December 1941. The school was similar to the one established in France in 1918 for training military police in the AEF. Its curriculum emphasized internal security and intelligence functions. The Provost Marshal General's School, as it was renamed on 15 January 1942, had four basic departments: Military Law, Traffic Control, Police Methods, and Criminal Investigation. The corps also established a replacement training center and a unit training center. By V-J Day some 40,000 men had processed through the replacement training center.
Based on its experiences during the war and faced with the challenge of a new conflict in Korea, the Department of the Army issued new guidance concerning the responsibilities and organization of the military police in September 1950.[1] It redefined the responsibilities of the provost marshals who henceforth would not only advise the commander on policy matters, but directly supervise the operations of the military police of the command.
The Korean War also introduced a new duty for military police. The war witnessed a dramatic increase in black market activities associated with an army fighting in a third world nation In previous decades control of the black market fell to civil affairs units, but the massiveness of the problem that began to appear in 1951 quickly involved the resources of the military police and, eventually, the corps added control and eradication of black market activities to its list of responsibilities.[2] Noting that the destruction caused by military operations and the usual local shortages of supplies in occupied territories created an extensive demand for items such as cigarettes, gasoline, food, weapons, and vehicles, the Department of the Army called on the military police, subject to the Uniform Code of Military justice, to detect and apprehend military personnel and civilians participating in black-marketing.
In ensuing decades America's involvement in Southeast Asia brought about yet another significant expansion in military police responsibilities, underscoring new and varied uses for military police in a war without defined rear areas. In addition to their usual wartime functions, military police units served in a direct combat support role. They provided convoy security, often escorting supplies and equipment through districts subject to direct enemy attack. They controlled traffic throughout the four combat zones where front lines had ceased to exist in the usual sense of the word. They secured highways and bridges against both local subversives and North Vietnamese regulars. They joined combat troops in the hazardous task of locating and destroying enemy tunnels. They supervised the movement of refugees and the control of political detainees in a war where determining friends and enemies could be a deadly decision. Military police also became frontline fighters during the successful effort to repel the North Vietnamese during the Tet offensive in 1968. At one point in the war military police were given exclusive responsibility for a specific tactical area, including responsibility for civic action functions in that area.[3]
This increase in responsibility was recognized organizationally by the expansion in the number of military police units in Vietnam and by their organization for command and control purposes under a military police brigade.[4] The seven military police battalions that served in Vietnam were organized into three military police groups: the 8th performed all criminal
- ↑ FM 19–5, 14 Sep 50, Military Police, pp. 1–4 and 110–16.
- ↑ FM 19–5, 17 Jul 59, The Military Policeman.
- ↑ Military police responsibilities as well as the organization of police units in Vietnam are described in detail in Shelby Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle (Washington: U.S. News and World Report, 1981), pp. 176–78.
- ↑ Table of Organization and Equipment 19–262F, 8 Feb 65.
