Actually, this cite “Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote”: The WWII Roots of the 26th Amendment | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans says:
Less than a year into US involvement in World War II, President Roosevelt and his administration faced a dilemma: of the 20 million eligible men who registered for the draft, 50 percent were rejected either for health reasons or because they were deemed illiterate.
This is an example of a military Powerpoint slide. I’m not sure if recruiting personnel from the Mckinseys, Deloittes, and Accentures of the world will make things better or worse.
This is actually a brilliantly simple and yet wonderful idea, which all kinds of obvious benefits, so they won’t do it.
I remember taking the ASVAB in high school and I scored pretty well. Someone from the Marines called me and tried to recruit me. He specifically cited my good scores and implied that they might enable me to apply for some cool things in the service.
I told him I had asthma and that running for a long distance would cause a respiratory attack. And I wasn’t lying; only in the last 10 years or so has that gone away. He said that sadly it made me ineligible for military service.
(I wasn’t sad, I grew up a military kid and had no interest in doing it.)
I wonder if these days they would waive my medical issue?
I was sloppy. It wasn’t pure money,
Deferment was partly based on class rank and Selective Service Qualification Test scores. Having rich parents helped here, in the sense that working yourself through college makes it harder to get A’s. On the other hand, if you go to a less selective college, it is easier to have a high class rank.
As for once you were in the military, I’ve just now been looking for a link on that and failed to find one. I know I’ve read claims that Ivy Leaguers didn’t get forced into the infantry or swift boats. But I don’t have a link for that. And Ivy League isn’t a total synonym for wealth.
Your grades (so long as you had C average) and the school didn’t matter. If you were in school and were taking enough units, you could defer.
There were plenty of ways that the wealthy or savvy could avoid the draft: string out school as long as possible, get a job in a critical industry (my dad was an aerospace engineer) or get a friendly medical doctor to “find” something wrong with you to name a few. If all else failed, you could find some sort of National Guard slot somewhere.
I’ve read that many college professors were generous graders because they realized that their students would get drafted if they failed out.
Then why did you take the ASVAB?
My score was better than 96% of those who took it and every branch drove me nuts calling the house. Eventually I enlisted but was not inducted due to a medical issue that was rare but actually minor.
Didn’t the rules change over time? But even if you are precisely correct, one could take a deferment, in the early 1960’s, that put you plop into the Vietnam War era when you graduated.
Looking for a link on this, I see that to some extent it was also true, in World War II, that you could test out of the infantry.
But it may be that in World War II, there were lots of even more dangerous military occupations.
On all except the tiniest warships, you were safe, in terms of risk from enemy action, in the Vietnam era.
Ten B52’s were shot down over North Vietnam during the whole war, while losing ten B-17’s on a single raid against Germany might have meant low causuaties. Passing an apptitude test to become a tail gunner wouldn’t have helped your World War II life expectancy.
At my high school it was mandatory. It was a test everyone had to take. It was a day we all had no classes and took tests all day. It was done in school. It wasn’t something I chose to do. (Mid 1990s.)
One of my uncles got in trouble with his local VFW post by saying he was a Vietnam veteran, when actually, he was a Vietnam-ERA veteran. All of his service was stateside, and I don’t think he ever went overseas at all, not even to Germany which had a large presence at one time, and where another uncle did serve.
Nowadays, with an increasing number of women joining the military, they have twice the candidate pool to draw from.
Why?
Girls too?
ISTR that this project was the inspiration for Zero in the “Beetle Bailey” comic strip, and I do remember when I read “Unbroken” that Louis Zamperini noticed, as did a lot of other people, that as the war progressed, the Japanese soldiers, at least the ones he encountered, got less and less intelligent.
Why? No idea.
And yes, girls too. The ASVAB even had different percentages on it for boys and girls as test results.
