Revisiting 'The History of the Quartermaster Corps'
Erna Risch and Army History continue to speak from their respective pasts.
We return again to the works of our Army historian, Erna Risch, this time assessing the grand single volume history of the Quartermaster Corps (QMC), from its origins to the cusp of history. In writing this history as she did, she wanted to show the arc leading up to the Army’s logistical achievements in WWII. It is narrative of development in fits and starts by budgeting, campaigning, and spasms of war, every progress seemingly undone, even as the institutions grew in size and complexity of effort with each war. The haphazard development of capacity and capabilities to support the Army in garrison and in the field left practitioners in despair, clearly vexed our historian, but in the long story, offer hope to those who now worry that what has been broken cannot again be made whole.
Reflecting the European roots of its military origins to be found in the revolutionary struggle, Risch opens with Greene’s lament that history never recorded the name of the Quartermaster. In a cheerful irony, these words mark his greatest error. But in fact, even in his own context, the Quartermaster (QM) was a critical staff officer, the second to the Commanding Officer. Washington had served in the role, and in rather more misery than even Greene would endure. The Revolution and the War for Independence set the tone. The first war was the full text of the challenges that would face the Army specifically and the US defense enterprise generally, then and throughout. Geography. Politics and Economics. Structure and Organization. Process and Regulation.
Providing the first trait of American war, lacking much in the way of administrative preparation, they started the war with only several officers responsible for the various items of supply. First was the QM, who was job was to provide the logistical operation for the Army; next, the Clothier General, whose role was obvious; finally, the Commissary General of Stores and Purchases was responsible for food and other items of personal use. The QMG, less a purely logistics role, served historically as the commander’s right hand, manager of the details of operation. [How has the move to separate the QM functions away from the central line command affected things? I can’t wholeheartedly argue it has served the institution or its operation in war.]
Washington arrived in Boston in the Summer of 1775 with all three of Lion Gardiner’s stoole about to collapse; the Colonials in rebellion were facing wants of men, munitions, and victuals for their continued fight. With soldier enlistments, set briefly to meet the instant emergency in Boston, were to expire by year’s end, which would leave Washington Commander in Chief of a non-existent army. Furthermore, even if replacements were found, the state of supply was woeful. The Patriots would muddle on in such conditions throughout the first years chasing the resolution of each deficit, aided only by campaigning in home territories.
With war ongoing, military organizational and administrative development was erratic. After the first years struggle, by the winter’s reorganization at Valley Forge, the need and the governing capacity were sufficient to begin the creation of a regular military establishment to procure, distribute, and manage the supply of war. Try as they might, in excruciating detail Risch makes clear the system could never truly advance against the political, economic, and strategic challenges.
The first years of the Republic bring their own challenges in budget and structure. The new nation chose to ignore the hard-won lessons of the War for Independence. Rejecting even a modest but suitable military, early defense policy reverted to ad hoc reliance upon civilian contracting to manage supply. Even despite meagre size, Congress still funded below need. This return of Colonial Whiggishness is the The Era of Civilian Ascendancy, and opens with Elbridge Gerry’s contemporary admonition against standing armies. The force would garrison the frontier and coastal forts on limited resources. Rather than military personnel, the civilian administration of logistics would return as standard practice. The Quartermaster General position was eradicated – in part because the position was considered at the time as a wartime function not typically associated with defense process and institutions in peace, though certainly relevant to an establishment with ongoing operations, such as frontier service.
The return of civilian merchant supply brought the usual problems. Contractors did contractor things, the most common being low-bidding deliveries they would eventually fail to deliver. (78) The provisioning of the frontier garrisons kept failing. Thus, quickly the Army returned to in-house supply. (80) Early expeditions adopted uniformed service requirements for tactical support. From my even further along perspective of the post-Global War on Terror, this ping-pong between contracted and uniformed combat service support is eternal. And the failures of our recent past argue for more consideration of a return to the uniformed model.
