James Alexander Ulio (29 June 1882 – 30 July 1958) was an American military officer who served as Adjutant General in the United States Army from 1942 to 1946.

During World War I he served at El Paso, Texas, during the Pancho Villa Expedition, and on the Western Front, where he was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel on the staff of IV Corps.

After the Armistice was signed in November 1918, he served with the Army of Occupation in Germany, and in Armenia as chief of staff of the American Relief Administration.

His father had enlisted in the US Army in 1855 and had been commissioned during the American Civil War, in which he had risen to the rank of captain and was breveted as a major.

[3] Ulio decided to join the Army, so he traveled with his mother to Butte, Montana, to sit the entrance examination.

Following his promotion to first lieutenant on 11 March 1911, he served in the Territory of Hawaii at the Schofield Barracks and Fort Shafter from 1912 to 1916.

The following month, he embarked for France, where he attended the Army General Staff College of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) until 31 May.

In June, he was assigned to the newly organized IV Corps as its G-1 until 14 December, over a month after the armistice of 11 November 1918 that ended the fighting.

As Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, of the 4th Army Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Ulio showed marked organizing and administrative ability.

By his tireless efforts and ceaseless energy, he contributed in a large degree to the successes achieved by the 4th Army Corps in the Toul sector and in the battles of the St. Mihiel salient.

Later he handled with great success the evacuation and feeding of French civilians in the occupied territory recovered from the enemy, rendering invaluable services to the American Expeditionary Forces.

Ulio felt the Armenian people were opposed to communism, and the communist takeover in neighboring Azerbaijan was not a popular uprising but one engineered by Enver Pasha.

[5][10] In 1923, Ulio went to Greece for six months, where he served as chief of the administrative division of the American Red Cross.

[11] He was then assigned as assistant to the G-1 on the headquarters staff of the II Corps Area at Fort Jay on Governors Island in New York City.

During this assignment, he served as a junior military aide-de-camp on the staff of the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, and then on that of his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Fellow students included Omar Bradley, Ulysses S. Grant III, Ernest N. Harmon, Lewis Hershey, Courtney Hodges and Jonathan Wainwright, all of whom subsequently achieved general officer rank.

From June to September he headed the service command section responsible for planning for the contingency of a blockade of the islands, with the rank of colonel from 1 August.

[14] As Adjutant General, he had overall responsibility for the classification and assignment of soldiers in an Army that would grow to 8.2 million by March 1945.

[15][16] The Office of the Adjutant General had 12,574 personnel assigned in June 1943, of whom about 9,000 were in Washington, D.C.[17] At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that brought the United States into the war, the Army, after fifteen months of peacetime mobilization, had 1.6 million soldiers.

Advice from Major General Lewis B. Hershey, the Director of the Selective Service System, indicated that the country would run out of single and childless married men by 1 October 1943.

Experience had shown that many inductees had tuberculosis, but the Army had previously not required X-rays on account of the cost, which had proven to be a false economy.

The Army initially also rejected inductees with venereal diseases, but improved methods of treatment led to this being relaxed in 1943.

[26] In the case of soldiers who were missing in action or held as a prisoner of war, pay and benefits would continue for twelve months.

[26] One of the newest responsibilities of the Adjutant General was the administration of the National Service Life Insurance scheme.

In the event of the policy holder's death it was payable in 120 or 240 monthly instalments of $5.51 (equivalent to $120 in 2023) payments for each $1,000 of insurance depending on whether the beneficiary was over or under 30 at the time.

Of the 34,209 prisoners admitted to rehabilitation centers during the war, about 13,940 were restored to duty and 10,562 were sent on to disciplinary barracks to serve out their sentences.

The volume of surface mail sent by ship peaked at 1,700,000 pounds (770,000 kg) in January 1945, and parcel post at 1.7 million sacks in October 1944.

"[7] Shortly before his retirement it was announced that Ulio would join Food Fair, a supermarket chain based in Philadelphia as its vice president.

He testified that May had written to him in 1943 requesting a furlough for Sergeant Albert Freeman, whose father Joseph E. Freedman, was the Washington, D.C., representative of Garsson Brothers, a munitions firm that Federal prosecutors alleged had paid May $53,000 in bribes.

[34] He died at his residence at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C., on 30 July 1958, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.