ARMY AREA SCHOOL
NEW ENGLAND MILITARY DISTRICT
FORT DEVENS, MASSACHUSETTS

THE NEW G-2 SECTION

Colonel Thomas F. Van Natta, Cavalry Instructor, Command and General Staff College

(Reproduced from Military Review, XXIX (August 1949), 44-47.)

Anyone who had much business that brought him to a division or higher headquarters, back in World War II, probably noticed that the G-2 had a lot of extra people at his beck and call. These people were extremely useful in getting a job of intelligence done. There were the interrogators, who spoke the enemy language fluently and had been trained to extract information from prisoners. There were the photo interpreters, who could make an aerial photograph tell a whole story. And there were others who were not so conspicuous or well-known, such as interpreters to work with Allies and translators to handle documents.

What most people outside of intelligence circles did not notice, though, was that there were many very difficult problems in handling these specialists due to the organization in effect at the time. These specialists did not "belong" to a tactical unit; they were not part of its Table of Organization. Instead, they belonged to small, independent teams which were attached to tactical headquarters. The administrative troubles of such a system are obvious, and there was a morale problem, too. Too frequently, these small teams were made to feel that there was no one interested in their welfare.

The reason we got ourselves into this situation is easily explained: inexperience. It was not just inexperience in the functions those specialists were to perform, but inexperience in all fields of intelligence. In nearly all of our tactical units there was:

--no one who could perform those specialized functions.

--no one who knew how to train anyone to perform those functions.

--almost no one who knew how to use specialists trained in those functions.

There are countless illustrations of this inexperience, or downright ignorance, in the early days of the war.

Photo interpreters were confused with photographers and assigned to the Public Relations Officer. Translators were assigned as truck drivers and detailed to haul rations. Interpreters were given to headquarters commandants to assist in the effort to supplement the GI relations. Prisoner interrogators were made mess attendants. (The World War I major who ate the messenger or pigeons had plenty of company!)

The only possible solution to the training problem was to handle it centrally, at one location, where the few experts we could find could do some good. This was done with the creation of a Military Intelligence Training Center, and our specialists soon began to appear in adequate numbers.

The problem of misuse was a little different. The obvious solution, to educate the commandors and staffs, was all right for units that had not completed their training. But a large number of units were already fighting and had too many problems on their minds that were considerably more important. The next best solution, then, was to organize these specialists into small units. This organization into a team, complete with title, equipment and commander, gave the individual much more protection against misuse. Once the specialists had a chance to show what they could do, the tendencies to misuse them were greatly reduced.