Through Ancestry.com, I just turned up my grandpa’s draft registration card, dated 1942. He was 64 years old in 1942, and he didn’t make it through 1943, so I wonder why the government was registering old men for a military draft. Why didn’t the government just cap registration at age 45, or 50, or whatever? They weren’t even taking volunteers in their 40s for the most part, were they?
Interesting. I hadn’t known about the “old man’s draft” of 1942, but the idea was to create a pool of men suitable for potential duties on the home front, while releasing younger, fitter men for fighting duty.
The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 required all men aged 21 to 35 (the day before their 36th birthday) to register; amendments in 1941 and '42 extended this to ages 18 to 64, with men up to 44 liable to be drafted. In practice, men in their 40s were generally not drafted, and men over 45 (later, over 38) were classed IV-A or IV-H, deferred as overage. The US Armed Forces did accept some older men as volunteers, however; famously, Teddy Roosevelt Jr, already in his 50s, was reappointed an officer and served in North Africa and Italy before dying of a heart attack at age 56 in Normandy in July 1944.
Huh. So Grandpa Joe (I never knew him) just barely qualified at age 64, the cut off age. Interesting. Thanks.
A truly efficient way would have been to make these old guys the lead assault waves. Let the Germans use up their ammo on them. Then tye younger more energetic lads could come in and take the positions. Bonus, you save decades of pension payments.
My wife has the draft card for her great grandfather. He joined the Army at 20 years old in 1928 and served 2 years. When discharged he went to Jerome, Arizona and went to work in a copper mine. While there he married and had 3 sons. Work at the mine slowed in the late 30’s and he found other work in the area. In 1941 he was drafted and joined the Navy as a Seabee. He sent his wife and children to live with his parents in Colorado. He spent 4 years in the Navy building landing strips on islands in the Pacific Ocean. Upon discharge he moved his family to the Seattle area and went to work as a machinist at a rapidly expanding airplane company. My wife said her grandfather use to tell her if he didn’t get drafted for WWII, he probably would have never ended up in Washington, her parents would have never met and she wouldn’t have been born.
You could be directed into the Home Guard here up to 60, if you weren’t already doing firewatching or civil defence.
Those would be some slow-moving assaults, if the first over the top set the pace for all the rest. And the best assaults are accomplished with rapidity and violence, so probably counterproductive.
To say nothing about the horrific effect on morale of those fit young guys watching their grandfathers being used as literal cannon fodder based on such a batshit idea. The Nazis didn’t even start throwing 60-year old’s into the frontline until October 1944 when they were very firmly on the defensive, every fit male of a remotely more useful military age had long since been drafted and even a psychopath of Hitler’s level was
Aware that a “people’s army” would not be able to withstand the onslaught of the modern army wielded by the Allies, Hitler issued the following order towards the end of 1944:
Experience in the East has shown that Volkssturm, emergency and reserve units have little fighting value when left to themselves, and can be quickly destroyed. The fighting value of these units, which are for the most part strong in numbers, but weak in the armaments required for modern battle, is immeasurably higher when they go into action with troops of the regular army in the field. I, therefore, order: where Volkssturm, emergency, and reserve units are available, together with regular units, in any battle sector, mixed battle-groups (brigades) will be formed under unified command, so as to give the Volkssturm, emergency, and reserve units stiffening and support.
Not ‘throw the Volkssturm into battle first to soak up Allied ammo,’ but stiffen them with regular troops so that they don’t get immediately destroyed.
The one thing I know for certain is that when my father turned 39 in the late winter of 1943, he considered himself ineligible for the draft.
I do remember there was one battle in World War 2 (forgot the exact one) where some country fighting in its own soil got all the old men and injured younger men, dressed them up like real soldiers and had them march like they were going to attack from a certain direction. So the opposing army deployed their reserves to deal with this new threat, which then lead to them being dangerously short on men in a critical area where the actual regular army used to break through, and the old man army saw relatively little fighting.
The fourth registration. Note it was REGISTRATION not enrollment/induction.
and was not the literal draft.
While being able to draft everyone, eg for a dads army home front defense force, that was only a just in case, not the expected usage… they might not have done it if all they wanted was info on a literal “dads army” . What it was for, It was a rough and ready way to collect information about the health and employment related abilities of the workforce … How could the governments policies could enlist the younger workforce, and ensure it did not shoot itself by starving an area of workforce…
So this was a database for steering policy and the creation of particular war effort campaigns.
To discover where the personnel to boost war related production could come from …
It allowed the enlistment agencies to avoid starving an area …
without wasting untapped resource…
eg if a state had 5000 carpenters in non-carpenter jobs, and 50000 men in office jobs that were unimportant to the war effort , then
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the state could be asked to boost its carpentry contribution to the war effort, such as nissen huts, aeroplanes, boats, fitting out ships…
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While the country might generally be on "dont enlist carpenters " policy, this state might be given a quote to enlist, as t could afford to lose some carpenters to the military… eg enlist them and they might go to construction of bases, transport facilities, POW camps.
Just imagine Tim Conway’s “Little Old Man” wading ashore, or climbing the cliffs, or parachuting behind the lines. While it would make for a hilarious comedy film, it certainly is a lousy combat strategy.
~VOW