The Brink of Collapse.

One of the most controversial areas of the law in the 1940s concerned the administration of military justice. The system of courts-martial that existed prior to the war was set up for a small military, comprising less than 300,000 servicemen. As many as 16.5 million people served in World War II; the existent system of military justice failed to accommodate them. During World War II social scientists, using data from the 1940 census, determined that the armed forces held nearly 30 percent of the nation's potential criminals. They pushed the system to the brink of collapse. Approximately 2 million court-martial convictions were handed down during the war, an average of sixty convictions a day every day. Many of these convictions were arbitrary and punitive. Military law is different than conventional criminal law, and the rights of suspects are more limited. By the end of...