General helped scrap the draft

Walter T. Kerwin Jr., 91, 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 a nursing facility in Alexandria, Va.

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 its all-time high 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, Kerwin helped create a policy that scrapped the draft and led to the launch of an all-volunteer Army in 1973.

The voluntary enlistment program has been in place for 35 years and is credited with the development of a more effective and professional fighting force.

In 1974, Kerwin was named vice chief of staff, the Army’s No. 2 official, and he served four years in that post.

Kerwin was born June 14, 1917, in West Chester, Pa., and was a 1939 graduate of the U.S. 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 during the Italian campaign of 1944.

He also fought in North Africa and Sicily before being wounded in December 1944 in France. After the war, he was assigned to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico before being sent to Europe in the ‘60s. He served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969, then moved to the Pentagon. He retired in 1978.