For Want of a NailA Brief History of the QuartermasterSupply Mission

Without supplies neither a soldier nor a generalis good for anything.

Clearchus of SpartaSpeech to the Greek Army401 B.C.

Key to Victory. Old Clearchus certainly knewwhereof he spoke. History relates numerous instanceswhere entire armies were lost (or nearly lost) whentheir supplies ran out. Alexander the Great managedto get himself cut off from his naval lifeline whilecampaigning in 327 B.C. Forced to undertake adesperate 300-mile trek through what is now southernIraq, he eventually saw as much as three-quarters ofhis Macedonian army swallowed up by the shiftingsands of the Gedrosian desert.

Fast forward 2,000 years to the AmericanRevolution where a similar catastrophe completelyundid a less capable British commander. "GentlemanJohnny" Burgoyne found himself isolated at the endof a fractured supply line. Faced with a starve-or-

Dr. Steven E. AndersQuartermaster Corps Historian

fight situation at the battle of Saratoga, NY, he woundup surrendering his entire force to the Americanpatriots. Add to that the image of Napoleon's GrandeArmee dying en masse on their forlorn retreat fromMoscow in 1812. Or French paratroopers in thespring of 1954, casting agonizing glances toward theskies over Dien Bien Phu, praying for signs of reliefin Vietnam. All are painful reminders that withoutneeded supplies an army is no good for anything.

Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest iscredited with having given us a wonderfully succinctdefinition of military supply operations. He simplycalled it "gittin' stuff." Of course, there is nothingsimple about it. It is a laborious, often painstakingprocess that entails at least three separate acts:procuring the necessary items, storing them untilready for use, and finally distributing the suppliesamong the soldiers or user units for which they areintended. Implied too is some form of requisitioningtechnique, along with proper accounting procedures,various maintenance considerations, and much morefor a supply system to work effectively. However,

when that system fails to work or becomes seriouslythreatened, or undermined, as the preceding examplesillustrate, the results can be fatal.

In the United States Army it has always been oneof the primary missions of the Quartermaster Corpsto provide the supplies that individual soldiers needmost to survive in the field. It is no accident that theimage of the Key is so prominently displayed in theCorps' regimental insignia. It symbolizes the tradi-tional "keys to the storehouse." Other missions have

come and gone, but the role of Quartermaster aschief supply master for the Army has remained fixedthroughout, from the Revolutionary Era to thepresent. Fixed but not unchanged. Indeed the scope,scale and the overall way in which the Corps hascarried out its supply mission have changed enor-mously over the past two-and-a-quarter centuries.

Revolutionary Beginnings. General GeorgeWashington had ample reason to complain, as heso often did, of the Continental Army's flawedsupply system during the American Revolution.Chronic shortages led to widespread hardshipthroughout the war. Of their retreat from New Yorkin November 1776, for instance, one of his sergeantswrote that "our soldiers had no shoes to wair (sic);was obliged to lace on their feet the hide of the cattlewe had kill'd the day before." Similarly, those whotrudged over ice and snow-covered roads onChristmas Eve 1776 to win the battle of Trenton, NJ,were still wearing summer clothes, and many werewithout shoes. Even worse shortages occurred the

following winter at Valley Forge, PA, where bloodyfootprints were again seen in the snow and wherethe mournful cry of "No meat! No meat!" was heardechoing throughout the camp. Yet again, even worse,at Morristown, NJ, a year later. All telling evidenceof a supply system that refused to work.

Some of the problems were unavoidable. Sincethe colonies were not as yet a manufacturing country,many finished products (such as cloth for clothes andblankets, and canvas for tents) had largely to beimported. Which was both risky and costly. Moneyindeed added to the patriots' logistics woesthroughout the war. There was never enough of itto ensure the purchase of adequate supplies.Congress' attempts to print and allocate moremoney only fueled inflation and led to devaluationof Continental currency. This rendered farmers,shopkeepers and artisans all the more reluctant tosell to Army supply agents.

