CMTC candidates got 3 per mile to and from their homes, no other money.
In 1925 I was appointed midshipman. There were 51 qualified applicants trying for that one appointment.
240 of my class graduated; 130 fell by the wayside. One of that 130 resigned voluntarily; all the others resigned involuntarily, most of them plebe year for failure in academics (usually mathematics), the others were requested to resign over the next three years for academic, physical, or other reasons. A few resigned graduation day through having failed the final physical examination for commissioning. Three more served about one year in the Fleet, then resigned - but these three volunteered after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 28 of the 129 who left the service involuntarily managed to get back on active duty in World War Two.
So with four exceptions all of my class stayed in the Navy as long as the Navy would have them. About 25% were killed in line of duty or died later of wounds. Neither at the Academy nor in the Fleet did I ever hear a midshipman or officer talk about resigning. While it is likely that some thought about it, all discussion tacitly carried the assumption that the Navy was our life, the Fleet our home, and that we would leave only feet first or when put out to pasture as too old.
Enlisted men: When I entered the Fleet, before the Crash of '29 and about a year before unemployment became a problem, Navy recruiting offices were turning down 19 out of 20 volunteers; the Army was turning down 5 out of 6. The reenlistment rate was high; the desertion rate almost too small to count.
Span of Time - Today in the Armed Forces
I have said repeatedly that I am opposed to conscription at any time, peace or war, for moral reasons beyond argument. For the rest of this I will try to keep my personal feelings out of the discussion - as I did in the rosy picture painted above. I reported facts, not my emotions.
I will not review details showing that the USSR is today militarily stronger than we are as the matter has been discussed endlessly in news media, in Congress, and in professional journals. The public discussion today concedes the military superiority of the USSR and centers on how much they are ahead of us, and what should be done about it. The details of this debate are of supreme importance as the most expensive thing in the world is a second - best military establishment, good but not good enough to win. At the moment the three - cornered standoff is saving us from that silly way to die ... but I cannot predict how long this stalemate will last as key factors are not under our control, and neither our government nor our citizens seem willing to accept guns instead of butter on the scale required to make us too strong for anyone to risk attacking us. Polls seem to show that a controlling number of voters think that we are already spending too much on our Armed Forces.
What I set forth below comes primarily from an article by Richard A. Gabriel, Associate Professor of Politics, St. Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hampshire, author of CRISIS IN COMMAND. I lack personal experience with Army conditions today but what Dr. Gabriel says about them matches what I have heard from other sources and what I have read (I belong to all three associations - Army, Navy, Air Force - plus the Naval Institute and the Retired Officers Association; I get much data secondhand but no longer see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears).
Readers with personal experience in Korea, Viet Nam, and in the Services anywhere since the end of the Viet Nam debacle, I urge to write and tell me what you know that I don't, especially on points in which I am seriously mistaken.
Summarized from "The Slow Dying of the Amen - can Army," Dr. Richard A. Gabriel in Gallery magazine, June 1979, p.41 et seq.:
Concerning the All Volunteer Force (AVF): Early this year the Pentagon admitted that all services had failed to meet quotas.
30% of all Army volunteers are discharged for offenses during first enlistment. Of the 70 per 100 left, 26 do not reenlist. The desertion rates are the highest in history... and this fact is partly covered up by using administrative discharges ( - i.e., "You're fired!") rather than courts martial and punishment - if the deserter turns up. But no effort is made to find him.
According to Dr. Gabriel, citing General George S. Blanchard and others, hard - drug use (heroin, cocaine, angel dust - not marijuana) is greater than ever, especially in Europe, with estimates from a low of 10% to a high of 64%. Marijuana is ignored - but let me add that a man stoned out of his mind on grass is not one I want on my flank in combat.
Category 3B and 4 (ranging down from dull to mentally retarded) make up 59% of Army volunteers.. . in a day when privates handle very complex and sophisticated weapons and machinery. Add to this that the mix is changing so that a typical private might be Chicano or Puerto Rican, the typical sergeant a Black, the typical officer "Anglo." And that officers are transferred with great frequency and enlisted men with considerable frequency and you have a situation in which esprit de corps cannot be developed (an outfit without esprit de corps is not an army unit; it is an armed mob - R.A.H.).
Today we have more general officers than we did in World War Two. Our ratio of officers to enlisted men is more than twice as high as that of successful armies in the past. But an officer is not with his troops long enough to be "the Old Man" - he is a "manager," not a leader of men.
Dr. Gabriel concludes: "The most basic aspect is the need to reinstate the draft."
I disagree.
My disagreement is not on moral grounds. Forget that I ever voiced opposition to slave soldiers; think of me as Old Blood - and - Guts willing to use any means whatever to win.
Reinstating the draft would not get us out of trouble, even with the changes Dr. Gabriel suggests to make the draft "fair."
As everyone knows, we were in the frying pan; shifting to AVF, instead of producing an efficient professional army, put us into the fire. Dr. Gabriel urges that we climb back into the frying pan - but with improvements: a national lottery with no deferments whatever for any reason.
I can't disagree with the even - steven rule... but my reason for thinking that Dr. Gabriel's solution will not work is this:
A lottery, even meticulously fair, cannot make a man willing to charge a machine - gun nest in the face of almost certain death. That sort of drive comes from emotional sources. Esprit de corps and patriotism cannot be drawn in a lottery.
Conscription works (among free men) only when it is not needed. I have seen two world wars; we used the draft in each.. . but in each case it was a means of straightening out the manpower situation; it was not needed to make men fight. Both wars were popular.
Since then we have had two non - Wars - Korea and Nam - in "peacetime" and using conscript troops.
And each non - War was a scandalous disaster.
I don't have a neat solution to offer. If the American people have lost their willingness to fight and die for their country, the defect cannot be cured by conscription. Unless this emotional condition changes (and I do not know how to change it), we are whipped no matter what weapons we build. It could be overnight, or it could continue to be a long slow slide downhill over many years - ten, twenty, thirty. But the outcome is the same. Unless something renews the spirit this country once had, we are in the terminal stages of decay; history is ending for us.
Our foreign masters might graciously let us keep our flag, even our national name. But "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" will be dead.
Time Span - Inflation
The Winter of '23 - '24 I paid a street vendor 5 for a five billion mark German note and I paid too much; 5,000,000,000 DM was worth a trifle over 1. A bit later it was worth nothing.
In 1955 at the foot of the Acropolis I bought a small marble replica of the Venus of Melos for 10,000 drachma. I wasn't cheated; that was 35$ USA.