The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons From World War to Cold War by David Nasaw

Author:David Nasaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

WASHINGTON, APRIL 1947

The Americans too faced a labor shortage, but of an entirely different sort than that of other nations.

On April 1, 1947, the law that had authorized the draft expired and Congress declined to renew it. The Army, which had been awash in recruits through 1946, would, it was expected, meet future requirements—estimated at thirty thousand a month—with volunteers. In January 1947, thirty-five thousand had volunteered for military service. The February total, however, was only twenty-two thousand, with the trend from there decidedly downward: twenty thousand for March, sixteen thousand for April, and an estimated twelve thousand for May.57

On May 28, 1947, Major General W. S. Paul, Army director of personnel and administration (P&A), proposed to the director of plans and operations (P&O) in a memorandum entitled “Enlistment of Foreign Nationals” that an efficient and effective way to at least partially alleviate the “personnel shortage [in the] next fiscal year” would be to recruit foreign nationals to serve “with the occupation forces in Germany.” Army Intelligence, G-2, in Frankfurt, to which the proposal was forwarded, after reviewing it, concluded “that the possible advantages [did not] outweigh the disadvantages.” Recruiting displaced persons would represent “a debilitating influence on our own manpower” and open the door to “unfriendly infiltration”; foreign nationals “could not be counted on to approach our occupational problems from an American point of view”; and the Polish Guard Corps, composed of displaced persons with military training, was already providing all the supplementary “foreign” manpower the military required.58

P&A in Washington dismissed the objections of Army Intelligence in Frankfurt and added a new rationale for the enlistment program.

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