Even when agents succeeded in acquiring neededgoods - through direct purchases, contracting, state

quotas, foraging, impressments and the like - theyfaced no less a burden with efforts to store anddistribute them. The Quartermaster General'sDepartment in the Revolution had neither theorganization northe personnel needed to effect properstorage of supplies. Nathanael Greene, asQuartermaster General, created a series of supplymagazines (mostly for temporary storage of food andforage) that served as a "line of communication" and

In the 1850s a line of isolated fortsprotecting the western frontier stretchedacross the Great American Desert. Oftenseparated by hundreds of miles, these far-flung outposts were connected by neithernavigable streams nor practical roads.

It was generally felt that an animal thatcould move swiftly, pack a heavy load forlong distances and live off the land wouldbe the answer to the problem of providing aline of supply and communications betweenforts. The solution lay in pack mules ... orpossibly camels.

The suggestion of importing camels forservicing military outposts was given strongsupport by Secretary ofWar Jefferson Davisin 1853. In 1856, 75 camels were landed inIndianola, Texas. With patience, the Armylearned to cope with the animal and itsharness. Subsequent expeditions from Texasto California proved the camels could travelevery day twice as far as mules, whilepacking a heavy load.

Although the camel experimentweathered every major test, it wasinterrupted by the Civil War and eventuallyabandoned when the first transcontinentalrailroad became a reality.

Courtesy of theUS Army Quartermaster Museum

allowed Washington's army to move more effectivelyin the wake of Valley Forge. But these hardlyqualified as well-run depots, which is what the Armyreally needed.

Distribution remained the single most vexingproblem for Revolutionary Era logisticians. TheQuartermaster General and his deputies in the fieldcontracted with civilian agents and wagoners to movesupplies from place to place. Goods typically wentfrom agent to agent, until finally reaching the handsof an issuing officer in uniform, then to a RegimentalQuartermaster Sergeant who actually disbursed thegoods with a small group of detailed soldiers fromthe line. It was a tenuous process at best. With littlemeans for control or careful supervision, distributionwas subject to vast amounts of what today would becharacterized as "waste, fraud and abuse." All toooften wagoners absconded, or left supplies along theroads. Clothes were at times deposited in barns underthe supposed care of private individuals - there to beforgotten, abandoned, then rediscovered months later,all mildewed and rotting.

While it cannot be said that supply inadequaciesresulted directly in patriot defeats on the battlefield,such shortages placed a severe restriction on whatWashington and others might have wanted to do. Infact proposed campaigns had to be postponed or putoff indefinitely for want of needed clothes, food,arms, and especially wagons and other means oftransportation. Certainly the soldiers themselvessuffered unduly because of those shortages.

Reform and Reorganization. The manylessons that might have been learned from supplyfailures in the Revolution were all but lost in thedecades that followed. Colonel Josiah Harmar'sand General Arthur St. Clair's ill-fated expeditionsagainst the Indians of the Old Northwest in 1790-91 both failed miserably, in part because ofmonumental supply shortages. One historian aptlydescribed the civilian contractors and supplyagents at that time as "venal rogues, withoutconscience, who would sell a soldier's life like apound of flour." It took nearly another twodecades, until after the War of 1812, for the manyrepeated calls for reform to finally take root.

In 1818 Congress established a permanentQuartermaster Department in Washington, DC, withBrigadier General Thomas Sidney Jesup asQuartermaster General. From that point on, supplyoperations in the United States Army took a decidedturn for the better. Jesup immediately set aboutdefining the principles of a well-run supply system.He also drafted new rules and regulations for moreeffective movement of goods and personnel, and formuch stricter ac-countability on thepart of the officersand civilians chargedwith carrying outQuartermasteroperations. Economy,efficiency and ac-countability, as Jesupwell knew, were thethings most lackingin the supply systemof old. Moreover,when put to the test inthe ensuing fourdecades - notably in theSeminole War (1835-42), theMexican War (1846-48) andvarious frontier expeditionsin the late Antebellum Period- Jesup ultimately succeededwhere others had failed.

