With the coming of the Age of Motor Vehicles
Unlimited, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation), the pressing danger of supply shortage was exchanged for the evil of a continuing glut of supply:
Reversing the tale of the hoopsnake, the tail of the army began to swallow the head.
More mobile capacity meant that more supply could go forward more rapidly to troops-or so it seemed. But the end of it was that there were fewer troops in the combat area, and more vehicles had to be brought in to move greater quantities of supplies to the ever-increasing number of soldiers cluttering up the rear.
And by the hundreds of thousands these men felt more or less clearly that the duties they were doing, the time they were marking, wasn’t even incidental to the prosecution of the war, with the result that many became unwilling and malcontent.
So Special Services was brought in to relieve these men from boredom. But to make that possible came more troops, more supply, more vehicles to move the supply, more crews to maintain the vehicles-’and still more men to get bored. The net effect was to drain fighting power away from the force as a whole, not only through sapping its moral strength, but assigning tens of thousands of men — enough to have made a national combat reserve — to unnecessary duties in the rear areas.
On December 1, 1945, near midnight, I stopped to talk to a Negro sentry who was walking post around a mountainous dump of medical supplies at Carentan, France, a few minutes’ drive from Utah Beach. I asked him how long the dump had been there. “Since three weeks after the invasion.” How long had he been doing guard duty at this point? “Since three weeks after the invasion.” Had anything been removed from the pile in that time? “Maybe, but it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten.”
And there he was, one poor soldier who had started walking around a pile of pills and bandages while the war was still within hearing distance. And he had kept
on walking around it for a full year and a half-till long after the guns had at last gone silent on the plains of Bohemia.