Adventures in Logistical Innovation: Snapshots from World War II
Whatever the troops needed, there was always someone working to get it delivered on time.
A Landing Ship Tank (LCT) prepares to disgorge its supplies onto an Allied railway system.
Attention is often lavished on the experiences of soldiers, sailors, and airmen at the “tip of the spear” during World War II. But historians have increasingly emphasized the centrality of logistics to Allied victory and Axis defeat in World War II.
Admiral Henry Eccles once described logistics as “the bridge between military operations and a nation’s economy.” The term is often used as a catch-all to describe ways in which militaries sustain their forces in battle. This includes (but is not limited to) resource procurement and allocation, the transport of goods and personnel, the provision of maintenance services and infrastructure like warehouses, field hospitals, roads, bridges, depots, airfields, and lines of communication, and the sustainment of field operations.
The global nature of warfare during World War II forced logisticians to take far more than the enemy into account when planning frontline operations; geography, weather, local traditions, shipping availability, the agency of partners and allies, and other unforeseen constraints complicated supply efforts in every theater.
Identifying solutions to fickle logistical challenges occurs in every war, but innovative problem-solving was a true hallmark of World War II. This article takes a look at a few examples that illustrate how ordinary individuals made an extraordinary difference from Europe to the Pacific and everywhere in-between.
Frenzied Tailoring
England bustled with activity in the buildup to the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944. Prior to the invasion, American paratroopers meticulously rehearsed their role in the upcoming drama. Scattered behind enemy lines several hours before the amphibious landings, they would sew chaos under cover of darkness, distracting and disrupting enemy attempts to repulse the seaborne landings.
Paratroopers needed robust uniforms that could endure the rigors of their elite vocation. Early reports from veteran units highlighted the need to reinforce high-usage areas — knees, elbows, and pockets especially. Shortly before D-Day, the paratroopers submitted requests for more fabric straps to support ammunition bandoliers and utility pockets.
Paratroopers inspect equipment prior to takeoff. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.
The task was only simple on its surface. When Captain H.G. Kayne, a Columbus, Ohio native in command of an American Quartermaster Salvage Repair Company in England, received the specifications for the order, he steeled himself for the job ahead: He and his men were responsible for altering 14,000 uniforms, all under a strict deadline from his superiors.
Kayne approached the problem with industrious zeal. Setting up an assembly line, soldiers-turned-tailors began altering the first batch of uniforms as soon as they arrived. They worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, foregoing their weekend-passes. Within seven days, Kayne’s team was churning out 1,110 altered uniforms per day, completing the order three days before the deadline.
Eager Unloaders
American Liberty ships performed yeoman’s service overseas during World War II. Scattered throughout every major theater, they transported vital equipment from the factories to the beaches in some of the war’s most defining amphibious operations.
There were strict rules for loading these ships. Every cubic foot mattered. Supplies were loaded with an operational plan in mind — the least critical material loaded first, the most loaded last.
Stuffed to the brim with up to 7,800 tons of bulky, hard-to-handle supplies, under normal circumstances it could take more than a week to unload a single vessel.
American Liberty Ships line the wharves in Boston Harbor during World War II. Image courtesy of The U.S. National Archives.
In the China-Burma-India theater, members of an ambitious quartermaster port battalion decided to buck the trend. The unit devised and circulated a specialized unloading plan to the entire unit. Each man knew his role. Swarming the ship before it even berthed, the men began cutting cargo free and staging it for offloading.
They worked around the clock. After forty-six hours, the ship was empty. In the process they set a new record, discharging just around 100 tons of cargo per hour.
Notably, members of the 242nd Quartermaster Service Battalion achieved a similar feat during the Salerno Landings in September 1943. Working nonstop and under periodic fire, the unit received a citation for single-handedly offloading the combat materiel of two American divisions in just five days.
Bakers Under Fire
An Army Field Bakery Company at work.
Armies, like all organizations, require food to remain effective. As the popular aphorism goes, “An army marches on its stomach” — a quote often mistranslated from Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous observation, “It is soup which makes the soldier.”
Soldiers could go weeks without a hot meal. Reliant on cans of spam and boxed rations for sustenance, the sight of the occasional field bakery lifted spirits wherever they were found.
Army Bakery Companies armed with gasoline-fueled ovens, dough mixers, and fermentation cans could produce an incredible amount of bread — some 24,000 pounds daily, under optimal circumstances.
Not all bakers, however, enjoyed a danger-free work environment. During the grueling campaign through Italy, Allied bakers occasionally suffered the same privation and perils as their fighting brethren.
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“The story of the 30006th Quartermaster Bakery Company, now with the Fifth Army in Italy,” one document notes, “is one of constant movement, danger, excitement, and outstanding service.” Having previously served in North Africa and Sicily, the unit ended up at Anzio, the site of an Allied amphibious operation gone awry that resulted in a five-month stalemate.
