Were some Eagle Scouts given the rank of lieutenant upon entering the Army during World War 2?

Answer 1

I don't believe any Eagle Scouts were commissioned just because they were Eagle Scouts. There were direct commissions from civilian life, but these were mostly for older men with specialized skills the Army wanted. Lots of Hollywood actors, for instance, were commissioned and served - in Hollywood, in the Motion Picture Unit, making Propaganda and training films. Ronald Reagan was one of these. John Kennedy was directly commissioned in the Navy when his father - formerly the US Ambassador to England - pulled strings. The Navy and Army Air Force had programs that led to flight training and commissions for those who succeeded at becoming pilots. There was something called ASTP - the Advanced Service Training Program. Both the Army and the Navy had this. Every man, on entering the Army, took a test, and was ranked from 1 to 5. The Quartermaster Corps ran the testing program and skimmed a lot of cream, the AAF could claim to need intelligent men with technical ability, the field artillery needed men good at math. But tens of thousands of men who scored high on this test were diverted into the ASTP. They were sworn in, and then sent to college. They got military pay. They had the girls to themselves because everybody else was in uniform somewhere. As long as they made satisfactory progress they got to keep on, and the idea was that when they graduated they'd get a commission. In the autumn of 1944 as the Army became fully involved in Europe, casualties far exceeded anything anyone had predicted, and there was a "replacement crisis". Under the goad of this emergency the Army ended its ASTP, and just about all those guys were whisked from a college campus straight to an infantry unit in combat. They're still aggravated about it today, if you come across one of them. Promises were made. But the Navy never did end its program, and when peace was declared there were still 60,000 happy sailors racking up college credits on military pay. As WWII was looming General George Marshall, Chief of Staff, had the experience of WWI in mind when he contemplated the need for tens of thousands of junior officers to serve in combat leadership positions, leading platoons and companies. West Point, VMI and The Citadel could provide only a tiny fraction of the need. During WWI, actually beginning in 1916, the year before the US got involved, there were "Plattsburg Camps", named after the first one of them, at Plattsburg, New York. At these camps well intentioned young men came on their own, for no pay, to try to learn something of soldiering, and most of these were commissioned and did the best they could. The Marines and the Army commissioned men straight from civilian like for WWI, but this was unsatisfactory, obviously. So Marshall started OCS - Officer Candidate School, with the first class beginning in the fall of 1941, before Pearl Harbor. A man had to have two years of college to qualify, and the three month course was tough. Enlisted men sneered at these "90 day wonders", but this was how the Army met almost all its huge demand for junior officers. Marshall also sought to commission any prewar regular he could get to take a commission, and encouraged Battlefield Promotions to be made as often as possible. (Audie Murphy being the most famous to receive a Battlefield Promotion).