New York and Boston in the east - and to thevarious depots established at each of theselocations (to the so-called "army behind the army")to procure or manufacture the ever-growing listof supply items needed by a modern force in thefield. New technology in the form of telegraphsand steam-powered ships and locomotives allowedfor long distance logistics communication andmore effective distribution of supplies.

The Civil War indeed sawthe introduction of a full-fledged, well-organized, logis-tics supply system running from"factory to foxhole" (as it mightbe described in today's terms).Items such as shoes, apparel,tents, leather goods, ambu-lances and wagon wheels leftthe factories and weredeposited in huge area basedepots. From there they moved

by ship or train to stilllarger advance depotsin or near the maintheaters of operationsthat allowed armies toact independentlyfrom the base area.The largest advancedepot for the UnionArmy was City Point(present-dayHopewell, VA,) whichwas used to sustainthe Armies of theJ ames and thePotomac for the lastnine months of the

war. With the exception of City Point and a fewother major depots that were run by colonels andlieutenant colonels, the job of Depot Commanderusually fell to a Quartermaster captain, whoseresponsibilities far outweighed what the pay gradewould suggest. Temporary depots, landings,railroad sidings and open storage dumps - allpurposefully located at convenient points for finaldelivery or pick up by user units - formed the lastlink in the Civil War supply chain.

Civil War Supply.When the Civil War beganin the spring of 1861, theUnion army quicklyexpanded from a fewthousand to nearly a halfmillion soldiers - all ofwhom looked to the Quartermaster Department forsupplies and equipment. As Lincoln'sQuartermaster General, Major GeneralMontgomery C. Meigs invariably receives highmarks from professional historians for his skillfulhandling of wartime supply operations.

The Army looked to the major urban andindustrial hubs, from Chicago, St. Louis andCincinnati in the west, to Washington, Baltimore,

In spite of the many and varied instances of fraudand corruption that surfaced from time to time, brokencontracts, the issuance of shoddy goods and whatnot,and wastage on a sometimes monumental scale - thesystem overall worked remarkably well. It got evenbetter as the war progressed. General Ulysses Grant,for instance, thought City Point Depot in 1864 thebest-organized Quartermaster supply operation ever.As for General Meigs, he could recount only twoinstances during the entire war - after GeneralWilliam Rosecrans'defeat at Chickamaugaand following thecapture of Savannah -when Union supplylines were seriously dis-rupted, if only for arelatively short time.

When the new Depot Commander arrived there inmid-May, he was horrified to discover that no lessthan 1,000 train cars loaded with supplies werealready sidetracked in and about the city. Adding tohis woes, the depot had only 5 government-ownedwagons and 12 contracted wagons to unload them.Said one account: "Freight was arriving at the rateof 50 cars a day and could be unloaded at the rate ofonly two or three." Despite such difficulties, the forcedeployed successfully within a matter of weeks.

However, the massconfusion, crowding andcongestion that so marredthe embarkation wasreplicated, in fact madeworse, at the point ofdebarkation in Cuba.

Road to Profes-sionalism. The threedecades following theCivil War found theArmy mainly pullinggarrison duty on thewestern frontier, while en-gaged in relativelysmall- scale Indian cam-paigns, or stationed at coastalfortifications guarding thecountry's main harbors. Awhole new generation of of-ficers and noncommissionedofficers (NCOs) was comingto maturity with very littlesystematic instruction, and noexperience in handling largebodies of men. For Quarter-masters coming of age at century's end, that meantno formal supply training and no firsthand experi-ence solving the complex problems of logisticssupport for large units. All that inexperience and lackof training - and unpreparedness - found full expo-sure in 1898, with the sudden outbreak of theSpanish-American War.

