The dauting task of returning the troops home after WWII

Operation Magic Carpet

The U.S. military experienced an unimaginable increase during World War II. In 1939, there were 334,000 servicemen, not counting the Coast Guard. In 1945, there were over 12 million, including the Coast Guard. At the end of the war, over 8 million of these men and women were scattered overseas in Europe, the Pacific and Asia. Shipping them out wasn’t a particular problem but getting them home was a massive logistical headache. The problem didn’t come as a surprise, as Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall had already established committees to address the issue in 1943. The repatriation of military personnel was done in Operation Magic Carpet.

When Germany capitulated 76 years ago in May 1945, the U.S. Navy was still busy fighting in the Pacific and couldn’t assist. The job of transporting 3 million men home fell to the Army and the Merchant Marine. 300 Victory and Liberty cargo ships were converted to troop transports for the task. During the war, 148,000 troops crossed the Atlantic west to east each month; the rush home ramped this up to 435,000 a month over 14 months.
 
The conditions of a soldier returning home and getting discharged from military service were set out in the so-called Advance Service Rating Score (ASRS) better known as the Points System. Servicemen could obtain points for different actions in combat, number of dependents, number of months served, etc. More points meant less months until repatriation. An enlisted serviceman needed a score of 85 points to be considered for demobilization. With the end of the war getting closer, the Points System was revised almost every 3-4 months.

In October 1945, with the war in Asia also over, the Navy started chipping in, converting all available vessels to transport duty. On smaller ships like destroyers, capable of carrying perhaps 300 men, soldiers were told to hang their hammocks in whatever nook and cranny they could find. Carriers were particularly useful, as their large open hangar decks could house 3,000 or more troops in relative comfort, with bunks, sometimes in stacks of five welded or bolted in place.

The Navy wasn’t picky, though: cruisers, battleships, hospital ships, even LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) were packed full of men yearning for home. Two British ocean liners under American control, the RMS Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, had already served as troop transports before and continued to do so during the operation, each capable of carrying up to 15,000 people at a time, though their normal, peacetime capacity was less than 2,200. Twenty-nine ships were dedicated to transporting war brides: women married to American soldiers during the war.

The Japanese surrender in August 1945 came none too soon, but it put an extra burden on the operation. The war in Asia had been expected to go well into 1946 and the Navy and the War Shipping Administration were hard-pressed to bring home all the soldiers who now had to get home earlier than anticipated. The transports carrying them also had to collect numerous POWs from recently liberated Japanese camps, many of whom suffered from malnutrition and illness. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of German and Italian POWs held in camps outside Europe had to be returned to their countries, too. This was also done under Operation Magic Carpet.

The time to get home depended a lot on the circumstances. USS Lake Champlain, a brand-new Essex-class carrier that arrived too late for the war, could cross the Atlantic and take 3,300 troops home a little under 4 days and 8 hours. Meanwhile, troops going home from Australia or India would sometimes spend months on slower vessels.

There was enormous pressure on the operation to bring home as many men as possible by Christmas 1945. Therefore, a sub-operation, Operation Santa Claus, was dedicated to the purpose. Due to storms at sea and an overabundance of soldiers eligible for return home, however, Santa Claus could only return a fraction in time. On top of that, the rapid demobilization of American servicemen threatened to create a shortage of manpower for occupation of Germany, Austria, and Japan. Many soldiers driven by homesickness protested worldwide, involving soldiers in Guam, Japan, France, Germany, Austria, India, Korea, the United States, and England. For instance, four thousand soldiers in the Philippines had demonstrated against the cancellation of a repatriation ship on Christmas 1945 and stormed the city hall of Manila. Some soldiers were arrested in the demonstrations but most commanders took a tolerant approach. In light of the protests, the armed forced sped up demobilization with measures like the further liberalization of the Points System.

Many freshly discharged men found themselves stuck in separation centers on American soil. The nation’s transportation network was overloaded: trains heading west from the East Coast were on average 6 hours behind schedule and trains heading east from the West Coast were twice that late. Luckily, the soldiers faced an outpouring of love and friendliness from the locals. Many townsfolk took in freshly arrived troops and invited them to Christmas dinner in their homes. Others gave their train tickets to soldiers and still others organized quick parties at local train stations for men on layover. A Los Angeles taxi driver took six soldiers all the way to Chicago; another took another carload of men to Manhattan, the Bronx, Pittsburgh, Long Island, Buffalo and New Hampshire. Neither of the drivers accepted a fare beyond the cost of gas.

All in all, though, the Christmas deadline proved untenable. The European phase of the operation concluded in February 1946. The last 29 troop transports, carrying some 200,000 men from the China-India-Burma theater, arrived to America in April 1946, bringing Operation Magic Carpet to an end, though an additional 127,000 soldiers still took until September to return home and finally lay down the burden of war.
 
Those interested in history might have heard about another Operation Magic Carpet, too. Under the same codename, between 1949 and 1950, the newly-founded state of Israel evacuated nearly 49,000 Yemeni Jews from Yemen to Israel due to the economic crisis and the expanding anti-Jewish violence in the country.