There, the company set up camp. On its first night at the beachhead, enemy artillery damaged every single one of its fifteen ovens. “Sift[ing] the shrapnel fragments from the flour” as they worked to repair them, another artillery strike damaged the ovens again the very next day.
Bakers at Anzio slept with their helmets on, working nineteen hour shifts and churning out an impressive 28,000 pounds of bread per day on average — a stunning achievement.
Native Supply Chains
Out in the Pacific, treacherous coral reefs lining sandy atolls in the path of advancing Allied forces offered a unique challenge to quartermasters. Shallow water, sometimes just inches deep along reefs that could extend outward up to a half-mile from the shore, forced Liberty ships and other transport vessels to dock far from their intended offloading point.
Native New Guineans transport Allied supplies by water. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
In the Buna campaign on New Guinea, American and Australian servicemen improvised, aided, no doubt, by the presence of local labor teams. Pressing resilient natives into groups of twenty, the New Guineans worked to offload cargo onto small rafts and boats capable of traversing the coral reef. From the shore, supplies were loaded onto forty-pound backpacks hefted by members of each individual carrier train. An American quartermaster, in turn, led the train inland to deliver supplies where they were most needed — sometimes under threat of ambush or snipers.
Porters heft Allied supplies through the jungles of New Guinea. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Hot Meals in the Mountains
Mountain warfare prevailed throughout much of the Mediterranean during World War II, exposing Allied and Axis soldiers to the extremes of combat at altitude.
In Italy as elsewhere, mules, not mechanized vehicles, ruled the day. Jeeps, halftracks, trucks, and tanks simply could not penetrate the steep mountain trails under most circumstances, especially when rain and snow replaced sunny skies.
The onset of poor weather meant packing everything soldiers needed to subsist and fight onto the backs of mules, guiding them up the slopes, and guiding them back down again. As usual, mule trains were susceptible to enemy fire, a fact that often forced army veterinary surgeons to perform “de-braying” operations to remove position-betraying vocal cords ahead of frontline service.
French Moroccan soldiers guide a mule train up into the mountains of Italy. Photo taken by George Kaye. Image courtesy of NZ National Library.
Mules, however, could not access every frontline position. Perched precipitously on ridges and peaks thousands of feet above the surrounding valley floor, Allied soldiers regularly relied on each other for support.
Loading food, water, and ammunition onto specially designed packboards, resupply often involved clambering up steep crags on all fours for hours — an exhausting prospect for man and mule alike.
Quartermasters worked tirelessly to repay the sacrifices of frontline soldiers braving elements and enemy fire to hold friendly positions. Pioneering new methods of delivering warm meals, they discovered that heated water stored in blanket-wrapped five-gallon cans could stay warm for anywhere between two and four hours.
Where that didn’t suffice, pilots cut bomb-bay doors into the floors of slow-flying Piper Cub reconnaissance planes, flew over friendly units, and dropped warm food and water with an emphatic bombs away!
Polish forces haul supplies up into the mountainous Cassino sector, circa 1944. Image courtesy of the National Archives, Kew, London (WO 204/13019).
Aerial Resupply in Burma
Aerial resupply occurred elsewhere, too. In Burma, members of certain truck companies adapted their role to the theater’s unique jungle setting. When forward units ventured deep into the jungle, enlisted men took to the skies, accompanying pilots on several two-to-four-hour sorties each day to airdrop much-needed supplies for American, British, Chinese, and Indian units.
American air crews prepare to airdrop supplies over Burma.
Delivery methods varied. Smaller objects had parachutes fastened to them to slow their fall. For heavier, more important items, air crews pioneered a sure-fire “free-fall” method to expel cargo from large aircraft:
Packages to be dropped were stacked at the open door of the plane; one crew member, called the “kicker-outer” lies on his back and the remaining two men take stations on either side of the door; on signal from the pilot, the man on the floor shoves with his feet while the others push with their free hands. The dropped cargo consists of food, clothing, medicine, guns up to 75mm. ammunition and other items.
The "kicker-outer" pushes supplies out of an aircraft door over Burma, 1944–45. Image courtesy of the Office of the Command Historian.
An early antecedent of the ubiquitous grade school egg-drop experiment made an appearance too: “Fresh eggs were supplied the jungle troops by ingeniously packing [and dropping] them in rice husks in bamboo crates.”
Conclusion
In almost every wartime setting, strategic, operational, and tactical prowess correlated with logistical competence. “Clearly, logistics is the hard part of fighting a war,” Lt. Gen. E.T. Cook argued forty-five years later with great reason.
Though it is easy to take for granted, the broader tale of logistics during World War II is one of service, sacrifice, and devotion. Remove the bakers, tailors, native laborers, airborne “kicker-outers,” ship unloaders, and other supporting cast members, and the show could not go on.