US Marine Corps - The Black Vault

CHAPTER XI
Logistics
The Heart of the Six Months Battle
August 1942–February 1943
The two sectors of the Navy which were quite inadequately developed
on 7 December 1941 were logistics and intelligence.
The primary reason for the logistical deficiency was that the officers of
the Line of the Navy had taken only a cursory interest in logistics in the
years just before World War II. This occurred because in the day by day
peacetime Fleet operations, there were few really large difkult logistical
problems demanding command decisions.
Consequently, logistical matters were handled mainly by oficers of the
various excellent Staff corps, particularly the Supply Corps. So the command
corps, the Line, lacked skill and experience in handling logistical matters
on a large scale.
The secondary reason for the logistical deficiency in the Navy was that
no one had ever been able to free the seagoing Navy from the thinking
that its operations should be on an austere basis in the field of logistics. It
was quite unprepared mentally for wartime operations with their tre-
mendous actual expenditures and waste, or to use the cover-up word for
waste, “slippage.”
Both the intelligence and logistical sectors received a great war influx
of citizen sailors. These citizen sailors soon found that their sectors were
rated by the professional officers of the Line as markedly less important
than the command and operational sectors of the naval effort.
The penalty for the failure of the professional oficer to adequately
evaluate intelligence and logistics in pre-World War II days was a massive
take over of these important wartime functions by officers with little or
no naval knowledge or experience in the vast waterlands of the world to
provide balance to their technical judgments.
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