Walter Kerwin; helped create volunteer Army
WASHINGTON - Walter T. Kerwin Jr., a retired four-star general who was the Army's second-highest-ranking officer in the mid-1970s and an architect of the all-volunteer Army, died July 11 of respiratory failure at the Washington House nursing facility in Alexandria, Va. He was 91 and an Alexandria resident.
In the early 1970s, during the Vietnam War, the military draft was deeply unpopular and desertions were common. In 1971, the Army's desertion rate of 62.6 per 1,000 troops nearly equaled the Army's record of 63 per 1,000 in 1944. Social problems, including drug abuse and racial strife, were evident throughout the military.
As the Army's deputy chief of staff for personnel, General Kerwin helped create a policy that scrapped the draft and led to the launch of an all-volunteer Army in 1973. "We think that the programs we have initiated, and our coming out of Vietnam, should enable us to turn the corner and bring this level of indiscipline down," General Kerwin said during a congressional hearing in 1971.
The voluntary enlistment program has been in place for 35 years.
In 1974, General Kerwin was named vice chief of staff, the Army's number two official. (His superiors were Frederick Weyand and, later, Bernard Rogers.) During his four years as vice chief, General Kerwin sought to raise salaries, educational standards, and morale. He also promoted the "total Army" concept, which put the National Guard and Army Reserve onto more equal footing with the Army.
General Kerwin was born June 14, 1917, in West Chester, Pa., and was a 1939 graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. As an artillery officer during World War II, he helped coordinate a massed artillery barrage that helped Allied forces make a successful beach landing at Anzio.
He also fought in North Africa and Sicily before being wounded in December 1944 in France. After the war, he held positions in intelligence and taught artillery methods to the Turkish Army before being assigned to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1953. He helped coordinate the transportation of nuclear weapons for testing in Southwestern deserts and in the Pacific.
After attending specialized Army training schools, General Kerwin was sent to Germany in 1961 to command an artillery division as a newly promoted brigadier general. He moved on to Allied military headquarters in Paris in 1963 as the officer responsible for nuclear targeting in Europe.
General Kerwin served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969 and took on his role as deputy personnel chief at the Pentagon in 1970. He retired in 1978. His decorations included the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, three awards of the Army's Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, and Purple Heart.
