However, with war looming in 1941, the Office of the Quartermaster General (OQMG) recognized the necessity of introducing better handling methods in its depots throughout the country. The acquisition and integration of such equipment presented many other obstacles.
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The full use of pallets by the military required the purchase of powered equipment to handle them. While such limitations were not a serious concern for the small peacetime Army of the 1930s, they presented a far greater dilemma as the 1940s unfolded. The handling of goods was slow and inefficient. The result was poor storage efficiency, with goods not stacked as high as they might have been on pallets. Even major depots such as those at Philadelphia, Jeffersonville, Chicago and Columbus had very few power operated machines. Unloading, storing, stocking and loading operations were largely performed without powered equipment, although a few sites had electric elevator stackers. Army Quartermaster depots of the day were largely dependent upon hand operated equipment. During the course of World War 2, that is exactly what happened.Īs the military build-up began in 1940, pallets were seldom employed, and packing cribs were usually poorly constructed. Demand for pallets could only grow as lift trucks became more widespread. Pallets were typically manufactured locally, in small numbers. Correspondingly, pallet production was also still in its early stages of development. in 1941, 25,000 forklift trucks were estimated to be in use. Pallets and forklifts had been introduced at a number of “leading edge” applications by the beginning of the 1940s. In spite of these conditions, some progress had been made in the private sector. This was especially true for the military. The surplus of labor in the work force, in combination with the lack of capital available for investment in facilities and equipment effectively put palletisation onto the back burner. There had been little impetus for more widespread introduction of palletized handling with forklift trucks. While the techniques of palletized handling had begun to take shape with the evolution of pallets during the 1920s and 1930s, the practice was not yet widely used in commerce.