CHAPTER III
Mission and Administration
With an understanding of the beginnings in military veterinary medicine and of developments in the Army Veterinary Service since its formation pursuant to the National Defense Act of 3 June 1916, the objectives and accomplishments of the 2,116 veterinarians who served in the Veterinary Corps of the Army during World War II become more real. At this point, it must be emphasized that the wartime expansion of the Army Veterinary Service was generally orderly, even showing increasing efficiency in answer, or partial response, to the seemingly imponderable problems and questions which then arose. This was not true during World War I when the newly created Army Veterinary Service was necessarily expanded even before its fundamental principles or nuclei were fully developed. The onset of World War II found the Army Veterinary Service with a tested definition of its mission and responsibilities and with a central administrative agency in operation two factors which were essential to orderly expansion. Their existence was a credit to the Veterinary Corps which had actively continued and repeatedly reevaluated them once they had been developed in the years past.
MISSION AND RESPONSIBILITIES
The mission and responsibilities of the Army Veterinary Service in World War II were generally no different from those which were defined soon after the Veterinary Corps was created and was made a component of the Medical Department. Only the words were changed after World War I, and time had brought about some refinements in these definitions as well as a more firm establishment of the relationship of the corps in Medical Department organization. Special Regulations No. 70, 15 December 1917, described the objects of the Veterinary Corps as follows: "* * * to protect the health and preserve the efficiency of the animals of the Army," and "* * * also provide for the inspection of meat-producing animals before and after slaughter and of dressed carcasses; and for the inspection of dairy herds supplying milk to the Army." Parts of the definition originated with the National Defense Act of 3 June 1916, which had created the Veterinary Corps to include veterinarians, veterinarians with mounted units, veterinary inspectors of horses and mules, and veterinary inspectors of meats. On 25 January 1922, AR (Army Regulations) No. 40-2005, Medical Department-Veterinary Service, General Provisions, provided: "The Veterinary Service as a part of the Medical Department * * * is charged in peace and war with duties falling under two definite heads: First, those in connection with the animals of the Army; second, those concerned with the food supplies of
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troops that are of animal origin." This was restated in the 15 September 1942 edition of the same regulation and was continued throughout the remaining period of World War II.
Animal Health
With reference to animals, the Army Veterinary Service was responsible for (1) investigating animal hygiene and sanitary conditions and making recommendations with respect thereto; (2) advising on those methods of animal management concerned with animal health and efficiency; (3) instructing military personnel on military animal sanitation and management and on horseshoeing; (4) examining animal feeds and forage when procured, in storage, and at issue; (5) evacuating and caring for sick and wounded animals; (6) physically examining animals; (7) managing and controlling veterinary hospitals and all other veterinary units; (8) investigating and controlling those diseases of animals which were known or suspected to be transmissible to the human being; and (9) controlling, training, instructing, and assigning to duty of the commissioned and enlisted personnel of the Medical Department who belonged to the Veterinary Service. These responsibilities expressly meant that the Army Veterinary Service in World War II-
1. Applied the principles of veterinary sanitary science to maintain animals in a correct environment with regard to their shelter, restraint, handling, feeds and feeding, grooming, work and exercise, shoeing, clothing, and equipment with the purpose of eliminating, so far as practicable, the causes of physical inefficiency.
2. Initiated suitable measures for the control of communicable diseases.
3. Reduced animal losses and inefficiency by the prompt discovery of the sick and wounded, their separation from the well, their evacuation, their segregation in veterinary hospitals, and the application of curative measures.
4. Physically examined animals prior to purchase and at other times with a view to insuring the acquisition of only serviceably sound animals and the prompt and economical disposal of the unsound.
5. Reduced the incidence among military personnel of diseases transmissible by animals by the application of veterinary public health measures applicable to military animals and civilian animals in the vicinity of troop areas.
Food Inspection
Regarding food supplies, the Army Veterinary Service in World War II was responsible for (1) the procurement and surveillance inspections of meats, meat foods, milk and dairy products used by the Army; (2) the determination, by inspection or other means, of the sanitary condition of food establishments, warehouses, and shipping conveyances and of the methods used in manufacturing, storing, shipping, and handling food products; (3) the
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submission of recommendations with respect to the food supply; and (4) the instruction of veterinary food inspection personnel. These responsibilities meant that the Army Veterinary Service-
1. Applied the principles of sanitary control over the condition and methods used in the production or manufacture, shipping, storage, issue, and other handling of food products, including food establishments, warehouses, freezing plants, refrigerators, railroad cars, ships, and airplanes as well as milk herds and dairies.
