Frequently Mentioned Persons: Brigadier General John D. Crowley .

Brigadier General John Denis Crowley, Jr. U.S. Army Transportation Corps, was the MACV assistant principal of staff for logistics (J-4), from February 1965 to August 1966. He was the principal staff logistical officer responsible for all ammunition, construction, supply, maintenance, medical services, fuel, and transport in South Vietnam.

1]

In 1965, Jack Crowleyreached a high level in a careerin which hisfortunes rose and fly with the precipitancy of a roller coaster. Born in Boston in 1916, Crowley enlisted in the Usa in 1934 and served in the 5th Infantry in 1934. In 1938,Crowley won appointment to the US Military Academy but had the dubious distinction of existence the "goat" (lowest academically ranked cadet) of the West Point class of 1942. During World War II, Crowley rose from second lieutenant to lieutenant colonel in less than 3 years as he commanded units with the 1st Filipino Infantry, the US 2nd Armored Corps, and the 101st Airborne Division. The bold nature of airborne combat appealed to Crowley. He led reconnaissance teams in the Battle of the Pop and in a secret mission behind the lines inside Germany that hastened the founder of the Ruhr Pocket.

For all his authority and success in combat, Crowleylanguished in the Army officer corps once the war concluded in 1945. Although the Army sent him to the Sorbonne for postgraduate studies in French and assigned him to West Point as a French language instructor, Crowley had reached a career dead end by 1952. There were too many talented colonels and lieutenant colonels in the postwar infantry, and the Army seemed probable to give him over for forwarding to brigadier general and retire him once he attained twenty years' active duty. As did many combat arms officers in the 1950s, including Clark, Crowley requested the Army transfer him from the Foot to the Transport Corps.

Crowley was a poorly qualified Transportation Corps general compared to his peers. He did not see the technical courses most junior, midlevel and senior officers did throughout their careers at the Army Transportation School at Fort Eustis, Virginia. He had never commanded a TC operational unit. Yet Crowley managed to flourish in staff and administrative assignments where he hid his lack of technical expertise and relied on competent junior staff officers to handle details. After a go of responsibility on the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) staff in Paris from 1955 to 1958, where he served in the Atomic Logistics Section and as Chief of Emergency Defense Plans and Requirements, the Army selected him to see the National War College, a senior service school and a major ticket punch that helped win Crowley promotion to brigadier general in 1963 and grant to pass the Army Transportation Research Command. Incredibly, the goatbecame the first member of the West Point Class of 1942 to get a general officer.

Crowley looked the region of a successful general; he was marvelous and handsome, with thick silvery hair swept back from his brow in the fashion World War II-era officers favored. Apart from his military appearance, the sole qualification that recommended Crowley to MACV commander General William C. Westmoreland was Crowley's membership in the unofficial but very real airborne fraternity. As mentioned before, Westmoreland overrepresented the MACV staff with Army airborne officers. For example, the MACV deputy commanding general, chief of staff, J-1, J-3, J-4, and deputy commanding general, U.S. Army, Vietnam, were all airborne officers.

Major General John E. Murray, U.S. Army Transportation Corps, commanded the 4th Transportation Command in Vietnam and was the last MACV J-4 in 1972. He colorfully described Crowley: "Part of our logistic troubles started out because our [second] pass of logistics, who was a dear friend of mine, was known as the Airborne's bad boy. He was the lowest man in his family at West Point and the first to get a star, but he also detested detail. We called him Happy Jack. We talked about required delivery dates and demand performance, and in his words, 'All that's shit.' Logistics was beneath contempt and he conceived a man's job description as one that was only properly written with the degree of a bayonet. He wasn't a mutton-head; he wasn't addled because he liked martinis; he was merely misplaced." [2]

Crowley's contempt for non-airborne officers and logisticians was apparently shared by his peers on the MACV staff, according to Major General Raymond Conroy, U.S. Army Transportation Corps, another former MACV J-4: "I ever had a belief that they didn't really accept [Transportation Corps officers], as they should have, and I saw this at various levels. And I saw it by talking to some of the masses in the infantry division and so forth about their old friends. Ole [Jack Crowley], he eventually got into the Transport Corps and got himself a star, and he would never have made it where we were and that sort of thing." [3]

As Clark will trust in his diary, Crowley and his character as J-4 will go a lightning rod for controversy from Saigon to Washington in the light and winter of 1965as the logisticsituationat South Vietnam's aerial and maritime ports worsened.



Brigadier General John D. Crowley, Jr. Assistant Chief of Staff for Logistics, J-4, MACV, 1965 (Photo courtesy U.S. Army).
Notes

[1] MACV General Order Number 2, 30 March 1962; Letter, MACV Number 01562, 30 November 1965, Subject: Joint Board of Distribution, Headquarters Staff, USMACV, 15 November 1965.

[2] Interview, Major General John E. Murray, U.S. Army Transportation Corps Oral History Program, Transportation Corps General Officer Interviews, Biggs Library and Information Center, U.S. Army Transportation Center, Fort Eustis, Virginia.

[3] Interview, Major General Raymond Conroy, U.S. Army Transportation Corps Oral History Program, Transportation Corps General Officer Interviews, Biggs Library and Information Center, U.S. Army Transportation Center, Fort Eustis, Virginia.