The Army demobilized relatively quickly after WWI ended, over a period of 5 years or so. Those soldiers that were retained faced potential rollercoasters in their career progression.
In "A History of the NCO" the author shares a story of Alexander Loungeway as an example of this – Loungeway served 32 years in the @USArmy – beginning in 1908, he was promoted to First Lieutenant during WWI, then reverted back to First Sergeant later.
Loungeway would later be a Sergeant, a Corporal, and a Private First Class, then promoted to Corporal again the year before he retired from service. All of his raters called him “excellent.”
There were two factors that affected soldiers like Loungeway at the time.
First – soldiers received their promotions from their regiments. So if one regiment “owned the stripes” there was a chance the soldier would be reverted to a previous rank if transferred elsewhere in the Army or if the unit was deactivated.
Enlisted soldiers were not guaranteed to keep their rank when they PCS (Permanent Change of Station) until 1940.
The other factor is that the Army scheduled to cut 1600 NCOs in 1922 in an effort to save money. For NCOs, especially those with families, this was a significantly difficult time. The Great Depression didn’t help either.
The Depression brought issues with pay, such as enlisted soldiers receiving only half of their salary, “or half the salary in money and the other half in consumer goods or food.”
From the 1930s until 1948, the Army had a “technician” grade of 3, 4, or 5 which were equivalent to Staff Sergeant (SSG), Sergeant (SGT), and Corporal (CPL) except the chevrons had a “T” to indicate “technician”.
“Pay from any one of 213 vocational skills could add $3 to $35 to the enlisted man’s monthly pay.”
Although “equivalent” to SSG, SGT, and CPL, these technicians were not considered NCOs. But because of their specialties, they were able to progress more rapidly in rank. Those technicians who were actual “leaders of men” were considered NCOs.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US Army faced a need to expand rapidly while simultaneously training recruits and draftees to be effective soldiers. In order to make this happen, the Army relied heavily on experienced NCOs.
Mobilization increased the size of the military, and with it the size of the NCO Corps. In 1941, the number of NCOs in the @USArmy was about 20% of the total force. By 1945, this had increased to almost 50% of the Army.
Of course, with oversaturation we saw a decrease in “shininess” – there were so many NCOs that the prestige associated with being a Non-Commissioned Officer had dulled a bit, at least for certain NCO ranks.
Changes to the Army’s organization gave NCOs new challenges to meet. The 8-man Infantry Squad increased to 12, and the Sergeant (E-5) replaced the Corporal (E-4) as a squad leader, diminishing the significance of the Corporal rank at the time.
Basic Training focused on practical hands-on experience rather than classroom learning, and NCOs were responsible for training all of the recruits and draftees.
Women were formally welcomed into the @USArmy in 1942 and by the end of the war there were 90,000+ women who had enlisted. @AccidentalE9@16thSMA
Now, since the scope of this series is mostly focused on the period before WWII, 1939-1941, we won’t go too much into post-WWII topics. But it was in 1945 that Congress decided enlisted soldiers with 20-29 years of service were entitled to retirement.
As promised, here are some of the resources used to write the threads on NCOs:
If you're just tuning in or you've missed any of the previous threads, you can find them all saved on this account under ⚡️Moments or with this direct link twitter.com/i/events/13642…
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Operation Chastise was a night bombing raid carried out by the @RoyalAirForce on the evening of 16 May 1943. This raid is also referred to as the Dambusters Raid because the bombers were targeting several dams in the Ruhr industrial area, in western Germany.
The Möhne Dam, the Sorpe Dam, and the Eder Dam. Destruction would affect hydroelectric power plants as well as the industries depending on the water. There was also potential for flooding cities and nearby areas if the dams were broken.
It seems like it’s about time for a #TankTwitter thread, so today we will talk about the first, largely intact, Tiger I captured by the Allies.
The Tiger I was a heavy tank that provided Hitler’s army with the first armored fighting vehicle to feature a mounted 88mm gun. It was big and scary, and it was expensive, both to build and to maintain, which is partly why only a little over 1300 were built.
On Tuesday we talked about the Battle of Sidi Bou Zid, and that thread also served as a primer for the third episode of the accompanying #WhyWeFight1943 podcast.
“In their January attacks Axis units puzzled Allied commanders by limiting their own advances and abandoning key positions. Soon, however, the enemy displayed more determination.”
On Tuesday, we talked about the secret multi-day trip that President Roosevelt took from the White House on 9 JAN to Casablanca, arriving on 14 JAN, in order to attend a highly classified series of meetings with his British counterpart, Winston Churchill.
This conference involved both FDR and Churchill, and their most trusted senior staff and senior military leaders. During the meetings they established the way forward for the Allies in this war, mapping out “the grand strategy for both the European and the Pacific Theaters.”
George Patton was put in command of the Western Task Force, which sailed from the east coast of the US right to Morocco for Operation Torch. The other two task forces sailed from the UK.
Patton was on the USS Augusta, which was under the command of Admiral Hewitt (next to Patton in the picture). That little pouch on the front of Patton's belt is actually a police handcuff pouch but Patton used it for a compass.
Everyone knows that the United States used two atomic bombs in the Pacific in World War II, and that the US was the only nation in the war to use this new type of weapon. This week we will take a look at the efforts to create these bombs.
The Manhattan Project technically ran from 1942 until 1946, but the American effort itself had actually started in 1939, and we had British counterparts already working on nuclear weapons development by the time the United States jumped on that train.⚛️