This is important and often overlooked. Each draft board area had a certain quota of men to deliver. If that number was filled by enlistees, then no one from that draft board’s area would be drafted. If no one enlisted, then draftees would fill the entire quota.
The draft pool I was in was legendary for turning out a lot of enlistees, and even people like me with low lottery numbers were pretty safe from being called up. The draft pool in the neighboring area had a very low enlistment rate, and men with numbers much higher than mine were called up to fill the quota.
My possibly wrong assumption is that draft boards had a lot of discretion. They could choose from just the poor people, just people from a certain ethnicity, the kid who’s trying to bang my daughter, not my son….
They also have to make questimates ahead of time about the numbers that will be classified as medically unfit. My father was called up, took a train to the induction center expecting to be sent from there to boot camp and then most likely Vietnam. As it turned out, after going through all the poking and prodding and waiting around with everyone else, he was called aside. There were fewer medical disqualifications than expected, the quota had been met, and he had a $10 or $25 fine for underage drinking at a federal park, so they sent him home.
Since he was guaranteed to be to not luck out that way again, he enlisted in the Navy.
My father-in-law was called up and given a physical. His eyesight was not great (though he was not close to being blind) and he was given a solid 4F.
This was on December 6, 1941. (I’m told. They must have been working Saturdays.) If he had come in two days later he’d have been drafted for sure.
My father-in-law was 18 at the start of WWII. His father thought that becoming a Navy officer would be safer than being drafted. The problem was that my FIL was color blind, which would disqualify him from being an officer. So his father somehow obtained a copy of the color test sheets that were used, and my FIL memorized them.
During the test, he couldn’t remember one of the colors, and when asked to name it, he cleverly said “ochre”, thinking that the test giver wouldn’t know what that means. Sure enough, the test giver frowned and said “ochre?” He called his supervisor over and said, “This guy says this color is ‘ochre’. Is this ochre?”. The supervisor apparently didn’t know the word either, but he shrugged and said, “I guess so, sure,” so my FIL entered officer training.
My father didn’t turn 18 until the end of 1945 so he wasn’t going to be drafted. He joined anyway at 17 but not soon enough to get into any fighting. He always told me that the pre-war draft was very strict. They disqualified people for any slight physical problem. My uncle his brother-in-law was drafted and almost done with his stint when Pearl Harbor happened. My father said he was the best athlete he ever saw and probably would have been a pro baseball player if it wasn’t for the war. It took almost that level of physical health to get drafted then. Of course standards dropped immediately. Because my uncle had a year of seniority on all the new troops coming in he had an advantage and was a Master Sergeant by the end of the war.
If I recall correctly, my uncle couldn’t be drafted in World War II because he has flat feet. This is no longer generally a condition that keeps one from getting into the U.S. military. I don’t know what the entire history of this is.
Oh, it’s clear why they once thought that having flat feet would exempt you from the military. That’s not what I’m asking about. What I want to know is why they changed their minds about this. Have they found how to make flat feet better? When? How?
The day after Pearl Harbor, my father and two of his buddies went down to enlist. His buddies were accepted, he was rejected because of a heart murmur. By September 1942 my father is married and my mother is pregnant with their first child. He gets drafted. Suddenly his heart murmur miraculously disappeared and he was 1-A and served for the duration.
My Dad would have been Korea or early Vietnam. He was classified 1-Y which meant they would have only called him in the most dire of circumstances. He got that classification because he was an engineer for a large defense contractor.
See #47 (above) and follow the link. There were two conditions that looked like flat feet. One was bad for marching. The doctors weren’t trained to tell the difference.
Someone working for a defense contractor would normally have been Class II –A (or 2-A) . Maybe there was some other reason he got I-Y and didn’t bother with the paperwork to get II-A later.
My father (in Canada) was rejected due to flat feet and traces of atrial fibrillation (fast/irregular heartbeat) in 1939. He was accepted in 1942 - suffering the same conditions. Not much marching in the Air Force - which was his service of choice.
My eldest brother was born in 1946. He got exempted as a college student (math and what would become known as computer science.) Which was fine, until he flunked out, mostly because he rarely bothered to attend classes. Within a few months he got drafted and “You’re in the army now.” (Did the services get notified when their exempted students stopped being students?)
But it worked out very nice for him. Apparently the Army had growing needs for people who grokked electronics and such, and he suffered through his entire service in Hawaii – and then the GI Bill paid for him to go back to college. This time he actually did the work.