2. Reduced or eliminated the hazards to troop health that existed in diseased, contaminated, or deteriorated food supplies, by sanitary inspections and reinspections of food products.
3. Assured that the quantity and the sanitary, nutritive, and grade qualities of food products were delivered by contractors in accordance with the requirements of specifications and purchase instruments.
By the operations listed, the veterinary food inspection service assured that the food supplies of animal origin which were purchased by the Army were produced in establishments maintaining acceptable standards of sanitation, that they were sound and of the required quality when procured, and that the food products at time of issue to troops were wholesome and fit for human consumption. The operations also were important in the conservation of the Army food stockpiles against unnecessary deterioration or outright losses due to spoilage.
Relation With Medical Service
In the conduct of this service with Army animals and the inspection of the Army food supply, the Veterinary Service was administered, under the direction of The Surgeon General, by a Veterinary Corps officer who was selected by The Surgeon General and assigned to duty in his office as chief of the Veterinary Division. Below the level of the Surgeon General's Office in the organizational structure of the Army, these services in a theater of operations, territorial department, corps area (later service command), camp, airbase, or other station, or in a field army, army corps, division, air force, or other unit were the responsibility of, and were conducted by, the senior Veterinary Corps officer, whose official designation was "veterinarian." His basic title was, for example, chief veterinarian, department veterinarian, corps area (or service command) veterinarian, station veterinarian, depot veterinarian, base veterinarian, port veterinarian, army veterinarian, corps veterinarian, division veterinarian, brigade veterinarian, or regimental veterinarian. At these levels of the military organizational structure, the dual nature of responsibilities of the Army Veterinary Service-concerning animals on one hand and troops on the other-involved a close and definite relationship in Medical Department organization and administration. The veterinary service with animals, and the general medical service with troops proceeded along parallel lines. Their problems of sanitation, preventive
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medicine, control of preventable diseases, professional care and treatment of the sick and injured, and the administration of hospitals were precisely analogous, as were the procedures prescribed and the means provided for their solution.
Staff Duties
While appropriately united in one department and administered under one head-The Surgeon General-the veterinary and medical services were, in a technical sense, separate except as they met on the common ground of an animal disease which might possibly be communicable to man. On the other hand, the veterinary service with troops or operations concerned with the examination of the food supply was a matter of sanitation and, thus, a direct extension of the sanitary service of the Medical Department, which was charged with responsibility in all matters concerning the protection of the health of troops. Proper coordination of these activities of this service branch of the Army was assured only when there was but one representative of the Medical Department on the staff of the commanding officer. Since all considerations involving the health of troops were paramount, such staff duty logically devolved upon the senior Medical Corps officer present with the command. This principle, however, was construed as placing the veterinary officer of the command as a subordinate of, or assistant to, the surgeon only in a staff capacity. In his staff relations, the veterinarian furnished the surgeon with such technical information as was necessary in properly representing the affairs of the Medical Department. In addition to their staff functions as surgeon and veterinarian, respectively, the medical officer commanded the medical detachment and the veterinary officer commanded the veterinary detachment, and in such command capacity each was directly responsible only to the commanding officer. Accordingly, at posts, camps, and stations, such matters as reports and returns relating exclusively to the veterinary detachment or to veterinary technical operations not involving the health of troops were not transmitted by the veterinarian through the surgeon.
In the absence of a veterinary officer, the ordinary staff duties of the surgeon were expanded to include direct responsibility for the command's veterinary service, including its administration. Where there were no veterinary personnel-officer or enlisted-the surgeon represented the Medical Department in matters pertaining to the Veterinary Service, utilized such facilities as were at his disposal, and kept the commanding officer advised as to the veterinary requirements. To the extent that veterinary personnel were available, these situations were avoided by the assignment of specially trained and selected veterinary noncommissioned officers to the surgeon's offices of commands, by the authorization to employ civilian veterinarians, or by the naming of an attending veterinarian who performed at such stations the same duties as were required at his regularly assigned station.
