On the island of Oahu, in the autumn of 1943, American Army units built nearly two thousand wooden pallets for a single operation against a single small island. Fifteen hundred of them had flat bottoms, designed to slide like toboggans; the other three hundred and fifty had runners fitted underneath, like sleds. Each measured roughly four feet by six, and the idea behind them was simple: a man would not have to pick up what was strapped on top. The officers who ordered them built had spent the previous weeks at desks, reading a report written by a different division about a different battle.
That division was the 7th Infantry, and it had come back from the Aleutians. It had used pallets at Attu in the spring of 1943, and when it reached the Hawaiian Islands, it wrote the practice up and reported on it in favorable terms. The Army’s own history of the campaign that followed records the sequence in one flat sentence, which is how the Army records most of the things that decided anything. There is no drama in the passage at all.
It sits between a paragraph about amphibious tractors and a paragraph about ship loading. The word pallet in 1943 did not mean what it means now. There was no standard and almost no agreed definition, and the services were pulling in two directions on the question of size. The Navy settled on a forty-eight-inch square deck that suited ordnance, while the Army worked toward forty by forty-eight.
What the 7th Division had used in the Aleutians was a wooden platform with supplies lashed down to it, smooth on the underside so a tractor could drag the whole load off a landing craft and up a beach without anybody touching the boxes. That is the entire invention: a frame, some strapping, and the decision not to lift. It took the United States about four years to arrive at it, and those four years are worth walking through because almost nothing in the story runs the way people assume it ran. In 1940 and 1941, the Quartermaster Corps ran its storage depots on muscle.
Unloading, stacking, storing, and loading out were done by men with hooks and hand trucks. A few installations had electric elevator stackers. The big depots at Philadelphia, Jeffersonville, Chicago, and Columbus had almost nothing powered at all, and boxes did not go high because there was no safe way to put them high. The buildings held less than they could have.
Somebody in the office of the Quartermaster General went and looked at how private industry was solving this problem. The Depot Operations Branch sent representatives into factories, warehouses, shipyards, and railroad terminals to watch civilians move freight. What they saw was forklift trucks and wooden pallets. Along with tractors, trailers, and conveyors already in ordinary use by companies that had no war to fight, they came back and said the forklift and the pallet together were the most efficient system available for the kind of goods the Corps handled.
Tests at the Fort Wayne Quartermaster Depot in July of 1941 supported them. Money was released that September, and then the whole thing stalled for a reason that is almost funny: the War Production Board graded forklift trucks as luxury items. Steel was rationed by importance to the war, and a machine whose whole purpose was to save men did not read on paper as a weapon. Quartermaster officers had to go and argue the point that a lift truck might be a luxury in a country with spare labor and spare warehouse space, and that the country no longer had either.
The argument was accepted, but manufacturing capacity turned out to be the next wall, and there was a scramble to convert plants over to building lift trucks. Shortages ran through most of 1942 and into 1943, and when production did come up, half of it went overseas, which left the depots at home short again. Machines also arrived in the wrong sizes. A depot that had asked for a light truck with a short mast so it could work inside a boxcar would receive a four-thousand-pound machine with a mast twelve feet tall, because equipment was allocated by urgency of need rather than by what a building could physically accept.
While that was going on at home, the argument was already being lost on the other side of the world. In August of 1942, the Navy put the first Marine Division ashore in the Solomons and then had to unload the cargo ships that had brought it. There were no docks. There was no crane on the beach.
Small boats ferried the cargo in and grounded gunwale to gunwale in the dark, and the freight came out of them the way freight had always come out of them, in the arms of whoever was standing closest. The commanding officer of one transport put the state of affairs after dark at a complete impasse. Boats waited up to six hours for a chance to land. Cargo ships that were meant to be empty and gone were still loaded when the fleet had to leave.
Nobody involved lacked courage, and the reports say so. What the beach lacked was machinery and a way of packing that machinery could pick up. The Navy set about fixing it in two directions at once. One was men.
The first special naval construction battalion raised for combat stevedoring was commissioned in September of 1942, and something close to forty of those battalions eventually served. The other direction was quieter, and it ran out of a laboratory at an ammunition depot in Hingham, Massachusetts. The Navy had built a materials handling laboratory there on a base that existed mainly to store shells for the Atlantic Fleet. The people in it worked on how to pack, load, and move things, and the range of what came across their benches ran from munitions to meat sauce, boots to binoculars.
Among them was a lieutenant named Norman Connors, who before the war had been a track athlete at Harvard and who after it would become a publisher. What Connors is remembered for is a modification so small it sounds like nothing: he cut notches into all four sides of the pallet instead of two. A two-way pallet can be entered from the front or the back and nowhere else, so a driver coming at it from the wrong angle has to get down or reposition or wait for somebody to turn the load in a crowded hold or a warehouse aisle or on a pier at night. That is most of the job.
