The Transportation Corps

The history of World War II is making increasingly clear the central fact that the tightest rein on the military effort of the United States in that war was imposed by transportation. As long as this nation fights overseas the same situation is likely to reoccur-a prospect that gives a special importance to the exposition of the subject in this series. The Army promptly recognized the importance of transportation when, as in World War I, it centralized its supervision of this branch of its vast logistical effort in a Chief of Transportation and created (in July 1942) a Transportation Corps. The Army did not, and could not, control all the factors that entered into the movement of its men, munitions, and supplies. The larger story the reader must seek elsewhere- in the two volumes on Global Logistics and Strategy and in the theater volumes of the U.S. ARMY IN WORLD WAR IL Here the story is told from the records and point of view of the Army's Chief of Transportation, Maj. Gen. Charles P. Gross. In this volume, the second in the group of three Transportation Corps volumes, Mr. Wardlow passes to the policies and methods adopted to move men and matériel within the continental United States and out to theaters of operations-the core of General Gross's mission-and to provide the Transportation Corps' quota of equipment and trained soldiers necessary to accomplish its overseas mission.