As the new country approached its first war in independence, old lessons are new policies again as Risch narrates the rise of the Secretary of War: Origins of a Republican Administrative Capacity. As military administration intensified with war and consequence, reforms sought to rationalize performance. Operations were centralized to Philadelphia, while the Quartermaster Department was established in 1812. These are the beginnings of military structure and organization for its own administration and support. Yet wartime supply is plagued again by the perennial inflationary beast as, lacking central coordination of purchase, multiple agents compete for goods in the markets adjacent to campaigning theatres. (160) Do such lessons still matter, you wonder? Shall we recall the first months of COVID in the US where critical PPE and testing supplies were overpriced and scarce? Same problem. Legions of intermediary agents chasing goods often saw them being bought, sold, and resold among them without any deliveries being made.
Continuing the development of the state, the next period, The Era of Regulation under Jesup stands in stark relief in this moment. Recognizing the need for standards and rules to manage the administration of the armed forces, we are reminded that human fallibility is eternal. Nevertheless, early reforms attempted too much parsimony. The prevailing effect was to create the problem of “making the staff efficient at the expense of the line.” (195) That is, by cutting support functions to the bone, and then some, the effect was to worsen substantive and operational output. An Army cannot march without a proper bureaucracy. Plus ca change! We are about to see this effect manifest across the government and armed forces.
Following the ebbs and surges of activity and attention between war and interlude, the Mexican-American War of 1846 heralded its own shifts. For the first time, those entering the war had significant active experience in some form of campaigning. This is the first rise of professional education, of learning from experience, such as from the Seminole Wars, as the Quartermasters represent the first “staff” whose training would be implemented at Leavenworth a few decades hence. And still, the fleeting desire of logistics, pre-war kit-in-being, was the fondest dream of the war’s leaders: “Undoubtedly, it would have been of great advantage in 1845 to have had in readiness a wagon train of 300-400 wagons, all of them made from one established standard pattern, so that by freely interchanging parts, as Col. Cross suggested, a complete wagon might have been made from two or three crippled ones.” (241) No. They were made in haste, in uniqueness, and in the last moment. And it still doesn’t matter whether forces in being exist – it is a thing that is wanted but its value to outcomes cannot be prove. After, again into peace, the administration was taxed by the Revolutionary challenged of an expansive theatre and long LOCs. The westward campaigning expansion through the first half of the 19th century revived the difficulties of the first war across all goods. (305 map) Here, too, was a first iteration of complication in the management of supply, with frontier uniform requirements diverging from those demanded in garrison and coastal service. (302-3)
For its confluence of trends and events, the Civil War is a logistics watershed. As industry, rail, and the nation grew, the matter of supplying the army exceeded the parochial mercantilism of the past. The rise of industrial powers altered the dynamic between state and supplier, with military need driving and sustaining the growth of enterprise while the masses possible dangled unheard promise before the eyes of generals. In transport, the curious public-private endeavor to build the rails led to the easy creation of the position of Railway General for war-time service. To all of the mass and complication was added increasing regulation and procedure, organization and structure, to manage the material needs of the war.
In field operations, capacity and capabilities exploded on the Union side, even as the rump Army struggled to manhandle burgeoning industrialization into warfighting and supply. While the lessons of campaigning led to the rise of professional staff education after the war – as much for the field commanders to learn the complexifying requirements of support – Quartermaster operations were more successful than not. Of the great issues facing the Union forces, transport, and the integration of railroad works into military capacity, was tops, as again, the United States was fighting across a massive theatre. Although outside of the remit of the Quartermasters, their responsibility to support rail operation in supply, replacement, and construction of lines, as well as providing the junction function moving goods and intermodal transport capacity with follow on wagon lift. It was during this period that the administration of supply began learning the management of scale and complexity, as goods in railcars, and railcars in train, were identified for contents and/or unit destination. In subject matter dear to my own heart, this was the beginning of the industrialization of subsistence – and the output was as unpalatable to the soldiery as MREs are to service members today. With “Patent Compounds” delivering shelf-stability for field expedience, “desiccated vegetables” and “consecrated milk” were a miss. Despite emergency development against historic challenges, field logistics delivered by the Quartermasters sustained victory and affected campaigning on only two, less than strategic occasions.
