I've talked extensively several times about the experience of the Army enlistee or draftee using this post here. I detail how military occupational specialties were assigned to men starting with this comment here, but below I'll talk about how men at the upper range of allowable in the military were handled from 1940 to 1945.
On September 16, 1940, the Selective Training and Service Act was passed. It called for the registration and peacetime conscription via random lottery of not more than 900,000 (what Congress appropriated could only sustain 800,000, however) men between the ages of 21 and 35 (21st birthday to the last day of the 35th year) at a time. The men were to serve on active duty for twelve months, and then be transferred to a "reserve component of the land or naval forces of the United States" until ten years had passed or they had reached their 45th birthday, whichever came first.
On August 16, 1940, the Act was amended to defer liable men who had reached their 28th birthday by July 1, 1941 from service; men who were over 28 and had been inducted under the Act could apply for a transfer to a "reserve component" for the remainder of their service. The first draft lottery was held on October 29, 1940, and the first men reported for military service in November. By the summer of 1941, a large number of new officer and enlisted training centers were established. On August 18, 1941, the Service Extension Act of 1941 was passed; this gave the president the authority to extend the term of service of any member of the Army up to eighteen months in the aggregate. With Congress's approval, the period could be extended for as long as the president deemed necessary for national security.
Table 2.-Men inducted into military service by age groups November 1940-November 1941
| Age | Number | Age | Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | 3 | 28 | 44,610 |
| 18 | 3,893 | 29 | 29,410 |
| 19 | 11,065 | 30 | 23,121 |
| 20 | 8,482 | 31 | 20,031 |
| 21 | 44,042 | 32 | 16,326 |
| 22 | 153,997 | 33 | 14,168 |
| 23 | 153,951 | 34 | 12,322 |
| 24 | 122,019 | 35 | 9,821 |
| 25 | 98,000 | 36 | 8,773 |
| 26 | 79,356 | 37 | 1,369 |
| 27 | 66,960 | 38 | 3 |
You'll notice that many men older and younger than the specified age ranges were inducted. Birth certificates, Social Security numbers, and driver's licenses were not universal, and many a sympathetic draft board let men fib about their true ages.
Since the United States was not yet at war, replacement training centers focused on providing troops to both old and new units on a basis that just accounted for everyday attrition and non-battle losses. Infantry replacements, as a result, were a much smaller percentage of the total in peacetime than in wartime; it was estimated that when World War II was at full swing in mid-1943, Infantry branch troops made up only six percent of all Army troops, but suffered 56 percent of the casualties. Confined to just the seven arms of the Army Ground Forces, the Infantry represented over 80 percent of the casualties suffered among these arms; about three-fourths of those casualties were infantry riflemen, MOS 745. As a result of pre-war thinking which placed a far greater emphasis on service, tank destroyer, and antiaircraft men, the percentage of the total troops trained as infantry replacements did not come close to matching 80 percent on paper until February 1944, and even then, bureaucratic failures prevented the employment of the full number of newly trained troops as envisioned.
As I discussed in the comment regarding military occupational specialty assignment above, the Army tried to the best of its ability to assign men with useful civilian skills jobs which closely matched what they had done, insofar as the Army found practical. As a man with a useful trade (electrician), Teddy Thompson would have probably been assigned, had he not requested a specific assignment (this was possible if soldiers met the physical and mental requirements for the requested position, along with having a high enough Army General Classification Test score; most of the requested jobs were "glamorous," such as the Army Air Corps or parachute infantry; only 5 percent of men who picked their jobs chose "tip of the spear" professions like "regular" infantry or Armor), to the Corps of Engineers or Signal Corps, both of whom dealt with electrical equipment. With the war on, this practice was only followed some of the time; during the fall of 1944, to attempt to assuage the replacement problem that was occurring, all newly-inducted men who qualified for overseas service were being assigned to replacement training centers
With the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Selective Training and Service Act was amended again, on December 20, 1941. All men aged 18 to 64 were required to register with the Selective Service, and all men aged 20 to 44 were made liable for induction; the provision exempting men aged 28 and over from induction or service was de facto abolished. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9279 on December 5, 1942. This order provided that the only way men aged 18 to 37 could enter the military was to be drafted. Implicitly, the order brought the Navy (as well as the Marine Corps and Coast Guard) into the Selective Service system; it had previously been an all-volunteer force. Concurrently with the signing of the act, the military declared that men over the age of 38 years were unacceptable for service. On November 13, 1942 the men who were 18 and 19 and had previously been made to register were made liable for induction.
The original Selective Training and Service Act provided an exemption for men with dependents; those who were working in jobs essential to national defense, and those who were not, would have to register but would not be drafted. The War Department, thanks to the established combat doctrine of the time, systematically failed to proportion the number of replacements in each arm of the Army correctly to account for the actual employment of unit types in battle and their casualty rates. The first indication that replacement training center output was at an insufficient level came in the summer of 1942, when the War Department directed the Army to use divisions in the United States to furnish overseas replacements when necessary; the 76th and 78th Infantry Divisions served in this role from October 1942 to March 1943. The replacement training cycle was lengthened from thirteen to seventeen weeks over the summer of 1943 with no corresponding increase in the capacity of centers, resulting in a temporary drastic drop in output. The entry of large numbers of units into combat in 1943 and no real reaction by the War Department to mounting casualties for over a year resulted in a full-blown manpower crisis by 1944.
By late 1943, the Army's available pool of preferred manpower; single, physically fit men from the ages of 18-26, particularly those from 18-20, was beginning to become depleted. It was foreseen a situation in which the only 18 year old men able to be drafted would be those newly entering the Selective Service system each month. In July 1943, Selective Service realized that the manpower pool of (necessarily older) men not working in critical occupations with dependents needed to be tapped, and sent messages to local draft boards to begin reclassifying those men who were eligible and start inducting them on October 1, 1943. Several Congressmen got wind of the Selective Service's plan, and began to fight it; this resulted in another amendment to the Selective Training and Service act on December 5, 1943 which redefined the Selective Service's powers when it came to drafting men with dependents. The bill said that men could only be drafted if "[they] were married prior to December 8, 1941, [had] maintained a bona fide family relationship with their families since that date and [had] a child or children under eighteen years of age" and if all other suitable candidates had already been taken. The term "child" in the context of the bill also included a stepchild, adopted child, or foster child, and they had to have been born prior to September 15, 1942.
The bickering in Congress delayed the Selective Service's plans, and from September 1, 1943 to April 30, 1944, they fell behind in their deliveries to the Army to the tune of 443,967 men. From fall 1943, the second-most inducted group of men other than those just turning 18 were those men from their late 20s to mid-30s, man of whom had one or multiple children. From September to December 1943, 24,000 enlisted men were withdrawn from 14 infantry divisions and sent to divisions alerted for overseas movement or provided as overseas replacements. Further stripping from 7 divisions occurred in February 1944; the overall numbers are unavailable.