Associated Press
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, left, gives the order of the day to paratroopers in England prior to the first assault of the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944.
- By the end of 1940, most of the world was at war, and the US military was getting in shape for a potential fight. The US wouldn't enter the war, however, until the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941.
- Mobilizing millions of troops was no easy task, and to figure out what it was doing wrong and what needed to change, the Army asked the soldiers themselves.
- A history professor who compiled tens of thousands of survey responses told Insider why the Army sought the unvarnished opinions of its soldiers and what those opinions revealed.
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In September 1940, World War II was a year old. The US was still a noncombatant, but it was preparing for a fight.
That month, the US introduced the Selective Training and Service Act - the first peacetime draft in US history. Mobilizing the millions of troops was a monumental task and essential to deploying "the arsenal of democracy" that President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Americans to provide.
Inducting millions of civilians and turning them into effective troops - and keeping them happy, healthy, supplied, and fighting - was also a daunting challenge.
In order to find the best way to do that, the War Department mounted an opinion survey, polling nearly a half-million soldiers stationed all around the world throughout the war. Their uncensored responses, given as the war was being fought, are an unprecedented window into how those troops felt about the war, the military, and their role in both.
"Entirely too much boot-licking going on," one soldier wrote. "Some sort of a merit system should be instituted."
"Spam, Spam, Spam. All I dream about is Spam," wrote another.
In an email interview, Edward Gitre, a history professor at Virginia Tech whose project, The American Soldier in World War II, has compiled tens of thousands of responses to those surveys, explained why the Army sought the unvarnished opinions of its soldiers and what those opinions revealed.