Boom and bust, war and interregnum, the relentless cycle continued with the Civil War’s end. Although every previous war had ended with the dissolution of most of the Army, the scale of this conflict made the normal demobilization a significant effort. Both the release of personnel and infrastructure (rail and telegraph) required significant administration in the years following. This was also the first time that official recording and burial would be conducted as a responsibility of the Army. Transitioning to frontier supply systems again was a lighter materiel requirement, but complicated by uneven and changing manning levels at the posts. But this was the start of institutional concern for morale as a matter of creature comforts and morale outside of war, which improved the offer of living requirements to include improvement to the quality and variety of the ration.
“When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, the country was wholly unprepared; the lessons of 1861 had been completely obscured by the subsequent victories of the Union Army.” (515) That is quite an opening line. Remembering of course that she is speaking of the administration of supply, this has often been the case. On the other hand, where tactics and favored strategies are concerned, the military never forgets – consider for how long we have been chasing decisive engagement, for how long we have lived under the sword of Napoleon’s Myth. But in the details of war, forgetting is its own tradition. Nevertheless, the Civil War had demonstrated American industrial potential in war. The conflict with Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, would force even greater care into the administration of logistics, because the advancing industrialization meant mass on unprecedented scale, and thus waste and confusion at new, staggering levels if things were not handled completely. In this way, Risch rebukes Musk and DOGE from beyond and the past.
“It declared war and then got ready to wage war.” (519) Risch despairs this state of affairs, but it is very American and, as it turns out, more successful than preparedness, as forty years of a recent professionalism have demonstrated. Apropos of this publication, a major point of failure during the war was junctions. Florida railheads filled with trains and piles of goods they had not the capacity to manage onwards to Cuba. Moreover, this was the first real foray into global operations which involved an entire universe of naval logistics nobody has ever bothered to write in so systemic a fashion as this. Finally, it is the dawn of a new era of military subsistence with mobile refrigeration facilitating wider distribution of goods.
Following the war, as was the American tradition, contraction and reform defined the age. This was the age of Elihu Root. His concern, as had arisen in the Civil War and accelerated with advancing industrial warfare, was in the staff and line tensions and improving the delivery of high command with the creation of a General Staff, the fulcrum between institutional leadership and field command. This is the rise of the ‘detail’, the secondary jobs that line officers would hold at turns, to bring the reality of the front to the staff. It was thought at the time that officers in the support bureaus lost touch with real line needs. (559) I suspect it is as likely that line officers had insufficient knowledge of the operations in support of the field forces. For the Quartermaster Corps, another round of consolidation of functions, and the increase of uniformed performance of duties outside of war. And advancing the industrial age, “Motor T” was born in 1910, after initial pessimism by the QMC. (596) Perhaps more than any technological advance in warfare, the internal combustion engine, especially when powering the mighty truck, was the most transformative advance, enabling robust, long-distance transportation and mobility.
With WWI, Risch offers us another delightful turn of phrase in titling her chapters, “Supply in the Zone of the Interior” to discuss operations in the US. In this first portion she details the Stateside operations in advance and support of American entry into WWI. It is very “the Matter of Flanders and Picardy.” Here is detailed the big picture of the war effort, and especially the neck of the bottle issues that slowed sailings of men and materiel to Europe. It is always the junctions. For the Army, a significant problem was the lack of space for either at New York’s points of embarkation. (611) Without sufficient preparation, they attempted to ad hoc the TPFD (Time Phased Force Deployment) to obvious results. In other fronts, advances towards centralized procurement, recognizing that Big War needs organization to produce Big Logs. (613) While mid-war reorganization improved the operation at the strategic level, with Goethals leading, in theatre, Quartermaster operations in-theatre managed tensions of execution and paradox. It was horses and autos in tandem, needing the balanced services and supplies for both. In subsistence, it was the last war of common cooking of whole foods at the front lines. Alas.