The "Splendid Little War," as Secretary of StateJohn Hay once called it, got off to a less thanauspicious start at the staging area in Tampa, FL.

In the months followingthe Spanish-American War,the Quartermaster Corps,along with the other supply

bureaus had to endurea torrent of both officialand unofficial criticism.Cries of inadequatesupplies, unhealthy liv-ing conditions, Armyindifference, wholesaleneglect and abuse (andof course "embalmedbeef') shall forever belinked to the Cuban en-terprise - even thoughthe campaign itself wasabundantly successful.Nor did anyone seem totake full note of the

many outstanding supply achievements toward theend of the conflict.

Looking back positively though, the Spanish-American War's many-lamented logisticalshortcomings focused long overdue attention on theneed for reform. For Quartermaster supply personnelthat meant the need for better training, enhancedexecutive and administrative skills, better foresightand improved planning to avoid the problems of therecent past. In a word, more professionalism.

As the new century opened, the QuartermasterGeneral began arguing more insistently the need fora "service corps," meaning uniformed troops specifi-cally recruited, tested andtrained to carry out Quar-termaster functions, inlieu of hired civilians anduntrained soldiers de-tailed from the line. It ..---" Iworked. On 24 August1912, Congress passed anact consolidating threesupply bureaus (the Quar-termaster, Pay, andSubsistence Departments)into a single Quartermas-ter Corps. At the sametime Congress militarizedthe new Corps with thecreation of a "service corps" of en-listed men to serve as clerks,engineers, firemen, carpenters,blacksmiths, packers, teamsters andlaborers. By 1916 their numbers hadexpanded to nearly 6,000. This fore-shadowed the development ofQuartermaster military occupationalspecialties (MOSs) in the yearsahead and also the trans-fer of Quartermasterofficers and enlisted per-sonnel into permanentlyorganized, separate sup-ply and service type units.

At the start of WorldWar I, there were onlyfour types of Quartermas-ter field units: bakery,truck, pack, and wagoncompanies. By the time ofthe Armistice, some 26different types of Quarter-master units wereoperating in France. Among them were various de-pot and supply units, each filled with trainedpersonnel and specialized types of equipment.Schools had also opened in both Philadelphia, PA(1910) and Jacksonville, FL (1918) to train Quarter-

masters. There young officers were learning the ba-sic maxims: that "supply is a function of command"and "the impetus of supply is from front to rear."

Fledgling officers and NCOsalike practiced requisition-ing and providing supplies,property accountability, in-ventory procedures, andbusiness management skills.

For sure, General"Black Jack" Pershing hadstill to contend with a hostof major supply difficulties,especially in the hectic early

months of thewar, as heprepared to sendthe AmericanExpeditionaryForce (AEF) toFrance. Num-erous accountsrefer to ship-ping delays,faulty suppliesand equipment,defective goodssuch as gasmasks, wagonswithout wheels,

and trucks without motors,so on and so forth. Suchaccounts as the one wherea division Quartermasteropened a box ofunderwear, and wasshocked to discover 12dozen infants' nightshirts!

This all made for validcriticism (not to mentionhugely entertaining presscopy). However, the real

story lies in the amount of change that had occurred- in Army supply policy, training, techniques,organization and equipment - in such a relativelyshort period of time. That thousands of trainedQuartermaster supply personnel in France (under the

supervision of the Services of Supply (SOS» hadthe knowledge and the skill needed to create andsustain a vast array of depots (base, intermediate,and advanced) from the coast to the interior ofFrance; and an equally vast network using trains,trucks and wagons to move supplies forward on asteady basis - speaks volumes as to the roleprofessionalism now played in military supplyoperations in the early 20th Century.

