Bringing Them Home/Operation Magic Carpe

On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies. Victory in Europe, VE Day, was declared. Two days later the War Department announced a point system called the Adjusted Service Rating Score (ASRS). Its purpose was to determine which soldiers were eligible to be repatriated to the United States for discharge from military service. Operation Magic Carpet would repatriate those millions of American military personnel. The WSA, War Shipping Administration, was charged with the responsibility for ensuring efficient movement of all war material and troops across the ocean.

By VE Day, the WSA, using nearly anything that could float, scrounged up 546 vessels to use for the homeward bound troops. Some soldiers were immediately repatriated. Others would have to wait months for transport. The Navy was excluded from the initial European sealift. It was preparing for a likely invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. The war in the Pacific had first priority for ships and aircraft.

So, the task of bringing the troops home from the European front would become the responsibility of the Army, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine. Millions of service members were stationed in Europe, Africa, and Mediterranean on VE Day.
In late June 1945 the first homeward bound ships left Europe.

The war in the Pacific had been expected to last well into 1946. But the Japanese surrendered three months after hostilities in Europe concluded. President Truman announced on August 14, 1945, that Japan had surrendered. Officially, WWII ended September 2, 1945.

When it ended, there were nearly 8 million service members from every branch of service scattered across four continents. The fighting was over, and it was time to bring the heroes home. Nobody had anticipated bringing troops back home from the pacific Theater in 1945. The WSA was in the middle of an already massive repatriation effort from the European Theater. The authorities were caught flat footed.

When Japan surrendered and the combat phase of the war was over, the Navy was able to add its tremendous fleet of vessels to the repatriating operation. The Navy then began converting all available vessels to transport duty. Cruisers, battleships, hospital ships, and even LSTs (Landing ship, Tank) were packed full of men being transported back home. By October 1945, over 700 ships of all shapes, sizes, and nationalities were involved.

Operation Magic Carpet returned US servicemen at an astonishing rate averaging 435,000 troops per month during a fourteen-month-stretch. A peak was reached in December 1945, when over 700,000 personnel were repatriated from the Pacific Theater alone.

Battleships such as the Washington, West Virginia, and Maryland, and aircraft carriers such as the Enterprise, Saratoga, and the newly commissioned Lake Champlain were diverted for use in Operation Magic Carpet. Saratoga brought home more troops than any other individual warship. She carried a total of 29, 204 troops home.

Half a million American soldiers had married European women. 29 specially commissioned ships transported those war brides to their new homes in America.

The Pacific portion of Magic Carpet involved extra layers of complications. The Pacific Theater was defined by the territories of the Empire of Japan which stretched from eastern China, southeast Asia, the islands of Oceania, and the Aleutian Islands in North America. The sheer vastness of the Pacific Theater and the POW camps within it had to be dealt with. By war’s end, there were over 27,000 American POWs in the Pacific. They were scattered in Japanese camps for years and had to be located. The Navy sent out aerial reconnaissance to locate them. Once liberated from those Japanese camps, they were transported home. Many of them suffered from malnutrition and illness.

Operation Magic Carpet was not exclusively a one-way flow of traffic. The Allied forces repatriated German, Italian, and Japanese POWS to their home countries. Over 500,00 POWs were returned to Europe through the Magic Carpet operation.

As daunting and complex as Operation Magic Carpet was, it was completed relatively quickly. The WSA had repatriated over 1.4 million servicemen from the European Theater by September 1945. By April 1946 nearly three and half million more were repatriated and essentially ending the European phase of the operation. Between October 1945 and April 1946 over three million American military personnel were repatriated from the Pacific theater. The last of the troops would arrive home in September 1946, bringing an end to Operation Magic Carpet, the largest mass movement of humanity ever attempted or accomplished.

Interesting magic carpet facts

Two British ocean liners, RMS Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, were under American control and were already serving as troop transports. Their Peacetime capacity was less than 2.200. As a converted transporter they were able to carry up to 15,000 people at a time.

In mid-October 1945 the United States Navy donated the newly commissioned carrier USS Lake Champlain – fitted with bunks for 3,300 troops – to the operation. She was joined in November by the battleship USS Washington. The European lift now included more than 400 vessels. Some would carry as few as 300 while the large liners often squeezed 15,000 aboard.

Smaller ships such as destroyers were capable of carrying around 300 men. The service members on them were told to hang their hammocks in whatever nook and cranny they could find. Carriers could house 3,000 or more troops in relative comfort on bunks.

The amount of time it took for a service member to get home depended on their circumstance. If lucky enough to be on the USS Lake Champlain, an Essex-class carrier that arrived too late for the war, 3,300 could cross the Atlantic in just under 4 days and 8 hours. But if coming from Australia or India it could take months on the slower vessels.

The public wanted their service men and women home by Christmas. An enormous pressure was placed on the operation to get them home in time to celebrate Christmas 1945. A sub-operation, Operation Santa Claus, was dedicated to that purpose. But because of storms at sea and an overabundance of soldiers eligible to return home, Santa Claus could only return a fraction of them home in time to celebrate with families.

Those who reached American soil and stuck in separation before Christmas but were not able to make the final trip to their home were met with an outpouring of love and friendliness from the locals. Many invited troops into their homes for Christmas dinner. Others gave train tickets to soldiers or organized parties at the local train station for those troops on layover.

The nation’s transportation network was overloaded, trains heading west from the East Coast were on average 6 hours behind schedule and trains heading east from the West Coast were twice that late
A Los Angeles taxi driver took six soldiers all the way to Chicago ; another took another carload of men to Manhattan , the Bronx, Pittsburgh ,Long Island, Buffalo and New Hampshire . Neither of the drivers accepted a fare beyond the cost of gas.