Chapter 58: Dec 1945 U.S. Troops Head Home

Initial Demobilization in Europe

“On V-E Day, 3 million American army men were in Europe. Additional replacement soldiers were in the pipeline to be assigned to Europe although overall force levels had been declining for several months as the war wound down. Army and Army Air Force units in Europe were classified into four categories for the purpose of occupation, redeployment, or demobilization.

Category I consisted of units to remain in Europe. The occupying force for Germany would consist of eight divisions and a total occupying force of 337,000 personnel to be reduced further in June 1946.

Category II consisted of units to be re-deployed to the Pacific. About one million soldiers were slated to be sent to the Pacific, including 13 infantry and 2 armored divisions. 400,000 soldiers were to go directly from Europe to the Pacific to arrive between September 1945 and January 1946; another 400,000 were to undergo eight weeks of retraining in the United States and continue to the Pacific to arrive by April 1946. About 200,000 air force personnel were to go to the Pacific, either from Europe or the United States.

Category III units were to be reorganized and retrained before being reclassified into Category I or II.

Category IV units were to be returned to the U.S. to be inactivated or disbanded and personnel discharged. Category IV units consisted of soldiers who qualified for discharge under the point system. The total number of soldiers in Europe to be discharged was planned to be 2.25 million between the end of the war in Europe and December 1946.

As departures of soldiers from Europe was to be by units, a massive reshuffling of personnel took place to get soldiers eligible for demobilization into units designated for return to the U.S. and deactivation. Turnover of personnel in one typical unit, the 28th Infantry Division, was 20 percent for enlisted men in one week and 46 percent for officers in 40 days. This impacted efficiency and unit cohesion.

The demobilization proceeded rapidly. Assembly areas to accommodate 310,000 soldiers were established in France. The soldiers lived in tent cities while waiting for transport back to the United States. In May 1945, 90,000 soldiers were repatriated, but others would have to wait months for transport as the war in the Pacific had first priority for ships and aircraft. Elaborate schemes of education and travel were attempted by the military to maintain morale during the waiting period. Upon arrival in the U.S., soldiers would undergo final out-processing at a number of designated military bases.”

The withdrawal of American troops from Europe after the celebration of VE Day (Victory in Europe) was complicated by the fact that the war in the Pacific with Imperial Japan was still far from over. The American Navy and Marine Corps were heavily involved in the Pacific Campaign and the proposal presented to the new president Harry S. Truman was that one million of the troops being withdrawn from Europe would be immediately sent to the Pacific to wage war against the Japanese.

Stalin’s promises were merely words on paper and he only employed his troops in a way that would benefit the Soviet Union and not hasten the end of the war as discussed at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences. The Russians were far too busy murdering German civilians and raping every German female between the ages of 8 to 80 that they were able to corner. In addition, they were dismantling all movable German industry and transporting it back to Russia to bolster their lagging production.

The war department was loath to accelerate the discharge of soldiers they brought back to the United States because the war was still undecided in the Pacific.

The United States was not alone in these difficulties because British troops were rioting in various parts of the world for the right to return home as quickly as possible after years of overseas duty. The protests spread to the American troops in Frankfurt who had tired of the SNAFU in returning even the troops that were due to be discharged from Europe. The soldiers were fearful of having their orders changed and being sent to Japan instead of back to their homes in the United States. The war department elected to treat the issue with “kid gloves” rather than make a bad situation worse.

In May of 1945, the United States had more than twelve million men and women in uniform. As previously stated, the Navy and the Marine Corps were primarily assigned to the Pacific theater of operations and were not really involved in what was an Army and Air Force problem in transporting most of the three million men in Europe back home from the war in Europe. It was further complicated by the simple fact that over one million of these troops would be sent to the Pacific rather than back to their homes in the United States.

Between May of 1945 and January of 1947, operation “Magic Carpet” returned and demobilized close to 11,000,000 soldiers leaving at total force of about 1,300,000 still active. The total force in Europe had been reduced to 350.000 soldiers to fight a decade’s long war with the Soviet Union.

It is certain that the sheer numbers of men under arms was a primary consideration that President Harry S. Truman considered when making his decision to use the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to conclude the war the in the Pacific. A study done at the time indicated that non-use of the atomic arsenal would eventually cost more than 1,000,000 lives of American troops and well over 3,000,000 Japanese lives with a full scale ground invasion of the Japanese homeland. Okinawa was the model used in projecting those statistics.

In 1946, the war office also changed the draft to all but shut it down completely and eliminate the drafting of over 100,000 men a month into the Uniformed Services of the United States.

That was the beginning of the shift from a war-time economy to a peace-time economy in the homeland.