On a winter morning, on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., on the corner of the fifth floor of the Quartermaster Building, in an office with the nameplate of the Army Transportation Chief hanging on the door, John was absentmindedly sipping coffee.

Behind a desk facing the office door, Adjutant Captain Miller was sorting through the papers John needed to sign this morning.

In the blink of an eye, John had been transferred back to Washington for more than a month. Speaking of which, Stimson and Marshall are really resolute. It took only three short days from the time he finished talking to John to the time he received the order to form the Army Transportation Bureau.

Now, John is no longer the deputy commander of the 82nd Division, Vanderbilt, but the Vanderbilt director of the Army Transportation Bureau. Although his military rank is still brigadier general at the moment, it is obvious to agree on the weight of the deputy commander of an ordinary infantry division and the head of a second-level functional department of the army (the transportation bureau is subordinate to the quartermaster department). At least in the eyes of most people, John is now the number one person, and his status in the army is no longer the same.

What's more, many discerning people in the staff have already seen that the position of commander of the major general of the Army Transport Corps Command is none other than John. As long as he completes the integration of the army's transport units and functional departments, it is only natural and natural to add a pair of stars to his shoulders.

However, John, who is on the rise and thriving in the eyes of outsiders, is not at ease at the moment. After planning for more than a year, he wanted to become the founding veteran of the Airborne Forces, and he was suddenly arranged to form another new branch of the army, the transport army, and everyone had to adapt to it for a while.

What's more, the transport troops and the airborne troops, which can be said to be completely new, are different. Military transportation has been an essential function in the U.S. Army since the Revolutionary War.

Although it has never become an independent class, it has the same functions as it should be. Highway, railway, inland waterway, port, loading and unloading, distribution, warehousing...... There are many related functional institutions.

What is even worse is that these departments, institutions, and units have been subordinate to the quartermaster and engineering units for a long time, and all kinds of interests are entangled, and it is difficult to separate them in a short period of time. In the more than a month since he took office, John has been driven crazy by all kinds of historical problems.

In the end, thanks to Uncle Stimson's guidance, John barely figured out the ins and outs.

After a long time, John was not the first director of the Army's transportation bureau. As early as 1919, at the end of World War I, the U.S. Army realized that the simple division of labor between the Quartermaster Corps and the Army's deep-sea fleet, with the Engineer Corps managing the railroad and port carriers, could no longer accommodate the increasingly large and complex transportation needs.

As a result, the then Secretary of the War ordered the establishment of the Army Transportation Bureau and appointed Brigadier General Frank T. Hines as the first Director of the Transportation Bureau.

This Brigadier General Hines has been busy with this for more than a year. Eventually, the U.S. National Defense Act, passed on June 4, 1920, formally placed all military transportation other than railroads under the management of the Army Transportation Administration, which became an independent bureau under the General Quartermaster Department.

Unexpectedly, a few days before Hines was happy, isolationist forces in Congress raised their heads. A few months after the U.S. National Defense Act went into effect, Congress passed a resolution to downsize the military. The newly established Transport Bureau was streamlined into a Transport Division under the General Office of the Quartermaster General Headquarters, and became a functional department that purely managed traffic and transportation plans. The bit of real power that Hines easily got in his hands was divided between the quartermaster and the engineers.

As the new director of the Army Transportation Bureau, the head of the future transportation corps, John certainly did not have a reason to hand over the power that should belong to him to others. It's just that on the question of what power should belong to the transport troops, there are some small differences between him and some bigwigs in the logistics command.

In accordance with the original concept of the Logistics Command, the transport corps would henceforth take over the draught fleet, railroad, stevedoring and port transport units from the quartermaster and engineering corps. The quartermaster corps retains trucks and newly formed amphibious vehicle units, and the engineering corps retains special engineering brigades responsible for the emergency repair and maintenance of facilities and equipment such as ports, railways, and bridges, as well as assault landing craft for the army's amphibious landing (because it is a transoceanic operation, the amphibious operations carried out by the army are much larger in scale and number than the marines, and all the army forces have their own large number of landing craft for the transportation of personnel and materials in the shallows).

This division of labor certainly did not satisfy John, because the transporters were only responsible for those modes of transport that the other two branches did not want to be responsible for. Although it seems that historically, when the transport corps was officially established in July 1942, it was divided into labor with the quartermaster corps and the engineer corps.

But in John's own conception, the scope of responsibility of the transporter was much larger, covering all areas of transport from the barracks to the front, from the arsenal to the trenches. In addition to the functions of the later U.S. Military-Surface Deployment-and-Distribution Command (SDDC), even some functions of the Military Seaborne Command and Air Mobility Command were also put into John's pocket.

There is no way, who let the US Air Force not yet be established, and the Army itself maintains a strong deep-sea transport fleet (during World War II, the US Army had the world's largest maritime fleet, sending 7 million soldiers overseas and transporting 126 million tons of cargo, which is much larger than the US Navy's maritime transport capacity). John would have taken the opportunity to plan and build a Vanderbilt version of the Combined Transportation Command, which would have been too outrageous.

Unfortunately, although the ideal is full, it is not so easy to realize. At present, the Army Transportation Bureau is still just a newly formed grass platform team. John was a bureau chief, and he didn't even have an office with a suite, and he and his adjutant Miller were crammed into a room.

No way, who let the Pentagon not be built. The Army General Staff was already inadequate, and his hastily established new department had not even been able to provide a centralized office, and its personnel were scattered in four or five places around the Quartermaster Building and the National Mall.

Fortunately, John himself didn't have to worry about these chores. He found a competent butler for the Transportation Bureau - his classmate and old subordinate, Fred, the former head of transportation at FedEx.

He has been working under General Somerville since he was kicked into the army by his father, Brigadier General Robit Ken, and is now a major. As soon as John took office, he first took him under his wing.

Although Fred's rank is not high, he has also worked with Somerville for a few years, and he is familiar with the work of the logistics command. Coupled with knowing the bottom line and handing over the administrative affairs of the Transport Bureau to him, John is still very relieved.

Therefore, these days John has the heart to figure out how to encroach on the territory of the engineers and quartermasters step by step.

The first target he aimed at was the special engineering brigade of the engineering corps. Railway and bridge construction units can be dispensed with for the time being, and the transport troops themselves must have a force capable of opening ports in the theater, which is of great importance in the next war.

For this reason, he had tried several times with General Somerville, but the other party had not let go. John is also not good at acting too eager, after all, he has just taken office, and it is not good to eat too ugly.

Last night, John was alone in bed, pondering this until late at night. It wasn't until this morning that he sat down at his desk and saw the calendar on his desk that he realized that it was December 6th!