SERVICES
CHART 21. CHART 21. EMBARKATIONS FOR OVERSEAS
order to obtain barges, harbor craft, and other necessary equipmem.
Commercial designs were used extensively, although efforts were made to adapt specifications to various climates, beaches, and specialized uses. Special maintenance and repair vessels, refrigerator-mounted barges, rescue boats, and special tugs were developed. Many craft from other sources were pressed into service. The impossibility of standardizing marine equipment made maintenance and the procure- ment of spare parts difficult. Nearly 8,000 self-propelled vessels and over 6,000 nonpropelled vessels were purchased during the war.
Little difficulty was encountered in the procurement of railroad equip- ment, although the rolling stock had to be adapted to various gage widths and to special terrain features. Some 7,000 locomotives and over 97,000 railway cars were procured.
There were few officers in the Regular Army who had transporta- tion training or experience. Railroad companies, steamship com- panies, and industrial shippers made personnel available to the Army to·the fullest possible extent. Many of these men were commissioned in the Army, and others served in a civilian capacity. Most of them had little or no military experience, and time was required to acqnaint them with Army practices and procedures. Other personnel were ob- tained through Officer Candidate Schools and Service schools that trained them for specific transportation jobs. By the end of the war a highly trained corps had been deyeloped.
Finance
The 'Val' Department had no central organization for managing its fiscal affairs before 9 March 1942. Budget estimates had been prepared independently by each agency. A 'Val' Department budget committee screened these estimates prior to their submission to the Bureau of the Budget; this was the full extent of centralized staff supervision of fiscal matters.
The separate Arms and Services were not accountable to a central agency for allotted funds other than those included in the summaries of expenditures made by the Chief of Finance. No adequate central records of commitments or obligations were kept. Although the Chief of Finance controlled the issue of allotments as a safeguard against the allotting of funds in excess of appropriations, the Chiefs of Services limited their controls to a report of the status of an allot- ment after all funds thereon had been obligated. No monthly status report of funds was required. The absence of a coordinated system subjected the 'Val' Department to the danger of overexpending its appropriations without detecting the fact. until afterwards.
The lack of a coordinated system of allotting, accounting, auditing, and disbursing appropriated funds. plus the shortage of trained per-
sonnel, gave rise to problems that could be solved only by placing responsibility fol' the supenTision of these imp0J'tant functions in one office. This was accomplished by appointing a Fiscal Director in the Army Service Forces.
The magnitude of War Department appropriations and the expan- sion in number and size of installations made it necessary to establish a system for accumulating accurate accounting information in sum- mary form. Commanders at each echelon could then appraise the current progress of the military program. All operating agencies were required to have a fiscal officer. The responsibilities of such officers were clearly defined; they were an important part of the Army Service Forces managerial organization. The Fiscal Director estab~
lished uniform standards, concepts, and technical procedures. Reports on the status of funds were submitted through the Same channels as those used for allotments. The Fiscal Director consolidated these data in summaries that were made available for War Department use.
The 14-fold increase in expenditures during the Fscal Years 1941- 1945 and the expansion and deployment of the Army throughout the world'required an extensive disbursing system. Prompt payment of all War Department obligations was essential: salaries of military and ch"ilian personnel, invoices on construction and supply contracts, and transportation bills had to be met promptly, and amounts due the Government had to be collected. In order to accomplish these tasks, personnel were trained and procedures were simplified. Cer- tifications of essential facts replaced the voluminous documents required in peacetime in justification of disbursement vouchers. This change was achieved by legislation to which the General Accounting Office interposed no objection. Payments to carriers were greatly expedited by using microfilm records and by making it unnecessary to associate copies of bills of lading with specific vouchers.
The great volume of disbursing records made it impracticable to centralize such primary records in Washington. The Army Service Forces established four regional accounting oOices in the United States where disbursing officers' accounts werc sent. Headquarters, ASF, also established similar centralized fiscal offices in each of the major Theaters of Operations. All disbursing officers' accounts were processed through these offices. The General Accounting Office, for the first time in its history, established its own accounting offices adjacent to these regional offices. Army examiners first reviewed dis- bursing officers' accounts and supporting data. These were then turned over to the General Accounting Office for final settlement.
The General Accounting Office examination and settlement never lagged more than three or four months behind current payment, in contrast with the several years required to settle accounts after World
War 1. When suspensions in Army disbursing officers' accowlts were interposed by the General Accounting Omce, it was not dimcult to reconstruct the circumstances of the payment and to provide the additional information requested by the General Accounting Omce.
A greater time lag would have made prompt and satisfactory reply almost impossible. By the end of the war suspensions on vouchers, other than those involving cost·plus.a-fixed-fee contracts, were less than two one-thousandths of 1 percent of total payments.
In order to control cost·plus-a-fixed-fee contracts, the contractor and Army oflicials audited all costs before payments were made. In addition, a complete duplicate set of documents had to be sent to the General Accounting Omce in Washington for auditing and settlement.
Each review included a detailed check of every transaction. The Army Service Forces simplified this procedure by taking over cer- tain of the contractors' audit personnel, by introducing a uniform selective auditing procedure in examining contractors' claims, and by persuading the General Accounting Omce to establish its own audi- tors at the site of large projects where cost-plus-a· fixed-fee contracts were used. These practices gl'eatly improved the emciency of the accounting activities required for this type of contract.
Fiscal activities included more than the preparation of budget esti- mates, the control of obligations, and central control of disbursing activities for the entire Army. There were many additional tasks that had to be undertaken. One of the most important was the pay- ment of family allowances and allotments. By 30 June 19-15 there were 4.4 million active family allowance and 3.8 million voluntary allotment accounts. Despite this great volume, the Omce of De- pendency Benefits was able to mail eight million checks for the June payment by 1 July. In addition, the Fiscal Director deducted 55 million dollars a month for the payment of 10 million Government life insurance allotments.