For the first time, the Quartermaster Corps hadtaken to the field as a militarized organization. Thescope and scale of what they accomplished astoundedthose familiar with supply operations from an earlierera. In testament to which, Major General JohnsonHagood, SOS Commander, later wrote that "in thematter of supply the operation of the QuartermasterDepartment in the Great War was not only farsuperior to anything that we had in any previous war,but, as a rule, throughout the A.E.E the service wasmore efficient and more satisfactory to the individualthan it had been at home in time of peace."

Supply TrendsWorld War II to the Present

Increased Scope, Scale and Reach. In its dayWorld War I was called "The Great War," but then20 years later came World War II that was greaterstill, in virtually every respect. Much greater in termsof the number of nations and peoples involved, thedemands made on their economies, the greatlyenhanced lethality of the many new weaponsintroduced, and the unprecedented casualties thataccrued as a result of their use.

Certainly too the scope and scale of logisticsinvolved was much greater, and far more challengingthan ever before. Unlike the First World War, theSecond was truly global in nature. US supply linesultimately ran from New York to North Africa,England, France and Germany; and from SanFrancisco to Hawaii, Guam, Australia, New Guinea,the Philippines, China and Okinawa.

The amount of Quartermaster supplies it took tosustain an Army of nearly 8 million over four longyears was unmatched in world military history. In an

age that rightly proclaimed "Supply Wins Wars!" thenumbers speak for themselves: 140,000 tons ofQuartermaster supplies arrived and were stored inEngland in the final months leading up to D-Day.Shortly thereafter, the First Army Quartermaster onthe continent in Europe found himself responsiblefor no less than 70,000 separate Quartermaster items.During the war as a whole, Quartermasters procuredand distributed 505 millionpairs of socks, 10 millionsleeping bags, and over 17billion pounds of cannedvegetables. And the listgoes on.

one of the busiest port cities in the world. By thenthe First Logistical Command in Vietnam had a stocklist of over 140,000 supply and maintenance items.

As for the Persian Gulf War that concluded littleover a decade ago, that trend toward long-distancelogistics and mega-amounts of supplies continued.During the first six months of Operation Desert

Shield, 296,000 soldiersdeployed to the region,along with 2.3 millionshort tons of equipmentand supplies. Over90 percent of the latterwas transported bysealift. By comparison,1.6 millions tons wereshipped to Korea in asimilar period and 1.4million tons to Vietnam.

Obviously, comparedto World War II, theKorean and Vietnam warsthat followed were farmore limited engagements.Yet, they reaffirmed thenotion that extraordinaryamounts of supplies areneeded to field sizableforces in the last half of the20th Century. In Korea, forinstance, the Eighth Army'ssupplies included suchthings as 1.3 million woolundershirts, 430,000 fieldjackets, 300,000 pairs ofinsulated rubber boots, and90,000 tent stoves. Cargoamounting to more than500,000 tons of material ofall classes passed throughthe San Francisco Port ofEmbarkation in August1950 alone, thusapproximating the monthly tonnage processedthrough that same facility during the peak years ofWorld War II.

Personnel Develop-ment and Training.World War I saw thebeginnings of a classi-fication program, asskilled soldiers andtechnicians were trainedfor service overseas. TheMOSs we know todayhad their real start inWorld War II. TheDictionary of Quar-termaster EnlistedOccupational Skillspublished in June 1942lists a total of 125separate MOSs, gen-erally divided into two

categories: Motor and Transportation specialists andSupply and Service specialists. Each of the nearly20 supply-related fields had its own three-digitdesignation. For instance, a Supply Clerk (323) wastrained to maintain stock records, conductinventories, understand military specifications,inventory procedures and so on. An Inventory Clerk(374) learned to control the amount of stock on hand,hold inspections, maintain records, and recommendprocurement of needed supplies.

Once the logistics buildup in Vietnam had gotteninto full swing by 1965-66, more than 150,000 tonsof supplies were offloaded monthly at the port ofQui Nhon, another 200,000 tons at Cam Ranh Bay.Further south, more than 300,000 tons monthly wereoffloaded at the port of Saigon, which soon became