World War II & The Birth Of Military Psychology

As the world prepared for war in 1939, the National Research Council (NRC), Division of Anthropology and Psychology, voted to establish a comittee on Public Service in the event of war. The comittee, chaired by John Jenkis, was soon renamed the Comittee on the Selection and Training of Military Personnel. The APA also organized and Emergency Comittee on the war effort as did AAAP. Finnaly, the NRC Sponsored a coordinating comittee to pull together these different national efforts into one national effort under the leadership of Karl Dalenback. This was the emergency comittee on Psychology, and many prominent psychologists of the day served on that comittee including Yerkes.

Dallenback saw the role of the Emergency Comittee as advisory in nature. Yerkes on the other hand saw the comittee as an opportunity to unite academic and applied psychologists under one banner. As a result he organized a powerful sub-comittee on Survey and Planning that permitted him to take charge. In early 1942 he organized a conference on long-range planning. The conferees choosen by Yerkes were: Richard Elliot, E.G. Boring, Edgar Doll, Calvin Stone, Alice Bryan, Ernest Hilgard, and Carl Rodgers, all prominent members of APA and AAAP. The outcome of this conference was the recommendation that a Central American Institute of psychology should be established along the lines of the WWI office of Psychological Personnel (OPP). Part of the recommendation was to convene an intersociety convention to discus the formation of a central institute. This proposal was endorsed by the Emergency Comittee and an intersociety convention was planned for Spring, 1943. Yerkes and his comittee members prepared a handbook and suggested three alternative national structures - modification of the APA, a federation of the current represented societies, and an ideal new society. It also contained OPP statistics on membership in the American Psychologist which clearly showed that APA was by far the most inclusive organization.

The convention lasted three days and what emerged was a plan to reorganize APA to permit the voice of special interest groups. Part of this proposal was that all five selections of AAAP, including the military psychology section, would become charter divisions within APA. The new organization of APA was realized in 1944. The new APA began operation in September, 1945 but did not get underway until 1946 with the election of new division officers

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Monitor on Psychology Volume 40, No.6 June 2009