Closing the narrative, the Interlude of Peace between 1919 and 1939. This period of ‘peace’ in its other sense is ironic, in my view, because this was perhaps the most dynamic moment in logistical learning, planning, and organizing. It was as if the practice itself understood the masses war (especially the American version) was hurtling towards in this period. For any historian of logistics, the Interwar is probably the most fertile for research. Returning to the work of the Army QMs in this moment, the matters of demobilization took priority. First was to return personnel from Europe. Then the matter of dealing with the war’s wake wave of materiel. Releasing industry for wartime restrictions and requirements was next. Finally, again the Quartermasters were tasked to deal with the dead. This would be the first time mass honorific graves overseas would be managed, giving rise to Gold Star pilgrimages supported by service and government. For others, repatriation was carried out with all of the necessary dignity.
Her closing, In Retrospect, deserves your own reading of it, or its own review. It is the author looking back at the history in its progress. No more perfect a contemplation of the public function could have been written for this moment. There is no pat explication possible here. But it is a thing to read if government services are of interest. However, specifically to military logistics, she ends with a paeon that resembles Forester’s description of Happiness in Rifleman Dodd. (1)
Glory is deservedly the combat soldier's reward, but the historical record does not reveal him as overly generous in sharing credit for victory with the supply officer without whose work that goal could not be reached. Only rarely is the effort of the Quartermaster officer praised. An abundant and steady flow of supplies is taken for granted by the troops, usually without any awareness of the problems involved in its maintenance. Let supplies or transportation be delayed, however, and denunciations of the quarter· master at once fill the mail pouches. If encomiums were few for Quarter· master officers, they may take quiet satisfaction in the fact that in the history of the Corps no military operation of the U.S. Army failed for want of supplies. Despite difficulties and occasional failures, they gave unstinted support to the line in the doldrums of peace as well as in the spirited stimulation of war.
Why read this? On its face, it seems a rather esoteric work for a limited audience. For myself, I returned to it as Ukraine War strategy leaned into logistics. And as the Biden Administration conquered myriad difficulties delivering an allied sustainment strategy to support Ukraine’s logistics-based warfighting and political strategies of liberation, the outlines of Logpower strengthened. Yet, just as we stood on the cusp of real transformative capabilities to match the capacities the West had developed, the Trump Administration and Musk’s DOGE have circled around to attack the foundations of public administration which we had once thought solved. Which means that while Risch is less important for the modern advancement of logistics practice, it now speaks loudly to bureaucratic necessity and development. Free to download – because we paid for that – it is a work at least worth your perusal.
Notes
Bibliographically speaking, this work is a compendium of critical sources for the period covered. It is a treasure trove for that alone. Enjoy!
(1) The “Happiness Passage” from Rifleman Dodd.
It was nearly dark by now, and Dodd had but a short time to observe these things. As twilight fell he picked his way up stream again and chose a lair for himself — a stony hollow in the side of the ravine, where he could rest. That night, just as on most of the other night and most of the days, it rained heavily and a cold wind blew. Dodd still, before going to sleep, found passing through his mind that old Biblical passage about foxes having holes and birds having nests.
Yet if he had been asked — it is quite impossible, but assume it to have happened — if he were happy, he would not have known what to reply. He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and verminous; that his clothes were in rags, and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of his life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about. Perhaps the fact that he did not think about it proves he was happy. He was a soldier carrying out his duty as well as he knew how. He would have been the first to admit that under the wise direction of an officer what he had done and what he proposed to do might be more successful, but as it was he felt (or rather he would have felt if he had thought about it) he had nothing with which to reproach himself. And that condition is not at all far from true happiness. At the same time, he would have been utterly astonished if he had ever been told that some day a real printed book would devote paragraphs to the consideration of his frame of mind.