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Professional Duties
In addition to the duties and responsibilities devolving upon him as a doctor of veterinary medicine, the Veterinary Corps officer inherited certain duties and responsibilities which were commensurate with his commissioning as an Army officer and were proper to the performance of the mission assigned to the Army Veterinary Service. These may be classified as professional, advisory, and administrative. The professional duties were typical of those which were performed by the veterinary surgeons and employed veterinarians who saw service with Cavalry, Field Artillery, and the Subsistence and Quartermaster's Department before 1916; they had no advisory duties and no personnel to assist them. The advisory duties may be compared with the activities of professional consultants or civilian experts, but only the Veterinary Corps officer could perform all three classes of duties and be responsible for them, including that of command. The duties and responsibilities, in general, of the veterinary officers when acting in a professional capacity were to-
1. Practice preventive veterinary medicine by recommending suitable measures for the prevention and control of animal diseases and injury, including physical examinations of animals.
2. Provide treatment and hospitalization for animals analogous to that provided to troops by medical and dental officers.
3. Conduct sanitary inspections of establishments producing, storing, issuing, or otherwise handling foods of animal origin which were used by the Army and to conduct procurement and surveillance food products inspections.
Advisory Duties
When acting in an advisory capacity, or as a staff veterinary officer, his duties were-
1. To keep informed of existing conditions having any bearing upon the health and physical efficiency of the animals of the command and, especially in a moving command, to anticipate the occurrence of such conditions.
2. To keep informed of conditions affecting foods of animal origin which might have a bearing upon the health of troops.
3. To transmit to the commanding officer such of this information having a bearing upon the military administration and to submit appropriate recommendations.
4. To transmit to the surgeon such of this information having any bearing upon the health of troops.
5. To make prescribed reports and returns and to take appropriate action on reports and returns received from subordinates.
6. To perform such other duties as directed by superior authority.
These advisory duties did not mean that the veterinary officer took corrective action to minimize a defect-that being the direct responsibility of
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the commanding officer. If, however, the commanding officer expressly authorized the Veterinary Corps officer to give orders in his name for the correction of such defects, then the duties and responsibilities of the latter were correspondingly increased. In advising, it became necessary for the veterinary officer to remember that when any veterinary necessity of the moment conflicted with a purely military necessity, the former was ranked secondary in importance, unless the veterinary officer was convinced that the responsible military authority was not aware of the far-reaching results from a veterinary point of view, in which case, it was necessary to again present the matter to the military authority, who alone possessed all of the facts bearing on the decision of action for which he alone was responsible.
Administrative Duties
In his administrative duties, the Veterinary Corps officer was directly responsible for the condition and efficiency of the veterinary service of his command-this being comparable to the duties of administrative officers of the line units of the Army. More specifically, the veterinary officer was responsible for-
1. The training, discipline, efficiency, and assignment to duty of the personnel which he commanded and the supervision of the internal economy of the veterinary organization or unit.
2. The maintenance of equipment in proper condition by requisitioning the needed supplies and by properly caring for the property on hand.
3. The keeping of prescribed reports and the making of prescribed reports and returns.
4. The performance of such other duties as were required by superior military authority, such as the conduct of veterinary instructional services in horseshoeing schools.
Changes in Emphasis
The mission and responsibilities of the Veterinary Service during World War II were not materially different from those of World War I. However, during the war, there were some changes in the emphasis on parts of the mission and responsibilities and in the way that they were fulfilled. For example, World War II saw the definition of Army animals, so far as the Army Veterinary Service was concerned, expanded to mean not only horses and mules but also Army dogs and signal pigeons and even laboratory animals. However, this change in meaning did not add to, or detract from, the mission of the Army Veterinary Service to protect and preserve animal efficiency; nor did changes in animal strength have an influence on this mission. Similarly, the newer threats to troop health which came with leptospirosis and rabies of dogs or with psittacosis and salmonellosis common to pigeons-diseases which are infectious for the human being-had little influence on the basic concept of the mission of veterinary public health and its relationship
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in the Medical Department. In regard to the Army food supply, which was many times the volume of any past period, the increasing emphasis on centralizing food procurement, on conducting inspections at food establishments, and on conserving Army stockpiles by surveillance inspections involved changes and expansion of the administrative organization of the Army Veterinary Service in the Zone of Interior and theaters overseas in lieu of amendment to the statement of mission and responsibilities.
