MEN INTO OFFICERS

By UNWIN FLEMING

WO.S.B.—War Office Selection Board to the well informed, just plain " Wosbe " to lesser breeds—is the goal of thousands of young servicemen today and also, alas! the disappointment of some hundreds more. The job of the many Boards who have these last two years been sitting in various parts of the country is to pick out from amongst the crowd of candicrates recommended for Army commissions those really fit to shoulder the responsibilities and bear the ardours and strain of modern service in the field. Obviously the recruitment of these men is an all-important task. An Army's efficiency in action depends on the initiative, the resource, the vitality of the local commander—on the qualities in fact of a subaltern. It is insufficient, then, to pick these junior officers merely on their showing in a formal, though searching, interview as had been done in the early years of the war, especially as such a system necessitated a continuous return to the ranks of men found unsuit- able for a commission at the O.C.T.U. stage of their work. This rejection of something like zo per cent. of the men originally picked made new methods of selection imperative.

The War Office's answer to this challenge was the setting-up of new Selection Boards, which not merely meet' the candidates concerned on one formal occasion, but have the opportunity of observing them over a period of several days. The confidence placed in these Boards has been fully justified, as the proportion of men now rejected at Pre-O.C.T.U. or O.C.T.U. has declined considerably. There is little doubt that these Boards present one of the most successful applications of the psychological method to the art of interviewing and personnel-selection.

I have just returned from one of these Boards and feel that under- lying the whole scheme is the idea that candidates should be treated as gentlemen; they are, while they stay at the Selection Centre, " guests of the officers' miss " and are treated accordingly. Sheets— a rare sight in the Army—cover the beds, table-cloths the dining- room tables. Candidates are thus immediately brought into the sort of environment where behaviour as an " officer and gentleman" becomes possible. Ranks, moreover, do not matter; for a blissful three days the private will be on a par with the Sergeant Major. In order to facilitate this, no names are used, each candidate becoming the bearer of a number, which he wears on both sleeves, covering up any stripes he may possess.

This levelling of rank would be worth little if a second condition remained unfulfilled—the condition, I mean, of social equality. The Board, so the Colonel assured us on arrival, was interested neither in the status of our family nor in the place of our education.

Public or Primary School was all the same to him as as we could demonstrate there and then our fitness to take command of others. My own observation bears out the justice of his remarks. Accents differed, from the precise tone of Scotch to the comfortable dawdle of the West Country ; civilian occupations varied from instrument-making and book-keeping to baking and butchering; there was one man I met brought up in Hackney, there was another educated at Harvard. Who cares? The first, for all we know, will make as good an officer as the second. The truth impresses itself upon the observer that the exigencies of total war have forced us to cast the commission-net wider than ever before and that we have not found abilities of endurance and leadership to be the monopoly of one class. Any man in the British Army, with his Commanding Officer's assent, has a fair chance of being considered for commissioned rank.

Now in accomplishing its work and in arriving at a definite conclusion about each man within half a week, the Board seenied to work on the fertile principle, borne out often enough by social psychology, that within a small social group each man, so to speak, will find his own level. It is a matter of everyday experience that one man will tend to take command, that another will talk but do no work, and that another perhaps will make his contribution by hard and continuous thinking. So the Board split us up into groups of six or eiglit, set us certain tasks—building a bridge across

a stream, lighting a fire, removing a casualty—observed us c'osely, took hectic notes on us, told us-to take command in turn (" Now

number five you take over ") confronted us with unexpected situa- tions, in the end thanked us kindly, having, I suppose, gauged our " leadership potential " to their satisfaction.

Back indoors we would be told to hold a discussion on a subject of our own choice. We debated first what it was to be: post-war Britain? No ; too general. Germany? No ; too abstruse. The position of women? No ; their position was too obviously In the home. Town-planning? Yes ; everybody had something to say about town-planning, and for the next half-hour we delightfully topped our 'plans for pre-fabricated houses with commonplaces on decentralization and industry. Time was up; next we may have had w word-reaction test ; we were to write down our first thought on hearing such words as " Father," " Jealousy," " Beat," " Death " (are all Army psychiatrists Freudians? 7. Papers were collected, and the " trick cyclist " spent the next two hours, one suspects, reading perversions into minds quite normal and happy. Intelligence and imagination tests follow till—till one desperately hopes it is time for tea.

Next day perhaps we address the group on a subject of our own choice; ease of deliverance, lucidity of thought and exposition were probably being tested here. One of us is installed in the rank of Platoon Commander and gives his men a speech of welcome on being posted to his unit. Another one is picked out to deal with a drunk and disorderly Sergeant lately returned from the Italian front. Before long we are a party of soldiers left on Crete at the time of our forces' evacuation. We talle.over future moves, suggest possible lines of action, decide we should like to see the Mayor,

and molto presto, an officer gets up, explains in broken English he was sent for and asks who we might be. His Worship proved

quite disgracefully intractable, and I believe we should be on that island to this day, had it not been for the dinner-gong which interrupted our deliberations. Lunch is served, and for an hour, the watching, searching, looking, writing of the officers ceases. .

Itlo wonder we' leave the Board at the end of the third day a little the worse for wear—with the feeling that all our righteous

impulses will have been analysed away into the promptings of an enlightened self-interest. Amidst general laughter someone is re-telling (for the hundredth time) the story of the Major who, dissatisfied with the high percentage of his men who. had failed the Board, determined to find out the facts for himself. Disguised as a lance-corporal he went off to the nearest W.O.S.B. Duly the report came back; not only was he considered unsuitable for a

commission, but also ill-fitted to bear a stripe. Though I cannot vouch for the truth of this, it is worth passing on; the misfortunes of others give us hope for ourselves.

The above notwithstanding, these methods of selection are com- mendable not only for their ready transferability to the peace-time recruitment of leaders—in industry, education and commerce—not only for their thoroughness and elasticity, but also for their immedi- ate usefulness, for their over-riding fairness in assessing impartially the contribution to be made by each in the building of a democratic army.