The sale of war bonds was actively promoted among all military and civilian personnel throughout the War Department and the Army.
Arrangements for handling bond deductions were unsatisfactory un- til the activity was greatly decentralized. It was desirable to per- suade soldiers overseas to refrain from spending their pay because of the adverse effects of such spending upon the local economy. The establishment of soldier deposit accounts and free service in transmit- t.ing funds from overseas to the United States did much to accomplish t.he desired objective. By June 1945, military personnel were spend- ing only 15 percent of their pay overseas; the remainder was retained in or was returned to the United States.
Banking facilities were provided at military installations in the Zone of the Interior. Contractors were assisted throughout the war
in obtaining financing through guaranteed Joans from private banks and advance payments on wa.r contracts. Insurance costs chargeable to the Government by contractors were controlled in order to avoid unnecessary coverage and to minimjze the cost of essential insurance.
This resulted in the saving of hundreds of millions of dollars. Vari- ous types of military and special invasion currencies were obtained for use in overseas areas through the Treasury Department. Exchange rates for such currencies in terms of American dollars were estab- lished by the Treasury Department in consultation with the State Department.
Fiscal management in World 'Val' II represented an outstanding achievement. The largest appropriations in Government history were handled efficiently, and payments were made promptly to military and civilinn personnel, to contractors, and to comrn(\l1 carriers.
Printing
Printing and publishing activities in the 'Var Department during the war were big business. There was no central office for the control of this work at the time of the reorganization of the Army in 1942.
Each Arm and Service was responsible for its own publications. The Procurement and Accounting Division III the Office of the Secretary of War merely maintained accounts of the charges made by the Govern- ment Printing Office against the War Department appropriation for printing and binding. The Army Service Forces established a Pub- lication Division in The Adjutant General's Office in the latter part of 1042, with general responsibility for the initial printing and distribu- tion of all Army S.ervice Forces publications. The Publication Divi- sion became the central publishing agency of the Army Service Forces, and in addition served the entire Army in many phases of printing.
The publications of the various Technical Services in 1942 were dis- tributed by Teclmical Service depots. In order to reduce the num- ber of pnblications and improve procedures, an Adjutant General Depot was established in each of the nine Service Commands, and a distribution system was set up. Publications and stocks of printed forms were sent from tbe printer to these depots, and from there they were distributed to posts, camps, and stations located within the re- spective Service Commands. This service was provided to all units of the Army Ground Forces, and was available to all units of the Army Air Forces. War Department publications werc made available to Air Technical Service Command depots for redistribution to Army Air Forces stations. The latter distribution system duplicated the service that _\c1jutant General Depots were prepared to render to all posts.
An analysis of publishing in 1943 disclosed that the distribution system functioned badly, and that the printing was frequently of poor
quality. Excessive quantities of SOIne pUblications were produced.
Some important publications were poorly printed and were without adequate illustration. A review mechanism was established and The Adjutant General given responsibility at the highest echelon. All initiating agencies in turn were held responsible for screening manu- scripts in order to determine the need for them. Controls were sub- sequently provided for the distribution of publications and stocks of printed forms in order to curtail procurement. A stock control sys- tem was established. Finally in 19H additional controls were intro- duced governing the production of publications and blank forms, whether printed at the Government Printing Office, printed under contract, accomplished in field printing plants, or produced as man- uals to accompany equipment manufactUl'ed by industrial contractors.
Between April 1943 and September 1945, The Adj utant General's Office reviewed 34,900 manuscripts of proposed publications and dis- approved 2,400 as nonessential. Furthermore, the number of Army field printing plants was reduced from 70 to 35; at the same time pro- duction increased 20 percent, and the average annual cost of operation per plant dropped 17 percent. A reduction of $2,750,000, or 20 per- cent, for contract field printing was accomplished in the Fiscal Year 1945.
Photography
Photography, a responsibility of the Chief Signal Officer, was used as an important tool during the war. Motion pictures and film strips were major adjuncts to the programs for training, orientation, and education. The Army Pictorial Service served both the Army Service Forces and the Army Ground Forces. This Service produced training films of all types and entered into contracts with the motion picture industry in order to supplement its own production. More than 2,500 motion picture films were produced. Over 300,000 prints of these films were placed in film libraries, which in tUl'll supplied the prints needed for military training purposes. Military personnel both in the United States and in oversea Theaters were kept informed of tactical and technical problems and developments through the exhibition of com- bat films.
Because of the large number of requests for training films, a special board representing the Vvar Department, the Army Ground Forces, and the Army Service Forces was created in order to establish film production priorities and to insure that only essential training films
"'ere produced. In addition, the production of films was placed on a scheduled basis, thereby reducing production time as much as one half.
From among hundreds of thousands of still pictures taken by Signal Corps cameramen, 423,000 prints were assembled in the War Depart-
ment Film Library for training, intelligence, informational, and l11s- torical purposes. At the end of the war, communications and photo- graphic facilities permitted the transmission of color photographs of the Potsdam conference by radio for the first time.
Maps
The Army Map Service in the Corps of Engineers was established to collect, evaluate, and disseminate terrain intelligence. Without maps an army cannot travel or fight. The task of mapping various areas was divided among the United States and its Allies. International conferences established mapping policies, insured uniformity of map design, and coordinated map production and distribution. Advance programming was essential', because it took about 8 monlhs to convert an aerial photograph of an operational area into a usable map for de- livery into the hands of troops. Maps were produced and distributed in a shorte,' period than this, but at the expense of quality and de- taiL A war of movement required an astronomical number of maps.
The Army Map Service throughout the war supplied 488 million copies of over 65,000 different maps for operations overseas.