I do feel some sympathy for her, but she had to be nuts to think kids that young should be in the military.
Related:
“Pentagon: 7 in 10 Youths Would Fail to Qualify for Military Service”
Dad dropped out of engineering school when WWII started. He was hired as a civilian by the Navy Bureau of Air and was sent to the Curtis-Wright factory in Columbus, OH as an inspector. Part of his deal was that at some point in time, he’d be inducted into the USN as an aviation cadet. He probably, like all civilian males of that age, carried in his wallet his draft card which explained his status. When that time came around, the Navy told him his overbite was too severe to wear the oxygen mask and they weren’t going to take him. Since my dad didn’t have an overbite, he was probably too Jewish to be a USN aviation cadet. But the USAAF took him and trained him to be a bombardier in B-17s.
Back in my day (the Vietnam Era), when you were drafted or enlisted, you had a 6 year commitment. Some of that was Active Duty, the rest was reserve. And back then, Inactive Reserve meant throw your uniforms away and let your hair grow as long as you wanted, you weren’t going back in. You just needed to let them know the address to mail your Honorable Discharge to when your time was up. There were also manpower programs like “McNamara’s 100,000”, which meant they could draft illiterate inner city youths (yep, Blacks or Hispanics) who didn’t meet the normal requirements.
Yeah, going back to the original OP, I read the problem was more about being underweight and having other physical ailments which came from lack of food during the depression.
Thing is in WW2 they were able to find military service related work for nearly everyone. I saw one show where they recruited midgets to work as welders in cramped quarters like the noses of bombers. Blind and deaf also found work in factories.
That’s false. There is a photo in my family of my grandmother, my mother, and a 6 year old me on the Atlantic City boardwalk and we were all fat. Not morbidly obese, but my grandmother went up to 221 and was not much over 5’. She eventually lost 80 pounds. This was in 1943.
Starchy fattening food was still relatively cheap. Meat was expensive, yes, but bread and potatoes weren’t. In fact, weight loss books were big sellers.
My father-in-law was one of those dentists, and he’s told us horror stories of the dental health of incoming soldiers. Some of those guys had apparently never used a toothbrush. His colleagues would paint a man’s teeth with a colorful but non-toxic stain (gentian violet?), hand him a toothbrush, and tell him not to come back until he’d scrubbed off all the purple.
That was true up until a few years ago (2011-2012?). Once we pulled out of Iraq, they quit needing so many troops, but until then, they’d sign up just about any warm body- they’d extended the enlistment age to 42(?), and waived a bunch of other prior requirements.
The Army’s Standards for Physical Fitness in World War II are online at http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a291761.pdf, with the texts of the standards themselves reprinted in the appendixes. Obesity was cause for rejection if it interfered actually or potentially with normal physical activity, or if it was so marked as to interfere with marching or military duties (p. 218). Also, you couldn’t get in the Cavalry if your weight was in excess of 180 pounds. Obesity does not seem to have been a major cause of disqualification of draftees, but it clearly did keep some out of the Army.
Didnt they also kick them out if they were gay?
Dismayed by the number of men who had cracked up in battle in WW1, the Army went to considerable trouble with psychiatric testing to attempt to screen out men who were deemed to be fragile. The end result, however, was that the PSTD rate was not greatly different from what it had been the last war.
Going off at a rather wild tangent (different country, different war); but this puts me in mind of an anecdote in memoirs written by a British guy, born at the very end of the 19th century. He was in the Officers’ Training Corps of the public (Brit-speak – elsewhere=elite private) school which he attended, and was sent to said Corps’s summer training camp on Salisbury Plain, in summer 1914. Facilities there for the lads to wash themselves and keep clean, were not all that they might have been – likewise lacking, instructions for trying to make the best of that situation. A few days after the outbreak of World War I, the camp’s session ceased, and the boys were roused at a very ungodly hour of the early morning, and marched some miles to the nearest railway station, and put on a train heading for London.
On the boys’ arrival at the terminus at London’s Waterloo Station, in their cadet uniforms, civilian passengers on the spot made a great fuss of them, and embraced and congratulated them, thinking them to be soldiers on their way to France (notwithstanding their ages of – as above – about 14 – 16). Among all the congratulations, the lads picked up indications of dismay about their looking so very young, and so very scruffy. The folk felt bothered that Britain seemed to be so desperately scraping the barrel, extremely early in the war…
The Israeli military goes to great lengths to accommodate conscripts with disabilities. IIRC they have a clerical unit specifically for deaf soldiers.
Yes, but that was subject to manpower needs of the service (in other words they’d ignore it as much was possible until they didn’t need you then it was Dishonourable Discharge time). Sodomy was also a punishable offence under both the UMCJ and the Articles of War in case they weren’t satisfied with a discharge (sodomy was also illegal in every state until the 1960s).
Back then it was the circus sideshow to see obese people, not riding a scooter at Walmart.
Didn’t most units have a hillbilly in addition to the guy from Brooklyn (says the guy who grew up in East Tennessee and later lived in Brooklyn)?
This.
Look at pictures at Shorpy.com. It is immediately striking how few overweight people you see in old photos.
Slight hijack: A deceased relative of mine was about the right age to have served in WWII. But he did not. His story is lost to time. Is there any way to find his records and would they be specific enough to say what health issue or job he had to keep him out of the service?
My brother located our father’s draft card from 1942 on ancestry.com. It doesn’t have draft status, but does list his “place of employment or business”, and has a space for “other obvious physical characteristics that will aid in identification” (which might include injuries or disabilities).
Here is a good photographic example - http://www.edwardjkelty.com - obesity that got you a sideshow job in the twenties and thirties is not too uncommon today.
My data points:
WWII: I had an uncle that was just on the edge of being underweight. He enlisted, went to boot camp, where he promptly lost weight. They quickly mustered him out before he reached the deadline for qualifying for VA benefits.
If they were really desperate, it would seem that they would have just pulled him out of basic for a couple weeks, fattened him up a bit, and they sent him back in with instructions to eat more. He was a volunteer, not a draftee so he wasn’t trying to pull anything.
Vietnam: I knew a guy who was overweight. The draft office would call him in every 6 months to check his weight. They kept telling him to lose weight so they could draft him. Right.
I was borderline underweight. I was never called in for an exam, but if I was, I only had to lose something like 2 pounds to be disqualified. Plus I had other things “going” for me.
Thanks, Shakespeare, I’ll try that!