Tables 3 and 4 show the number of animals treated, and tables 5 and 6 show the amounts of foods of animal origin that were inspected. These tables present a picture of the magnitude of the mission and responsibilities of the Veterinary Service during World War II.
TABLE 3.-Veterinary service to horses and mules in the U.S. Army, by year, 1941-46
[Rate expressed as number per annum per 1,000 average strength]
Year | Average strength | Admissions | Deaths | Days of treatment | ||
Number | Rate | Number | Rate | |||
1941 | 46,520 | 44,696 | 960.8 | 2,528 | 54.3 | 918,553 |
1942 | 49,701 | 33,424 | 672.5 | 2,181 | 43.9 | 706,794 |
1943 | 56,287 | 31,784 | 564.7 | 2,987 | 53.1 | 853,481 |
1944 | 43,334 | 25,471 | 587.8 | 2,364 | 54.6 | 610,916 |
1945 | 35,200 | 19,939 | 566.4 | 2,856 | 81.1 | 486,652 |
1946 | 7,717 | 3,119 | 404.2 | 275 | 35.6 | 59,210 |
Source: Reports, Veterinary Division, Surgeon General's Office, for the annual reports of The Surgeon General, 1942-45. [Official record.]
ADMINISTRATION
Surgeon General's Office
The Army Veterinary Service was administered as a component of the Medical Department under the direction of The Surgeon General by a Veterinary Corps officer who was selected by The Surgeon General and assigned to duty as chief of the Veterinary Division of his office. Pursuant to the regulations of the Army, his title was that of chief of the Veterinary Division and not chief of the Veterinary Corps. His recommendations and actions were first subjected to review and approval by The Surgeon General, but on certain matters of primary veterinary concern these recommendations were accepted so regularly that, from a practical viewpoint, the chief exercised a varying degree of direct control over the Veterinary Corps.
In 1939, the chief of the Veterinary Division, then a veterinary officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel, was advising The Surgeon General directly on the administration of the Army Veterinary Service. The Veter-
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inary Division at the time included one other veterinary officer and four civilian employees (table 7). During the pre-World War II emergency period, the veterinary personnel strength was augmented by three officers-the first increase in their numbers since mid-1925. With this change, the peacetime Veterinary Division was reorganized to include, as of 7 December 1941, the chief of the division, the assistant chief, the officers in charge of the animal service and the meat and dairy hygiene subdivisions, and the liaison officer to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Quartermaster General's Office. A few months later, this internal arrangement was replaced by one more or less contemplated in the mobilization plans which had been developed in the preceding peacetime years. The Veterinary Division was divided into four subdivisions: (1) Personnel, Statistical and Training; (2) Inspection; (3) Animal Service; and (4) Meat and Dairy Hygiene. Probably the most important part of the change at this time was that mobilization planning had provided for the rank of the chief of the division to be that of brigadier general. Thus, on 17 March 1942, this officer, Col. Raymond A. Kelser, VC, was advised by The Adjutant General of his temporary appointment as brigadier general in the Army of the United States (with date of rank, 9 March 1941) (1). He was the first in the history of the
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Army Veterinary Service to attain general officer rank. The other parts of the mobilization plans were not as rigidly carried out, though a Veterinary Corps officer was assigned to the Personnel Division (for the period, 9 February 1943-11 April 1944), and, in lieu of the veterinary subdivision in the planned Inspection Division, the position of traveling veterinary consultants was established.
On 26 March 1942, the Veterinary Division was elevated to the status of a "service" within the organizational structure of the Surgeon General's Office and was internally organized to include the director of service and three divisions (each with three subdivisions).
