Corps of Engineers

The Corps of Engineers gained responsibility for Army camp construction after the Truman Committee investigated the work and recommended a change in who administered it. The transfer, which Brehon B. Somervell later conceded was warranted, was one concrete consequence of the committee’s scrutiny of wartime spending.

Camp construction and the committee’s intervention

Investigations into Army camp building alone saved the government $250 million, Somervell later acknowledged. Acting on the committee’s strong recommendation, responsibility for camp construction was removed from the Quartermaster Corps and assigned to the Corps of Engineers. The book presents the transfer as a correction to the original arrangement: camp construction, it says, should have been the Corps’ responsibility in the first place.

A place in wartime procurement

The reassignment shows how congressional investigation could lead to changes in the organization of military work, not just criticism of its cost. The committee’s inquiry identified a construction function that it believed belonged with the Corps of Engineers, and the War Department shifted responsibility accordingly. The evidence establishes this administrative change, but does not describe the Corps’ subsequent camp-building methods or results.

The Canol project and excluded expertise

The Corps also appears in the account of the Canol pipeline, a secret proposal to build a four-inch line for 1,200 miles from Canada to Alaska. The project had been launched by Somervell without meaningful consideration of terrain, climate, materials, manpower, oil experts, or the views of the Corps of Engineers and the War Production Board. The committee’s examination of Canol therefore provides a contrast with the camp-construction transfer: in one case, the Corps was given responsibility for a function the committee judged appropriate to it; in the other, its expertise was bypassed when a large construction project was initiated.