Let me put it this way… If it wasn’t mandatory that certainly wasn’t made clear to us. A lot of people taking it didn’t want to. (I didn’t mind taking it, I always liked aptitude tests because I was curious how I’d do.) It was a school-wide thing.
I remember they also had career recommendations, I vaguely remember that they had a survey bundled with it to determine what sort of career you’d be interested based on a questionnaire. It suggested I should either be an engineer or a social worker.
The rules definitely changed over time but, I believe, not really in that respect. Originally the draft boards in each area got to pretty much pick so they could choose just the poor people or just the black people or the dickhead who is trying to bang my daughter. They instituted the birthday lottery to make it more fair but the ways to wriggle our were the same if you got a low number. If you got a high enough number, you could choose to quit school and not worry.
A relevant story from a friend regarding rule changes. There was a change to the number of units required to be considered enough for a deferment. My friend missed that notice and took too few, had a low lottery number and was called up. He decided to join the Army National Guard and heard all kinds of rumors that he might have to drive hundreds of miles away to find a slot. He was lucky enough to get one in town though. He ended up having to show up for drill for years after the war was over.
Why wouldn’t girls take it too? They join the military.
Well, today’s youth may be fat, but at least they have enough teeth. In 1941, 10% of recruits were rejected because they didn’t have enough teeth.
I tend to think it’s something of a nothing-burger, in that the military could very easily solve this by tacking a few more weeks onto boot camp, or having some sort of fitness camp recruits would attend prior to boot camp. Fitness is something that can be solved. Missing teeth, mental health issues, serious drug use, etc… aren’t.
Infantry was statistically the most dangerous occupation for the US in WW2 and baring a couple of outliers was the most dangerous in all nations. Any infantry division that spent long enough on the line was going to lose more than 100% of its Table of Organization strength, meaning with the continual flow of replacements for the dead and the injured casualties exceeded its nominal organizational strength. In some US infantry divisions, it exceeded 200%, as in the case of the 1st Infantry Division (205.9%) and the 3rd Infantry Division (201.6%). It gets even worse when one considers that of the 14,000 or so total soldiers in an infantry division, only 2,916 were riflemen in the infantry squads, and they suffered heavily disproportionate casualties to that of the other branches in an infantry division. The only two outliers that pop immediately to mind are RAF Bomber Command, which was at one point losing more bomber crewmen than German civilians they were killing early on in the night bombing offensive, and German U-boat crews which hit 75% fatalities of all U-boat submariners.
I know you said in terms of risk from enemy action, but it was by no means safe. There were three major fires on US aircraft carriers during the war; the Oriskany on Oct 26, 1966 which killed 44 and injured 156, the Forrestal on July 29, 1967 which killed 134 and injured 161, and the Enterprise on Jan 14, 1969 which killed 28 and injured 314. Separating out deaths and injuries caused by accidents in ammunition handling in a combat environment that wouldn’t have happened in peacetime is splitting hairs a bit.
Total US aircraft losses in Vietnam were a lot higher than one might expect. In total, the United States military lost in Vietnam almost 10,000 aircraft, helicopters and UAVs (3,744 planes, 5,607 helicopters and 578 UAVs).. On helicopters [t]otal helicopter pilots killed in the Vietnam War was 2,202. Total non-pilot crew members was 2704.
The teeth thing was a huge problem in WWI in the US so a huge number of dentists were drafted. The dental corp went from fewer than 100 to over 2000.
I had to take a bunch of aptitude tests in high school but not the military one. As soon as I declared an engineering major in college I got tons of calls from the Navy wanting me to become a nuke officer on submarines. (mid 80s) I finally got them to stop by telling the recruiter that I never intended to stop smoking weed. Aside from that I have a legitimate medical condition that would have made me ineligible.
Right- by comparison with missing/bad teeth, merely being fat is not such a big deal in terms of something that can easily be remedied.
It just would require the military to acknowledge that they’re not going to get the same sort of recruit they’ve got in the past, and adjust their training/fitness regimes to compensate.