War Department Reorganization
In March 1942, The Surgeon General lost his place in the War Department organization structure of direct accessibility to the Chief of Staff and War Department General Staff (2). In the reorganization of the War Department, many of its operative functions in the Zone of Interior were then consolidated and delegated to three new major commands: the Army Ground Forces, the Army Air Forces, and the Army Service Forces (origi-
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Year | Total | Procurement inspections | Surveillance inspections | ||||
Cause for rejection | Computed procurement inspections4 | Rejection because insanitary or unsound5 | Food insanitary or unsound6 | Computed inspections at issue to troops7 | |||
Not type, class, or grade2 | Insanitary or unsound3 | ||||||
|
| Millions of pounds | Millions of pounds | Percent | Percent | Millions of pounds | Percent |
1941 | 58.05 | 51.72 | 6.33 | 5.6 | 10.9 | 0.49 | 0.06 |
1942 | 242.33 | 221.46 | 20.87 | 7.5 | 8.6 | 3.36 | .17 |
1943 | 307.96 | 282.92 | 25.04 | 5.1 | 8.1 | 17.49 | .44 |
1944 | 374.20 | 314.05 | 60.14 | 4.6 | 16.1 | 40.17 | .77 |
1945 | 246.35 | 200.11 | 46.24 | 3.0 | 18.8 | 40.53 | .66 |
1946 | 42.02 | 36.22 | 5.80 | 3.8 | 13.8 | 15.17 | .70 |
1Based on data contained in Health of the Army, August 1949, vol. 4, No. 8, pp. 2-9.
2Refers to products which have failed to comply with Army purchase instruments in matters such as quality, sex, age, fat content, color and artificial color, damaged cans or cases, excess moisture, improper packing and packaging, improperly trimmed, insufficient curing or smoking, mutilated, defrosted, overweight, seedy, soft and oily, undercured, underweight, and storage deterioration.
3Refers to products such as broken eggs, contaminated, decomposed, putrid, rotten, moldy, uninspected by U.S. Department of Agriculture, off flavor, parasitic infestation, rancid, short vacuum, slimy, sour, stale or deteriorated, swellers and leakers, and diseased.
4The total procurement inspections were simply the sum of the inspection prior to purchase and the inspection on delivery at purchase. Actually, not all food products were inspected prior to purchase (that is, during manufacture or packaging), but these and considerably larger quantities of others which are not so inspected are always inspected when delivered to and purchased by the Army. Thus, to compute more realistic data of the actual amounts of foods inspected for procurement, the amounts passed during inspection prior to purchase may be disregarded (because the same foods are reinspected, or figuratively duplicated) in the inspections on delivery at purchase. Conversely, the computed procurement inspection is the sum of the quantities inspected (both passed and rejected) on delivery at purchase and the quantities rejected during inspection prior to purchase. This column is the procurement inspection total rejections shown as percent of the sum of the inspection on delivery at purchase and the rejection prior to purchase.
5Based on total amount inspected.
6Surveillance inspections relate to Government-owned food products, and these, having passed procurement inspection, cannot be rejected except for insanitary condition or unsoundness.
7The total surveillance inspections were simply the sum of the inspections on any receipt except purchase, in storage and at time of shipment, and at issue to troops; in fact, it is a duplication possibly of a given quantity of food as it was received in depots, stored, transshipped, and issued. Probably, more realistic data on such a given quantity may be observed in the inspection at issue to troops, which was the final, one-time inspection before its consumption. This column is the surveillance inspection total rejections shown in percent of the sum of these rejections plus the passed inspection at time of issue to troops.
nally named Services of Supply). The Surgeon General's Office (and the Medical Department), along with the several supply arms and branches, came under the jurisdiction and were subjected to the authority of the new Army Service Forces command. In consequence, recommendations of the Army Veterinary Service in general lost much of their identity and finality because any Medical Department policy was necessarily subjected to the approving authority of Army Service Forces headquarters before the War Department General Staff and Chief of Staff could pass on them; the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces imposed additional qualifications
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before these recommendations reached the veterinary personnel in the field.1 The general trend toward decentralization of authority from these three major command staffs complicated and furthered the losses of decentralized technical supervision over the Army Veterinary Service as a whole. This "decentralization of authority without losing essential control"-as the phrase read-was carried to the extreme in the Army Service Forces which refused authorization to revise properly, and even threatened to destroy, the existing veterinary reports and Army-wide reporting procedures on sick and wounded animals and on the inspections of food. Both reports were critically needed by the Veterinary Division to plan for, and to evaluate, the efficiency of the Army Veterinary Service.
