could thereafter serve as leaven to a larger mass. From that mass, later, would be extracted newly trained elements which could then be mingled with a still larger mass, and thus provide the next stage of a step-by-step development. Could this plan be carried out without interference, it was reasoned, a vigorous 90-day training cycle would produce a rapidly expanding army that would be increasingly efficient. Events so effectively blocked the continued pursuit of this plan that, instead of using the Regular Army's best qualified training officers and noncommissioned officers in methodically paced expansion of the existing units, the Army had to scatter its invaluable trained personnel widely and rapidly through a too swiftly increasing flood of recruits. The shortage of fully qualified instructors in the training camps was as apparent to intelligent citizen-soldier recruits as to anyone else and was the subject of vigorous and justified complaints even in 1941. This was true in the National Guard units as well, where veterans capable of giving proper instruction were themselves so few that the Guard divisions, likewise gorged with an excess of raw personnel, had to go through about one year of intensive training. When a core of trained and disciplined men was finally attained, it was possible to recruit as many as 514,345 enlisted men in the single month of October 19427 but that was fantastically ahead of possibilities in 1940 or early 1941. Thus, when it was necessary to send antiaircraft elements to Hawaii and the Philippines and engineer units to Alaska, the Regular units in these categories (some of them 90 percent
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recruits and insufficiently equipped) patently could not be regarded as fit for efficient overseas duty, nor could they be whittled down to efficiency without grave injury to the whole training program. Accordingly, selected National Guard units were sent overseas, these being demonstrably at a better stage of readiness at the time. The critical need in 1940, if it could be met, General Marshall stressed, was for orderly employment of the existing trained manpower, both of officers and men; the problem was to avoid a too rapid dilution of their mass. General Marshall expressed a desire to organize his new divisions at peace strength (8,500 men) and get them going before raising them to war strength.8
Source: The US Army in World War II by Mark Skinner Watson.