During WW2, was obesity beyond some limit enough for you to be classified 4-F, or did the overweight simply get put through a regimen to lose weight? My guess is that beyond the merely chubby they wouldn’t have bothered so long as a sufficient pool of more able bodied were available.
In one episode of M.A.S.H.*, a guy who actually wanted to stay in the army was under threat of being given a medical discharge if he didn’t lose weight, prompting Klinger to try gorging himself.
My brother was in Korea 51-52 and he said guys were leaving their socks off in order to get frozen toes so they could get out of service.
I suspect you’d have to have been grossly obese and uncooperative to get out of service in WWII.
I don’t know, but I had an uncle who was blind in one eye and got drafted. He was a hydro-matic (GM’s automatic transmission) mechanic and he was stationed in Florida repairing the transmissions on tanks. Two inferences I make from this story. First, they really were scraping the bottom of the barrel, second, they actually took a guy’s civilian skills into account in assigning duties. Obviously, he wasn’t going to be in the infantry.
Obesity was exponentially less common in the 1940s than today. Daily life was not so sedentary, and food was a lot more expensive in relation to the value of the dollar. Even being a little overweight was still uncommon.
Can’t speak for the WW2 era, but in the Vietnam era, as long as your fitness problem was not permanent, you were put on the list to be re-checked periodically. Some medical conditions can change; you could lose weight. Or the standards might change, too.
One of my childhood friend’s father was nearly blind in both eyes. He enlisted and they even managed to find a job for him. He spent his hitch in a headquarters building somewhere in New England shoveling coal into a furnace. I was at his funeral a couple of years ago and his family was presented with a flag by the VFW for his service.
I was always under the impression that medical deferments were actually easier to get in WWII than Vietnam because more men were volunteering (or at least fewer men were asking for deferments) and the Army wasn’t as worried about attempts to scam the system.
There was also a higher cost to not joining. In his autobiography, Greg “Pappy” Boyington tells about the time between his being discharged from the Flying Tigers and being reinstated in the Marines. In six months, he was investigated by the FBI, got into a fight at a football game when he didn’t sing America the Beautiful with the crowd (coming from China, he didn’t know the words), and had to take his old college job parking cars. Anyone who intentionally tried to dodge the draft would have had a hard time of it at home.
I’ve always heard that in times of war, especially your more desperate struggles like WWII, they’re not as choosy about who they sign up as they are during peacetime. Hell, if nothing else you can be a stock clerk on an Army base in Kansas, freeing up some fitter soldier to go fight.
According to this site (p. 78), so many draftees could not meet the original requirements for having adequate teeth that the government lowered the standards twice and ended up drafting one-quarter of all the dentists in the US at the time to meet the demand for dentures and repairing battle damage.
This was fifty years before the Americans With Disabilities Act. I’d guess that anyone deemed unfit for service would have to explain themselves unless their disability was the first thing that people noticed.
Though there was a category for perfectly healthy men=
You can find the chart here
defense industry, farmers, certain classes of student, hardship, already completed military service, conscientious objectors of certain types. official, alien, served in a foreign military, and overage.
There were changes made in the categories over the years so it varies depending on what year and war you are thinking about.
I am actually of the opinion that like many other countries in the world, we should actually have universal service. Especially with the economy as crappy as it is now, it would at least give the kids coming out of high school who have no actual job prospects an income for a couple years to get them into the groove of working, learning discipline and a way out of a dead end life. Male and female can join the military, conscientious objectors could go do something like the old civilian conservation corps.
There have been recurring proposals for that, and I can see some good sense in what you say, but it would be massively expensive and I just don’t think Uncle Sam could afford it.
Not to hijack the OP, but that’s a horrible idea. The last thing the military wants is a bunch of conscripts. They don’t have any problem meeting their recruitment goals now (except for specialists like translators), and besides it’s not their job to provide American youth with job skills, that’s the school system’s job. The military’s only job is to fight wars. And a non-military draft (where most conscripts ended up working in old age homes or building houses for the poor) would likely be unconstitutional.
I’ll try to find a cite, but the SSS did a study and apparently if a draft were conducted today under present rules and enlistment standards less than 25% of draft-age men would even be able to meet those standards; the rest would all need to be deferred (or standards drastically lowered).