Personnel | 1939 | 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | 1946 |
Veterinary Corps officers: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Brigadier general | --- | --- | --- | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | --- |
| Colonel | --- | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| Lieutenant colonel | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Major | --- | --- | 2 | 1 | 11 | 1 | 2 | --- |
| Captain | --- | --- | --- | 1 | 1 | --- | --- | --- |
Branch immaterial (later Sanitary Corps officer), major | --- | --- | --- | --- | 1 | 1 | 1 | --- |
| Total officers | 2 | 2 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 4 |
| Civilian employees | 4 | 4 | 12 | 19 | 15 | 17 | 16 | 7 |
1Assigned to duty in Military Personnel Division.
Sources:(1) Annual Reports of The Surgeon General, U.S. Army. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939-41. (2)Reports, Veterinary Division, Surgeon General's Office, for the annual reportsof The Surgeon General, 1942-46.[Official record.]
In the general reorganization of the Surgeon General's Office during August 1942, the Veterinary Service organization again became the Veterinary Division, but it was grouped with other divisions (such as Medical Practice, Dental, Nursing, and Preventive Medicine) under the newly formed Professional Services, now a major organizational unit within the Surgeon General's Office. This action marked the low-water mark in the history of technical administration of the Army Veterinary Service because Professional Services stood in the way of the direct access that the nominal chief of the Veterinary Corps formerly had to The Surgeon General who, himself, had lost his channel of direct communication with the Chief of Staff during March 1942. During the period of the next 2 years, the director of the
1The headquarters of the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces at no time during World War II included veterinary staff officers.
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Veterinary Division was assisted in his staff work with the following branch organizations:
Veterinary Policies Branch (formerly Miscellaneous Branch)
Qualifications Section
Correspondence and Publications Section
Equipment and Construction Section
Meat and Dairy Branch
Inspection Section
Quartermaster Subsistence Liaison Section
Reports Section
Animal Service Branch
Veterinary Hospitalization Section
Remount Liaison Section
Report Section
On August 1944, Professional Services was dissolved, and the Veterinary Division regained its standing as a major element in the organizational structure of the Surgeon General's Office; the director of the Veterinary Division again had direct access to The Surgeon General.
Veterinary Consultants Division
There was little change in the status of the Veterinary Division during the remainder of the war. However, on 19 April 1945, the position of The Surgeon General to advise on matters pertaining to the health of the Army was removed from effective supervisory control by the headquarters of Army Service Forces (3). Returning to the situation which existed before 9 March 1942, The Surgeon General again became "the chief medical officer of the Army and the chief medical adviser to the Chief of Staff and the War Department." On 18 October 1945, the Veterinary Division was renamed the Veterinary Consultants Division. Though the change in name was made without reduction in the scope of current veterinary administrative responsibilities within the Surgeon General's Office, the new name erroneously conveyed the impression that the chief of the division was only a professional adviser or special civilian consultant to The Surgeon General. By the end of the winter of 1945-46, all officer personnel who had seen wartime service in the Surgeon General's Office were retired, discharged from active duty, or reassigned, and were replaced by newly assigned personnel. Also, the personnel space authorizations were cut back after V-J Day to three veterinary officers and seven civilian employees.
Traveling Veterinary Consultants
Veterinary consultants were essential because the administrative responsibilities of the Veterinary Division had been largely subordinated (1) to the wartime staffing empires in the headquarters of Army Service Forces and,
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for a time, in the Professional Services organization of the Surgeon General's Office, and (2) by the general trends in decentralization of authority and functions. The necessary liaison and technical evaluation on uniformity of the widespread operations and efficiency of the Army Veterinary Service, particularly its food inspection activities throughout the Zone of Interior, were retained in the Surgeon General's Office by a newly developed program of field inspection. A similar program had been established and maintained during World War I, but then the program involved the assignment of general veterinary inspectors, five in number, who sought to improve the veterinary service with animals. In World War II, the program involved the utilization of three traveling veterinary consultants who were concerned with the inspection of foods.
