The Whiz Kids of the 100th Division

The Army Specialized Training Program

A question came up on Facebook about the very large number of ASTP men in the 100th Division, so here’s a section from earlier chapters about how that happened.

As it turned out, the 100th Division wasn't going overseas, not then, or at least not as a division. The Army had other plans. Having spent 14 months and a great deal of time, effort, and money creating an optimal level of unit cohesion and efficiency—the kind that is essential for the best performance in combat--the Army tore the units apart. Rather than send the Division as a unit overseas, they grabbed thousands of men out of the regimental line companies, dumped them into replacement depots overseas, and plopped them randomly into units that had been decimated in the fighting in North Africa and Italy. Coincidentally, many of them ended up in the 3rd, 36th, and 45th Divisions, all of whom would end up side-by-side with the 100th Division in France. (History of Company C) The replacements hit the front lines without even knowing the names of anyone around them. Notoriously, many replacement men were killed before their paperwork caught up with them or anyone had bothered to learn their names. At least the men sucked out of the 100th Division were thoroughly trained, unlike some of the poor guys dumped into the front later in France, where stories were told of men from the replacement depot turning to the man next to them and asking how to reload their rifles. The Army turned their citizen soldiers into cannon fodder, violating in the most fundamental way the psychology of how men handle combat the most effectively--they fight for their buddies. The “band of brothers” is not just a cliche.

One of the men that they may have been replacing was Mom’s cousin Charlie Gifford. He had made it from North Africa, through Sicily, and part way up Italy, but then he’d contracted malaria and gotten wounded at Anzio at the end of January 1944. News took a while to filter back to the Catskills in New York. He was nursed for a while by an Italian family before Army medics could get to him.

The skeleton of the 100th Division left behind in Fort Bragg suddenly looked like a training division, destined to process others but never to go overseas. The men who were left behind were thoroughly disgusted. Their friends were gone, the units hollowed out, and the only prospect after all that training was more training. There was nothing more, after the experience in Tennessee, to be learned. It wasn’t so much that they wanted to see combat, but they wanted the experience of being yanked out of their civilian lives to count for something more than years of "chickenshit." While the 325th Combat Engineers had not been torn apart as badly as the infantry units, as part of the division, they were still stuck, repeating what they had already done. As it turns out, being stuck Stateside was an experience far more common than combat. There was an old joke in the 1960s--what did you do in the war, Daddy. And the answer for millions of men was, not much. In early 1944, it looked as though that was the fate of the 100th Division—garrison duty.

The 100th Division got a large influx of men from the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). ASTP men had scored 115 or above on the general classification test, higher than the scores needed for Officer Candidate School. Starting in 1942, the Army recruiters went to high schools, administered the classification test to the male students about to graduate, and offered the ones who passed a sweet deal. It was still extremely rare for anyone to go to college and most couldn’t afford it. The Army promised a college education. By the time they graduated, they were sure the war would be over and they could serve in the occupation. The recruiters came to the school where Mom taught in rural upstate New York where few could think about affording college. It was a very attractive deal.

They naturally got the nickname “Whiz Kids” from the radio quiz show. After high school, they went through basic training and then were sent to college campuses to learn skills that might be needed after the war such as languages, administration, engineering, and medicine. The argument had been made early on that World War I had notoriously wiped out a generation of the best and the brightest, especially in England, so they were trying to keep the brightest out of combat and still make eventual use of their skills. Early in the war, there had been a lot of hope that, in the era of blitzkrieg, wars would be won from the air and with artillery and that infantrymen—boots on the ground—were an anachronism. However, the tough slog up Italy, especially the meat grinders at Monte Cassino and Anzio, was proving that the air force and the artillery had a limited ability to gain ground. The way to roll Germany back on the Western front was going to be one step at a time with foot soldiers. Looking ahead at the looming invasion of Normandy, the estimates were that the Army was short 300,000 men. Suddenly the best and brightest became expendable. Over 100,000 students were yanked out off their college campuses and dumped into the most hazardous duty there was, rifle units. And in the plain old infantry, the pre-war regulars and even the hardened draftees were happy to teach the Whiz Kids their place at the bottom of the pecking order. The Whiz Kids felt like the whole deal had been bait and switch and they were bitter. They’d voluntarily signed up, usually because college for them had been unaffordable. Without the deal, they might have chosen the better living conditions and safer odds in the Navy.

The month that the ASTP was shut down, Marshall’s sociologists published a survey about the “educated soldier.” They reported that officers were often puzzled by them because they questioned authority and Army rules and practices. They were critical of the nation’s war effort, cynical about the Army, and expressed the least vindictiveness toward the enemy. They also did not take everything their officers said on faith. (What the Soldier Thinks February 1944 vol 1 no 3) The officers and old hardened sergeants of the 100th Division had some fun when the Whiz Kids showed up.