“At that time”? It’s always been the prevailing attitude. It’s almost always true, too.
I just asked my husband, whose father served in WWII, how Dad ended up in the war. He was an engineering student at UA, but he had let his grades slip because of attention to a certain lovely young lady who became my mother-in-law after the war. He went into the Army - Mr. SCL says that it was allocated according to which branch needed members at the time, but I wonder if being next door to Fort Benning might have had something to do with it.
That’s eerie. My grandfather told the exact same story.
Steve McQueen couldn’t drive when they inducted him, so, of course, they made him a tank driver. Made sense, really, since Pattons had joystick steering. Knowing how to drive with a steering wheel would mess you all up.
One from the Civil War - Benjamin Grierson was kicked by a horse as a child, became afraid of horses as a result, and still hated them as an adult. When offered a commission, he said he was willing to serve in any capacity, but requested that he not have to deal with horses. So naturally, the army made a cavalry commander out of him. And he pulled one of the most daring cavalry raids of the war. And still hated horses.
This sort of thing never changes, it seems.
When I reported to my assigned submarine as a junior officer, I was assigned to be the Electrical Officer. I had a degree in chemical engineering, and my weakest course in college had been the introductory electrical engineering course.
A month later, another guy reported to my sub. His degree was in electrical engineering. He had almost failed out of the Naval Academy due to his difficulties with chemistry. So of course they assigned him to be the Chemistry/Radiation Control Officer. :smack:
This might be an unusual story, but I had two uncles who served (my father passed the upper limit in '43 and escaped). The younger one volunteered just before he could be drafted and this so angered the draft board so they drafted the older one. He was blind in one eye (which would have normally exempted him) and was a highly skilled hydromatic mechanic. So he spent the war repairing tank transmissions. There must have been other cases where civilian skills were used to determine someone’s service responsibilities.
On the other hand, after the war it was different. A friend of mine’s father was a mathematician running some kind of calculation bureau in Washington. He said he needed two mathematicians and was duly provided two recruits who had degrees in mathematics. Unfortunately, the rules were that the newest recruits to that office were put on guard duty and so he didn’t get to use them for the purpose they were recruited, at least not for a long time.
[anecdote]
A relative volunteered for the service in WWII. He was told he didn’t score high enough on the tests to join the Navy (which he wanted.) So they sent him to the Army.
The Army assigned him to the Army Air Corp which made him a pilot.
He piloted B-17 in the Eighth Air Force.
[/anecdote]
…
My dad was drafted in 1944 just after graduating high school. Not surprisingly, he and a number of his friends all got their draft notices on the same day. When they showed up at the recruiting station, they all asked to go into the Navy together. Sure enough, all of them – about a half dozen or so – wound up going through basic training together.
After training, they got different assignments (my dad sailed a desk in San Francisco – the only shooting he saw came from whiskey glasses at some of the local watering holes) but it’s interesting that they all stayed together for their initial instruction.
The flodfather, in fact, served in the US Navy during the Korean War. (He volunteered just before he figured he would be drafted.) To this day the guy is not what you’d call a strong swimmer. And during Korea the Navy certainly didn’t have a greater need for sailors than WWII; if they accepted non-swimmers in '51, surely they would have in '42. Might have been how individual recruiters decided things, but I’d want to see some proof before I believe it was Navy policy.
Incidentally, the flodfather’s take on it is that a non-swimmer has that much more incentive to keep the damn ship afloat 
Even when they screen for aptitudes, it might not be all that accurate. My uncle was inducted, I believe, during the Korea era. His group was asked “Which of you guys knows how to drive a truck?”. Figuring that driving a truck was probably better than what he’d wind up doing otherwise, he said “I do, sir”. In reality, he’d never driven a truck in his life. Nonetheless, they took him out to a test course, and plopped him down behind the wheel of a deuce-and-a-half. He passed, somehow, and drove trucks during his hitch. Which had little to do with his post-army career of becoming a music professor.
My Dad was drafted in 1943, they asked him if he wanted army or navy, he chose navy, he went in the navy.
My maternal grandfather volunteered for the Navy during WWII. My paternal grandfather was the only son of farmers and was exempted from the draft because of it. His sister (my great aunt) however was a doctor and was one of the first women to join the Army Medical Corps.
