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By September of 1945, the United States Army was perhaps the strongest in the world, numbering 8,300,000 out of a total of 12,350,000 of the U.S. Armed Forces. It was only exceeded in manpower by the Russians, and it led the world in weaponry, strategic mobility and logistic capabilities. Winston Churchill described it thus:

“I saw the creation of this mighty force, victorious in every theater against the enemy in so short a time and from such a very small parent stock. This is an achievement which the soldiers of every other country will always study with admiration and envy.”

“But that is not the whole story, nor even the greatest part of the story. To create large armies is one thing, to lead them and to handle them is another. It remains to me a mystery as yet unexplained how the very small staffs which the United States kept during the years of peace were able not only to build up the Armies and the Air Force units, but also to find the leaders and vast staffs capable of handling enormous masses and of moving them faster and further than masses have ever been moved in war before.”

When compared to the pitifully inadequate state of the U.S. Army in 1939 (sixteenth in size, right after Romania), most of whose units were still trained in the combat methods of 1918, rather than those needed to meet the oncoming onslaught that the Germans were prepared to unleash, then the true magnitude of this achievement can be seen in its proper perspective.

On June 30, 1939, the U.S. Army was made up of three elements. The Regular Army consisted of 187,893 men, including 22,387 men in the Army Air Corps. This force manned 9 infantry divisions, 2 cavalry divisions, and a single mechanized cavalry brigade. The National Guard totaled 199,491 men forming 18 infantry divisions. All of these units were at minimal peacetime strengths, available equipment was sorely lacking, and most of what was available was either obsolescent or obsolete. The Regular Army was well trained, but the training of the National Guard was regarded with suspicion by their regular counterparts, as they only drilled for only forty-eight evenings a year and attended a mere two weeks’ of field duty every summer.

The third element of the Army was known as the Organized Reserves. Although this only existed in the mobilization plans, it provided a pool of over 100,000 trained officers, mostly graduates of the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, it was to prove to be a invaluable asset to the Army when the expansion program began.

On September 8, 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a limited national emergency, which raised the strength of the Regular Army to 227,000, although this was mostly taken up by enlarging the garrison in Panama and increases in the Army Air Corps. The National Guard was also authorized to recruit to a strength of 235,000. These were small concessions, but they did enable the General Staff to establish several tactical corps headquarters and enough army troops to create a fully functioning field Army. This was followed in April 1940 by the first corps maneuvers to be held since 1918, and in May 1940, corps vs. corps exercises took place, testing new weapons and tactics. The emergency proclamation permitted the expansion of the officer corps, by allowing the assignment of reserve officers to active duty as well as emergency expenditures that were used to purchase badly needed motor transport.

On August 27, 1940, Congress authorized the induction of the National Guard into federal service for a period of twelve months and then increased the authorized strength of the Regular Army. The new Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall ordered a reorganization of the infantry division moving from the old four regiment ‘square’ division and into the new three regiment ‘triangular’ division, allowing for greater maneuverability and flexibility. Once the new organization had been fully tested in the Spring 1940 maneuvers, all divisions, including those of the National Guard, were reorganized as triangular.

During May and June of 1940, the Germans swept across Europe, eliminating France as a world power and leaving Britain to stand alone, facing imminent invasion. The gravity of the situation finally struck home with the people of the United States. The public began to demand urgent and enormous increases in the armed forces. On September 16, 1940, the first peacetime draft in US history was passed by Congress. However, the draftees were limited to one year of service. The Selective Service Act authorized the strength of the Army to be raised to 1,400,000 men, of which 500,000 were to be Regulars, 270,000 National Guard and 630,000 Selectees. A month later, in public buildings all over the country, men between the ages of 21 and 35 began registering under the new law. Between October 1940 and July 1941, 17,000,000 men were registered, but of these, only 900,000 were permitted by the SSA to be inducted for service in the Army. General George C. Marshall appeared before Congress on August 7, 1941 and Congress approved (by one vote) an indefinite extension of service for the Guard, draftees and Reserve officers.

By the summer of 1941, the Army had increased eightfold and had almost reached the new ceiling of 1,400,000 men. The ground force in the continental United States now consisted of four armies, containing nine corps and made up of 29 divisions, plus overseas garrisons. The picture on new equipment and weapons was still far from good, due to the President’s lend-lease policy, assisting Britain and any other effective enemies of Germany, even at the expense of American rearmament.

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the United States of America was dramatically brought into the war with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. The first bombing run was made at 0755 hours and was over with within two hours. The U.S. Pacific Fleet lost 18 warships, including eight battleships sunk or damaged, 188 aircraft had been destroyed and 3,581 service members killed or wounded. This attack, followed by the declarations of war by Germany and Italy, involved the United States in a global conflict the likes of which had never been seen before. There was now much to do and precious little time to do it in. Mobilization had to be completed as quickly as possible, so as to develop the full potential of the whole of the country. Men had to be inducted and trained, industrial capacity and output expanded and all military facilities increased to unheard-of proportions.

During this initial period of the war, the U.S. was forced to stand on the defensive and endured many humiliations at the hands of the Axis powers because she was too impotent to strike back. All of the nations efforts were directed to the rapid deployment of the available men and equipment in an effort to slow the momentum of the enemy attacks. At the same time protected lines of communications had to be established around the world, while a vast expansion of the military establishment was begun. It took the U.S. eight months to accumulate the weapons and equipment needed, to train the men that were needed initially and then to transport them to the various theaters where they could be employed in offensive operations against the enemy. The end of this end of this initial phase was marked by the first U.S. amphibious assault in August 1942 against the Japanese, at Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.

In spite of these measures, expansion was slow. By December 31, 1941, 24 days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Army consisted of 1,685,403 men ( including 275,889 in the Army Air Corps) in 29 infantry, 5 armored and 2 cavalry divisions. While an increase of 433% in two and a half years was a magnificent achievement, shortages of equipment and trained personnel were serious. Over the next three and a half years, the Army would expand by an additional 492%, to a total of 8,291,336 men in 89 divisions: 66 infantry, 5 airborne, 16 armored, 1 cavalry and 1 mountain division.

On December 16, 1944, 43 of these divisions were deployed in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), including 2 airborne, 10 armored, and 31 infantry divisions. At the same time, an additional 16 divisions were preparing to join them. One armored division had already deployed to Europe and was on its way to the front, and one airborne division was in England, awaiting shipment to France, these would be committed into the fighting by January 16, 1945. One airborne, 3 armored and 7 infantry divisions were completing training in England or in the United States in anticipation of deployment to the ETO.

The Chief of the Army Ground Forces, Lieutenant General J. Lesley McNair was the final decision maker on Army organization. He campaigned tirelessly to reduce overhead in US divisions, insisting on as much streamlining as possible. There were two reasons for this approach. First, shipping space was a premium for not only combat but support units, and all supply items (including food to feed the population of Britain) had to be shipped from the United States to England. Second, McNair and other planners realized that the US manpower pool was not inexhaustible. Industry and farming in the US, as well as the massive expansion of the Navy, Marine Corps and Army Air Corps all absorbed vast numbers of men. The Victory Program of September 25, 1941 called for an Army of 213 divisions, this goal was never even close to being achieved; it proved difficult to man the 89 divisions that were eventually fielded

An adjunct to McNair’s efforts to streamline the division was his effort to pool all non divisional combat assets in the Army into homogeneous battalion-sized units. Pooled units were to be held by corps/armies and were to be attached to divisions as required. Artillery, engineers, armored, tank destroyers, antiaircraft artillery and infantry units were all components of the pool.. Group and brigade headquarters units were created to control manageable aggregations of the large number of pool units.