Department of Military Science

3. THE CREATION OF THE ROTC

The years immediately preceding America's entry into World War I witnessed increased Army interest in collegiate military training.  The general Staff devoted considerable attention to it.  That body believed that America's institutions of higher learning were the source from which the United States should draw the bulk of its reserve officers.  But to obtain the desire qualitative results, the General Staff felt, the system of collegiate military training had to be standardized, which in turn necessitated centralized direction.  "Central control," it wrote in one report, "is needed to insure efficiency and standardization."  Imposing such uniform program of military instruction on the nations highly diversified system of higher education, is also realized, would be extremely difficult.

The Army Chief of Staff at the time, Ben. Leonard Wood, proposed some definite ideas about how to improve the existing system of military training at colleges and universities.  In addition to upgrading on-campus instruction, Wood wanted to introduce a system of summer camps t provide cadets with practical training and to require every lieutenant to perform a short tour of active duty upon commissioning.

In 1913, Wood tested his summer camp prototype when he sponsored two experimental student military instruction camps for high school and college students at Pacific Grove, Calif., and Gettysburg, Pa.  Except for tents, rifles and personal equipment, which were provided by the Army; student paid the entire bill.  The training lasted five weeks and included drill, marksmanship, squad patrolling, and other tactical subjects.  Two years later, with the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania as a backdrop, Wood opened an additional summer camp at Plattsburg, N.Y., for some 1,200 attendees, ages 20 to 40, with contributions from business and professional men.Within weeks, national interest in Wood's camps escalated into the Plattsburg Movement.  Utilizing the Plattsburg model, Wood hosted two more camps that same summer; one attracting 3,000 participant and the other 16,000.  These camps prepared 90,000 officers for service in World War I and served as models for the ROTC summer training program that followed the war.

While Wood was busy pushing his program, repetitive from Ohio State University, led b President William O. Thompson and Dean Edward Orton, Jr., advanced a program of their own.  At the 1913 annual convention of Land-Grant colleges, Orton recommended legislation instituting minimum national standards fro collegiate military training and education.  AT the very least, he wanted each military science program to include two years of military drill, three periods per week of military instruction, strict discipline during drill periods, a week of field training each year, and instruction in small unit tactical operations.  Students completing this course of study would be commissioned into a reserve officer corps.  To ensure compliance with prescribed standards, the federal government should, in Orton's opinion, reserve the right to discount payments of Land-Grant funds to those schools failing to meet this criteria.

Repetitive from various civilian and Army education organizations met in Washington, D.C., in November 1915 and, using Orton's proposals as a guide, drafted a bill to create a Reserve Officers' Training Corps.  The full support of the academic associations made possible the eventual incorporation of the ROTC Bill into the National Defense Act of 1916, which was passed on June 3 of that year.  In addition to creating the ROTC, the act established an Organized Reserve Corps; an organization into which ROTC graduates and other reserve officers could be pooled during peacetime.

The first ROTC units appeared in the autumn of 1916 at 46 schools. They registered a combined enrollment of about 40,000.  These units were established too late, however, to permit them to exercise a significant impact on American involvement in World War I.  ROTC training, in fact, was suspended in 1918 in favor of the Student Army Training corps, a body formed to train enlisted men for special assignments - not to provide on-campus pre-commissioning training.

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