CHAPTER III

Changes in the Marshall Organization

The War Department General Staff

The Marshall reorganization deliberately bypassed the General Staff in favor of expediting the conduct of the war through the Operations Division and the three major commands. Although technically still part of the General Staff, OPD had become a super general staff, the GHQ which War Department planners envisaged after World War I. General Marshall and Lt. Gen. Joseph T. McNarney were determined to remove the General Staff from operations entirely because it took too long to get decisions from its members. The most effective means of accomplishing this was to reduce their staffs so drastically that they could not operate for lack of personnel.1 In this reduction G-1 and G-3 lost 75 percent and G-4 over 90 percent of their personnel. Maj. Gen. Raymond G. Moses, who succeeded General Somervell as G-4 on 9 March 1942, recalled that he had inherited a lot of empty filing cabinets and some typewriters, but no one who could type.2

The Operations Division as General Marshall's operating command post expanded 250 percent, while G-2 remained an operating agency in fact because it successfully opposed separating its operating arm, the Military Intelligence Service, from headquarters. The nature of its work also made it difficult to assign G-2 operations logically to any of the three major commands.3

Accompanying the cutback in the General Staff was the assignment of all but two special staff agencies, the Legislative and Liaison Division and the Office of the Inspector General, to the Army Service Forces.

1

1 See Chapter II, above, pages 68-69.

2 Interview, Hewes with General Moses, 16 Oct 68.

(1) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, pp. 394-98. (2) McNarney Interview, pp. 14-17. Patch-Simpson Board files.

As long as General McNarney remained Deputy Chief of Staff he exercised tight control over the General Staff and the department, although five new special staff divisions were added before he left. Under the reorganization, the Chief of Staff's Office consisted of a Deputy Chief of Staff, General McNarney, and the secretariat. By the end of the war there was an additional Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, an Assistant to the Deputy Chief, and a Director of Information, while the General Staff had doubled in size.1

There were several reasons for the increase in size of the General Staff toward the end of the war. The events themselves indicate that Lt. Gen. Thomas T. Handy, who succeeded McNarney as Deputy Chief of Staff, did, not exercise as tight a control over the department as General McNarney. Perhaps a more important reason was the traditional confusion in the Army between the role of the General Staff as a planning organization and its role as an administrative agency assisting the Chief of Staff in directing and controlling the War Department bureaus. While General Marshall and General McNarney tried to confine the General Staff to planning, the General Staff still had to co-ordinate and supervise the three commands and it could not avoid involvement in their activities. G-1 and G-4 complained that co-ordinating the commands was laborious because they had to go to them for the information required to make decisions. General Somervell's Director for Plans and Operations, Lt. Gen. LeRoy Lutes, admitted that the reason ASF represented the Army on various joint and combined supply committees was that ASF had the information required for prompt action, and that going through G-4 would simply delay matters. Similarly General Marshall consulted General Somervell on supply matters rather than G-4 because his staff had the information required.

So far as planning was concerned, G-1 complained its staff

(1) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, pp. 467-70. (2) Strength Accounting and Reporting Office, WDSS, History of the Strength Accounting and Reporting Office. Draft manuscript in OCMH. (3) Organization and Manpower Charts of SARO. OCMH files. (4) History of the National Guard Bureau. Draft manuscript in OCMH. (5) “Annual Report of the Chief of the National Guard Bureau, FY 1946," Washington, 1947, p. 5. (6) Office of the Executive for Reserve and ROTC Affairs, Survey of History of Office for Reserve and ROTC Affairs, 1923-1946, pp. 2, 116. Draft manuscript in OCMH. (7) Organization chart, War Department, 30 Sep 45. OCMH files.

had so few people that they did not have time to read many of the elaborate studies and reports prepared by the large staffs in ASF, AGF, or AAF headquarters. G-l's current operating responsibilities forced planning functions aside. “Future planning was limited to those problems which had to be solved at the moment; others which did not require immediate decision were relegated to the bottom of the basket." 5 A separate agency, the Special Planning Division, was set up to develop the Army's demobilization plans, normally a G-1 responsibility, because G-1 simply did not have the staff to do it."

G-1

With its reduced staff G-1 consisted of the Officers, Enlisted, and Miscellaneous Branches. A Statistics Branch was added in July 1943 to help develop uniform personnel reporting in the Army. A new Legislative Section merged with the Miscellaneous Branch to form a Legislative and Special Projects Branch. In March 1944 the Office of the Director of the Women's Army Corps was assigned to G-1.