The wartime program seems to have originated on 8 September 1942 with the headquarters of Army Service Forces (then called Services of Supply) which in a general administrative memorandum requested The Surgeon General and other technical service chiefs to encourage and develop a well-organized program of field inspections. During the next month, the Veterinary Division proposed a checklist on its conduct of inspections of veterinary activities in the service commands; the latter, superseding the corps areas, had become the principal field organizations of the Army Service Forces. A similar checklist was developed for use by the service command veterinarians even though AR 40-2010 expressly provided for each such veterinary staff officer "* * * to act as veterinary inspector for the service command * * *" and defined his specific duties. On 30 April 1943, the Veterinary Division advanced a specific proposal for expanding the field inspections beyond the geographical limits of service commands by the establishment of a program operated by the Surgeon General's Office.
Subsequently, on 3 May 1943, the headquarters of Army Service Forces granted the augmentation of personnel space authorizations to the Surgeon General's Office by four veterinary officers "to provide positions as traveling Veterinary Corps inspectors, under The Surgeon General." Later, this number was reduced to three and then, after World War II, to two traveling veterinary consultant officers. Actually, not more than three such officers were on duty at any one time during World War II.2 Though assigned to duty with The Surgeon General, they were attached for administrative purposes to the Chicago Medical Depot, Chicago, Ill., until the fall of 1944, when they were reattached to the Kansas City Medical Depot, Kansas City, Kans., and then, after January 1946, to the St. Louis Medical Depot, St. Louis, Mo.; however, Chicago proved to be the best location for their field office because the Quartermaster Corps had located most of its
2During the summer of 1943, Colonels Frank M. Lee, Gerald W. FitzGerald, and Oness H. Dixon, Jr., were assigned as traveling consultants. Colonel Dixon was replaced in April 1944 by Col. Jacob L. Hartman; on 10 July and 10 August 1945, Colonels Lee and FitzGerald, respectively, were reassigned, but their places were filled by the assignment of Col. John H. Kintner on 3 July 1945 and Col. Gardiner B. Jones on 15 February 1946.
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food procurement operational headquarters there. The traveling consultants were ordered on detailed itineraries of travel which were developed by the Surgeon General's Office. After their tour of travel or conduct of special investigations of veterinary food inspection activities at given places, the traveling consultants submitted reports of inspection to The Surgeon General, who then initiated letters recommending corrective action, if and when indicated, to the pertinent major commands. This field inspection program proved of excellent value in making for uniformity and standardization of procedures pertaining to the inspection of meat, meat-food, and dairy products, and the dissemination of current information relative to changes in and the interpretation of specification requirements. The success of the program was reflected in the continued assignments of traveling consultants under the supervision of The Surgeon General during the post?World War II period and in the subsequent definition of them in SR 40-930-1.
Tours of Inspection
Other means of coordinating the Army Veterinary Service included the conduct of conferences, meetings, surveys, and visits of observation by the officer members of the Veterinary Division. To a certain degree, these were augmented by inspections of field activities conducted by the Inspector General's Department and by The Surgeon General and senior officers of his staff-the latter, especially before their departure, having been informed by the Veterinary Division of the local veterinary situation or problems in the areas to be visited. While it is impractical to record each such event, special mention is made of the tours of inspection by Veterinary Division personnel to the oversea theaters during World War II as follows:
Liaison duty with the British Army Veterinary Remount Services in the European, Mediterranean, Middle East, and India-Burma areas, 27 November 1943 to 17 February 1944.
Survey of the sanitary, veterinary, and other professional services in the China-Burma-India theater, 10 October to 11 November 1944.
Observation of operation of the Army Veterinary Service concerned with food inspection in the Mediterranean theater, 25 March to 25 April 1945.
It should be mentioned also that the Veterinary Division did not promulgate circular letters or similar mediums of technical and professional information to the Army Veterinary Service such as was done during World War I. The Army Veterinary Bulletin, a periodical which was used to disseminate such information continuously since its first appearance on 14 January 1920, was stopped after the publication of the July 1943 issue; the integration of this bulletin with the professional publications of the Medical and the Dental Corps gave origin to The Bulletin of the U.S. Army Medical Department, a recurring monthly publication appearing first in October 1943 and continuing through the remainder of World War II.
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References
1. Letter, The Adjutant General to Col. R. A. Kelser, VC, Veterinary Division, Surgeon General's Office, 17 Mar. 1942, subject: Appointment as Brigadier General.
2. War Department Circular No. 59, 2 Mar. 1942, subject: War Department Reorganization.
3. War Department Circular No. 120, 18 Apr. 1945, sec. IV, subject: The Surgeon General.