Family history has it (I don’t know the details) that my grandmother was one of the first female British surgeons to go to France in WW1. Obviously her field hospital was somewhat behind the lines. Alas, she died when I was very young.
The current Armed Services vocational aptitude battery, (ASVAB), was preceded by similar vocational testing procedures. When I joined the Navy in 1956 I scored high in mechanical aptitude and was subsequently assigned to the Seabees, one of only two recruits from my company to be so designated. I recall my father talking about the “basic battery” testing when he joined during WWII.
Generally, the basic battery will dictate a recruits job placement during their time in service. Now there are exceptions. When a recruit gets to their first unit, after initial training, it may be that they are needed in some other field although this is the exception, not the rule.
As far as draft boards designating which branch of the armed forces a draftee would be assigned, I’m guessing that the Dept. of War (WWII) would have assigned requirements, w/ the vast majority going to the Army.
I joined the Navy in 1993. Strong swimming skills were not required.
The swim training we received entailed jumping off of a ten meter platform into a pool (to simulate jumping into the ocean from a ship’s deck), treading water for a few minutes, and the removal of your dungaree trousers and turning them into an improvised flotation device.
We used to joke that swimming wasn’t required for some very good reasons - if the danm ship ever sank, you typically would be hundreds of miles from land, and no amount of swimming would get you there.
In some cases assigning people away from their specialties (especially in obvious cases of need, like the mathematicians) may have been semi-deliberate. It could have been a way of reinforcing military discipline: ie, whatever real operational needs may be, the authority of command comes first.
darn right
Of course that might simply mean that he guessed right. whichever answer he gave had a 50% chance of being right.
From what I hear–from my father, so it may be apocryphal, but he served voluntarily in the Navy for forty years, a handful of which were during the Vietnam era–they got a card in the mail with the assigned branch on them, and it was random. Apparently the friendlier neighborhood mailmen would peek at them and then warn the would-be infantry so they could volunteer for a cushier placement.
Did each branch have its own air service, like the modern US military? Did draftees who wanted to become pilots get moved to another branch?
Just to nitpick: MOS doesn’t mean the same thing in each branch. In the Air Force, it refers to a locker check (basically) during boot camp.
Para-infantry is a volunteer service even in modern-day Israel, where there’s a 100% compulsory draft for 18-year-old Jews of able mind and body, and “attitude problems” are rare to inexistant. Paratrooper service requires extensive training including simulated torture and requires an abnormally (maybe freakishly) strong mind and body. Combat pilots, same deal: not only do they need sharp visual and audial acuity, they also must be prepared to be captured and tortured (no small matter when your enemy is the freakin’ Nazis), and they must again be extraordinarily fit to withstand the physical stress of high speed at high altitude. Have you ever been in a plane at G-force? I have, just barely, and I was effectively paralyzed the entire time. Of course, I would’ve never made it into the Air Force back then, having been quite a bit overweight and living a terrible lifestyle (being 12 years old didn’t help either!). But still…
And as for submariners, each member of a sub crew needs to be able to perform every single job on the ship if called upon in an emergency. That, in and of itself, means every single person who’s ever tasked to a submarine needs much more training than their deck-swabbing peers by definition. Add that to the psychological stress of serving on a sub–cramped quarters, little sunlight, tough hours, and it takes a special kind of person to do it.
I don’t claim to be an expert on any of these–but I’ve spent significant time with Israeli paratroopers, an American submariner and a couple of American combat pilots and military airpower enthusiasts and tried to soak up what I can. In short, while you’re undoubtedly right in that the DOD wanted to keep the reluctant fighters out of those forces, the main reason they were volunteer-only is that they required rare attributes and skillsets.
What alphaboi867 said, plus: the vast majority of modern Air Force personnel will never fly a plane. Most are ground support, Security Forces (the Air Force version of MPs), or do various other odd jobs around the base. Of those who serve on planes, most are crew, support staff, engineers, etc. I don’t remember the figure, but I think it comes down to 15% pilots, 85% everything else. Fun fact: the AFSC (AF version of MOS) with the most Airmen is Security Forces.
I assume it was similar in the Army Air Corps of the WWII era, although the support staff themselves may not have all worn Air Corps badges.