Before OCS: Plattsburg
The idea began with civilians. Before the First World War, a meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City led General Leonard Wood, commanding the Army's Eastern Department, to provide officers and equipment for a "Military Training Camp for Business and Professional Men" at Plattsburg, New York. The public called them the tired businessmen's camps; they were paid for by private donation. What became known as the Plattsburg Movement left behind a conviction that outlasted it: that good combat officers could be produced only by rigorous field training.
The Military Training Camps Association, organised in late 1915, was funded in 1916 and its camps became Officer Training Schools in 1917 — sixteen three-month camps across the United States, with more in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines and Panama. For the first time in American history, officers commissioned outside West Point and ROTC received common training. A camp at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, commissioned 779 Black officers in 1917. By the Armistice of November 1918 the wartime schools had commissioned 80,568 line officers — over sixty percent of the Army's officer strength.
Why OCS was needed
When the United States began to mobilise in 1940 the Army had just 14,000 Regular officers, and it was heading for 8,300,000 men and women. ROTC was commissioning about 9,000 officers a year; West Point about 450. The arithmetic did not work.
Marshall, Bradley, and a fight inside the War Department
In late 1940 Army Chief of Staff George Marshall began pressing for an Officer Candidate School program. He was opposed by every chief of the combat branches, and by Brigadier General Courtney Hodges, commanding the Infantry School at Fort Benning. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Under Secretary Robert Patterson wanted a large program of First World War-style training camps instead. Marshall told Stimson that the day he ordered it, he would resign. Stimson later admitted that OCS proved the most democratic and effective way of securing junior officers.
In February 1940 Marshall told Lieutenant Colonel Omar Bradley he had been promoted to Brigadier General, given the Infantry School, and was to get OCS going. Bradley found a prototype of two poorly organised classes drawn from Ivy League graduates and the sons of wealthy families. His plan was approved by the War Department on 24 March 1941 and became the model for every other OCS program.
1941: ten schools in one week
The March 1941 plan called for four schools — Infantry, Cavalry, Field Artillery and Coast Artillery. By April the War Department had expanded it to ten branch schools, and all of them began classes between 1 and 8 July 1941, months before Pearl Harbor:
- Infantry — Fort Benning, Georgia
- Cavalry — Fort Riley, Kansas
- Field Artillery — Fort Sill, Oklahoma
- Coast Artillery — Fort Monroe, Virginia, later Camp Davis, North Carolina
- Armor — Fort Knox, Kentucky
- Signal — Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, later Fort Gordon, Georgia
- Engineer — Fort Belvoir, Virginia
- Ordnance — Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland
- Quartermaster — Schuylkill Arsenal, Pennsylvania, later Fort Lee, Virginia
- Medical — Camp Barkeley, Texas, and Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania
By the end of 1941 nearly 2,000 candidates had graduated from the ten schools. More branches followed in 1942 — Transportation, Chemical Warfare, Adjutant General, Judge Advocate General, Finance, Anti-Aircraft Artillery, Tank Destroyer, the Army Air Forces — and schools opened overseas, in New Caledonia, Fiji, Brisbane, Shrivenham and Fontainebleau. The Fontainebleau course came out of the losses of the Battle of the Bulge: eight weeks for candidates, three for officers already commissioned on the battlefield.
Ninety days
The course ran thirteen weeks — ninety-one days — until July 1943, when it was lengthened to seventeen. Enlisted men with as little as three months' service, slightly above-average ability to learn and the promise of leadership went through what Dr Milton McPherson called "the most intensive scrutiny and training in the history of our Army." Those who survived it were commissioned second lieutenants, and known ever after as the ninety-day wonders.
By the end of the war there were 280,000 of them. West Point, in its first 140 years, had graduated 12,600.
Integrated from the beginning
Army OCS was integrated from the start of the program, in 1941 — while every other part of the Army, including Army Air Forces aviation cadet training, remained solidly segregated throughout the war. It was the armed forces' first deliberate experiment with formal racial integration in the twentieth century, seven years before President Truman ordered the services desegregated.
The Women's Army Corps
WAC OCS — first the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps — was established at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in July 1942. Selection was more rigorous than for men: boards included two prominent local women and were instructed to ask whether they would want a daughter to come under this person's influence. Ninety percent of candidates had been successfully employed in civilian life and only one in twenty had not finished high school. The course was identical to the men's but for combat subjects — six weeks at first, twelve from 1943.
Few advanced beyond company grade, and many were used, as the record puts it, in ways more suitable for a maid than an aide. They were nonetheless the pioneers for the women who fill virtually every position in today's Army.
After the war
In August 1946 every Army branch OCS was discontinued; the last Infantry class graduated at Fort Benning on 9 December 1946. A twenty-four-week Army Officer Candidate School, commissioning into any arm of service, opened at Benning on 3 October 1946, and the last of its ten classes graduated on 1 November 1947. Everything then moved to the Army Ground General School at Fort Riley, Kansas, where branch-immaterial OCS continued until its final class graduated on 9 May 1953.
Korea
Six twenty-two-week programs were activated in 1951 — Infantry, Artillery, Signal, Engineer, Ordnance and Anti-Aircraft Artillery. All but Infantry, Artillery and Engineer closed at the end of 1952, and Engineer closed in 1954. WAC OCS, reactivated at Fort Lee in 1948, moved to Fort McClellan, Alabama, in 1954.
Vietnam
Only Infantry and Artillery OCS were running when the war began. In 1965 twenty-three-week courses opened for Engineer at Fort Belvoir, Signal at Fort Gordon and Armor at Fort Knox, alongside an eighteen-week WAC course at Fort McClellan. Transportation, Quartermaster and Ordnance followed in 1966. All closed again in 1968 except Infantry, Artillery, Engineer and WAC — Engineer in 1971, Artillery in 1973, and WAC in 1976, when it merged into the branch-immaterial school at Fort Benning.
Branch Immaterial, and the school today
The fourteen-week Branch Immaterial Officer Candidate School was established at Fort Benning in 1973, renamed Federal OCS in 1998 to distinguish it from the National Guard state schools, and is now twelve weeks in two phases: six weeks of physical and mental assessment, then six of applied leadership including an eighteen-day field mission. Graduates go on to their branch basic course.
It is the only active Army OCS program, and it commissions more than half of the junior officers the Army takes in each year. West Point and ROTC provide roughly a quarter each. (The post was designated Fort Moore from 2023 until 2025, when the name Fort Benning was restored.)
Source
This account follows the Society's own history of Army OCS, itself a summary of The Ninety-Day Wonders: OCS and the Modern American Army by Milton M. McPherson, Ph.D., Infantry OCS Class 16-52, published in 2001. Dr McPherson served for many years as the US Army OCS Alumni Association historian and gifted the copyright of his book to the Association. The OCS historical timeline displayed at the National Infantry Museum draws on the same work.
Trace a graduate
The Society maintains the record of those commissioned through OCS. Start a search, or go straight to the Army OCS Database.