Huh? I would think that would lead to lopsided recruiting, with the some areas wo are percieved as more interesting getting high percentages of recruits and other seeing shortages. You would never fill artillery for instance. Or is it similar to the Commonwealth Militaries and Navies where a recruit was asked at the outset which arm or regiment he wished to join and it was honoured depending on the vacancies.
Pretty much the latter - because artillery is, in fact, a problem. But they try to make sure that only people who asked for a combat position are posted there, even if their first choice was infantry or tanks.
They also try to solve the problem creatively: for instance, many Flight School drop-outs (which is something like 95% of pilot candidates; the attrition rate there is brutal) are sent to artillery.
Well to begin with, they “volunteered” people who didn’t even consider themselves British
An easy online cite is Wikipedia.
In the US, usually when we refer to a draftee, we mean someone who was called up without volunteering. The guy who volunteered, we simply call a volunteer. I guess that’s because although we used to have active conscription, we didn’t have mandatory military service like some countries (Israel, South Korea, etc.). What you’re referring to is someone who volunteered for a particular service or branch within one service instead of waiting for the local equivalent of the Selective Service Administration or Military Manpower Administration to call them to active duty and assign them as the SSA/MMA determines.
In the “been there done that” category, I can tell you that your draft notice advised you were being drafted into the “Armed Forces.” not the Army, Marines, etc. As noted earlier, the Navy & Air Force never needed to draft. In part because many enlisted in those branches to avoid the Army. Ironically, many who elisted in the Navy became corpsmen and were attached to Marine units. Those guys had it every bit as tough as the Marines.
I was drafted in May of 1969. At the AFEES (Armed Forces Entrace & Examination Station) 113 draftees reported in at 6:30 AM on that fateful Chicago morn. Two were selected for the Marines. Considering I returned in one piece two years later it was a very positive experience. Boot camp was challenging, but having grown up in Catholic schools, strict discipline was no big deal. Not so for some. On the other hand, the physical conditioning was tough.
Right. “Volunteering” is mostly meaningless when you’ve got a universal draft - if you’re fit for service, the army will call you up. The only people who can volunteer to serve in the IDF are foreigners, and Israelis who have been found not fit for service for physical or mental reasons.
During WWII you could get drafted into the Army, Navy or Marines. The Air Force was a branch of the Army then. By Vietnam era, it was only the Army and some Marines.
Nixon ended student deferments, and my lottery number was 76. I got a pre-induction physical notification and volunteered for the Navy. Good times!
Besides the five uniformed service branches already listed here, there are also the United States Public Health Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Corps. Did anyone get drafted into those? Or alternatively was it possible to escape the draft by volunteering for them?
“Or alternatively was it possible to escape the draft by volunteering for them?”
Not a chance.
So five of the uniformed services actively poached officers from the other two? Wasn’t this in the least bit controversial?
I’d speculate that during the Vietnam War era, these services were probably flooded with volunteers and were turning people away. You probably needed to have a specialized degree to even be considered as a volunteer.
As I understood (from books and movies vaguely recalled, like “Billy Budd”) the problem was the British were the dominant player on the seas with the biggest guns, and in the middle of a war with Napoleon. They would arrogantly pull over a ship and search for “deserters”. If you thought the voter-ID debate was interesting, imagine trying to sort out the identity of illiterates with no personal and official identification and no “national databases” to reference. The British assumed anyone suspicious were lying deserters. If you had your parents’ English accent, “prove you are not from Warwickshire - Can’t? Must eb a deserter. Off to the British ship with him…”
Not to be confused with press gangs in port, even foreign or colonial ports.
1C classification
Spain’s draftees could go into any of the three branches of service (Army, Navy or Air), including into some groups which were considered “special forces” (such as the Legion) but not others (Airborne were all-volunteer, at least c. 1980). Of course, since the draft lasted about 180 years and included several civil wars and a foreign one, the actual setup changed a lot.
Same deal with the National Guard. There were waiting lists, and family connections helped alot. Ironic given that during the Iraq & Afghan War Guardsmen (& Guardswomen) were deployed overseas so often people complained about a “backdoor draft”.
In post-war Germany, conscripts were drafted into all branches of the Military, at times even into the Federal Border Guard (which today is called Federal Police).
However, IIRC, they wouldn’t make you serve in the Navy against your will.
To be fair, we (the United States) really were pushing the law past any reasonable point. A sailor could simply go to any American consul in Europe and pay for citizenship papers on the declaration that he intented to settle in the United States at some point in the future. Most of them obviously had no intention on doing this and were just seeking the supposed protection from impressment they would theoretically get as a citizen of a neutral country.
The peacetime draft operated in England from 1945 to 1963 when the last man left. Most draftees went to the Army, with the RAF taking most of the balance. The Navy took very few, no more than about 10% (until 1948 you could also be drafted to work in the coal mines). The period of service was initially twelve months but the Czechoslovak crisis saw it extended to eighteen and the Korean War to 2 years. In the late Fifties it came down to eighteen months again. By then the system was producing more recruits than the Services needed and people were being rejected for quite trivial medical reasons.
There isn’t anymore a military service in France (draftees became useless after the fall of the Warsaw pact), but indeed I was thinking of the situation here when it still existed.
By “elite”, I didn’t mean special forces but units with special training and generally considered as being significantly superior to the run of the mill infantry. To give examples of what I had in mind, a friend served as a marine infantry paratrooper, another on a boomer, one of my brothers as a lieutenant in alpine infantry, an acquaintance in a desert environment recon team in a warzone.
As pointed out by Alessan, those were volunteers, went through a selection process and accepted a longer time of service (except the sub guy who stayed only for the regular one year)
If you intend to rely in part on reservists to fight a possible war (like France during the cold war, Israel, Korea, whatever…) you can’t just train grunts during military service. You need to train NCOs, snipers, tank gunners, paratroopers, chemical warfare specialists, artillery observers, communication technicians, etc…too. So, in case of actual draft, draftees will be found in almost all branches and positions in the armed forces.