A major reorganization in April 1945 set up a Personnel Group (later called the Policy Group). A Planning Branch was added to it later to deal with personnel readjustment policies and universal military training. Finally in August 1945 a Control Group was set up to include the Statistics Branch, plus a Requirements and Resources Branch and an Allocations. Branch responsible for the replacement system generally. Both branches were transferred from G-3. G-l's remaining functions were consolidated into a Special Group, including a Miscellaneous Branch now responsible for personnel and morale services previously performed by The Adjutant General's Office and the Special Services Division of Army Service Forces."

5 War Department General Staff, G-1, History of Personnel Division, G-1, War Department General Staff, World War II, pt. II, History of Planning Group, G-1, p. 3. Manuscript copy in OCMH.

6

(1) Nelson, McNarney, Lutes, and Moses Interviews. Patch-Simpson Board files. (2) War Department General Staff, G-1, History of Personnel Division, G-1, War Department General Staff, World War II, pt. II, Summary History of Personnel Division, G-1, and History of Planning Group, G-1, pp. 1-3.

(1) Nelson, National Security and the General Staff, p. 362. (2) History of Personnel Division, G-1, pt. II, Summary History of Personnel Division, G-1; Tab C, Chronology of Organization, G-1, WDGS; and Tab D, War Department Staff Circular 5-1, 18 Apr 45, Organization, Personnel Division, G-1.

A major factor complicating G-l's burden of co-ordinating and supervising Army-wide personnel operations was the division of responsibility for personnel functions among a great many different agencies at all levels of the War Department from the Secretary of War's Office on down the chain of command.8

G-2

Too large rather than too small a staff created serious management and organization problems for G-2. Its staff more than doubled in size from 1,000 in 1941 to 2,500 at the end of the war. In order to separate G-2's staff from its operating functions, the Marshall reorganization had created a new field agency, the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), theoretically outside the department, as an operating command. Almost immediately the distinction between G-2 and the MIS was largely wiped out by appointment of the Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, as the Chief of the Military Intelligence Service and the G-2 Executive Officer as Assistant Chief of the Military Intelligence Service for Administration.

Initially the MIS was divided into four groups, each under an assistant chief: Administrative, Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Operations. A Foreign Liaison Branch and a Military Attache Section reported separately to the Chief of the Military Intelligence Service. 10

Maj. Gen. George V. Strong became the G-2 in May 1942. He, like most other Army officers, thought the whole concept of separating staff and operating functions impractical and recommended the abolition of the Military Intelligence Service as a separate agency. In the two years that he was its chief, G-2 and the MIS underwent four major reorganizations resulting finally in the abolition of the MIS. The principal issue was the function of evaluating intelligence and whether this should be performed by G-2 as a staff function or by the MIS. This version

8

9

Summary History of Personnel Division, G-1, WDGS, p. 6.

Military Intelligence Division, WDGS, A History of the Military Intelligence Division, 7 December 1941-2 September 1945, p. 380. Manuscript in OCMH.

10 Ibid., pp. 10-16.

of the staff versus operations controversy would remain a major issue within the American intelligence community.

11

Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, and General McNarney became progressively dissatisfied with the management and organization of the Army's intelligence operations. This dissatisfaction came to a head after General Strong's departure as chief in February 1944. A special War Department board under Assistant Secretary McCloy, assisted by a working group under Brig. Gen. Elliot D. Cooke from the Inspector General's Office, met to study means of strengthening Army intelligence. The resultant reorganization once again separated G-2 and the Military Intelligence Service, although the latter retained the function of evaluating intelligence. At the same time the MIS was relieved of all other functions except the collection, evaluation, and dissemination of information. Counterintelligence, training, and propaganda operations were removed from MIS and continued under the General Staff supervision of G-2 along with a World War II Historical Section, which had been established in August 1943. The Military Intelligence Service itself was reorganized along functional lines with a Directorate of Information responsible for the collection and dissemination of intelligence, a Directorate of Intelligence responsible for evaluation, and a Directorate of Administration. Co-ordinating and directing the MIS and other intelligence operations within G-2 was a policy staff similarly organized along functional lines.12

These changes, according to General McNarney, created much bitterness and resentment within G-2 and the MIS, but “frankly,” he told the Patch Board, “G–2 defeated me. I never got G-2 organized so that I thought it was functioning efficiently." The principal reason, he thought, was the innate conservatism of professional intelligence personnel and their resistance to new ideas. "What I would like to do," he said, "is get rid of anybody who has ever been military attache and start new from the ground up.'

" 13

11 (1) Ibid., pp. 17-32. (2) Roger Hilsman, Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956). (3) Interview with Richard M. Bissell, former Deputy Director for Plans, CIA, 5 Aug 67. (4) Bruce W. Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, Department of the Army General Staff, c. 1953, pt. II, chs. I and II, pp. 1-40. Manuscript in OCMH.

12 Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, pp. 33-55.

13 (1) McNarney Interview, p. 17. (2) Bidwell, History of the Military Intelligence Division, ch. I, pp. 21–38.