Connors’ block pallet could be taken from any side. He held the patent, which the government used for free through the war. He also worked out how loads should be stacked to fit a deck without waste, and he wrote a magazine called The Palletizer that the Navy mailed to its contractors, telling private companies how to pack their crates so that the Navy could handle them. That is the part of this story that is about one man’s head.
Nobody ordered Connors to think about the third side of a wooden frame. The work was unglamorous even by the standards of an ordnance depot, and the men doing it were surrounded by a war that was interested in other things. There was an objection to all of it, and it was a good one. A pallet is wood, and wood takes up room.
Loaded into a ship’s hold, the pallets themselves came to something like a tenth of the cargo space. In the Atlantic, where every ship was a target and every cubic foot of a hold was an argument, the Transportation Corps resisted extensive palletizing of shipments to Europe until somebody could answer that. And until the ports on the far end had the equipment to handle what arrived, the Corps was not being obstructive. A pallet with no forklift waiting for it at the other end is a load that has to be broken down by hand anyway, with the extra weight of the frame added on.
That brings the two lines together. On Oahu, in the autumn of 1943, the 27th Infantry Division’s logistics officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ferris, opened a school for transport quartermasters on September 17th. His officers and non-commissioned officers went down to Pearl Harbor, got aboard Navy transports, and measured them. They measured hatches, they measured holds, they watched ships being loaded, and they studied the stowage plans that had been used at Attu.
Then they went back to Oahu and tested pallets against the ground they expected to fight on. Both types were tried. The flat toboggan bottom worked better on rough coral. The runners worked better on sand and on the fine broken coral the reports call finger coral.
So they built both, fifteen hundred of one and three hundred and fifty of the other. In the end, the assault force strapped down nearly everything it was taking, with the fifty-five-gallon drums left out. On November 20th, 1943, the 165th Regimental Combat Team went ashore on Butaritari in Makin Atoll. Amphibian tractors came in to the landing craft, hooked on, dragged loaded pallets straight off and up to the dumps inland, and the boxes were not handled once between the boat and the dump.
The figure the Army’s official history gives for what that was worth is one-twelfth. Under ideal conditions, a lighter could be unloaded in about a twelfth of the time the same job took by man handling. That number deserves handling with care, and the history itself makes it easy to give because it says where it came from. It is not a stopwatch reading taken on the beach.
It is an estimate sourced to an interview conducted with Colonel Ferris in September of 1947, four years after the fact, by the historian writing the volume. Ideal conditions at Makin meant a tractor available, a beach a tractor could cross, and somebody at the far end to take the load. The same operation is on record for a great many things that were not ideal. A number like that survives because a historian sat down with a colonel four years later and asked him.
A good deal of what gets covered here was saved the same way, by one person bothering to ask before the men who knew had scattered. The Marines at Tarawa, two hundred miles to the south, built few pallets. They landed the old way, into water under fire across a reef, and across the Gilberts operation as a whole, the method saw real use at Makin and nowhere else. The record holds two comments on that.
One battalion commander at Tarawa wrote afterward that pallets would have worked on his beach, and the transport quartermaster on the Marine Corps staff looked at what the Army had done at Makin and reported favorably on it. That is the whole of the enthusiasm on record from the Marine side in 1943, and it is worth noticing how mild it is. By 1945, the Marine Corps schools had written the practice down, and the tone of that document is the most honest thing in this story. Palletizing bulk cargo, it says, should be used after careful consideration of a specific operation, and never at all unless the mechanical equipment to handle it is present.
Because without machines, the time is spent breaking the loads down again. Some kinds of supply suited, even for those that do, more than about seventy percent is almost never feasible, and in a combat loading, the figure should not, as a rule, be allowed above half. That is a manual written at the end of a war by the service that had just fought the largest amphibious campaign in history, declining to claim more than it could support. The gains that did arrive came in through the back, and at home more than anywhere.
Across the Quartermaster depots, the average tonnage handled per man about doubled between the middle of 1943 and the spring of 1945. Rail cars turned around faster. Ships turned around faster. Fewer men were needed on a pier, which mattered a great deal by 1944, when there were no spare men anywhere.
The core historian who wrote the volume, Erna Risch, called the forklift and the pallet the most significant and revolutionary storage development of the war. The same 1945 manual that set the ceilings on palletizing opens its section on personnel with a sentence that has nothing mechanical in it. Machines and techniques have been devised, it says, but the basic element of the procedure is the individual. It then describes him as a strong back in the labor element and goes on for two paragraphs about morale and about how nowhere is a man more apt to feel that what he is doing does not matter.
The men who unloaded the ships got no campaign credit for the beach. They came out of replacement pools and garrison troops and depot companies, and they carried, in the end, most of what the machines could not reach. The wooden frame took some of the weight off them. It never took it all.
And the manual, which knew that better than anyone, put the morale paragraph in first.